Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  'So?' I said.

  'He's in there. He's still in a right strop.'

  'Oh.'

  'I said I'd come out and wait for you in case you didn't know where to go. We can wait for you for a lot longer if you like. Did Dad tell you what happened?'

  'Not really. Just that he punched the wall.'

  'He's such a complete knob sometimes.' Josh looked at the ground in front of us. 'I don't understand it.'

  'What was the stuff about Milly moving in?'

  'Dad wants to clear out Christopher's old room and redecorate the house. Christopher has hardly been in his room for years, except that time when you stayed with us. As you'll remember, there are still Euro '96 posters in there, and Oasis tapes. Milly's going to use it as a study for writing her music book, which was Dad's great idea. He must have known Christopher would freak out because of the mural. When Christopher turned up today out of the blue, Milly was cooking dinner and Dad asked if he wanted to stay. After dinner, the subject of his room came up and he hit the roof. I guess I do sort of know why. It was a bit insensitive of Dad to pick that room.'

  Christopher's mother had painted the mural for him before he was born. It was a forest scene, with an enchanted castle on the top of a faraway hill and a brown, earthy path leading to it. In the foreground, a big white unicorn bowed its head, as if waiting to be stroked. A few years before, when we were waiting to move into our current house, Christopher and I had stayed with Peter and Josh for a few weeks. We'd slept together in Christopher's old, lumpy single bed, even though Peter offered the spare room. Every night I undressed in front of the mural and imagined what it would be like to be pregnant, to give birth, to hope and dream for a child as well as yourself. I had never felt the urge to have children, and I kept looking at the mural and trying to have it and failing. It wouldn't have been any use if I had conjured it up. Christopher didn't want children either; and we hardly ever had sex, even then.

  'I asked him about the mural once,' I said to Josh. 'He didn't say much. It was obviously one of those things I was supposed to know never to mention.'

  'There's been all sorts of trouble over that mural,' Josh said. 'When Christopher was a teenager he thought it was childish and covered it over with posters. I remember I wanted to move into that room so I could have it, and he was like, "It's mine," and then covered it up. Then he took all the posters down when he came back after she died. Just those: he didn't change anything else in the room. I guess I like the mural too, but things have to move on. I think Dad just wants to get on with his life. You can't keep something like that for ever. If we sold the flat, or if it burned down, it would be gone anyway. Maybe memories are better on their own. Dad has offered to have a high-resolution digital photograph taken of it, and to frame a big copy for Christopher.'

  'Yeah. I can see why he freaked out, though.'

  'He went up quite calmly, and then the next thing we heard was a load of tearing and smashing, and we rushed upstairs and found that he'd started breaking things in the room, and ripping his posters down and kicking things about. He ended up by punching the wall, right by the unicorn, which I thought was kind of significant, not that anyone really cares what I think. Then he looked at Milly and said, "And you're not my fucking mother," as if that even had anything to do with it. Then he walked out. That was when I phoned you. I found him in the pub with his hand all bleeding, and some guy trying to throw him out because of HIV. It was horrible. I hate blood, as you know. Once he was properly bandaged up I got Dad's car and brought him here for an X-ray. It's like a nightmare in there. Too many clocks and too much mess.'

  'I didn't even know he was coming round to your place tonight,' I said.

  'No. But he just turns up. Does it all the time. Usually lunchtimes.'

  'Are you OK?'

  'Yeah. Dad's not, though.'

  'I know. He said Milly had gone.'

  'She'll come back. But they should ban Christopher from coming round at all until he can get over whatever it is. Milly's so nice. She doesn't deserve all this.'

  'He's having a pretty bad week. He got knocked back from another job.'

  'There's always something.'

  Peter had more or less said this too. But was it really true? I was sure that Christopher went for long periods without there being anything bothering him at all. I tried to remember when one of these periods had been. Perhaps in the run-up to last Christmas. We'd decided to home-make all our presents, and there was a nice weekend when I was sewing little rectangles and Christopher was filling them with lavender through a funnel he'd made, but which kept breaking. He'd had a problem with his eyes, I suddenly remembered. That was why the funnel had broken. He'd never needed glasses, but said everything had gone blurry. We couldn't easily afford an optician's appointment, but I worked out that if we took a bit more money out of the Christmas fund and lived on nine, instead of ten, pounds a day for a bit, then it would be OK. I bathed his eyes and didn't say anything when he threw the remote control across the room later that evening because he couldn't see the buttons. I thought that once his eyes were better, then we'd go back to normal; if only his eyes hadn't been bothering him, it would have been a perfect weekend. Maybe Josh was right. Maybe there was always something. But there was also always the sense that if the something could be fixed, then all would be perfect.

  I looked into the sky. There were no stars now, just the orange haze of Torbay.

  'By the way,' Josh said, 'did you get the book I left for you?'

  'What book?'

  'The Kelsey Newman book. The Science of Living Forever. I gave it to Christopher to give to you.'

  'Ah.' I rolled my eyes and smiled. 'That explains everything.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Oh, I reviewed it by accident. It got mixed up with another book.'

  'Mixed up with another book?' Josh raised both eyebrows.

  I laughed. 'Yeah. I thought my editor at the paper had sent it, and so I just reviewed it like some sort of robot.'

  'You knob.'

  'Of course, Christopher didn't actually tell me you'd given it to me; he just left it on my desk, with a note from my editor in it. So that didn't help.'

  'He's such a twat. I bet he did it on purpose.'

  'Who knows. Probably they both fell on the floor and he just stuck the note in the wrong book when he put them back. I'll never know, because I can never ask him about it again. You know how you can only ever talk about a problem once with Christopher and then if you bring it up again he goes totally crackers? We've already had one big row about the mix-up.'

  'What did you think of the book?' Josh asked.

  'I'm not sure. What about you?'

  The entrance to casualty was through two sets of automatic doors. These now opened, and Christopher walked out. His hand was neatly bandaged, but apart from that he looked a mess. His hair was all over the place, and he was still wearing the clothes he used on the project: shapeless tracksuit bottoms and a paint-spattered T-shirt.

  'What's going on?' he said, looking first at Josh and then at me.

  'Nothing,' Josh said, standing up. 'Meg just got here.'

  'Well, why are you sitting out here?'

  'I was just finishing my tangerine,' I said, standing up as well. 'How are you?'

  'Couldn't you have done that before you got here? I've got to go through to radiology now. I've already seen a nurse.'

  Josh said, 'I had to tell Meg what happened.'

  'And you couldn't have done that inside? Whatever. Come on. We've got to go.'

  As I got up I remembered the change Peter had given me.

  'I brought this from your dad,' I said, giving it to Christopher. 'For the machine.'

  'That's a lot of use now.'

  The radiology waiting room was at the end of a long red line painted on the floor. There were only three other people there. There was a shrivelled man in a wheelchair, who looked dead already, and a mother with a boy of about eleven. The mother and boy were called thr
ough almost immediately, and we were left with the shrivelled man.

  Christopher was holding his paperwork in his good hand, which was shaking.

  'How are you feeling?' Josh asked him. His voice echoed in the big empty space. Everything was different shades of blue, and one of the lights flickered.

  'Shit,' he said.

  Josh shrugged, and leaned across him to pick up a magazine that had been lying at a strange angle on the wood-veneer table.

  'For fuck's sake,' Christopher said loudly, dropping his paperwork. The shrivelled man stirred in his wheelchair.

  'What?' Josh said.

  'My hand. God. Be more careful.'

  I bent down and picked up the papers Christopher had dropped.

  'I think we should try to keep the noise down,' I said.

  Josh got up and took the magazine over to the other side of the room, where there was a disorderly pile of magazines on an identical table. He added the magazine he'd picked up to this pile, counted the items in it and then straightened it. Then he looked at it again and made the magazines into two piles. I watched him concentrate as he did this, oblivious to Christopher sighing and rolling his eyes. When the magazines looked neat and symmetrical he came back. We all sat in silence until Christopher was called in for his X-ray.

  'You OK?' I said to Josh, when Christopher had gone.

  'Yeah. I've been trying to think of hospital jokes to lighten the mood,' he said. 'All I could remember is one my analyst told me, which is kind of sick. Thought I'd better not tell Christopher, but...'

  'Go on,' I said.

  'OK. Mary and John are patients in a mental hospital. One day they're walking by the swimming pool, and John, who can't swim, throws himself in the deep end and waits to drown. Mary jumps in and rescues him. The doctor sees what Mary has done, and decides she is safe to be released, since her heroic act shows she's mentally stable. He calls her into his office and says, "Well, there's some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you're being released. You saved a man's life and it's quite clear you're ready to enter society again. But I'm afraid there's bad news too. The man you saved, John, hanged himself shortly after the incident in the swimming pool and is now dead. I'm so sorry." "Oh," Mary said, "he didn't hang himself. I hung him up to dry." See? I told you it was sick.'

  When I'd finished laughing, I said, 'Why did your analyst tell you that?'

  'She tells a lot of jokes and stories,' Josh said. 'I'm supposed to reflect on them.'

  'So what did you learn from this story?'

  'I think I learned that there's more than one way of seeing your actions.'

  'Or, I guess, other people's actions.'

  'Yeah. So what did you think of all the science in the Kelsey Newman book? I was pretty impressed by it. I've got the original Frank Tipler book too. It's all there. The science, I mean. It makes a lot of sense, although in the Tipler book there's a slightly disconcerting description of exactly how humans would have to colonise the whole universe before the Omega Point could be of any use. On page forty-eight he talks about test-tube babies being born from artificial wombs and being brought up by robot nannies in other galaxies. This surely would be a universe full of maladjusted psychos. Or already is, if he's right. They'll be the ones running things, of course.'

  I smiled. Josh always remembered what page something was on. I'd learned a lot about Josh's relationship with numbers when I'd snuck him onto a Zeb Ross retreat for free a few years ago, just before our flirtation had begun. I used to do an afternoon session on the mathematics of narrative, where we looked first at unity, then pairing, then incidences of the number three in fairy tales and myths, then Jung's theory of quaternity and so on. Josh had an encyclopaedic knowledge of instances of any number in almost anything, and had added much to the discussions, including an incredible list of threes that began with the Three Little Pigs, and ended, after about fifty other items, with the Three Wise Men. He'd even talked about the meanings of the threes in Tarot cards: the Threes of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. It was only much later that I discovered that he was using his knowledge of threes as a stalling device: a way of avoiding getting to the discussion of sixes.

  After 9/11, Uri Geller put forward a theory that the attack had been cosmically connected with the number 11 because, for example, the Twin Towers looked like the number 11, New York was the 11th state added to the union, and flight number 11 had 92 people on board and 9 + 2 = 11. He even put a list on the relevant page of his website of significant people whose names had eleven letters, which included Tutankhamen, Harry Potter, Nostradamus and Josef Stalin. Josh had written a long blog about how you could choose any number and do this kind of idiotic thing with it, just as you could predict or confirm just about anything you wanted, with any text, if you followed the principles of the Bible Code. Josh could be a real sceptic when he wanted to be, which made his belief in aliens and sea monsters all the more interesting.

  'What do you think about Newman's ideas, though?' I said now.

  'I think that apart from the robot nannies it's very exciting. It makes a lot of sense. And I guess it is comforting too.'

  'Because of your mum?'

  'Yeah, but also because it means I'm not as mad as I thought I was. Lots of things that I've always believed in are possible in Newman's system, even probable, and completely consistent with the laws of physics. It proves the universe was designed—by human beings. How cool is that?'

  I kind of shrugged. Before Newman came along Josh had thought, with the astronomer Fred Hoyle, that human DNA came not from evolution but from outer space.

  'The Omega Point makes sense of everything,' Josh said. 'Every supposedly irrational thing I've ever come across: ghosts, telepathy, magic, astrology, reincarnation, Tarot, morphic resonance; they are all totally rational in Newman's universe. If we're already beyond the end of time, and living in this Second World in a never-ending afterlife, then everything makes sense. If every possible scenario exists in the mind of the Omega Point, then of course you'd see ghosts and monsters from time to time. It would mean that the universe, run on the physics of Energia, rather than matter, would be capable of a lot more than we ever thought. If the future has already happened, or, at least, if it's possible to compute, then of course you can predict it. If we are all conscious within the same system, and we all in some way share consciousness with the Omega Point, and therefore each other, then why wouldn't you be able to know what someone else is thinking sometimes? Energia is something you can do magic with. Why not? Doing magic in this system would be just like putting a shortcut on a desktop.'

  Josh was always collecting evidence for magic and telepathy. He was very fond of B, and when we'd stayed in the flat he'd become interested in the way she seemed to know when someone was coming home. It was catching: Peter and I—and even Christopher, for a while—all became interested as well. At first we hypothesised that B heard the cars coming and believed her hearing to be extraordinary, especially as we all had to park down a side-street about a hundred yards from the flat. But she even picked up on people walking home. One time Peter was returning from London on the train and although he was supposed to let us know what time his train was due in so that someone could collect him, he decided to walk back from the station instead. About three minutes before he arrived, B started running around the flat, looking out of windows and wagging her tail, before ending up at the front door with her favourite ball in her mouth just as Peter turned his key in the lock. Each time something like this happened, the people who were in the flat would try to convince the person who'd just arrived that B had known they were coming. It was hard to believe when you were the person arriving, but hard not to when you saw her deliberately go through her preparations for greeting someone minutes before it would be possible to hear their footsteps, or their cough, or even smell them. Josh knew all about Rupert Sheldrake's experiments to find out if dogs really do know when people are coming home. Sheldrake argued that the universe has morphic field
s, and morphic resonance, which involve memories being stored not in an individual, but outside, along with everyone else's. This, if true, would enable telepathy, among other things, since if a person's thoughts are not kept in their head, but outside in a collective space, then anyone can access them. I never admitted it, and I was sure there was a more conventionally scientific explanation for it, but B was so telepathic—or something—that on a walk if I even thought the word 'squirrel' she'd be off after it. If I thought to myself, 'Perhaps we'll go past the pet shop and get beef sticks later,' then B would seem to start anticipating it, and would pull in that direction. Sheldrake's theories also, Josh said, accounted for why I found it easier to do my crossword on a Thursday than I did on the Sunday it was published. By the Thursday, he said, so many people would have got the answers that they'd be the morphic resonance equivalent of neon, glowing from some nearby dimension. By Thursday I'd be simply plucking the answers out of the air. Josh ended up keeping a detailed record of B's telepathy and sent the results to Sheldrake, although I never found out what he made of them, if anything.

  'So why isn't everyone doing magic and predicting the future if it's all possible?' I said.

  'I think because we're encouraged to believe it's not possible. Maybe the Omega Point stops people. That bit I'm not quite sure about.'

  'And why are there so many frauds out there pretending to bend spoons? Why is it that every stage magician you see is so obviously not doing real magic? If it was out there, I'm sure people would be doing it. You'd see people doing it. People would really bend spoons.'

  'Maybe the people who really do it, do it quietly. Also, I think the wrong type of person senses that there's more power out there than they've been given access to, and so they pretend they've got it. Again, I'm not sure. But I'm very intrigued by this Second World, and I think it has the potential to answer a lot of these questions. Kelsey Newman is coming to Totnes to speak, by the way, so I'm going to ask about all of this. I thought you might want to come. Even to tell me what's wrong with what he says back. You could be my devil's advocate or something.'