The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  "I like this place," Adam says, sitting down on the sofa.

  When my coffee's ready I sit down on the old sofa next to him. I don't think I've ever actually sat on this sofa with another human being. It feels a bit like sitting on a train, our backs facing the direction of travel, both being careful not to let our knees touch.

  "What's the Shrine of St. Jude?" I ask him.

  "Oh, that. You noticed."

  "I just saw it on the wall in the church. I've heard the name before: St. Jude. What's he the saint of?"

  "Lost and hopeless causes. The shrine's in Faversham. I go there whenever..."

  "What?"

  "Just whenever things go wrong. You're not asking me the obvious question."

  "What obvious question?"

  "About me being a priest."

  "I'm not very good at asking those questions," I say.

  There's a pause. I should say something else; I know that it's my line next. And I do want to know. Usually I would want to know everything about being a priest and how it's possible to be a priest and then not be one. I want to ask why he still crossed himself in the church, for example. But now I've got the holy water and the Carbo-veg and it's just like those days when I kept a razor in a box and I just wanted everyone to go away so I could do what I wanted, on my own.

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

  He shrugs. "It's your flat."

  "Yeah, I know, but..."

  "Honestly. Don't mind me."

  He sips his water while I light up. I see the slight shake of his left hand holding the water, and then I look away, my gaze moving over the scarred kitchen surfaces: the time I burned the rice; the time I scalded myself; the time I cut my finger.

  "What was it like?" I ask, forcing my thoughts to stop. "Or even what is it like?"

  "What?"

  "Being that religious; I mean, being religious enough to be a priest."

  He puts his water down and sits forward, leaning his elbow on his knee and propping up his face with his right hand. He uses his forefinger to draw around the edge of his face, as if he was blind and wanted to know what his own face looked like.

  "I've been thinking about this," he says. "I've been trying to put it into words but I didn't have anyone to tell and ... Now I've met you I think maybe you'll understand. In fact, I know you will."

  "Why do you think that?"

  Now he puts both his hands over his face and lets his head drop into them.

  "I don't know."

  "Adam?"

  "I'm sorry. I'm not even sure I want to talk about what you want to talk about. I didn't even stop being a priest because I wasn't religious enough ... I was just being stupid back at Heather's. I didn't lose my faith because I wanted to have sex with little boys or old men or young women or anything like that. I studied the Tao Te Ching—years ago, now—and decided to follow The Way alongside being a priest. It's not unusual—lots of people do it. But it undermined my faith. I just wanted to desire nothing, but that was something that I desired, obviously, and it almost drove me mad. And then I couldn't stop thinking about paradoxes. I thought about the virgin birth and the mystery of faith and everything else. I didn't hate the paradoxes—they're the basis for the church, after all—but I started wanting more of them. I wanted to see what a pure paradox would look like. Eventually I realized that I simply needed silence, so I joined a silent order for two years and thought about nothing. Then I stopped. I can't explain this very well ... And you're right. Why am I telling you this? Where have I seen you before? Shit. I should go."

  "Adam..."

  He gets up. "I'm sorry for barging in here. This isn't the right place for me."

  He's right. I fuck old men and become obsessed with curses and rare books. He needs someone more sensible than me to talk to. I look at his old clothes and messed-up hair and imagine his dark, strong forearms. I wonder if he's ever even been to bed with anyone?

  I take a deep breath. Why am I always the wrong person?

  And, without either of us seeming to do anything, we're now pressing against each other, kissing as though it's midnight at the party at the end of the world. I feel his cock get hard, and I push myself against him. This feels different. There's something real about this that I thought I'd forgotten.

  "I'm sorry," he says after about twenty seconds, pulling away. "I can't do this."

  "I don't know what happened there," I say, acting as if I agree that this is a bad idea. I can't catch his eye. I turn towards the stove, as if I've got something important to cook. Can you have a disappointment cake? A rejection cake? An unhappy birthday cake?

  "I'm sorry," says Adam, behind me. "I'm ... I shouldn't drink. I'm not used to it."

  By the time I say sorry, he's gone. I'm a fucking idiot. Or am I? When attractive young guys offer me something, they always take it away again pretty soon afterwards, so it's probably best that this never happened. What's a man like Adam going to get from me, anyway? If you're someone like Adam, you can sleep with anyone. If he had a shower and put on a suit or something, well, I can't imagine any woman turning him down. With someone like Adam, it doesn't matter about my iPod, or my smooth neck, or my tits that have not (yet) sagged. I don't have cellulite, and men over the age of fifty therefore feel lucky to sleep with me. What have I got that Adam could possibly want? In the sexual economy, I've got millions in the offshore account called "Older Men," but I think I'd get turned down for an account anywhere else.

  I used to have a black marker pen, but I don't know where it went. It was a big, phallic, chemical-smelling thing, and I used it to write the number of this flat on one of the bins in Luigi's backyard. But that was, what, a year and a half ago? It's not in the kitchen drawer, and it isn't in the cup of pens on the shelf. Damn. The closest thing I can find is a black Biro. I do have a white piece of cardboard, however. It's the backing from a cheap pair of fishnet tights I bought from the market last spring, and it's been lying on my chest of drawers since then. So I draw the black circle on the card: It takes five minutes just to color it in.

  I also have a black mark on my arm; the place where I dug the pen in experimentally to see what it would feel like; to see if it would be like it used to be.

  The holy water looks murky in the glass vial. I get the page from The End of Mr. Y and lay it on the kitchen counter to check the instructions. OK, so I have to mix the Carbo-veg into the holy water and succuss the mixture several times. That's just shaking, surely? I seem to remember from the homoeopathy books that it is. As I reach up to the cupboard to get the Carbo-veg out of the sugar tin, the single page from Lumas's book floats onto the floor. I pick it up and note that the edge is now slightly damp. I remember seeing some Sellotape in the kitchen drawer, so I get that out and spend the next few minutes carefully repairing the book, matching up the jagged tear in the page with the jagged tear left behind between pages 130 and 133. You can see the join, obviously, but the page is now part of the book again.

  I remember that you're not supposed to touch homoeopathic medicines, so I tip one of the pills onto a metal spoon. It makes a tiny clinking sound. Then I unplug the cork from the vial and put the pill inside. It bobs on the surface for a second and then sinks, the water becoming cloudier as it begins to dissolve. My heart's a little rubber ball bouncing against my rib cage. I don't know why I'm nervous: All I'm doing is adding a little sugar pill to some water. Still, I stand there shaking the mixture for several minutes and then, remembering something I read earlier on, I give the vial a couple of little taps on a tea towel folded up on the work surface. I look, and see that the pill has completely dissolved into the water. So now I'm going to drink it.

  Am I? Is holy water sterile, or even hygienic? How many people's fingers have been in it? Probably not that many. Come on, Ariel. But ... Does the priest put it out at night, or in the morning? This is stupid. Cross with myself for caring about anything as banal as how many people's fingers have been in the water, I uncork the vial and force myself to drin
k a large mouthful. There. Now I don't have to think about it anymore. I take the piece of cardboard and lie down on the sofa, drunk and tired and now feeling a little sick.

  Black dot, black dot. A smear. And then I'm asleep.

  I dream of mice. I dream of a mouse-world, bigger than this one, with a faint voice saying to me You have choice, or something like that, all night long.

  I don't wake up until gone ten o'clock, shivering in my jeans and jumper on the sofa, with hard winter light glaring at me through the kitchen window. I must have dropped the piece of cardboard as I fell asleep, because it's on my stomach now. In daylight it looks pathetic: a scribble on a cheap, floppy bit of off-white card. I should have done better, really, but I was quite drunk. So it didn't work. Or it didn't work because I messed it up. How long do you keep trying, though, before you realize that you've been fooled by fiction (again) and it's the familiar, disappointing world that is real? You have choice. I have the choice to stop obsessing about being cursed. I have the choice to stop drinking concoctions suggested by rare books. I could try to sell the book, presumably, even though it is damaged? But even as I think this I know that nothing would make me give it up. So I'll keep the book, but go back to normal. I'll write something about curses for the magazine. I'll get on with my Ph.D. A chapter on Lumas about the blurring between fiction and nonfiction, and the thought experiment that becomes a physical experiment. A trick that makes you see the world anew...

  Except I don't feel like I'm seeing the world anew. I feel like I haven't even been to sleep. And my stomach hurts, like period pain but slightly higher up. That water must have been contaminated. Maybe I should eat something. Maybe that will help.

  There's still some soya milk in the fridge, so I put porridge on the stove, and coffee. As I go to the bedroom for a different jumper I realize how cold and tired I really am. I think I need a scarf as well. As I pull the thick black sweater over my head and wrap a long black woollen scarf around my neck, I look out of the window. There are little icicles hanging off the inside window frame: the kind of detail you vow to recall for people at some point in the future when your life is sorted out and you want to tell an anecdote about how poor you were that winter, and how dismal your flat was. But every day I grow less and less confident in that future. I'm not sure I want it, anyway. Ha ha, when I was poor. Ha, ha, have you seen that play? Ha ha, I know this is really bad, but I've actually been thinking lately that it might make sense to vote Conservative. I want to swerve to avoid that life at all costs. Maybe I'll just live like this forever. So I'm not that interested in the meaning of the icicles. There are icicles. I smile briefly, even though no one's looking, and wrap the scarf around my neck one more time.

  I walk back down the long hallway, and into the kitchen, through the wooden door that's thick with decades of gloss paint. Then I have an odd feeling that the door is much too small or I am much too big. It feels exactly like déjà vu, as if I'm about to shrink and look up at a door that is a hundred times my size, rather than a foot or so taller than me. But it doesn't happen; it just sits there in my mind: a parallel thought; perhaps something that's happening to some other me, out there in the multiverse. The sensation reminds me of the time someone gave me mushroom tea without telling me and I spent the whole evening watching this pink and cream suburban sitting room grow and shrink around me. I remember the TV being on in the corner; some Saturday night game show where loud, happy, healthy families competed against one another to win a new car or a holiday. At one point the TV towered over me, as if I could walk inside the screen. But the image I remember most vividly is when the room shrank to the size of a sugar cube. I was looking down on it, on the room I was in, but I wasn't inside the room anymore. Afterwards I asked my friend how he thought that could have worked. Where was I if I wasn't in the room? He just smiled and said, "Inside a bad trip, man." What an idiot. I close my eyes and open them again. The door's normal. I really must have drunk too much last night.

  After breakfast I consider going in to the university but instead decide to stay here. OK, so the heat costs money here, but as long as I use the gas it should be OK, at least for a day while I try to get my thoughts together. Did I throw myself at Adam last night or did he throw himself at me? I can't be in a room with him today, anyway. It's still so cold, so I switch on the oven and then sit on the sofa with my knees pulled into my body, smoking and thinking about what to do next. I could write something, but I can't. I could read something—but what do you read after Mr. Y? I could just sit here all day and wait for the curse to hit me. But there is no curse. The only curse in my life is me.

  You have choice.

  What was going on in my dream?

  While I'm cleaning my teeth, shivering in the damp bathroom (by far the coldest room in the flat), I remember that the marker pen is in the bathroom cabinet. Of course. I bought that weird shampoo that came in an unmarked bottle and I wanted to write on it in case I bought something else from that market stall and became confused. It's the kind of thing I do when I should be working: write labels on shampoo bottles; iron jeans; think about seagulls. I don't think I really cared about the shampoo: It was just something to do. I open the cabinet and there it is, a thick black pen lying there alongside some old paracetamol and a broken hairbrush. As soon as I open the door it rolls out and I catch it before it falls in the sink. OK.

  Ten minutes later I'm sitting on the sofa again, this time with a fresh cup of coffee, a cigarette, and a perfect black circle on the back of a perfect white card. I went through all the random mail from downstairs until I found a birthday card, probably about a year old, inside a pale blue envelope. Happy 20th, Tamsin, it said. We'll come and see you soon. It was signed Maggie and Bill. But that bit's in the bin now. I've got the other bit: a rectangle of card with a Victorian pastoral scene on one side, and bright white nothingness on the other. Well, now it's bright white nothingness with a small black circle in the middle of it, perfectly filled in.

  I stub out my cigarette and drain the last of the coffee, turning the card over and looking at the Victorian image again. It's dated 1867, and it's called Summer Landscape, although its colors seem autumnal. It looks like such a peaceful place: red earth carpeted with thick grass and canopied with emerald and bronze trees; a path by a river where you could walk in complete silence. I turn the card over and there's the circle again. Circle. Soothing landscape. Circle. Soothing landscape. I know which one makes the best birthday card. Right. Are you supposed to wait fifteen minutes before doing this? The homoeopathy books I read yesterday all said that homoeopathic medicines should be taken on a clean mouth, fifteen minutes after eating or drinking. But that's OK. If it doesn't work then I can blame the coffee and start again later. As long as I keep doing it wrong I'll have something to do all day. Then, this evening, I can admit that my adventure is over and go back to normal life. Maybe I'll reread Erewhon. That usually cheers me up.

  So I pick up the vial and give it another little shake. What the hell—I bang it hard twice on the side of the sofa. I suppose I've probably done too much succussing now, but surely that makes it more potent, not less? I think back to the homoeopathy books and remember that if I were to take a drop of this mixture and put it in some water and shake it some more, the result would be stronger than this mixture, even though scientifically speaking it would be more dilute. How does that work? Come on Ariel; stop thinking about it and just get on with it. It's just you and the liquid. OK. I drink it: a large mouthful. Then I lie down on the sofa and stare at the black circle, concentrating as hard as I can. And this time, I do not fall asleep: I watch as the black circle splits into two, and I try not to blink as it kaleidoscopes around on the sheet, lifting and turning.

  And then, in an instant that feels thinner and sharper than the edge of a razor, I'm falling. I'm falling into a black tunnel, the same black tunnel that Mr. Y described in the book. But I'm not falling down, if that makes any sense: I'm falling along, forwards, horizontally. The walls of the
tunnel pass by as if I were in a car, but I'm not in a car. Wherever I am it's completely silent and I have no bodily sensations at all. I'm fairly sure my body is here with me, but it has no feelings and no desires. I'm not even sure if I'm wearing clothes. Only my mind feels alive. I see—although it doesn't feel as if it's actually through my eyes—almost exactly what Mr. Y saw: black all around suddenly pinpricked by little lights that turn into wavy lines that seem to go on forever. Then a huge penis, drawn in the same style as that on the Cerne Abbas Giant, but rendered here in light. There's also a vagina, which looks less familiar, and then it's gone. Then I seem to be moving faster. I see the birds and feet and eyes that Mr. Y saw, but to me they look like Egyptian hieroglyphics, the kind of thing you learn about in primary school. Then I see many letters: Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic. I don't recognize all of them, but after a while they organize themselves into alphabets and there are several minutes where nothing seems to change in the tunnel. Could I stop this experience if I wanted to? I'm not sure I could. Can my mind even handle this experience, whatever it is? I've never much liked hallucinogens because of the lack of control you have, and the fact that you have to finish the trip; you can't just switch it off. Now I'm here and I know I can't switch this off. I could go mad. Maybe I have just gone mad. Maybe this is what it's like crossing from sanity into madness, and maybe I'll never escape. As I think, I begin to feel sick, so I try to stop thinking and instead just look at the walls of the tunnel again.

  The alphabets look more familiar, and now include numerals, although in patterns I don't immediately recognize. Odd combinations of Roman numerals that I don't understand are interspersed with sequences beginning 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 and 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. At least, I assume they are sequences, but soon they dissolve into long lines of numerals that look like cosmic telephone numbers. In places I can see equations, but they only flicker and then disappear. I'm sure I see Newton's F=MA, and, later, Einstein's E=MC2. I can see mathematical symbols that I don't understand, as well as those I do: the = and + signs, and later various pieces of set notation like I = {1, 2, 3, ... 100}. Then more series of numbers that go on for minutes and minutes. I see sequences that don't make any sense at all, such as: 1431, 1731, 1831, 2432, 2732, 2832, 3171, 3181, 3272, 3282, 11511, 31531, 31631, 32532, 32632, 33151, 33161, 33252, 33262, 114311, 117311, 118311, 124312, 127312, 128312, 214321, 217321, 218321, 224322, 227322, 228322. At first I think they must be dates, but then the numbers get too big again. Then something else happens, something not described in Lumas's version of this: The letters from the alphabet all disappear and turn into numbers, and then the numbers, apart from 1 and 0, disappear as well until I am left with millions and millions of 0s and 1s waterfalling down the walls around me.