The End Of Mr. Y (32 page)

Anachronistic neon signs glow pinkly all over the place.
Closed. Fermé. Closed for Renovations. Closed. Shut. No Vacancies
. What kind of place has gothic castles and towers with pink neon signs everywhere?

Console?

The thing comes up.

You have no choices
, says the female voice.

Oh, great. This again. Has the whole thing crashed? Did those men do something to this place that means I just can’t access anything any more?

You have one new message
.
What?

You have one new message
.

Can I get the message?
There’s no response. Where’s the little envelope that you click on? What is the equivalent here? How do I retrieve a message in the Troposphere? Who would have left me a message, anyway? For a second I imagine some brown-paper package with red, green and black wires coming out of it: a bomb from my enemies. But this doesn’t make me feel anything at all, and I remember that this is what I like so much about this space: no hot, no cold, no fear.

Something now glows in the console and I notice that it’s Apollo Smintheus’s mouse-hole. I didn’t notice it before, but it’s there now: sitting between what looks like Valhalla and something called the Primrose Tea Shoppe. Am I supposed to go in there? I do want to see Apollo Smintheus. I switch off the console and walk through the white archway and into the room I recognise from before: the empty tables and shelves and the nest in the corner. There’s no sign of Apollo Smintheus. I walk through to the other room. The fire is out and there’s no one here. But there is a booklet lying on the table.

A Guide to the Troposphere
, it says on the cover.
By Apollo Smintheus
. Is this the message? I open the booklet.

You now have no new messages
, says the console.

So the booklet is the message. OK. I sit down on the rocking chair and begin reading. The whole document is only about three pages long, but the script is large.

The Troposphere is not a place.

The Troposphere is made by thinking. (I am made from prayer)

The Troposphere is expanding.

The Troposphere is both inside your universe and outside it. The Troposphere can also collapse to a point.

The Troposphere has more than three directions and more than one ‘time’.

You are now standing in the Troposphere but you could call it anything. The thought is all thought.

The mind is all minds.

This dimension is different from the others. Your Troposphere is different from others’. You achieve Pedesis via proximity in Geography (in the world)

Tropography (in the Troposphere) Ancestry (in the mind)

The choices the Troposphere gives you relate to proximity alone. (Except when information is scrambled)

You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds).

You can also jump from person to ancestor in the world of memory. This is all memory.

The Troposphere is a different shape from the physical world to which it (loosely) corresponds. For this reason it is sometimes more efficient to travel in the Troposphere and sometimes more efficient to travel in the physical world (see diagram).

Disclaimer: This diagram is a scaled-down version of a higher-dimensional calculation. It will be correct for journeys of a short or non-complex nature. Pedesis that takes the ancestral route over many generations will (probably) lead to inaccuracies.

Note: Units of distance/time in the Troposphere work out as roughly 1.6 times that of their equivalent in the physical world. An ‘hour’ in the Troposphere will last for 1.6

physical-world hours, i.e. ninety-six minutes.

Converting time to distance should be done in the usual way. Distance is time in the Troposphere.

You cannot die in the Troposphere. You can die in the physical world. ‘You’ are whatever you think you are. Matter is thought.

Distance is being.

Nothing leaves the Troposphere.

You could probably think of the Troposphere as a text.

You could think of the Troposphere that you see as a metaphor. The Troposphere is, in one sense, only a world of metaphor.

Although I have attempted it here, the true Troposphere cannot be described.

It cannot be expressed in any language made from numbers or letters except as part of an

existentiell
analytic (see Heidegger for more details).

The last point could have been clearer. What I mean to say is that experiencing the Troposphere is also to express it.

End.

EIGHTEEN

B
ACK ON MY BED, AND
it’s only just gone midnight. I have to try to write down as much as possible of Apollo Smintheus’s document before I forget it. I have to be able to think about it in the real world. What does it all mean?
The thought is all thought. The mind is all minds
. Is that what the Troposphere is? All minds? Perhaps I already knew that. Perhaps that’s what I suspected. If that’s the case, is the city in my mind so big that it has a little shop or house or, indeed, castle for every consciousness in the world? What were all those castles about, and why were they all shut? What is consciousness? Do worms have it? They must, if mice do. If I wanted to get in the mind of a worm in Africa, how would I go about that?

One thing is clear. Time does work differently in the Troposphere. I don’t quite understand what distance/time travelled in the Troposphere is, but it seems obvious that when you come out of it, more time has passed than when you were inside. The first thing I do is draw out the diagram as I remember it. It’s basically Pythagoras’s theorem. It’s Pythagoras’s theorem, but applied to space and time. I struggle to recall all the popular science books I’ve read over the years. Gravity works in a similar way, doesn’t it? But there’s nothing in Apollo Smintheus’s document about mass. It’s all about distance and time. Indeed, he seems to be suggesting that, in the Troposphere, distance is the same thing as time. I know that’s true in the ‘real’ universe as well. It’s called space–time. But you don’t notice it in your normal life. You can’t mess around with time by taking a trip to the shops, or even a trip to the moon. If you want to mess with time, you have to fly away from Earth very fast in a spaceship, and keep travelling at something close to the speed of light without accelerating or decelerating. Then, if you come back, you’ll find that ‘more’ time has passed on Earth relative to you in your spaceship. What seems to happen in the Troposphere is the opposite of this. Or is it, in fact, the same? My stomach grumbles. I’m going to have to eat again soon.

But I can’t stop thinking about the castles and towers with their ornate spires and heavy drawbridges. As I write out the lines
You could think of the Troposphere that you see as a metaphor. The Troposphere is, in one sense, only a world of metaphor
, I wonder what the castles, if they are metaphors, represent. And then I also wonder: when you go into the Troposphere, do you immediately get access to the consciousnesses ‘closest’ to yours in the physical world? And if so, did all the castles belong to the religious people in this building? And who decided that they would be castles? Did they; or did I?

I finish writing out the document. I think it’s almost right. It’s easier than I thought to remember, but then I think about what Apollo Smintheus has told me and it becomes clear that my Troposphere (because it’s different for everyone) is in my mind. This document is now a memory. But memory is already decaying it. I look at one line I’ve written:
You can jump from person to person in the physical world
. It doesn’t look right. Have I left something out? I scrunch my forehead, as if this will make my memories rub together and create a kind of friction of remembrance. It works.
You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds)
. OK. I don’t know what this means, but at least it’s there on paper.

I yawn. My body wants to sleep – and eat – but my mind wants to keep doing this: to keep answering questions until there aren’t any more questions. I glance back over my list. I have to smile when I see the reference to Heidegger. What’s Apollo Smintheus doing thinking about Heidegger? But some instinct tells me that Apollo Smintheus knows how to explain things to people in their own personal language, and my language does include terms like
existentiell
and
ontical
, as well as their grander counterparts:
existential
and
ontological
. I’ve never forgotten what I read of
Being and Time
, although not finishing it is one of the big regrets of my life. I remember those terms because they’re the ones I wrote so many notes about, all in the margins of the book.

When I read
Being and Time
, I always thought of it as
Being and Lunchtime:
it was my private joke with myself for the month it took me to read the first one hundred pages. It took that long because I read it only at lunchtime, over soup and a roll in a cheap café not far from where I was living at the time in Oxford. That house had no heating at all, and it was damp. I spent the winters with chest infections and the summers with a house full of insects. I tried to spend as little time there as possible. So every day I’d go to the café and sit there for an hour or two reading
Being and Time
. I think I managed about three or four pages a day. As I remember this, I can’t help wondering: does Apollo Smintheus know this, too? Does he know about the day the café closed for renovations and I stopped going there? Does he know that I started having an affair with a guy who wanted to meet me at lunchtimes, and that I left Heidegger for him?

I wish I’d finished the book. I wish I’d brought it with me. But who takes
Being and Time
with them as an essential object when running away from men with guns? I get out of bed. There’s a freestanding antique bookcase by the wall. It has a glass front and a little silver key. I look through the glass and see lots of texts written by Pope John Paul II, including a book of his poetry. There are thick brown Bibles and thin white Bible commentaries; all dusty. No thick blue books. No
Being and Time
. As if I thought there would be. My stomach makes another peculiar noise, as though it’s a balloon being blown up. I’m going to need to eat if I’m going back into the Troposphere. Then I’m going to have to work out how to find Burlem.

The corridor is dark and cold. I can’t believe I’m on my way to steal food from a priory kitchen. Is it actually stealing? I’m sure that if anyone else was awake, and I could ask them, they’d tell me to help myself. That’s what people usually say to guests, isn’t it? At least I haven’t had sex here; I haven’t had sex in the priory with an ex-priest.

I wonder where Adam is. Is he in one of the other guest rooms? I imagine bumping into him in the corridor and taking back everything I said earlier on. But I’m not sure you can take back everything I said. My insides spiral into themselves as I briefly imagine touching him; touching him anywhere. It doesn’t begin as a sexual thought, but it soon becomes one. I imagine licking his legs and scratching his back. As my mind spirals more tightly, everything falls away. There are no men with guns; there is no priory. In an impossible half-hour with Adam, a half-hour without context, what would I want to do? We could do anything. How far would I go? How far would be enough to smother this desire? Jagged, violent images dance in my mind like broken glass, and I sigh as the fantasy breaks down.

Perhaps nothing will ever really satisfy me.

The kitchen door is closed, but unlocked. Inside it is dark, but some heat is still coming from the range, and there’s an orange glow of fuel burning in there. I don’t switch on the light; the orange glow is just bright enough to see by. The smell of stew that was so savoury before has lost intensity and become something more like a memory of a meal: that plasticky food smell you often get in institutions. I try a couple of cupboard doors before I find the pantry. There are large red and silver tins of biscuits, all stacked on top of one another. There are about twenty catering-sized tins of baked beans. There is powdered milk and condensed milk. There are several loaves of bread. What will actually give me energy I can use to stay in the Troposphere? I recall advice columns from

several years’ worth of my ex-housemates’ women’s magazines. Complex carbohydrates. That’s the kind of thing I need. Wholewheat pasta, brown rice. But I can’t cook anything. There’s a box of fruit. I’m sure I remember that bananas are a good source of something or other. I take three and then, after thinking about it, I take the whole bunch. I can take some with me when I go. A small loaf of sliced brown bread. A jar of Marmite. A bottle of lemonade. For Christ’s sake. I’m going to travel to another world on Marmite sandwiches, bananas and lemonade. The thought is absurd. Just before I close the pantry, I see something else: several huge tubs of Hi-EnerG meal replacer. I take one just in case. It’s a brown cylinder, with pink, cheerful lettering. I think about stupid capital letters on products, and then I think
iPod
. And then:
Burlem
. That’s where I put all his documents.