The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  "So what actually happens to Mr. Y?" Wolfgang asks. "In what sense does he meet his end?"

  "Oh, he vanishes into the Troposphere."

  "What, in his body?"

  "No." I shake my head. "They find his body later."

  Wolf's eyes open wide. "He dies?"

  "Yes," I say. "There's an 'Editor's Note' at the end that explains how he was found, cold and dead, on the floor of his cellar. He had locked himself in and taken his last journey from there. His wife thought he had gone missing, and then discovered the locked cellar door and alerted the police. He had starved to death."

  "And the author of this book, he died, too?"

  "Yes."

  "It is a good thing you don't have these ingredients then, isn't it?"

  "Mmm."

  Sometimes at night the cathedral gates are like an open mouth: an exclamation of surprise in a street crowded with old lopsided buildings, patched up and filled in over the years like teeth. Tonight the mouth is closed. The big wooden gate is up and there's a sign telling visitors that the precinct opens again tomorrow morning at eight thirty.

  No holy water tonight then. No Pedesis.

  But I know it's not real, so perhaps I'm just putting off knowing for sure. I could have gone to the cathedral earlier, after all. So it's real life again for the evening, but real life with an implicit promise of something else, something fictional. Another night of that isn't bad, although now I see the closed gates, I wish I had the holy water: I wish I had something dangerous to do later on.

  I walk on along the twinkling, frosty pavements, using my new map to find Heather's street. It turns out to be in a side road just behind the cathedral: a small yellow-brick terrace with a black door. I knock twice with the silver knocker and then take a step back to wait for her to answer.

  "Ariel, hello!" she says, when she opens the door. "Thanks so much for coming. Is that wine? Fantastic—I need as much as possible after the day I've had. How are you? Oh, sorry: Here I am, chatting away on the doorstep. Come in."

  The door opens from the street right onto the sitting room. It's the kind of house lots of young academics seem to have before they get married and have children: pine floorboards, rugs, lots of bookshelves, framed Picasso prints, autumnal throws over the sofa and chairs, a coffee table with coffee-table books, and several lamps. It's what my place would probably look like if it had heating and no mice and I could be bothered to inhabit more than one room. I can smell garlic cooking, mingled with something in an oil burner; some combination of peppermint and lavender. The house is warm. Jazz is playing on a small speaker system. There's no sign of Adam.

  "White or red?" Heather asks. "Oh, and make yourself at home, by the way. Put your coat anywhere—it's always a bit of a shambolic mess in here."

  Why do people always say their houses are messy when they're not?

  "Er, red, please. Your place is lovely, by the way. I love that print."

  "Oh, it's cool, isn't it?" Heather says over her shoulder as she goes into the kitchen for my wine. She comes back and gives it to me in a huge glass with a silvery pink stem. "I love Picasso."

  "I particularly like that one," I say, gazing up at it. "I like anything to do with four dimensions. It's kind of an obsession."

  "Four dimensions?" she says. Then she groans. "Go on, tell me what I've missed. I never appreciate art properly: I just think, That's a pretty picture and then hang it on my wall. This is what happens when you're a biologist. You need humanities people to explain real life to you."

  I laugh, and, after reassuring Heather that I only know a tiny bit about the cubists and the futurists, and not much else about art, say something about the way the woman's head could be said to be moving through time, or that, alternatively, a fourth-dimensional being is viewing her.

  "Wow. That's so cool. I like The Scream best. But I thought it would be a bit studenty to have it on my wall, so I went for something a bit more sophisticated. I so love The Scream, though. It's how I feel most days."

  "Why?"

  "Oh, um..." There's a knock at the door. "That'll be Adam, I hope, and not some mass murderer." She laughs. "Hang on."

  For no reason I'm aware of, my hands start to shake. I put my wine down and then pick it up again. There's a sharp blast of cold air as Heather opens the door and greets Adam. He looks exactly as he did earlier; the only difference is that his hair seems scruffier.

  "Hi," he says to me, taking off his coat.

  "Hello," I say back.

  Heather tells him to put his coat anywhere and repeats her apology about "the mess" and then goes into the kitchen to get a glass of white wine for him. We stare at each other without moving or saying anything.

  "So," she says, coming back. "I'm doing pasta and roasted vegetables. It's just simple—I hope that's OK with you, Adam."

  "Yeah, thanks," he says, taking the wine while still looking at me. I'm looking right back at him, but this time he breaks the moment and focuses on Heather. "That sounds perfect."

  Adam settles into a corner of the big sofa across the room from where I'm sitting. Without looking at either of us, he leans forward and examines the books on the coffee table. Once he's looked at them all he picks up a large hardback book called Weird Fish and starts flicking through it. None of us says anything for a couple of seconds. Heather must have her music on shuffle, because once the jazz track stops, a mournful acoustic guitar tune begins and a guy starts to sing about being alone in the small hours of the morning.

  "Better put the pasta on," says Heather.

  "Well," Adam says, once she's gone, "how's life?"

  "Fine, I think. How about you? Are you settled in OK?"

  "Yeah. And thanks for sharing your office with us."

  "It's OK. Anyway, as I was telling Heather before, I didn't exactly have a choice."

  "Ah. Right. So we were foisted on you?"

  "Yeah. But I don't mind at all. Really."

  Small talk, small talk. And now he's back to flicking through the pages of the book on his lap.

  Heather comes back in.

  "So, how's the world of religion?" Heather asks him. "How's life with God?"

  "How should I know?" says Adam.

  "Aren't you religious?" she says. "I thought..."

  Adam smiles. "I'll give you the short answer: no."

  "Oh, come on," says Heather. "What's the long answer? Oh!" Something in the kitchen has just gone "ding" and she jumps up to go and deal with it. "Sorry—it's my pasta, I think."

  Adam gives me a look as if we're both about to rob a bank together. He also looks as if he doesn't really want to.

  "Saved," he says.

  I smile at him. "It's a shame, though," I say. "I would have liked the long version, too."

  "Oh..." He sighs and runs his fingers through his hair.

  "Hey—it doesn't matter," I say. "I'm only playing around. You don't have to tell me anything."

  "I'd rather look at fish, to be honest," he says.

  I smile. "Yeah, I think I know what you mean."

  "They are weird, these fish. Have you seen them?"

  "No."

  "Come and look."

  As I move onto the same sofa as him I'm reminded of all the times I've been with a man and chains of lies have led us first to the same house, then the same sofa, then the same bed. I'm tired. I'm cold. Come here, I want to show you something. It always ends in fucking. I'm sitting only a couple of inches from him now, but, of course, Heather's in the kitchen. I pull down the sleeves of my jumper to cover my wrists.

  "Look," he says, pointing.

  The book is open on a full-page image of a transparent fish. It looks like a used condom with red teeth.

  "Yuck!" I say. But I actually quite like it. "Does it have a name?"

  "I don't think so. Look at this one."

  Adam turns the page and leans the book towards me. There's what looks like a fish, but instead of a normal fish "face" with bulging eyes and a little mouth this thing seem
s to have the head of a stone monkey, as if someone just slapped two things together—the fish body and the monkey head—as a joke, or even as an accident.

  "What would you call that?" I say.

  "I don't know. Monkey Fish? Pretend Monkey Fish?"

  He turns the page and there's another picture. It looks like a worm with a disembodied vulva coming out of it. I want to laugh but I don't.

  "Orchid fish," he says. And then we're called into the dining room to eat.

  "So please tell me you don't approve of teaching creationism to kids," Heather says to Adam about five minutes after we've started eating. "Or whatever they're calling it now: intelligent design."

  We're eating pasta and roasted vegetables, as promised, with a large salad. Until this new conversational segue, Heather had been talking about her problems finding any decent men at the university. The pasta is almost as impossibly bouncy as she is, and the white spirals slither off your fork if you aren't careful. The vegetables—cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, aubergines, and roasted onions—have been coated with olive oil and lemon juice and they've got that sticky, almost caramelized texture. There's garlic bread, too, and I'm eating as much as I can. In fact, until this moment I'd been much more interested in the food than in the conversation. I tend to hate dinner party conversations, but even I can see that this one could get interesting.

  "In what sense?" Adam says.

  "As part of science courses," Heather says.

  "Aren't creationism and intelligent design different?" I say.

  "Not really," she says. "Intelligent design claims to be scientific but it's not: After all, it deals with things you can't ever know."

  "The intelligent design people are the ones who say that evolution is too complicated to have happened all by itself, aren't they?" I say.

  "Yeah," Heather says. "Like, duh. Just because they don't understand it..."

  "I wouldn't teach religion as science," Adam says. "But we do teach parts of science in our religion courses, if that's any help."

  "Like what?" Heather says.

  "We teach creation myths," says Adam. "And we include the big bang."

  "How precisely is the big bang a myth?" Heather asks.

  "It's a story," Adam says. "Just like the story that the world hatched from a giant egg, or that God said Let there be light and there suddenly was. They're all just stories about the genesis of the world—none of us was there to gather the actual facts, so we have to conclude that the whole thing is unknowable."

  I think about saying something about Alexander Pope's lines on Newton:

  Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

  God said "Let Newton be!" and all was light.

  Then I think about saying something about thought experiments. Then I think about time and the universe, and I'm about to say something about that, but Heather's faster.

  "We are of course still part of the big bang," she says. "So we're observing it all the time. We are 'there' right now." She grins. "I'm no cosmologist or astrobiologist, you understand, but that part of it is blindingly obvious, especially if you've read Jim Lahiri. By the way, help yourselves to more wine and everything."

  "I enjoyed the Lahiri book," I say, pouring more wine and taking another slice of garlic bread. "I liked that bit about how the universe contains its own past and present—and, possibly, future, although I didn't completely go along with all that speculative stuff—and that since everything in the universe was originally part of the primordial particle, we could be said to have been 'there' at the beginning."

  "Not that I want to cause a row or anything," Adam says, smiling. "But I can't agree with big bang theory any more than I can agree with people who think the world is held up by giant turtles."

  "But you can't not agree with big bang theory!" Heather says.

  "Why not?"

  "Well, it's not an opinion; it's a well-established theory, with plenty of evidence. It's certainly not something you can choose to agree or disagree with. You could try to disprove it, but that's something different."

  "So you can form an opinion on, say, creationism, or whether or not there's a God, but I can't form an opinion on whether the universe started as an unimaginably small speck that, for no reason at all, simply exploded?"

  "OK, I admit that the beginning bit is pretty far-fetched," Heather says.

  "And there is the problem of what came before the beginning," I say.

  "Yes, yes," says Heather. "But you can put all that to one side and look at all the evidence for the big bang. The simplest bit to understand is the expanding universe. Once you realize that everything in the universe is moving, and every piece is moving farther away from every other piece, then you realize that, well, yesterday, all the pieces were a bit closer together, and the day before that, a bit closer still. Rewind the tape to the beginning and you see that logically everything must have been lumped together."

  "But as a tiny speck...?" says Adam. "Everything's not getting bigger, is it?"

  "It depends how you define 'big,'" says Heather. "The universe is getting bigger, but it doesn't have more matter in it. That's the other thing—the universe is a closed system with the same amount of matter that never changes."

  "Unless you listen to Stephen Hawking circa 1980," I say.

  "I could never get my head around all that black hole stuff," says Heather. "But anyway, Adam, you have to agree with the reverse tape scenario."

  "Do I? Oh, can I have some more vegetables, please?"

  "Only if you agree with me," says Heather, laughing.

  "Oh, well in that case..." Adam holds up his hands as if to stop something big from crashing into him.

  "No, I'm only kidding. Here..." She pushes the dish of vegetables towards Adam. "But I still don't see how you can disagree with scientific fact."

  "'Fact' is a word. Science itself is just a collection of words. I'm guessing that truth exists beyond language, and what we call 'reality.' It must do; well, if it exists at all, that is."

  "Come again?" says Heather, frowning.

  "Aha," I say, nodding and raising an eyebrow. "He may have you there."

  "It's all just an illusion," says Adam. "Creation myths, religion, science. We tell ourselves how time works—so, for example, you can imagine running your tape-of-the-universe backwards and be sure of what you'd get in this portion of time we call 'yesterday'—but yesterday only exists because we made it up: It's not real. You can't prove to me that yesterday even happened. Everything we tell ourselves to believe is simply a fiction, a story."

  "Well," says Heather, "you can't argue with that—which makes me suspicious. And anyway, if all reality is just an illusion, then why do we bother?"

  "Bother what?"

  "Trying to work it all out. Trying to find the truth."

  "You can try to find the truth outside reality," Adam says.

  "By doing what exactly?"

  Adam shrugs. "Meditation, I think. Or possibly getting very drunk."

  I was going to say something pithy about Derrida, but Heather looks genuinely upset now so I decide not to.

  "Meditation isn't science," she says.

  "That's the point," says Adam.

  "For God's sake," she says, slightly breathlessly. "All that woolly, superstitious stuff ... No offense, but you just need words and logic to do science. I teach this evening class on the scientific method for adult returners and I always give them the example of the spiders' webs outside the room I teach in. Basically there's this long passageway outside the classroom with these orange lights attached to the wall. The lights are always on. In the evening you can see the spiders' webs stretched over the lights, and you can see all the crane flies and other night insects that get trapped in them. You could look at that and think: Aren't the spiders clever because they know to build webs where the other insects will fly because they're attracted to the light. Or you can go one step further and realize that you can only see the webs near the lights and that's why you have assumed
those are the only ones. A poet might stand there and dream about the cunningness of spiders. A scientist would record exactly how many webs there are, and where, and conclude that some of them are built over the lights just by chance."

  "But all of that just proves what I'm saying," Adam says. "I wouldn't conclude that the spiders intended to use the light to help trap the insects. I'd assume that I could never understand what the spiders were doing and why, because I'm not a spider."

  "But scientists have to try to understand things. They have to ask why."

  "Yes, but they'll never get a proper answer," Adam says.

  "Anyway," I say, in a louder voice than I intended. "Er ... Anyway, I was just going to say that this stuff about science and language is really interesting in relation to something I read about the big bang. It's a bit complicated, but it shows that if you start with a few basic assumptions about the big bang, then logic takes you to a situation where we're either living in a multiverse, or a universe created by God. There's really no other option."

  "My head's going to be wrecked by the end of tonight," says Heather.

  "Just drink more wine," says Adam, smiling at her.

  I've just finished the last piece of garlic bread and Heather and Adam have both put down their knives and forks. I pick up my bag and take out a packet of cigarettes.

  "If you're into all this meditation, are you supposed to drink wine?" Heather asks.

  "Oh, I do it very rarely," says Adam.

  I don't know if he means meditation or drinking and although I expect Heather to ask him, she doesn't. Instead, she picks up a stray rocket leaf and puts it back in the salad bowl.

  "Do you mind if I smoke?" I ask her.

  "No, not at all. I'll open the back door though, if you don't mind."

  She gets up to do that and Adam and I briefly start making movements towards clearing the table before she tells us not to fuss and just leave it all.