The End Of Mr. Y (50 page)

But if the book is the only thing that disappears? If I make it so it was never written?

Then maybe I did know Adam. Maybe he did move into my office. Maybe the railway tunnel did collapse. But not because of Burlem. And maybe I became a PhD student, anyway. Maybe Burlem still did the conference in Greenwich, but on another subject. Maybe he talked about Samuel Butler. I would have gone to that. We still would have talked, and we still would have got pissed together, and we still wouldn’t have had sex, and everything would be more or less the same.

I can sort of see how that might work. But Adam would still be dead.

Perhaps I’d wake up from a scary dream about men chasing me, and there’d be a knock at the door, and a policeman would be telling me that he just passed away in his sleep. A tragic mystery. But don’t be stupid. No policeman would come and tell me anything. They’d tell his relatives, and I wouldn’t even be invited to the funeral because no one would have known we were involved.

Perhaps I’d read about it in the university newsletter, or in one of those ‘Sad news’ e-mails. I sit up.

‘Where are you going?’ Adam asks sleepily.

‘I’ve got to … Well, basically, I’m going to 1900,’ I say.

‘And I’m coming, too.’

‘Are you sure you want to?’

Adam sits up and shakes his head. ‘We’ve just shared the most amazing experience that I’ve ever had,’ he says. ‘And I’m not leaving you. Not ever.’ He pauses. ‘Not until you have to go back.’

I don’t know what to say next. Until I have to go back. I didn’t have any lunch. Who knows how much time I’ve got? You can only use the underground system if you are alive. But does it even matter now whether I am alive or dead? I really don’t know.

‘So what do you think? Should we aim for America, and then go back in time?’ Adam asks. ‘Or the

other way around?’ ‘Hm?’

We’re walking hand-in-hand back towards town, the moon racing us down the river and winning. The way I feel with him now is hard to describe. It feels as if we’ve already grown old together. I know, already, that we’re going to die together.

But he’s already dead.

‘Pedesis,’ he says. ‘How shall we do it?’

‘I think we’re going to have to go back and forwards around the world in order to jump the time,’ I say. ‘We can aim for Massachusetts later. In fact, maybe we should be aiming for one of Abbie Lathrop’s descendants, and then carefully jumping backwards from there. I’m not actually sure what would happen if we missed her. Say we jumped back ten years too far or something. You can’t exactly go forward in time here – well, you can, but it has to be in real time. We’d be stuck in Massachusetts for ten years.’

Adam sighs. ‘I think you know more than me about doing this.’

‘I’m not sure. I mean, I managed to find Saul Burlem, but only because I found out about his daughter and found her in the physical world. I don’t really know how to approach this problem. It’s over a hundred years. It’s huge.’

We walk through a gate, and then the river goes off to the left while we walk towards the right, past some old boat-building sheds towards the city.

I frown. ‘Surely you know as much as I do about this?’ I say.

‘Why?’

‘You’ve been in my mind. You must know everything.’

‘I’m not sure I do know everything,’ he says. ‘Your mind is very complicated. Everything I know about
you
… It’s real and unreal all at once. No … That’s not a very good description. It feels ghostly in some way. As if I thought I was there – I thought I was you – but now it’s just a dream. I remember it all, but it doesn’t make sense yet. That’s the only way I can describe it.’

I think about the moment when he penetrated me in the clearing, and how I knew then that what we were doing wasn’t physical. It was as if I was the void and he was everything real, and the sensation of him entering me was like the largest presence filling the smallest absence. Our minds were making love, and in the moment when I came I saw his whole life as if I was him and I was dying.

I felt the humiliation of my father’s belt. I knew what it was to be hungry.

I walked in bare feet over brown, dusty earth.

I kept worms as a science project, but really I thought of them as my pets. My father smashed up my wormery when he was drunk.

My mother never said anything.

(They’re both dead and I don’t miss them; I miss what could have been.) Those hot, wet evenings when my cousins would stay over.

The ghost stories that frightened me.

The little bell I would ring during Mass, when I was an altar server.

The cold echoey church, and the way it comforted me because the violence in the Bible was on such a large scale that it made my father’s actions seem small. I inverted my life, so what was real became unreal, and everything that was said in church was the truth and everything else was a lie. My father never saying he was proud of me, even though I joined the church for him, because it was the only thing I could see that meant something to him, the man who didn’t like rugby or cricket, who said that sports were for ‘poofters’ and arts for ‘nonces’, and school didn’t prepare you for the

real world, and that men should work and pray and do nothing else. The excessive alcohol consumption was somehow never factored into his philosophy of life.

The night I told my cousins about the Holy Ghost, to scare them. And on another occasion I told them all they’d go to hell.

When I decided to go into the seminary for all the wrong reasons. The morning my father discovered me in bed with Marty, my cousin. The hollow look in his eyes when he looked at me after that.

Trying to make myself holy. Blank. Blank. Blank. Adult life: I’m trying to be a father for everyone …

But I look at women. I try masturbation, but I hate myself. I try self-flagellation. It just makes me feel more aroused.

When the priest from the village rapes my sister, I feel as though I did it. My father abandons the church.

My father is God now.

I am going to eliminate all desire from my life. (…)

I know him, but I don’t know it all: I wasn’t connected to his mind for long enough. I don’t know what’s in the gaps.

There’s still an eternity of knowledge of him that I don’t have. And I want it now as much as I want to breathe.

We’re in the city again now, walking towards the place where Apollo Smintheus’s mouse-hole was. It isn’t there any more, but the street is still exactly the same apart from that. This was where I emerged into the Troposphere from Burlem and Lura’s house. All I’d have to do to get back to the physical world would be to carry on walking. I could go back and tell Burlem and Lura that I simply failed. Then Adam could live in the Troposphere, and I could come and visit him.

But that’s not possible. That would be the same as only having him as a memory.

‘Why don’t you hate me?’ I say, even though I already know the answer.

‘What do you mean?’

He’s holding my hand so tightly that it might break. I don’t care. ‘Well, you know everything now. All the sex. All the … everything.’ ‘I understand it all, though,’ he says. ‘I know you.’

‘Yeah. I know what you mean.’ We stop outside a pawnshop. I’m not sure why. Then I see the café glowing somewhere inside it. It’s the dimensional problem again.

‘Shall we have coffee before we go?’ Adam asks.

‘Troposphere coffee,’ I say. ‘How can I refuse?’

We sit at a table outside, and after a couple of tries we realise that all you have to do is think coffee for it to appear. Well, actually, it takes a bit more effort than that. You have to think coffee and believe it will appear, and then it does.

‘Why did you come looking for me?’ I ask. ‘The last time I saw you I really pissed you off; I could see that. I shouldn’t have said …’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ ‘Maybe not. But why?’

‘Would it be stupid to say that I thought I’d fallen in love with you?’ I look down on the table. ‘Um …’

‘Sorry. I’m not that good with words. Well, I am good with words, but not these sorts of words. Oh, that actually does sound stupid. Why did I fall in love with you? On reflection, it wasn’t a great move

– well, objectively speaking. But …’ He sighs. ‘I couldn’t help it.’ Now he runs his hands through his

hair. ‘Oh. I can’t explain.’

‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I don’t understand why you feel that way, but …’ ‘What?’

‘I was going to say I’m glad you do. But I’m not sure. You’d be alive, if it wasn’t for me – and
The End of Mr. Y
.’

‘Yeah. But.’ He closes his eyes and then opens them again. ‘I wouldn’t have this.’ He opens his hands as if he’s holding the world, but there’s nothing in them. He just means that I should look around and see what he would be holding, if his hands could hold ideas, and metaphors, and multidimensional buildings.

‘Why do you see the same thing I see?’ I ask.

‘Hm?’

‘You see the same thing I see. The same Troposphere. I thought this was the inside of my mind?’ ‘It is.’

‘Then …’

‘I died inside your mind.’

‘Oh.’ I get that Troposphere pain, briefly, like a dull blade cutting me up inside, slow and dirty. I can’t think about this. ‘What was your Troposphere like?’

‘Very similar. A city. But it was daytime. There were more parks. But it did have a graffiti problem that yours doesn’t have.’

‘It was daytime here once, as well,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what happened to that.’ ‘Oh, well. I like night. It’s romantic.’

‘Like that meadow and the river,’ I say. ‘That space was very romantic. But I’m not sure those came from my mind. It’s funny …’

He tips his head over to one side for a second. I think we both know what happened when we made love by the river. His mind is inside me. ‘Hm. Yeah. Both our minds at once. And all the minds in the world are in here with us … We could do and see anything.’

‘Adam …’ I reach for his hand across the table. ‘I want …’ But that sounds wrong here. This isn’t a place for wanting. ‘What?’

‘You. But wanting sounds wrong. I wish we were still in that meadow …’ ‘Mm. Why don’t we go back?’

‘No. I owe Apollo Smintheus. I’d be dead, if it wasn’t for him.’ ‘We’ll do his mission, and then Lura’s mission, and then …’ ‘Yeah.’ And then. ‘OK.’ I finish my coffee. ‘Let’s go.’

Adam finishes the last of his coffee.

‘Mice,’ he says, suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Why don’t we use mice?’

‘For what? Oh … I see. Go back to Abbie Lathrop using mice. Wouldn’t that take ages? I mean, to get back a hundred years using Pedesis, we’d really need to be crossing continents every few jumps. Remember that time is distance in the Troposphere. The more distance we can cover in the physical world, the more time we can jump through in here.’

As I say the phrase, I feel something like déjà vu. That expression:
Time is distance in the Troposphere
. I keep hearing it, and I keep saying it, but I don’t know what it means. The Troposphere is made from thoughts. Distance in the Troposphere is just the arrangement of thoughts. What do I already know?

Distance = time.

Matter = thought.

So what if there’s another equation to add: Thought = time?

Then, I guess, thought really is everything. And it makes sense: time isn’t measured in anything other than thought. The only thing that separates today from yesterday is thought.

‘What are you thinking?’ Adam asks.

I laugh. He can see what I’m thinking: it’s all around him.

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell you on the way,’ I say.

‘Hang on. We don’t even know where we’re going yet.’

‘Oh. Yes. You’re right. OK – do you understand about the distance thing?’

‘Yeah. I think so. If I’m in someone’s head, and I can see all their ancestors, I can jump to any of them. If one of them lives in Norfolk, and I’m in Kent, I’ll go back maybe a couple of weeks at the same time as I do the jump. But if one of them lives in Africa, and I’m in Kent, I could maybe go back a couple of years.’

‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘So maybe we find a well-travelled family to go back through.’ ‘Look up,’ Adam says.

I do. I can see the black sky hanging there like something I just clicked on, with the moon like a big digital button. But its light is still real, draped over the buildings and the street. Just beneath the sky, I can see the grey tower blocks that seem to be everywhere in the Troposphere, just rising out of the ground and pointing upwards.

‘What am I looking at?’ I ask.

‘The tower blocks,’ he says. ‘Where the animals live.’ ‘Why do the animals live in tower blocks?’

‘I don’t know: this is your metaphor.’

‘Oh. I suppose I wouldn’t think of them as shops. People are shops. People are part of an economy in a much more direct way …’ I shake my head. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘Well, let’s find some mice.’ ‘But the time …?’

‘We’ll see how far we have to jump before we get into a lab mouse, and then it should be just millisecond jumps all the way back to Abbie Lathrop, surely?’

‘I don’t think all lab mice are descended from her stock,’ I say. ‘I can’t remember what Apollo Smintheus said. Damn.’
Console?
It comes up.

‘Can you see that, too?’ I ask Adam.

‘Yeah,’ he says.

‘Hm. I wonder if it’s possible to send messages on this thing?’

But we don’t have to. There’s the broken sound of a small engine struggling to fire, and then a red scooter comes around the corner.

‘Good plan,’ says Apollo Smintheus, getting off. ‘Mice. I like it.’ ‘So where do we start?’

‘I’ll take you to a descendant. But that’s all I can do.’

I want to say thanks, except that I’m doing this for him, anyway. But I do owe him.

‘Thanks,’ I say.

We all walk towards an office block. There’s an entryphone, but Apollo Smintheus manages to get us buzzed in by saying something I don’t understand in that unfamiliar language of his. While we walk up a set of concrete stairs, I try to plan this, but there isn’t too much time. But surely what Adam

said is right. Apollo Smintheus said before that all of these mice are inbred. We should be able to go back to Abbie Lathrop directly. We should … Apollo Smintheus has stopped outside a door. And Adam is opening it.