Authors: Scarlett Thomas
The End Of Mr. Y (14 page)
‘This mixture,’ I said. ‘It will have the same effect as … ?’ ‘You wish to know if the mixture will enable you to telepath?’
‘Yes,’ said I. ‘If that is indeed what took place in Nottingham.’ The doctor’s thin smile returned.
‘This mixture will most certainly enable you to telepath, if that is all you require of it.’ ‘If that is all I require? What in heaven do you mean?’
‘The mixture will take you on many curious journeys, Mr. Y, I can assure you of that.’ For a second or two the doctor looked as if he may continue in this portentous vein, but then something queer seemed to happen to him. His whole body appeared to grow limp, like a marionette placed in a cupboard after a performance, and for a full minute he did not move;
nor did he say anything else. When he did come back to life it was with a little jerk, as if someone had once again taken hold of his strings. He looked at the piece of note-paper in his hand as if puzzled by it and then, without saying anything else, he handed it to me.
I had only the merest opportunity to glance at my treasure before he rapped the table twice with the knuckles of his left hand and made to stand up.
‘Well, then, good evening, Mr. Y. You have what you came for.’
I hesitated, understanding that this would be my only chance to ask the question that so burned on my lips.
‘Before I leave,’ I said, ‘I have one question to ask of you.’ The doctor lifted one eyebrow in response but said nothing.
‘I wish to know how many other people have this recipe,’ I said.
‘You wish to know how valuable is this knowledge you hold in your hand,’ said the doctor. ‘You wish to know how much power you now possess, and how it has been potentially diluted among the rest of the population. Well, I can answer your question quite easily. You are the only person to whom I have sold this recipe. Not everyone is as willing as you were to lie in a tent and imbibe a stranger’s medicinal concoction simply for the purpose of knowledge. For pain relief, this is common. For pleasure, also. But you can rest assured, sir, that you are my only customer to date.’
I had more questions, but the doctor made it quite clear to me that our business was concluded and I walked out into the cold, murky hallway. In a parlour on my right I saw a child trying to light a fire. The result of this was a low, persistent, hissing noise and enough smoke to make my eyes sting. When I was certain that no one was looking, I rubbed the grime from my eyes and briefly examined the document in my hand. It only contained four lines, written in an untutored, unorthodox hand, in pale violet ink.
Make the tincture in the following way:
–
Combine one part Carbo Vegetabilis, that is, vegetable charcoal, in the 1,000th centesimal homoeopathic potency, with 99 parts holy water in a glass retort or flask and succuss the mixture ten times
.
FD 1893
Then I slipped the blue paper into my shoe and made my way for the door.
I finish reading the missing page of
The End of Mr. Y
with a dry mouth and my heart beating as if it’s trying to get out. I just can’t believe it. I immediately reread the page, trying to recreate the sensation I felt when I got to the recipe, rather in the same way you queue up to take a fairground ride that has just terrified and excited you. But it doesn’t quite work in that way. This isn’t a ride you can take again, but one, I am guessing, that is simply impossible to get off. And then I find that I can’t sit down any more. I get up and pace the room, feeling as though I should do something bigger, much bigger, to express the emotion I feel, but not knowing what that would be. Laughter? Tears? My brain is hysterical, but I don’t do anything to show it in the end; I just pace and smoke and think. I think about the strange preface, and all the hints that
The End of Mr. Y
contains something real. I think about the trouble someone, probably Burlem, has taken to conceal this page, which contains nothing of any interest apart from the instructions for making up the tincture. I think of Lumas’s strange allusions to telepathy, and I remember this section about the ‘automaton of mind’.
As Robert-Houdin has built automata with which to produce his illusions, I shall here propose to create an automaton of mind, through which one may see illusions and realities beyond;
from which one, if he knows how, may spring into the automata of all minds and their electricity.
And when I’m certain that I understand why the page is important, and the potential reason it was hidden, I sit down and finish the rest of the book, distracted by my own desire to find the ingredients and make up some of this tincture for myself.
The matters of which man is cognisant escape the senses in gradation. We have, for example, a metal, a piece of wood, a drop of water, the atmosphere, a gas, caloric, electricity, the luminiferous ether. Now, we call all these things matter, and embrace all matter in one general definition; but in spite of this, there can be no two ideas more essentially distinct than that which we attach to a metal, and that which we attach to the luminiferous ether. When we reach the latter, we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with nihility.
The only consideration which restrains us is our conception of its atomic constitution; and here, even, we have to seek aid from our notion of an atom, as something possessing in infinite minuteness, solidity, palpability, weight. Destroy the idea of the atomic constitution and we should no longer be able to regard the ether as an entity, or, at least, as matter. For want of a better word we might term it spirit. Take, now, a step beyond the luminiferous ether –
conceive a matter as much more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass – an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity.
Edgar Allan Poe,
The Mesmeric Revelation
As material things prove all to be connected and parts of one thing; as the pebble at our feet and the most remote and profitless fixed star are still united, so ‘Does it rain, my dear?’ and the most dreary metaphysical inquiry are still closely connected.
Samuel Butler,
Note-books
Y
OU LOOK IN THE MIRROR
and this time it tells you that, yes, you are cursed.
The sun is only just rising by the time I get to the university library on Tuesday morning, about five minutes before it opens. I’m a little mind-numbed by the experience of walking up the hill in the weak grey light, smothered by the winter sky and my own breath, which is itself a winter sky in miniature. For the first time ever I walked along listening to my iPod, and the music I felt most fitted this experience of walking up a hill at dawn, on my first day as someone who may be cursed, was Handel’s
Dixit Dominus
, the same piece that was playing the night I met Burlem in Greenwich. I both love and hate this piece of music, and while it plays it feels as though it’s something that’s crawling on me, on the inside and the outside surfaces of my skin.
Patrick may think I am tremendously postmodern because I have an iPod, but I still prefer libraries to the Internet when it comes to research. And although I know what holy water is, and where I am likely to get some, I have no idea about the other ingredient in Mr. Y’s recipe: Carbo Vegetabilis (or vegetable charcoal). Well, OK, I understand that vegetable charcoal implies burnt wood or vegetation, but what is a homoeopathic potency? I guess the Internet probably would tell me this quickly, but it may not tell me accurately. I also need to know what a nineteenth-century writer would have meant by it – who knows? The term may not be in existence any more, or it might mean something different now. Look at how the word ‘atom’ has changed over the centuries. I have definitely decided that I am going to make this tincture and try it out. Even though this morning I was slashed into consciousness by that jagged honesty you sometimes get when you wake up, and something inside me told me to stop. But why should I? And it’s not as if this mixture can do me any harm. Charcoal isn’t poisonous, and neither is water. And it seems to me that this recipe is a part of the book, and that, for whatever reason, Lumas intended the reader to try it out.
The History of Medicine section of the library turns out to be on the fourth floor, beyond the religion and philosophy books, in a little corner by some stairs. There is a whole section on homoeopathy: lots of aged hardbacks with muted binding in dark green, dark red and grey. I pick up a thick green book and see the title,
Kent’s Repertory
, and the publication date, 1897. I sit cross-legged on the faded carpet and flick through it, intrigued by the odd format that I don’t understand. The book seems to contain lists of symptoms, grouped under headings such as ‘Sleep’, ‘Eyes’, ‘Genitalia’ and ‘Mind’. I flick to the ‘Sleep’ section and find a curious poetry there in a section entitled ‘Dreams’. I read down the page and see one-word or, occasionally, one-sentence entries saying things like
serpents, sexual, shameful, shooting, skeletons, smelling sulphur
and, further down,
stars falling, stealing fruit and struck by lightning, that he was
. After each small piece of text are letters I don’t understand, but that look like abbreviations. Under the entry ‘dreams, snakes’ there are a lot of these: alum.,
arg-n
., bov., grat., iris., kali-c.,
lac-c
., ptel.,
ran-s
., rat., sep., sil., sol-n., spig., tab. I don’t know why some of these are in italics, nor what the abbreviations mean.
I flick backwards in the book to the ‘Mind’ section and, under ‘Delusions’, find some very odd entries, including the delusions ‘alive on one side, dead on the other’ and the more vague ‘fancy, illusions of’. In the ‘Genitalia, Male’ section I find references to erections that can be ‘impetuous’ or can only
happen in the afternoon, or while coughing. I like this, but I don’t understand it, so I close the heavy volume and browse some of the other books on the shelf. It’s strange: I always thought homoeopathy was some kind of cranky herbalism, but looking at all these books makes me realise just how seriously some people must take it, or, more accurately, must have taken it around the turn of the century when most of these books were originally published. All the authors have very grand or strange names: Constantine Hering, MD; John Henry Clarke, MD; William Boericke, MD; and even some women, including Margaret Tyler, MD and Dorothy Shepard, MD. They all have those letters after their names, implying that all the important people who practised homoeopathy at that time were doctors. Eventually I have amassed a pile of books from 1880 until the early 1900s; I take these to a small table and start trying to understand it all.
After two hours’ solid reading I go outside for a cigarette. The sky is now a uniform, artificial blue, and for a second it feels like something has been deleted from it. A grey squirrel runs along the grass in front of me, its sleek body rising and falling like a wave. My eyes follow it as it runs up a tree and disappears. Beyond the tree, and far down the hill, the small city shimmers in the false, low light. The cathedral dominates the view as usual, and in this light it looks sepia-yellow, like a JPEG of an old photograph. As I inhale smoke in the cold air, I think about what I have learnt this morning.
Homoeopathy seems to have been invented (or, perhaps, discovered) by Samuel Hahnemann in 1791. Hahnemann was a chemist who had written treatises on syphilis and poisoning by arsenic. He was unhappy about contemporary medical practices, especially bloodletting. Hahnemann believed that King Leopold of Austria had essentially been murdered by his doctors, who had bled him four times in twenty-four hours to try to cure a high fever. While he was translating Cullen’s
Materia Medica
, Hahnemann had an amazing moment of insight. Cullen said that cinchona bark cured malaria simply because it was bitter. But Hahnemann happened to know that poisoning by cinchona bark produced symptoms similar to those produced by malaria, including internal dropsy and emaciation. He realised that the thing that cured malaria also caused very similar symptoms. Could this be true in other cases of diseases and medicines? Could it be, he wondered, that like cures like? This was his first eureka moment. It led, eventually, to the development of a whole new system of medicine with the motto:
Similia similibus curentur
– let likes be cured by likes. Hahnemann’s second eureka moment was when he worked out that it is the small dose that cures. It was all very well giving someone some cinchona bark to cure their malaria, but since the bark is poisonous, it generally harmed the person as well. Curing poisoning with a poison didn’t sound like a very sensible idea, so Hahnemann experimented with dilutions of cinchona bark, and found that you could dilute the crude substance quite a lot and still get a reaction. Later, the nineteenth-century homoeopaths worked out that the more dilute the dose, the more effective the medicine: approach the infinitesimal, and you approach something very strange, and very powerful. Paradoxical, but there you are. Paradox never stopped the quantum physicists, or Einstein.
It’s freezing out here, despite the blue sky, and as soon as I have put out my cigarette I go back into the library and up to the fourth floor to continue reading. I get the first book I looked at back off the shelf and re-examine it. I now understand that this is something in which homoeopathic physicians look up symptoms and find the common substance listed under all of them. Those funny little abbreviations relate to homoeopathic substances, it appears. Ars. is Arsenicum; bry. is Bryonia; carb-v. is Carbo Vegetabilis. Once I understand how the system works, I am tempted to start looking up all my own strange symptoms – waking early; craving salt, cigarettes, and alcohol; liking transgressive sex; preferring my own company to that of others – but I don’t have time. My wrists and ankles have matching rope burns that glisten on my skin like little pieces of melted plastic.