The End Of Mr. Y (2 page)

‘Um … OK, then. Well, there’s this author called Thomas E. Lumas … Have you got any books by him?’ I always ask this in secondhand bookshops. They rarely do have anything by him, and I’ve got most of his books already, but I still ask. I still hope for a better copy of something, or an older one. Something with a different preface or a cleaner dust jacket.

‘Er …’ She screws up her forehead. ‘The name sounds sort of familiar.’

‘You might have come across something called
The Apple in the Garden
. That’s his famous one. But none of the others are in print. He wrote in the mid to late nineteenth century, but never became as famous as he should have been …’

‘
The Apple in the Garden
. No, the one I saw wasn’t that one,’ she says. ‘Hang on.’ She walks around

to the large bookcase at the back of the shop. ‘L, Lu, Lumas … No. Nothing here,’ she says. ‘Mind you, I don’t know what section they’d have put him in. Is it fiction?’

‘Some is fiction,’ I say. ‘But he also wrote a book about thought experiments, some poetry, a treatise on government, several science books and something called
The End of Mr. Y
, which is one of the rarest novels …’

‘
The End of Mr. Y
. That’s it!’ she says, excited. ‘Hang on.’

She goes up the stairs at the back of the shop before I can tell her that she must be mistaken. It is impossible to imagine that she actually has a copy up there. I would probably give away everything I own to obtain a copy of
The End of Mr. Y
, Lumas’s last and most mysterious work. I don’t know what she’s got it confused with, but it’s just absurd to think that she has it. No one has that book.

There is one known copy in a German bank vault, but no library has it listed. I have a feeling that Saul Burlem may have seen a copy once, but I’m not sure.
The End of Mr. Y
is supposed to be cursed, and although I obviously don’t believe in any of that stuff, some people do think that if you read it you die.

‘Yeah, here it is,’ says the girl, carrying a small cardboard box down the stairs. ‘Is this the one you mean?’

She places the box on the counter.

I look inside. And – suddenly I can’t breathe – there it is: a small cream clothbound hardback with brown lettering on the cover and spine, missing a dust jacket but otherwise near perfect. But it can’t be. I open the cover and read the title page and the publication details. Oh, shit. This is a copy of
The End of Mr. Y
. What the hell do I do now?

‘How much is it?’ I ask carefully, my voice as small as a pin.

‘Yeah, that’s the problem,’ she says, turning the box around. ‘The owner gets boxes like this from an auction in town, I think, and if they’re upstairs it means they haven’t been priced yet.’ She smiles. ‘I probably shouldn’t have shown it to you at all. Can you come back tomorrow when she’s in?’

‘Not really …’ I start to say.

Ideas beam through my mind like cosmic rays. Shall I tell her I’m not from around here and ask her to ring the owner now? No. The owner clearly doesn’t know that the book is here. I don’t want to take the risk that she will have heard of it and then refuse to sell it to me – or try to charge thousands of pounds. What can I say to make her give me the book? Seconds pass. The girl seems to be picking up the phone on the desk.

‘I’ll just give my friend a ring,’ she says. ‘I’ll find out what to do.’

While she waits for the call to connect, I glance into the box. It’s unbelievable, but there are other Lumas books there, and a couple of Derrida translations that I don’t have, as well as what looks like a first edition of
Eureka!
by Edgar Allan Poe. How did these texts end up in a box together? I can’t imagine anyone connecting them, unless it was for a project similar to my PhD. Could someone else be working on the same thing? Unlikely, especially if they have given the books away. But who would give these books away? I feel as though I’m looking at Paley’s watch. It’s as if someone put this box together just to appeal to me.

‘Yeah,’ the girl is saying to her friend. ‘It’s like a small box. Upstairs. Yeah, in that pile in the toilet. Um … looks like a mix of old and new. Some of the old ones are a bit musty and stuff. Paperbacks, I think …’ She looks into the box and pulls out a couple of the Derrida books. I nod at her. ‘Yeah, just a real mix. Oh, do you? Cool. Yeah. Fifty quid? Seriously? That’s a lot. OK, I’ll ask her. Yeah. Sorry. OK. See you later.’

She puts the phone down and smiles at me. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you can have the whole box if you want, but the bad news is that I can’t sell individual books from the box, so it’s all or nothing really. Sam says she bought the box herself from

an auction, and the owner hasn’t even seen it yet. But apparently she’s already said she hasn’t got the space to shelve loads more stuff … But the other bad news is that the whole box is going to cost fifty pounds. So …’

‘I’ll take it,’ I say.

‘Seriously? You’d spend that on a box of books?’ She smiles and shrugs. ‘Well, OK. I guess that’s fifty pounds, then, please.’

My hands shake as I get my purse out of my bag, pull out three crumpled ten-pound notes and a twenty and hand them over. I don’t stop to consider that this is almost the only money I have in the world, and that I am not going to be able to afford to eat for the next three weeks. I don’t actually care about anything apart from being able to walk out of this shop with
The End of Mr. Y
, without someone realising or remembering and trying to stop me. My heart is doing something impossible. Will I collapse and die of shock before I’ve even had a chance to read the first line of the book? Shit, shit, shit.

‘Fantastic, thanks. Sorry it was so much,’ the girl says to me.

‘No problem,’ I manage to say back. ‘I need a lot of these for my PhD, anyway.’

I place
The End of Mr. Y
in my rucksack, safe, and then I pick up the box and walk out of the shop, clutching it to me as I make my way home in the dark, the cold stinging my eyes, completely unable to make sense of what has just happened.

TWO

B
Y THE TIME
I
GET
to my flat it’s almost half past five. Most of the shops on the street are starting to close, but the newsagent opposite glows with people stopping for a paper or a packet of cigarettes on their way home from work. The pizza restaurant underneath my flat is still dark, but I know that the owner, Luigi, will be somewhere in there, doing whatever needs to be done so that the place can open at seven. Next door the lights are out in the fancy-dress shop, but there’s a soft light upstairs in the Café Paradis, which doesn’t close until six. Behind the shops, a commuter train clatters slowly along the brittle old lines and lights flash on the level crossing at the end of the road.

The concrete passageway that leads to the stairs up to my front door is cold, as usual, and dark. There is no bicycle, which means that Wolfgang, my neighbour, isn’t in. I don’t know how he gets warm in his place (although I think the huge amount of slivovitz that he drinks probably helps), but in mine it’s a struggle. I’ve no idea when the two flats were constructed, but they are both too large, with high ceilings and long, echoey corridors. Central heating would be wonderful, but the landlord won’t put it in. Before I take my coat off, I put the box of books and my rucksack down on the large oak kitchen table, switch on my lamps, and then drag the electric fire down the hall from the bedroom and plug it in, watching its two metal bars blush dimly (and, it always seems to me, apologetically). Then I light the gas oven and all the rings on the hob. I close the kitchen door and only then take off my outdoor things.

I’m shivering, but not just from the cold. I take
The End of Mr. Y
carefully out of my bag and put it down on the table. It seems wrong, somehow, sitting there next to the box of other books and my coffee cup from this morning, so I move the box of books and put the coffee cup in the sink. Now the book is alone on the table. I pick it up and run my hand over it, feeling the coolness of the cream cloth cover. I turn it over and touch the back, as if it might feel different from the front; then I put it down again, my pulse going like ticker tape. I fill my little espresso maker and put it on one of the blazing gas rings, and then I pour out half a glass of the slivovitz Wolfgang gave me and down it in two gulps.

While the coffee heats up, I check the mousetraps. Both Wolfgang and I have mice in our flats. He talks about getting a cat; I have these traps. They don’t kill the mice; they just hold them for a while in a small plastic oblong until I find them and release them. I don’t think the system works: I put the mice outside and then they come straight back in, but I couldn’t kill them. Today there are three mice looking bored and pissed off in their little see-through prisons, and I take them downstairs and release them into the courtyard. I didn’t think I’d mind having mice in the flat, but they do eat everything, and one time one ran over my face while I was lying in bed.

When I get back upstairs, I take four large potatoes from the box in the vegetable rack and wash them quickly before salting them and putting them in the oven on a low heat. That’s about as much cooking as I can cope with now; and I’m not even hungry. My sofa is in the kitchen, since there’s no point having it in the empty sitting room, where there is no heat. So, as the room starts to steam up and fill with the smell of baking potatoes, I finally take off my trainers and curl up with my coffee, a packet of ginseng cigarettes and
The End of Mr. Y
. And then I read the opening line of the preface,

first in my head, and then aloud, as another train rattles along outside: ‘The discourse which follows may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerised by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed.’

I don’t die. But then I didn’t really expect to. How could a book be cursed, anyway? The words themselves – which I don’t take in properly at first – simply seem like miracles. Just the fact that they are there, that they still exist, printed in black type on rough-cut pages that are brown with age; this is the thing that amazes me. I can’t imagine how many other hands have touched this page, or how many pairs of eyes have seen it. It was published in 1893, and then what happened? Did anyone actually read it? By the time he wrote
The End of Mr. Y
, Lumas was already an obscure writer. He’d been notorious for a while in the 1860s, and people had known his name, but then everyone lost interest in him and decided he was mad, or a crank. On one occasion he turned up at the place in Yorkshire where Charles Darwin was receiving what he called his ‘water cure’: he said something rude about barnacles and then punched Darwin in the face. This was in 1859. After that, he seemed to retreat into ever more esoteric activities, visiting mediums, exploring paranormal events, and becoming a patron of the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. After about 1880, he seemed to stop publishing. Then he wrote
The End of Mr. Y
and died the day after it was published, after everyone else who’d had something major to do with the book (the publisher, the editor, the typesetter) had also died. Thus the rumoured ‘curse’.

But there may have been other reasons for the idea of the curse. Lumas was an outlaw. He favoured the evolutionary biologist Lamarck (who said that organisms pass on learned characteristics to their offspring) over Darwin (who said they don’t), when even people like Samuel Butler – once described as ‘the greatest shit-stirrer of the nineteenth century’ – were coming around to the idea that we are all, actually, Darwinian mutants. He wrote letters to
The Times
criticising not only his contemporaries, but every major figure in the history of thought, including Aristotle and Bacon.

Lumas became very interested in the existence of a fourth spatial dimension and wrote various supernatural stories about it, somehow managing to upset people who did not believe in the existence of another dimension. His response was ‘But they are merely stories!’, although everyone knew that he used his fiction mainly as a way of working out his philosophical ideas. Most of his ideas were about the development and nature of thought, particularly scientific thought, and he often described his fictional works as ‘experiments of the mind’.

One of his most interesting stories, ‘The Blue Room’, tells of two philosophers who attend a party in a mansion. Somehow they get lost on their way to play billiards with the host and end up in a blue room in the (supposedly) haunted wing of the house. This room has two doors, on its north and south walls, and a spiral staircase in the middle. One of the philosophers says they should go up the stairs, but the other thinks they should leave via one of the doors. They can’t reach an agreement and instead end up speculating about the existence of ghosts. The first one argues that, as there are no such things as ghosts, they have nothing to fear. The second agrees that there is nothing to fear: he has never seen a ghost, and therefore has concluded that they don’t exist. Satisfied that there are no ghosts, and enthused by their agreement, the philosophers leave the room via the door they came in and try to make their way back to the party. However, the blue wing of the house seems to be arranged in a peculiar way. Once they leave the room they find a corridor leading to a spiral staircase. When they go down it, they end up back in the blue room. When they try the other door, the same thing happens. But when they go up the staircase, they simply find one of the doors.

Whichever way they go, they end up back in the blue room.

There have been a few academic papers written about Lumas as a historical figure, and maybe ten about his novel,
The Apple in the Garden
. There have been no biographies. Back in the 1990s, a

couple of Californian Queer theorists claimed him, or at least his journals, in which one can find, among other things, half-finished homoerotic sonnets about some of Shakespeare’s male characters. But I don’t know what happened to the Queer theorists. Perhaps they lost interest in Lumas. Most people do. As far as I know, hardly anything has ever been written about
The End of Mr. Y
. What has been written has all been by Saul Burlem.