Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  Claudia snorted. 'Come on, V. Surely no one had anything to gain from this. It was just an accident. You can't come up with a conspiracy theory for everything. The company themselves said it was a huge loss for them as well.'

  'It's an encore to colonialism,' Vi said. 'Yet another encore. Not even the final one. People just keep on clapping.'

  'You've even lost me, my love,' Frank said. 'It could have crashed anywhere, surely?'

  'Well, maybe. But don't you think there's something horribly poetic about a storyless nation being put to death by other people's "heroic" stories? No one from this island ever did anything to anyone else or went out and conquered anything. But first of all some eighteenth-century explorer turns up and decides to name the island because he thinks it looks like a pillar of salt from a story he's read, and now this. Killed by soap operas and American drama series.'

  'How can a nation be "storyless"?' I asked.

  Vi sighed. 'OK. I don't think in the end a nation can be storyless. Only a story can be storyless. They did have stories on Lot's Wife. But in recent times mainly Zen stories, which are storyless stories, because they are constructed to help you break away from drama, and hope and desire. Some of them are funny. All of them are unpredictable. They're not tragedies, comedies or epics. They're not even Modernist anti-hero stories, or experimental narratives or metafiction. I lost count of the times someone would say, "I'll tell you a story," and then recite something like an absurdist poem with no conflict and no resolution. One of these "stories" was about a Zen monk who, on the day he was going to die, sent postcards saying, "I am departing from this world. This is my last announcement." Then he died.'

  'Isn't this a problem of definition?' Claudia said. 'They obviously weren't telling "stories" as we would understand them. If we say that a story is something with a beginning, a middle and an end, deterministically linked, with at least one main character, then someone else can't come along and say that a story is actually defined as "anything anyone ever says".'

  'How about if we define "story" differently again?' Frank said. 'What if a story is simply any representation of agents acting? What if that's all it is, and the shape of the narrative, its determinism, its construction of "good" and "bad" characters and so on are culturally specific?'

  'Exactly,' said Vi. 'Thank you, my love. These structuralists who go on and on about the universality of the hero's journey like to talk about the story of the Buddha, because he saw three fucked-up things and then set off on a journey and got enlightened at the end. But they don't pay so much attention to the Chinese story "Monkey", which is another Buddhist story, but with a very silly Trickster hero who doesn't do the right things or ask the right questions, but ends up enlightened as well. They also don't pay any attention at all to the Pacific Trickster Maui, who, according to the stories, fished up at least some of New Zealand with his grandmother's jawbone. Maui eventually dies while attempting to creep inside the goddess of death, Hine-nui-te-po, through her vagina, which is lined with teeth. He's supposedly a hero entering an innermost cave—ha ha!—and hopes to secure immortality for everyone. He has taken some bird companions on his great quest. But one of these, the Piwakawaka, or fantail, laughs at Maui and wakes up the goddess, who crushes him between her legs. These are storyless stories, because they are not Aristotelian, or even Claudian.' Vi smiled at her sister as if she was the one now picking out all the mistakes in Claudia's knitted blanket. 'If we go with Frank's definition, then they are stories, but they're not satisfying in the way we expect stories should be in the West. They also make us re-think what we mean by "story" in the first place.'

  'Isn't that more or less a normal tragedy?' I said. 'No hero can ever succeed on a quest for immortality. There's too much hubris.'

  'Yeah.' Vi nodded. 'I see what you mean. But in its very nature the story takes the piss out of tragedy, because it's funny and absurd, which is not how tragedy is supposed to be. This, for me, is a key feature of storylessness: all structures must contain the possibility of their own non-existence—some zip that undoes them.' She smiled. 'The storyless story is a vagina with teeth.'

  There was no sign of Libby's car in the river on Monday morning. I had plenty of time to look, since I got stuck in the ferry queue for half an hour. I was on my way to the library as usual, where I planned to finish my review of The Science of Living Forever and then try to work on my novel. I was sleepy but warm, wrapped up in my new turquoise ribbed scarf. I'd woken when Christopher had, at five, and only dozed between then and him leaving. I realised I'd been dreaming Kelsey Newman's words over and over again— You are already dead—and of being chased around by the Omega Point, which had become a blueish, cartoonish antagonist that said things like 'Ha, ha, ha,' and twiddled its moustache. I also dreamed some other words, words that I remembered, and which seemed to be connected somehow: You will never finish what you start. You will not overcome the monster. And in the end, you will come to nothing. After a quick shower, I'd taken B to the beach. I did this every morning in the winter, and some days it woke me up, but most days it didn't. Today I'd been looking at all the little barnacles clinging to the rocks, and remembering Darwin writing about their evolution, and the female barnacles that at one stage had a 'husband in each pocket'—like Libby, I'd thought with a smile. If we were living in some sort of Second World, what was the point of evolution? I supposed Newman would say that the whole point of evolution in the First World would be the ultimate creation of the right scientists, and then their Omega Point. I wondered what the creationists would make of that idea: that the ultimate purpose of evolution is to create God.

  While I'd been looking at barnacles, B had been fishing for a big rock that I kept throwing in the sea for her. She strutted around with it between times as if carrying the rock was her important job. Animals hadn't seemed to figure much in Newman's afterlife. They had in Plato's, I remembered. If you were sick of being a human, you could ask the Spindle of Destiny if you could come back as a dog or a horse or a sparrow and have a less troublesome life. According to Plato, even Odysseus chose to come back as a normal citizen in his next life because he couldn't be bothered to have adventures any more. But it didn't sound as if Newman was a fan of the quiet life. What was wrong with sitting around eating pizza if it made you happy and you didn't hurt anyone? Why was this worse than, say, slaying a dragon or rescuing a maiden? The idea of a thousand years of adventure just made me feel tired.

  After a while longer in the ferry queue I thought I was going to drop off, so I started doing the Waterwheel, a breathing exercise I'd learned a long time ago. To breathe like a waterwheel, you breathe through your nose but imagine your breath entering your body at the base of your spine, continuing up your spine, stopping for a second at the bottom of your throat and then tumbling down the front of your body, exiting somewhere around your navel. The Waterwheel eventually creates the sensation that you are breathing in and out at the same time, and that the air is like water constantly flowing around you. It is both relaxing and energising at the same time.

  I learned the Waterwheel when I was eight. It was the beginning of October in 1978, and my school was closed because of the strikes. We hadn't had a holiday that year because of my brother Toby being born, but suddenly one day my father said, half to me, and half to my mother, 'Meg would like a holiday, wouldn't you?' and the next day we got in our old car and drove to Suffolk. It wasn't much of a holiday at first. My mother was busy with Toby, and my father was working on an important paper and worrying about his promotion application. We'd rented, or perhaps borrowed, a house on the edge of a forest, and for the first few days I simply sat on my bed and read books about children who go on holiday and find criminals in caves, or enchanted castles or dungeons with treasure in them. My parents occasionally said I should go out and get some fresh air, but I got the impression they didn't much care whether I did or not. Still, when the books ran out I went off to explore the forest. Perhaps I wanted an adventure, like the ones I'd been read
ing about. Perhaps I did just need some fresh air.

  Each morning I would make cheese and pickle sandwiches and a flask of tea and go out for the whole day, wondering what I'd do if I met a fairy, or came across a monster in a lair. I knew I wouldn't tell my father. It was a bright, crisp autumn, and early in the morning cobwebs glowed white with dew between the low branches of trees, and robins and thrushes sang high-pitched songs that echoed through the forest. Cones were beginning to grow on the branches of silvery-green pine trees, like little cosmoses sprouting in the kind of multiverse my father sometimes talked about. On the ground I would sometimes find bright red and white toadstools that had come up suddenly, like the Yorkshire puddings my mother made on a Sunday. There were different sorts of mushrooms everywhere: some were like huge, spongy pancakes lying at the base of tree-trunks; others were tiny, with stalks like spaghetti. Late in the day, the cobwebs would become almost translucent in the low sun, and I would only notice them at all because of the spiders that hung in the middle of them like nuclei. One time I saw a spider catch a wasp. I hated wasps, and I was quite pleased when this one flew drowsily away from me and got stuck in the web. In an instant, the fat spider came and started wrapping up the wasp in its white silk. The wasp struggled at first, and I felt sorry for it. But then it stopped moving. The spider worked away, turning it around, cocooning it, its thin, jagged legs moving this way and that, each one as precise as a needle on a sewing machine. Then it picked up the wasp in its front legs and took it up to the centre of the web the way a human would carry a newborn baby. I watched for ages, but nothing else happened, and when I came back the next day the whole web had gone. Another day I found some string in the damp, creaky holiday house and made a shoulder-strap for my flask. In the forest I made myself a necklace out of wild flowers by piercing each stalk with my thumb-nail and threading the next flower through it, just like a daisy-chain. I ate blackberries from bushes until my hands were dyed purple with the juice. I had stopped brushing my hair. I'd gone wild, and no one seemed to notice.

  One bright, chilly afternoon I followed a stream and found a thatched stone cottage that seemed as if it had grown out of the forest. It was covered in a dense, deep-red ivy, with holes for only the windows and the door. It looked like something you might try to draw at school because you'd seen it in a picture book. There was a gate that opened easily, and I walked into a garden and past a small well. Around the side of the cottage there was a wrought-iron gazebo, also covered in climbing plants and half shaded by big, old trees, and inside it there were two wooden rocking chairs and a wooden table on which stood six cups, into which a man was arranging flowers. I'd never seen a man arranging flowers before. In fact, no one I knew arranged flowers.

  Aha! A young adventuress,' he said. 'Well, don't just stand there gawping. Come and help.'

  I went and stood closer. He was small, with a big, brown beard the colour of tree bark. He looked as if he had grown out of the forest along with everything else. He was wearing electric-blue suede boots and faded red trousers. He had a blue suede waistcoat too. I liked that colour blue: it was the same as the hairband I was wearing.

  'Hold these,' he said, giving me some flowers. And if you're lucky I'll show you some magic and maybe even tell your fortune.' He winked. After I'd held several bunches of white flowers while he cut their stalks, he asked me to go and gather some foliage. I didn't know what that was, and I must have looked baffled, because he said, 'Just green stuff. Go on—quickly—or the spell won't work.'

  When I'd finished helping him I said, 'Now will you show me some magic?'

  He laughed. 'I just did.'

  'Oh,' I said, disappointed. Nothing seemed to have changed.

  'All right,' he said. 'Watch this.'

  He took a matchbox out of his pocket and put it on the little wooden table. He sat down in one of the rocking chairs and looked at it; then it started to rise up in the air. I gasped and it fell down with a little clatter.

  'Is it really magic?' I asked.

  'Yes,' he said, smiling. 'I suppose so.'

  'Will you teach me how to do it?'

  'We'll see.'

  'And what about my fortune?'

  He looked at me seriously. 'I'm not sure it's always good for people to know their fortunes.'

  'But you promised,' I said.

  He sighed. 'Come back tomorrow if you like. Make sure your parents know where you are, though.' The man said his name was Robert, 'like the herb, and that before I could learn magic, or indeed understand my own fortune, I'd have to learn some other things. He had a friend called Bethany, who would be there tomorrow, but who was very shy and wouldn't want to be disturbed too much. He said she was so shy that I might not even see her at all, but that she would definitely be there.

  The next morning I went straight back to the strange little cottage. There was a beautiful young woman there who was wearing a long, wine-coloured dress. She seemed to be Robert's wife, although there were other times when I thought she was his daughter, or even his granddaughter. She would sit and play the flute all morning, and on market-day afternoons she would gather up her things in a drawstring bag and go off into the local town. The first thing that Robert taught me was the Waterwheel. We were sitting in the gazebo, and Bethany was inside the cottage playing a melody that sounded like half-finished birdsong. 'You breathe like this', he said, 'when you want to concentrate, or when you're scared, or, he smiled, 'if you want to do magic.' But he didn't show me any actual magic.

  Each day of the rest of the holiday was more or less the same. I'd arrive early at the cottage and Robert would give me some task to do, like organising the woodshed or filling bird feeders, because, he said, Bethany loved seeing the birds, and feeding them 'made the other Faeries happy too'. One day we planted bulbs in the garden: snake's-head fritillaries, irises and grape hyacinths. Another day we made some sort of moonshine in a still at the back of the cottage. Another day we pickled walnuts. One day I gathered blackberries, hawthorn berries and rosehips with Bethany. It was the first time I'd been with her alone. She didn't say much, but at one point she smiled and said, 'Robert's taken a shine to you. He must think you are one of us.' Then she skipped off to the next bush and didn't say another word. Later, we made jam. On the last day of my holiday, I asked Robert if he would please show me just a little bit of magic, because I wouldn't be able to come back again. He sighed and said, 'Are you sure you want to learn?'

  'Yes,' I said.

  Bethany was still out in the town. I was sitting at the big, pine table in the kitchen, where I had been shelling peas for her. Copper pans, skillets and griddles hung from the ceiling, and there was an axe propped up by the back door. I'd done so many tasks at the table, and I'd got used to gazing over at the strange objects on the dresser, one of which was a ship in a bottle, which particularly fascinated me. I wondered how the ship had come to be in the bottle. It couldn't have fitted through the neck. Perhaps it had come to be there by magic. One time Robert had been out collecting mushrooms and I'd picked up the bottle and looked at the ship inside. It had white muslin sails, and writing on its hull in a white, chalky script. When I looked closely I saw that the writing said 'Cutty Sark'. The ship sat on a waxy blue sea, and the bottle had a cork in its neck. I'd wanted to pull the cork to see if it came out, but hadn't.

  'Do you believe you already have the ability to do magic?' Robert asked me.

  'Yes,' I said solemnly. 'I think so.'

  He smiled. 'I think so too. So does Bethany. Not everybody sees Bethany, you know.' Now he looked down at his hands. 'Some people think you need to be initiated to do magic, and that you need to understand the relationship between the world of the Faeries, this world and the world above before you can even attempt a spell. It's a big commitment, and once you open the doors to the Otherworld, you can't go back. But I happen to think there's a lot of magic you can do on your own. Some people might say that every time you cook something or give someone medicine you're doing magic, because you're
changing the states of things by redirecting energy.'

  I bit my lip. 'But that's not real magic, is it?'

  'That depends on your point of view. You need to understand that good magic is always about bringing harmony to the world, not disorder. And you must also accept that magic has consequences. Do you understand that idea?'

  I shook my head. 'Do you mean getting into trouble?'

  'When you do magic, you are always involved in the redirecting of energy. You might choose to focus lots of healing energy on someone who is sick, or you might simply sew a good-luck charm into the patchwork quilt you are making for a friend. But you must never do this lightly, because you are always taking energy from somewhere else. Depending on the sort of magic you are doing, you will usually ask for help from the spirits of the underworld—the Faeries; or the spirits from Middle Earth; or the higher spirits that dance among the stars. You might call on the Lord and Lady of Middle Earth to help you with a sick cat, for example, or a Faerie to help you interpret a dream. Some people believe that these magical creatures and deities really exist. Other people believe that they are manifestations of an energy that we can only understand metaphorically, as stories and pictures. In any case, when you ask the Faeries for help with a spell or charm, for example, you always need to do something in return. You might feed the birds in your garden, or plant some new flowers. Faeries like nature. Indeed, they don't come to our world much any more because of what we've done to the natural world. If you don't do what you've promised ... Well, all I can say is that it's fairly easy to use what you would call "magic" to redirect energy, but it always has consequences.' He frowned and then smiled. 'Oh, dear. You're not following me, are you? Bethany said you were far too young. Maybe she's right.'

  I shook my head. 'I'm not too young.' But I was beginning to worry about this. I already had some idea of what 'consequences' were. They were always bad things like burning yourself because you played with matches, or being run over because you didn't use the pelican crossing correctly, or being sent to your room, or being beaten with a slipper, or having to write lines. I didn't like the idea of magic so much any more if it had consequences. I didn't like the idea of offending Faeries who lived in some underworld. What if I forgot to do what I'd promised and they came to get me in the middle of the night?