The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

Chapter Twenty-six

  Apollo Smintheus is tied to a chair, and he looks very pissed off.

  "Oh, thank you," he says, when we untie him.

  He stands up, sways a little, and then sits back down again.

  "Oh," he says. "Those little brutes."

  "They've gone now," I say. "Well, I think they have."

  "And you two are reunited," he says.

  I'm wondering whether Apollo Smintheus has told Adam about the dangers of staying in here too long: whether he's shown him a screen of himself in the physical world, like he did with me. Where is Adam's body? Is it still in the priory? I wonder if anyone has found him and saved him. I remember those images of Apollo Smintheus in my dreams: You owe me. You owe me. And I wonder if it was Apollo Smintheus who got into Adam's dreams, and why he wanted him to come in here as well.

  It's a horrible thought, but for a second I imagine that it's a punishment: because I took my time coming back; because I haven't yet completed his mission.

  "Where's the address?" I ask him. "I need to know how to get to Abbie Lathrop."

  "Don't you want coffee first?" he asks.

  "No. I just want to go. I'm going to see Adam back to the physical world, and then I'm going to go straight off and do this. I don't have much time."

  Apollo Smintheus seems to narrow his eyes slightly.

  But Adam's quicker to speak. "I'm coming with you," he says to me.

  "You can't," I say. "Don't you know...?"

  "Know what?"

  I look at Apollo Smintheus, who doesn't seem to want to catch my eye. Then I look at Adam again. His big eyes are as warm and clear as a midsummer morning. They're so deep, I think again. But here they don't look like fossils from the past, they just look like a promise of the future.

  But what do his eyes look like in the physical world? I think.

  "You're not supposed to stay in here too long," I say.

  "Did I not mention that...?" Apollo Smintheus says.

  Adam looks at me. "I've been in your mind, Ariel," he says. "And, on the way back to your mind, Saul Burlem's and Lura's. I know everything."

  "But..."

  His eyes leave mine. "I wasn't going to talk about this now."

  "Talk about what?"

  "I think it's already too late. There was a very big storm yesterday. Apollo Smintheus said that when you get weather in the Troposphere..." But I'm not listening properly. Why didn't Apollo Smintheus save Adam? Why didn't he tell him to go back?

  Sadness in here feels like a warm flannel. But it's still sadness; the warm flannel is over my face and I can't breathe properly.

  "It can't be too late! Apollo Smintheus must have told you about the trains?"

  "I did," says Apollo Smintheus. "Well, sort of."

  "He told me there was a way I could get back to where I'd started. But I didn't want to go back there. I wanted to find you."

  "But Adam..."

  "What?"

  "Adam, you can't ... You didn't..."

  "I think I'll leave you two to it now," says Apollo Smintheus. "Here's that address for Abbie Lathrop." He produces a slim white business card, very similar to the one he first left for me: the one I found on the street after I'd done Pedesis for the first time. I take the card and look at it. When I look up, he's gone. I'm here on my own with Adam.

  "I don't like it in here that much," says Adam. "Let's go outside."

  There is no outside, I think. Not anymore.

  But I follow him down the jumbled-up street, anyway. We pass a car showroom and a small haberdashery. I want to cry but it doesn't work. I don't think you can cry in here. But raindrops start falling softly from somewhere above me, and when I look up, the night sky seems wet and glossy.

  We end up in a meadow by a river. The bright moon seems to touch every part of the black water, and moves through the tall yellow grass like gentle fingers. There are benches that face the water, and Adam sits on one of them. I sit on one, too. The wood isn't cold. Like everything else in here, it doesn't seem to have a temperature. Tiny drops of rain still fall from the sky, but they don't feel wet.

  "Ariel," says Adam, taking my hand.

  "Why did you do this?" I ask him.

  "I wanted to know...," he says.

  "Know what?"

  He shrugs. "Just to know. I couldn't go back."

  "But ... Why did you want to find me?"

  "I just had to. And I missed you."

  I breathe in for a long time. Then I sigh. "I missed you, too. But..."

  "What?"

  "Shit. Adam. Why?"

  He shrugs again. "Apollo Smintheus told me you needed me."

  "I would have found you when I got out. I'd..."

  Adam looks away from me and out onto the river. An owl hoots.

  "Fuck," I say. "So it's all too late. Nothing means anything anymore. Everything's..."

  "Don't say it," Adam says. "Just come with me."

  He takes my hand and we stand up. We walk down the path, past thousands of trees that seem to reach up into heaven. Moonlight strobes on their leaves, and bats flicker in and out of the trees like shadow puppets against the black of the sky. Soon we come to a clearing: a circle of thick, soft grass, surrounded by trees. We walk into the clearing and Adam immediately pulls me towards him.

  "Ariel," he says. And he kisses me.

  But what's happening? This kiss is a million kisses. This kiss is every kiss. Our lips seem to press together with the force of ten thousand hurricanes, and when his tongue meets mine it feels like the softest electricity: a million-volt shock happening in slow motion, one electron at a time, where each electron is the size of the sun.

  And in the sky, there's lightning.

  The rain starts to hammer the ground, but I can't feel it.

  Adam is pulling me down onto the grass.

  As I close my eyes I can see that there are tornadoes everywhere, but I can't even feel a breeze. All my clothes have gone. I'm so naked it's as if I don't even have skin. Adam's taut body moves down onto mine. And when he enters me it's as if I'm being turned inside out, and the whole world is penetrating me; and that means I contain everything.

  Afterwards we both lie there on the ground, shaking. I know everything about Adam now, and he knows everything about me.

  "Oh...," says Adam.

  "Yeah."

  "Oh ... Is that...?"

  "No."

  "You don't know what I was going to ask."

  "Yes I do. You were going to ask if that's what sex is like usually."

  He takes my hand. "Well, something like that."

  "And the answer is no."

  "But we'd never done it before," he says, and I can see him smiling in the moonlight.

  I imagine tornadoes around the Shrine of St. Jude. But maybe he's right.

  I put my head on his shoulder and he puts his arm around me. I feel so small and warm, like I'm an acorn he's holding in the palm of his hand. But at the same time I feel as if I'm the one holding on to him. He only exists here now. And if I do this and then go back... Don't think, Ariel. Just have this moment. But if there's no Troposphere, I won't be able to see Adam ever again. Perhaps I'll go back and find that I don't even know who Adam is. Perhaps I won't miss him, because I'll never know I knew him.

  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 Ph.D. 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 p
oliceman 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?"

  "Hmm?"

  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 forwards 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 anymore, 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 realize 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.

  "Hmm?"

  "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. "Hmm. 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..."

  "Mmm. 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."