The End Of Mr. Y. Scarlett Thomas

I look as if I have caught myself unawares, washed out and dazzled in the fluorescent light.

      Would you read a cursed book, if you had one? If you heard that there was a cursed book out there and you found it in a bookshop, would you spend the last of your money on it? If you heard there was a cursed book out there, would you go searching for it, even if no one thought any copies existed any more? I think about my conversation with Wolf last night and wonder if life is as simple as ‘there is a book’. But again I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply ‘there is a book’. Once upon a time there was a book. That makes more sense. There is a book. And then what happens? There is a book and it contains a curse and then you read it and then you die. That’s a proper story.

      I come out of the bathroom and find Patrick wearing expensive-looking blue jeans and a pale pink shirt. He doesn’t look bad in jeans, but I preferred Burlem’s look: the black shirt, the dark trousers and the trench coat. But Burlem’s not here, and Patrick is. After flirting for a while, we go for dinner and have a strange conversation about nineteenth-century poetry, during which I go on and on about Thomas Hardy, and how the best bit of his poem ‘Hap’ is his invented word ‘unblooms’, as in: ‘And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?’ The whole poem is about wishing for evidence of a vengeful god – since there certainly isn’t any evidence of a benevolent one – because a higher power, even a cruel one, gives us meaning in a way we can’t give meaning to ourselves. This ends up with us talking about structuralism and linguistics (Patrick’s specialism), and then Derrida (one of mine).

      ‘How can you read Derrida?’ Patrick asks me at some point.

      ‘How can you not?’ I say.

      We’ve finished dinner, and I realise that I am now having the conversation as if I were a robot taking part in the Turing Test. I can probably convince Patrick that I am human and listening to him, but really I’m thinking about Mr. Y.

      ‘Are you OK?’ he asks.

      ‘Yeah,’ I say. Perhaps I should try harder. ‘Have you ever listened to any of Derrida’s lectures?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘You should. I’ve got one on my iPod. In it, he says that praying is “not like ordering a pizza”. I love that. I love the little image of Derrida spending an evening praying and ordering pizzas to prove they’re not the same thing. Not that he would have done. I mean, I can’t see him praying, or trying to prove something by experiment. I bet he ordered pizzas, though.’

      Patrick is grinning again. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ he says.

      ‘What, Derrida praying?’

      ‘No. The fact that I’m about to sleep with someone who owns an iPod.’

      Our roles in bed are quite simple. I am the eager young student and he is the slightly sadistic professor. We don’t go so far as to actually act out our parts, and his slight sadism doesn’t extend further than occasionally tying me up with silk scarves, but I like it when he tells me what to do.

      By the time I wake up the following morning, Patrick has had breakfast and left. There’s a card on the bedside table thanking me for a wonderful night and explaining that there’s been some sort of ‘crisis’ at home that he needs to attend to. I wish I’d brought my book with me. I have a large room-service breakfast and read a complimentary newspaper before getting up and making the most of the hot water. The water in my flat never seems to get anywhere beyond ‘fairly’ hot, but I like water with which you can actually burn yourself.

      As soon as I am washed and dressed I walk back into town and along the dilapidated city walls towards my flat. The ring road runs next to me on my left, and the landscape I can see is a confused mess of cars, shops, road signs, bollards, a petrol station, some cranes in the distance, a pub, a roundabout and a pedestrian bridge. At some point a train goes past, emerging from behind a billboard advertising shiny cars and disappearing again behind a nightclub. Every kind of urbanity seems to exist in this space, from the city walls themselves to the remains of the Norman castle and the ugly red blocks of flats that have gone up next to it. Beyond the castle there’s a subway under the ring road, and if you go through it you can walk along the river towards the motorway, passing the gas tower and the encampment of homeless people who live in tents. I walked that way once, curious about the local countryside. There was a smell of gas all the way.

      When I get back there’s no sign of Wolfgang’s bike, so it looks as if I’m going to be on my own with the mice. When I look, I’ve got two full traps, so I take them downstairs and release the mice out the back by Luigi’s bins. Back in the kitchen I reload the traps with stale biscuits and put them back under the sink; then I put coffee on the stove and arrange all my things around the sofa: The End of Mr. Y, cigarettes, notebook, pen. As soon as my coffee is ready, I curl up on the sofa and begin reading where I left off yesterday morning.

      The moment the liquid struck my tongue I became aware of several new sensations, including a sudden aversion to darkness and a heavy, constricted feeling. At first I felt sure that these were simply delusions occurring because of the rather melodramatic manner in which the fluid had been prescribed, and that I was simply falling prey to fancies. However, after a time I began feeling increasingly anxious and experiencing something like vertigo. Nevertheless, I fixed my attention upon the black circle, as instructed, beckoned once again by curiosity’s claw. I remained convinced that, if this fair-ground doctor was, as I suspected, a fraud, then nothing he could do would cause me any harm.

      After lying on the hard slab staring into the black circle for several moments I was startled to see it begin to disintegrate before my eyes. Two larger circles took its place, one pink and one blue, and these shapes then appeared to expand and contract with the soft translucency of jellyfish. I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that one has when moving downhill on a switchback ride, or in the dreams of falling that one has from time to time. It was not my physical being, however, which was descending, but rather my mind. It was as if the thinking, reasoning part of my being was closing with the finality of a heavy, locked door. In its place a small aperture appeared, growing larger and larger until it eclipsed the black circle on the small piece of card, and continued to enlarge until it was the size of a railway tunnel. I was alarmed to realise that I was now moving down this tunnel at a giddying speed.

      The walls of the tunnel were charcoal-black at first but presently I became aware of various inscriptions on the walls which appeared alongside me as if drawn by light. At first these were simply pinpricks, like little stars in the firmament, and I fancied that if one could connect them, then perhaps a picture would form. There were also oscillating lines of the sort one might observe in the crude representation of a wave in the sea. For one instant I fancied I saw before me pictures of the human genitalia. There then appeared various shapes, and, despite the tremendous speed with which I passed them, I observed several circles, spheres, triangles, pyramids, squares, cubes and rectangular parallelepiped objects until these faded and the walls of the tunnel then became adorned with what appeared to be ancient hieroglyphics, which I confess I could not read. These little pictures blinked like apparitions as I passed them: I saw things that looked like birds and feet and eyes. All of these impressions appeared before me as though drawn with light.

      I became aware of my anxiety paling as I continued my journey through the tunnel, and I was intrigued by the little symbols that flowed past me as if projected on a phenakistiscope. I saw many circles bisected with a cross or a line, and an abundence of other shapes including those which resembled little flags, stalks, boxes, and the reversed Roman letters g, E, r and P. I also saw what appeared to be Roman letters as if drawn in the hand of a child. However, it was clear that not all the Roman letters were present, and their expression seemed to vary between upper and lower case. I am sure I only observed the letters y, I, z, which was crossed in the French style, and l, o, w and x. Later there also appeared the upper case characters A, B, H, K, M, N, P, D, T, V, Y and X. Presently the Greek letters appeared in sequence, from alpha, beta, gamma and delta through to phi, chi, psi and omega. Then I observed the Roman alphabet in the correct sequence, from A through to Z. Still there appeared hieroglyphics here and there. The further I journeyed into this long tunnel,