The End Of Mr. Y (37 page)

Who am I?

I am Saul Burlem.

Thank God. Where am I?

Walking along Fore Street. I’m walking along Fore Street, but Planck wants to turn left, past the cheese shop, and then right, towards home. He can’t want to go home already. No, he doesn’t. He trots right past our front door and onwards, his muzzle like an arrow pointing down towards the space where the walls meet the pavement. Ah, now here’s my second-favourite place in town.

Where am I?

I’m standing here while the dog sniffs some weeds growing out of the pavement. Yes, here’s the space I like. It really is a space, an absence, enclosed with four walls. Various signs have gone up lately explaining that this is a building site belonging to blah blah, and telling you the various bad things that will happen if you trespass in it. It spoils the effect somewhat. It was better before the

signs went up. An empty space, enclosed by walls: a house with no rooms and no roof and a carpet of pinkish Devon earth. I like that. It reminds me of my favourite place in town: the castle. The castle is the same kind of thing – walls enclosing nothingness. I have a postcard of the castle above my desk. It’s an aerial view, probably taken from one of the helicopters that are always throbbing in the air on clear days. You look down on it and it’s like a grey stone ring left discarded on a hillside, ripped, perhaps, from a giant’s finger. And you can go to visit it as well: you can pay money to go into a circle of empty space with some walls around it. I love it. You look at this empty space, fenced off, made special, and you think: ‘What am I supposed to be looking at here? Are the walls there to keep the nothingness in, or the town out?’

And now, bizarrely, I know exactly how stone is constructed. But I still don’t know who made the spaces. Who invented absence? Who chooses to celebrate it here? Of course, people don’t know they’re celebrating absence (although they should; they really should). They think they’re visiting something, something tangible – but it just isn’t there any more. They think that by visiting an empty space enclosed by walls, they can travel through time. And I know about that, too.

Why won’t Burlem think of the name of the town he’s in?

Where am I?

Now I’ve crossed the road, and I’m standing outside the church, the church we go to every evening, just in case. We don’t pray, but what we do is perhaps a sort of prayer. We walk in and then out again, just in case. I’ve never known exactly what sort of church it is, even though I’m inside it every night. I assumed it must be C of E or Catholic, but it doesn’t actually have a name: it’s not Saint Anything’s. But every Thursday evening happy people come here in home-made clothes and do something cheerful inside. Well, they always seem cheerful when they come out. I think they go door-to-door in the evenings they’re not here, selling something invisible, like hope or salvation. Lura obtained the keys and no one minds that we go in there every night. Do I believe in what they do in there? Yes. I have to, now. But I wonder if they’d still believe, if they knew what I know.

Where do I live?

St Augustine’s Road.

But I know where that is: it’s his old house. Why doesn’t he think of his address here?

Where am I now?

Walking up the hill where the road sweeps around like a question mark and you can get run over, if you’re not careful. There’s a sign at the top – Torquay – and an arrow pointing right.

So he’s near Torquay; but I don’t even know where that is. It’s not enough.

What happened to make me leave my house?

Oh. Where to begin this story? Why am I thinking about this now? The dog snuffles onwards, up through the market square, but I’m not seeing that any more. I’m seeing … what? How far back does my mind want to go? I see scenes on fast-forward: the first one is, predictably, that paper I gave in Greenwich on the curse of
Mr. Y
. Lura was there. The Project Starlight men were there, too. Of course, I had no idea who any of them were then. The only truly innocent member of the audience was Ariel Manto, and she was the one I kept looking at: the girl with the tight grey jumper and the red hair. I remember Lura walking away afterwards, going back to join the Lahiri group without saying anything. Then I see myself drinking too much with Ariel, fantasising about making love to her and then – the horror, the horror – realising she probably would go to bed with me. I left, of course, before I had the chance to actually go through with it.

Then a couple of weeks later, or maybe a bit more: an e-mail from Lura. She is/was a scientist. She was at the same university as Lahiri. But she’d seen the title of my paper and been intrigued. She enjoyed it. She wanted to meet me.

And I was thinking: two chances of sex in a month?

And then realising that, as usual, one of them is (potentially) a student, and the other is too old.

Or: I’m too old. That’s the main thing. And I know that they can’t really want me; not now. Although Dani did. Bland Dani wanted me. That was the last time: me, shirtless, with my grey chest hair shining awkwardly under the fluorescent office lights, and Bland Dani, the weakest of all the MA students, saying ‘I want to see you’, with her dull eyes pointing at my trousers. Of course, when she said ‘you’, she meant my cock. Why is it that women do that? ‘I want you inside me.’ No. You just want my cock, and you may as well ignore the large lump of flesh attached to it, the man who has a brain that will never be ‘inside you’, and that you’ll never understand. It was supposed to be a tutorial. I suggested blindfolding her, not because it turns me on but because I didn’t want her to see me. It ended badly, of course. What’s wrong with not seeing? Then it’s all in the mind, and perhaps not even against the university regulations. But she threatened to report me anyway when I (literally) stopped seeing her. I didn’t even desire her: she looked like a slab of melting butter.

I arranged to meet Lura at a café in a gallery in London. What she said almost floored me. She owned a copy of
The End of Mr. Y
; perhaps the only known copy: the one in Germany. That’s actually why she’d come to hear my paper. The book had been her father’s. He had been one of the first scientists involved in the theory of quantum mechanics, she explained. She clearly didn’t want to talk about him very much, but she outlined the basics: that he had been a contemporary of Erwin Schrödinger and Nils Bohr, but had refused to follow many European Jewish physicists to America to work on the atom bomb and other similarly diabolical projects. Instead he stayed in his university and continued constructing his earth-shattering theory – details of which are now lost. The week before he was sent to the concentration camp, he had written a note in his diary about
The End of Mr. Y
. He was very excited to have ordered it from London and believed it to be one of very few remaining copies. One of his last diary entries talked about the possible ‘Curse of Mr. Y’. Lura had been shocked, she said – but also intrigued – to see the title of my paper. She said she hadn’t ever come across that phrase before, except in her father’s diary.

She explained all this to me without changing her facial expression once. But she kept running her hand through her hair, and pausing for a long time between parts of the story. Then, when our coffees arrived, she gave up on the hair and started on the handle of the cup, moving it back and forth and pushing her thin finger through the hole.

‘So that’s it,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d like to know some of the history of the book; or, at least, that particular copy.’

‘I’m very grateful,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much for taking the time to come and meet me.’ Her eyes looked as though she was going to smile, but she didn’t.

‘The book was important to my father,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I simply asked, ‘Have you read it?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘But I know it’s important – after all, people keep trying to buy it from me.’ ‘But you won’t sell?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

She sighed. ‘Much as I hate that book, I can’t sell it. I haven’t sold any of my father’s books. Plus, I don’t particularly like the people who are trying to buy it. They’ve become a little threatening lately. But they can’t do anything about a book in a bank vault. Perhaps they’re planning a heist?’ Now she did smile. ‘Well, I shouldn’t think they’ll have much luck.’

‘Who are they?’

She shrugged, and sipped from her
café crème
. ‘Americans.’ There was a long pause. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I expect you’d like to see it, wouldn’t you?’

‘Really?’ I must have sounded like a little boy excited over some-one else’s collection of rare comics.

But I couldn’t stop myself. ‘I mean …’

‘Of course. It will be of some intellectual value to you. I can see that. My father would have approved, and I think that’s a good enough reason.’

‘Has anyone else seen it?’

‘No. I’ve looked at it briefly, but I couldn’t touch it …’ ‘Why not?’

She looked at the table. There was a minute speck of Demerara sugar by her saucer and she squashed it with her finger. Then she looked up at me again and laughed weakly.

‘Family superstition?’ Her laugh shrank into a sigh. ‘I’m a scientist, and of course I know that Hitler killed my father, not some cursed book. But even so … It was the day after he received it that they got him. The last thing he did as a free man was to put that book in a bank vault.’

We talked a little more. She explained that she was going out to Germany the following month and invited me for a long weekend. Of course, I wanted to go: to see the book, to touch the book. But I made some polite objections – would she want all those memories brought up again? Would she want some stranger intruding on her family business, etc., etc. – and she politely rebuffed them all, as I’d known she would. So I went. It was the first week of term and I welcomed getting away from all the admin and e-mails and meetings for a few days. I tend to work when I’m at home, and I am terrible at taking holidays. We spent the Thursday evening watching an absurd play, and then we went to the bank vault on the Friday. It was supposed to be summer, but the air was grey and damp, and everything around me seemed as though it was being slowly smothered by everything else. When I had the book in my hands, she looked at the floor and almost immediately said, ‘I want you to take it. Take it away from here.’

‘You’re selling it?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Just take it away.’

We had a sad kind of sex on the last night I spent with her. There was a mundane inevitability about it, like flu in winter. I didn’t think I’d ever see her again. She hated the book and she’d given it to me. I wasn’t even sure whether or not she wanted it back. I didn’t really understand anything about what was happening, but I didn’t question any of it. I needed that book: I wanted it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

Then came the strange events that I wrote off at the time as a kind of self-undermining parapraxis. First, I forgot to pack the book; then I forgot to collect my bag from the carousel in the airport.

Somehow I did get home without misplacing it. That afternoon I had to attend a university event at the cathedral – but it passed in no time. I sat next to my research student, Ariel Manto, and I think I even managed to flirt with her a little (harmless, harmless). Then I made my excuses and rushed home. I sat there in my ancient conservatory, and, as the sun set and then rose again outside, I finished the book. Afterwards I couldn’t sleep, so I drank a vintage bottle of wine and wept several times, just because of the utter beauty of the experience: of holding the book, of being able to read it at last. No one bothered me and all I could hear was birdsong.

And I immediately resolved to make up the mixture from the book and try going to the Troposphere myself. I did some fast, blurred research, and found out that I could buy some Carbo-veg in the right potency from a shop in Brighton. I drove there and back that afternoon and, after taking some holy water from St Thomas’s, had my first experience in the Troposphere that night. Most of what I can remember of my first few experiences is a blur. I remember travelling through the tunnel, so familiar to me now, and arriving in what appeared to me to be a nostalgic-postcard version of nineteenth-century London, full of dark slums and fog and abandoned hansom cabs. And I explored, of course, and started understanding some of the rules of this place. I tried Pedesis on the milkman. I attempted – and failed – to enter the mind of the university’s vice chancellor.

I got the first e-mail on the Saturday evening. It seemed to be from a university student at Yale, despite the Yahoo e-mail address, asking me if I would be willing to enter into e-mail correspondence about
The End of Mr. Y
. I politely declined. The e-mail was poorly written, and my own students take up enough of my time. I thought it was a coincidence that this person had got in touch just as I had obtained the book, but at the time I thought it was genuine. The second e-mail came on the Sunday, at roughly the same time of day.

Please forgive this intrusion. I am the director of Project Starlight, a significant interdisciplinary study into the activities and potentials of the Human mind. We have been recently studying a method outline in the book
The End of Mr. Y
. Or, I should say my predecessor was doing this? Since I have taken over this study I am interested in pursuing this study but unfortunately all our systems have gone down and I have lost everything … including the instructions for making the formula. This also explains why I am using a Hotmail account right now! Our systems will not be running again for another week but I do need that formula ASAP. Since you own a copy of the book I hope you will not mind sparing a few minutes to write it up for us.

I called Lura on Monday.

‘Project Starlight?’ she repeated, after I had explained.

‘Yes.’

‘They’re the people who offered to buy the book from me.’ ‘Do you know anything about them?’

She paused. ‘Well, I did check them out.’ ‘And?’

‘Project Starlight closed almost a year ago. There is no Project Starlight any more.’ ‘What is – or was – it?’