The End Of Mr. Y (51 page)

You now have one choice …

You
…
I
… We’re walking quickly over bare floorboards, and our claws are going click-click-click as we move. It’s like the sound of Lura’s knitting needles, but in a much larger, more bare space. ‘Adam?’ I say.

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t think we’re a lab mouse.’ ‘I know.’

I become aware of the mouse registering our voices – or, actually, only my voice – and I immediately know that we shouldn’t communicate with each other like this. The mouse … I can hear sounds in my mind, and I try to run away from them. Faster, along the wood. I haven’t eaten for several hours, and I remember that if I run down here, and then follow my own scent through the large gap in the wall, I will probably find something.

Console!

It appears. I can see lots of images. Most of them are moving, but one is still. ‘I’m going to let you do all the choosing,’ Adam says. ‘I’m not even going to look.’ ‘OK. But shhh. I don’t want to disturb the mouse.’

‘Sorry.’

Voices, voices. I can hear a person, but I can’t see her. I remember another time when I heard voices like this, and there was pain. And then hands on my back, but hands gloved with something that wasn’t shiny and smooth, and then sickening movement in the dark, and then freedom: something I had never known before.

This new voice sounds like that one, a little. But all voices are danger.

I fix my mind on the static image in the console. Something tells me that this could be the lab animal. The mouse we’re in now was freed. I can sense that from his memories. But …

We switch. And …

You now have one choice
.

You
… I can hear something muffled and distant.

‘No!’ It’s Adam screaming. ‘Ariel, no…’

But I can’t hear him because I am screaming, too. But I can’t even hear that properly because the pain stops me registering anything very much. I want to die … I don’t know what death is, but there’s something in my mind that does, and understands that I should be able to move, and that there shouldn’t be metal spikes in my eyes, that if they weren’t there I would have less pain in my head, and maybe I’d be able to see. What is seeing? The world is a black slab, and I have never known anything apart from this. Each day it takes an effort to draw air into my lungs, and that’s what I spend my life doing, just trying to breathe …

‘Jump again,’ Adam’s saying. ‘Oh, God …’

The pain is like nothing I have ever felt before. The console is still there, faintly.

I don’t think I’ve got any legs. I don’t think I have ever walked. Everything is black. I pick an image from the console: any image.
You now have one choice
.

You… I
… We are standing at the entrance to a maze. A new world! How exciting. Maybe this is finally going to be the way out. I’ve been down this passage before. And this one. I can smell the food at the end. It’s the same stuff again, but it keeps me alive, and it keeps me doing this. I’m only

halfway down an unfamiliar passage, when a gloved hand picks me up, and the feeling of the material against my fur smells the same as the walls of my world, and all my life I have been comforted by these smells. Now I am being placed down again: my feet touching the glass. Where’s my reward? This is the wrong tank. Where’s the sawdust? This doesn’t smell like my tank. I can see the same symbols on the ground (and which I can now read, and which say HappiMat™), but something is terribly wrong. Fear pierces me like the needles my carers use on me every day. My brothers and sisters are lying around me, but they’re not trying to fight me or mount me. They smell different. I walk over and look at them. I nuzzle one of them with my nose: he’s cold. They are all just lying there like the wet cloths our carers sometimes leave in the tanks when they have finished wiping off some of the smell. I walk over and sniff them … They’re not right. They’re … Ow! Get off.

Another gloved hand takes hold of me, but this one isn’t gentle … ‘Ariel!’

‘Sorry.’

We jump.

You now have one choice
.

You
…
I
… We’re being injected again. I don’t know what is worse: the sensation of the cold, sharp needle going in, or the sensation of it coming out again. Once it’s in, I want it out, but once it’s out, I feel dizzy, and I can’t make my nest properly and … I don’t actually care about my nest. I feel something warm and wet creeping down my legs. I just want to sleep. My nest smells sour now, but I need to sleep. I can’t even be bothered to lick myself clean.

You now have one choice
.

You
…
I
… We can’t breathe because of all the smoke. I can’t move my head.

You now have one choice
.

You
…
I
… We are flying through the air, and then landing with an awkward bump, and then flying again. My friend is flying as well, and another mouse I haven’t seen before, and all around us people are laughing; although I can’t understand the language, something in my mind can hear the carers saying, ‘Stop juggling the mice, Wesley.’ I am very dizzy, and I want to go back in my tank.

You now have one choice
.

You
…
I
… We can’t understand why this keeps happening. I keep making my nest in exactly the way I like it (the way my mother taught me), and then I find it’s gone. The hand takes it away. And then the hand gives me more nesting material, and I start building again. Every night I sleep on bare glass, despite all the nests I have made.

You now have one choice
.

you
…
I
… We can’t sleep with these lights on all the time.

You now have one choice
.
You
…
I
… We

You now have one choice
.
You … I …

You now have one choice
.
You …

You now have one You now have You now

You You You You

You

We’re now jumping so fast that it feels like a fluid journey, just as Mr. Y described in the book. It takes a lot of concentration, although it is hard to concentrate when you’re essentially surfing on a wave of pain, fear, humiliation – and the constant simple desire for a warm, quiet nest. This is a wave of death: a wave of dead black bodies and dead white bodies and gloved hands and bony fingers and the pain of the needle and the pain of the tumours and the blindness and trying to lick off your own blood when it’s still pouring out of you, and being left with your legs and back broken in a pile of other broken bodies and still thinking that there’ll be food at the end, and that the carers will put you back in your tank just as they always do after something bad happens.

While I surf, Adam tries to locate details. Most of the labs have calendars on the walls.

And I notice that, as we go back, the lights become dimmer, and the tanks become smaller. There are no more HappiMats™. We hear sirens and explosions, and we travel through labs that all smell of metal and gunpowder. But each tiny jump is a new kind of pain. By the time we reach 1908, I have bled thousands of pints of blood, and vomited and pissed myself and fallen asleep in my own shit, and each time – every moment – I have just wanted to crawl into my nest, because something I am born with tells me it’s good and comfortable in my nest, but all the time I have known that there’s something not right about my existence. I either don’t have a nest, or someone has taken it away, or I simply know that there shouldn’t be glass walls around it.

We slow down as the calendars start showing 1907, 1906, 1905 …

And then there she is. She’s lifting our friend out of a box full of sawdust. In the console, the black mouse she is holding is blurred.

And we jump. We’re in.

TWENTY – SEVEN

Y
OU NOW HAVE ONE CHOICE
.

You
…
I
… We are taking one of the best mice – one of the black ones – and I’m about to put it in a box, with sawdust, and take it to meet the scientists. I smile at that. It’s going to be examined – or assessed – by them. I’m the one having the meeting. A business meeting for a mouse, however … How charming. I can almost see the mouse in a little tuxedo, and me in my … Oh! What shall I wear? Goodness … My most fancy formal skirt and my black shawl, perhaps, although I don’t want to look like a widow in mourning. So maybe the green.

The mouse is like a little machine, running from my right hand to my left hand and then to my right hand again, as I rotate my hands over one another like pistons. Would you even call this movement piston-like? Oh, dear. I never was one for words. Somehow the movement makes me think more specifically of a sewing machine, but I can’t work out whether the mouse is the needle or the thread. Either way, this machine is not sewing a line. It’s sewing one stitch on top of itself again and again. Unfamiliar pictures appear in my mind, briefly. Something like a family tree; then there’s a white space with glass boxes in it. I sigh. I used to like touching the mice like this: I used to find their quick movements delightful. But now it’s become, like so much else about life, tiresome and depressing. The smell in here has come to weigh on me: the heavy fug of wet sawdust, animal waste and cheap wood. Oh! And now there’s that flutter again, somewhere behind my breastbone. It’s nothing. The doctor said …

Mama would have said … She would have said it’s the air in here.

As the mouse trembles on the wheel of my hands, I think instead about the wording of the letter from the scientist. How exciting to have gotten a response! But it fades as all of life does: moment into moment, hope into hope. I was a schoolteacher who wanted something more. Now I breed fancy mice, and I still want something more.

A castle; a prince.

A dress made of white silk. Ribbons.

But I am not fifteen years old any longer. Then … Maybe the blue. Yes. The blue shawl.

The mouse catches my hand with one of its claws and I wince. Dumb animal. Yes, into the box you go, you filthy thing. I used to speak to the animals: the chickens I farmed a long time ago, and the waltzing mice. But eventually I learned that the waltzing mice were deaf (which was why they waltzed), and anyway, if animals wanted you to speak to them they would speak back, surely? If God wanted us to converse with His creatures, He would certainly have given them a way to respond.

My acquaintance, Dr Duncan MacDougal, is planning an important experiment. He told me he hopes to obtain authorisation from Mass. General Hospital to weigh patients before and after they die, in order to record the mass of their souls. He’s going to construct a special bed like a set of scales, and have patients’ lives literally held in the balance … Then he will do the same with dogs (which he will kill – with the human patients, I believe he plans to wait for the natural death). I offered him my

mice, but he has not yet said whether or not he would like to place an order. But these scientists … Such fancy writing …

The blue or the green? Abbie, make your mind up.

Do human souls all weigh the same amount, or do some people have more soul than others? I asked this of Dr MacDougal, and he said he believed each one would be the same, but that his experiment would settle the issue.

I imagine laying in a hospital bed like that, on scales, waiting to die. And then I hear a voice in my head:
Miss Abbie Lathrop
.

Then a pause and the same voice again.
Shhh. She can’t hear you, remember
. Oh … I feel queer. I shut the box. I’ll just sit down for a moment.

No! I won’t let these voices control me again. Mama would have taken me straight to the church, but I’m hardly likely to put myself through that for a second time. Perhaps if I just keep busy. Yes: Mama’s cure for everything:
Keep busy
. Or, even better:
Keep busy in the fresh air
. Yes. I’ll add more sawdust to the mouse’s box, make it look like a dear little chocolate while NOT falling prey to fancies.

I glance over at Number 57. It’ll be the next to go, if this works. But …
Please be quiet
. Oh!

It’s a weird sensation, being myself and Abbie Lathrop at the same time. As Abbie Lathrop, I can only hear my own voice. As myself, I can hear Adam as well.

‘Ariel,’ he’s saying again.

My being and Abbie Lathrop’s being are now so scrambled together that they have all the coherence of a scribble. But I’m still telling her what a worthless piece of shit she is, and now she’s running around the barn with her hands over her ears saying things like ‘Demons! Get out. Go away!’

‘You’re not being very subtle,’ Adam says.

‘I know,’ I say to him. ‘It’s like attacking myself.’

‘Let the mice go,’ I say in her head now. ‘All of them.’

And she’s thinking about her livelihood, and the cold winter, and the fancy writing on the letter sent by the scientists, and how she now has no excuse to see Dr MacDougal, and …

‘Let the mice go,’ I tell her. ‘And you’ll never hear voices again.’

And then Abbie Lathrop gets up and, with a shaking hand, releases the wooden catches on all the cages.

That could have been more subtle, but it worked.

The console is still up. I look at the Quit button, and then we’re out on the Troposphere. Adam and I fall into each other’s arms immediately, knowing we don’t have to say anything about the experience we’ve just had. I feel as though something has been lifted from me, because I don’t owe Apollo Smintheus anything any more. But the weight of what I know about suffering makes that lifted weight feel like a speck of dust I have just brushed off myself. And I still feel haunted: not by Apollo Smintheus, of course. Something has replaced that, but I’m not sure what it is.

The Troposphere looks exactly the same as usual, except that when I bring up the map in the console we seem to be thousands and thousands of miles from where we started. There’s something different about the map now, and I realise what it is: there are little yellow circles dotted here and there, and I understand that these represent train stations. These are the way I could get out of here, if that was what I wanted to do.