The End Of Mr. Y (38 page)

Now she sighed. ‘It was a highly classified American project. I found out about it through a friend of a friend – a physicist at MIT. He had only heard rumours about the project – that it had started as a simple telepathy study and then mutated into something else. He mentioned a highly secretive desert facility, remote viewing, staring at goats, and the quest for the “ultimate weapon”. He said he’d heard that something catastrophic had caused the study to close down, and warned me not to get involved in asking any questions about it. It certainly sounded sinister.’

‘So if the project is closed, why are people going around saying they’re a part of it?’ ‘I don’t know. I think I already said that they soon became threatening.’

‘And how do they know I have the book?’ I didn’t ask if she’d told them.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

I paused. ‘Do you think they are actually dangerous?’

‘I really have no idea. Do you know why they want the book? I assume you’ve read it by now?’ ‘Yes. I’ve read it.’

‘And … ?’

‘I have no idea why they’d want it.’

Why was I lying? Of course I knew they wanted the formula, and I also knew why: because it worked. All I could conjecture was that these people were some kind of breakaway group who had been given the formula but never knew what it contained. And I was already familiar with the sensation of needing to go back into the Troposphere. Imagine needing it and not being able to go there? I imagined something of what a drug addict might feel.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘Lura, I really think …’ ‘What?’

‘I think I should return the book to you now. I think it should go back in the bank vault, where they can’t get it.’

‘But if there’s nothing in it that they’d find useful …?’ ‘I think it should go back,’ I said.

After our conversation finished, I walked into the conservatory and looked at my own reflection in the glass. It was dark outside and I could only see a couple of stars, hanging in the sky like a half- hearted attempt at decoration. An American classified study. Goat-staring. The ultimate weapon.

That sounded military to me. I walked back into the house and picked up the book. Of course I would send it back to Lura; I’d do it tomorrow. But I also knew that the men from Project Starlight – or people like them – would get it in the end. And then what would happen? My mind filled with unpleasant thoughts of world domination and thought-control. If a repressive regime – or any regime – got hold of this mixture, then … what? I found I could imagine exactly what such an ‘ultimate weapon’ would look like. I sent back an e-mail to the Hotmail address given by the last correspondent, saying that although I had seen the book, it was already on its way back to its owner in Germany. I apologised and assured him that he must be mistaken: there was no recipe in the book. And I put it on the table, ready to go.

But I didn’t really want to post it. What if it got lost? Damaged? On the other hand, I had no time to go to London to meet Lura to hand it over in person until the weekend. And would she even want to see it? Perhaps she’d suggest sending it straight to the bank and asking them to put it in the vault. There were too many possibilities and I’d had no more e-mails. I did nothing. I spent the Tuesday and Wednesday in meetings, including Max Truman’s annual Health and Safety presentation – compulsory; although Ariel Manto simply didn’t go. I’ve always quite enjoyed Max’s eccentric annual presentations. This one was entitled ‘When Things Go Wrong’. It was a tongue-in-cheek history of the old railway tunnel under campus, ending with a dramatic account of its collapse in 1974. Max had obtained lots of PowerPoint slides of gruesome images of the Newton Building crumbling and people running around looking confused. He made various connections between the collapse of the university and the collapse of student–staff relations in the mid-1970s. While the tunnel was collapsing, he said, some demonstrating students had stormed the Registry and were busy drinking the vice chancellor’s port. We learned that our own building had been constructed in 1975 – right over the newly reinforced tunnel. Max told us that there was still a maintenance route into the tunnel from our building. We needed to know this, he said, so we could take the necessary precautions. At this point, Mary asked what the necessary precautions would be.

‘Just don’t fall into it,’ said Max.

‘How would we fall into it?’ she said.

‘Well, you can’t,’ he said. ‘But new Health and Safety advice says I have to warn you about it, anyway.’

‘But it’s been there for almost thirty years,’ said someone else. ‘And no one’s fallen into it yet …’ ‘Where is it?’ asked Mary.

‘Photocopying room,’ said Max. ‘Next to the machine.’

‘You mean that sort of hatch thing that we all stand on every time we do any photocopying?’ said Lisa Hobbes.

‘Yep.’

‘So we could actually fall into it?’

‘No, don’t be daft. This isn’t Alice in bloody Wonderland. It’s well secured.’ ‘What’s it like in the tunnel?’ asked Laura, the creative writing tutor.

‘Don’t even think about it, Laura,’ said Mary.

‘What?’ she said. ‘I think we should go down there and investigate.’ Everyone groaned.

‘OK, OK. I’m only joking.’

Laura had been in trouble the previous year for sending all her students on some kind of psychogeographical project in which they’d had to use maps of Berlin in order to walk around the city centre. Three of them had ended up walking along the motorway and were arrested.

While the questions and answers continued, I simply sat there thinking about the Troposphere. I thought I already had a fairly good idea of how it worked. In fact, I hadn’t got too much sleep in the preceding few days because of it, and while the others kept on talking about the railway tunnel, and whether or not Laura was going to lead a search party down the hatch, my eyes started to close. I dreamed of a world in which everyone had access to everyone else’s minds, until some government recruited men in deep blue uniforms to go around and brainwash everyone so they didn’t know how to do it any more. When I woke up, everyone had gone. It was a good thing: I’d been sweating in my sleep and my shirt was almost wet through. Even though I was on my own, I had a profound sense of being watched. I knew I had to give the book back to Lura, so I went straight home to ring her to arrange it for the weekend. As I drove through the heavy rush-hour traffic, I wondered if it might be better to burn the book altogether, or at least destroy the page with the recipe on it.

But I am a professor of English literature. I couldn’t destroy a book if my life depended on it. At least, that’s what I thought then.

I got the last parking space on my street and walked the last twenty yards to my house. Then I went inside and considered what I had to do. I had it all planned out by then. My idea was that I’d remove the page with the instructions on it – but I certainly wasn’t going to destroy it. I planned to keep it or hide it … I wasn’t sure quite what I was going to do with it. Perhaps it was clear to me that I would have to destroy it at some point, but for then I thought removing it would be enough. I’d remove the page, give the book back to Lura, and then feign ignorance if she ever asked me about it.

It was at exactly the moment that I had opened the book to the correct page that I saw the car headlights sweep up outside. Then I heard the steady throb of a diesel engine, and I simply assumed someone had called a taxi. But I was jumpy and noticing everything, so I went to the window to look, still holding the book in my hands. And then I saw them: the two blond men I’d last seen when I gave my paper in Greenwich. They were trying to find somewhere to park in my street. They wanted the book. It was them.

And worse: one of them was driving – looking for somewhere to park – but the other one? Well, he seemed to be asleep.

I couldn’t think quickly enough. If one of them was in the Troposphere, then he was one or two jumps away from my mind and everything I knew about
The End of Mr. Y
. I looked at the book and quickly ripped the page from it. My thoughts almost collapsed then, but what I did next took on the clarity and focus of a bullet-point list. I had to leave the book behind, but I’d take the page with me. By the time I’d decided that, I’d already folded up the page and put it in my shoe. By the time I’d done that I realised I had to get away before the men either came in here and beat me up or – worse – jumped into my mind and took my knowledge, anyway. They were still trying to park. I hid the book behind the piano; then I grabbed my coat, wallet and keys, and left via the back door.

Over the neighbours’ fence, through their garden, down their driveway and into my car. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. The conscious man didn’t even look over when the car door slammed. I imagined a car chase, but no one looked at me as I drove past. And I drove – faster than I’ve ever driven – to the university. My thoughts were racing ahead of me at a speed I’ve never

experienced before. And in the jumble of strategy, fear and conjecture, one thought stood out. I realised that I would be the target of those men for as long as I had my memories. It wouldn’t matter if I destroyed
The End of Mr. Y
. It wouldn’t matter if I shredded the page concealed in my shoe. If they could get into my mind, they could get the instructions for making the mixture, just as Mr. Y had learnt the secrets of Will Hardy’s ghost show. It would be as simple as that. They couldn’t get it from Lura, who hadn’t read the book. But as long as I remained alive and sane, they could get it from me.

As I parked in the Russell car park, I felt much as though I had just been given a life sentence. When I’d been a teenager, I’d fantasised about the life of a tragic hero. I’d thought there would be some sort of glamour in being Hamlet, or Lear. But now I could see death at the end; I could see it with more certainty than I could see tomorrow. I remembered a dissertation that I’d marked a couple of years before. In it, the student argued that American eighties and nineties gangster films are postmodern tragedies. He spent a lot of time on one detail: that no one in these gangster films ever escapes. In our society – connected up with bits and bytes – you can never become entirely anonymous. At that moment I realised that the Project Starlight men would track me down, wherever I went, and take what I knew. They were going to rape my mind, and there was nothing I could do about it. I also realised that I had one slim chance of preventing this. I could disappear now. But I didn’t have much time. They’d come here next: I knew that.

It was too dangerous to wait for empirical evidence of what they were going to do. I had to work from
a priori
assumptions, namely:

• The men wanted my knowledge of the ingredients for the mixture.
  

• The men could get my knowledge in three different ways:
  

• Torture
  

• Pedesis
  

• Taking the sheet of paper from me by force.
  

I reasoned that I could eat the paper, or not give in to torture, but I could do nothing about Pedesis. What I knew of the logic of the Troposphere suggested that, in order to get into my mind, the man in the Troposphere would only have to jump into the mind of someone near me, or likely to see me, and then, at the moment this other person saw me, make the final jump into my mind and all my knowledge and memories. In theory, the sleeping man could simply get into the mind of his colleague and send him to see me.

So I couldn’t let anyone see me. Once in my office, I closed the blinds and the curtains and locked the door. I hadn’t smoked for twenty years, but when I saw that Ariel had left a box of cigarettes on her desk I took one out and lit it. I pleaded with myself to find some way out of this situation.

Where could I go where no one would see me? My mind filled with images of roads and shopping centres and supermarkets. On a usual day, how many people would see me? Hundreds? Thousands? Everywhere I cast my mind, I saw these blobs of flesh-and-consciousness; the detail that is always left off any map. Even if I got back in my car and drove, I would travel past people. I wondered why I had even come to the university; why I had chosen as my hiding place a room with my name on the door, a room whose details can be found on the university website, which also contains handy maps: how to get to the English and American Studies Building from anywhere on campus; how to get to the campus by road, rail, air, Eurostar and ferry. I smoked and paced. I felt safe at the university. That was it: that was why I had gone there. But only because there are always so many people there. You never feel alone at the university, and, usually, in dangerous situations you want to be around people. Not this time.

Three or four minutes passed. I heard laughter moving down the corridor: Max and the others, no doubt, coming back from the bar. It didn’t matter that I’d locked the external doors; now they were

bound to be unlocked. I looked at the heavy paperweight on my desk. Perhaps I could stop them with force? No. You can’t use force against remote telepathy. I urged myself to think faster. Should I destroy the page from my shoe? I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. Why had I not driven away to somewhere random when I had the chance? My thoughts pushed and shoved each other like desperate Christmas shoppers, and I reminded myself that I had only two decisions to make: what I should do with the page; and where to go next. Before I knew what I was doing, I had reached up to the very top shelf for the fourth volume of
Zoonomia
. I used to hide money in books a long time ago, when I was a research student and my front door was almost as flimsy as a curtain and anyone could open it with a credit card. I reasoned that thieves aren’t interested in books, and anyway, books are bulky. If you were a petty thief, you wouldn’t be able to transport a thousand or so books. So you’d ignore them: you wouldn’t select, say, ten to steal. You’d ignore them all and focus on the VCR and the microwave. For that reason, I’ve always hidden things in random books. I’ve hidden love letters, pornography, credit cards … Would this work now? These Project Starlight men did clearly know the value of books. Ah, I thought, but this is where the university will help me. I can hide the page and lock the door, and no stranger is going to be able to come and look through my things. And even if someone did manage to do that, the book they want wouldn’t seem to be here. And then I thought, ‘How long am I going to be away?’