The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  Console?

  It comes up.

  What do I do now? I ask it.

  Read the Departures Board, it tells me.

  So much for the timetable existing on my console.

  All the screens seem to be showing departures. Are there no arrivals here? I stop in front of one of them and read the information on it. And then I don't know what to think. There don't seem to be any times on the board; there are just lots and lots of platform numbers. And the train lines are called Fear, Love, Anger, Frustration, Disgust, Pain, Ecstasy, Hope, Comfort.... Every abstract emotion you can think of is there. And, oddly, there's room for them all on a screen the size of a portable television.

  How do I use this system? I ask the console.

  You find a platform and board a train.

  But which platform?

  Where are you trying to get to ?

  Myself. Oh—do I use the coordinates?

  No. The coordinates only relate to your position on the Troposphere. I believe you are trying to get out of the Troposphere.

  So ... What do I do, then?

  You join with a train of thought relating to the state of mind of the person you want to rejoin: in this case, yourself. And you alight when you get there.

  The console is mildly annoying me, so I close it down. Trains of thought. It's obvious and frustrating at the same time. Who invented this weird system? And then I think, I did. I invented everything here. Except ... I didn't invent Apollo Smintheus, and I didn't invent those KIDS. I sigh and look at the board again. If I am going to get back to myself, it looks as though I'm going to have to identify an emotion I know I was experiencing at the time I want to get back to.

  And I'm thinking: Time travel, to the past, using emotions? Einstein wouldn't have approved of this. I'm not sure I approve of this. And I don't know how you really distinguish between emotions, anyway. I have enough trouble (intellectually) distinguishing between things. But emotions are not even things. They don't really exist outside the mind. But I'm going to have to do this, anyway. OK. When I was in the hotel room, what was I feeling? Hope? Sort of. I hoped that I'd find Burlem through Molly. But it wasn't a strong feeling. Does it have to be a strong feeling?

  The console opens up in my mind, even though I didn't ask it to.

  You have one new message, it tells me, and then it closes itself again. I open it back up.

  Where is the message? I ask it.

  There's a glow on the screen and I follow it over to a news kiosk just beyond the Departures Board. There is one newspaper in a small rack outside and I pick it up. It's not a newspaper.

  A Guide to the Underground, it says on the front. By Apollo Smintheus.

  I open it up.

  You now have no new messages, says the console.

  In my previous work I alluded to a vulnerability that a mind may have to the world of all minds. I feel that this now needs greater explanation. As you are aware, consciousness itself is a sprawling landscape with many open doors from one mind to another. The landscape and the doors are metaphors. The openings may just as well be tunnels through a coral reef, or wormholes in space. In most cases, information in the Troposphere is stored where it is created: in the "mind space" of that individual. However, there are several cases of information, which is more dynamic and, you may say, "global" (not that the Troposphere is a globe, of course). What you call "emotions" are types of information that are shared among minds in the Troposphere. The human experience of emotion can be said to be like a wind blowing across an infinite, curved desert, or a planet orbiting its sun. (And it is only ever "like"; it never "is." Emotion is a whole world of metaphor itself, a type of being that shows itself only in not showing itself—as the symptom and never the thing.) You choose to "see" it as an underground train travelling along an infinite, looping track. Minds are not passengers on these trains: They are the stations themselves—sometimes open; sometimes closed. When the station is open, the train of emotion can roar through. When the station is open, it is also open to other things: other open minds or, perhaps, people attempting to achieve Pedesis.

  Emotion could simply be termed "motion." Indeed, I remember that this word used to simply mean movement, or a transference from one thing to another. In this world-made-of-language, meaning never really becomes obsolete. In this case, the motion is of something that has no mass (motion itself) and so the meaning it carries can travel at incomprehensible speeds: speeds fast enough to take you backwards. All you have to do is get on a train and find the right station.

  I look at the Departures Board again. I think myself back into that hotel room. I'd just had a bath, I remember: I was trying to wash Patrick's horrible desire away. I was trying to forget that I'd just had sex for money. I was ... What? I was afraid, of course—although I think I knew I'd lost the Project Starlight men for the time being. What else? I was sad, because I knew I'd never see Adam again. But I'm so used to sadness and disappointment that they don't even register.

  Which train do I get on?

  The platform for "sadness" is number 1225. The platform for "disgust" is number 69. I'm not sure I want to board a train of sadness, or a train of disgust. What about pain? But I wasn't actually in pain.

  I think back to the moments I have been able to enter other people's minds. With Molly it was that moment—that pang—when she thought about Hugh, and the pain of having to go all over town looking for him. With Maxine it was easy: She was worrying the whole time about being fat and smelly. And now I think I understand this "vulnerability to the world-of-minds." You have a strong emotion and something in your mind opens, slightly, and at the moment of emotion your mind connects with all the others that are feeling the same thing. Or maybe I don't understand. It actually sounds a bit flaky to me, put like that. As an idea, it doesn't have the hard lines of Derrida or Heidegger. Oh well. I think harder, but I'm not sure I was feeling anything very definite in that room. But ... Hang on. Surely it doesn't matter how far back I go, as long as I aim for some moment before I came into the Troposphere. So when did I last feel strong emotion? What about the fear I felt as I drove away from the priory? That tumbling-over-itself sick feeling as I waited for the black car to slither out of some side street and start following me. I look at the Departures Board again. Fear: Platform 7. I can't see this working, but I'll give it a try.

  I start the long walk down the endless concrete tunnel, ignoring signs to Platform 31, Platform 57, and Platform 99. There's no order here. Eventually I find it: Platform 7. I walk down a set of aluminium steps and see that the train is already there; it's an old rusty thing that reminds me of the oldest and nastiest Northern Line trains that would always seem to grind to a halt just outside Camden. Isn't it a bit lucky that the train is already here? But from down here I can see all the other platforms, all with trains sitting in them. Just as the screens upstairs suggested: There are no arrivals here, only departures. And then I realize that the train isn't "really" here at all. It's just a metaphor—just like everything else here. I rotate the tarnished silver handle and pull the door towards me. Whatever the metaphor is—and whatever this experience "really" looks like—I am left in no doubt that I am now climbing inside fear itself.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  But so far fear just looks like the inside of an old London Underground train. The seats are covered in tatty green velveteen with a repeating orangy pattern. The floor has a layer of dirt so thick that the real floor could fall away and no one would even notice. The carriages are joined together with creaky mechanisms that you can see (or so I imagine) when you look through the window in the adjoining door. I sit down and a whistle blows. The train starts to move. It slowly creaks its way to the end of the platform and then, suddenly, we're going at what feels like three hundred miles per hour, through a long tunnel and then out onto a landscape I don't recognize. I absurdly think, This must be a Circle Line train, since we're going above ground already; then I realize what's wrong with what I'm thinking, and I stop
.

  I don't like this landscape. I don't like it at all. The syrupy feeling I have in the Troposphere is now gone, and I feel not simply cold and tired but completely hollowed out, as if all I am is skin. The train speeds up again and I can't help but look out of the window. Looking out of the window feels a bit like when you look on the Internet to find out if your symptoms suggest terminal illness: You know they will, and you know you shouldn't look, but you do. Outside of this window is just one big field. But it's not a green, hopeful field: It's basically mud. And on the mud, I can see burning houses. It should feel just like I do watching the TV news—that hyperreal sense that nothing you see in two dimensions on a screen can ever really happen—but it does not feel like watching TV. The houses that are burning outside aren't just any old semis from the news: They're all the houses I've ever lived in. And I'm inside, and I can't get out; my parents are inside, and they can't get out. I know my sister is already dead. But more than that. This is fear without hope: This is the image of me asleep in my cold bedroom back in Kent, wearing the thick pajamas my mother got me back in the days when we still spent Christmas together. In the image I am not just fast asleep; the smoke from the fire has already knocked me out and now, as I watch, the leg of my pajama bottoms has caught fire and the skin around my ankle is starting to melt. I won't ever wake up again. I am just going to melt, and I won't even know anything about it.

  After the fires all I can see are floods: water creeping up and up the outside of the same houses—my houses—until they are completely submerged; until even the people on the roofs, and the people hiding in the attics, are soon dead. My whole family; everyone I've ever known. On one level I know I don't care too much about my family—when did I last see them, after all? But I'm there with them now as we wait for help that does not come; as we accept the moment when the water becomes too high and we all fall into it. There's nothing apart from the water: It's black and cold and it stinks like death. And I'm the first one to go, to stop trying to hold my breath and actually breathe in the black water. That's it. Blackness. My useless body sinks down to where the street used to be. And, in this train of fear, I'm sweating, and my heart's beating so fast that it's like one long heartbeat, or maybe no heartbeat at all.

  The worst thing about the images outside is that there is nothing else apart from them. And it's not simply that I cannot see anything beyond the houses and the mud: I know with the deepest certainty possible that there is nothing out there beyond what I can see. There isn't any me here; there is no train. I will die in all those houses and there is nowhere else to escape to. There's no sense that this will ever exist "around the corner" or on TV or be happening to someone else. This is what it must be like to open the door to a dead-eyed man with an axe. This is what it must be like when you haven't fought him off (after all, how could you?) and you're tied up and you know you're going to die. You're not watching this happen to a fictional character; you are experiencing it for real: It's me; it's the end of me. Or, worse: You are like a fictional character, but not one of the leads. You're just one of the victims along the way.

  The train lurches on. The alleyways I'd usually never walk down after dark are all there now: a world of dead ends with rapists patrolling the thin dark passages like the ghosts on Pac-Man. I am stabbed a thousand times by people who don't know my name, or what books I like to read, or that if my life wasn't such a mess I'd quite like to get a cat. I watch myself bleed to death like a farm animal in an abattoir, while parts of my own body lie scattered around me, hacked off and discarded. I pray for unconsciousness, but it doesn't come. Oh Jesus. I can't stand any more of this. I feel what it is all like: I'm having an operation but the doctors don't know I'm actually awake. I experience a motorway pileup. I see Adam dying a million different ways. Then I'm killing Adam: I'm killing him in every possible way, and I'm killing everyone else, too. I'm in prison, and I'll never escape. I have no choice.

  I have no choice.

  I have no choice.

  Every millisecond of this horrible journey is an epiphany in which I realize that this is it. This is my last moment of life, and any idea of free will disappeared long ago. And each epiphany is, at the moment I have it, absolutely irreversible. It's not the moment when you think Shit! That was close. It's the moment after that, in a world where you are the unluckiest person on Earth and there's no one to help you and no one to care, especially when everyone you know is already dead....

  I can't stand this.

  Console? I say, weakly, although I can barely believe that such a thing still exists.

  It comes up.

  Where do I get off? I ask it.

  You get off at your station.

  Where is my station?

  You have to be able to see it.

  What?

  You now have no choices.

  Well, I knew that.

  I want to stand up and go and ask the driver to stop the train, but I know that there is no driver and this isn't really a train. I'm surfing on a wave of fear that's moving faster than ... What did Apollo Smintheus say? Incomprehensible speeds. Think, think. Don't look out of the window. Don't ... I look.

  And then I realize that I'm not alone out here. There's actually something worse than being alone with your own worst fears, and I'm just beginning to see what that might be. Faintly—not above, below, in front of, or behind my images of fear, but in some other relation to them—I now sense the howling spectre of something else: layers upon layers of other people's fear. There are misty representations of money burning, of someone being fisted by his own father, of toys that tell you to "fuck off" and then rip out your throat, of the idea that there is no such thing as reality, of someone being abducted by an alien and strapped to a table in a white lab, of nuclear war, of a child drowning, of hundreds of children drowning, of it being all YOUR FAULT, of choking on fish bones, of lung cancer, of bowel cancer, of brain tumors, of spiders—thousands and thousands of spiders, of a prolapsed uterus, of sleep apnea, of eating, of any kind of sex, of rats, of cockroaches, of plastic bags, of heights, of planes, of the Bermuda Triangle, of the live rail, of ghosts, of terrorism, of cocktail parties, of crowds, of the dentist, of choking on your own tongue, of your own feet, of dreams, of grown-ups, of ice cubes, of false teeth, of Father Christmas, of getting old, of your parents dying, of what you might do to yourself, of coffins, of alcohol, of suicide, of blood, of not being able to take heroin again, of the thing behind the curtains, of soot, of spaceships, of DVT, of horses, of fast cars, of people, of paper, of knives, of dogs, of redundancy, of being late, of being seen naked, of scabs, of leap years, of UFOs, of dragons, of poison, of accordion music, of torture, of any kind of authority, of being kicked while you just lie on the ground trying to protect your head until you become unconscious and can't protect yourself anymore.

  You—why don't you look out of the window for a while.

  My eyes are now shut. Incomprehensible speeds. What does that mean?

  I can't breathe. The man with the gun...

  There's no man with a gun, Ariel.

  There is. The whole world is made only of men with guns. There's no one else in the whole world, just me and billions of men with guns. I feel sick.

  Incomprehensible speeds. I can comprehend the speed of light. I can comprehend ten times the speed of light. The only thing I can't comprehend is infinite speed.... That's what Apollo Smintheus said, didn't he? Or did he just say that the train track was infinite? Anyway, what if we were moving at infinite speed? Although I can't really comprehend it (which is, I think, the point of "incomprehensible"), something travelling at infinite speed would actually seem to be at rest at every point that it travelled past. Something with infinite speed, travelling in a loop, should be able to be everywhere at once, surely? Maybe more than once: Who knows? So maybe I don't have to wait for my station. Maybe my station is simply there, outside, and I have to find it.

  I don't want to look out of the window, but I do. Now my own fears are i
n sharp focus again. Everything I've ever written is on fire. Someone's rubbing my name out of every document in which it's ever appeared. I don't know where these images are coming from. They appear to be random, but maybe ... I try to think of Adam again and, as if I'd ordered the memory in the consciousness equivalent of the most efficient fast-food restaurant in the world, there he is, outside the window, fucking my mother. He's fucking my mother and saying to her: "Who's Ariel? I've never heard of anyone called Ariel." He seems to turn and see me watching them. Then he laughs. He pokes her in the ribs and points at me and they both laugh. "I don't have time for this now, Ariel," my mother says. "You're not the center of the universe, you know."

  Cars, I think. Driving. Driving towards London from Faversham. Come on. I'm escaping from the priory; from the Project Starlight men. And then I see/feel it. I'm in my car and I'm zoning out into the fear. In the image through the train window I can see the men racing behind me in their black car, driving down the almost-empty motorway with the gray sky above and the snow lying in fields, on rooftops, and alongside the long, curving hard shoulders. I can see them behind me and I know this is the end. In a film, I'd shake them off. But they're going to run me off the road and no amount of gutsy driving or intelligence is going to save me. My life is going to end in a crunch of jagged metal, with my blood spurting onto the windscreen. I don't want to go there, to this place, but I have to. I have to get into that place from this one. My mind is open at that point, I instinctively know that. And the men aren't really there: That's just the fear.

  At least—I hope it's just the fear.

  How do I get off? Not knowing what else to do, I walk towards the doors.

  The image is still the same one outside the windows. I focus on it, and then I press the button to open the doors. The train's still moving but the doors open and...