Going Out

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘So it’s control, and it’s death?’ As Wei says this, he raises his hand and holds up first one, then two fingers, as if he needs to count these items.

  ‘Yeah.’ Julie stops examining the table and puts her hands in her lap. Her palms are sweaty.

  Wei puts his hands back on his knee. ‘Give me some examples.’

  Julie tells Wei about how she can’t eat prepared food like sandwiches or pizza – even though she managed a pizza last night, she still waited an hour in fear that the acid was going to kick in – and how she also can’t stand the idea of natural foods, because they might have earth on them, and she’s scared of E. coli and dirt and fungus and fertilisers and cancer. Then she explains all her travel phobias: the way she feels about planes, trains and boats; then she tells Wei about her fear of the weather, bacteria and freak accidents in general. He nods enthusiastically while she talks. Then he laughs.

  ‘Well, you may as well be dead,’ he says.

  ‘I know. I’ve thought that myself.’

  ‘And you’re not in control.’

  ‘No, but I try to be. Like if I only eat heavily processed foods, I’m controlling what goes in me, and I know I don’t have a very healthy diet but at least I control it. If I do that, I can’t be killed by someone else’s mistake, or sabotage, or by a rogue spore in some clump of earth.’

  Wei scratches his head. ‘So which fears have you overcome?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t exactly overcome anything, but . . .’ She tells him about the flood she drove through, and how excited she felt, and how different that was for her.

  ‘So you felt the joy of life once?’ He raises a finger, counting again.

  ‘The joy of life? I suppose you could put it like that. Yes. I did.’

  ‘Only once?’

  Julie frowns. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘When was the last time you felt that joy?’

  ‘Um, oh, last night, actually, in a way.’

  ‘Last night?’ Wei raises his eyebrows. ‘What happened?’

  ‘My friend who came on the journey with Luke and me – Charlotte; you know her, I think – she was due to leave the country, but now she’s staying so she can travel around with me and maybe Luke if he gets healed and doesn’t want to go home afterwards.’

  ‘So you have friendship?’

  Julie thinks about this. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re continuing on your journey?’

  ‘I hope so. I’m not so good with roads, but there’s always more than one way to get somewhere. And if I hadn’t been on the small roads, I’d never have been able to drive through the flood.’

  Wei stands up and walks across the room, with his back to Julie. She can see him counting on his fingers again. ‘So you have two good friends, you’re on an exciting journey, and you are healthy. But you are still afraid.’

  ‘Stupid, isn’t it?’

  He turns around and looks at her. ‘Julie, if somebody did put LSD in your sandwich, what’s the worst thing that could happen?’

  She frowns again. ‘Well, that would be the worst thing, it being there.’

  ‘But people take LSD for fun, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but I never would.’

  ‘Well, that’s good.’ He pauses and looks at the blanket covering the window. Julie gets the impression he would actually like to look out of the window at the dawn but the blanket is there ready for when Luke comes and there’s no sunlight coming through it at all. He stops looking at the blanket and looks back at Julie. ‘But still, these things don’t usually kill you. So, it terrifies you because it’s not your choice. But you accept that some people take it and have fun?’

  ‘Yes, but some people take it to have fun and then try to fly by jumping off a bridge or something. That terrifies me.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t do that, would you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I might.’

  Wei starts walking back towards the table. ‘Look, these drugs don’t change your whole mind, they just confuse it. You are still the essential person inside, just a little bit muddled. You would never get so muddled that you’d kill yourself. You want to live so much. A drug would never make you stop wanting to live. The feeling’s too dominant in you.’ He sits down and crosses his legs again. ‘Julie, I want to ask you: what would you actually do if there was LSD in your sandwich?’

  Julie’s embarrassed. Her fear sounds so stupid when he puts it like that. Terrifying still but totally stupid. How does her mind come up with these things? Mind you, people do spike other people all the time. Once, in The Edge, someone’s ex-girlfriend came in with another guy and got an E in her Pepsi. Julie’s fears are grounded in some sort of reality. She stares at the table again, trying to think how to answer. She can’t lie; there’s only one response to Wei’s question.

  She looks up at him. ‘What would I do? I’d panic.’

  ‘OK. So you’ve panicked. What then?’

  This throws her. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never thought beyond the panic.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘OK, well, I suppose if I was driving, I’d pull over. But I’d be scared that I’d start hallucinating and there’d be monsters on the road and it would be dark and I’d go mad . . .’

  Wei leans forward. ‘So the monsters come. What would you do?’

  ‘Tell myself they’re not real, maybe. Put the radio on. Keep drinking fluids. Have a cigarette. Maybe I’d phone someone and get them to pick me up. But what if I couldn’t remember their number or I thought my phone was crawling with insects or something? Mind you, you don’t really get acid that strong, do you? I’ve heard people at work talking about it. In fact, some of the people I used to work with would do acid and other drugs then go out clubbing – or even come into work. So, logically, I wouldn’t get completely out of it. I’d be able to do something, like phone for help. Or, I could phone for help as soon as it kicked in, before it got too bad. Then my friend would pick me up, and I’d get them to call a doctor to give me a sedative. Or, I suppose if I really was so out of it that I couldn’t phone anyone, then I’d just have to sit it out. Anyway, hopefully I’d just be sedated and wake up OK, and then in the morning I’d call the police and report what had happened.’

  Wei looks amused. ‘In the morning, eh?’

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘You just survived.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. So I did.’ Julie smiles.

  ‘If surviving is the worst thing that can happen to you, I don’t think you have much to worry about. I think you need to think through the ways you’d cope if some of these things happened, and not just stop at the idea of you panicking. Assume that once you’ve panicked for a while, you’d have to do something else, and work through the scenario until you either survive or you don’t. Most times you will. Who cares if you get a little sick, or a little muddled . . . You’ve survived! Not that I’m recommending you eat packaged sandwiches – they really are horrible.’ He laughs. ‘But you could if you wanted to. It’s so unlikely that you’d get one that someone had deliberately put LSD into anyway . . .’

  ‘It’s a possibility, though.’

  ‘Not a very convincing one. I think the odds would be very remote.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. Oh, dear. I, uh . . . I have a bit of a problem with probability,’ Julie says, knowing she’s probably about to really piss Wei off, but not able to stop herself. ‘It’s that whole quantum-physics thing where you have infinite possibility and infinite universes, and therefore everything has a probability value of one. In a sense the probability of getting acid in my sandwich is the same as not getting it, and it would be just my luck to be stuck in the scenario where it happened. If there were infinite universes, I just know I’d be stuck in the one where everything goes wrong.’

  ‘Are you a mathematician?’

  Julie blushes. ‘Sort of. It’s my hobby.’

  ‘Explain this idea of infinite possibility.’ He makes this sound like an order.

  ‘OK,’ Julie say
s nervously. ‘It’s basically the idea that every known outcome to every possible event not only exists but actually happens somewhere, in a parallel universe or another world. The probability of anything happening therefore simply has a value of one, because if you accept multiple universes and infinite outcomes, everything possible actually happens. In that sense everything exists: millions of versions of this conversation, millions of outcomes of the throw of a pair of dice, square circles, zombies, God and the devil . . . They all exist somewhere. In some universe somewhere, when you asked me to come into the room before, I instantly turned into a lemon. In another, I tripped and fell, in another I went off with Luke and never came back. You’ve probably heard those ideas before. It’s all to do with wave-function . . . I’d better not explain that bit, it gets a bit complicated.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ says Wei, smiling. He sighs. ‘So it’s just as likely that you’ll get acid in your sandwich as it is that you’ll turn into a lemon. I have heard about this before, although not phrased in exactly the same way, but I see how it works. It’s connected with that unfortunate cat, isn’t it?’

  ‘Schrödinger’s cat?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one.’

  Julie smiles. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘The cat was in a box, I think?’

  For some reason Julie thinks of the mice she saw in the pet shop last week. ‘Yes. It’s a thought experiment – there’s no real cat and no real box, of course. In the thought experiment the cat is sealed in the box with some radioactive material and some cyanide. There’s a fifty per cent chance that the radioactive material will break down and start a chain reaction that releases the cyanide. So the question is this: is the cat alive or dead while the box is sealed? Since you can’t observe the cat, you can’t know. Therefore the cat is in a “superposition” of the alive and dead states as long as the box is closed, and only becomes actually dead or alive when you open the box to make the observation. Until you look at it, the cat is both dead and alive, or fifty per cent alive, both of which are impossible. Nothing can be alive and dead at the same time; and there isn’t a state between life and death. Schrödinger’s thesis was a paradox that he used to illustrate problems with the way quantum theory treated the observation of atoms. The cat must be alive or dead. It can’t be alive and dead, or fifty per cent alive, which is what the experiment suggests.’

  Julie suddenly thinks about Luke, and about how he’s been sealed in his box for so long. Before he left his room, was he alive, dead or fifty per cent alive? Or was he some sort of paradox, a trick, or something imaginary like a number you make up because it answers your impossible question? If something’s not there you invent it. If you don’t have an answer, you make one up. Is Luke imaginary? Is his life – full of narrative and perfect fiction – just imaginary?

  Wei strokes his chin. ‘This is an imaginary cat, is it not?’

  Julie nods. ‘Yes. It’s a thought experiment, like I said.’

  ‘So it can be neither alive nor dead anyway.’ Wei smiles. ‘Or even fifty per cent alive. And if the cyanide is imaginary it can’t kill anything, can it? And you think you are like the cat. You always think you are going to be killed by imaginary cyanide.’ He shakes his head. ‘So, do you believe in all this quantum theory?’

  Julie freezes. Is she the cat? No. Luke’s the cat. Isn’t he?

  ‘Julie?’

  ‘What? Oh, do I believe in quantum theory? Well, not really. I accept the possibility of it being there, but it doesn’t actually mean anything, apart from the fact that probability is a stupid concept. It never works, and bookmakers are sometimes wrong, but not often, and you can cut a pack of cards fifty times and get the same card every time, particularly if you’re cheating. Probability can only ever truly be considered in the context of infinity, because once you start talking about probability, you have to consider infinite outcomes, which makes it all a bit tricky. That’s all I was trying to say. Infinity always creates its own paradoxes. In fact, if you had infinite possibility and infinite universes one of the possibilities would have to be that infinite possibility doesn’t exist. That would cancel the others out.’

  She sighs. ‘Anyway, the point is that I still believe in weird things happening and no one’s going to use probability theories to convince me otherwise, because once you start talking about probability, you have to accept that anything’s as likely as anything else, including stuff that’s a lot weirder than the weird thing you were worried about in the first place.’

  Wei gets up again and walks around silently for a few moments. ‘For someone so clever, you are not the wisest person in the world, are you?’ he says eventually. ‘You are right but you’re not using this knowledge you have. You have to get to the point where you do not do these calculations in your conscious mind. Let your spirit handle chance and probability and calculation – those decisions you make in milliseconds are usually the best ones; for example when you “automatically” swerve out of the way when someone steps in front of your car. As you know, when you do that, your brain does thousands of calculations to do with distance and time and velocity and so on, and you are not even conscious of those calculations. If you knew the joy of playing sport you’d know that your mind is able to calculate the effects gravity has on a ball. When you fall in love, you have to let your internal world handle that. Your unconscious mind – or your spirit – makes wonderful calculations. You should not override it all the time.’

  Wei turns, looks at Julie then sits in his chair again. ‘Anyway, going back to our discussion, then: whatever happens to you, there are two possible outcomes, apart from the infinite ones where you turn yourself into a die, throw yourself a billion times and come up with the number six every time.’ He laughs. ‘You must realise that, in your predicament, when you have too much fear, even the infinite outcomes boil down to two basic ones. Essentially, you’ll either survive, or you won’t. Even the Schrödinger experiment demonstrates that. There really is no such thing as being fifty per cent alive. You accept that?’

  Julie has to accept elegant maths. ‘Yes.’

  Wei looks at her. ‘So if you survive, that’s OK. But what if you died?’

  Julie feels a chill go through her. ‘That’s what I’m trying to avoid.’

  Wei frowns. ‘But what frightens you about death?’

  ‘Not existing any more. Nothingness.’

  Now he speaks gently. ‘And you’re sure death leads to nothingness?’

  ‘Huh? Of course it does.’

  ‘What about all the other – I’m tempted to say infinite – possibilities? There are many ideas about the afterlife, and there are notions of reincarnation, or there’s what I believe: that your spirit lives on in life and in nature. Many cultures believe that there is an afterlife. In fact, millions of people all around the world believe it. There are so many different versions of the afterlife.’ Wei laughs. ‘The one thing there couldn’t be is nothingness.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Come on, Julie. Nothingness cannot “be”. Therefore it cannot exist. Use your own logic.’ He smiles. ‘You like using your logic. Come on. Infinity might have problems but it is more believable than nothingness. We use our being to contemplate infinity, because it exists. It is the concept of existence, multiplied to the highest factor. It is absolute being. But how can we contemplate non-being? Have you heard the phrase nature abhors a void? Of course you have. You should look to nature for some of your answers. Nature is all about being. Even death leads to life in nature. You shouldn’t need me to tell you these things.’

  Julie smiles. ‘OK, but I’m still scared of dying. I know it’s selfish but I don’t want to make way for new life right now. I just want to carry on being me for a long time, at least until I’m very old.’

  Wei sighs. ‘People who have had near-death experiences say it’s nothing to be scared of, you know. They see wonderful lights, happiness.’

  ‘I know. But isn’t that actually just some hallucination to do with th
e optic nerve closing down or something?’

  ‘Is it? I heard of an experiment in which it was proven that the person’s spirit was able to float above the body, or at least move outside it in some way, because people reported seeing objects that were placed in the room outside the range of vision anyone would have at ground level. In fact, the human spirit is a well-travelled thing, if you believe all the accounts. Ghosts, spirit guides, shamanic flight, dreams. If your spirit can travel, surely it can live on after death?’

  ‘Really? Do you believe in all that?’

  Wei smiles. ‘I believe life is good and life has meaning. Look, my words aren’t going to instantly cure you – as you can see, I don’t work like that. But you can create for yourself a better sense of well-being if you simply ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen?” and realise that only in rare circumstances will it be death, and even if it is, so what? If death’s the worst thing that can happen, you can cope with it! You are a strong, beautiful woman, Julie. Do you really think death will be the end of you? Of course not. And even if it was, which I doubt, and there was no heaven or any sort of spirit world or afterlife, it still wouldn’t be, because you will leave behind some wonderful things: maybe some children, or some ideas. Perhaps a nice garden, or a beautiful picture, or a song you made up. These are the important things. But you can’t create these things, or live life, when you are so scared.’

  Julie sighs. ‘I know. You’re right. It just might take a while for me to accept that.’

  ‘Look, Luke’s going to be waiting for you to collect him, so unfortunately our time is up, but I have enjoyed talking to you.’ Wei gets up and walks over to his bedside table, from which he takes two pieces of yellow paper. One of them is blank. He gives it to Julie, along with a pencil. ‘I have prepared some guidelines that I think will help you. I think you’ll find these are the only reasonable precautions you’ll need to take to keep healthy, which is all you’re really worried about, so you can go on your journey, and have fun with your friends, and do your strange maths. Some of these are from the Tao, but most are things your grandparents could tell you, in that they’re just common sense. And Julie, do not be afraid of illness – you will be ill, then you will get well, and you may read a wonderful book while you are in bed. Illness can be a blessing.’