The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  It's six A.M.—just gone—on the A2 and the sign is telling me that if I keep going I'll end up in London. That's not what I want. Or maybe it is? No. I need the M25 and then a road to Torquay, wherever that is. I glance in the rearview mirror: still no black car. There's another sign ahead of me pointing to the various exits you could take if you wanted to go to any one of the various Medway towns. I haven't lived around here long enough for any of the names to mean anything to me. Except ... One of them does mean something to me. It's the town where Patrick lives. But—oh shit. I'm having déjà vu. I remember being here before and taking that exit and getting Patrick to come and fuck me in the toilets for a hundred quid.

  Except it wasn't déjà vu. It happened. It happened and then I went to Molly's school and then I got lost in the Troposphere and then I time-travelled back here, in a train full of fear and ... So much for paradoxes. I pull over to the hard shoulder and take out a cigarette. At the same time I check my purse to see if I still have the rest of Patrick's money. No. I've got the £9.50 I set out with and very little petrol. I light my cigarette and pull back onto the road. I'm going to Torquay. And I can't help smiling. I've no idea where I've actually been but—oddly—for the first time since I first went into the Troposphere, I don't feel at all mad. I feel absolutely fine about what just happened. I'm not a whore after all, I think as I drive off again. I got what I wanted without actually doing anything. Or did I actually do it and then overwrite it with something else? Oh, whatever. I put all thoughts of Abbie Lathrop—and the KIDS—out of my mind and, as I drive towards the M25, I try to make myself vow never to try Pedesis again.

  It's just gone midday when I park in a big, anonymous car park next to Torquay Library, about 250 miles from the Shrine of St. Jude in Faversham. There's no snow in the southwest, but the sky is as gray and flat as the one back home, as if January has been reformatted in two dimensions and broadcast on a cheap black-and-white portable TV. The Troposphere always seems flat to me, but this is worse; I'm not sure that the real world, with its dirt and its people, is exactly where I want to be. But then I'm not sure the Troposphere is a good place for me, either. I still have half a tank of the petrol that I "forgot" to pay for, but now I need food, and coffee. There's a café just across from the library, next to a big slablike church of a denomination I don't recognize. I decide to go into the café before using the public Internet terminals that I hope are in the library. I'm going to search for local castles and see what I find. I remember Burlem's memory of the one in his town: the one he thought of as being like a giant's ring, ripped off, and left on a hilltop. If that doesn't locate it, I'll try something else, but I'm not sure what.

  Even though I have my plan, I still sit in the car for about five minutes before I do anything. What a journey. I drove about two hundred miles before I stopped looking in my rearview mirror for the police (who I assumed would want to ask me questions about the petrol), and the Project Starlight men. Some time after that I lost track of where I was. I pulled into a town I thought was Torquay, but there was nothing at all to distinguish it from every other town I've ever seen in Britain, and I couldn't be sure that I'd actually reached my destination. There was a large roundabout with various signs to industrial estates, and a Sainsbury's supermarket off to the right. I pulled into the Sainsbury's car park and got out of the car for the first time since the petrol station on the M25. My legs felt shaky. I walked in and went straight up to the kiosk and bought a cheap packet of tobacco.

  "Where am I, exactly?" I asked the woman, after she'd given me my change.

  The way I said it made it sound like a completely normal question. But the woman looked at me as if I were completely odd.

  "You're in Sainsbury's, dear," she told me.

  But after some further conversation I realized that I was not in Torquay and got some pretty good directions that led me straight to the library.

  So now I'm in a car park that is indistinguishable from any other car park in any other town, and I watch as people unload buggies and small children, or pack away large, shiny carrier bags with the word SALE on them. Two women go past, both in those new mobility scooters that look a bit like bumper cars, and they seem to be arguing about something. The gray concrete is smeared with old fag butts, familiar take-away wrappers, and polystyrene coffee cups. I look beyond all of this, towards the thin line of bare-branched trees up a small hill separating this car park from the road above. The trees are the only things that stand out in the grayish-whitish smudge of official buildings and the sky. And then I see something in the trees: six or seven squirrels all moving at once; one in each tree, or so it seems, moving and jumping and rearranging themselves constantly, like pixels on a screen. Their bodies are silhouetted by the pale light of the sky behind them. It's winter, and I can't imagine what they find to eat in a place like this. Aren't squirrels supposed to hibernate? Do they have a god looking after them or does nobody pray for squirrels? I shiver. What if Burlem isn't in this place anymore; or what if I can't actually find out where it is? I imagine what it's like to live as a squirrel—or any animal—in a concrete, urban space, where everything costs money. What will I do if I can't find Burlem? I can't go home; I think it's fair to say that I have no home anymore.

  I wonder if the book is still safe.

  I wonder if the men have got to Adam yet.

  And I feel a pulse like a fist, hitting me first between my legs and then somewhere in my stomach. Is it possible that I'll ever see him again?

  I stop thinking and get of the car. There's a billboard layered with rained-on, peeling posters, most of which are advertising a pantomime starring someone from an Australian soap that I've never heard of. Above that there's a sign: NO OVERNIGHT SLEEPING. Shit. I never realized that you could be stopped for just parking your car somewhere and sleeping in it. I walk over to the ticket machine, the cold wind jabbing at my face as if I've stolen something from it. As I'd feared, it's extortionate to park here: about a pound an hour. I pay for half an hour and then use my fingernail to smudge the time on the ticket as I walk back over to my car. Then I prop the ticket in a hard-to-see place on the edge of the windscreen, so only the date is showing, before locking the car door and walking across the road and through a tinkling door into the café.

  It smells of soup, plus something sour that I can't identify. It's almost full up, but I manage to get a seat in the corner by a display of greeting cards, jewellery, and Fairtrade muesli. There are various pictures on the walls depicting slim white women in Africa leading choirs of small, brightly clothed children; or helping equally brightly clothed women pull water up from a well. I realize this is a Christian café just as a late middle-aged woman in a yellow twinset comes to take my order. As I ask for the carrot and parsnip soup and a black coffee, I notice the leaflets that are scattered around, and the poster on the wall advertising the times of the service in the church—presumably the one next door. And I wonder: What kind of god is created and sustained by the hundreds of people who must pray here? Apollo Smintheus is the result of six people's prayers and he seems real enough. What does more prayer do? What sort of god does it make? And is this god—the one made by the people here—the same god created by the people in the church near Burlem's house? Is it the same god created by the people in the Faversham priory? What would a god like that look like? I suppose if I met him in the Troposphere, he'd look exactly as I'd want him to look—probably an old man with a white beard: the atheist's view of a Christian's view of God. And what does he do for these people? What must it be like to have millions of people telling you what to do? And I also wonder: What does he ask in return?

  While I'm waiting for my soup, I study one of the leaflets. It talks vaguely about "joy." But I haven't seen anything joyful since I've been in this place. I haven't seen anything joyful since ... I can't actually remember when the last time was. And that's why I like reading Heidegger and Derrida and Baudrillard. In that world life isn't a matrix of good and bad; happy and sad; jo
y and failure to achieve joy. Failure and sadness are there to be examined, like a puzzle, and the puzzle is open to anyone. It doesn't matter how many people you've slept with, or whether or not you smoke, or whether or not you get something out of damaging your own body. You can have a go at the puzzle that assumes imperfection and never asks you for anything.

  I look down at my wrists—the pinkish, silvery marks—and then I glance around the café. Most of the other people here are middle-aged and dressed in respectably unstylish catalog clothes. They scare me a little; not because of what they might do to me (these people never do anything: They're benign) but because of what I am in their thoughts. These aren't the middle-aged women I remember from the estate I grew up on—women who'd cackle and smoke and discuss the benefits of giving blow jobs without your false teeth. Neither are they like the social workers who'd come round every so often to check we weren't being sexually abused by these women's husbands (it was more usually the sons). No. These are of the same species as the women I remember from the bakery and the corner shop: the ones who don't bother to stop talking about your crazy mother when you walk in because they think you're too stupid to understand. They're the school secretaries who could have simply told me I needed to wash my clothes more often, rather than talking about it behind my back and, eventually, reporting me to the head teacher. They're the kind of women who would never wear flattering clothes—or anything black—because looking attractive equals sex. There's only one other young person in the café: a blond guy with shabby clothes who looks like the sort of RE teacher who'd spend a long time talking about world religions and not so long on Christianity. He looks at me for a moment and I see a familiar desire in his eyes. It's not romantic desire: It's for sex, raw sex, and it's because I look like I'd be up for it. Compared to everyone else in here I look like a whore. But, of course, that's the point of these women. By being what they are, they make you a bad person by comparison, even if all you're doing is wearing lipstick. I try to give him a look back that says "Not today, thanks," and then I pick up the leaflet and pretend to read it again.

  The woman with the yellow twinset comes with my soup.

  "Six thirty is the next one," she says to me, in a crisp voice.

  "Sorry?"

  "The next service is at 6:30."

  I don't want to appear rude, so I just say, "OK. Thanks."

  "Are you local?" she says.

  "No. Not really."

  I don't mention that I could easily become local: a local bum with nowhere to go—except, I'd guess, the library and the church.

  "Oh."

  "I'm just passing through," I say.

  But respectable people don't have hair like mine, and they don't pass through anywhere. Passing through is the kind of thing men do—truckers and cowboys—and we all know what happens to women who act like men. The woman walks off, making a tutting noise.

  When I've finished my soup I look around in my bag for a notebook, so I can write a list of things I'm intending to look up in the library. I take out the tobacco as well. Obviously I can't smoke in here, but I'll roll one to have while I'm crossing the road. I've rolled my cigarette and put it to one side on the table when the woman comes back to collect my bowl. I drain the last of the coffee and offer her the cup, too.

  "You can't smoke in here," she says.

  "Oh—I know. I wasn't going to, don't worry," I say, smiling.

  "Yes, well, just as long as you know." She doesn't smile back. In fact, her body stiffens, as if she thinks I'm about to attack her or something. As if I'm bad enough to do something like that.

  What is it about these people that makes me feel as though they're damning me to hell all the time? Or maybe it's not them: It's me. I should tie my hair up; my hair can offend people. I should pretend not to smoke. I should always use my nice quiet BBC voice, not my loud, confident one. I should always offer to help. I should always tell people exactly what they want to hear ... I should join in with people who pretend that meaning exists and makes people like me bad in order to make them good. I should feel absented by their presence. I should lie all the time, because the truth just isn't nice. It isn't holy.

  "What's your god like?" I ask the woman, before I can tell myself to shut up.

  "What's God like?" she says.

  I should never have asked this question. "Yes," I say.

  Although all I've done is ask about her god, I've broken social convention and my eyes start to water and itch, and I can feel myself blushing slightly. I don't want a row; I really don't. I only asked the question because I was interested. And I meant to say "Yes" in a timid way, but I don't do timid very well, and it didn't quite work. Nevertheless, I expect the woman to be polite back—or even to answer my question. But instead her eyes harden further.

  "He looks after the people who believe in him," she says.

  And then she walks away.

  As I leave the café, light my cigarette, and sit on a wall to smoke it, I remember the various times in my life when I've tried to find out about religion. It often starts with a logical idea: that so many people around the world believe in a god, or a way of life, that there must be something in at least one of these approaches. So I go to the local library, or the university library, and there's always that moment—perhaps similar to the moment before you choose the bread you want in the bakery—where there seems to be so much possibility. So many books; so much "truth." Surely it can't all be false? Surely it won't all be the same? But all the books do just seem the same to me. They all have the same hierarchies. They all have leaders. Even Buddhism has rules over who can really "belong" and who can't, who is in charge, and who is not. And all the leaders are men.

  I remember once flirting with Roman Catholicism when I was seeing a guy who'd been a choirboy as a kid, and who seemed to get something out of the whole thing (and had worked it all out so you could be a Catholic and still have dirty sex). I got a couple of books and magazines from the local church and started to read up on it. I'd kind of bought all that stuff about the Virgin Mary and was in the process of trying to convince myself that a religion that took a woman so seriously must have something going for it. Then I read a humorous anecdote in one of the magazines about a time when Pope John Paul II was visiting some town, and the nuns who were supposed to cook for him messed it up and ended up giving him fish fingers. Obviously the point of the story was that it was funny that the pope had eaten fish fingers, but I couldn't get over the detail that the pope had nuns to cook for him. Surely religious leaders are supposed to be somehow wiser than the rest of us? But I realized then that there was nothing special about this system at all, nothing that made it more profound and extraordinary than the rest of society. If someone who had given up his whole life to thinking about goodness and rightness and truth still expected nuns to cook him his fish fingers (because after all, nuns haven't got anything else better to do, and none of them are ever going to be priests or become the pope, because women aren't good enough for that), then something was very wrong. How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God? If this was the wisest Catholic, I certainly never wanted to meet the stupidest one.

  Perhaps this is similar to the anthropic principle, but I am a woman, and after a lifetime of experiment I know I am capable of everything men can do, except things that specifically require a penis (like pissing standing up). I mean it's so obvious it even sounds a bit silly to repeat it, a bit like saying "All humans have heads." So what does religion know about me that I'm missing? Am I worth less in an a priori sense? But that would be utterly nonsensical. How is it possible that religion, which claims to be more profound than anything else, still has less of a grasp on humanity than any personnel department in the country?

  It's not just Christianity, either: How could the Buddhists have missed the bit in their thinking about freedom from desire, when most of them seem to desire to be reincarnated well, and in such a way that they can be a man, and be called a "venerable mas
ter" and tell other people what to do? Why is religion so disappointing? You expect it to tell you something you don't know, and all it ends up telling you is the stuff you've known for years, and that you long ago decided is wrong.

  Over to my left is the big gray wall in front of the church.

  ARE WE THE THOUGHTS OF GOD? a poster asks.

  No, I realize. It's the reverse.

  I put out my cigarette and stop thinking.

  The library is a large square space with two floors. There's a checkout desk in the middle of the ground floor, and bookshelves all around it. The second floor is basically just a gallery with a big hole in the middle, so you can stand up there and watch what's going on downstairs, or sit at one of the small desks and try to work, if you don't mind all the noise. I remember the library I went to as a kid. It was always deadly quiet and, at least in my memory, everything in it was orange, including a little sunken bit in the kids' section that to me felt like a huge abyss, and that I would beg my mother to let me go and sit in.

  I walk up to the counter.

  "Hi," I say, when a bearded librarian walks over to me. "I want to use the Internet."

  "Are you a member?"

  "Of this library?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh, no. Sorry. I'm not."

  "Are you a foreign student?"

  "No."

  He smiles. "We can give you a day pass. You'll need to fill in this form..."

  He gives it to me. But I'm wondering whether I can lie on it, and if so whether they will check. I certainly don't want to leave any written record of myself.

  "Maybe I'll see if I can find the information I want in a book first," I say. "But I'll try this if that fails." I did want to look up the Web site of the cult of Apollo Smintheus as well as look for the information on the castle, but maybe I won't bother. After all, I am vaguely in debt to these people.