The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  One day, when the man in the story has almost lost his wits, a mysterious old man comes to his (real) house with a box full of equipment. He tells the man that he has heard of his predicament and thinks he knows what has happened. He takes out a velvet-lined folding case and explains to the man about the daguerreotype, and how it works. The man is initially impatient. Everyone knows how daguerreotypes work! But then his visitor makes an impossible claim. If humans, three-dimensional beings, can create two-dimensional versions of the things around us, would it be too impossible to assume that four-dimensional beings could make something like a daguerreotype machine of their own, but one that produces not flat, two-dimensional copies of things, but three-dimensional ones?

  The man is angry and throws the photographer out of the house, thinking that there must be another explanation. However, he is unable to find one and later comes to the conclusion that his visitor must have been right. He finds the man's card and resolves to call on him immediately. But when the maid lets him into the man's house, he finds something very strange. The photographer seems to be standing in the drawing room, holding the daguerreotype machine. But it's not the real man; it's a lifeless copy.

  "You know what I love about The Daguerreotype?" Burlem said.

  "What?"

  "The unresolved ending. I like it that the man never does find his answer."

  Up until that moment there had been no music in the Painted Hall, just the crackle of voices and laughter echoing around the large rooms. But someone must have remembered that they were supposed to have music on, and the first heavy notes of Handel's Dixit Dominus seeped into the hall, followed by the first line, with all the choral voices tumbling over themselves: Dixit Dominus Domino meo, sede a dextris meis.

  "So," Burlem said, raising his voice over the music, "you work full time at this magazine, then?"

  "No. I just write my column every month."

  "Is that all you do?"

  "For the moment, yes."

  "Can you live on that?"

  "Just about. The magazine's doing pretty well. I can afford my rent, and a few bags of lentils every month. And some books, too, of course."

  The magazine started as a small thing, edited by this woman I met at university. Now there's a distribution deal and it's given away in every big record shop in the country. It has proper advertising now, and a designer who doesn't use glue to put the layouts together.

  "What did you do at university? Not science, I take it."

  "No. English lit and philosophy. But I am seriously thinking of going back to do science. I think I'm probably going to apply to do theoretical physics." I explained that I wanted to be able to actually understand things like relativity, and Schrödinger's cat, and that I wanted to try to revive the dear old ether. I think I was feeling a bit drunk, so I wittered on about the luminiferous ether for some time. Burlem was familiar with it—it turned out that he ran the nineteenth-century Literature and Science MA at the university—but I still went on at length about how fascinating it was that for ages people couldn't work out how light could travel in a vacuum, considering that sound couldn't (you can see a bell in a vacuum, but you can't hear it go ding). In the nineteenth century people believed that light travelled through something invisible—the luminiferous ether. In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley set out to prove that the ether existed, but in the end they had to conclude that it didn't. While talking to Burlem I couldn't, of course, remember the date of this experiment, or the names of the scientists, but I did remember the way Michelson referred to the lost object of his experiment as the "beloved old ether, which is now abandoned, though I personally still cling a little to it." I got a bit excited about how much poetry there was in theoretical physics, and then I went on for a bit about how much I like institutions: especially ones with big libraries.

  And then Burlem interrupted and said: "Don't do that. Fuck theoretical physics. Come and do a Ph.D. with me. I'm assuming you don't already have one?"

  It was the way he said it. Fuck theoretical physics.

  "What would I do it on?" I said.

  "What are you interested in?"

  I laughed. "Everything?" I shrugged. "I think that's my problem. I want to know everything." I must have been drunk to admit that. At least I didn't go further and say that I want to know everything because of the high probability that if you know everything, there'll be something to actually believe in.

  "Come on," Burlem said. "What's your thing?"

  "My thing?"

  He took a gulp of wine. "Yeah."

  "I don't think I know what my thing is, yet. That's the whole point of the magazine column. It's about free association. I'm good at that."

  "So you start at the big bang and work your way through science until you end up at Lumas. There must be a connection between all the things you've written about."

  I sipped some more wine. "Lumas's ideas about the fourth dimension are particularly interesting. I mean, he didn't exactly preempt string theory, but..."

  "What's string theory?"

  I shrugged. "Don't ask me. That's why I want to do theoretical physics. At least, I think I do."

  Burlem laughed. "For fuck's sake. Come on. Find the connection."

  I thought for a moment. "I suppose almost everything I've written about has had some connection with thought experiments, or 'experiments of the mind,' as Lumas called them."

  "Good. And?"

  "Um. I don't know. But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics but using metaphors instead. That's how I've been approaching all my columns. For each of these ideas and theories, you find there's a little story that goes with it."

  "Interesting. Give me an example."

  "Well, there's Schrödinger's cat, of course. Everyone can understand that a cat in a box can't be alive and dead at the same time—but hardly anyone can understand the same principle expressed mathematically. Then there are Einstein's trains. All of his thoughts about special relativity seem to have been expressed in terms of trains. I love that. And whenever people want to understand the fourth dimension nowadays, they still go back to Flatland, which was written in 1880-whatever. I suppose you can look at Butler that way, too. Erewhon is basically a thought experiment intended to work out ideas about society and machines."

  "So write a proposal. Do a Ph.D. on these experiments of the mind: I'd be very interested in supervising that. Work in some more novels and poetry. I'd recommend looking at Thomas Hardy and Tennyson, as well. Make sure you don't get too carried away. Set a time frame, or some other sort of limit. Don't do a history of thought experiments from the beginning of time. Do, say, 1859 to 1939 or something. Start with Darwin and end with, I don't know, the atom bomb."

  "Or Schrödinger's cat. I think that was in the thirties. The bomb is too real; I mean, it's where the thought experiment becomes reality, really."

  "Maybe." Burlem ran his hand over the stubble on his face. "So, anyway, what do you think? I reckon we could sign you up pretty easily. You have an MA?"

  "Yeah."

  "Superb. So let's do it. I can get you some teaching as well, if you want."

  "Seriously?"

  "Seriously." Burlem gave me his card. At the top it had his name in bold, and then: PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

  So I wrote the proposal and fell in love with my idea. But then ... I don't know. When I went to start working with Burlem, he seemed to have gone cold on the idea of Lumas. My proposal had been accepted, of course—I was planning to look at the language and form of thought experiments, from Zoonomia to Schrödinger's cat—and everything was fine with Burlem until I mentioned Lumas. When I did, he stopped making eye contact with me. He looked out of the window, now my window, and said nothing. I made some joke relating to our conversation at the conference; something like "So, has the curse claimed any more victims, then?" and he looked at me and said, "Forget that paper, OK? Leave Lumas until later." He recommended that I start by focusing o
n the actual thought experiments: Schrödinger's cat, Einstein's Relativity, and Edwin A. Abbot's book Flatland. He also persuaded me to leave out Zoonomia, Charles Darwin's grandfather's book about evolution, and begin later, in 1859, when The Origin of Species was published. He also reminded me to look at some more poetry. I had no idea what was wrong with him, but I went along with it all. And then, a week later, he was gone.

  So now here I am, unsupervised, like an experiment with no observer—Fleming's plate of mold, perhaps, or an uncollapsed wavefunction—and what am I doing? I'm reading Lumas. I'm reading The End of Mr. Y, for God's sake. Fuck you, Burlem.

  Chapter Three

  The End of Mr. Y By Thomas E. Lumas

  PREFACE

  THE DISCOURSE WHICH FOLLOWS may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerised by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed. Those readers should not abandon their scepticism, for it is their will to seek to peer behind the conjurer's curtain, as it is the will of man to ask those peculiar whats and wheres and hows of life. Of life, as of dreams. Of image, as of word. As thought, as of speech.

  When one looks at the illusions of the world, one sees only the world. For where does illusion end? Indeed, what is there in life that is not a conjuring trick? From the petrifactions that men find on the seashore to the Geissler tube recently seen at the Royal society, all about us seems filled with fancies and wonders. As Robert-Houdin has built automata with which to produce his illusions, I shall here propose to create an automaton of mind, through which one may see illusions and realities beyond ; from which one, if he knows how, may spring into the automata of all minds and their electricity. We may ask what illusion is, and what form may it take, when it is so easy to dive into its depths, like a fish into a pool, and when the ripples that emerge are not ripples of illusion nor ripples of reality but indeed the ripples made by the collision of both worlds ; the world of the conjuror and the world of His audience.

  Perhaps I mislead the reader by talking of the Conjuror in this manner. Let the creator become curator! And we creatures who live on in the dreams of a world made of our own thought ; as we name the beasts and barnacles who creep on and cling to this most precious and mysterious earth ; as we collect them in our museums, we believe ourselves curators. What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon. And beyond this is not truth but what we have made truth ; yet this is a truth we cannot see.

  Can this place—this place where dreams and automata are one, where the very fibres of being are conjured from memories no more real or unreal than the dream in which we may observe them, and fish with noses and jaws and skin made only of thought play on the surface of the pooled fancies of our maker—can this place be real, created as it is in Aristotle's metaphora? Indeed, for it is only in the logos of metaphora that we are to find the protasis of the past, that glorious illusion which we call memory, that curtain of destiny, drawn tightly over the conscious mind but present in every fibre of being, from sea-creature to man, from pebble to ocean, as Lamarck and E. Darwin have maintained. Can this place be real? Perhaps not. For this reason, it is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered.

  T. E. Lumas, July 1892

  PROLOGUE

  I see ahead a time-wrought shore;

  A fishing boat lifts on a wave;

  No footprints on the sandy floor,

  Beyond—an unfamiliar cave.

  Or—forest tree'd with oak and yew

  A dark mare waits to carry me,

  Where nothing stirs yet all is true,

  A cabin door and here—the key!

  Perhaps I'll wander in a field,

  With poppy-flush on carpet green:

  However thought has been concealed

  No sleeper's eye can now undream.

  In any place that I take flight

  The dark will mutate into light.

  I finish reading the preface at about nine o'clock. It is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered. That's how the preface ends. What does that mean? Surely anyone would read a novel as fiction, anyway?

  The main narrative begins with a businessman, Mr. Y, visiting a fair-ground in the rain. But I don't read properly now. Instead I skim the first couple of chapters, reading the odd sentence here and there. I like the first line: By the end I would be nobody, but in the beginning I was known as Mr Y. I keep flicking through the book until I reach the end (which, of course, I don't read), mainly just because I like the feel of the pages, and then I turn back to the first chapter. It's while I'm flicking backwards that I see it. There's a page missing from the book. Between the verso page 130 and the recto page 133 there is simply a jagged, paper edge. Pages 131 and 132, two sides of one folio page, are missing.

  I don't quite believe it at first. Who would want to rip a page out of The End of Mr. Y like this? Is it simply vandalism? I carefully check the rest of the book. There are no other missing pages, nor any other obvious sign that somebody wanted to damage it. So why rip out a page? Did someone not like that page? Or did they steal it? But if you were going to steal a page from a book, why not steal the whole book? It's too confusing. I shiver, wishing it would heat up in here.

  Downstairs, I hear the squeal of the main door that suggests that Wolfgang is back. Then, a few seconds later there's a soft tap at my door.

  "It's open," I call, putting The End of Mr. Y away.

  Wolfgang is small and blond and was born in East Berlin. I don't think he ever washes his hair. Today, he's wearing what he always wears when he plays at the hotel: a pair of pale blue jeans, a white shirt, and a dark blue suit jacket. When I first met Wolfgang, on the day I moved into this flat, he told me he was so depressed he couldn't even get the enthusiasm together to kill himself. I became worried and started doing small, life-enhancing things for him, such as making him soup and offering to bring him books from the university library. For ages he said yes to the soup and no to the books, but recently he's been asking me for poetry: Ginsberg and Bukowski mainly.

  As Wolfgang walks into the flat, I keep thinking of Lumas's words: Of life, as of dreams. Shall I tell Wolfgang about the book? Perhaps later.

  He grins at me sadly. "Oh, well. I'm rich in one universe. Are you cooking baked potatoes for me?"

  The "rich in one universe" thing is something I told him. It's what the Russian physicist George Gamow said after he lost all his money in an American casino. It means that, as usual, Wolfgang has gambled his tips away in the hotel casino. In a parallel universe, perhaps, some other version of him has won thousands of pounds.

  "Mmm," I say back. "Potatoes with..." I look around the kitchen. "Olive oil, salt. Um ... I think I've got an onion somewhere."

  "Great," he says, sitting at the kitchen table and pouring some slivovitz. "Gourmet." This is a joke between us. Very gourmet is worse, and implies a meal costing almost nothing. (I can do something very gourmet with lentils; Wolfgang's very gourmet meals usually include fried cabbage.)

  I open the oven and take out the potatoes. "I suppose you could say I'm rich in one universe, too," I say, through the steam and heat. I put the baking tray on the counter and smile at Wolfgang.

  He raises a blond eyebrow at me. "You've gambled also?"

  "No." I laugh. "I bought a book. I've got about five quid left until the magazine pays me at the end of the month. It was ... it was quite an expensive book."

  "Is it a good book?"

  "Yes. Oh yes..." But I still don't want to tell him about it just yet. I start slicing the onion. "Oh—the university fell down today as well."

  "It fell down?" He laughs. "You blew it up? No. How?"

  "OK, well, it didn't exactly all fall down, but one building did."

  "A bomb?"

  "No. A railway tunnel. Under the campus. It all kind of collapsed inside, and then..."

  Wolfgang downs his drink and pours another. "Yes, I see. You build som
ething on nothing and then it falls down. Ha." He laughs. "How many dead?"

  "None. They evacuated the building in the morning."

  "Oh. So is the university shut down?"

  "I don't know. I suppose it must be, at least for the weekend."

  I mash olive oil into the potatoes and put them on the table with some olives, capers, and mustard. We sit down to eat.

  "So how's life, anyway?" I ask him.

  "Life's shit. No money. Too many mice. But I've got my afternoon shifts back."

  "Fantastic," I say. "What happened to Whatshername?"

  A few months ago some talented kid came along and took some of Wolfgang's shifts. From her point of view the narrative must have been exciting: Teenage girl gets life-changing opportunity playing piano in public. But it meant that Wolfgang couldn't pay his rent and his bills, so he stopped paying his bills.

  "Pony accident."

  I smile while he fills in the details. I'm not really listening; I'm thinking about the book.

  "Oh ... Wolf?" I say, once we've finished eating.