The End Of Mr. Y (48 page)

Newtonian cause and effect suggested that someone wound the original clock and set it ticking, and that every single action in the universe could be predicted – if you had something powerful enough on which to do the prediction. There’s no free will in that world: a world where everything can potentially be known. In that world, I’ll get up in the morning and do what I have been programmed to do: as though all my actions are just computer-game dominoes, triggered by other computer- game dominoes. It’s what happens when you try to combine God with science. It’s narrative, pure and simple. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. And the middle is only there because the beginning is; the end is only there because the middle is. And in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Take away that cause-and-effect narrative and you have the quantum world, disturbing enough in its own way, with all the possibilities of multiple universes and infinite probability. But if you don’t take it too seriously, and if you factor in evolution and economics, and everything else that’s taken for granted in our world, then you have at least the illusion of free will. You can decide to become rich. You can grow up to be president. Improbable, but possible.

But in this new world of poststructuralist physics, I have so much free will that nothing means anything any more.

But you believed that before, Ariel. You’ve read Heidegger, Derrida. You got a thrill out of it all: no absolutes. It’s what you believed. Everything depends on everything else
.

But I didn’t want it to be true. Or, I wanted it to be true for the closed system of language, in which nothing is ever absolutely true, anyway. I wanted uncertainty. But I didn’t want the world to be made only of language and nothing else.

Maybe that’s why Burlem’s heading for the void.

And that’s where I’d be going, too, if I didn’t have to go into the Troposphere again, with a real possibility that I’ll never come back. But I suppose that Burlem and Lura’s reasoning is clear enough. If I’m going back to change Abbie Lathrop’s mind for Apollo Smintheus, why not just keep going and change Lumas’s mind for the human race? And, of course, what they said made sense. The Troposphere shouldn’t be there. If enough people knew about the Troposphere, we’d have the worst possible scenario: no God – and no free will, either. People would simply be able to control other people’s minds. Those with power could simply manipulate the rest of us to think what they want us to think. Any ‘bad’ or ‘revolutionary’ thoughts could be erased.

Yeah: like I’m going to erase the thoughts of Abbie Lathrop and Thomas E. Lumas.

When I lie down in bed, I can hardly sleep. And when I do drop off, I just find I’m dreaming of Apollo Smintheus again. Most of the dream is the same as the one from the other night, with him saying ‘You owe me’, over and over again. But the other half of the dream is about everything he said about time travel and paradoxes. I’m asking him, ‘But how can I go back in time and change a world that is not already now changed by what I did?’

And he’s saying, ‘You already have.’

I get about an hour’s sleep in the end.

When I get up in the morning, the rain has stopped and Burlem’s cooked me porridge. I’m not sure I want porridge: I think I want to smoke a lot, and then go through the kitchen drawers until I find the sharpest knife, and then I want to spend a few hours alone convincing myself that I’m real and I’m human and I mean something. But in the end I just eat the porridge, and then smoke one cigarette with a glass of water. Lura comes down from her study at about ten o’clock.

I’m sitting on one of the yellow sofas, finishing my second cigarette of the day. The fire is dead and I flick the stub into it. Burlem is out walking Planck. Lura makes herself a cup of herbal tea and comes to sit in the armchair.

‘So,’ she says.

I cough a little. ‘So,’ I say back.

‘What a night,’ she says. ‘How do you feel?’

I look beyond her and out through the patio doors. The grass is still damp from the frost last night. I can see the patch of earth that we dug over yesterday, and it looks redder and fluffier than the rest of the garden.

‘I feel completely wasted,’ I say. ‘All that thinking … And I didn’t sleep very well.’ ‘Oh? Because of the thinking?’

‘Mainly because of bad dreams,’ I explain. ‘Time-travel paradoxes.’

‘Ah. Yes. They’ll keep you up. I used to be married to a world expert on them: I should know.’ Her

smile is watery, and I wonder what happened to him. Did he go off with someone whom he’d phone from toilets? Or maybe he died, and Lura got the dog to keep her company. But I can’t ask.

I frown. ‘I was bothered by feet.’ She smiles and sips her tea. ‘Feet?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘The human foot. No one knows exactly how it works – well, not well enough to be able to replicate one. And then there are things like junk DNA and cognitive processes, and the way quantum theory doesn’t match up with gravity, but everyone thinks it must do … How does that work?’

‘You may have to explain more clearly,’ she says. ‘How does what work?’

‘Well, clearly no one’s been able to “think” these things into existence, but they do exist. I suppose what I’m trying to ask is how poststructuralist physics accounts for things that exist in the world without explanation, if the explanation is what creates them?’

Lura’s nodding. But she doesn’t speak yet.

‘I mean,’ I say, ‘in the scenario you’ve described, how is there any mystery at all?’ ‘Good question,’ she says. ‘Very good question.’

‘Is there an answer?’

She sighs. ‘Yes. I think so. It’s interesting you were thinking about time-travel paradoxes, because

…’ ‘What?’

‘Well, all these questions are really about creation. What is a creator? What does a creator do? When does creation take place? Of course, scientists hate the word “creation” and “creationist”. Science says it is against creationism, or intelligent design – or at least, it’s against them being taught alongside science, in science classes. But the irony is that there are creators, and they are the scientists.’ Lura sips her tea and then puts it down. ‘And we’re so used to the idea of creation as something that happens in the beginning. First the world was created, then we were created; then things started to happen. That’s the way the story usually goes. But what if it’s the future that creates us, not the past?’

‘Shit …’ I say. ‘But …’

Lura laughs. ‘But how does that work? It doesn’t; not according to classical physics.’

‘So … This is connected to that question I asked last night, about thoughts having “backwards effects”, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’re saying that, in the future, someone will come up with a theory that, for example, reconciles quantum physics and gravity, and that this theory makes the world work the way it does now? So scientists are just discovering things that have already happened?’

‘Yes to the first bit, but no to the second. Einstein still created relativity by thinking it,’ she says, picking up her tea again and taking a sip. ‘But someone in the future will do the next bit, and someone else will do the bit after that, and it will all trickle down through history.’

‘So we’re living in a world that has had infinite people in the future thinking about it already,’ I say.

‘No. Because the future hasn’t happened yet. And the future may not be infinite.’ ‘But …’

‘It’s not a cause-and-effect universe any more, Ariel. Nothing really happens before or after anything else. You could say that, in some way, everything happens at once.’

I think of the train of fear, and the way I was able to return to myself at any point I wanted. But that was because I was moving on something that had no mass, that was able to travel infinitely fast. I was travelling on emotion, not on anything real.

But is thought real? Does thought have mass?

It must do. We’ve already agreed that thought is matter. Or have we? I’m still not sure about all this.

‘Sorry,’ Lura says. ‘This is a lot to take in.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Don’t be sorry. I want to know it all now, before I go back into the Troposphere. I want

… Lura?’ ‘Yes?’

‘When – and I suppose if – I get back, the book won’t exist, right?’ She nods. ‘I hope that’s what happens.’

‘So you don’t actually know?’

‘No. I don’t know what is going to happen.’

‘It’s possible that I’ll never have met you,’ I say. ‘After all, Saul will never have given his talk, and therefore never met you, and therefore never found the book, and therefore never had to run away. And the Project Starlight men won’t be chasing us all and … I won’t actually even know Saul, because I met him at the conference. So I won’t be doing a PhD any more, and …’

‘That’s a cause-and-effect universe, though,’ Lura says. ‘I don’t think we are living in a cause-and- effect universe.’

‘So what do you think will happen?’

‘I think the book will go, but everything else will stay the same.’

I remember Apollo Smintheus.
The mice would all just dissolve into the air, I think. The world wouldn’t change. No one would notice
. I just don’t get it. How can you go back to edit the past and expect it only to change the future a little bit?

‘You think. You don’t know?’

‘Sometimes thinking is knowing,’ she says.

And then I wonder what this is. Is my last trip in the Troposphere an experiment, or something less or more than that? But I have to go. I know all the reasons why. And I am glad Lura is telling me all this before I do. Presumably my thoughts won’t change? I hope not. There’s still so much to think about.

My stomach churns. I’ve made a decision. I’m going to do it this afternoon. I tell Lura.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I think it’s the right time.’

When Burlem gets back we all have another cup of tea, and they ask if I want lunch before I go, as if I were a weekend guest about to take a train back to London. I should have some lunch, but I don’t have any appetite at all. I don’t want to say goodbye, exactly, and it’s clear that they don’t want to, either. Saying goodbye would be a bit frightening, and it’s not even clear that we are saying goodbye. Perhaps I will be able to find my way back, and perhaps I will still know who they are when I get here.

The black circle on the card. Perhaps I don’t even need that. But I take it out of my bag, anyway. And so I find myself lying on my bed, just as the sun starts to fade in the sky like a dissolving tablet, wondering if I’ll ever see anything in this world again. I’m sure I no longer need the liquid; so now all that remains is for me to lift the black circle up above my eyes. And I’m blurring away from here. ‘Goodbye,’ I think. I didn’t want to say it before. But suddenly I have to. I have to end this properly. ‘Goodbye, Lura. Goodbye, Burlem. Goodbye …’

It’s night-time in the Troposphere, as usual. I’m standing on a familiarly cluttered street, with too many edges and outsides and insides. But I can make sense of it. There are cobbles beneath my feet, but on either side of me there are great looming grey buildings set behind rows of shops, casinos, herbalists, brothels, sex shops, pawnshops and toyshops. There’s a tiny antique bookshop on the corner, and I think: ‘Burlem.’ But I can’t see anything at all that relates to Lura. The neon

flickers everywhere.
Open. Open. Girls, girls, girls
. Some of the signs are just arrows, and when I look at them they seem to be pointing at other arrows. One of them says
You are here
. Another points to a doorway that, when I approach it, looks like the entrance to a mouse-hole. Do I want to see Apollo Smintheus? I suppose I have to see him. I have to find out exactly where to find Abbie Lathrop. I walk towards the mouse-hole.

And then the sky darkens.

There’s movement. What’s happening? I catch a glimpse of brown, and then blue. That colour blue: where have I seen it before? But I don’t have too much time to speculate, because the next thing that happens is that both the KIDS walk out of the mouse-hole.

‘Aha,’ says one of them, the one in the cowboy suit.

‘Too fucking easy,’ says the other one, his blue cape moving in a non-existent breeze. They both giggle.

Oh, God.

‘Well, there’s her mind. There’s the gate. Let’s go in and finish this job,’ says the first one. ‘It doesn’t look like everyone else’s minds,’ says the boy in the cape. ‘It’s all full of weeds.’ ‘Yeah, well. Who cares, right?’

‘Wait,’ I say.

‘Wait,’ says the one in the cape, mimicking my voice.

‘Yeah, right,’ says the other one. ‘Wait.’

They giggle again.

‘We never get to have any fun in here,’ says the one in the cape. Shit. Shit. What do I say now?

‘This is going to be the most exciting thing we’ve ever done,’ says the one in the cowboy suit. ‘Woo- hoo!’ He makes a little whooping sound as if his parents have just told him that he can have that toy, or that they are going to the zoo, or that he can stay up late and watch the film with everyone else.

‘I know what happened to you,’ I say. ‘I’m really sorry.’ ‘Why? You didn’t kill us,’ says the one in the cape.

‘No, but …’ I want to say something about how I understand; about how I think I might be one of them. But nothing comes.

‘Shut up, Benjy,’ says the cowboy. Then, to me: ‘Don’t try to psychoanalyse us, bitch.’ The other one opens his eyes wide, and then laughs.

‘OK, coming through,’ says the other kid. He pulls a skateboard from under his cape. ‘Come on, Michael.’

I’ve got to do something. But what could I possibly do? There aren’t even any weapons here. No metal bars or anything like that – although I get the impression that those things wouldn’t work so well on these two.

Where is Apollo Smintheus?

‘Please help me,’ I think.

‘We’ve already taken care of your lover boy,’ says Michael, the cowboy.

The other one stifles another giggle. I don’t know why he tried to hide it: it’s not as if I can do anything about it.

‘He’s really lost his mind,’ says Benjy. He rotates his finger around by one of his temples. ‘Cuckoo. Cuckoo,’ he says.

Oh, God. What does this mean? Did they get to Adam in the priory? I imagine them sneaking in there somehow, despite everything being closed, and finding him: creeping into his mind like deranged little goblins. What would they do then? Perhaps they tried to persuade him to come out