Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  I heard Christopher come up the stairs, walk across the small landing to the bathroom door and sigh loudly before walking up the next flight of stairs to the bedroom. Was he going to bed already? He went to bed earlier than me, because on weekdays he took the 6 A.M. bus to Totnes to work as a volunteer on a wall-rebuilding project. But it wasn't even nine o'clock yet. He came down the stairs again and tried the bathroom door, which I'd locked.

  'I won't be a minute,' I said.

  'Can I come in? I need to piss.'

  'I'm just about to get out. Can you hang on?'

  'I'm desperate. And I want to get ready for bed. Why have you locked the door anyway? Why have you been in there for so long?'

  'I'm going to be like one minute. Just hang on.'

  He sighed again. 'Don't worry. I'll go and piss in the kitchen sink.'

  'Fine,' I said. 'But I will only be a minute if you want to wait.'

  I heard him muttering something like 'I don't believe this,' as he went down the stairs again. I wished I knew what to say to him, but I didn't. I didn't know what to say about us, or about his father and Milly, or about Josh and his episodes, or about Becca and her bitterness about everything, or indeed about Christopher's lack of paid work. Could I plot one single thing to say that would make everything better? A Zen koan, maybe fifty words long, could change your whole life; it could, apparently, bring you enlightenment. I knew all about this because the Zeb Ross editorial board had recently rejected a novel where some survivors of a plane crash find a utopian island populated by wise people who tell each other Zen stories all the time. The Zen stories, and indeed the novel itself, had no obviously conventional narrative structure. In one of the stories, a woman gains enlightenment after the reflection of the moon falls out of a bucket of water she is carrying. Another told of a woman Zen master who owns a teashop. People who come to her teashop for tea are well treated, but those who come looking for Zen are beaten with a red-hot poker. In the novel, which I had quite liked but pretended not to, each of the main characters is given a koan, kind of a Zen riddle, to work on, and their lives start to change. But their enlightenment is all about cheering up, doing simple things well, not being too high and mighty, and accepting the unfathomable nature of the universe. Christopher, like most people, didn't like his universe being unfathomable, so I doubted that a Zen koan would help him. Mind you, he did like doing simple things well. He spent every day rebuilding sections of dry-stone wall, after all.

  He was broken when I met him, and beautiful. We'd gone to bed together for the first time not long after I'd split up with Drew. Everyone wanted to talk to me about the split, or blame me because Drew had been hospitalised, even though it wasn't my fault. I just wanted to talk to Christopher; although he didn't say much in those days, we seemed to have a special connection. We both recycled everything we could, and both moaned about Becca and Ant leaving all the lights on in their huge house. He said he liked me because I was an 'old-fashioned gal' who used a fountain pen and played an acoustic guitar. That day we'd met in some greasy spoon that no one else liked, and talked half-seriously about running away from Brighton and getting working passages on a ship Christopher had heard of. We wouldn't escape on a plane, of course, because of the environment. Then we drank all day. Christopher had lived in a shared house near the police station. His bedroom walls were painted magnolia and there was a mattress on the floor, and nothing else. I was wearing a new pair of blue knickers with white lace on the edges, and he laughed at them. 'What are you wearing those for?' he'd said. And I thought that meant he wanted me naked, right then, and I threw them in the corner and got under the lumpy duvet and put the spliff he passed me into an ashtray and waited. In some ways I was still waiting. Nothing happened that night except for his long, brown hair spreading out on the pillow, and him stroking my arm until we both fell into a stoned sleep. It didn't seem to matter much. Back then, life felt like something that would happen in the future, not now; and it felt as if you could easily fit the cosmos into a single poem.

  After I'd dried off and said goodnight to Christopher I settled down on the sofa with The Science of Living Forever. It was dark and quiet outside the cottage, and the only sounds I could hear were the occasional ack, acks of the seagulls, and the odd door slamming up the hill as people got back home from the pub. Sometimes boats would blare their foghorns from way out at sea, but there were no foghorns tonight. I was tired, and glad I had only one chapter and an epilogue to read. In the last chapter of his book, Kelsey Newman discussed the visions of heaven in all the major world religions, and argued that the Omega Point, essentially the God constructed at/by/ in the end of time, was very similar to the Gods we already know. He quoted from the Bible, the Qur'an, the Upanishads, the Torah and the Buddhist scriptures to show that the prophets from history knew all about the Omega Point, and its eternity and power. Was the Omega Point so different from the Hindu God that manifests itself in everything? Was it so different from the Buddhist idea of the interconnectedness of all living things? When the Bible talks about God being the 'alpha and omega, the beginning and end, surely this is what is meant?

  As I was reading, I was wondering about basing a Zeb Ross novel on Newman's book. I imagined a girl-hero who decides to rescue humanity from this artificial, shrink-wrapped universe at the end of time. Perhaps she'd have to kill herself in order to get to the Omega Point, and then she'd have to overthrow it, or convince it to let the universe go. This would undoubtedly be rejected by the Zeb Ross editorial board, though, even though I was on it. For one thing, Zeb Ross didn't write about unanswerable mysteries beyond the universe. All the plots, however puzzling, had to have neat resolutions, and anything mysterious had to be ultimately explainable using GCSE-level science or common sense. So, for example, if there was wailing in an attic, and the attic was empty, a Zeb Ross hero would show that there was no ghost, but actually a secret room concealed between the top floor and the attic, where a disturbed teenager was hiding—the long-lost cousin of the hero, perhaps, who would now move into the spare room and would be able to help him fit in better at school. Also, no hero in a Zeb Ross novel could ever commit suicide, even if you could prove, using GCSE-level science, that this would not be the end of her. Along with suicide, Zeb Ross novels were not permitted to contain anorexia, drug use, the words 'fuck' or 'cunt, cannibalism or self-harm. There were a few other things too, all printed on a sheet that we gave to new ghostwriters.

  Maybe there was some other way of plotting this end-of-universe novel; I could certainly have used Newman's ideas in one of my Newtopia novels, if I was still writing them. Did I miss them? I wasn't sure. I was tapping my pencil on my leg, and my thoughts were going tap, tap, tap too, and I was quite distracted by the time I reached the first lines of Newman's epilogue. I had been wondering whether to skip it altogether. But it was quite arresting.

  'So now you won't mind, Newman wrote, 'if I tell you something shocking. You are already dead. You died a long time ago, probably billions of years ago. In fact, you are already immortal, although you may take a few more lives to properly realise it. You are currently living, and re-living, in what I will term the Second World, which has been created by the Omega Point as a place where you prepare for the rest of eternity. No one knows much about the First World. It probably looked a lot like the world we are living in now, for reasons I will come to in a moment. It is the world whose scientists originally created the possibility of the Omega Point, and thus ensured the immortality of all its beings. You were certainly one of those beings once. How do we know for sure that we are in the Second World and not the First World? Remember that the Omega Point is infinitely powerful. It can, and therefore will, use its Energia to create an infinity of universes that look just like the one you are in right now. There is therefore an infinity-to-one chance that we are not living in a universe created by the Omega Point; it is mathematically impossible for us not to be. Compared with the infinity of time in a simulated universe, the physical life of t
he universe was a mere sneeze. It is far more likely that we are in a post-universe, which is eternal, than in a finite universe, which must be long-gone. So why are we stuck in this Second World? I have just written a whole book telling you that you will go to Heaven when you die, and now I'm telling you that you are already dead, and living in a world that is distinctly unheavenly. But here's where things get exciting. In my next book I will explain in detail how to leave the Second World for the last time and embark on the Road to Perfection, which will take you to the Heaven that I have shown is mathematically not just possible, but inevitable. For now, I will conclude with a few remarks about the nature of the Second World, and the purpose of its creation.

  'No one knows, he went on, 'what Heaven will be like. It's unimaginable. But one thing we can say for certain is that all of us, immortal beings though we may be, are not ready for it yet. We were originally wired up for roughly a hundred years of life in a terrestrial environment, and so this is when we begin our immortal lives—just as the Bible says. However, your human brain—and I will show you the science behind this in the next book—has room inside it to store a thousand years' worth of memories. The Omega Point could give it even more. The Road to Perfection is the place you go after you die for the last time in the Second World. It is where you set about collecting these memories, and it can be whatever you want it to be. The Omega Point will find a perfect partner just for you, if that's what you want, and together you can go on great adventures. On the Road to Perfection, you will have a new, improved body, with no aches, pains or defects. You will be consciously immortal and enlightened. But only the properly individuated Self can cope with all this. And to become truly individuated, and to be able to succeed in your great Quest on the Road to Perfection, you need to learn how to become a hero in this world. In short, you get out of the Second World by becoming truly yourself, and overcoming all your personal obstacles. Then you will be ready for enlightenment and transcendence.

  'You will receive plenty of Special Invitations in your life: those moments where you are invited to embark on an adventure, where the universe seems to be beckoning you with its finger and saying, Come here and try this. Will you sit on your sofa eating pizza and thinking that adventure is not for you? Then you'll take a long time to make it out of the Second World, which, of course, is full of pizza-guzzlers and other no-hopers who have not transcended and therefore not a nice place. Decide what you most desire, and set off on a quest to get it. In my next book, I will describe the nature and possible structures of these quests, and give you some ideas about how to complete one. But in the meantime, you can learn almost everything you need to know about what it means to be a true hero from classic myths, stories and fairy tales.'

  My mind was a tangle as I put the book down and picked up my knitting. I had only a small amount of my turquoise wool left, but I stayed up until about midnight making knit-stitch after knit-stitch and purl-stitch after purl-stitch, continuing my K2 P2 rib and wondering why I hated this book so much. No doubt it would give great comfort to people who'd been bereaved, or who were scared of dying. It was certainly very well argued, and the maths made sense, sort of. Perhaps a real scientist would be able to say what was materially wrong with Newman's theory. I just wondered what the Omega Point's motivation was in all this.

  My turquoise wool had been a Christmas present from Frank and Vi. Claudia, the publishing director of Orb Books and also Vi's twin sister, had been staying in the holiday cottage in Scotland as well. Things were slightly awkward between us because Orb Books had recently told me they wanted me to focus more on Zeb Ross projects and that they wouldn't be renewing my contract for the Newtopia books. I'd mentioned this to Vi about a week before Christmas, when Claudia was lying down one afternoon and we were in the kitchen of the holiday cottage making beetroot soup. I explained that Orb Books didn't feel my own work was 'commercial' enough any more and that I was taking too many risks with the genre. Vi had clapped me on the back and said, 'Good for you. Fuck them. Finish your own book at last. Screw their bottles of oil.'

  This was a reference to Aristophanes' play The Frogs, which she was re-reading over the holiday as research for her next project. In the play Dionysus goes to the underworld to stage a competition between the dead poets Aeschylus and Euripides to see who is the better tragedian, and who, therefore, should go back to Earth to save Athens. They take it in turns to criticise one another's work. Euripides says that Aeschylus was too dark, brooding and overwrought, but then Aeschylus proves that any of Euripides' clever but formulaic stories could be about someone losing a bottle of oil. The point seemed to be that every formulaic story starts with a conflict that's later resolved—like losing a bottle of oil and then finding it again.

  Vi was grinding pepper for the soup, while I processed oranges into zest, juice and segments. Frank came in for a glass of sherry and then went back to watching the cricket in the sitting room. The dogs were all in front of the fire and Frank's parrot Sebastian was in his cage on the piano. Every so often I could hear him saying half-sense things like 'He really middled it yesterday', 'See you after the break, Grandma' and 'One hundred and eighty!'

  'If we go along with Nietzsche's arguments that art and writing should do something much more profound than simply have someone lose a bottle of oil and then find it again, then it is obvious how pointless most stories are,' Vi said, looking up from the pestle and mortar. 'They're just dull repetitions of the same kind of idiot losing the same bottle of oil and then, of course, finding it again and living happily ever after and not being such an idiot any more. But I'm still not sure how, or if, Nietzsche comes into this. I'm not sure what he says about tragedy is quite right. I know you think tragedy is beyond all formula, but I'm not a hundred per cent sure.'

  'Why not? In tragedy if someone loses a bottle of oil, it's a really important bottle of oil and they end up dead.'

  'It's still a formula.'

  'But don't you think it's significant that the end isn't happy?'

  'But it is happy for Nietzsche. I think that's my point. He likes it that everyone is cast into primal oblivion.'

  I thought for a second. 'That is interesting,' I said.

  The kitchen was filling with the sweet smell of roasting beetroot. Vi kept on grinding the peppercorns, breaking them down firmly but gently.

  'I can't stop thinking of the stories everyone told at the nursing home,' she said. 'They didn't have beginnings, or they didn't have ends—happy or sad. People often put themselves and their lives into something like a formula, but then they would subvert it. One woman I worked with told me about her kid walking in when she and her husband were having sex on the living-room floor. "I'll only be a minute, love," the father said to this kid. "I'm just slipping your mum a length."'

  I laughed. 'How is that subversive?'

  'It should be a dramatic moment, but it isn't.'

  'I see.'

  While Vi carried on talking about nursing-home anecdotes involving blow jobs, false teeth, colostomy bags, thrush epidemics and ninety-year-olds lap-dancing, I was imagining using the bottle-of-oil idea as an exercise on an Orb Books retreat. I imagined telling the new writers about how easy plotting could be if you just imagined that your character has lost a bottle of oil and then needs to find it again by the end of the novel. This wasn't what Vi had in mind, of course. She was still in the process of working out her theory of the 'storyless story, an idea which had come out of all the anthropological work she'd done. She'd got her professorship relatively late—she was now sixty-four—and was planning to talk about this storyless story in her inaugural lecture. I didn't pay too much attention to this stuff any longer, considering that my entire existence now depended on me being able to take a good but unhappy character from bad fortune to good fortune in a credible way, and give them a bottle of oil—if that was what they wanted—as a prize at the end. I wanted to make my 'real' novel less formulaic and more literary, of course, but if I listened to Vi's theories, then my o
nly narrative strategy would be 'shit happens.

  Being in Scotland with Frank, Vi and Claudia felt like a proper holiday. During the day we walked on the beach with the dogs, read, or wrote in our notebooks. Frank had some marking to do, Claudia was editing a Zeb Ross novel and Vi was finishing a feature for Oscar, the same literary editor who commissioned me to review science books. In the evenings the dogs lay by the fire and Sebastian hopped around in his huge cage on top of the piano, just as he would at home, interspersing phrases he'd been taught from Shakespeare or picked up from the cricket with words and phrases he'd taught himself, like 'Banana!' and, regardless of whom he was addressing, 'You're a very hairy man, Frank.' Frank was indeed very hairy. He was in his early fifties and had a scruffy beard, bushy hair, ragged fingernails and sharp, green eyes, like some creature living in the mountains. Vi resembled one of these mountains: tall, jagged and permanent, with the possibility of a dangerous fall if you took the wrong path.

  One cold afternoon, while Frank and Claudia were out getting supplies, I asked Vi to teach me how to knit. I'd never knitted before, but I'd bought some wool and knitting needles in Dartmouth on a whim one cold, void-like day earlier that December after a big argument with Christopher. Sometimes arguing with Christopher made me feel as if I were a planet that had been tipped off its axis by some unspeakable cosmic event, so that even rotating normally would now be enough to cause radioactive storms, tectonic shifts and tsunamis. I would stand there in the kitchen scared to do anything, because the tiniest sigh or meaningless glance out of the window could start the whole thing off again. Later, when I reflected on the tiny sigh or the 'meaningless' glance I'd realise that there had been something in it after all, and I'd wonder whether the whole problem with Christopher was actually me.