The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  At about eleven o'clock I'm almost done. My throat hurts from all the talking and the cigarettes I've smoked. My mouth feels dry; that hangover mouth you get when you've only had a couple of hours sleep. We've drunk about four pots of tea since I got here, but I haven't actually eaten anything since lunchtime and my stomach is audibly growling, although I don't feel hungry.

  "We need to eat," says Lura, after my stomach makes the noise again.

  "I'll phone for a curry," says Burlem.

  But he waits until I finish my story before he does. The story isn't complete. I've left out the detail about fucking Patrick in the Little Chef toilets, obviously. But I haven't made it clear that the book is in the priory, either. So I'm not surprised when the first question Burlem asks is about the book.

  "Where is it now?" he says. "You've got it with you, presumably."

  I shake my head. "I did what you did," I say.

  "What I did?"

  "Yeah. I left it behind, thinking it would be safer than carrying it with me."

  "Fuck" is all Burlem says before he goes to collect the food.

  While he's gone I am left on my own with Lura and the dog, who has now woken up properly, stretched, slurped some water, and then come to sit on the sofa next to me. Lura hasn't said anything at all since Burlem left, and I feel I have to say something.

  "What's his name?" I ask.

  But I know already: Planck; presumably after the quantum physicist.

  "He's called Planck," she says. Then she sighs and shakes her head. "You've had some lucky escapes," she says. "I can't believe..."

  "What?"

  "Oh, nothing. There's even more to the Troposphere than I thought. Although it all makes sense, of course."

  "Sense?" I laugh. "Please tell me how it makes sense."

  "Oh, we will," she says. "But not now. It's late."

  There's a silence for a few seconds. I'm not sure Lura likes me. I scratch the dog between his ears and try to think of something simple I can say that doesn't simply amount to "Tell me whatever it is I don't know—that no one knows—about how the world works, now! Tell me what could possibly make sense of the experiences I've had, because I haven't got a clue."

  "How did you come to be here?" I ask her in the end. "How did you make it so they couldn't find you?" I remember that when Burlem cut me off by walking into the church, he was still in the railway tunnel. I have no idea how he came to be here, with Lura, and how they remained undetected for so long. "How did Saul even get out of the tunnel?" I ask.

  "He shifted the pile of rubble," she says. "Brick by brick. From the sound of what you've said that tunnel was unstable anyway, and I'm surprised it took another year to collapse after he disturbed it."

  "Oh—you think he made it collapse, then? How weird," I say, thinking that the tunnel collapsing was the reason for everything starting: that if the tunnel hadn't collapsed then I wouldn't have got the book, or found the page. Or maybe I would; maybe I would have found those things eventually, anyway.

  And I realize that someone will find the book in the priory eventually, as well.

  "Anyway," she says, "he got out of the tunnel and got on a bus to anywhere. He just travelled randomly until he was far enough away to get his thoughts together. He went up to Scotland and lived in a bed-and-breakfast for a while, during which time he explored the Troposphere—and was very lucky not to get killed. He sent me a mobile phone and asked me to go into a church on a certain date, at a certain time, and said that he would phone me." She smiles. "It was a bit like being in a film. He was completely paranoid and didn't trust me at all at first, and we kept having to have these coded conversations with me standing in a church talking on a mobile phone—which did not go down well with church people at all. But we got through it. I'm retired now, as you probably know, so I wasn't tied to London when all this happened. We came down here temporarily at first and then ended up staying. It's actually my brother's place, but we have an arrangement." She shrugs. "He needed a place in London, and we've sorted out all the paperwork so we are officially renting this place from someone else entirely, under assumed names. It's complicated, but we thought it was quite solid."

  "I have to ask," I say. "What is the logic behind the church detail: You know, that no one can jump into your mind if you're in a church?"

  "You don't know?"

  "I know hardly anything beyond what I've worked out, and what Apollo Smintheus has told me." I shrug. "I can make a guess, but..."

  "What's your guess?"

  "That all the prayer in a church—all the extra-charged thought and hope—somehow scrambles the signal, if that makes any sense. You know, like interference."

  She smiles. "That's good. That's exactly what I think as well." Now the smile goes. "I'm assuming you know about my book?"

  "No." I shake my head. But the way she says it—I realize that this is why she has a problem with me. She thinks I know her as intimately as Burlem does because I've been in his mind. She thinks there's a possibility that I know everything about her. For the second time I get the feeling that she's the wife and I'm the mistress, and she knows her husband hasn't just been screwing me; he's been telling me things about her as well. I remember when I used to have affairs with married men whose wives didn't know, and wouldn't have approved, and those marriages were always in crisis. Inevitably the guy would tell me things about his wife that I didn't want to know—and didn't feel I had any right to know. The special dinner she arranged to try and get their marriage back on track (and during which he called me on his mobile, from the toilet); the special dress she bought to try and get him interested in her again (and which he told me made her look old and fat). I shudder to remember these exchanges. I don't think I've ever felt so bad in my life as when I heard those things, and I stopped sleeping with men like that because I didn't want to be a party to anything so sad.

  I want to say something to make this all right, but I can't think of anything.

  "Hm" is all she says in response to my not knowing about her book.

  A couple of seconds later the dog's ears prick up, and he acts as though something's about to happen. Then, two or three minutes after that, I hear the sound of Burlem's key in the lock and feel the blast of cold air as the front door opens and closes again.

  The dog knew, I think. The dog knew that Burlem was almost back.

  How does that work?

  For the first time since all this happened, I feel my understanding of the world start to shift, as if it's only now—now that I know this is all true—that I can allow myself to start answering all the questions I have: to start adding up all the pieces of information and all my experiences. The dog knows, I realize, because we all potentially know everything about what other people are thinking and doing. We all potentially have access to one another's thoughts. I wonder properly where the Troposphere is, and what it is, now that I'm convinced it isn't just a figment of my imagination. Is it hovering less than a particle away from us, perhaps in another dimension to which we have access only some of the time? Or does it work in another way entirely? But I am suddenly sure that the moment when you catch someone's eye, or the moment you think someone's looking at you, or the moment when you think of someone and then they ring, or the moment when you start getting lost in a building you know so well because most other people in it are lost—these aren't accidents. They relate in some way to the structure of the physical world, to the fact that all our minds are as connected as everything else.

  I wonder what Lura's book is about? I was lying, of course, when I said I knew nothing about it. It was sitting there in the back of Burlem's mind the whole time I was with him. Lura's Book. Lura's Book. It's important, but she hasn't taken this opportunity to tell me anything about it. I wonder what would make her trust me.

  We eat vegetable curry and rice at the table with a bottle of white wine from the fridge. Planck goes back into his basket and falls asleep as we all start questioning one another on the Troposphere, and w
hat my experiences in it could possibly mean.

  "I'm intrigued by this god, Apollo Smintheus," Burlem says.

  "Yeah," I say. "I thought I was going mad."

  "Maybe you were," he says. "I never met any gods in the Troposphere. In fact, I've never met any other beings in the Troposphere. I didn't think it was possible."

  We talk about Apollo Smintheus some more and all the questions of religion I was thinking about earlier today. It seems that neither Burlem nor Lura has thought about the Troposphere in a religious context, apart from noting the detail about the interference caused by churches. Lura seems vaguely—but only vaguely—impressed by my feminist analysis of all major religions, but Burlem seems uncertain about me lumping Buddhism in with everything else.

  "Zen," he says gruffly. "Zen's different. And the Tao."

  And I remember his desire for the void, tempered by his need to lose desire altogether. And that makes me think of Adam and what happened to him. I hardly know Adam, but I miss him more than I thought possible.

  "We've all got our own ways of aiming for enlightenment," Lura says. "I'm writing the book, but he's meditating all the time, trying to see outside everything we already know. There's still so much..." But she doesn't finish the sentence. Instead, she yawns. "Oh. What a day."

  Our conversation has meandered around so much. We've discussed Pedesis, and the possibility of time travel using people's ancestors, and Burlem has confirmed that the milky images you get in the console when you're in someone else's mind relate to all their living ancestors: That's why the mice had hundreds and he only had one (his mother). The way you can most effectively go back in time is to use living ancestors until they run out (presumably, for example, Burlem's mother has none, so, if you got to her, you'd have to jump into another person rather than pick another image from the console, and then go back as far as possible using that person's ancestors). We discussed this point for some time, as I couldn't quite see how you'd ever get beyond people who are living now. But then Lura reminded me that distance is time in the Troposphere, and that by jumping across the world using ancestors, you also go back in time, sometimes by years rather than months. When I jumped from Molly to Burlem, I was jumping from Hertfordshire to Devon, and that's what got me back to before Christmas. If Burlem had been in Scotland, I may have ended up in August or September; if he'd been in Australia, I may have gone back three or four years. If you're lucky (or if your journey is well planned), you'll eventually find living ancestors who were dead when your journey started, and each time you jump, you'll go farther back in time. It sounded like a slow process, but Burlem reminded me that the jumps themselves are very quick. He also pointed out that this is obviously what Mr. Y was doing when he died. Mr. Y is a fictional character, but Lumas isn't. Burlem made it clear that this was also how Lumas must have died, and everyone else who was "cursed" by the book. Pedesis is dangerous, just as I discovered when I did it to get to Burlem.

  I've also learned that Burlem's Troposphere is indeed the Victorian city he was thinking about when I was in his mind. Lura gets a little cagey when we start comparing our personal Tropospheres. When I ask her how she experienced it, she tucks her hair behind her ear and says, simply, "Oh, a scientific matrix kind of thing. Not something anyone else could visualize, really." And then she gives Burlem a meaningful look.

  "We'd better all go to bed soon," he says. "We can pick this up in the morning. There's still so much to talk about. And Lura, why don't you make use of Ariel. She may be able to help you in some way. She's better with science than I am."

  "I'm really not," I say.

  And Lura looks at me for a second as though she's sizing me up, and then her eyes drop as I clearly fail. Whatever Burlem thinks, we're not just going to settle down together cozily to work out a theory of the Troposphere, or whatever. Not unless I can convince her to stop disliking me.

  All night I dream of Adam. In my dream he's telling me that he loves me; that he will never leave me. Dreams are so cruel sometimes. I'm never going to have that life. In fact, these shreds of life that I'm left with—I'm not sure they add up to anything very much.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Saturday and Sunday pass by in the same sort of way, with haphazard discussions and my growing sense that there's a lot I don't know, and that Burlem and Lura are trying to work out when to tell me something. We punctuate each day with tea, coffee, and sandwiches, as if our lives are just one long conference. Each evening we all go into the church across the street before having our last cup of tea before bed. I get the impression that Burlem and Lura discuss me when I'm not there, and that Burlem's still trying to persuade her to trust me. They are obviously still jumpy about me being here and pretty much put me under house arrest, apart from the visits to the church. Burlem tries to explain to me about his meditation and Lura mainly avoids me. In the evenings I sit up with Burlem and try not to flirt with him. I'm not sure what is going on with the two of them, but I don't want to get in the middle of it. Every so often the phone goes, but Lura always lets the machine get it. I have the impression that they have a friend whom they've only recently fallen out with, but I don't get any more details than that.

  My room is small, white, and cozy, with exposed beams and a short, fat, four-poster bed with a pink blanket over a white cotton duvet. I spend most of my time sitting on the bed, writing notes about the Troposphere. I mainly do this to keep my mind off my desperate need to go back there. But Burlem and Lura have forbidden me from going back in, at least for now. They're worried about this mission that Apollo Smintheus has in mind for me, as am I. And it's so clear that getting lost in it is a danger, although I'm sure that I can now get back anytime I want using the underground system. But Lura and Burlem seem unconvinced by this system, even though it must definitely exist. I wish they'd just tell me things directly instead of whispering in the kitchen and then stopping when I go in to make coffee. I know they want to get the book back from Faversham, but I don't know how we could ever do that.

  And I'm not sure exactly how I feel about everything. I'm warm, comfortable, and well fed for the first time in ages, but in another sense my life is over. Not over, maybe, that's a bit dramatic, but everything I thought I "had"—my job, my Ph.D., my few friends, my flat, my possessions, my books—I'm pretty sure they're all gone now. And unless Lura changes her mind about me, I'm not going to be able to stay here forever.

  On Sunday night I am having the same dream I have had since I got here, in which Apollo Smintheus is standing in front of me saying, "You owe me." I am awoken by the rain pounding the skylight like an industrial machine, and the clock says that it's four A.M. On Monday the sky is drum-metal gray and the morning is broken up with sudden pulses of strip-light yellow lightning. At about midday there's one crack of thunder, and then it stops raining. Burlem has the radio on for a while, and it warns of some huge storm coming, with winds of eighty miles per hour. But the storm doesn't come.

  On Tuesday morning the sky is as blue and sharp as a reflection in metal. I'm thinking, Is this the calm? The eye? Lura decides to do some gardening and I just sit there smoking at the dining table while she locates her gardening gloves and goes outside without saying anything to me. Through the window I can see what looks like a falcon perching on one of the telegraph posts behind the house. I wonder if Lura's seen it. It's so beautiful; it's more like something from a book than from real life. It's more like a picture or a word than a thing. And I wonder: Does language distance us from things so much that we can't believe in them anymore? Or is it just because I've been in the Troposphere so much that I'm in the habit of looking at things like that, like the falcon, and assuming that I invented it, and that it's a metaphor for something else? I put out my cigarette. Maybe I should go and try to make peace with Lura. I haven't had any fresh air for days.

  She's on her knees by one of the flower beds, turning the soil.

  "Hello," I say, walking towards her. "Can I help?"

  "No, it's all ri
ght," she says without looking up.

  I should just go away, but I persist. "Please," I say. "Let me help for a bit?"

  She sighs. "Trowels are in the shed."

  I get a trowel and a piece of tarpaulin similar to the one Lura's using to kneel on. I walk over and place my tarpaulin next to hers, and start copying what she's doing. We stay like that for five minutes or so before I realize I'm going to have to start any conversation I want to have.

  "I'm sorry for turning up the way I did," I say.

  "Hm," she says back. The same short closing-down sound she always makes.

  "And ... Look. I've been wanting to say this for a few days. I really am sorry that I went into Burlem's head to get here. I do know things about you that you probably don't want me to know and I'm so sorry I've intruded." I take a deep breath. "It's one of those problems with the Troposphere that you don't think about until it's too late and you've already done it. I mean, all my experiences in there so far have really been experimental." I think again; that's not quite true and she knows it. I have to be honest if I want to connect with her at all. "OK, I guess the one time I did use it in a deliberate way was when I wanted to find Saul..."

  "Why do you call him 'Burlem' sometimes?" she asks me, still turning the earth.

  "Er, I just do," I say. "I think I picked it up at the university. A lot of people there call him 'Burlem' rather than Saul."

  "Surely they call him 'Professor Burlem,'" she says, frowning.