Authors: Scarlett Thomas
The End Of Mr. Y (34 page)
The skill of operating in MindSpace is to be able to plan your journeys. That gave me pleasure; knowing that I could find the most efficient way of getting to Iraq and then back home, without having to navigate the whole of Goddamn MindSpace to do it. Of course, this was a classified project, so no one told me anything about what I was doing, or how it worked. But it’s a real thrill, surfing on minds: riding memories out to oblivion and then coming back. I wish I could have told my friends – but once you’re on one of these projects, you can forget about even talking to your mother any more. Ed’s more into the philosophical side than me; I think that’s fair to say. And I guess I had my own questions about reality, dreams, the past, the future. But mostly we didn’t dwell on that. We talked about pussy, mainly. Yeah – like the time I was in some lady’s head, on a plane to Baghdad (it’s kind of weird that you’re given this power to travel around the whole world in people’s minds and you still find that the most efficient way to go is on an aeroplane), and she suddenly went off to the lavatory and pleasured herself. At first I always chose to be women whenever I could, although after a time it stopped being so appealing. One time I had breast cancer, and I knew I was going to die. That was a headfuck. Another time I was in this reporter’s head, supposedly getting information on the gang who’d kidnapped her. I ended up getting raped by three of the men. Most times I’d come out of the trance and tell Ed about my latest tits-and-ass escapade. But it started getting old, and in the end I just used men to surf through, and I just pretended to Ed that I’d stroked my own pussy, or done myself with a dildo or whatever. Maybe he was doing the same thing by then. Who knows?
I think the project was actually working when they brought in the KIDS. It would have carried on, and who knows where we could have ended up? Although, to be honest, I’m sure it’s still running somewhere, in someone’s mind. Enough people must have known the formula when they told us we’d been decommissioned. But the KIDS were a bad idea (the acronym stands for Karmic Interface Delineation System, but it’s generally regarded as a load of crap and just an excuse for a neat acronym that spells ‘kids’). It all started when the head of the study put his semi-autistic kid into MindSpace. This kid was seven years old and he got in there way faster than most of us. Then they found out that this kid could stop a chimp eating an ice cream just by willing it. Then they did more studies on more autistic kids. They borrowed a few of them from the NSA – took them off the prime- numbers study. It turns out that these kids can influence people’s thoughts. They can actually change things. So then they got in a whole bunch of these kids and hooked us all up: one Adult Operative and one of the KIDS working together.
The way it worked was pretty simple. First the kid got into your mind. Then you went into MindSpace. Wherever you went, the kid went, too. You could be walking around in the physical world with this little voice in your head reminding you of your ATM number, or your mother’s birthday, or the exact wording of a document you saw five years ago. They could read your memories off to you like an autocue. But things got weird when you took your KID into MindSpace with you. I mean, it was great in some ways, having a little buddy with you walking around that crazy landscape … But once you were in someone’s mind, you felt a bit like the middle of a Russian
doll. The KID, the littlest doll, would now be a voice in both of your heads, and you had to learn to switch off while the KID told the person to do whatever it was you wanted them to do. Because these KIDS – they could actually manipulate reality, or, at least, they could change people’s minds. We took our KIDS when we left. No one knew they’d stayed with us. They’re dead, of course. All the KIDS are dead. That’s why the project was decommissioned. Any project that kills a hundred children can’t go on, either with government funding or without it. The KIDS simply stayed in MindSpace too long. No one thought it could kill you, if you got lost in it. No one knew how to wake the poor little bastards up.
And now we have only one bottle of formula left from the twenty we took from the storeroom when we went. And what can I say? Surfing in MindSpace is something you just can’t stop doing. So we need the recipe, and the recipe’s in the book. Of course, we don’t just want it for ourselves. Can you imagine how much money there is in this? If we had the recipe, we could sell it for thousands of times the amount they’re planning on charging businessmen to fly to the moon. This is the only time I’ve ever been close to anything of any value. I have to get the book. I have to get the book …
I … Actually, I have to take a dump. The urgency is like a voice in my head.
‘Ed?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I have to take a dump, man.’
‘For Christ’s sake. Can’t you hold on?’
‘I’ve been holding on for a couple of hours, and I really think I’m going to shit my pants. And how long are we planning to stay here, anyway? It’s almost three a.m.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Ed’s hands are on the steering wheel, even though we haven’t been driving for hours. Now he moves it back and forth as if something is happening; as if we aren’t just sitting here. The steering locks and he curses. ‘Fuck. Jesus.’
‘Sorry, but you know … We could wait here for ever and she might never come out.’ Ed hunches his shoulders forward. ‘If she’s in there.’
‘Yeah. If she’s in there. I still think maybe Leeds.’ ‘We can’t lose the book.’
‘I know. I want it as much as you do.’ Ed rubs his face. ‘OK. New plan.’
My breath’s coming out all ragged, like a shredded ghost. ‘Go on.’
‘How about we leave here now? Go get some sleep. But we’ll give it to the KIDS as a mission. We’ll send them to trail her.’
I almost ask him how exactly he sees that working, but I need him to agree to give this up now, so I just say, ‘OK.’ I think of the pale shag carpet in my imagination and the real chipped linoleum at the motel. Either way, we have to go. I have to go. Something sure is insisting that I leave here now.
In its factical Being, any Dasein is as it already was, and it is ‘what’ it already was. It is its past, whether explicitly or not. And this is so not only in that its past is, as it were, pushing itself along ‘behind’ it, and that Dasein possesses what is past as a property which is still present-at- hand and which sometimes has after-effects upon it: Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, ‘historizes’ out of its future on each occasion.
Heidegger,
Being and Time
A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end. A beginning is that which itself does not follow necessarily from anything else, but some second thing naturally exists or occurs after it. Conversely, an end is that which does itself naturally follow from something else, either necessarily or in general, but there is nothing else after it. A middle is that which itself comes after something else, and some other thing comes after it.
Aristotle,
Poetics
S
O HOW LONG HAVE
I got? Not long enough. I get dressed and fold up the priory nightdress and leave it on the bed, my hands shaking a little. They know I’m here. They’ll send those KIDS here first of all, surely. Can they go into religious places? But if those guys got desperate enough … I just don’t understand the system well enough to know what they would or would not do. I just have to go somewhere they wouldn’t think of looking for me. I have to go where Burlem is. Wherever it is, he’s been hiding out there for over a year now.
Unless he’s dead, like those poor kids.
Once I am ready to leave, I take
The End of Mr. Y
out of my bag and touch it, perhaps for the last time. I can’t take it with me: there’s too good a chance that they’ll catch up with me. No. This place; this is where they can’t go. And maybe one day I’ll come back for it.
Can I actually do this?
I run my pale hand over the cream cloth cover. I can’t take it with me. But what if someone finds it?
I look again at the small bookcase. There’s even dust on the silver key. No one reads these books. They are there for show. I remember some English lit joke someone told me once about why it’s so easy to be a theology student specialising in any Old-or New-Testament faith. I don’t remember the whole joke, but I remember the punchline: ‘Because they have to read only one book.’ I’m not sure it’s true, but it got a laugh from us all in the bar. So, do I take my chances and leave
The End of Mr. Y
here with the Pope’s poetry? I don’t see what else I can do, so I unlock the case and put the book inside. You really wouldn’t notice it in there. I shut the glass front. Then I lock it. Shall I take the key with me? No, they’ll find it when they strip me down, after I am dead. I’ll leave the key here. But where? There’s nowhere else in this room to hide anything. Knowing I have to go, I just slip it under the bookcase in the end.
When I get outside, the black car has gone. The freezing air scrapes my face like a thousand knives, and at first I don’t understand the tears that come. It’s almost dawn and I want to be in bed, in the warm, with Adam. But instead I’ve got this: I’m on the run. I’m going to go and find Burlem and work out how I can stop these KIDS from messing with my brain. And … My thoughts are so precise and methodical that they scare me; I look at the priory and for a second I imagine it as a non- religious place: a place that I’m not afraid of, in which I could have slept with Adam last night. But if it wasn’t a religious place … Am I now so lost in a fantasy that I don’t understand what’s going on any more, or is it possible that the blond men really couldn’t go in there, and that I made them leave? That’s what I was trying to do. I just focused on Martin, and his horrible, clenched feeling, and I told him he had to leave and find a toilet. Is it that simple? So why can’t they do that? Isn’t it just the KIDS who are supposed to be able to do that? So why can I do it, too?
Apollo Smintheus. Why did you desert me?
There’s a part of the A2, just around Medway, where it looks as if you’re driving into the sky. Most roads in Britain seem to be designed on the principle that they should be enclosed by something: hedges; fields; houses. But this road sweeps through the landscape like the broad stroke of an
eraser tool on a computer, as if the pixel size has been set too high and too much has been rubbed out. It’s pale grey and four lanes wide. The sky is still black and everything that isn’t road or sky is covered with snow that glows in all the artificial white lights. For the second time this week, I feel as though I’m living in a black-and-white photocopy. It’s 6 a.m., and apart from two gritter trucks, I’m on my own out here, driving towards Burlem’s daughter’s school, not knowing what I’m going to do when I get there. I need to try to find Apollo Smintheus as well. I have so many questions.
The car heater is on full and I have finally started to warm up. But it’s freezing outside, and I don’t know where I am going to sleep tonight. I don’t even know how, or even if, what I’ve got planned is possible. How am I going to get into the Troposphere now? I don’t have a sofa, or a bed. Martin and Ed have got a motel room and two KIDS to help them. And I know that they’re willing to hurt me: that they want to hurt me. All I’ve got is my car and
£
9.50 in the whole world. I can’t go back to the university. I can’t go back to my flat. I think about my flat, the pathetic little space that was at least mine, and again I feel the beginnings of tears swelling behind my eyes. I see Adam’s face when he left my flat, and again when he left me last night. I was so sure I was doing the right thing. Now I’m on my own, probably until I die.
Take a deep breath. Don’t cry. Watch the road.
A feeling of coldness, more intense than the car heater … And then I seem to black out, just for a second – or maybe a bit more than a second. When I come back to myself, I can see a sign that wasn’t there before. ‘I hate it when this happens on the motorway,’ I think, quite deliberately, as if what I’m feeling is normal.
And I’m still not crying.
The sign is telling me that if I keep going, I’ll end up in London. That’s what I want. There’s another sign pointing to the various exits you could take if you wanted to go to any one of the various Medway towns. I haven’t lived around here long enough for any of the names to mean anything to me. Except … One of them does mean something to me. It’s the town where Patrick lives. Would he lend me some more money? Would he even be up at this time of day? My brain does some kind of quantum computation that’s too fast for my conscious mind to keep up with. And then, right at the last second, I’m indicating and pulling off.
Five minutes later I’m parked outside a Little Chef off a rundown roundabout. There are half-dead trees everywhere, and bushes full of lager cans and old take-away cartons. This place has the feel of something that’s been mis-designed on one of those city-sim computer games: a corner you’d forgotten to delete, or even arrange to have cleaned. It’s half past six. Does Patrick get up this early? I can’t piss him off, or alert his wife, so I send a text message:
Will do anything for cash
. I add the name of the town and three coquettish ellipses. This has to seem fun or he won’t buy it.
The cold air stings my eyes as I get out of the car and walk over to the door to the Little Chef. It doesn’t open until seven. I get back in the car and put the heater on full. Can you kill yourself sitting in a car with the heater on? Or do you actually have to turn on the engine and run a pipe into the window from the exhaust? Now I can’t seem to warm up, even with the heater on. I close my eyes. ‘Apollo Smintheus …’ I think. And then I wonder how you pray to an entity you’ve actually met. Is that possible? ‘Apollo Smintheus. Please be OK. Please help me, if you can. I’m doing something bad now, something I’ll never tell anyone about. But I need to get back into the Troposphere and see you, and for that I need a warm room.’ Is this even working? Is this how you should pray? I don’t even know any classic prayers. I used to be able to meditate. Perhaps that’s more appropriate. For the next ten minutes, I sit there with the buzz of the heater in the background and my eyes shut, repeating the words ‘Apollo Smintheus … Apollo Smintheus …’ like a mantra. I don’t know if it has worked, but when I open my eyes the snow under the car park lights seems about a thousand shades lighter than it was before. Then the world goes dull again. The Little Chef is open. I need