The End Of Mr. Y (33 page)

Of course.

Back in my room, it doesn’t take too long to set up my laptop and connect up my iPod. I transfer Burlem’s files across and then unplug my iPod and hide it in the bottom of my bag. Outside I can hear the wind picking up and I imagine a blizzard, something like the LUCA numbers gone viral, even though Adam said the snow had stopped. I eat three bananas, each wrapped in a slice of brown bread. I sip lemonade. I browse files. I learn that Burlem’s CV is out of date, even though he seemed to go through a phase of applying for jobs in the States about three years ago. I learn that he was halfway through a novel when he disappeared (and, I wonder, did he take the file with him? Did he ever finish it?). The first chapter is quite good, but obviously doesn’t have anything in it that will help me find him. I can’t help reading the rough plan as well before I move on. It’s only a page long. The novel is about a young academic who has an affair with a colleague who then gets pregnant by him. His wife finds out about the affair (but not the child) and divorces him, but the colleague’s husband believes the child to be his. When he dies, the child is told the truth about her parentage and begins a tentative relationship with her biological father. The narrator lives alone with only books for company, and wishes he could see more of his daughter. After I close that document, I keep searching through the files. I find all the parts of the application process Burlem had to go through to get his professorship. I find letters to his bank manager. But there’s nothing at all that suggests that he planned disappearing, that he planned to leave the university and never come back. There are more letters. There’s one to a Sunday newspaper, complaining about a cartoon that mocked Derrida the weekend after his death. I smile at that, remembering seeing the cartoon and hoping someone would write in. There’s a letter to someone I don’t recognise. Molly. There’s no surname. It’s written in a strange style, the kind of style you’d use to talk to a child. Then I realise it is to a child. It’s written to a child – or perhaps a teenager – at a boarding school. Burlem’s promising to go and see her soon, and to give her money. What would Burlem be doing with a schoolgirl? My mind fills with unpleasant thoughts.

Then I open the file of the novel again. The kid in the book is called Polly.

I read the letter again. This is Burlem’s daughter; of course it is. Shit. He never mentioned this to me. I just thought he was an unmarried – or, I guess, possibly divorced – guy in his fifties. I didn’t know that he had a troubled past, although I should have realised. He certainly always looked like a man with a troubled past.

There’s no address on the letter apart from Burlem’s. But now I find other letters – a whole list of them below the ones to the bank manager – that make sense. They are all to a Dr Mitchell, and are on subjects such as fees, bullying and extra tuition. Then I look at the bank-manager letters and find instructions to set up a direct debit to a school in Hertfordshire. The reference is Molly Davies. Now I get it. Burlem’s paying for his daughter to go to boarding school. There’s an address on these letters. The address of the school.

My mind’s buzzing. Could I get to Burlem through her? I need to find Apollo Smintheus.

When I get back into the Troposphere, I realise that the town square has more than four corners. The same castles are standing around with the same neon pink signs, still looking like impossibilities. The owl hoots again.

‘Apollo Smintheus?’ I say. Nothing.

I call up the console.

You have no choices
, it says.

‘Can I still use the Apollo Smintheus card?’ I ask it.

The Apollo Smintheus card has expired
.

Fuck. I thought he said I’d have it for a couple of days.

I wander around the square, but everything really is shut. There’s a road leading out of the square and I take it. With each step I think of Apollo Smintheus’s ‘rough calculation’ that each unit of distance/time in the Troposphere is worth 1.6 in the ‘real’ world. So what is a footstep? How much time does this take me? If I take a hundred steps, and it takes me, say, two minutes, when will I wake up in the priory? How far would I have to go to miss breakfast? How far would I have to go to be pronounced dead? I walk on, past a couple of car parks and a jazz club. On the other side of the road there’s a run-down strip club with black oily streaks down its white façade, as if it recently caught fire. Neither of these places has a name, but the strip club has silhouettes of girls on poles, and the jazz club has a picture of a saxophone. The jazz club is on a corner, and there are concrete steps leading down towards an alleyway, at the end of which is a cinema and another car park.

None of these buildings seem to be closed. There are no pink neon signs here. Without really thinking about it, I enter the jazz club. But there’s no music and no smoke.

You now have one choice
.

You
… I’m cold and I need to take a shit. But it looks like we’re going to sit here all night. Ed’s got the heat on full, but my feet are still like blocks. There’s snow on the ground outside and the wind’s picked up, too. The sign on the church across the street rattles back and forth. Who is Our Lady of Carmel? The word makes me think of caramel; a lady made out of caramel or something. The car smells of coffee and junk food. There are sandwich cartons all over the floor. I kick one of them and it makes a thin, plastic, broken noise.

‘What’s that?’ says Ed.

‘Sandwich carton,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’

Ed says nothing. His eyes are pure pupil.

‘Maybe she isn’t in there,’ I say.

‘Look, the priest knows about the churches and she’s screwing him, right?’ ‘Yeah, but …’

‘And he “comes here when things go wrong”. Why wouldn’t he ask her to come, too? They’ll know that as long as they stay in there, we can’t do anything. Maybe she knows, anyway. Who knows how long she’s had the book? She could have been surfing MindSpace for years.’

‘I say the book’s on its way to Leeds.’ ‘Where is Leeds, anyway?’

I shrug. ‘North-west? It’s not close to here.’ ‘Shit.’

‘We’ll get the book.’

‘We didn’t get it last time.’ ‘We’ll get it.’

I’m … Oh, fuck. I’m in the mind of one of the blond men. Martin. Martin Rose. OK, Ariel. Don’t let him know you’re here. But how do you tiptoe around in someone’s mind? Shhh. Do I stay or do I

go?
Console?
The thing appears like a slide transparency and now, as I/Martin look over at Ed, his face is busy with an overlay of images. Someone’s baking something. Someone else is driving on a freeway. Another person is looking up at a blue sky. What are these images? I remember Apollo Smintheus’s document:

You achieve Pedesis via proximity in Geography (in the world) Tropography (in the Troposphere) Ancestry (in the mind)

OK. So if you are close to someone in the physical world, you can get into their mind via the Troposphere. This kind of makes sense. These guys are right outside the priory, and I had to walk down one metaphorical street to find them. I don’t understand what Tropography might be. But
Ancestry
. Is that what I’m seeing now? Are these images something to do with Martin’s parents and grandparents? Are they their POVs? There are only three of them. That’s not much ancestry. In the mouse’s mind, there were hundreds of images. Come on, Ariel. Think … But I don’t want to think too loudly in case I alert Martin to the fact that I’m here. I am almost intrigued enough to try one of the images in the console to see what will happen, but something tells me that this would be a big mistake. When I last did this, with the mice, I managed to jump from the cupboard under my sink to the backyard and into the mind of the mouse by the bins, who must have been the first mouse’s – what? – father? Grandfather? Who knows where I’d end up if I jumped here? Maybe somewhere in America. How would that translate in the Troposphere?

‘Ed?’

‘What?’

‘If she just stays put in there, there’s not much we can really do.’ ‘Right.’

‘Does she know that?’

Ed shrugs. There’s been a doorway hovering faintly over him the whole time, but now I can see another image in the console. It’s an image of the interior of a car and a blond man … It’s me. It’s Martin. So I could choose to be Ed now? Is that right? Shall I jump? Shall I do it? No. Stay safe. I try to relax and let my ‘I’ fall backwards, so that I can properly become Martin and get further into him than just the surface of his thoughts. And – it’s like putting on a new outfit; something too warm, like a jumper on a hot day – my consciousness slows down, and my ‘I’ is now Martin’s …

‘We could burn it down,’ I say, not really meaning it. I didn’t come here to burn down churches – or shoot priests. We’ve been given a second chance to take the book and OK, we’ve gotten a little crazy. But on the other hand, we don’t have much formula left, and so this whole thing feels urgent. Our CIA cards will only get us so far; especially if someone chose to actually call the number and speak to our ex-boss. What would he say? No, haven’t seen those boys since they joined Project Starlight. Haven’t seen them since I signed the form releasing them from their duties. CIA? Not any more.

‘That’s not a terrible idea,’ says Ed. ‘At least we’d warm up.’ ‘It is a terrible idea. Forget I ever said it.’

‘Why? Smoke them out. It’s a great idea.’

I look out through the windshield. I’m thinking that I have a problem with shooting priests, but I could hurt her: Ariel Manto. I guess she’ll be expecting it. That makes it easier. The first time it wasn’t so easy: I remember vomiting into the toilet in some pale blue diner out West. I held on to the bowl, and there was blood on it afterwards; blood from my hands. The next person I killed was

a piece of scum anyway, and was expecting it. That made me realise that there’s the possibility of impersonality in doing these things, and after that I found I could do it without really being there. As though you’re there, but you’re not there. You have a haze in your mind and afterwards you just wipe it. Then again, all this time in MindSpace makes you empathise with people more. But still, we need to get rid of the people who know the secret – once we know the secret ourselves. I kick the sandwich container again and Ed glares at me. Every so often the wipers go off and more snow accumulates in these mini-drifts on the edges of the windshield. On the right, just in front of us, there’s the priory: the little red-brick building. Could I get out of the car and set it alight? How do you set fire to something? Isn’t it hard, especially in the snow? We’d need gas to do it, and some kind of kindling, and a lighter.

‘I don’t think it’s that easy to set fire to a place,’ I say. ‘So how in God’s name are we going to get them out?’ ‘I don’t know.’

A long pause.

‘I’m cold.’

‘So am I.’

Martin’s mind – at least his surface thoughts – quieten into a buzz of physical sensations and my own consciousness seems to automatically struggle out of its restrictive costume. My ‘I’ is back. So how do I go into Martin’s memories? The console’s still there, and I recognise the ‘button’ for Quit. I switch off the console, just by thinking it closed. Now I’m just sitting there in Martin’s presence, haunting him without him knowing anything about it. I can’t let him know I’m here. But I want his memories. I want to know what he knows. Mr. Y did it in the book, so I should be able to do it, too, now that fiction seems to have become truth.

‘Childhood!’ I think, experimentally. I try to give it the kind of jaunty, authoritative exclamation mark I give when I think
Console!
Nothing happens. I try to merge a little more with Martin. I suppress myself as much as I can. I feel what he feels. I stop trying to be me at the same time as I am him. I focus on all the shit in my gut, and how I’m not even sure if I want the formula as much as I want to be in a clean, air-freshened bathroom, with my bare feet on a cream shag-pile carpet, taking a dump, clearing all the waste from my system … I try it again. ‘Childhood!’ And suddenly there it is: an image of a plastic toy; this thing that changes from a robot into a car and then back again. And I feel something for this piece of plastic: a desire; a hope; some kind of victory… ‘Project Starlight!’ I think. And that’s it: I’m suffocating into him as my ‘I’ seems almost to stop existing at all, and I’m Martin, in the past … In …

… a white room with electrodes on my head and chest. This is weird. This is different from the early parts of the study, where I had to hold pictures of triangles, circles and squares, and try to transmit them to Ed in another room. This feels more like the remote-viewing experiment – not that I was any good at that. Other guys were travelling to Iraq in their minds, and drawing out pictures of weapons dumps and biotech factories, deep underground. I couldn’t find any of that shit when I went to Iraq in my mind. A couple of camels: they said I imagined them. But this is something completely different. They’ve given me some formula from a clear test tube, and now they’ve plugged me into this machine. I’m sitting on something that looks like an electric chair crossed with a dentist’s chair. But … then I’m in another world.

When I come out and finish filling in the questionnaire, they tell me I’ve been to a place called MindSpace. I’m like, ‘What the hell is MindSpace?’ No one wants to tell me. But pretty soon I’m running errands for them; taking trips to Iraq, but not looking for weapons this time. Not that there are any to find – not according to Ash, the guy in charge of that part of the programme. I remember he once said to me that the skill of remote viewing is twofold: 1) find what’s there and 2) find

whatever they tell you to find. So I don’t look for weapons in Iraq. I read people’s minds. No one lets me go close to Saddam, though. I’m not good enough for that. Plus, my security clearance is a little uncertain. After all, Ed and I were recommended for this after things got out of hand in New Orleans, and we shot right to the top of the transfer list. And a transfer into a wacky paranormal project? There’s no better way to relieve yourself of a couple of crooked agents. Anyway, once the project was in full swing, my missions involved people much further down the pack of cards than Saddam. Two of diamonds; three of spades. I’d go out there, come back, and then some guy would come in from the military to question me. That became my job. Ed and I joked that we should get new titles: Mind Agents – something like that.