The End of Mr. Y

Chapter Nine

You 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 gray 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 anymore, 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 gray. 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, farther 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 realize 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 practiced 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 gray 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 realized 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's 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 reexamine 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. Should I try and find something to cure them? That might be quite quick. Maybe not, though. I almost like them.

I yawn and don't bother to cover my mouth: No one's been up here all morning. I still don't know what Carbo Vegetabilis is, nor what the thousandth potency might be, so I flick through the pile of books on the desk until I eventually find two helpful documents. One is a short biography of Dr. Thomas Skinner, a Scottish homoeopath who visited the United States in 1876 and developed something called the "centesimal fluxion machine" for making what the book describes as "potencies in excess of the thousandth." After a lot more flicking and reading I come across the next helpful document. It's a reproduction of a 1925 catalog entry from the Boericke & Tafel Homoeopathic Pharmacists of Philadelphia, and it explains, in great detail, exactly how homoeopathic medicines are (or were) made. The process sounds crazy. It seems that a substance (cinchona bark, arsenic, sulphur, snake venom, whatever) is steeped in "the finest spirits, made of sound grain," and then the medicine is made by taking one drop of this "mother tincture" and combining it with ninety-nine drops of alcohol, then succussing (shaking or pounding) the mixture ten times; then taking one drop from this new mixture and combining it with ninety-nine new drops of alcohol, and so on. The thirtieth potency, apparently common in homoeopathic prescribing, is made by doing this thirty times. The thousandth potency, therefore (which they call the 1M potency), is made by doing this one thousand times. At least, I think I've got that right. It sounds impossible. I read it again. Yes. That is right.

Shit. Do people even make this stuff anymore? Is there still such a thing as Tafel's High Potencies or the Skinner Machine? Am I going to have to go out and find some charcoal and start messing around with pipettes and slivovitz (does that count as the finest spirits? Probably not). Could my wrists even cope with all that shaking? I don't have bionic arms, and I have absolutely no stamina. Once I rubbed out the pencilled-in marginalia from a hundred pages of a book that I wanted to photocopy (long story) and afterwards it felt like I'd been wanking off a giant for a hundred years.

I'm still thinking about this, and wishing there was a way of finding some sort of Victorian pharmacist to help me, when someone taps me on the shoulder. Even though I thought I was alone in here, I don't jump. In fact I am so absorbed in this new problem that I vaguely shrug the hand away from my shoulder and keep reading. I can already sense that it's Patrick, anyway. I can smell his woodsy aftershave, and the lemony scent of his clean clothes. He touches my shoulder again and this time I have to respond.

"Hi," I say without really looking up.

"Hello," he says, hovering behind my right shoulder. "What are you reading about?"

"Nineteenth-century homoeopathy," I say, turning my hand over so it rests on the book, rather than holding it open. I don't want him to see my wrist.

"Gosh," he says. "Was homoeopathy around then?"

"I think it was its heyday," I say.

There's a long pause. I wish he'd go away.

"Ariel," he says.

"What?"

"Can I buy you a coffee to say sorry?"

I sigh. "I'm quite busy doing this."

"Ariel?"

I don't respond. He stands there behind me silently and I don't know whether to turn and look at him or just to continue with this and hope he'll just get the message and leave. I'm not quite sure exactly what message I want him to get. Something like Leave me out of your fucking family shit. After I've ignored him for a while he comes closer and looks down at the book in front of me, in the same way that people look at photographs in a lonely room.

"OK, I'll leave you to it," he says, without moving. "Hey," he puts his thin finger down on the textbook in front of me. "Phosphorus; I've taken that."

I look up. "You've taken homoeopathic medicine?"

"Yes, of course. I'm not sure it worked, but..."

"Look. Maybe we should have a quick coffee," I tell him. "But you'll have to give me a few minutes to finish up here and check out some of these books. Say outside in five minutes?"

"Wonderful."

Shelley College (named after Mary, not Percy Bysshe) has a Fibonacci staircase, a 1960s chandelier, and a bistro called Monster Munch. Monster Munch is the only bit of the college I don't like. It's all done out in clean orange and pithy white curves and edges, with new-looking pool tables and a plasma screen. I prefer the decrepit little bar in the Russell Building that has stand-up ashtrays and chipped particleboard tables. The students don't like the Russell Bar, which means it's usually empty. Occasionally they'll go in there to revise, or to curl up on one of the stained old sofas with a hangover, but not that often. Anyway, you can't smoke in Monster Munch. You can only do shiny things in Monster Munch; you have to be a shiny, clean person in here: The fluorescent lights and the mirrors on the walls prevent you from being anything else.

I sit on a stool at a small white table by the window and pull the arms of my jumper down to cover my wrists while Patrick gets coffee for both of us: some sort of frothed milk thing for him, and an Americano for me (they call it "black coffee" in Russell). I have my pile of homoeopathy textbooks in front of me, and they look wrong in here, as do I. The mirrors reflect the unhealthy tone of my skin, pale against my red hair, and the fraying on the bottom of my jeans that I didn't think was that noticeable. I put on this black jumper this morning without even thinking about it, but now I can see how thin the wool has become, and how smudged it makes me look. If it wasn't for my hair I'd basically resemble a bad-quality photocopy.

Patrick puts my coffee in front of me and looks out of the window.

"Wow, you can see a long way today," he says, sitting down. The sky is still a hyperreal blue.

"Yeah, but you can't see the cathedral." All you can see from up here are fields with nothing in them and, farther away, strange industrial towers.

"Do you have to be able to see the cathedral?"

"I think so. I mean, it's the only thing to look at, isn't it? From up here."

"Maybe." Patrick digs around in his froth with a thin silver spoon. I notice that his hands are shaking slightly and there's a slight reflection on his forehead from a thin sheen of perspiration. "So."

"So," I say back. "Are you..." What do I say? I was about to ask if he's feeling any better, but then I realize that this is an absurd thing to say, because I don't really care how he's feeling. The ellipses hang in the air for a moment, and then Patrick fills in his own question and answers it.

"Yes. Emma's back. I'm..." He prods his froth some more. "I'm sorry if I seemed to be in a rather strange mood yesterday. I wonder if you'll ever forgive me."

"It's OK," I hear myself saying. "It's not as if I said ... You know, I mean..."

"No, but, I shouldn't..."

"I mean, maybe we should try to avoid ... In future..."

Monster Munch is not the kind of place to have this conversation. This is a post-midnight, post-watershed, jazz-bar conversation, and we're trying to have it in a place that looks like it's already been censored.

"Anyway," I say.

"I'm really sorry."

"It's OK."

I think about Frankenstein's monster, the fictional character who indirectly gave his name to this place. She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair ... The murderous mark of the fiend's grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips. That's what Victor Frankenstein's creation did to his fiancée, Elizabeth. Maybe this is the place to have this conversation after all.

"You...," I begin, at the same time that Patrick says, "I..."

"You first," he says.

"No, go on."

"No, really."

"I just ... I don't want to be a stand-in for your wife. Especially not when you're angry with her. That was never the deal."

"No. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

We're silent for a couple of moments. I sip my coffee and vaguely wish I could have a cigarette. Two women walk in and order juice from the bar and then come and sit at the table behind ours.

"So how come you took homoeopathic medicine?" I ask Patrick.

He shrugs. "Someone suggested seeing a homoeopath a while ago."

"What was it like?"

He sips his coffee and I notice that his hands are not shaking anymore.

"It was interesting." He frowns. "They ask you lots of odd questions. They want to know what foods you crave, what you dream about, what you do for a living, and how you feel about it. It's like seeing a therapist in a way."

I saw a therapist once. A gym teacher saw the scars on the tops of my legs and made me go to the doctor. The doctor referred me to some teenage unit at the local hospital. I remember watching a soap opera in the waiting room, which, as well as the smeary TV screen, had green plastic chairs and posters about AIDS. The guy who saw me was a young, moon-faced man with glasses. I told him how amazing it was to be able to give yourself pleasure through pain, and how I knew cutting was addictive but I wasn't addicted yet. I laughed through an account of my childhood. Through all this the therapist simply looked at me in a puzzled way, and a week later I got a letter saying they didn't have the facilities to help me "at this time." I still remember the boxy, thin-walled little room, though. It smelled of smoke, and I noticed a silver foil ashtray on the table by the box of tissues and the vase of plastic blue flowers. That was the moment it occurred to me to try smoking. That eventually replaced the cutting, but I still have the scars. Patrick likes them.

I sip my coffee as Patrick keeps talking about the homoeopathic interview.

"I don't know why they need that level of detail about your life," he says, and laughs briefly. "I only went there with headaches and insomnia."

I finish my coffee. "So you ended up with phosphorus?"

"Yes. Now I think about it, I haven't had any headaches since, although I still don't sleep well."

"Do you actually believe in it?"

"Mmm. I don't know. I saw a documentary that said the remedies are just placebos, and there's nothing in them that can have any effect on anything. They actually dilute the remedies so much that, in chemical terms, all that is left is water. Apparently, homoeopaths argue that water has a memory, which sounds pretty wacky."

"So what did the medicine look like?" I ask him. "Where did you get it?"

"Oh, the homoeopath gave it to me. She had this huge wooden cabinet..." Patrick opens his arms about three feet wide and, with one finger pointing up on each hand, tries to show the scope of this thing. I notice that he doesn't look at his hands as he does this, but at the wall behind me. It suddenly occurs to me that when people describe size this way, they're relying on perspective to help them. He's not saying, It's this big. He's saying, It would look this big from here if it was over there.

He goes on, "It had all these little drawers labelled alphabetically. She opened one of them up and there were lots of little glass bottles inside, each containing tiny white sugar pills. She explained to me that the medicine is originally a liquid, but that the little pills absorb it and make it more convenient to take. Sorry. This must be boring."

"No, I'm really interested. I just had no picture in my mind of what any of this stuff actually looks like." I try to run my fingers through my hair, but there's some huge tangle at the front, so I try to tease it out as I speak. "So, do you have to get these pills from a homoeopath?"

"Oh no." Patrick laughs. "Don't you ever go into Boots? They sell homoeopathic remedies everywhere now. You can get them at any health food shop as well. I get Nux Vomica for indigestion. You just buy it over the counter."

"Hmm," I say. "That's interesting. I never realized it was so mainstream."

"It's big business now," he says. "I've got some Nux in my office if you want to see what the tablets actually look like."

"OK."

Most people's offices tend to be a mess. I've seen people who seem to be trapped in their rooms, still working at eight P.M. because perhaps there really is no way out across towering piles of old journals, books, and printed e-mails. Patrick's room, on the other hand, is large, square, and spotless. It doesn't exactly have the shine of the Monster Munch bistro, but you can see why he likes having coffee there. He has an L-shaped desk arrangement similar to mine, but his tables are larger and one has a glass top. The glass-topped one faces the door and has nothing on it apart from a heavy translucent paperweight and a white lamp. The other one faces the window and has nothing on it apart from his computer, and looks as if it's been polished recently. The room is so large that there is also space for a coffee table and four comfortable chairs.

He shuts the door behind us and walks over to his desk drawer.

"Here," he says, taking out a small brown glass bottle and offering it to me.

I put my library books down on the coffee table and take the bottle from him. The label says Nux Vom 30.125 tablets. An instruction on the side tells you to take a tablet every two hours in "acute" cases and three times a day otherwise. I unscrew the cap and peer inside at a pile of tiny flat tablets, pure white like miniature aspirins.

Now Patrick is locking the door and closing his blinds.

"How forgiven am I?" he says.

"Hmm?" I say, looking up, but he has already grabbed me and is kissing me hard. "Patrick," I say, once he stops. But what am I going to say next? Despite—or, weirdly, because of—yesterday, a familiar sensation trickles through me and instead of talking about how this isn't a good idea, I allow him to remove my jumper and pull down my jeans and knickers and then bend me over the glass table, holding me by my hair. My breasts press against the cold glass, and, while Patrick fucks me, I wonder what they look like from underneath.

"God, Ariel," he says afterwards, wiping his cock with a Kleenex as I pull my jeans back up. "I don't know if you bring out the best or the worst in me."

"I think it's the worst," I say, smiling.

He smiles back. "Thanks for forgiving me."

I laugh. "I'm not sure if I have yet." I pick up my books and head for the door. "Oh well. Guess I'd better go and see what my new roommates are like."

Patrick throws the Kleenex away. "Roommates?"

"'Refugees' is what Mary's calling them. People from the Newton Building. I'm sharing my office with two of them."

"Oh. Bad luck." Patrick leans against the glass-topped desk and looks at me. "Well, you're always welcome here."

"We'll get caught."

"Yes. Probably." He sighs. "Back to hotels then."

"We'll see." I soften this with a naughty smile, since something's just occurred to me. "Oh, Patrick?" I say with my hand on the door handle, as though it's an afterthought.

He's fiddling with the buttons on his trousers, making sure they're done up.

"What?"

"I've left my purse at home. You haven't got like a tenner lying around, have you? It's no big deal but I've got to put some petrol in the car on the way back. I'll give it back to you tomorrow or something."

He immediately reaches for his wallet and pulls out a twenty.

"Don't worry about it," he says. And then, just as I'm leaving, and in a lower voice: "There's always more where that came from."

As I leave, I wonder if that was better than stealing from the tea and coffee fund in the kitchen, or worse.

Chapter Ten

There's a young woman in my office. She's about my age, or a bit younger, and has thick black glasses and short, blond, curly hair. She's putting books on one of the shelves I cleared. Around her feet are about five other boxes with all kinds of things spilling out of them: mainly books, but also CDs, a small stereo, a plush green frog, and a scrunched-up lab coat.

"Hi," I say, walking around the boxes. "I'm Ariel."

"Oh my God. I'm so sorry about this. I'm Heather." Her accent is Scottish, possibly Edinburgh.

She grins at me, puts down the book she's holding, and holds out a hand for me to shake. I put my own pile of books on my now single desk and take it.

"Seriously," she says. "I'll be out of your hair as soon as possible. It's so nice of you to offer to share, though. I do really appreciate it."

"Er ... That makes me sound like a better person than I am," I say. "Not that I wouldn't have offered. But I was originally sharing this office with my supervisor and he's not around at the moment, so, well, it's logical for me to share, really. My head of department suggested it, though."

"Well, just, thanks so much. I mean, you could have said no."

I couldn't have said no, but still.

"I'm just going to check my e-mail," I say, sitting down at my desk. "But I can give you a hand in a minute if you like."

"No. You're all right. I'll try not to make too much of a mess, though. I don't want to completely ruin your office."

"Honestly," I say. "It's fine."

Heather has already set up her computer on the desk that is now facing the window. The theology guy is therefore going to have the one behind mine, facing the other wall. Heather's computer has got a large, flat-screen monitor, which appears to have gone on standby. I press the buttons to turn on my computer and then I get up and start picking my way through the maze of boxes to go upstairs to check my pigeonhole and get a coffee from the kitchen.

"Do you want a coffee or anything?" I ask Heather as I go.

"Really? Oh, no. I couldn't ask you to make me coffee as well as everything else."

"It's no trouble. I'm already making myself one."

"Oh, OK. But only if it's no trouble. I probably need some to keep me going."

"I know the feeling," I say.

Once I'm back at my desk I immediately start searching the Internet for homoeopathic remedies. From what I can make out they cost about three or four pounds a bottle. I could order them online, but I don't have a credit card so I'll have to go into town. I'm feeling so hungry that I think I might pass out, but I don't think I'll waste any of my money in the canteen. I think I'll finish my coffee and then liberate my car, go home, and have some soup and a bath. Then I can go out and find the Carbo Vegetabilis. There's a huge Boots and two or three health food shops in town, and if these medicines are as ubiquitous as Patrick says I shouldn't have any trouble finding what I need.

While I'm doing this, Heather finishes putting her books on the shelves.

"Oh dear," she says.

I glance up and see her looking at the shelves. "Is everything OK?"

"Oh, sorry, I don't want to disturb you if you're working."

"I'm not," I say. "What is it?"

"I haven't left any room for the other guy."

We both look at the shelves. She really has managed to fill a whole bookcase to the extent that there are even books lying on top of other books and volumes poking out awkwardly as if the other books are trying to eject them. Even the green frog is there, looking squashed. She bites her lip, clearly genuinely worried about this. Then she catches my eye and we both laugh.

"Oh well," I say, shrugging.

"Maybe he won't have many things. I only have mine because everything was in storage. My office was going to be redecorated over the holidays. I suppose if he has, I can always put some of mine back in boxes." She walks over to my desk and looks at my pile of homoeopathy books. She touches one of them as if she thinks it might be contaminated, and then she takes her hand away. "You're an English lit person, aren't you?"

"Um, yeah. Sort of."

"Why the homoeopathy books?"

"Oh, I always have weird books. I'm doing a Ph.D. on thought experiments. I think the department wants to kick me out, actually. It's all a bit too scientific, even if I do look at poetry and stuff as well."

"Thought experiments! How cool."

"Yeah. It is fun. You're an evolutionary biologist, aren't you?"

"Yeah, I've got a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular genetics, so it's kind of evolution from the beginning of time, or at least the beginnings of life, which gets pretty crazy. I get to teach a few of the kids—that's what my old supervisor calls the students—in term time, but mostly I'm making these computer models. Actually, do you want to see something cool?"

"Yeah," I say. "What is it?"

"Look." She touches the mouse on her desk and her flat screen jumps back into life. Suddenly I can see white numbers and letters covering the whole black screen, all changing, like numbers on a stock exchange or information on a computer matrix, as if there should be a tick-tick-tick noise at the same time. "It's working out the origins of life," she says. Then she laughs; it's the kind of high-pitched laugh that ideally needs more people in a room to absorb it. "That sounds a bit mental actually. Sorry."

"Wow," I say, staring at the screen.

"Yeah. Well. My research proposal made it sound a lot more boring than that, but that's essentially what I'm trying to do. It's all about looking for LUCA. Or actually looking beyond LUCA, since no one really believes in LUCA anymore."

I'm still staring at the screen, but Heather now turns away. There's a pencil on her desk and she picks this up and starts playing with it, leaning against her desk with her back to the monitor. The numbers and letters keep changing and repeating in front of me. It's the kind of thing you could watch for ages. You'd watch it all night and then close your eyes and see thousands of letters and numbers still crazily scrolling in the darkness. "What's LUCA?" I ask.

"The Last Universal Common Ancestor."

"Like..."

"The thing we all descended from."

"Aha," I say. "So this program on here. What's it doing?"

Heather runs her hand through her hair. "God—there's a question," she says. Then: "Oh, hello."

A male voice says, "Hi."

I turn around. There's a guy standing in the doorway holding a small box. He's got shoulder-length black hair and he's wearing haphazard layers of black, gray, and off-white clothes. Under his black thigh-length cotton jacket is an open gray shirt. Under that there's a thin black sweatshirt. Under that there seems to be a white T-shirt. Despite all these clothes he is thin and angular-looking with a slightly pointed nose and high, corpselike cheekbones. He also has about three days' stubble. He's young, probably in his early thirties, but his brown-black eyes look millions of years old.

"Hi," I say back. "You must be...?"

"I'm Adam. Apparently there's a space for me to work in here?"

Heather immediately takes charge, pinging around the office like a squash ball.

"Hi, Adam. I'm Heather. This is Ariel. Here's your desk and your notice board is right here and I'm so sorry but look at what I've done to the shelves already..." I'm vaguely aware of the high-pitched laugh again, and Heather saying something else. I'm not sure if Adam's listening to her at all: His eyes are locked on mine. I have no idea why, but I have an urge to walk across the room and merge with him: not to kiss, not to fuck, but to merge. It's ridiculous—he's way too young for me. I think he's going to break this deep, infinite stare any second, but he doesn't. Could this go on forever? No. Suddenly I think about Patrick and everything else to do with my sordid past and I rip the moment in two by turning around and looking at my computer screen instead. For the first time I notice all the dust around its edges. Everything seems dirty. I look back to Adam again, but now he's busy reassuring Heather about the shelves.

"I really don't have anything," he's saying. "Look."

He's showing her his box. Inside are three blue pencils, a university diary, a red notebook, and a Bible.

"You do travel light," Heather says.

Adam shrugs. "You keep the shelves. I'm just grateful for the desk."

He sits down at the desk and starts up the computer. Heather keeps talking to him and from listening to their conversation I learn that Adam is working on nothing more exciting than planning some MA seminars for the coming term. I'd usually find this kind of conversation boring, but Adam's voice is so mesmerizing that I can't help but listen. I can't place his accent. First I think it's South London; then I revise it to South London with a hint of New Zealand. Then I revise it further to New Zealand with a hint of Irish. Then I give up and start thinking again about going home. I can't develop feelings for a guy who carries a box around with a Bible in it, especially not when I can still feel Patrick's spunk dribbling down my legs. Oh, I'm so gross. I get up and start putting on my coat.

"So," Heather's saying. "I think we should all celebrate." She's looking at me. "Ariel? Oh, are you off? What do you think?"

"Huh?" I say, putting the homoeopathy books in a bag to take home with me.

"Dinner, my house tonight? I was thinking that I can tell you about LUCA and Adam can tell us about how God made Man and we can all get really drunk. Well, we can. I'm guessing Adam doesn't drink. What do you think, Adam?"

"I'll come only if I can drink," he says.

I smile at Heather. "Er, yeah. It does sound good."

"Fantastic," she says. "Seven? Here's my address." She scribbles something down on a piece of paper and gives it to me.

This time when I get to the Newton car park there aren't any men standing around and all the yellow tape has torn and is flapping loosely in the wind. Beyond that, the broken building stands unevenly with scaffolding half-erected around it. My car is the only vehicle now parked here and I'm glad I can take it away. I always expect my car to be warm when I get into it but as usual it's refrigerator-cold, slightly damp, and smells of cigarette smoke. Still, it starts first time.

The traffic's heavy going into town, and as I approach the level crossing I see the lights start to flash and the big gates slowly come down. Shit. That means I'm going to be stuck here for about ten minutes. There's a bus in front of me, sticking out at an awkward angle and half-blocking the other side of the road, and the few cars that got through before the level crossing went down start trying to maneuver around it. There's a bakery on this side of the road, just beyond a pub, so I get out of the car and go to buy some bread. There's a woman in the bakery who smiles at me as if everyone I've ever known has just died. On my way back I realize the reason for the awkward angle of the bus: It's a white van, parked on the curb outside the pub. The lettering on the side of it says SELECT AMUSEMENTS. After a couple of seconds a man comes out of the pub wheeling an ancient-looking fruit machine with wires hanging out of the back. He leaves it on the pavement while he opens the back doors of the van. As I walk past, I can see six or seven other upright machines inside, all with tarnished buttons, each presumably bearing the fingerprints of thousands and thousands of people. There's a second man in the back of the van polishing one of the machines with a white cloth. Once he sees that his colleague is back with the new machine, he stops doing this and jumps down to help lift the machine into the back of the van and then strap it in. For a moment I suddenly think the machines are alive, and these men are taking them prisoner. Then the gates come up, the traffic starts to move again, and I jump back in my car and drive off. I get to the filling station without any problems and buy five pounds' worth of petrol.

I rent a parking space from the Chinese restaurant around the back of my flat and luckily today no one else has parked in it by mistake. After I've had some soup, I go and get in the bath with two of the homoeopathy books: Kent's Lectures on the Materia Medica and a rather strange-looking volume called Literary Portraits of the Polychrests. I'm going to read about Carbo Vegetabilis, then I'm going to go and buy some. It doesn't matter how dirty I am, or that I want to pretend there's nothing wrong with me, or that I desperately want to see Adam's face again, or that I should think about getting back to my thesis and my new piece for the magazine. This is my mission. This isn't real life. Real life is letting men fuck you over their desks (and enjoying it, which is somehow the worst thing). Real life is regularly running out of money, and then food. Real life is having no proper heating. Real life is physical. Give me books instead: Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book; I'd give anything for that. Being cursed by The End of Mr. Y must mean becoming part of the book; an intertextual being: a book-cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg. Things in books can't get dirty, and real life is, well, eventually it's dust. Even books become dust, like the crumbled remains H. G. Wells's Time Traveller finds in the museum. But thoughts are clean.

Before I start reading I think an experimental thought, just for a second. What if this is real life? What if I am cursed and I'm going to die, just like Lumas and everyone who read The End of Mr. Y in the 1890s? If I really thought this was real, some survival instinct would make me stop doing it, surely? But if it's not real, why am I bothering? I pick up the first book, Kent's Lectures, and start to read about Carbo Vegetabilis.

We will take up the study of Vegetable Charcoal—Carbo-veg. It is a comparatively inert substance made medicinal and powerful, and converted into a great healing agent, by grinding it fine enough. By dividing it sufficiently, it becomes similar to the nature of sickness and cures folks.

The Old School use it in tablespoonful doses to correct acidity of the stomach. But it is a great monument to Hahnemann. It is quite inert in crude form and the true healing powers are not brought out until it is sufficiently potentized. It is one of those deep-acting, long-acting antipsoric medicines. It enters deeply into the life, in its proving it develops symptoms that last a long time, and it cures conditions that are of long standing—those that come on slowly and insidiously.

What follows is basically a long list of symptoms that can be cured by this medicine in homoeopathic doses. Not much of it seems particularly interesting or gives any indication as to why this would be the "special" medicine chosen for Lumas's concoction. I read of sluggishness, laziness, and vomiting of blood. Then I read down the page and learn that people who need Carbo-veg are also cold and cadaverous. I close this book and pick up Literary Portraits of the Polychrests. The flap informs me that it should be possible to "read" or decode characters in literature in the same way as one reads a person with an illness. I can see how that would work: all those little symptoms I read about before, all the emphasis on knowing whether someone feels worse at eleven A.M. (sulphur) or four P.M. (lycopodium). I open the Portraits book and read the following:

Carbo-v is known as the corpse-reviver—and any practicing homoeopath will tell you why. When a patient appears to draw his last breath, this is the remedy that must be given in the highest possible potency. iM or 10M is usually sufficient to bring about a revival, or, indeed, to aid the patient in his passing.

After an introduction, this chapter then lists the various famous literary personages who, in the author's opinion, would require this remedy. Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker get a few pages to themselves, and the author spends a long time considering the dying character in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Mesmeric Revelation." Then, of course, there's a section on Elizabeth Lavenza from Frankenstein. The section ends with this:

As I get out of the bath, damp and clean but not perceptibly warmer, I feel my mind tick-ticking like the screen on Heather's computer. The corpse-reviver. Now that at least does sound interesting. And all that stuff about carbon being the essence both of life and death. I remember there was something interesting about carbon in Jim Lahiri's popular science book, so, with my dressing gown on, I go into the kitchen and put on some coffee while I search my shelves for the book. Eventually I find it and it tells me what I remember reading. In the furnace of the big bang, hydrogen was the first element to form from the hot plasmic soup of electrons and protons. It's a bit of a no-brainer: All you need for hydrogen is one electron and one proton. The mass of this hydrogen isotope is one—because it has one proton (electrons don't really have any mass). In the incredible heat, hydrogen isotopes with masses two (deuterium—one proton and one neutron) and three (tritium and trialphium) also formed. Then helium, with mass four. But there is no stable atom with mass five. Because there is no atom with mass five, no one understood how carbon could ever have been made. Each new element is made from fusing the elements that came before it, but you can whiz hydrogen and helium around in a cosmic blender for as long as you want and you won't make carbon.

That is a problem, because if you can't make carbon in this way, then the rest of the periodic table looks impossible as well. But because the most usual mass of carbon is twelve, you'd have to get three helium atoms to collide at exactly the same time, at a vast temperature, in order to create it. It looked like it was impossible that this ever happened. Then the cosmologist Fred Hoyle reasoned that carbon had to exist since he was made of it, and worked out exactly how the "mass-five crevasse" could be jumped. In response to all this, George Gamow wrote a spoof of Genesis, in which he had God creating all the possible chemical masses but forgetting to create mass five in his excitement.

God was very much disappointed, and wanted first to contract the Universe again, and to start all over from the beginning. But it would be much too simple. Thus, being almighty, God decided to correct His mistake in a most impossible way. And God said: "Let there be Hoyle." And there was Hoyle. And God looked at Hoyle ... and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased.

Now, of course, carbon is the basis for life and, as the homoeopathy book pointed out, the inevitable outcome of death. So if you were going to create a mysterious concoction of any sort, carbon wouldn't be a strange inclusion at all—especially if you diluted it so that it didn't even exist anymore; so it was simply a memory.

I get to the health food shop at around half past four but although Patrick was right and they do have a homoeopathy section, there's no Carbo Vegetabilis. After trying Boots and Holland & Barrett I am feeling less confident about this mission. Boots didn't have Carbo Vegetabilis at all, and Holland & Barrett only had it in a 6C potency, about 994 times less dilute than I need it. It's gone five by the time I drift into the little shop by the Odeon cinema. I've never been into this place before, and I don't even know what it sells. When you walk past, it looks as if it is simply a door with no shop behind it, but if you look more closely there's a glass display built into the wall next to it. Inside the glass display are a couple of jars of what look like herbs, a copy of the Tao Te Ching, and a pack of tarot cards. The name of the shop— Selene, Greek for "moon"—is on the door, along with a faded sign in an ornate script inviting you to "come in and browse." I am hopeful that the shop may have homoeopathic medicines, though, since the woman in Holland & Barrett told me to come here.

As I open the door, something inside tinkles feebly. Beyond the door is a thin wooden staircase, and I walk up in the semidarkness. At the top of the stairs I find another door, this one with frosted glass panels, and I open this and walk into the tiny shop where I find a thin bald man sitting behind a desk reading a book. The shop smells strongly of sandalwood incense and is arranged in a small rectangle with the desk on the near left-hand side. The desk looks like something a nineteenth-century architect might have used: It's large and broad with what seem to be many drawers in it; each is only a couple of inches high, but about three feet wide. There's no cash register. Behind the desk is a frayed and curling poster in a script I can't understand, and next to that there's a wooden purple door covered with an orange bead curtain.

The man doesn't acknowledge me but I start drifting around the displays, anyway. The far left-hand side of the shop has a wobbly set of wooden shelves containing little brown bottles of homoeopathic remedies. I find Carbo Veg, but this time it's in the potency 30C. I sigh and walk around to the right, past plastic tubs containing crystals, and rows and rows of big penny-sweet jars of herbs. Underneath the herbs there's a small, dusty display of glass jars and vials, some stoppered with cork; others with simple screw-tops. I pick up a glass vial to use for the holy water. I can't see any other homoeopathic medicines anywhere. I walk over to the counter and wait for the man to look up.

"I'm looking for a homoeopathic medicine," I say.

"Over in the corner," he says, and goes back to his book.

"I know," I say. "I need it in a higher potency, though."

"Oh," he says. He looks at his watch. "We're actually about to close, so..."

"So you don't have any higher potencies?"

"We do," he says. "But we can't sell them over the counter."

I frown. "What, do I need a prescription or something?"

He shakes his head. "You pay for a consultation." He sighs. "Which remedy did you want?"

"Carbo Vegetabilis," I say, blushing as the unfamiliar word comes out.

"Sorry?" he says.

"Carbo Vegetabilis. The corpse-reviver. At least, that's what people seem to call it. I found it in one place but not in a strong enough potency."

"The corpse-reviver? Where did you get that?"

"Oh, a book," I say.

So much for trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

"Well, I've got it in everything up to 10M," he says.

"I want 1M," I say. "The thousandth potency. That's right, isn't it?"

He frowns again. "You know that higher potencies can be dangerous if you don't know what you're doing?"

I don't say what I'm thinking, which is: But it's just water.

"Yes," I say. "I know. It'll be fine."

"All right," he says. "But I'll have to give you some sort of consultation. What seems to be the problem?" He yawns while I say something about a headache. He lets me go on for a while and then, while I'm still talking, he opens up one of the big drawers and takes out a brown bottle.

"Yeah, yeah. OK. I prescribe Carbo-v," he says. "That'll be eight pounds. That's for the consultation. The remedy is free."

"Thanks," I say, taking the bottle. I pay for the "consultation" and the glass vial I picked up before. Then I leave.

Chapter Eleven

Somehow it's gone six o'clock by the time I'm back out on the freezing street. The light from car headlamps hangs mournfully in the thin mist and people are walking along wearing thick hats and gloves and carrying briefcases, or plastic bags full of lumpy shopping, or both. I decide to go home now and try to pick up the holy water on my way to Heather's instead. The cathedral is on my way to her house, anyway.

Wolfgang's bicycle is in the hallway when I get home. My hands are frozen, even though I kept them both clenched in my pockets all the way back, one holding the glass vial, the other holding the Carbo Vegetabilis. The first thing I do is hide the remedy in an old sugar tin at the back of one of my cupboards; I'm not entirely sure why. Then I put the glass vial on the table and run both my hands under warm water, trying to wash away the cold. I put some coffee on the stove and then go into the bathroom. I try brushing my hair but it's too tangled, so I stick it up in a band instead. I look at myself in the mirror and, as usual, wonder to what level I am cursed. Common sense says that curses don't exist. But then I think that later tonight I am going to make Lumas's concoction, drink it, and see what happens. My reflection doesn't seem to react to this thought, except I think I can sense a mild disappointment in my eyes. When the concoction fails to have any effect, then what? Then it's back to real life and real work without even an office to myself anymore. I put some face powder on my already pallid face and then apply some pale pink lipstick. I don't think I'll get changed again. The jeans I put on earlier are clean, if a bit washed-out and frayed, and all my jumpers look more or less the same, anyway.

After I've had my coffee, I wander down the hallway and bang on Wolfgang's door. He answers it almost immediately and invites me in to his kitchen. Neither of us has a fitted kitchen, just a couple of shelves and cupboards. Wolfgang's shelves are all crammed with nuts, seeds, and dried fruit in clear packets. His cupboards only contain alcohol, and that's why I'm here. As I walk in I realize that the kitchen smells cleaner than usual. Usually it only contains one Formicatopped table and one chair, and if I come to eat here I have to bring my own chair. This evening, however, there are two chairs and there is a little pot of flowers in the center of the table.

"Do you think this is an inviting space?" he asks me.

"Yes, of course," I say. "Especially with two chairs. Is Catherine coming round?"

"Catherine? No. I have finished with Catherine. I'm expecting someone much more special than Catherine."

"Your love life moves quickly," I say.

"Ha! Yes. Quickly and unexpectedly."

"OK. Well in that case I won't keep you..."

"You were not coming for dinner? Because as you know, any other night..."

"No," I say. "Don't worry. Although I wish I was looking for somewhere to have dinner. I'm actually about to go and meet the people who've taken over my office." I shake my head. "I don't know why I'm going, really."

"Ah," he says. "Then, if it is not one of my gourmet dinners, presumably you want something else?"

"Mmm. Yeah. I was wondering if you had any more of that dodgy wine."

Just before Christmas Wolfgang acquired about thirty bottles of Bulgarian red wine from person or persons unknown and he was selling it to me at a pound a bottle. I haven't bought any for a couple of weeks but I need to take a bottle over to Heather's and I don't want to pay a fiver in the supermarket when I've now only got about ten pounds left in the world.

He shakes his head. "Dodgy? How can you say my wine is dodgy?"

I laugh. "OK, then. Your totally legal wine."

His eyes flit horizontally to one of the cupboards. "I have a few bottles left."

"Can I have one?"

"Of course." He pulls one out of the cupboard. The label is written in Bulgarian, which does make it look pretty authentic and, dare I say it, expensive. "So how is life?" he asks, handing it over.

"OK," I say, giving him a pound coin. "Weird. Oh—did I tell you I finished the book?"

"The cursed book?"

"Yeah."

"And this recipe was there? You have the ingredients?"

I don't ask why on earth Wolf would make the accurate assumption that, once I knew these ingredients, the next thing I would do would be to track them down.

"No," I lie. "Sadly, it wasn't there."

"So what happens to Mr. Y?"

"Pretty much everything he feared would happen. There is one good thing: He makes up the concoction and takes it, and it does transport him back to the Troposphere. But it's all horrible. He enters his wife's mind and discovers how unhappy he has made her. Then he enters his business rival's mind and realizes he will never defeat him. Just before it becomes clear that he and his wife are going to have to go to the workhouse, he discovers a bit more about how the Troposphere works. You can in fact jump from one person's mind to another, just as Mr. Y thought. And by doing that you can travel across memories.... It's a bit like surfing, although Mr. Y gives it his own term: Pedesis."

"Across memories...? So perhaps like time travel?"

"I think that was the implication."

I remember the penultimate paragraph of the book.

"So what actually happens to Mr. Y?" Wolfgang asks. "In what sense does he meet his end?"

"Oh, he vanishes into the Troposphere."

"What, in his body?"

"No." I shake my head. "They find his body later."

Wolf's eyes open wide. "He dies?"

"Yes," I say. "There's an 'Editor's Note' at the end that explains how he was found, cold and dead, on the floor of his cellar. He had locked himself in and taken his last journey from there. His wife thought he had gone missing, and then discovered the locked cellar door and alerted the police. He had starved to death."

"And the author of this book, he died, too?"

"Yes."

"It is a good thing you don't have these ingredients then, isn't it?"

"Mmm."

Sometimes at night the cathedral gates are like an open mouth: an exclamation of surprise in a street crowded with old lopsided buildings, patched up and filled in over the years like teeth. Tonight the mouth is closed. The big wooden gate is up and there's a sign telling visitors that the precinct opens again tomorrow morning at eight thirty.

No holy water tonight then. No Pedesis.

But I know it's not real, so perhaps I'm just putting off knowing for sure. I could have gone to the cathedral earlier, after all. So it's real life again for the evening, but real life with an implicit promise of something else, something fictional. Another night of that isn't bad, although now I see the closed gates, I wish I had the holy water: I wish I had something dangerous to do later on.

I walk on along the twinkling, frosty pavements, using my new map to find Heather's street. It turns out to be in a side road just behind the cathedral: a small yellow-brick terrace with a black door. I knock twice with the silver knocker and then take a step back to wait for her to answer.

"Ariel, hello!" she says, when she opens the door. "Thanks so much for coming. Is that wine? Fantastic—I need as much as possible after the day I've had. How are you? Oh, sorry: Here I am, chatting away on the doorstep. Come in."

The door opens from the street right onto the sitting room. It's the kind of house lots of young academics seem to have before they get married and have children: pine floorboards, rugs, lots of bookshelves, framed Picasso prints, autumnal throws over the sofa and chairs, a coffee table with coffee-table books, and several lamps. It's what my place would probably look like if it had heating and no mice and I could be bothered to inhabit more than one room. I can smell garlic cooking, mingled with something in an oil burner; some combination of peppermint and lavender. The house is warm. Jazz is playing on a small speaker system. There's no sign of Adam.

"White or red?" Heather asks. "Oh, and make yourself at home, by the way. Put your coat anywhere—it's always a bit of a shambolic mess in here."

Why do people always say their houses are messy when they're not?

"Er, red, please. Your place is lovely, by the way. I love that print."

"Oh, it's cool, isn't it?" Heather says over her shoulder as she goes into the kitchen for my wine. She comes back and gives it to me in a huge glass with a silvery pink stem. "I love Picasso."

"I particularly like that one," I say, gazing up at it. "I like anything to do with four dimensions. It's kind of an obsession."

"Four dimensions?" she says. Then she groans. "Go on, tell me what I've missed. I never appreciate art properly: I just think, That's a pretty picture and then hang it on my wall. This is what happens when you're a biologist. You need humanities people to explain real life to you."

I laugh, and, after reassuring Heather that I only know a tiny bit about the cubists and the futurists, and not much else about art, say something about the way the woman's head could be said to be moving through time, or that, alternatively, a fourth-dimensional being is viewing her.

"Wow. That's so cool. I like The Scream best. But I thought it would be a bit studenty to have it on my wall, so I went for something a bit more sophisticated. I so love The Scream, though. It's how I feel most days."

"Why?"

"Oh, um..." There's a knock at the door. "That'll be Adam, I hope, and not some mass murderer." She laughs. "Hang on."

For no reason I'm aware of, my hands start to shake. I put my wine down and then pick it up again. There's a sharp blast of cold air as Heather opens the door and greets Adam. He looks exactly as he did earlier; the only difference is that his hair seems scruffier.

"Hi," he says to me, taking off his coat.

"Hello," I say back.

Heather tells him to put his coat anywhere and repeats her apology about "the mess" and then goes into the kitchen to get a glass of white wine for him. We stare at each other without moving or saying anything.

"So," she says, coming back. "I'm doing pasta and roasted vegetables. It's just simple—I hope that's OK with you, Adam."

"Yeah, thanks," he says, taking the wine while still looking at me. I'm looking right back at him, but this time he breaks the moment and focuses on Heather. "That sounds perfect."

Adam settles into a corner of the big sofa across the room from where I'm sitting. Without looking at either of us, he leans forward and examines the books on the coffee table. Once he's looked at them all he picks up a large hardback book called Weird Fish and starts flicking through it. None of us says anything for a couple of seconds. Heather must have her music on shuffle, because once the jazz track stops, a mournful acoustic guitar tune begins and a guy starts to sing about being alone in the small hours of the morning.

"Better put the pasta on," says Heather.

"Well," Adam says, once she's gone, "how's life?"

"Fine, I think. How about you? Are you settled in OK?"

"Yeah. And thanks for sharing your office with us."

"It's OK. Anyway, as I was telling Heather before, I didn't exactly have a choice."

"Ah. Right. So we were foisted on you?"

"Yeah. But I don't mind at all. Really."

Small talk, small talk. And now he's back to flicking through the pages of the book on his lap.

Heather comes back in.

"So, how's the world of religion?" Heather asks him. "How's life with God?"

"How should I know?" says Adam.

"Aren't you religious?" she says. "I thought..."

Adam smiles. "I'll give you the short answer: no."

"Oh, come on," says Heather. "What's the long answer? Oh!" Something in the kitchen has just gone "ding" and she jumps up to go and deal with it. "Sorry—it's my pasta, I think."

Adam gives me a look as if we're both about to rob a bank together. He also looks as if he doesn't really want to.

"Saved," he says.

I smile at him. "It's a shame, though," I say. "I would have liked the long version, too."

"Oh..." He sighs and runs his fingers through his hair.

"Hey—it doesn't matter," I say. "I'm only playing around. You don't have to tell me anything."

"I'd rather look at fish, to be honest," he says.

I smile. "Yeah, I think I know what you mean."

"They are weird, these fish. Have you seen them?"

"No."

"Come and look."

As I move onto the same sofa as him I'm reminded of all the times I've been with a man and chains of lies have led us first to the same house, then the same sofa, then the same bed. I'm tired. I'm cold. Come here, I want to show you something. It always ends in fucking. I'm sitting only a couple of inches from him now, but, of course, Heather's in the kitchen. I pull down the sleeves of my jumper to cover my wrists.

"Look," he says, pointing.

The book is open on a full-page image of a transparent fish. It looks like a used condom with red teeth.

"Yuck!" I say. But I actually quite like it. "Does it have a name?"

"I don't think so. Look at this one."

Adam turns the page and leans the book towards me. There's what looks like a fish, but instead of a normal fish "face" with bulging eyes and a little mouth this thing seems to have the head of a stone monkey, as if someone just slapped two things together—the fish body and the monkey head—as a joke, or even as an accident.

"What would you call that?" I say.

"I don't know. Monkey Fish? Pretend Monkey Fish?"

He turns the page and there's another picture. It looks like a worm with a disembodied vulva coming out of it. I want to laugh but I don't.

"Orchid fish," he says. And then we're called into the dining room to eat.

"So please tell me you don't approve of teaching creationism to kids," Heather says to Adam about five minutes after we've started eating. "Or whatever they're calling it now: intelligent design."

We're eating pasta and roasted vegetables, as promised, with a large salad. Until this new conversational segue, Heather had been talking about her problems finding any decent men at the university. The pasta is almost as impossibly bouncy as she is, and the white spirals slither off your fork if you aren't careful. The vegetables—cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, aubergines, and roasted onions—have been coated with olive oil and lemon juice and they've got that sticky, almost caramelized texture. There's garlic bread, too, and I'm eating as much as I can. In fact, until this moment I'd been much more interested in the food than in the conversation. I tend to hate dinner party conversations, but even I can see that this one could get interesting.

"In what sense?" Adam says.

"As part of science courses," Heather says.

"Aren't creationism and intelligent design different?" I say.

"Not really," she says. "Intelligent design claims to be scientific but it's not: After all, it deals with things you can't ever know."

"The intelligent design people are the ones who say that evolution is too complicated to have happened all by itself, aren't they?" I say.

"Yeah," Heather says. "Like, duh. Just because they don't understand it..."

"I wouldn't teach religion as science," Adam says. "But we do teach parts of science in our religion courses, if that's any help."

"Like what?" Heather says.

"We teach creation myths," says Adam. "And we include the big bang."

"How precisely is the big bang a myth?" Heather asks.

"It's a story," Adam says. "Just like the story that the world hatched from a giant egg, or that God said Let there be light and there suddenly was. They're all just stories about the genesis of the world—none of us was there to gather the actual facts, so we have to conclude that the whole thing is unknowable."

I think about saying something about Alexander Pope's lines on Newton:

Then I think about saying something about thought experiments. Then I think about time and the universe, and I'm about to say something about that, but Heather's faster.

"We are of course still part of the big bang," she says. "So we're observing it all the time. We are 'there' right now." She grins. "I'm no cosmologist or astrobiologist, you understand, but that part of it is blindingly obvious, especially if you've read Jim Lahiri. By the way, help yourselves to more wine and everything."

"I enjoyed the Lahiri book," I say, pouring more wine and taking another slice of garlic bread. "I liked that bit about how the universe contains its own past and present—and, possibly, future, although I didn't completely go along with all that speculative stuff—and that since everything in the universe was originally part of the primordial particle, we could be said to have been 'there' at the beginning."

"Not that I want to cause a row or anything," Adam says, smiling. "But I can't agree with big bang theory any more than I can agree with people who think the world is held up by giant turtles."

"But you can't not agree with big bang theory!" Heather says.

"Why not?"

"Well, it's not an opinion; it's a well-established theory, with plenty of evidence. It's certainly not something you can choose to agree or disagree with. You could try to disprove it, but that's something different."

"So you can form an opinion on, say, creationism, or whether or not there's a God, but I can't form an opinion on whether the universe started as an unimaginably small speck that, for no reason at all, simply exploded?"

"OK, I admit that the beginning bit is pretty far-fetched," Heather says.

"And there is the problem of what came before the beginning," I say.

"Yes, yes," says Heather. "But you can put all that to one side and look at all the evidence for the big bang. The simplest bit to understand is the expanding universe. Once you realize that everything in the universe is moving, and every piece is moving farther away from every other piece, then you realize that, well, yesterday, all the pieces were a bit closer together, and the day before that, a bit closer still. Rewind the tape to the beginning and you see that logically everything must have been lumped together."

"But as a tiny speck...?" says Adam. "Everything's not getting bigger, is it?"

"It depends how you define 'big,'" says Heather. "The universe is getting bigger, but it doesn't have more matter in it. That's the other thing—the universe is a closed system with the same amount of matter that never changes."

"Unless you listen to Stephen Hawking circa 1980," I say.

"I could never get my head around all that black hole stuff," says Heather. "But anyway, Adam, you have to agree with the reverse tape scenario."

"Do I? Oh, can I have some more vegetables, please?"

"Only if you agree with me," says Heather, laughing.

"Oh, well in that case..." Adam holds up his hands as if to stop something big from crashing into him.

"No, I'm only kidding. Here..." She pushes the dish of vegetables towards Adam. "But I still don't see how you can disagree with scientific fact."

"'Fact' is a word. Science itself is just a collection of words. I'm guessing that truth exists beyond language, and what we call 'reality.' It must do; well, if it exists at all, that is."

"Come again?" says Heather, frowning.

"Aha," I say, nodding and raising an eyebrow. "He may have you there."

"It's all just an illusion," says Adam. "Creation myths, religion, science. We tell ourselves how time works—so, for example, you can imagine running your tape-of-the-universe backwards and be sure of what you'd get in this portion of time we call 'yesterday'—but yesterday only exists because we made it up: It's not real. You can't prove to me that yesterday even happened. Everything we tell ourselves to believe is simply a fiction, a story."

"Well," says Heather, "you can't argue with that—which makes me suspicious. And anyway, if all reality is just an illusion, then why do we bother?"

"Bother what?"

"Trying to work it all out. Trying to find the truth."

"You can try to find the truth outside reality," Adam says.

"By doing what exactly?"

Adam shrugs. "Meditation, I think. Or possibly getting very drunk."

I was going to say something pithy about Derrida, but Heather looks genuinely upset now so I decide not to.

"Meditation isn't science," she says.

"That's the point," says Adam.

"For God's sake," she says, slightly breathlessly. "All that woolly, superstitious stuff ... No offense, but you just need words and logic to do science. I teach this evening class on the scientific method for adult returners and I always give them the example of the spiders' webs outside the room I teach in. Basically there's this long passageway outside the classroom with these orange lights attached to the wall. The lights are always on. In the evening you can see the spiders' webs stretched over the lights, and you can see all the crane flies and other night insects that get trapped in them. You could look at that and think: Aren't the spiders clever because they know to build webs where the other insects will fly because they're attracted to the light. Or you can go one step further and realize that you can only see the webs near the lights and that's why you have assumed those are the only ones. A poet might stand there and dream about the cunningness of spiders. A scientist would record exactly how many webs there are, and where, and conclude that some of them are built over the lights just by chance."

"But all of that just proves what I'm saying," Adam says. "I wouldn't conclude that the spiders intended to use the light to help trap the insects. I'd assume that I could never understand what the spiders were doing and why, because I'm not a spider."

"But scientists have to try to understand things. They have to ask why."

"Yes, but they'll never get a proper answer," Adam says.

"Anyway," I say, in a louder voice than I intended. "Er ... Anyway, I was just going to say that this stuff about science and language is really interesting in relation to something I read about the big bang. It's a bit complicated, but it shows that if you start with a few basic assumptions about the big bang, then logic takes you to a situation where we're either living in a multiverse, or a universe created by God. There's really no other option."

"My head's going to be wrecked by the end of tonight," says Heather.

"Just drink more wine," says Adam, smiling at her.

I've just finished the last piece of garlic bread and Heather and Adam have both put down their knives and forks. I pick up my bag and take out a packet of cigarettes.

"If you're into all this meditation, are you supposed to drink wine?" Heather asks.

"Oh, I do it very rarely," says Adam.

I don't know if he means meditation or drinking and although I expect Heather to ask him, she doesn't. Instead, she picks up a stray rocket leaf and puts it back in the salad bowl.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" I ask her.

"No, not at all. I'll open the back door though, if you don't mind."

She gets up to do that and Adam and I briefly start making movements towards clearing the table before she tells us not to fuss and just leave it all.

"No, come on," she says. "Tell me about this whole God-or-the-multiverse thing."

"OK," I say, lighting my cigarette. "Sorry—do you have some sort of ashtray? I can go outside if you want..."

"No, I'll get you a saucer."

"God or the multiverse," says Adam softly as Heather gets a saucer. "Hmm."

"Are you both familiar with basic quantum physics?" I say. "Not the really hardcore stuff, but the kind of thing you'd find in a popular science book. You know, the wavefunction and probability and that sort of thing."

Adam's shaking his head. Heather cocks her head to one side as if she's trying to make the information roll down a hill in her mind and come to rest in a place she can access it.

"I should know it," she says. "I think I did know it once. But you ignore all that stuff when you're working on the molecular level. It just doesn't have any perceivable effects so it can be disregarded."

"I'm afraid I'm completely in the dark," says Adam.

"OK, well in a nutshell—and I warn you, I'm doing a humanities Ph.D. so you could probably get this from a more reliable source—quantum physics deals with subatomic particles, in other words, particles that are smaller than atoms."

Adam now frowns. "Call me nuts, but I'm having this odd sensation as if I'd seen one of these particles once or something," he says. "Maybe I'm drunk. I must have learnt this at some point and then forgotten it. Anyway, despite all that, my brain is begging me to ask you: What on earth is smaller than an atom?"

"Oh, well, everyone knows that an atom is made up of neutrons, protons, and electrons," says Heather.

"And those parts are all made up of quarks," I say. "Apart from the electron, which is indivisible—or at least people think it is. People thought the atom was indivisible a hundred years ago, and before that they didn't think it existed, so it's not as if we know everything."

It's cold with the back door open; Heather gets up and takes a small cardigan from the back of a chair and puts it on.

"I think we're pretty sure about the electron," she says. "Brrr. It's cold."

Adam and I exchange a look.

"Anyway," I say, "quantum physics deals with those tiny particles of matter. But when physicists first began theorizing about these particles and observing them in action in particle accelerators and so on, they found out that the subatomic world doesn't act the way we'd expect."

"How?" asks Adam.

"All that common sense stuff—the past happening before the future, cause and effect, Newtonian physics, and Aristotelian poetics—none of it is applicable at a subatomic level. In a deterministic universe, which is the sort Newton thought we lived in, you can always tell what's going to happen next, if you have enough information about what went before. And you can always know things for sure. It's either day or night, for example: It's never both at once. On a quantum level, things don't make sense in that way."

"This is the stuff that does my head in," says Heather.

"Yeah, it's weird," I say. "It's like ... there are particles that can go through walls just like that. There are pairs of particles that seem to be connected and stay connected in some way even when they are separated by millions of miles. Einstein called it 'spooky action at a distance' and rejected it completely, as it seemed to suggest that information could travel faster than the speed of light."

"And nothing can travel faster than the speed of light," Heather says. "I'm with Einstein on that one."

"Anyway, one of the weirdest things about subatomic particles is that something peculiar happens when you observe them. Until they are observed, they exist in a smeared-out state of all possible positions in the atom: the superposition, or the wavefunction."

Adam's shaking his head. "You've lost me, I'm afraid," he says.

"OK," I say. "Imagine that you are out on a walk and I don't know where you are. You could be at the university, in the park, in the shop, in a spaceship, on Pluto, whatever. These are all possibilities, although some are more likely than others."

"All right," says Adam.

"Well, conventional logic tells us that you are definitely in one place or another, regardless of whether or not I've seen you there, or know for sure that you are there. You are somewhere, I just don't know where that is."

Adam's nodding and, for a second, I imagine a life so normal that I could be with someone like him, perhaps sharing a house like this, and have such a mundane, but somehow amazing, thought: Is he in the shop or is he at work?

"Anyway," I say, "obviously you're standing in for the particle in this example ... Well, quantum physics says that when your situation is unknown—so you could be in the shop or in the park for all I know—you actually exist in all places at once until someone finds out for sure by observing you. So instead of one clear 'reality,' there's a smear. You're in the shop and the park and the university, and it's only when I go out looking for you and see that you're in the park that all the other possibilities melt away and reality is set."

"So observation has an effect on reality?" says Adam.

"Yes—well, in this way of looking at it. This idea that all probabilities exist as a wavefunction until an external observer looks at—and therefore collapses—the wavefunction is called the Copenhagen interpretation."

"Are there other ways?"

"Yes. There's the many-worlds interpretation. In a nutshell, while the Copenhagen interpretation suggests that all probabilities collapse into one definite reality on observation, the many-worlds interpretation suggests that all the possibilities exists at once, but that each one has its own universe to go with it. So there are, literally, many worlds, each one with a tiny difference. So in one universe you're in the park and in another you're at work and in another you're on the moon, or at the zoo or wherever."

"Those are the only two choices, right?" Heather says. "Like most people believe in one or other of those two?"

"Yeah, I think so," I say. "I think most people favor the Copenhagen interpretation, though."

"So how does this relate to the big bang?"

"Well," I say. "If you imagine the primordial particle: the thing that went 'bang' fourteen billion years ago ... That particle should be just like any other particle. It would have its own wavefunction—a series of probabilities about where it was and what it was doing. So what we know of quantum physics suggests that unless an external observer showed up and observed the exact state of the particle, its wavefunction would not collapse. In other words, it would exist in a state of all the different probabilities at once. It would be both fast and slow, moving left and right, here and over there all at once. An observer external to the universe must be God. So perhaps God collapsed the wavefunction that became the universe. In other words, out of all probabilities God collapsed the original particle into one universe, in which we now live. That's the Copenhagen interpretation applied to the original particle. If you reject that, you're left with the many-worlds interpretation, which would suggest that there is no external observer and no collapse. Instead, all the probabilities exist 'out there'—every possible universe you could think of exists alongside this one: some hot, some cold, some with people, some without, some that create their own 'baby universes' and some that don't..."

Heather groans. "I knew there was a reason I'd forgotten this stuff."

"What if you reject this quantum physics?" asks Adam.

"Then I guess your CD player and credit cards stop working."

"I don't have a CD player or a credit card."

I grin at him. "Yes, but you know what I mean. Real technology is built on quantum physics. Engineers have to learn it. I mean, it is nuts, but it works out there in the real world."

"God or the multiverse," says Heather. "Which one would you choose?"

"I'm not happy with either of them," I say. "But probably God—whatever that actually means. Call it the Thomas Hardy interpretation: I'd rather have something out there that means something than feel like I exist in a vast ocean of pure meaninglessness."

"What about you, Adam?"

"God," he says. "Even though I thought I'd given all that up." He smiles without showing his teeth, as if doing more with his mouth would break his face. "No, it does make sense: the idea of an external consciousness. I prefer that anyway, given this choice."

"Oh well, I'm on my own then with the multiverse," says Heather.

"You're never alone in the multiverse," I say.

"Ha ha," she says. "Seriously, I can't believe that God made life, not with the research I'm doing. I mean the evidence just isn't there. And I get so many threatening letters from creationists that I just can't align myself to them in any way."

"I don't think this means aligning yourself with creationists," I say. "Surely some external being could have sparked the very beginning of the universe and then everything else just evolved as scientists think it did."

Although as I say this I think: via Newtonian cause and effect, and I realize that this is at odds with the idea of a quantum universe, and I suddenly don't know what to say.

"What is your research exactly?" asks Adam.

"Looking for LUCA," she says. "Well, that's how the headlines put it whenever science journalists write about it. LUCA stands for Last Universal Common Ancestor. In other words, searching for the mother of us all."

"She's got this computer model," I say. "You have to see it next time you're in the office. I didn't understand it when I looked at it, but it still gave me the shivers somehow."

"The universal mother," says Adam. "Interesting."

"Don't tell me—you're thinking like the Garden of Eden, with...," she begins.

"No, no. The great mother. The beginning of everything. The Tao is called the Great Mother: Empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds. That's from the Tao Te Ching."

"Oh," says Heather. "Well, that's just as bad. Who wants pudding?"

Chapter Twelve

After pudding—baked apricots with honey, cashew nuts, and brandy—and a long conversation about LUCA, and some other entity called FLO (the first living organism), Adam and I thank Heather and leave together, trying not to slip on the frosty pavement.

After we are out of earshot of the house, Adam laughs.

"What?" I say.

"Well, I didn't like to say, but I'm not sure I care about which type of bacteria we evolved from."

"Biologists do always tend towards the most depressing explanations for things," I say. "I wasn't convinced by Heather's reaction to my idea about machine consciousness, either."

"No. She likes the status quo, I think."

"I think so, too. But I don't see what's wrong with the argument. At some point animals evolved from plants and conscious life was formed. What is consciousness? Obviously it's made from the same quarks and electrons as everything else, perhaps just arranged in a different way. But consciousness is obviously something that can evolve. Samuel Butler said as much in the nineteenth century. If human consciousness could evolve from nothing, then why can't machine consciousness do the same thing?"

There are obvious objections to this idea, some of which Heather did point out. For example: What if consciousness can only exist in organic life-forms? But what is an organic life-form? Machines can self-replicate. They're made from carbon. They need fuel, just like we do.

"Unless consciousness isn't made from matter," says Adam.

"Yeah, well that's possible, too," I say. "But I do sometimes wonder: If a computer read every book in the whole world, would it eventually start to understand language?"

"Hmm," says Adam. Then, after a long pause: "It's cold."

"Yeah. I'm freezing."

It's almost silent as we walk towards the city center. It's past midnight and as we approach the cathedral the only sounds I can hear are the distant humming noises of trucks outside shops; the creaking sound of men unloading blouses and sandwiches and packaged salads and coffee beans and newspapers so they can appear in the shops to-morrow, as if they came to be there by magic.

"Do we know each other?" Adam suddenly asks.

I pause, and then say: "In what sense?"

"I mean I thought I knew you when I saw you earlier today."

I take a deep breath: cold air in my lungs. "I thought the same thing."

"But I don't know you. I'm sure of it."

"Well..." I shrug. "Perhaps we did meet before and forgot."

"I wouldn't forget. I wouldn't forget meeting you."

"Adam...," I start.

"Don't say anything," he says. "Just look."

We're just walking past the cathedral gates. If you stop and look up where Adam's pointing now you can see Jesus looking down on you, carved in stone.

"It is amazing," I say, without thinking. "Even if you don't believe in all the rest of it, Jesus is a remarkable figure." Then I laugh. "That sounded so stupid and banal. Sorry. I'm sure no one even disagrees with that."

"You'd be surprised," Adam says.

"Oh," I say, suddenly remembering standing in the same spot earlier on, but looking at the gates, rather than up at Jesus. "Do you know anything about holy water?"

"That's a strange question."

"I know." We start walking again, turning off down a small cobbled street towards my flat. It occurs to me that maybe we are going to go back to my place and sleep together; maybe I could do that. But instead of my usual excitement I feel something else: the same feeling I got when I looked at my computer screen and saw how dirty it was earlier on. I'm dirty, and I'm busy doing something to help me escape. But we're walking on towards my flat, anyway.

"What do you want to know?"

"Um, well, all sorts of things, but mainly where I would get some."

"Get some?" I can't see his expression in the darkness but I can hear the frown in his voice. "Are you a Catholic?"

"No. I'm not religious at all. My mother believed in aliens."

"Ah."

"Yes. But why do you ask?"

"Only Catholics have holy water. You'd find it in any Catholic church."

"Not in the cathedral?"

"No. Not usually."

"I was sure I remembered fonts in the cathedral. I was going to go there before, but it was all locked up."

"There are fonts. But they're empty. The Anglican Church gave up on holy water centuries ago."

"Oh. So, presumably if you want to get holy water from a Catholic church you have to go in the day?"

"No. Not always. You..." He pauses. "Do you want to get some now?"

"Maybe. Yes. Maybe. I don't know."

"Can I ask why?"

"Probably best if you don't. It's, well, something you probably wouldn't approve of. Have you ever heard of the physicist George Gamow?"

"No. While you tell me about him shall we walk the other way? I'll show you where to find holy water."

"Really?"

"Yes. I've got a key to St. Thomas's. This way."

I follow him across a car park and through a small passageway onto Burgate. Burlem's house is just across the ring road, past St. Augustine's on a leafy residential road. I wonder what the house looks like now. I imagine it all boarded up and then realize that's silly: People don't board up houses nowadays. Maybe Burlem sold it. Maybe he's even there? I did go and knock on the door last year, but no one answered. Adam and I turn left and walk past the comic shop: a whole window display of superheroes and villains; good guys and bad guys. As we walk I put Burlem out of my head and instead tell Adam about George Gamow and how, when he was a kid, he once kept a Communion wafer instead of swallowing it and put it under his microscope to see if there was any difference between it and a normal wafer. I tell Adam that what I want with the holy water is somewhat similar to this—basically an experiment not at all in keeping with the spirit of Catholicism. Then we're at the church.

"I'll understand if you don't actually want to let me in now," I say.

"No. I like the sound of your experiment. And it doesn't matter to me, anyway."

Inside the church doors it's dark and smells of incense and cold stone. We don't go right inside: It turns out that the holy water is in a little font just inside the entrance. I notice that Adam crosses himself in front of an image of the Virgin Mary. I take out my vial.

"I'm sure this isn't something you should be letting me do," I say.

"It's only water," says Adam. "There are no rules to say you can't take some away with you. And like I said, all of this doesn't mean anything to me anymore."

But he doesn't watch as I dip the vial into the font. Instead he walks beyond me and starts fiddling with leaflets and copies of the Catholic Herald. There's a poster on the wall with the words Shrine of St. Jude on it. Adam lifts his fingers to it and touches it briefly. I don't think he realizes that I'm watching him. I look away.

"Can I ask why you have keys to the church?" I say to him as we leave.

"Oh, I'm a priest," he says. "Or, at least, I was. Can we go back to your place?"

Through someone else's eyes my kitchen must be a dark, fetid, oppressive space that smells of garlic and cigarettes. There's also a cursed book on the mantelpiece: a slim, pale volume that you don't even notice, if you are someone else.

"Sorry," I say to Adam, as we walk in.

But I'm not exactly sure what I'm sorry about. The thick gray dust on the top of the door frame? The broken arm of the sofa? The burn marks on the old kitchen work surfaces? The peeling green lino? I don't even see those things when I'm on my own. I want to open a window, but it's too cold. I want to turn on all the gas rings like I usually do, but I don't.

"Sorry it's so cold," I say.

"My place is freezing," says Adam. "I live on campus."

"Do you? Where?"

"I've got a room in Shelley College. It's tiny and smells of macaroni and cheese all the time. This is luxurious—believe me."

"Would you like some coffee?" I ask him.

"Just some water, please, if that's all right."

I fill a glass with tap water for Adam and then put on coffee for myself. A train goes past outside and the thin sash window rattles gently. I see a tiny movement in the corner of the room—there and then gone, like a phantom particle. A mouse.

"I like this place," Adam says, sitting down on the sofa.

When my coffee's ready I sit down on the old sofa next to him. I don't think I've ever actually sat on this sofa with another human being. It feels a bit like sitting on a train, our backs facing the direction of travel, both being careful not to let our knees touch.

"What's the Shrine of St. Jude?" I ask him.

"Oh, that. You noticed."

"I just saw it on the wall in the church. I've heard the name before: St. Jude. What's he the saint of?"

"Lost and hopeless causes. The shrine's in Faversham. I go there whenever..."

"What?"

"Just whenever things go wrong. You're not asking me the obvious question."

"What obvious question?"

"About me being a priest."

"I'm not very good at asking those questions," I say.

There's a pause. I should say something else; I know that it's my line next. And I do want to know. Usually I would want to know everything about being a priest and how it's possible to be a priest and then not be one. I want to ask why he still crossed himself in the church, for example. But now I've got the holy water and the Carbo-veg and it's just like those days when I kept a razor in a box and I just wanted everyone to go away so I could do what I wanted, on my own.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" I ask Adam.

He shrugs. "It's your flat."

"Yeah, I know, but..."

"Honestly. Don't mind me."

He sips his water while I light up. I see the slight shake of his left hand holding the water, and then I look away, my gaze moving over the scarred kitchen surfaces: the time I burned the rice; the time I scalded myself; the time I cut my finger.

"What was it like?" I ask, forcing my thoughts to stop. "Or even what is it like?"

"What?"

"Being that religious; I mean, being religious enough to be a priest."

He puts his water down and sits forward, leaning his elbow on his knee and propping up his face with his right hand. He uses his forefinger to draw around the edge of his face, as if he was blind and wanted to know what his own face looked like.

"I've been thinking about this," he says. "I've been trying to put it into words but I didn't have anyone to tell and ... Now I've met you I think maybe you'll understand. In fact, I know you will."

"Why do you think that?"

Now he puts both his hands over his face and lets his head drop into them.

"I don't know."

"Adam?"

"I'm sorry. I'm not even sure I want to talk about what you want to talk about. I didn't even stop being a priest because I wasn't religious enough ... I was just being stupid back at Heather's. I didn't lose my faith because I wanted to have sex with little boys or old men or young women or anything like that. I studied the Tao Te Ching—years ago, now—and decided to follow The Way alongside being a priest. It's not unusual—lots of people do it. But it undermined my faith. I just wanted to desire nothing, but that was something that I desired, obviously, and it almost drove me mad. And then I couldn't stop thinking about paradoxes. I thought about the virgin birth and the mystery of faith and everything else. I didn't hate the paradoxes—they're the basis for the church, after all—but I started wanting more of them. I wanted to see what a pure paradox would look like. Eventually I realized that I simply needed silence, so I joined a silent order for two years and thought about nothing. Then I stopped. I can't explain this very well ... And you're right. Why am I telling you this? Where have I seen you before? Shit. I should go."

"Adam..."

He gets up. "I'm sorry for barging in here. This isn't the right place for me."

He's right. I fuck old men and become obsessed with curses and rare books. He needs someone more sensible than me to talk to. I look at his old clothes and messed-up hair and imagine his dark, strong forearms. I wonder if he's ever even been to bed with anyone?

I take a deep breath. Why am I always the wrong person?

And, without either of us seeming to do anything, we're now pressing against each other, kissing as though it's midnight at the party at the end of the world. I feel his cock get hard, and I push myself against him. This feels different. There's something real about this that I thought I'd forgotten.

"I'm sorry," he says after about twenty seconds, pulling away. "I can't do this."

"I don't know what happened there," I say, acting as if I agree that this is a bad idea. I can't catch his eye. I turn towards the stove, as if I've got something important to cook. Can you have a disappointment cake? A rejection cake? An unhappy birthday cake?

"I'm sorry," says Adam, behind me. "I'm ... I shouldn't drink. I'm not used to it."

By the time I say sorry, he's gone. I'm a fucking idiot. Or am I? When attractive young guys offer me something, they always take it away again pretty soon afterwards, so it's probably best that this never happened. What's a man like Adam going to get from me, anyway? If you're someone like Adam, you can sleep with anyone. If he had a shower and put on a suit or something, well, I can't imagine any woman turning him down. With someone like Adam, it doesn't matter about my iPod, or my smooth neck, or my tits that have not (yet) sagged. I don't have cellulite, and men over the age of fifty therefore feel lucky to sleep with me. What have I got that Adam could possibly want? In the sexual economy, I've got millions in the offshore account called "Older Men," but I think I'd get turned down for an account anywhere else.

I used to have a black marker pen, but I don't know where it went. It was a big, phallic, chemical-smelling thing, and I used it to write the number of this flat on one of the bins in Luigi's backyard. But that was, what, a year and a half ago? It's not in the kitchen drawer, and it isn't in the cup of pens on the shelf. Damn. The closest thing I can find is a black Biro. I do have a white piece of cardboard, however. It's the backing from a cheap pair of fishnet tights I bought from the market last spring, and it's been lying on my chest of drawers since then. So I draw the black circle on the card: It takes five minutes just to color it in.

I also have a black mark on my arm; the place where I dug the pen in experimentally to see what it would feel like; to see if it would be like it used to be.

The holy water looks murky in the glass vial. I get the page from The End of Mr. Y and lay it on the kitchen counter to check the instructions. OK, so I have to mix the Carbo-veg into the holy water and succuss the mixture several times. That's just shaking, surely? I seem to remember from the homoeopathy books that it is. As I reach up to the cupboard to get the Carbo-veg out of the sugar tin, the single page from Lumas's book floats onto the floor. I pick it up and note that the edge is now slightly damp. I remember seeing some Sellotape in the kitchen drawer, so I get that out and spend the next few minutes carefully repairing the book, matching up the jagged tear in the page with the jagged tear left behind between pages 130 and 133. You can see the join, obviously, but the page is now part of the book again.

I remember that you're not supposed to touch homoeopathic medicines, so I tip one of the pills onto a metal spoon. It makes a tiny clinking sound. Then I unplug the cork from the vial and put the pill inside. It bobs on the surface for a second and then sinks, the water becoming cloudier as it begins to dissolve. My heart's a little rubber ball bouncing against my rib cage. I don't know why I'm nervous: All I'm doing is adding a little sugar pill to some water. Still, I stand there shaking the mixture for several minutes and then, remembering something I read earlier on, I give the vial a couple of little taps on a tea towel folded up on the work surface. I look, and see that the pill has completely dissolved into the water. So now I'm going to drink it.

Am I? Is holy water sterile, or even hygienic? How many people's fingers have been in it? Probably not that many. Come on, Ariel. But ... Does the priest put it out at night, or in the morning? This is stupid. Cross with myself for caring about anything as banal as how many people's fingers have been in the water, I uncork the vial and force myself to drink a large mouthful. There. Now I don't have to think about it anymore. I take the piece of cardboard and lie down on the sofa, drunk and tired and now feeling a little sick.

Black dot, black dot. A smear. And then I'm asleep.

I dream of mice. I dream of a mouse-world, bigger than this one, with a faint voice saying to me You have choice, or something like that, all night long.

I don't wake up until gone ten o'clock, shivering in my jeans and jumper on the sofa, with hard winter light glaring at me through the kitchen window. I must have dropped the piece of cardboard as I fell asleep, because it's on my stomach now. In daylight it looks pathetic: a scribble on a cheap, floppy bit of off-white card. I should have done better, really, but I was quite drunk. So it didn't work. Or it didn't work because I messed it up. How long do you keep trying, though, before you realize that you've been fooled by fiction (again) and it's the familiar, disappointing world that is real? You have choice. I have the choice to stop obsessing about being cursed. I have the choice to stop drinking concoctions suggested by rare books. I could try to sell the book, presumably, even though it is damaged? But even as I think this I know that nothing would make me give it up. So I'll keep the book, but go back to normal. I'll write something about curses for the magazine. I'll get on with my Ph.D. A chapter on Lumas about the blurring between fiction and nonfiction, and the thought experiment that becomes a physical experiment. A trick that makes you see the world anew...

Except I don't feel like I'm seeing the world anew. I feel like I haven't even been to sleep. And my stomach hurts, like period pain but slightly higher up. That water must have been contaminated. Maybe I should eat something. Maybe that will help.

There's still some soya milk in the fridge, so I put porridge on the stove, and coffee. As I go to the bedroom for a different jumper I realize how cold and tired I really am. I think I need a scarf as well. As I pull the thick black sweater over my head and wrap a long black woollen scarf around my neck, I look out of the window. There are little icicles hanging off the inside window frame: the kind of detail you vow to recall for people at some point in the future when your life is sorted out and you want to tell an anecdote about how poor you were that winter, and how dismal your flat was. But every day I grow less and less confident in that future. I'm not sure I want it, anyway. Ha ha, when I was poor. Ha, ha, have you seen that play? Ha ha, I know this is really bad, but I've actually been thinking lately that it might make sense to vote Conservative. I want to swerve to avoid that life at all costs. Maybe I'll just live like this forever. So I'm not that interested in the meaning of the icicles. There are icicles. I smile briefly, even though no one's looking, and wrap the scarf around my neck one more time.

I walk back down the long hallway, and into the kitchen, through the wooden door that's thick with decades of gloss paint. Then I have an odd feeling that the door is much too small or I am much too big. It feels exactly like déjà vu, as if I'm about to shrink and look up at a door that is a hundred times my size, rather than a foot or so taller than me. But it doesn't happen; it just sits there in my mind: a parallel thought; perhaps something that's happening to some other me, out there in the multiverse. The sensation reminds me of the time someone gave me mushroom tea without telling me and I spent the whole evening watching this pink and cream suburban sitting room grow and shrink around me. I remember the TV being on in the corner; some Saturday night game show where loud, happy, healthy families competed against one another to win a new car or a holiday. At one point the TV towered over me, as if I could walk inside the screen. But the image I remember most vividly is when the room shrank to the size of a sugar cube. I was looking down on it, on the room I was in, but I wasn't inside the room anymore. Afterwards I asked my friend how he thought that could have worked. Where was I if I wasn't in the room? He just smiled and said, "Inside a bad trip, man." What an idiot. I close my eyes and open them again. The door's normal. I really must have drunk too much last night.

After breakfast I consider going in to the university but instead decide to stay here. OK, so the heat costs money here, but as long as I use the gas it should be OK, at least for a day while I try to get my thoughts together. Did I throw myself at Adam last night or did he throw himself at me? I can't be in a room with him today, anyway. It's still so cold, so I switch on the oven and then sit on the sofa with my knees pulled into my body, smoking and thinking about what to do next. I could write something, but I can't. I could read something—but what do you read after Mr. Y? I could just sit here all day and wait for the curse to hit me. But there is no curse. The only curse in my life is me.

You have choice.

What was going on in my dream?

While I'm cleaning my teeth, shivering in the damp bathroom (by far the coldest room in the flat), I remember that the marker pen is in the bathroom cabinet. Of course. I bought that weird shampoo that came in an unmarked bottle and I wanted to write on it in case I bought something else from that market stall and became confused. It's the kind of thing I do when I should be working: write labels on shampoo bottles; iron jeans; think about seagulls. I don't think I really cared about the shampoo: It was just something to do. I open the cabinet and there it is, a thick black pen lying there alongside some old paracetamol and a broken hairbrush. As soon as I open the door it rolls out and I catch it before it falls in the sink. OK.

Ten minutes later I'm sitting on the sofa again, this time with a fresh cup of coffee, a cigarette, and a perfect black circle on the back of a perfect white card. I went through all the random mail from downstairs until I found a birthday card, probably about a year old, inside a pale blue envelope. Happy 20th, Tamsin, it said. We'll come and see you soon. It was signed Maggie and Bill. But that bit's in the bin now. I've got the other bit: a rectangle of card with a Victorian pastoral scene on one side, and bright white nothingness on the other. Well, now it's bright white nothingness with a small black circle in the middle of it, perfectly filled in.

I stub out my cigarette and drain the last of the coffee, turning the card over and looking at the Victorian image again. It's dated 1867, and it's called Summer Landscape, although its colors seem autumnal. It looks like such a peaceful place: red earth carpeted with thick grass and canopied with emerald and bronze trees; a path by a river where you could walk in complete silence. I turn the card over and there's the circle again. Circle. Soothing landscape. Circle. Soothing landscape. I know which one makes the best birthday card. Right. Are you supposed to wait fifteen minutes before doing this? The homoeopathy books I read yesterday all said that homoeopathic medicines should be taken on a clean mouth, fifteen minutes after eating or drinking. But that's OK. If it doesn't work then I can blame the coffee and start again later. As long as I keep doing it wrong I'll have something to do all day. Then, this evening, I can admit that my adventure is over and go back to normal life. Maybe I'll reread Erewhon. That usually cheers me up.

So I pick up the vial and give it another little shake. What the hell—I bang it hard twice on the side of the sofa. I suppose I've probably done too much succussing now, but surely that makes it more potent, not less? I think back to the homoeopathy books and remember that if I were to take a drop of this mixture and put it in some water and shake it some more, the result would be stronger than this mixture, even though scientifically speaking it would be more dilute. How does that work? Come on Ariel; stop thinking about it and just get on with it. It's just you and the liquid. OK. I drink it: a large mouthful. Then I lie down on the sofa and stare at the black circle, concentrating as hard as I can. And this time, I do not fall asleep: I watch as the black circle splits into two, and I try not to blink as it kaleidoscopes around on the sheet, lifting and turning.

And then, in an instant that feels thinner and sharper than the edge of a razor, I'm falling. I'm falling into a black tunnel, the same black tunnel that Mr. Y described in the book. But I'm not falling down, if that makes any sense: I'm falling along, forwards, horizontally. The walls of the tunnel pass by as if I were in a car, but I'm not in a car. Wherever I am it's completely silent and I have no bodily sensations at all. I'm fairly sure my body is here with me, but it has no feelings and no desires. I'm not even sure if I'm wearing clothes. Only my mind feels alive. I see—although it doesn't feel as if it's actually through my eyes—almost exactly what Mr. Y saw: black all around suddenly pinpricked by little lights that turn into wavy lines that seem to go on forever. Then a huge penis, drawn in the same style as that on the Cerne Abbas Giant, but rendered here in light. There's also a vagina, which looks less familiar, and then it's gone. Then I seem to be moving faster. I see the birds and feet and eyes that Mr. Y saw, but to me they look like Egyptian hieroglyphics, the kind of thing you learn about in primary school. Then I see many letters: Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic. I don't recognize all of them, but after a while they organize themselves into alphabets and there are several minutes where nothing seems to change in the tunnel. Could I stop this experience if I wanted to? I'm not sure I could. Can my mind even handle this experience, whatever it is? I've never much liked hallucinogens because of the lack of control you have, and the fact that you have to finish the trip; you can't just switch it off. Now I'm here and I know I can't switch this off. I could go mad. Maybe I have just gone mad. Maybe this is what it's like crossing from sanity into madness, and maybe I'll never escape. As I think, I begin to feel sick, so I try to stop thinking and instead just look at the walls of the tunnel again.

The alphabets look more familiar, and now include numerals, although in patterns I don't immediately recognize. Odd combinations of Roman numerals that I don't understand are interspersed with sequences beginning 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 and 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. At least, I assume they are sequences, but soon they dissolve into long lines of numerals that look like cosmic telephone numbers. In places I can see equations, but they only flicker and then disappear. I'm sure I see Newton's F=MA, and, later, Einstein's E=MC². I can see mathematical symbols that I don't understand, as well as those I do: the = and + signs, and later various pieces of set notation like I = {1, 2, 3, ... 100}. Then more series of numbers that go on for minutes and minutes. I see sequences that don't make any sense at all, such as: 1431, 1731, 1831, 2432, 2732, 2832, 3171, 3181, 3272, 3282, 11511, 31531, 31631, 32532, 32632, 33151, 33161, 33252, 33262, 114311, 117311, 118311, 124312, 127312, 128312, 214321, 217321, 218321, 224322, 227322, 228322. At first I think they must be dates, but then the numbers get too big again. Then something else happens, something not described in Lumas's version of this: The letters from the alphabet all disappear and turn into numbers, and then the numbers, apart from 1 and 0, disappear as well until I am left with millions and millions of 0s and 1s waterfalling down the walls around me.

0111011101101000011000010111010001110100011010

00011001010110011001110101011000110110101101101

001011100110110011101101111011010010110111001100

11101101111011011100111011101101000011000010111

0100011101000110100001100101011001100111010101

100011011010110110100101110011011001110110111101

101001011011100110011101101111011011100111011101

1010000110000101110100011101000110100001100101

01100110011101010110001101101011011010010111001

101100111011011110110100101101110011001110110111

10110111001110111011010000110000101110100011101

0001101000011001010110011001110101011000110110

101101101001011100110110011101101111011010010110

111001100111011011110110111001110111011010000110

0001011101000111010001101000011001010110011001

110101011000110110101101101001011100110110011101

101111011010010110111001100111011011110110111001

1101110110100001100001011101000111010001101000

01100101011001100111010101100011011010110110100

101110011011001110110111101101001011011100110011

10110111101101110011101110110100001100001011101

0001110100011010000110010101100110011101010110

001101101011011010010111001101100111011011110110

100101101110011001110110111101101110

And then everything goes white and I'm out of the tunnel.

Chapter Thirteen

I'm standing in an impossibly dense, thin street, with tarmac under my feet. Ahead of me there's a grubby tower block that may have been shiny once. On either side of me tattered shop fronts display postcards, newspapers, shoes, cameras, hats, sweets, sex toys, and rolls of fabric, but none of them looks open. I think it's nighttime here: The sky is hard to pick out but the light is artificial and I can see something black above me, although there are no stars, and there is no moon. All around me, broken neon signs crackle like acne scars. Two or three of them flicker in sexual colors: rouge, flush pink, powder white, but the rest of them just look like they may have last worked a long time ago. The space above the shop fronts is tangled with dim sodium lights, street signs, corrugated iron shutters, and windows of what seem like hundreds of apartments and stockrooms. There are signs everywhere, sticking out at right angles from the buildings like Post-it Notes in an old book. But I can't read them.

Can I move forwards in this space? Yes. I can take a step, and then another. I can see an alleyway off to my left: another impossibly thin space. At the end of the alley I can vaguely pick out what looks like a steel fence with barbed wire curled on the top of it. There are fire escapes everywhere: zigzags and spirals leading up and down tired brick walls. A blue light dances in an upstairs window: a television? So there is life here beyond me, although I don't feel particularly alive. I don't feel hot or cold, alive or dead, drunk or sober....I don't feel anything. It's actually pleasant, not feeling anything, although of course it doesn't directly feel "pleasant." It doesn't feel like anything. Have you ever not felt like anything? It's amazing. Perhaps I feel so calm because there are no people here. I've been in spaces like this before—Soho, Tokyo, New York—but there were always too many people shopping, camera-clicking, talking, running, walking, hoping, wanting. I get claustrophobic in big cities, overwhelmed by all that desire in one small place, all those people trying to suck things into themselves: sandwiches, cola, sushi, brand labels, goods, goods, goods. But there's no one here. There's a bus stop, but no buses; road signs but no traffic. I walk on, and I can actually hear the dull thud of my footsteps on the hard street. A turning on the right leads to a small square with a gurgling fountain in the middle of it. Here I see shadowy coffee shops with their tables and chairs crowding the dark pavements, and a couple of small city trees growing out of concrete blocks. I don't want to get lost, so I soon come back to the main street, unsure about what to do next. I turn around, everything jumbling in my vision.

Where do I go? I think.

And then a woman's metallic voice informs me: You now have fourteen choices.

My image of the street in front of me is overlaid, suddenly, with a console image: something like a city plan on a computer screen in my mind. A few areas flash briefly in a kind of pale computer-blue color, like war zones on a map of the world. These are the choices, I understand. But...? I don't actually understand anything about what's going on. The nearest "choice," if that's what this means, is the third floor of a block right next to where I started. I walk a few paces and start climbing the zigzag fire escape, the rubber from the soles of my trainers hitting the metal with a hollow, clanging sound. Soon I come to a green door with peeling paint. I push the door and it opens inwards. What do I do now?

You now have one choice, says the disembodied voice.

I'm inside.

You now have one choice.

You ... I'm standing still on four bent legs and—oh shit—I'm trapped. All around me are thick, blurry plastic walls and I can't move. I can go forwards a bit, and backwards a bit; I know that, but I am still at the moment. Fuck. I can hardly breathe. I keep blinking because my vision doesn't feel right: Everything outside of my prison looks brown and warped, and there are reflections everywhere. And I'm hungry; a hunger of a sort I've never experienced before, from a place in my stomach that I don't recognize. Whatever I am, this is a kind of hell: This is a feeling you could have in a nightmare for only one or two seconds before you woke up screaming. I can't move. I can't turn around. My arms/legs/wings are pushed into the sides of my body. I think I have a tail but I can't move it. It's pinned down by something. And I think I'm probably going to die here, on my own, unable to move even my head. Come on, Ariel. You are still Ariel. Yes, Ariel plus ... What? Who am I? Into whose mind have I telepathed? I—or at least "we"; I'm having the same problem Mr. Y had—want to scratch. I want to eat: I know that's why I came into this box. There was something sweet and crumbly which I did eat, but not recently. But almost as much as that, I want to scratch. I love it when my sharp foot rubs against my ears, taking away the itch, and I'd give anything to be able to do that now (not that I understand the economy of hope). I've tried—in fact, I keep trying. Why can't I move? I, Ariel, can see the Perspex walls, but the other "I" doesn't know what's going on. This being—the other I—panicked, hours ago. She couldn't do what she always does in these situations, which is to try to run fast and look for somewhere dark and soft to hide. But it's hard to think of this being, this thing I am now part of, as "she." My fur ("My fur"? Well, that's how it seems) smells of fear now: a damp, sweet, biscuity smell. And I know this smell from the others, from the ones who return with teeth marks in their bodies.

Zoom out. Maintain third person. For God's sake, Ariel, you are not a mouse. But I am. I know how to groom my fur. I have been pregnant a number of times (I don't think she can count, but I can. I'm not sure if she has language, but I have. I can count things in memories perhaps she doesn't even know she has). I remember the aching feeling of giving birth, like pushing on a new bruise. I know I am going to die here, but surely I can't know what death is? Only elephants understand death.... Where did I read that? I've got no idea how long I've been here, but I want to get out. Let me out! I try to scream but all I hear is the fast breath of the mouse, her heart beating instead of mine.

What do I do now? I know how to make myself calm in these situations. I've stood on crowded tube trains and in lifts thinking Not long now, and Breathe. But my consciousness has merged with this one and I know, because she knows, that this is danger; that it is imperative to escape now. But we can't move. Shit, shit, shit. How do I get out of here? Where's all the information Mr. Y said he saw on the edges of his vision? As I think that, something like a computer desktop snaps into focus. Now I can see what the mouse sees—a vast chamber warped by the plastic and browned by its tint (although she doesn't understand that, and believes she is somewhere she has never been before because even the scent is different in this plastic box)—but with an overlay: a console on which I can make choices. It's hard to describe what this looks like, since I have no idea how it works. It feels like a computer desktop but everything on it is unfamiliar. I don't know how to navigate it. But it does seem that when I call for it, it will come. And presumably it will get me out of here.

In the top right-hand corner of my vision is a blue square that twinkles when I look (think?) at it. The rest of the "screen" is layered with small milky squares, each one very faintly showing a landscape I don't recognize. It's like a hundred science documentaries playing on the same screen. What are these images? As I glance over each one it becomes momentarily brighter, like a link on the Internet, and I realize (I don't know how) that I can choose to jump into one of them: presumably to perform what Lumas termed Pedesis. But I don't want to do that. I need to get out of here—out of the Troposphere—and re-lease the mouse from her trap. I look over the milky images again. One of them intrigues me more than the others: The landscape seems extraterrestrial. But—oh no—the moment my thoughts rest on it and I think This looks interesting something begins to happen. I'm blurring—that's the only verb I can think of—out of this reality and into another one. I think Stop! I didn't mean it! But it's too late.

At least I'm not trapped anymore.

Now my paws pad over a cold, hard surface. I feel my back end sway as my paws touch the ground top-right; back-left; top-left; back-right. I have a tail that I can move! This seems both familiar and unfamiliar to me: something I've always had; something I once had a long time ago. The pale concrete below me (and I feel myself putting my own word on that, concrete) is ice-cube (ditto) cold, and I walk faster on it because of that. But I am warm enough. I have only just left my nest and the memory of so much fur, and the smell of my family (I'm translating as I go, here, and "family" is the closest I can get to this memory sense of togetherness and connectedness) soothes me like hot syrup (ditto). I am a mouse again (I think). But I am free.

There's something between my back legs: familiar to this mouse but not to me. It feels odd, like my tail, but while my tail is like an extra limb, this new thing feels powered-up like a clitoris, but there's more of it, and it extends from my stomach to somewhere outside of me. It tingles now as hot liquid comes out of it and hits the concrete. And I'm thinking that this will keep others away, and I've always done it because of this. My fur twitches with abstract nouns, an untranslatable, nonhuman sense of pride, property, future planning, and a constant, musky desire for violence—my claws in the backs of my small, pale rivals, ripping their flesh—and sex. Perhaps that's what I live for most of all: the way my brain trembles and softens as this clitoris-like cock moves in and out of the warm, tight hole in another being, and the feeling of oozing sweetness that eventually spreads in my stomach, back, legs, and throat, so sweet that I fall over, clutching her, she, whoever. I have desires—perhaps that's all I am—but I don't seem to dwell on them. My mind isn't equivalent to I want, I want. It's more like I've got, I've got. Only one thing is bothering me, as I wander around this space, with its bins on wheels that are bigger than me. Where is she? One down. One missing. One gone. I might not be able to count but I can certainly subtract. It's not fucking good.

Even I'm shocked at the idea that a mouse would swear until I realize that these are my thoughts merged with his: his feelings in my language. I should be trying to get out, but the feeling of being here, being him, is almost addictive. Everything about him is charged. Even his/my whiskers vibrate with electricity and anticipation, like live wires coming out of my face. He's moving now, so much lighter on his feet than I ever can be on mine, and it's like being on a fairground ride. We move over the concrete towards the other bin and I know where I'm going but at the same time I don't know, and every movement is a surprise. It's like being the driver and the passenger all at once. And there's something so sure about these movements, and the sensation I'm now feeling: the sensation of biting into a stale piece of bread, marinated in rain—a piece of bread I recognize as being stale because I threw it out, but which now seems delicious: a savory taste, like Marmite on toast.

But I do have to get out of here. This mouse is fine, but the other one isn't. She's in a trap I set and I have to get her out of it. I think Console! like I'm playing Space Invaders or starring in an SF film and yes, the thing appears, filming over my vision. I plan to ignore the milky images but then two things happen at once: In the vision behind the console—the mouse's vision—I see an orange blur, like a smear of marmalade; and in the console I see one square in which the image displayed is not like an alien landscape, one square in which there's a gray mouse sitting by a bin wheel eating bread. That's me. Something is looking at me.

Now it all becomes confusing. My mouse has seen the orange cat and it's as if we've both had an injection of icy cold water and gone onto high alert. It's fear, but a kind of fear I'm not used to. Death, death, death is coming. Fuck. My whole insides have turned to this icy mush and I have to run; I have to hide.... But hang on. The icy water is solidifying. I'm freezing into place. I know (some level of knowing that I haven't experienced before) that I have to keep still now. And I, Ariel, want to just get out of here but some instinct I didn't know I had—some mouse-instinct mapped onto my own—sees that there's also a doorway (gray, official) hovering over the cat. It makes me focus on the milky square with the statue-mouse in it, the square belonging to the cat, who is looking at the frozen sugar-mouse, whose terror I can feel in the tiny trembling in my own/our own body, and I think Switch! Switch!

And now I'm blurring again, into something bigger. My tail now feels lighter, and I flick it around as I crouch here, crazy with anticipation, my thin tongue licking my sharp teeth. This is going to be fucking fun, and I'm not even sure I can wait before I pounce. I move my bottom around in a repeating arc, balancing myself. Now? No. Wait. Need the right moment, totally the right moment. I've done this thousands of times before, and I could never, ever get bored with it. I don't plan my attacks in any detail but when I remember them they are like bloody ballets, with me as the director, poking the dancer with my paw, making the food dance, making it pirouette on broken legs, because I like food that moves. I do eat that brown shit in the plastic bowl but I don't enjoy it: It tastes like death. I only eat it to survive because half the time I have to wear a fucking bell that scares the food away. But I can take the bell off if I work long enough at it, picking away with my precise claws. So I have no bell and now there's food in front of me. I anticipate the way the warm blood-gravy-liquid will taste in my mouth once I've torn the furry coating off this thing shaking in front of me, trying to appear still. I remember the taste.... Oh God. Oh yuck. It's like hot Bovril mixed with iron tablets and rust. And now I'm thinking that must be disgusting really, but the synapses (or whatever) in my mind and the cat's mind are now jumping up and down like kids in a junior debating society. After a couple of seconds I'm almost convinced that blood is delicious after all, but whatever is left of me that is human and vegetarian thinks, No! I can feel this thought blending with the cat's thoughts and so, when the mouse decides this is the moment to leg it under the bin, I hesitate. And my cat-mind does a diving backflip, just for a second, but it's enough to fuck everything up. There's a voice in my mind telling me not to do it. I don't understand this. I don't have concepts like Why? in my language. This is like a headache, some memory of a white room and a table and being held down by my neck as something sharp jabbed into me. Well, no one's holding me down now.

Fuck off, passenger.

No.

You're like a flea inside my head.

Well ... Maybe you're right. Why save the piece of food, anyway? What is "saving"? Nothing makes sense.... Ariel: You are not a fucking cat. You were that mouse. You remembered your nest. But I'm not a mouse, either. And now I want to taste its blood.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

A buzz in my head I don't recognize. A chemical stronger than fear.

I'm moving forwards slowly now. The food has moved under the bin. New strategy. Not Game Over. I crouch and my back is a perfect curve: one shoulder slightly higher than the other, my left paw in front of my right. I'm going to crunch your skull, and I don't care how long I have to dance with you first. I'm ... You've gone. Where are you? Where's my fucking food...?

The mouse has gone. He's safe. My mind now has a celebration party and a funeral going on in the same room.

Console. Now I really have to get out of here. The thing comes up in my vision again, jerking as my hitchhiker consciousness bobs up and down with the cat, padding towards the wall, and then—wow—jumping up onto it. God, I liked that. But I have to get out of here. I've saved one mouse but there's still one more to release. I glance around at the desktop space again, ignoring the milky images in the center. The only thing left is the blue object/image, and so I direct my thoughts at it. Quit now? says the female voice I recognize from before. Yes, I think. Yes, yes, yes... A door appears in front of me and I am me again, twisting the knob and walking through on two heavy legs, with no tail. But I don't recognize this place. I seem to be in a long corridor with gray carpet and beige walls. Oh shit. Where's the fire escape? How do I get out?

I walk along the blank corridor, past notice boards with nothing pinned on them, past bright white office doors, until I reach a lobby with four lifts in a row. There's nothing on these walls except for one safety image: a green stick man and a green stick man in a wheelchair both moving towards a bright white exit. The stick man is winning. Not knowing what else to do, I press the button to call the lift. Instantly, all four sets of doors open. I smile at this. Is there really no one in this place apart from me? A whole city to myself—if I even am in the same city I started in. But I can't stay: I have to get back. I randomly take the third lift along from the left and press the G button. It drops down faster than I would have liked but I don't feel sick. I still don't feel anything. Once I'm on the ground floor I find a set of revolving doors that takes me back out onto the street. And then I see something odd: a small white business card lying there on the ground. It wouldn't look odd in a normal city, lying on a chewing-gummed pavement amid all the old crisp packets, fag butts, receipts, and torn pieces of newspaper. In a normal city you wouldn't notice it. But here it really stands out. I bend down and pick it up. The name APOLLO SMINTHEUS is written on it in brown ink. There's nothing else. I pick it up and put it in the pocket of my jeans.

I'm on a deserted main road lined with quiet office blocks. There are signs for subways but there's no traffic, so I walk across the road, climbing over the barrier separating the two carriageways. Now, I could go left or right or straight on, down a smaller road. Something about the smaller road seems familiar, so I walk onwards, afraid but not actually feeling fear, like I'm watching myself in a film, until I recognize the alleyway on my right with all the fire escapes. That alley was on my left before. Now I see. Somehow I ended up in the large building I was facing when I first arrived here. So presumably all I need to do to get back is to keep walking onwards, onwards down the road and then—yes—into the tunnel with the zeroes and ones and all the letters of every alphabet I've ever seen. Then I open my eyes.

Back on the sofa. I'm alive. I'm home. I'm human. I feel cold. I need to pee. The sense of disappointment I often get when I wake up from normal dreams has now mutated into something else: the disappointment of being me, here, now.

My overwhelming thought: I want to be back in the Troposphere.

And a weaker thought: But you wanted to get out.

Strange how I keep thinking about drugs, but that's the connection Mr. Y made as well. This time I'm remembering a bathroom, a long time ago. In fact, it must have been just before I went to Oxford. I was in a bathroom in Manchester with a big guy who gave me a tiny little pipe, coated in green enamel. I remember sucking on the pipe and feeling something I'd never felt before: complete contentment, something similar to how you feel just after an orgasm, but more—where the whole world is a big soft duvet and you're just about to go to sleep, and you feel as if nothing will ever hurt you again. I sucked this stuff into my lungs and it tasted like ammonia. And I asked the guy what it was.

"Freebase," he said. "Like crack cocaine. You'd probably best not do it again; it'll boggle your head."

In the same way that I immediately wanted to have another go on that pipe, I now want to get back to the Troposphere. So maybe that's the curse.

Muddled thoughts, muddled thoughts. It's quite obvious that I've just been asleep again. I can't have been in the Troposphere. It's a fictional place, a place from a book. But I still get up from the sofa and, before going to the loo or anything like that, check the mousetrap under the sink. And I feel sick. There she is, the being whose memory and thoughts I shared, trembling in the little box, her tail caught in the catch. I don't think I ever really looked at the mice in the traps before, or even thought about them very much apart from trying to remember to release them outside as quickly as possible. But now I'm looking. Whether it was "just a dream" or not, I know exactly how she feels in there. I undo the box, my hands fumbling on the catch, trying to free her tail as gently as possible.

"I'm sorry," I say to her. "I'm so sorry."

I gently place the box on the floor and she walks out backwards, slowly at first, with her nose twitching. I expect her immediately to become a gray streak across the floor as she runs for cover, but instead she sits there looking at me, scratching—I know how much she wanted to do that—and then just sitting there, her tiny black eyes locked on mine. I recognize this stare from somewhere, and I return it instinctively. We stay like that for a full minute and I'm sure she knows. I'm sure she knows, on some level, that I was in her mind and that I understand her. She's not afraid of me. Then she does go, scuttling away under one of the cupboards. I check the other traps and find them empty. Then I throw them all away.

There's something wrong with the light. It takes me a while to realize—I go to the bathroom and pee, and spend about four or five minutes looking at myself in the mirror, wondering what someone else would find out if they got inside my head—but as I come back into the kitchen and put on some coffee, I notice what it is. It's dark already. Then I look at the clock and see why. It's four o'clock. That's odd. I took the mixture at about eleven, I think. And I was in the Troposphere for about half an hour, or at least that's how it felt. Maybe I am losing my mind.

I check my jeans pocket. There's no business card there.

I look out of the window: There is no cat.

But I will look up Apollo Smintheus later, to see if it's a real thing.

The oven must have gone out while I was lying on the sofa, and now I'm shivering in the cold. I remember the way it was in the Troposphere: the no-feeling of the place, the lack of any temperature. I want that back. But if I can't have that, I want to be hot, hot, hot. I turn on more of the gas rings and stand as close as I can to the stove. Soon my coffee's ready, but I don't go anywhere with it. I just stand by the stove shivering and thinking. I should be warming up by now. Am I ill? Has that mixture affected me in some deep way? Is it fucking up my whole system?

And then I think that if I really have just travelled through some strange other dimension, into the minds of mice (and a cat) and out again, that would probably make me feel a bit weird. I mean, surely that would make anyone feel weird? This thought makes me smile, and then laugh. Only I could telepath into the mind of a sex-obsessed mouse and then a psycho cat. This would be a good story to tell, except that I don't tell stories, and no one would believe it, anyway. I stop laughing. Everyone else who has ever done this has died. If you added that to the story, then no one would laugh.

There's a buzzing from my bag. A text message.

It's Patrick. 4give my persistence, it says, but i need u again asap.

Oh Christ.

After checking through all my encyclopaedias for references to Apollo Smintheus, I eat dinner early—a bowl of rice with the last of my miso. There's something wrong with my flat this evening. It's not just that time has passed too quickly: It feels empty, cold, and dirtier than usual. Not bothering to worry about the electricity, I switch on the big kitchen light and the lamp, and I put on the radio while I'm eating. I don't usually listen to the radio at this time of day and I have no idea what kind of thing is on. I want something comforting: half an hour of eccentric people talking about travel books, for example, or gardening. Instead of that I find a religious discussion program. Looking at the clock I guess that it has been on for about ten minutes already. There are about four different voices, including the presenter.

– ...but Mantra II shows that the patients who were prayed for did not do significantly better than those who were not.

– I disagree...

– (Laughter) Come on. You can't disagree with scientific findings. It's there in black and white in the Lancet.

– For those who don't know, Mantra II—Mantra, I believe, standing for Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Trainings—was a study concluded earlier this year. It set out to discover whether or not prayer significantly helped a group of heart patients. The group of patients didn't know whether or not they were being prayed for. The external prayer groups ranged from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist....

– Mantra II is not the only study in this area—I feel I have to point this out. What about Randolph Byrd's classic 1988 study? Or William Harris's Kansas City study of 1999. In Harris's study, conducted in St. Luke's hospital, the prayed-for group did eleven percent better than the group who were not prayed for. Scientists have been researching this question for decades. They keep researching it because it has absolutely not been made certain that intercessional prayer does not help people. In fact, it is quite clear that prayer has some effect, although we are still a long way from knowing what that effect might be.

– Certainly, what I have observed in my practice is that prayer does have effects in the world. Coming back to Mantra II...

– But this is all ridiculous! Where is the proof? In the Harris study you mention, Roger—and which I looked at closely in my book—even the researchers themselves admitted that there was only a probability factor of 1:25 in the study. In other words, there would be a one in twenty-five chance of the result they obtained appearing on its own, by accident, by chance. That's certainly not enough to convince me. The Lottery would not be profitable for very long if all it had were twenty-five numbers and you only had to pick one of them!

– As I said, coming back to the Mantra II study—and I suppose this is relevant to the Harris study as well—you have to ask who is looking at the data and how they are interpreting it....

– Oh—so it's a conspiracy now? The researchers have "hidden the truth"?

– No, of course not. But perhaps something like prayer can't be understood in studies with data and graphs and probability factors. How do you even begin to measure something like this? For example, what is "one unit" of prayer?

– There is an interesting ethical question here about God, I think. Regardless of how we interpret the data from studies like Mantra II, we have to ask: Supposing prayer did help people—what sort of a God would only help the people who asked, or who had other people to ask for them? Surely this implies an inequality of treatment of people by God, even though we are apparently all God's children, all equal in his eyes?

– Yes, that's an interesting question. Perhaps the whole concept of prayer is in itself a paradox. Perhaps you can't pray to a God who treats all equally. Perhaps then prayer becomes a redundant idea. If God loves all people equally, presumably one should not have to remind him to care? There should be no logical reason for intercession.

– I agree that this is a profound point. However, you can ask: What if it isn't God? What if the success of prayer actually reveals something about the power of thought? Can thought actually influence matter?

– Like spoon bending?

– Yes. (Laughter) I suppose you could look at it as being a little like spoon bending.

I finish my rice and light a cigarette as the discussion goes on in the background. At least the voices are there, reminding me that there is a tangible world beyond this room, beyond my mind. Where the hell did I go this afternoon? And, I can't help thinking now, how long before I can go back there? Maybe I should try again as soon as possible, and see if a) the place is as real as it felt this afternoon and b) whether, if it is real (whatever reality is in this context), I can navigate it with more success than I managed the first time.

A train rattles past and I wonder where it's going. I haven't been out today.

I smoke another cigarette and try to get warm, but it doesn't work. I should probably try to get back into the Troposphere for that reason alone: At least I won't be cold anymore. If only I didn't think the events of today point towards me being mentally ill (empathizing with mice—I think that's a tick in the box)—and if I wasn't so bloody cold—then this would be, unequivocally, the most amazing day of my life. So I'll do it again. I'll find out if it's real (although I will try to avoid cats). And then what? Freak out? Celebrate? Have a nervous breakdown? There is no obvious logical thing to do before, during, or after this situation other than stop everything I'm doing right now and allow there to be no more before, during, or after. But that's the one thing I will not do. I have to try to go back.

As I settle back onto the sofa with the paraphernalia of my new addiction—the card with the black circle and the vial of liquid—there's a knock at the door. Is it Wolf? Ignoring it, I sink back into the sofa, vaguely thinking about how I never did get onto a psychiatrist's couch, and I drink more of the mixture and hold up the card over my eyes.

The tunnel.

The road.

Console.

Chapter Fourteen

You now have twenty-seven choices.

Why is it different from before? At least I'm in the same place, on the same deserted street, looking at the same signs. All but one of them are still in the language I can't read. One is now illuminated and readable. MOUSE 1 is what it says. I really must be going mad. But in here, in the Troposphere, going mad doesn't seem like something that should worry me. Like the fear I had last time—the fear that didn't feel like fear—the worry is there but it doesn't feel like anything. There's no quickened heartbeat; no sweat. I'm watching myself in a film again. I'm playing myself in a video game. So I've got twenty-seven choices. I still don't know what that means. And to be honest I'd be happy just staying out here on this nowhere road, feeling this blissed-out nothing. Could I be happy not knowing? No. I have to find out how this thing works. What is the Troposphere? The blurred console is like a translucent map over my vision, showing me which places are "live": which places I can enter. At least, that's what it seemed to mean last time. Last time the closest place I could enter was the apartment now marked with the MOUSE 1 sign. Now one of the shops just a few doors down the street seems to be highlighted. It's a little music shop with a piano in the window. In my mind I ask the console to close and it flickers out of my sight. Now I can look at the shop properly. There's the piano: a small black upright thing with sheet music propped up on the holder. I look more closely and see that the title is in German. The sign on the door is also German: OFFEN. I open the door and a small bell tinkles. I expect to see the inside of the shop but, of course, I don't.

You now have one choice.

You ... I'm now someone else: someone human and male. I'm sitting in a café, waiting. I don't need to translate this person's thoughts: It's a strange sensation, actually being someone else, but that's how it now seems. It's certainly easier than being a mouse, or a cat. I can ... I can speak German. I'm even thinking in German. I know how to read music. I ... OK, Ariel, just go with it.

So I'm sitting in a café looking at the dregs in a white cup smeared with old gray cappuccino froth, and I'm pissed off, but that's nothing new. How could he do this to me again? Again. The word makes me want to weep. I can feel it on my skin, in my cheeks, and running down my chest: little bugs of failure crawling on me, and they're all repeating that word: Again. He said it would be soon. Now it looks like never. It must be because of something I didn't say. It must be because of something I didn't do. The idea that this would have happened anyway is too repellent. It must be this shirt. He said he liked the blue one, so why am I wearing this red piece of crap?

At this point the waitress comes over and, just as Lumas suggested, a faint outline of another shop appears over her body, and I realize I could step into that doorway instead of remaining "here"—whatever, in this context, is "here." Shall I try that? What about when Mr. Y did it and got bounced back onto the Troposphere? I try to call up the console, but it doesn't come. I'm not trying anything without that to guide me. And I'm not sure I want to leave this story now, anyway.

But I do want the console. I call it again.

It doesn't come.

At least I spent fifteen more minutes with him. But what's fifteen more minutes of memories against a lifetime of being together? The future I should have had. I should have said that to him. I know he wants this as much as I do, but he's a coward after all. Maybe I should have said that. Robert, you're a coward. Maybe I'm the coward. I couldn't say something like that to him. Imagine his face if I said something like that. He'd storm out. He'd say I'd crossed the line. Stupid English expressions. Crossed the line. What line? Where? Oh, yes. The line that you drew between me and everything I want to say and be. The line between "normal" life and the other one, the other choice. You could have crossed that line. You promised to cross that line. You promised me. You promised me. You promised me. And I've been so gentle with you over these last few weeks, talking when you needed to talk, kissing away your tears when I actually wanted to be sucking your dick. I've done everything you wanted.

I see him walking in an hour ago, already ten minutes late, as if I didn't have anything else better to do (but I haven't, Robert: The only thing I want to do is be in love with you).

"I couldn't get away," he said. "The kids were creating."

Another stupid English word. Creating what? Shit? Works of art? Both?

His kids. They're across some other line altogether. But I've pretended to be interested in them for long enough. All right. Well, I was sort of interested. I imagined weekends with them at some point in the future, when Whatshername had gotten over everything. Trips to the park. Big ice creams. It didn't exactly compute, but I could have programmed myself to do it. I would have done that for you, Robert.

The table in front of me is a little piece of art in itself. What would you call it? After a Small Treachery. I like that. The Dregs of Betrayal. Two cups, two saucers, one man. You'd look at this and you'd know that two people were here a while ago, but one has gone. One has a meeting, an arrangement, a life. The other is me and I have nothing in the world apart from this coffee cup. Perhaps you even saw him leave, the one with the thinning hair and the black jeans. An hour ago he was walking in and there was nothing on this table apart from the red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth, a laminated menu, and a pepper pot (but no salt). He made his excuse and sat down, and I could see him shaking.

"Coffee?" I said. And I wanted to slap him, this shaking mess. I wanted to tell him to be a man. If I wanted to fuck girls for the rest of my life I wouldn't be doing this, would I?

A waitress came. They all speak French here, or at least, they affect convincing French accents, so he said, "Café au lait," in a stupid English-French accent, and then added, "Merci."

What an idiot. And now? Now I want to piss on his face. I want to drown him in my shit. I want to take pictures of him drowning in my shit and send them to his girlfriend. I want to write a concerto all about him drowning in my shit and play it at his funeral, and out of a permanent speaker system at his grave, so all his relatives will have to listen to it forever.

But I was still hopeful when he looked at me across the table.

"How have you been?" he asked me, as if I had cancer.

(You're the cancer, Robert, you miserable little tumor. You've given me cancer of the heart.)

"How do you expect?" I said.

I think what I meant to say was: Fine. Great. My life is full of pink balloons.

Well, that's more attractive, isn't it?

He lit a cigarette with shaking hands. I taught him to smoke, of course. I taught him to smoke, and I taught him how to drink, and I taught him how to fuck me. I showed him what I'd suspected: that two men are more powerful than the cancelled out yin-yang of cock-and-cunt. We discovered it together: the beauty of the male body. Don't you remember, Robert? I even bought you a reproduction of Donatello's David when I could hardly afford food. In return you bought me a bust of Alexander the Great.

And you said you'd move in with me.

Sitting at the table just over an hour ago, he didn't look like someone who was about to leave his wife and move in with me. On the other hand—I suppose he would be upset if he had just left his girlfriend (they're not married, despite the two kids). Maybe that's it, I thought. Maybe he's upset because he's told her and he's going to have to come back to my flat tonight and I'll give him vodka for the shock and suck his cock so hard that he'll never leave me again. I just wanted the chance to convince him it should be me. I see Robert as a fish with the hook still in his mouth. If she tugs it, he goes back: I know that for sure now.

Robert's sitting there with the cigarette, frozen in time. My mind won't play this memory like a film: It pulls me around like an Alsatian, making me go here and there.... And now I'm thinking I should write a guidebook for others in my situation. Or ... Yes. A Web site. I could send her the link, just so she knows.

Howtotakeitupthearse.com

Probably exists. And that's not what I want, anyway.

Robertisabastard.com

Not general enough.

Whenstraightmenpromisetogogayandthendonot.com

He sipped his coffee. I was facing the door; I'd placed myself there like a little welcome mat (another fucking stupid English invention) waiting for him to wipe his feet on me. So he sat there sipping his coffee, looking beyond me to the wall, covered in postcards from Paris, and I just watched people leave like bacteria looking for a new host to infect. No one new comes in at this time of day; it's as though the place has taken an antibiotic.

"Are you OK?" Robert asked me.

"I'm confused."

Last night he was due to come over to my flat to celebrate the beginning of our new life together. I'd finished my relationship with Catherine, and all that remained was for him to leave his girlfriend. He didn't come. Instead he phoned me at midnight and in a stupid whisper said that everything was too complicated and that he'd meet me here tomorrow. I said I'd bought flowers. He said he had to go. I suggested coming to my place rather than here—after all, this place is virtually next door to my flat. He said it wasn't a good idea.

So there we both were. And I knew he hadn't done it.

"You haven't told her," I said.

He was still shaking. "I did tell her," he said. "I did it last night."

"Oh my God," I said. "I didn't know. Sorry. Shit. Are you all right?"

I leaned across the table to touch his arm. Obviously he was now forgiven. He had done it. He had told her. Well, that was what I'd wanted. Actually it was what we'd both wanted. But where did he go last night? Just as I started wondering about that, he moved his arm away from my hand.

"Don't."

"Robert?"

"I told her. I told her I was leaving her."

"But that's good, isn't it? Unless ... Well, obviously you will be upset, but I can help you with that. It's all going to be all right now."

"I'm so sorry, Wolfgang. I've changed my mind."

Microwave my fucking soul, why don't you?

"I told her. I said, 'I'm leaving you,' and she said, 'No you're not.' Just like that. She knew something had been going on. She's not stupid. We're ... Oh God, I don't even know where I am, I'm so tired."

"We're what?" I said. "What were you going to say just then? 'We're...'"

"We're going to have another go."

This idiot makes a relationship sound like a children's spinning top. Oh, I'm just going to have another go! But I didn't say anything, and so he just went on and on talking about how he thought he was gay, perhaps, or at least bisexual, but now he wasn't sure. He said he thought he was probably bisexual but that really meant that he could stay with his girlfriend, and after all, they did have two kids and she was right when she said that he should think of them rather than just following his cock.

Console!

Console?

Console?

Shit. I've got to get out of here. I had no idea that this is Wolf's mind, although I suppose I could have read the fucking clues. Oh God. Oh God. I can't believe I'm intruding on his life like this. I shouldn't know any of this. I had no idea. Oh, Wolf ... I'm so sorry. Where's the waitress gone now? I can't look around, unfortunately: All I can see is what Wolf sees, and he's just looking at the table. No doors. No milky images.

Console?

But it doesn't come. I'm stuck.

Now he's getting up to leave the café. But he's still not looking at anyone.

And I recognize the way he feels. It would be what, seventeen years ago now.... Christ, that makes me feel old. I was in love, totally, innocently, in love, for the first and only time, with a guy who was doing a degree in town when I was doing my GCSES. He had dark shoulder-length hair and drove a little blue Mini. Just seeing it parked in the university car park would give me a little buzzing thrill, like touching the heart of the fake guy (or the guy-shaped hole) in that Operation game. Then he dumped me because I was too young, and I spent a year or so semi-stalking him (including once leaving an amusingly shaped cactus on his front doorstep) before I decided to just give up on love altogether.

Wolf's not doing any stalking, though. Wolf's going to get drunk. We're going to get drunk....

I'm going to get drunk.

It has started to snow. The bacteria-people on the pavement crush the flakes into instant slurry; it's exactly the consistency of the lemon-ice drinks Heike's mother used to make for us when we came back in the afternoons in our Pioneer uniforms. But the stuff on the pavement is dirty and brown. And that's it: life expressed in one moment. You start with pure crushed-ice lemon drink and you end up with a shitty mess. This is what you become. And I know where I'm going now, so I walk through the brown sludge on autopilot, not crying. I'm not crying yet.

But it will be OK. If you drink enough bourbon your humanity starts to melt away. By three o'clock this morning I won't care. Perhaps in an hour I'll be anesthetized enough to stop thinking about when I am going to cry. There's an icy wind along with the weak snow, but I can't be bothered to do up the buttons on my coat. I think I left my scarf behind at the café. Good. Maybe I'll freeze to death. Picture me frozen to death in the park, brokenhearted on a bench. Robert will read about it in the local paper and ... Here's a sadder picture. I die as before on a park bench, etc., and the fucker doesn't even read about me. I could die and no one would notice. My neighbor Ariel might notice after a few days. Catherine won't care now, though. She didn't say anything after I ended our relationship. She didn't even cry. She didn't tell me I'd made a mistake. She didn't implore me to stop thinking about men. This almost makes me go straight to the park and undo all the buttons on my hateful red shirt, but, despite what I tell everyone, I'm no suicide.

There's some business guy walking towards me, holding a newspaper over his head to stop the snowflakes touching his bald patch. Hey, idiot! Have you ever sucked someone's cock? I have.

Then again, it's more common than people think. He's probably done it, too.

(A door hovers over the man, but I hesitate; then Wolf looks away and it's gone.)

I want something to hurt. I want physical pain, not this mental shit. This would be an excellent time to go to the dentist. Hello, Herr Doktor Do whatever you want....

I could headbutt a lamppost. I could try to find some queerbashing football hooligan to kick me in the head while I lie on the ground in the recovery and/or fetal position. I'm walking towards the Westgate Tower, the tight arsehole at the center of this city. I used that description once and whoever I was talking to was shocked. "But have you never watched a bus try to squeeze through it?" I said. "They all look like they need lubricant." Ha. If I want to get in a fight I'm on the wrong side of town. I could go back towards home and then hang around near the kebab shop and wait for a gang of "youths." What would I do? All I'd have to do is stare at one of them. I wouldn't even need to call him a poof. You know who I really want to get beaten up by? I want to get fucked-up by faggots who'll fist you afterwards. I want something to hurt more than this hurts.

Console?

Console?

Still nothing. And all Wolf's looking at is the pavement.

We walk onwards, towards St. Dunstan's. Eventually we come to a door I've never noticed before. Well, I've simultaneously never noticed it and at the same time I realize I come here quite often. It leads downstairs to an underground wine bar. And I sit there until closing time, drinking Jack Daniel's, eyeing up every guy who walks past me. I think that one of them will react. One of them will want to fight me or fuck me, but I might as well be invisible. Maybe I am. Maybe I'm invisible. At last orders I go up to the bar for three more drinks.

"Am I visible?" I say to the bartender. "Can you see me?"

The wankers throw me out. And I'm not drunk enough yet. I go to the hotel.

The manager tonight is this ex-bouncer called Wesley.

"Hey—you're not on tonight," he says to me.

"Drink," I say. "I only want a drink."

My insides are volcano-hot. I need to do something about it. I think about explaining this to Wesley, but he simply says, "OK. Just a couple, though, mate."

Melissa's playing the piano tonight. I sit in the booth right next to it and eyeball her enough to make her play three wrong notes in a bar. Well, I think they were wrong. The whole world seems the wrong way up now. Why am I here? Oh yes. That bastard Robert. Perhaps when I get home he'll be waiting there for me with a little suitcase, dabbing at his eyes with a balled-up handkerchief.

In my dreams. Or, as Ariel says, in another universe—maybe the one in which I am also rich. That's the other thing: After tonight I will be so broke. I wonder if she'll lend me money? No. Didn't she say that she spent it all on that book? Could I steal the book? She said it was one of the rarest books in the world.... What would I do? Go in there for a drink before bed and leave the door on the catch as I leave. Then I could go back in and...

You bastard, Wolfgang. You're her friend.

The piano's so shiny it looks as if it might just walk out of here on its four legs. Am I going to throw up? Steady, steady. I'll go for a piss. That'll help.

I'm on my own in the fluorescent toilets, pissing into the ceramic urinal, when this guy walks in. He'd probably look more attractive in a photo-fit than in real life. Maybe he is a photo-fit. His huge eyebrows don't seem to go with his tiny slug-pellet eyes. Or maybe it's the nose that seems slapped on, or as if someone just punched him. He comes and stands next to me and takes his cock out, but he doesn't start to piss. He glances at me; down at my cock, and then up to my eyes. I look at his cock. He looks at my cock again. Is this some sort of secret code? Before I know what's happening, we're in one of the cubicles. I'm down on my knees on the slimy, tiled floor as he fucks the inside of my mouth. All I can taste is cold piss.

When it's over he calls me a bitch, and then leaves. I think of Donatello's David again and that's when I cry, after I've thrown up in the toilet behind me: Jack Daniel's laced with sperm and only the memory of coffee. Women are easier than this. I'll find a woman who will help me. I'll ... Oh God. I don't ever feel like having sex again in my life. But you can't get anything without sex, or the promise of sex (unless I've got that wrong and I actually mean violence, but I'm a little drunk). Maybe I'll try hanging myself, at least for some sympathy. Is it easy to get it wrong?

The next few minutes are confusing. Wesley—I'm sure it is him—comes in just as I'm unbolting the cubicle. He drags me down the corridor into the kitchen, where I manage to put my elbow in an icecream tub full of prawn cocktail before he presses my face down onto the stainless steel counter.

"Don't you ever do that in my fucking hotel again, you fucking faggot," Wesley says. I genuinely have no idea what he's talking about. I don't think he's firing me. I think this is the equivalent of the first formal warning. Something hurts: my arm behind my back. "Fight back, pussy," he says, jerking me backwards by the collar.

I laugh, forgetting "pussy" in this context does not mean "cute cat."

"Are you laughing at me?"

I spin, see a fist, and then everything goes black.

Console?

Nothing.

On the way home I try to get run over. I even walk through the Westgate Tower, on the road, muttering, Arsehole, arsehole, but the traffic just slows behind me, as though this is a funeral procession rather than just a drunk who needs a kicking. In the park I try abusing a couple of kids on a bench but they just look upset and run away. I think I might have forgotten where I live, but then I'm there, and there's my bicycle.

I spit on the ground twice before walking in. Two guys in a black car give me dirty looks before driving off and parking around the corner. Maybe they're going to get out and come and beat me up. Do I still want that? But nothing happens: It just looks as if they've gone to sleep.

Sleep. That's quite a good idea. Maybe I'll just go to sleep and not wake up. I wonder if Ariel has sleeping pills. Unlikely. Shall I go and see her now? Am I in a state? Objectively, would I seem "a state" if I were to knock on someone's door now? Actually, I don't think I've got the energy to even get up the stairs. It looks quite comfortable on the concrete. I think I'll just...

"Oh. Um ... I'm sorry."

Who said that? Oh ... Some guy is walking down the stairs. Wow! Check out the cheekbones. But—ouch. He's all bruised. Has Ariel been to bed with him? I'd go to bed with him if I were her. He looks like she would if she were a tall man with dark hair. It's a man-Ariel, a he-Ariel. Why is he here? Is he actually Ariel in disguise? Why would she be in disguise and putting on a different accent? He's sorry. He's sorry because I'm just settling down to sleep where he wants to put his feet. I don't understand what's going on. This is too complicated. I think I'll just go home to bed.

"Excusez-moi," I say, in French, to fool him. I start to get up.

"Do you need a hand?" he says.

"Nein, danke."

Yeah. I'm multilingual. Now that's funny.

(My mind isn't in a much better state than Wolf's and it's as if the drink has affected me, too. But I'm still thinking Adam. What's Adam doing here?)

"Are you Ariel's neighbor?"

"Si," I say, laughing. "Ja."

He runs a hand through his messy hair and sighs.

"I have to find her."

"She lives up ... In the clouds." I meant to say "upstairs." This is so funny.

"I know where she lives. She's not answering the door."

"She's out ... With the bastards ... With the wank, work..."

"With the what?"

"Dinner. With people from the office. Or was that yesterday? I'm sorry ... I'm a little drunk. You see, something queer and most tragic occurred this evening and..."

"Look, I'm sorry, mate. If you can't help me then don't. But don't waste my fucking time, OK? This is pretty serious. Her life is in danger, if that means anything to you."

"Danger? From a cock?"

"What? For fuck's sake, pull yourself together."

"Danger. Danger! Ariel's in danger? We must help her. Where are the grenades?"

"Oh, never mind."

"I'm sorry I'm like this. Please, let me help. She's my friend, you know."

The other man sighs. "There are two men, all right? One is wearing a black suit and one is wearing a gray suit. They both have fair hair, like yours, or a bit lighter. One of them has a little goatee beard." This guy's gesticulating at me as if he could conjure up these men by drawing them in the air. "I think they're driving a black saloon. Have you seen them?"

"Who? Are they here? No. I don't know. There's a black car..."

"Where?"

"What?"

"You said something about a black car."

"Did I? I'm sorry. I can't remember."

"Look, I think these men have guns. They're very dangerous. They've been to a bookshop and got information about Ariel. She bought a book that they want—that's as much as I've been able to work out."

"Oh, that. Well, Ariel won't sell the book. Never."

"What book is it?"

Don't tell him, Wolf. Don't tell him.

"It's a ... Oh. There's a voice in my head saying I can't tell you."

"What is the book?"

I shake my head. "No. Sorry. Herr Doktor's orders."

I can't understand all the voices in my head. One's telling me not to explain but another one's telling me that I should go and get the book now. And—ouch—not even sell it myself but give it to the nice man when he asks for it....

A doorway, kind of churchy, flickers around Adam's body. Switch! I command. Switch! I have to find out what's been going on. I start to blur, just as I have done before, but instead of blurring into Adam's head I seem to be falling, but not downwards. Before I can work out what's happening, or how it's possible to fall in a direction other than down, I land just outside the music shop. I'm back in the Troposphere, lying on the tarmac, looking up at the flickering neon signs and a black, starless sky. It's as if someone's switched everything off: the throbbing of Wolf's head, the smell of damp in the concrete passageway, the cold, the traffic sounds from the street outside the flats. As before, it's almost completely silent in the Troposphere. There are no noises at all: no birds, no traffic, no people. The only sound I've ever heard in the Troposphere is the sound of my own footsteps. Did the lifts make a sound? I can't even remember.

I have to get out of here now and find Adam.

Why would men with guns be looking for the book? I don't know Adam very well, but it was clear that he believed what he was saying and that he was trying to help me. Has he led the men to me—the men in the car? Or am I somehow dreaming all this? I'm bothered by what Adam said about the girl in the bookshop. He obviously didn't know what had happened, or why, but I can work it out. It's logical: If you want The End of Mr. Y, you keep searching for it; I know that. These guys must have Googled it and found an intriguing new link—a girl saying she sold it in a secondhand bookshop. So they find the shop, go there, and ask her about whom she sold it to. She remembers nothing, I'm guessing, except that I'm a young woman doing a Ph.D. at the university. So what happens next? The men go on the university Web site and search for "Lumas." And they find it there under my research interests on the "Staff" pages. And they realize I'm the one who bought the book. So they come looking for me.... And I'm not hard to find. No one based in a university is hard to find. You could come at it from all sorts of different angles, and there I'd be: Ariel Manto—my alias, my pen name, the name I gave myself when I was only eighteen and I didn't want to be me anymore. Ariel Manto. Research interests: Derrida, Science, and Literature, Thomas E. Lumas.

The Ariel part is real at least. And yes, it was the poetry, not the play.

The syrupy stillness of the Troposphere won't let me panic, so I calmly get up off the pavement and turn towards the exit, part of me just wanting to just stay here, where they can't get me. A city all to myself seems better than men with guns. But then I think of myself as I must be in the real world, so zonked out on my sofa that I can't even hear the door. Come on, Ariel. Get out and run. Talk to Adam and do whatever you have to do, but if there are men with guns involved you'd better run. Get out and run. Get out and run. Get out and...

There's a tinkling behind me.

And a creaking: a long, high-pitched arc of a sound. I turn around. This is all wrong. I should be on my own in here. I should be...

It's a door. It's a door opening. The door to the music shop. Oh fuck. And one—no, two—two men are coming out, walking into the Troposphere like aliens walking off a spaceship. They're just as Adam described: one man in a gray suit and one in black. They both have blond hair. But there's something slightly cartoonish about them. As if they've been chroma-keyed onto the background. They've got—huh?—children with them as well. Two young boys, both with the same blond hair as the men, perhaps lighter.

"There she is," says one of the men, the gray suit, his mouth not quite moving at the same time that his words come out. "She's already figured out how to get in."

American accent. Shit. Can I run, and lose them in the alleyways? Something tells me this isn't a good course of action.

"Don't worry about it," says the other one. "We can deal with this one fairly easily." Then he says to me: "Get out of the way. Come on. This isn't anything to worry about. We're just going to let the kids fuck you up a bit; find out where you put the book. It won't hurt while they're doing it."

The kids dance forwards like two marionettes. Their skin is the refrigerator-pink of raw meat. One is dressed in a cowboy suit; the other is wearing a blue cape.

"Let us in," sing-songs one of them, like he's an extra in a Dickens adaptation.

"We want to play," says the other one.

They both have sarcastic eyes, so pale they're almost white.

"Get out of the way," says the black suit again. "Let the kids have their fun."

Get out of the way? I don't think so. But I don't want these freaks—the men or the kids—near me, either. I'm walking backwards, as all four of them walk towards me. I stumble over something: I think it's one of the stand-up signs from outside one of the shops, but it actually turns out to be a rack of newspapers and postcards. I find my balance again quickly and kick the rack into their path. The children see it and jump over it. But the men don't seem to see what I've done.

"Whatever you think you're doing," the gray one says, "it's over. Come on. Move now. We just need to get past. Ouch! Shit, what the hell's that? Come on. You're just going to make it all worse. It doesn't have to be difficult, you know."

They want to get into my mind...? How? Think, Ariel. Where are they now? OK. They're in the Troposphere, just like I am. Come on. Work it out. To go back into myself, I walk down that road behind me until I get to the tunnel. So I have to stop them going there. It might not be correct, but it's the best I can do.

Help me, I think. But nothing happens. Or maybe something does. There's now a steel bar lying on the tarmac. I bend down and pick it up.

"Who are you?" I ask them.

They keep walking towards me, taking up most of the thin street between them.

"We're just here to get the book," the gray one says.

"You just need to cooperate a little," says the other one.

"Although if you don't ... Well, we don't really care what we have to do to get the book. You know how you've been lurking in your friend's mind, just watching? That's Level One. Once the kids are in your mind they're going to turn it into spaghetti."

"On top of old Smoky ..." sings the first kid.

"Get away from me," I say. "Fucking hell. Get away from me..."

I swing the steel bar at the gray-suited man, the one closest to me. He doesn't react until it thwangs him hard across the side of his head: It's as if he can't see the steel bar at all. Just like the newspaper rack.

"You little cunt," he says to me, swaying and clutching his head. Then: "Martin—she's got a weapon."

"You know what to do," says the other guy. "We may as well finish her here and then we'll go to her apartment and get the book. I'll bet you anything it's just there sitting on a bookshelf or something."

One of the little boys is picking his nose and, presumably, watching to see what the adults do next. The other boy, maybe slightly older, looks at me.

"When I do get into your mind, I'm going to wee on your memories," he says. "And then I'm going to poop all your other thoughts out of your eye sockets. I don't have any empathy. So you can't stop me."

I see myself in some asylum, dribbling. What happened to her, then? Oh, she went mad. First she thought she could practice telepathy, and then, for no reason, her brains just packed up. Turned to spaghetti, just like that. It's sad. She was working on a Ph.D. before it happened. And I'll never, ever, be able to tell anyone what happened to me. I'll have no memory. I'll ... OK. Now I am afraid.

Console?

The thing appears. Now the two men and the boys are highlighted red. Danger. Yeah—I think I got that by myself. The small crowded street behind them appears in a kind of grayed-out black and white. That's new.

You have no choices, says the woman's voice.

How can I have no choice?

Nowhere is open now.

OK. Tell me what I can do. Are there any options?

You can quit by exiting.

I don't want to quit. These psychos will enter my mind if I do.

You have no choices.

So is that it then? Basically quit, and then die?

You can choose to play the Apollo Smintheus card.

What?

Danger approaching...

The console is right. The black-suited man is approaching me with ... Ouch. Oh shit. I thought you couldn't feel pain in here. Oh fuck. It's like period pain in my head. It's toothache of the brain ... I fall to my knees. OK, I tell the console. Play the Apollo Smintheus card. Do it now. Do it now. Oh God.

Chapter Fifteen

How much time has passed? I don't know. But the men and the two horrible little kids haven't moved forwards any more, and now there's something, or someone, standing next to me. I'm still down on my knees on the black tarmac, holding my head in my hands, pressing in my fingers, trying to make the pain go away. I was so wrong about the Troposphere. I thought you couldn't feel anything here, but the pain here is more intense than anything in the real world. It's the worst form of pain as well: not the sharp sting of a knife, a tattoo, a cat scratch. Are headaches ever nice? I don't think so. And this is the worst headache I've ever had; something's wringing out my brain as if it's a wet dishcloth. I don't seem to be able to close my eyes, although the flickering neon in the street is making me dizzy. In fact, the flickering neon is now breaking up around me. Everything's breaking up and turning into some kind of gray static: the shops, the apartment blocks, the street itself. The Troposphere is fizzing and popping as though it's being broadcast on the wrong frequency.

The silence around me is already too loud, and so when the fizzing and popping actually turns into a crackling noise, like fire in a dry forest, and the two men start saying things like What the fuck is that thing? I just want to die quickly so I can't feel this anymore. The "thing," still standing next to me, is wearing a long red robe and black boots, but I can see that under the robe he is an animal: a mouse-hybrid of some sort, with gray fur on his legs. I can't do more than register that before the image begins to break up like everything else. Now all I want is for this to happen quickly, for everything to shut up and go away.

Apollo Smintheus, if that is who this is, says something in a language I don't understand, and the pain goes and the static goes, as though my channel has been retuned, crisp and clear. I stand up, wobbling slightly. Apollo Smintheus is taller than me: He must be eight feet tall, standing on his hind legs. He has a quiver full of arrows slung across his shoulder. His pointed mouse-face is covered in gray fur, and he has whiskers. He's probably the most bizarre entity I have ever seen. But when he speaks now, it's English with an American accent.

"Well," he says. "I've never seen this before. Who are these people?"

"I don't know," I say.

"They are the bad guys, though?"

"Yes. If you can help me..." I feel like crying. "Please..."

"OK. Don't worry."

He starts speaking in the other language again. At the same time, he takes his bow and loads it up with an arrow from his quiver. He fires one arrow at the gray-suited guy, who seems to deflect it somehow. I can't understand all of what happens next. The kids hide behind the legs of the men; then something seems to come towards Apollo Smintheus—some ball of yellow light—but he simply raises his arm and reflects it back towards the man in black. He falls to the floor now, clutching his head the way I was before. The two kids look at him, and then each other, and then turn and run away down the street. Now Apollo Smintheus loads up another arrow and fires it again at the man in gray. It sticks in his neck, but no blood spurts as the man stumbles, sees what's happened, and then takes hold of the arrow with both his hands and pulls it out, leaving a gaping hole with skin-flaps, like some piece of gross-out porn from the Internet.

As he starts speaking, I can see his voice box move.

"You fucker," he says, thickly. "Why are you fighting for her?"

"Oh, she asked me if I would," Apollo Smintheus says.

"What on Christ's earth did she do to get the attention of a god?"

"She did it the old-fashioned way. She helped a mouse," Apollo Smintheus says, loading his bow again. "Now, as they say in Illinois: Go to hell, fuckface."

Illinois? A god? This must be a dream. Nothing like this happened to Mr. Y. This must be the effect of TV and cinema and—not that I've played them often—video games on my weak mind. This is truly crazy. But I have to say I quite enjoy it now as Apollo Smintheus fires arrows into the two blond men as if they're 2D practice targets pinned up in an archery range. They're not dead, yet, but they are down. What do you have to do to kill someone in here? Apollo Smintheus now walks over to them and, after pulling a coiled rope from under his robe, binds them tightly together. Then he walks back towards me, muttering something. And, as he mutters in this odd language, a cage starts to form around the two men: like a bell-shaped birdcage made out of silvery wire. By the time he returns to my side and turns around, the men are imprisoned and unconscious, like something from a fairy tale.

"There," he says.

"Thank you," I say. "Thank you so much. I..." I look down the street. There's no sign of the caped-kid or the cowboy-kid. "What about those children?"

"You don't need to worry about them. Coffee?" says Apollo Smintheus. "We can go to my place and I'll explain. Sorry. I'm being rude. I can bring my place here, obviously. But perhaps you want to conjure yours up?"

I don't know what he's talking about so I just nod. "Your place," I say.

Apollo Smintheus starts incanting again and, between the music shop down the street and what seems to be a pool hall (which I never noticed before), an archway opens up. It's like an adult, live-action version of the mouse-hole from Tom and Jerry cartoons. I'm not sure I can take much more of this. If this is all going on in my imagination then I'm much more warped than I ever would have thought. I may need medication.

"This way."

We walk through the archway into what can only be described as a mouse burrow fused with a minimalist Manhattan apartment. The space is white, and it would be light and airy if it was ever daytime here, and if there weren't coarse brown blankets tacked over the large windows in the back wall. There are thick pine shelf units around the walls, but they're all empty. There's nothing on any of the tables. The floor seems to be tiled with polished dark parquet blocks, but you can hardly see it for all the sawdust. In the corner of the room there's a nest: lots of white fluff rolled into a ball. Apollo Smintheus leads me through this room and into another one. This one is more like an eighteenth-century parlor, with an open fire and two rocking chairs.

"Please, sit," he says. "I'll make coffee."

I expect him to take an old-fashioned kettle and hang it over the fire, but he doesn't do anything at all. Nevertheless, when I look down on the table, there's a mug of steaming black coffee sitting there on a wicker mat.

"So," he says. "You're not a god."

"I don't think so," I say. I want to smile but I'm still feeling shaken and freaked-out after my encounter with the two men—and the fucked-up children. "Those guys..." I say. "They're not dead, are they?"

"No. You can't kill things in here."

"How long will they stay there in the cage?"

Apollo Smintheus rocks in his chair. "As long as I've got the energy to keep them there. And, also, as long as I want to keep them there. What did they do to you? Why were you fighting?"

"They said they were going to go into my mind and fuck it up," I say. "Or I think they were going to send those boys."

"Oh dear."

"Yeah. I ... I think you saved my life."

"They can't really do anything to you in here," Apollo Smintheus says. "But I assume they were on their way to your..." Now he says a word in the strange language again.

"My what?"

"What would you call it? My Illinois friends obviously don't have a word for this. The portal into your consciousness. Do you have a word for that?"

I shake my head. "No. This is all absolutely new to me. I'm still not sure I'm not dreaming."

"Well, you know the thing I mean."

"Yes. And that's what I was trying to defend. I think. It's all so confusing."

"So. How did you all get here?" he says. "You're not supposed to be here."

"Sorry?"

"You're not a god. You're a physical being. How did you get here?"

"I read a book. It had instructions ... That's what those men want, by the way. The book."

It should be warm in here with the fire, but I don't feel anything above or below body temperature. I pick up my coffee and the outside of the mug does feel hot, but somehow the heat doesn't travel into my hands. I take a sip. It's the most delicious coffee I've ever tasted but when I swallow it, it doesn't actually go anywhere. I don't feel anything in my stomach at all.

Apollo Smintheus frowns. "Why do they want this book?"

I take another sip of coffee. "I don't know. I mean, they obviously already know how to get in here, so they can't want the instructions. It doesn't make any sense."

"They don't want you to have it. They want to stop people from coming. Hmm. I'd guess that'll be it. Not a bad idea. It's not good for people to come here. You're the first I've actually seen, but you're not the first I've heard of. I do approve of you coming and helping mice, obviously. That's why you got whatever you got that enabled you to call me."

"It was a business card."

"Oh." He smiles. "Very classy."

"I have to ask. Why shouldn't people come here?"

"This dimension ... I think that word is right. It's not something you can ever understand. Tell me what you see in front of you now."

"Um, a table and a chair with you sitting on it. A fire. A..."

"None of those things are there," he says. "Apart from me. And I don't see any of what you see."

"What do you see?"

"Nothing you have the words for. And, out of interest, what am I?"

"You're..." What's a good way of putting this? "A mouse-person."

He laughs. "A mouse-person. Do I even have fur?"

"Yes."

"What color?"

"Gray."

"Do I have the bow and arrows?"

"Yes."

"Am I wearing anything?"

"Yes. A red robe."

"A red robe?" He laughs. "Where did that come from? I don't wear that in any of the pictures."

"What pictures?"

"You know who I am, presumably? You looked me up?"

"Yes. You're Apollo Smintheus. God of mice."

"Were there pictures?"

"Yes. Some coin ... It wasn't very clear."

"I am, of course, not a mouse. Not usually."

"Oh. Sorry..." For some reason it seems right to be sorry; sorry for what's in front of my eyes.

"I am an incarnation of the Greek God Apollo. Or, at least, I was. I've been evolved since then. Or—what do the boys say?—upgraded."

I put down my coffee. The sensation of drinking something that isn't really there is weird, like bulimia. This can't really be happening. It's all too odd.

"I'm very lost," I say. "Are you saying that you are something other than what I see in front of me?"

"Oh yes. Like this whole place. It's different for everyone. Well, every human. You must know that."

"I'm afraid I don't know anything."

"Then why did you come here?"

"The book..."

He shakes his head. "What did it promise you? Money? Power?"

"No." I shake my head. "I don't really know why I did come. It didn't promise anything really, except knowledge. I think I just wanted to find out if the place was real."

"And now you know. Will you be coming back?"

"To be honest I don't know what I'm going to do. I think I'll have to find a way to escape from those men. If that means using this place then..."

"You can be sure they'll be using it to find you. And they'll be using the..."

It's that strange language again.

"Sorry?" I say.

"The children you saw. They'll be using them as ... Now I can't find the word in your language. I'm coming up with hitchhiker, piggyback, and infect. The children aren't projections of entities from your world. They're beings who only exist in this world, like me."

"So they're gods?"

"No. They're something else." He smiles, and his whiskers twitch. "I'm guessing that they are attached—in the way of a hitchhiker, piggyback-rider, or a virus—to those men. They won't go into your mind on their own. They'll go where the men go."

"Are you sure?"

"As sure as I can be. I can find out more for when you return, if you like."

"So I won't get into trouble then, if I come back?"

Apollo Smintheus smiles. "Trouble from whom?"

"You. The other gods. I don't know."

He starts laughing. "Oh dear. That's funny."

"Why? I don't understand."

"We can't stop you doing anything. This is your world, not ours. We're part of it, but humans made it. All I'm saying is that we do our work best here, and you're better off staying in the physical world. But that's only advice. You can ignore it."

"If I ignore it, will anything bad happen to me?"

"I doubt it. You'll probably need to use this space, anyway, if you want to defeat your enemy. But you'll need to answer an important question."

"What's that?"

"Well, if they're the bad guys, are you one of the good guys? And if so, what do the good guys stand for? If you're going to fight them you need to work out why you're fighting them."

"I don't think I have any choice. They're going to kill me."

Apollo Smintheus looks away from me for a second, as if he's wondering whether or not to tell me something. He sips from his coffee cup and then puts it down on the table.

"Well, you should understand that you can use me for help as long as you've got the card. And as long as I have the energy."

"How long will I have the card for?"

"Who knows. Probably a few days, in your time. Maybe less."

"Right. Thanks. And what do you mean about your energy?"

"If they pray, I survive. If not, I go to sleep. It's not death, exactly, but I can't do anything very impressive."

"Who are they? Mice?"

"Ha! No. Mice can't make gods. They wouldn't want to. No, I'm talking about the boys in Illinois. They're the ones who keep me going. There's a small club of them. A little ... A cult is what you'd call it, I guess. The Cult of Apollo Smintheus. They have a Web site." He yawns. "I'm actually getting a little tired now. I'll have to tell you about them next time."

"OK. Sorry. I'll get going." I stand up, and the chair carries on rocking a couple of times, as if it remembers me sitting in it. "I know this is an awful question..."

"Go on."

"Well, do you have any estimate about how long you can keep those men here? I'm assuming that while they're here they can't pursue me in the real world ... Is that right?"

"Yes, that's right. Well, if you go now and I can focus all my energy on it, I can certainly keep them here for..." He screws up his eyes. "This is a more complicated calculation than you'd think ... Um, about another three or four hours, your time."

"What do you mean, 'my time'?"

"I'll have to explain when you come back. I need some rest. I'm not the most powerful god around. With only six people in the world seriously praying to you ... Well."

"Thanks again," I say. "You really did save my life."

Back out in the Troposphere it's started to rain. That's odd. There's never been weather in here before. It beats down on the tarmac like percussion, and then rushes down the gutters with a shhhhh noise. The men are still unconscious in their cage, but I keep my distance as I walk around it. I have to get away from them. I saw what they could do to me, and, if they could get into my mind with those horrible kids, I think that would be it. That would be the end of me.

It seems to take ages to get through the tunnel this time, as if there's a wind blowing me the other way. What would the men see, if they went into my mind? Presumably they wouldn't go down this tunnel: I understand that this is my way into and out of the Troposphere. I wonder if I have a little shop and what's in the window. Do I decide, or do they? And what were they seeing in the Troposphere? From what Apollo Smintheus said, they wouldn't have seen what I saw—and it was certainly clear that they missed the newspaper rack and the steel bar. But those boys: They did see what I saw. He's right: It is hard to understand. But surely it can't be impossible to understand?

I pass the wavy lines and the pinpricks of light. Nearly home. Nearly...

Oh fuck. I come to on the sofa and everything feels different. I don't know what's happened to me. My mouth is so dry that I couldn't speak if I wanted to. Shit. I sit up, but I feel as if I've got the worst flu I've ever had. Water. I need lots of water. Somehow, I get up and make it to the sink. I drink three cups of water and then immediately throw them up. I drink two more and throw up again. I know I need fluid, so I force myself to drink another cup of water, slow sips this time. God. What's happened to me? I thought the Troposphere was some sort of "dream world" in which you can't get hurt. My eyes sting. The light coming from the window is laser-beam strong, and I move across the room and shut the curtains. There's bright white snow all over the rooftops outside, the sun glaring off it. Hang on. Why is it light? Why is there sun? It wasn't just nighttime in the Troposphere (where it's always nighttime anyway); it was nighttime when I left Wolf's mind, not that long ago.

I look at the clock. It says it's two o'clock. It must be afternoon if it's light.

But I took the mixture at five o'clock in the afternoon.

I run my tongue over my dry mouth. I feel dizzy. I know this dizziness: It's because I haven't had a cigarette for hours. Jesus. Have I been lying on the sofa for twenty-one hours? No wonder I feel ill. Is this dehydration? Or is it part of the same madness that means I imagine that I can travel through other people's consciousness? The same madness that means I believe two men are after me with guns?

The thing is, I don't feel mad at all.

Adam. I need to find Adam and find out what—if anything—happened yesterday (or whenever: Fuck knows what day it is—I could have gone back in time for all I know). And I make a deal with myself right now. If the men are real I'm going to drive away somewhere where they can't find me. But if they're not, I'm going to go straight to the university medical center and see if I can get myself sectioned. I guess that in either case I'll need to take some things with me, so, after taking The End of Mr. Y from the mantelpiece, I go into the bedroom and put it into an old holdall before covering it with clothes. What else do I need? My laptop. A big knife, just in case. Obviously I need the rest of the holy water mixture, and the bottle of Carbo-veg so I can make some more. I don't really have any food that's transportable, so I'll have to worry about that later. Once I have packed my bag, I wash quickly and go to leave the flat. There's an envelope by the door with my name on it. Someone must have slipped it underneath the door when I was out cold on the sofa. It's from Adam. Urgent, it says. I need to talk to you. OK. There's a local phone number, but now I'm paranoid and I don't want to use a phone for communication. I'll just go to my office and hope he's there.

My car, like everything else, is covered in snow. Large white flakes are still falling from the sky, and the street has that muffled, secretive sound that snow produces, as if the whole world is talking under its breath. There's an old piece of cardboard balanced on a bin out by my car, and I use it to scrape most of the soft snow off my windscreen. The ice underneath is more of a problem. I don't have a scraper, and the cardboard is now floppy and wet. In the end I put the heater on full and let the engine turn over for a few minutes until it starts to melt. I still can't see properly by the time I set off, but I have to go. I have to find out if I am mad or in terrible danger. I wish there was a third option, but there doesn't seem to be.

The university campus is bisected by a main road that unintentionally (or so I have always assumed) separates the arts buildings from the science labs. Usually at this time of day the road is clear: a ribbon of black tarmac with only the odd car or cyclist trundling down it, maybe leaving early, or even driving from Shelley College, on the far east side of the campus, to Hardy on the west. Today the road isn't black: it's a mixture of white ice and old gray sludge, and it is completely clogged with snow-smeared cars, all with their windscreen wipers going. And all over campus little groups of students seem to be making snowmen. What's going on? Where's everyone going? And what has happened to lectures and seminars? I can't sit in a traffic jam all day looking at fat white blobs that—and this is a tick in my "madness" column—seem possessed, as if they have come to take over the world. Not today, please. Just let me get to Adam.

As I whisper this to myself, and as I repeat the word "please," I suddenly wonder whom I'm asking, to whom I'm praying. I thought I was doing OK, but suddenly I'm having trouble breathing. Come on, come on. I hit the steering wheel a couple of times and then run a hand through my hair. It's damp with sweat, even though it's freezing outside. The traffic going this way is much worse than on the other side of the road. In fact, after a white university truck goes past, there don't seem to be any cars coming the other way. The turning I need to take for the Russell car park is about fifty yards ahead on the right. Fuck it. I crunch the car into gear, pull out, and start overtaking the long line of cars. People glare at me. Just as I approach the turning, traffic starts coming from the other direction. Well, they'll just have to wait. Except they don't. Even though I'm indicating right, and it's quite obvious what I'm trying to do, the first car just drives towards me, the driver gesticulating and flashing his lights, as if this is the most aberrant thing he's ever seen. For God's sake. I can't move forwards now that this car is blocking my way. To my right, there's a triangle of grass with one featureless snowman standing on it. There aren't any students around. I swerve off to the right and drive across the grass, hitting the side of the snowman and making it tip over and then crumble to the ground. I imagine the pissed-off driver of the other car, and what he would think of that maneuver, but I don't look around to see. I think this counts as an emergency, anyway. Now I'm on the road to the car park, and my way is clear, although there is a long line of cars trying to go the other way. I recognize several people. There are Lisa and Mary. They don't see me. Oh, and there's Max. I slow up as my car passes his, and roll down my window. He does the same.

"What's going on?" I ask him.

"University's shutting for the afternoon," he says. "We had an e-mail advising us to leave. Are you just on your way in?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I'd turn around if I were you. It's only going to get worse."

I park haphazardly, unable to see the white lines marking out the parking bays and not caring at all about what anyone thinks about where the bonnet of my car is in relation to the boot and the buildings next to it and the five other cars that are still here. Who actually gives a shit about how precisely you're able to put a vehicle in a white box drawn on the ground, anyway? Car parks seem to me like collective statements of sanity. I'm sane: I'm inside the lines. Me too! Me too! I am not inside the lines anymore. I skid on the ice as I run into the English Building, hoping that Adam hasn't yet left.

The door to my office is unlocked, but there's no one there when I go in. I close the door behind me. Heather's computer is switched on, and I can see the cascading numbers of her LUCA model trickling away. I didn't realize how psyched up I was, but when the door opens again, I jump and let out a little yelp.

"Ariel?" It's Heather, holding a cup of coffee.

"Sorry," I say. "Wow, I'm not used to there being other people in here. Um..." I need to say something normal. "Thanks for dinner the other night, by the way. It was great."

"Oh, thanks," she says. But her eyes are saying something else. "Are you OK?"

"Yes, of course."

"Did the er ... Those guys find you?"

"What guys?"

"The American policemen."

Policemen? Those guys are official in some way?

"Sorry?" I say, deadpan.

"They were here looking for you yesterday. They were actually quite vague about who they were—I'm just assuming they were police, since they acted like it. I thought Adam came to tell you. They wanted to confiscate your computer, and get all your files from Personnel, too. Yvonne wasn't happy about it, so they ended up having to try to get some sort of fax through from their offices in America to the dean. Apparently they've had to investigate someone else from this department before. They said they never found him, but they would have done if the university could have given his details to them sooner. Anyway, the fax didn't come yesterday and they went away in the end, saying they'd come back today. They weren't particularly nice. Ariel, what on earth has happened?"

"I don't know," I say. "I'm ... I didn't see Adam. I had no idea ... Do you know where he is now?"

"No. But he left you a note."

"Has anyone read it?"

"No. He told me to hide it, so I did. But I didn't feel comfortable about it. He's left his number, too."

She scrabbles around on her desk until she finds a scrap of paper with an 07792 number on it. It seems strange—I wouldn't have thought Adam would have a mobile phone. I'm not going to call the number, anyway: Who knows who could be listening in? If those men are official in some way then I'm more fucked than I'd thought. I'm certainly not phoning anyone, and I'm not using any cashpoints (not that I've got any money to draw out). I've seen enough of those action films to know the drill. The only trouble is that when I watch action films I usually feel the excitement and fear at one remove, as a spectator. So the hero might die, and you might think No! but you don't really care. It's just a story—and you know the hero won't usually die in a story, anyway. But I am aware that I'm not in a story, and that if someone really wants to shoot me, or get into my mind, or whatever, there's no scriptwriter who's going to make it all right for me in act 3. I'll be dead in act 2 and it's not as if Aristotle's going to come along and say it's all wrong.

And it looks as if I'm not mad. Not only is this definitely happening to me: It happened to Burlem as well. He's surely the "other person from the department" whom the men came to investigate. He's the last person who had the book. So I'm certainly not going to the medical center. I'm going to see if I can speak to Adam, and then I'm going to find Saul Burlem. I'm going to find him, find out everything he knows about what's going on—and then I'll work out what to do next. I guess he must have an excellent hiding place if he hasn't yet been found, but then he doesn't have the book anymore: I do.

"Have you got the note?" I say to Heather, trying to stop my voice from shaking.

"Yes. I think so. It's here somewhere."

Eventually she picks up a small blue envelope and gives it to me.

"Thanks."

"Ariel..."

"What?"

"Do you think those men are going to come back? They really freaked me out."

"I don't know."

"I mean, I know we're really just guests here in your office, and what you do is your business, and I don't want to intrude or anything but..."

"What?"

"Well, it's not very nice having the police turn up. If you are in trouble, don't you think maybe you should sort it out?"

Fuck off, Heather.

But I actually say: "I'm not in trouble. And I'm going to stay with my aunt in Leeds, so I won't see you for a while. Say good-bye to Adam for me—and enjoy the office space."

Maybe she'll send the psychos to Leeds, but I'm not counting on it.

Chapter Sixteen

It's half past three and almost completely dark by the time I get to the Shrine of St. Jude. I didn't have time to stop for directions or anything like that, so I simply drove around Faversham and waited for something to happen. Eventually I saw a chipped little sign saying ST. JUDE'S SHRINE and now here I am, outside the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. I think the shrine's inside. I'm estimating that I need to get away from here in the next half hour or so and go somewhere completely random to collect my thoughts. So I haven't got long.

There's no one in the church when I walk in, probably looking insane, with my tatty old bag slung over my shoulder. The whole place smells dusty, like incense. I notice the holy water in a font on my left, and although it reminds me of everything I've done, and everything that's going wrong, I dip my finger in it and touch my forehead. As I do this I remember playing Dungeons & Dragons on a couple of rainy lunchtimes at school. In some versions of the game you could go to a town and get holy water to cure all but the most serious ailments, and increase your health. In other versions you could use it as a weapon against evil spirits or the undead. But no one ever said you could drink it and go to another world, or that this might, in fact, be a bad idea. I walk farther into the church. It's a small, cold, calming space, with oak-panelled walls and hard wooden benches for pews. A sign directs me down some stairs to the shrine.

And—oh—it's so warm going down the stairs. Hundreds of candles are burning down below: There are several stands containing small tea light candles and a whole table covered with big candles in church-blue plastic holders, each with a picture—although I can't see what the pictures are. Once I'm down in the shrine it's actually hot, and I unwind my scarf. There's still no one here. On my right, and surrounded by many more candles, is a statue of what I assume must be St. Jude. The wall behind him is part mosaic, and part blackened brick. The statue is rendered in gold: a bearded man standing with his staff. There are bars separating me from him, and so for a moment he appears to be imprisoned. Of course, looking at it from his perspective, I'm the one in prison. I wander around the room. On one side are the prayer requests on yellow Post-it Notes. Please help my aunt who is in so much pain. St. Jude, please intercede for my son Stefan, who is only nineteen. Don't let my brother die. Please bring my son back from war. The requests are signed by people from Mauritius, Poland, Spain, Brazil.... All over the world. A sign explains to me that St. Jude is the patron saint of lost and hopeless causes. St. Jude seems to be the saint you come to when all others have failed. Then, on the other side of the room, a printed leaflet explains to me that St. Jude is a controversial saint, and may not even exist.

I've never prayed before in my life. But now, after lighting a candle and adding it to one of the blazing racks, I move back to the shrine and kneel in front of it. Once I'm there, I still don't know what to do. Thinking something like Oh please, St. Jude, help me and don't let those men ever find me seems silly. Something tells me I should not pray for myself; I should pray for another person. But whom do I have to pray for? Even the last person I slept with doesn't matter to me. I care more about the anonymous son from the yellow Post-it Note coming back from war. Instead of praying for anyone, I just gaze at the statue until its edges start to blur. Who are you? I think. What do you do with all the energy that comes together in this place? Because there is an energy here: It's crackling around me with an intensity that a million of these candles couldn't match. What is it? Is it my hope? Other people's hope? Simply the power of prayer? I feel St. Jude looking at me, and I think that if he were really there he'd be telling me to stop speculating and asking unanswerable questions.

But I'm not sure I can do anything else.

In the end I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world—and a type of being—that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there'd be no stories. If there were no stories, there'd be no language. If there was no language there'd be no ... What? I'm just thinking about Adam, and what he said about truth existing beyond language when I hear voices coming down the stairs: one female and one male. For some reason I feel embarrassed praying on my knees, so I get up and pretend to look at the candles. I know I have to go soon: I look at my watch. It's quarter to four. I feel so tired, though, as if I haven't slept for days. And it's icy and dark outside.

"Yes, we've managed to get the shrine functioning again—at last."

"It's amazing. I was afraid the last fire would be the end."

I recognize that voice, although it sounds tired, and almost broken.

"It's never the end for St. Jude. He has so many loyal supporters."

Poor Apollo Smintheus, I think, with his cult of only six people.

"It's ... Oh. Ariel! You're OK."

"Hello, Adam."

"Maria, this is Ariel Manto. The one I told you about."

Adam looks terrible. What's happened to his face? His right eye is swollen and bruised like a piece of rotting fruit. And he's wearing the same clothes I saw him in on Tuesday. Where are we now? Thursday. I think it must be Thursday. He's with a woman of about sixty or so. She's wearing a long brown skirt and a purple blouse. Her gray hair is mostly covered with a brown head-scarf, but a few silvery wisps fall down the side of her face. Her brown eyes somehow look younger than his.

She holds out her hand. "Hello, Ariel," she says softly. "I'm glad you got here safely. Adam has told us about your troubles. We made up a bed for you in the guest wing of the priory just in case you did drop by. You can rest here for as long as you need to."

A bed? In a priory? But I can't stay here. I have to go.

"That's very kind of you," I say, for some reason using the "polite" voice I use only to speak to schoolteachers, traffic wardens, and similar authority figures. "But I think I really am in terrible trouble and I don't want to involve you." I look at Adam, and point vaguely at his bruised face. "It's already gone too far. They did that to you, didn't they?" Adam nods. I continue: "Those people ... I don't really understand what's going on. I just came to say thank you to Adam. And sorry."

"How about some tea?" says Maria, as if I haven't just suggested that they are all in danger as long as I stay here. "We can go to the priory kitchens."

Adam looks at me. "They can't get you here," he says.

I sigh. "You can't be sure about that." And I'm not sure about anything. I'm not sure about him. What has he done to make me trust him? Is there anyone in the whole world I would actually trust? I think of my mother, and the time that I tried to tell her that I was cutting myself. I had it all planned out. I was going to tell her about how I started plucking my eyebrows because the other girls at school did, but that I found it was so cathartic that I couldn't stop. Then there was that evening in the bath where I realized that if I kept on plucking I'd end up with no eyebrows, but I hadn't given myself enough pain, not enough catharsis. So I took Dad's razor and stuck it in my leg. "Not now, Ariel," she said, settling down with her CB radio. "The world doesn't revolve around you, you know." Perhaps Burlem. For some reason I think I trust him.

Maria starts walking up the stairs.

"Why don't you show her the secret passage?" she says to Adam. "There's no point going outside if there are dangerous men around. I'll see you over there." Then she looks at me. "We've been through worse than this, dear."

Once the sound of her footsteps has gone, I look at Adam again. Shadows cast by hundreds of candles bounce off his sharp features and seem to rest on the softer, broken part of his face.

"I'm so sorry," I say. "I do have to go."

"Ariel..."

"If I told you half of what's been going on, you wouldn't believe me. But the short version is that they can get me anywhere. This sounds mad." I sigh, frustrated that there's no way to explain this. "Basically if they can get near to me, they can get to me. Getting near to me is enough. I know I'm not making sense, and even I don't know how it works ... But I think that my only hope is to go far, far away, as fast as possible."

"I'm sure you're safe here. At least come for tea. I'll explain."

"I haven't got much time before they follow me here."

"Do they know you're here?"

"They'll find out. Heather'll tell them."

"I told her not to read my note."

"But she probably did, anyway. I just can't take the risk."

My voice is rising in pitch as I speak, and it gets to a point where I realize that the next thing for me to do is cry. But I can't cry. If I cry then it's over. All the adrenaline will wash away and I think adrenaline is all I've got left. I don't have any money, and I don't even have much petrol in the car. But I can steal petrol: I've done it before. And I've got enough money to live on chips for a few days. As long as I get away, everything might still be OK.

I start walking up the stairs.

"Ariel? Ariel! Please. You're safer here, trust me."

"You can't know that."

"I know more than you think."

I hesitate.

"They didn't follow me into the university chapel," he says. "I don't think they could. And I haven't dreamed about them since I've been here. Come on. I'll explain downstairs."

He takes my hand and leads me away from St. Jude and into a room full of St. Jude-related merchandise. I'm not sure why I'm doing what he says, but I actually feel too weak to do anything else now. In this little room there are many unlit versions of the big blue candles, as well as postcards, pendants, lockets, prayer booklets, and little brown pots with white lids. Adam's hand feels cold in mine. He stops by one of the stands and, with his free hand, picks up one of the little brown pots.

"Here," he says. "You might need this."

I look at the label. OIL BLESSED AT THE SHRINE OF ST. JUDE, it says.

"And one of these." Adam now gives me a small blue pendant. It has a picture of St. Jude on it.

"Thanks," I say. And of course usually I'd say that I don't believe in lucky charms and snake oil, but I think homoeopathic remedies and holy water fit into the same kind of category, and look where they've got me. At the moment I need all the help I can get, however implausible it may seem. I take my hand from Adam's and put on the necklace. "Do I need to pay for these?" I ask.

"I'll do it for you later. Don't worry. I've been outside God's economy for quite a while now, but even I still understand it doesn't run on our money. OK. Now hang on a second ... In fact, can you grab and light one of those candles?"

He bends down and releases a catch that I can't even see on the floor. It's a trapdoor. I take a big candle in a blue holder and light it with my cigarette lighter. I notice that my hands are shaking, and then I realize that my legs feel light and wobbly, as though there's an electric current going through them. I don't feel at all well. My head...

Instinct makes me try to grab Adam's shoulder. I just want to put my head down on it for a second: I think this might make everything better. Then my head fizzes with what feels like bubbles of air.

"Adam," I say. But before he can reply, everything goes silent, and it's as if I'm being dipped, headfirst, into a giant tin of black paint.

When I wake up I'm lying on a small, firm bed that's been severely made up with crisp white linen and brown blankets. My bag is lying on the floor by a cupboard. There's a small bedside table with a copy of the Bible on it, and one wooden chair. There's a window to my right, but the curtains are drawn and so I have no idea what time it is. Then again, you can't tell the time that easily from winter skies. In winter, there's no difference between five in the afternoon and five in the morning.

There's no one here in the room apart from me. What happened? Did I faint? I suppose I haven't eaten for a couple of days. The Troposphere just seems to suck all your life away. Everyone else who has ever read The End of Mr. Y has died. And Mr. Y himself starved to death. I can now see why. But none of this affects the part of my mind that is almost aggressively demanding to be taken back there now.

I'm still in the clothes I was wearing when I came here: old gray jeans and a black jumper. I'd like to change but I don't have anything more presentable, so maybe I won't bother. Instead of changing I sit there brushing my hair, trying to get every knot out of it. It takes about fifteen minutes. Then I look at the burns on my wrists: They are little silvery-red scabs now and I resist the urge to pick them off. No one comes into the room. What do you get in a priory? Friars, I think. I don't imagine that any friars are going to come in here. But Maria and Adam. Where are they? Somewhere a bell chimes. One, two, three, four, five, six, SEVEN o'clock. Oh shit. The men will definitely have been released from their cage in the Troposphere by now. And they're not in my brain. Yet. At least it doesn't feel like they're in my brain. How would I know? I tie my hair into the kind of plait I think religious people might approve of and wash my face in the hand basin. There is no mirror here. Am I going to make it through another day? Who knows. I should find Adam and Maria. I open the door softly and walk out into a dim corridor. There's a yellowy light at the end of it, and I can hear the sound of women's laughter and the vibration of pan lids. I can smell food, as well: something hot and savory. It must be the kitchen. That was where I was going to have tea before I fainted; if that's what did happen to me.

My legs still feel weak. Am I going to faint again? No; come on. For God's sake, Ariel, it's just walking. But I think I need a rest. I lean on the wall for a second, breathing as if I've just run a marathon rather than walked about fifteen steps. What is wrong with me? Maybe I'll just close my eyes for a moment.

"Ariel?"

Somehow I'm now slumped on the carpet and Maria is standing over me, holding a blue-and-white checked tea towel. Her small face crunches into a frown.

"I think you should be back in bed."

"I'm sorry," I say. "I don't know what's wrong with me."

Those men could come now and they could do whatever they wanted. I wouldn't be able to stop them. Maybe it would be better that way: Get it over with. Would I prefer for them to finish me off in the Troposphere or out here? Apollo Smintheus said you can't die in the Troposphere, but perhaps there are things worse than dying. So I could just stay here and wait for a clean death. But they never said they were going to kill me. They just want to send me mad and take the book.

Maria helps me up and in a few minutes I am back in the bedroom.

"Maybe you should change out of those clothes," Maria suggests. "Get your night things on."

"I'm OK. I think I just need to lie down for a minute." I don't actually have any "night things" with me. When I packed I wasn't thinking about anything relaxing like going to sleep; I was just thinking about running away.

"You don't want to get into bed like that," Maria says. "I'll get you something to wear."

Half an hour or so later I'm lying in bed in a long white cotton nightdress thinking about going back into the Troposphere. I'm trying to work out whether it will kill me if I just go in for a little while and try to find Apollo Smintheus. Before I got back into bed I opened the curtains and looked at the sky for a while before closing them again. The sky was screen black, and snowflakes were falling with the same rhythm of the cascading numbers on Heather's LUCA program. When will she work out where I've gone? Will she tell the men?

Just after the church bells ring for eight o'clock, there's a knock at the door.

"Come in," I call.

It's Maria again. She's holding a large, thick, brown dressing gown.

"Can you face some supper?" she asks me.

"Yes," I say. "Thanks. You're being very kind."

If I eat, then I can definitely go back into the Troposphere.

"You don't have to get dressed. You can wear this."

I should get dressed, but I can't. I'm sure I'll get my strength back after eating, though. I'll get my strength back and go to the Troposphere. Or should I leave first? I imagine parking in some anonymous rural lay-by, reclining on the backseat of the car, and knocking myself out with the mixture. What would happen then? Would I freeze to death? Maybe I'll just stay here tonight. This bed is so warm and clean that I don't even want to get out of it now. But I should go and eat.

The kitchen is a long, narrow room with a large porcelain sink at the far end, work surfaces along the right-hand wall, and a long pine table running down the middle. To my left, there's probably the largest fireplace I've ever seen. There's no fire in it, though. Instead there's a fairsized cooking range, with two large silver pans on it, steam coming from both of them and disappearing up the gray stone chimney.

I walk to the table and the wooden floorboards creak under my footsteps.

"Sit down, dear," says Maria. "Adam will be along in a minute."

I pull out a chair and slump into it. I feel like shit.

"No one's come looking for me, presumably?" I say.

"No, dear." Maria smiles a young smile. "And we've got a lookout just in case."

I imagine a friar with a telescope. But it's probably one of the kitchen women on an extravagant kind of neighborhood watch. Both images seem comical to me, and the atmosphere here is just safe enough that I manage to smile back.

"Thanks," I say.

Now Maria goes over to the range. "Vegetable stew and dumplings?" she says.

"Yes. Thanks so much," I say.

I've already started eating when Adam comes in and sits down opposite me. Maria puts a plate of the same stew in front of him, although I notice she gives him two more dumplings than she gave me. There's a jug of water on the table, and I refill my glass for the second time and drink. I need fluid and calories: Then I can spend all night in the Troposphere if I have to. I'm not sure when I'm going to sleep, though. Perhaps I should try to divide my night into half sleep and half Troposphere. But I still don't know how time works when you're in there.

"Hi," says Adam. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm OK," I say. "Sorry I fainted on you."

"I tried to stop you, but you just went down," he says. "But you didn't bang your head or anything like that."

Maria takes off her apron. "I'll be next door if you need anything," she says.

The bruised part of Adam's face is exactly the same color as stewed blackberries. The eye on that side is almost entirely closed.

"It's not as bad as what happened to you," I say. "I'm so sorry about that."

He shrugs. "Oh, well. These things happen."

"Yeah, but they don't, though. Not really." I breathe deeply and take another sip of water. "Things like this shouldn't happen. Not in real life."

"Yeah, but what's real life? Honestly. It's fine. It's over."

"But what if they come here? We'll be fucked." I realize I've sworn out loud in a priory. "I mean ... Sorry about my language. But you know what I mean."

Adam smiles now. "It's only language," he says. "Just don't do it in front of the friars. They'll get confused." Smiling obviously hurts him a little. He winces now. "Ouch," he says.

"So what exactly did happen?" I say. "I mean, they obviously beat you up. But why?"

"I wouldn't tell them where you live."

Shit. How guilty is it possible to feel?

"But why were they asking you? I don't understand."

"They'd interviewed Heather already, and when she couldn't answer their questions she sent them to find me. They seemed to assume that we knew a lot about you, even though Heather kept telling them we'd been sharing an office for a total of two days. So she told them I'd gone to show a new sessional teacher around the university, and they caught up with me at the chapel. The woman I was showing around—her children's school had phoned and said they were shutting because of the snow, and she'd left about five minutes before. When I walked out of the chapel I ran straight into these two blond men.

"I asked if I could help them, then they asked me who I was and I told them.

"'We'd like to ask you a few questions,' one of them said.

"I agreed, obviously—there was no reason not to—and invited them into the chapel. It was absolutely freezing and snow was settling on their hair and eyebrows. I was going to suggest making them hot drinks in the chapel kitchen. One of them looked around, as if he wanted to find some other building to go into, but as you know, there's nothing around the chapel. Then they said that they'd rather talk to me outside. I remember wondering what was wrong with the chapel. For some reason I thought about bombs and terrorists, and I thought that maybe the men were here to evacuate the building or something. I asked them if everything was OK. Then it all got confusing.

"'Since we've got to stand in the freezing cold, we'll make this quick,' one of them said. 'Where is Ariel Manto?'

"'I don't have any idea,' I said. 'Why?'

"'We need to find her. It's a matter of international security,' said the other one."

I've been eating while Adam talks. Not the most dignified of responses to what he's telling me, I know, but I just have to keep forking in the calories. But this bit makes me stop and frown.

"'International security'? What does that mean?"

Adam sips his water. "I don't know," he says. "I didn't get the chance to ask. The next thing that happened was that I tried to invite them into the chapel again, and this seemed to make them angry. They swore at me and said to just tell them where you were or something bad would happen to me. They were saying, 'You fucked her and you don't know where she lives?' And I was thinking, What? Then I realized that Heather probably thought we'd gone off and had sex the other night. Anyway, they kept asking me really crude, sexually explicit questions about you. At that point I realized that these men were dangerous and I decided not to tell them anything. I realized as well that they didn't need to ask me where you lived: They could just go and look it up in Personnel. So I told them again that I didn't know anything. Then they threatened me. They said something like 'Tell us, or take the consequences.'" Adam shrugs. "I thought to myself that they couldn't do anything to me except hurt me, so I simply braced myself for what came next." He points at his face. "This is the result."

"I can't apologize enough...," I begin.

Adam now smiles, but mainly with the bottom half of his face. "Well, that's not even the strangest thing that happened, though. To begin with, they did start hitting me. One of them grabbed me and pinned my arms back while the other one punched me in the face, I don't know ... Three times? Maybe four. It reminded me of being at school on a lunchtime punishment, and this guy seemed to think he had all the time in the world to just keep on hitting me. He'd hit me, then pause, then blow on his hand because it was so cold, then hit me again."

"My God," I say.

"Then the man who was holding me said, 'This isn't working. This is some religious guy who probably thinks he's Jesus or something. We could crucify him and not get any fucking information out of him.' The other one then said something like 'Well, the Romans didn't have these, did they?' And then he took out his gun. I must admit that he was right: I did become a lot more frightened then. I struggled and the man holding me slipped on the ice and released his hold on me. Not knowing what else to do, I half ran, half fell into the chapel and shut the door behind me. I kept thinking of St. Thomas, and I tried to reconcile myself with the idea of death. It was easier than I'd thought. I knew I was probably going to die, although I was equally aware that it would be absurd to be shot dead in the university chapel. Instinct made me hide under one of the pews, but I knew that the next moment the door would open and they'd come in and shoot me. There was nowhere else for me to go."

I have stopped eating now. This is insane. "Then what happened?"

"The door opened—I think they kicked it—but they didn't come in. For about five minutes or so they stood outside calling in to me. They were just swearing, trying to get me to come out. They went into great detail about the things they'd do to you if I didn't come out—but I just blocked out what they were saying and, for the first time in years, I prayed. I heard them argue about their guns and about what they should do next. At one point one of them told the other to 'Just go in there and finish him off.' But the other one said he was crazy if he thought he was going to go in there and lose something ... Something I didn't understand." Adam sips some more water. "Anyway, this is why I thought you'd be safe here. I got the impression that they felt that they couldn't enter religious places."

"But what happened after that? Did they just go away?"

"Yes. Well, eventually. It felt like hours, but it must only have been about five more minutes or so. Neither of them was willing to go into the chapel, and I wasn't going to come out. I don't think they fancied a siege in which they had to stand in the snow for days while I lived on Communion wafers and wine inside."

"I think this is probably the bravest thing I've ever...," I start.

"Don't flatter me," he says, holding up his hands. "After they left I was shaking so much I couldn't stand up for about twenty minutes. Then, when I did get up, I drank all the Communion wine. I'm not brave."

I should argue more about this. But something's bothering me.

"That thing you said before. Something you didn't understand. What was that?"

Adam has picked up his fork and is now eating his stew as calmly as if he'd just told me the football scores, not a story about escaping from men with guns.

"Sorry?"

"You said that when one of them said the other should go into the chapel he then said he was going to lose something if he did. Can you remember what it was?"

"Um ... Yeah. It was an acronym, I think. Three letters."

"Sorry. There's no reason why you should remember what they are."

"No, I do remember. The letters were KID. 'I'll lose my KID.' That's what he said. But it doesn't mean anything to me. Does it mean anything to you?"

I shake my head. "No. I don't know why I thought it would."

Chapter Seventeen

After we've finished eating, Adam comes out to the cloisters with me so that I can have a cigarette. The cloisters here consist of a small grassed quad—currently iced with snow—contained within four thin gray stone walkways. As Adam explained, it's like being outside inside, or the reverse. When I asked, he said he wasn't sure if smoking was actually allowed in the cloisters but that no one really bothered the guests here, anyway. So now I'm standing here drawing toxic smoke into my lungs, thinking about the cloisters in Russell College, and how people only use them to smoke in: Most of the students wouldn't think cloisters were for anything else.

"You're quiet," says Adam, leaning against a stone pillar.

"I just feel so out of place here," I say. "As though I'm going to be struck down any minute for smoking or swearing. Or worse—for caring about stupid things like being struck down for smoking and swearing when really I should be feeling guilty about your face, and the fact that my being here puts you all in danger and ... And as well as all that, I've got to work out how to get away, and where to go."

"You could just stay here," Adam says.

"I can't," I say. "There's someone I need to find."

But I don't tell him who, and I don't tell him how I'm planning to find him.

"Is this connected with the book?" he asks.

I nod. "Yeah."

"I suppose I can't ask you about the book?"

"No. It's probably better that you forget there ever was a book."

Adam shrugs. "Oh. Well, I'm glad I saw you again, anyway."

"You can't be," I say. "Look at what's already happened to you."

"But I don't mind that," he says, looking away from me. "At least pain is real."

"I know what you mean," I say, after a pause.

"Do you?" says Adam.

"Maybe not," I say, blowing smoke out into the cold air. "But I have ... I don't know. I have an odd way of looking at things. It's yet another reason I feel out of place here ... And with you, actually." I clear my throat, and it feels as if my words are being swallowed back along with all the phlegm and junk. Everything I want to say (and also don't want to say) contracts into one sentence: "I've done a lot of bad things."

"Everyone's done a lot of bad things."

"Yes, but there's a difference between forgetting to buy your grandmother a birthday card and the kinds of things I've done. I..."

"Whatever you've done doesn't matter to me."

I can't explain my sexual deviance to Adam, so I throw my cigarette butt into the snow in the quad, where it sinks like a monster's eye. "I'm a self-destructive person," I say. "Or at least that's what I am in magazine-speak."

"Self-destructive," Adam says. "That's an interesting term. I suppose I'm self-destructive, but in a more literal way. It's what the Tao asks you to do: to destroy the self and get rid of the ego."

"So being self-destructive can be a positive thing?" I say. "That is interesting."

"Well, since I lost God..."

"You lost God?" I say, half my face dimpling into a smile. "That was careless."

Shit. This isn't the time to make jokes. Ariel, for God's sake, don't be offensive now. But Adam just looks at me for a second and then, suddenly, he walks the couple of paces towards me, pushes himself against me, and kisses me hard. I kiss him back, although I know we can't do this here. His lips press against mine with a cold urgency, and then he's using his teeth: biting my lip, almost tearing my flesh. I pull away.

"Adam..."

"Sorry. But you do things to me."

I look at the ground. "I don't mean to."

"Yes you do."

"No. Look—I know what you mean. I usually do mean to do things with people or even, as you put it, to people; but not you. You're different."

"What, because I managed to lose God? Or because I ever had God at all?"

"I am sorry I interrupted. What were you going to say?"

He sighs into the air: a frozen cloud of uncertainty. "I was going to say that I lost God, and then I lost myself. You know how religion usually helps people find themselves, and find God? I managed to lose everything. I thought that was the point. All the books I read about losing desire and losing the ego ... The whole thing was soul-destroying, literally. Nothing prepared me for it. Nothing prepared me for what it would be like to be aware, objectively, of religion without being a part of it. The Bible just became a book, like any other book. I could still read it and make opinions about what this or that bit meant, but I couldn't believe in it."

"Soul-destroying. Like self-destructive."

"Yes. I experienced being truly selfless and it was fucking terrifying."

"Adam..."

"Connecting with other people; losing yourself in them; becoming 'at one.' It's hell. Who said that hell is other people?"

"Sartre."

"He's right. I didn't realize: Ripping out your soul and offering to share it around isn't at all like giving Communion, or taking some old clothes to the charity shop. It's like going into the park at night and taking off all your clothes and waiting to be pissed on."

I think about Wolf, and his useless attempts to get beaten up.

"People can't be all bad," I say.

"That's not what I'm saying. I ... I don't know what I'm saying. This is what I wanted to explain to you the other night, but I'm not doing a much better job now. I told you I've had a breakdown?"

"Yes. I'm sorry. I..."

"It's part of the same thing. The self destructs; the self breaks down. It's about exploding the self until there's nothing left anymore. But I couldn't do it. I completely failed. I broke down, sure, but then before I'd even had a chance to look into the abyss and see what it was like I started putting myself back together again. I tried being 'normal': drinking and swearing. It was quite fun. But now I'm not sure who I am. I use this word 'I' and I don't know what it means. I don't know where it begins and ends. I don't even know what it's made of."

"Ah. Well, I can help you there," I say. "Everything in the known universe is made of quarks and electrons. You're made of the same stuff I'm made of, and the same stuff the snow is made of and the same stuff this stone is made of. It's just different combinations."

"That's a beautiful idea," Adam says.

"It's true." I laugh. "I don't usually say that. But it's as true as anything can be."

Once I did a class with my students about working with meaning. It's supposed to be the little introductory session I do to get them thinking about Derrida. We do Saussure and all that basic stuff, and then I show them a photocopy of Duchamp's Fountain—the urinal that was voted the most influential piece of art from the twentieth century—and ask them if it's art or not. In this particular class most of the students started arguing that a urinal couldn't be art: Two or three of them became quite angry about it, and started talking about Picasso, and how their children could draw better pictures; and the recent Turner Prize-winning installation with the light going off and on ... I'd thought that it would be quite an easy class. All I'd wanted to demonstrate was that something that is called a "urinal," which we understand to be something that men piss in, is only different from something that is called a "painting," which we understand to be paint on canvas, because we make it different in language. And whether or not we choose to group either of these things in the category "art" depends on how we define art. But the students were having trouble getting it and I became frustrated with them. I remember thinking, Fuck you. I'd so much rather be at home right now, drinking coffee in my kitchen. I explained to them that everything in the whole world is made up of exactly the same quarks and electrons. Atoms are different. Sure, there are helium atoms and hydrogen atoms and every other sort of atom, but they're only different in the number of quarks and electrons they have and, in the case of the quarks, which way up they are. I explained that, therefore, the urinal could, in a very real way, be said to be the same as, say, the Mona Lisa. I told them that what they thought was reality was all relative to the position from which they were looking at it. Under a powerful enough microscope, the urinal and the Mona Lisa would look identical.

It's not just space and time that are fucked up. Matter is energy, but more than that: Matter is already gray sludge; we just can't see it. Now I think of the Troposphere and I wonder what that is made of and, even if it's only in my imagination, what my imagination is made of.

Adam comes back to my room with me. I immediately get on the bed, but he paces around for a while, peeping out of the curtains, then picking up the Bible and putting it back down. I think he's going to sit on the wooden chair but eventually he comes and sits on the bed next to me, with his head resting against the headboard about two inches from mine.

"So if we're all quarks and electrons...," he begins.

"What?"

"We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."

"Better that that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time."

I hear his breathing take on a slightly different rhythm as he puts his hand on my leg just where the material of the dressing gown is hanging slightly open.

"And what would you call that? I mean if it's just atoms repelling each other then it can't be worthy of note, really. I mean, why should anyone mind?"

"Adam..."

"What makes it real at all?"

For a moment I think about pain again: about forcing friction; forcing atoms to exchange electrons; forcing something to become real. But this is about something else; something beyond that.

"Language," I say. "Everything from the existence of the word real to the existence of the word fucking to the existence of the word wrong."

I place enough emphasis on the word wrong that he takes his hand away from my leg. I close the gap created by my dressing gown and cross my ankles. I know why I can't do this, but reason isn't the same as desire, and I am aware of my blood pumping purposefully around my body, preparing me for something that can't happen: Adam's lips on mine; his dark, hairy chest pressed against my smooth, pale breasts; penetration; oblivion. It's like starving and feeling you have to eat. I'm starving and someone's just presented me with a bowl of food and told me that I can't eat it; that it might be poisoned.

Adam gets off the bed and walks over to the window. The curtains are still closed but he doesn't open them; he just stands there looking at the beige fabric. He sighs.

"This language stuff is what you study, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"It's very different from theology."

"Is it?" I say. "Some of that stuff you were saying the other night at Heather's ... It made me think about Baudrillard and his idea of the simulacrum: a world made up of illusion, of copies of copies of things that don't exist anymore; copies with no original. And Derrida's difference and the way we defer meaning rather than ever really experiencing it. Derrida talks about faith a lot. He wrote a lot about religion."

"It's still not fun, is it? It still has the power to tell you what to do. It's like: Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules. I want something that tells me I don't have to follow the rules."

"Oh, well, maybe then you're back to the existentialists. I think they have more fun. Although the problem there is they don't really know they're having fun."

I think about Camus and The Outsider. I think about the scene where Mersault drinks coffee in the funeral parlor and the way that this is used, later, as evidence that he is a bad person. Having sex in a priory would therefore make you what sort of person?

"So Derrida is not an existentialist?"

"No. But it all comes from the same background: Heidegger; phenomenology."

"And what does that say about life?"

"What? Phenomenology?"

"Yeah."

"Um ... This is all stuff I'm still thinking about, and the way I understand it might not be quite right, but basically it's to do with the world of things: phenomena."

I think back to Lumas's story "The Blue Room," about the philosophers trying to establish whether or not ghosts exist. It reminds me of the time I was first trying to properly understand phenomenology (a process still not complete). I'd been reading Levinas's Discovering Existence with Husserl—Husserl was Heidegger's mentor—and I was trying to come to grips with his work, but it was very difficult. I was lying in the bath, trying not to get the book wet, and, as a thought experiment, asking myself the old question: "Is there a ghost in this room?" I reminded myself that if I were a rationalist, I could answer no, quite confidently, as long as I had already established that ghosts don't exist using logic and a priori statements. You can be a rationalist with your eyes shut. I know ghosts don't exist, so there is no ghost in this room. If you're a rationalist, and you've made your world out of a logic that says that when things are dead they are dead and that's it, then you could be there in a room full of screaming ghouls and still conclude that there is no ghost in the room. If I were an empiricist I'd look for evidence from my senses: I would see that there was no ghost in the room and conclude that if I was not experiencing it, then it wasn't there. I'd got all that. But phenomenology, it seemed to me, wasn't interested in whether or not the ghost was there. Phenomenology seemed to be asking, What the fuck is a ghost, anyway?

I try to summarize this for Adam.

"Basically, phenomenology says that you exist and the world exists but the relationship between the two is problematic. How do we define entities? Where does one entity stop and another begin? Structuralism seemed to say that objects are objects and you can name them anything you like. But I'm more interested in questions about what makes an object. And how an object can have meaning outside of the language we use to define it."

"So everything's just language in the end. There's nothing beyond words. Is that the main point?"

"Kind of. It's not just words though. Maybe 'language' is the wrong term to use in this context. Maybe 'information' is better." I sigh. "This is so hard to put into words. Maybe Baudrillard does it best when he talks about the copy without an original: the simulation. Like, you know the way Plato thought that everything on earth was a copy—or a shadow—of some 'ideal object.' Well, what if we've created a world in which even that shadowy level of reality isn't the final copy? One in which anything that was ever 'real' is now gone, and the copies that referred to things—in other words the language, the signs—don't refer to anything anymore? What if all our stupid pictures and signs don't make reality at all? What if they don't refer out to anything else, but only inward towards themselves and other signs? That's hyperreality. If we wanted to talk about it in Derridean terms we could talk of a world that constantly defers the real. And it is language that does that. It promises us a table, or a ghost, or a rock, but can never actually deliver one for us."

"Isn't it depressing?" Adam asks.

I laugh, but it sounds hollow in here. "Surely no more depressing than your idea that everything is an illusion?"

"But I was talking about an illusion that covers something up. Some definite reality. You're talking about a world where nothing is not an illusion."

"Well, maybe I do want to believe that there's something outside the simulacrum. I don't know. But it is exciting to think about it. Like finding out that everything is just quarks and electrons. I find it exciting because everything you learn about the basic units of things—language, atoms, whatever—you find that they are absurd. That stuff I was telling you the other night about quantum physics: It's so crazy it can't be true. And then what you were saying about truth existing outside reality: I found that exciting as well. There's always another level that we just don't know. The scientists have it down to the quarks and electrons, and the various weird variations of them that come down in cosmic rays and so on, but they don't know if that's it, if they have found indivisible matter—what the Greeks called atomos. It could even be that there's infinite divisibility. And there are still these big questions that no one can solve: What came before the beginning and what will happen after the end. The fact that these big questions still exist is exciting. No one really knows anything very important—and there's still such a lot to know."

"So now we're back to religion."

"I thought you said religion was part of the illusion. I mean, it's made of language like everything else..."

"But faith," he says now. "What's faith made of?" Adam touches the curtains but doesn't open them. "But you can't base anything on faith. Nothing based on faith is true."

"Isn't it? You could argue that we all have faith. We have faith in language, for example."

"Faith doesn't always pay off, though, does it? You don't always get back what you want."

He turns and looks at me. His face is pale and I remember what he said about not feeling "so good" at the moment. But he's still probably the most attractive human being I have ever seen, and for a second I can't believe he is here in this room with me, with his long, unwashed hair and his old grayscale clothes, like there's so much more to him than flesh, so much more than just atoms. How easy it would be to just close my eyes and let him in. But then he'd go away again and I'd be left with what I'd done. I don't want him to go away. I can't have sex with him, so I'm going to have to keep him talking. And then maybe we could just go to sleep in each other's arms? Don't be stupid, Ariel. Here that would be as bad as fucking.

"You could say we have faith in a shared culture," I say.

"Based on what?"

"Shared language. I mean, we do share a culture, and that culture is made up of things that we've broken down and labelled, like the way the nineteenth-century natural scientists classified everything. Of course, people still debate all those classifications. Are two similar fish actually one sort offish or two? Is everything different from everything else or the same?"

He's looking at me with the most sulky expression I've ever seen, everything on his face pointing downwards, including his gaze, which now drifts to the floor. But I'm still thinking that I want to drown in him; I want to drown in a pool of sulky, pissed-off Adam. I want him so much more now that he's cross with me for not agreeing to sleep with him. It's as if the lines of force between us have become elastic, and they're trying to contract. Are we different from one another or the same?

He doesn't say anything, so I carry on.

"According to what criteria can you say, This thing ends there, and here's where another thing begins? What exactly is 'being' anyway? Unless you go down to the atomic level, there seem to be no spaces between things. Even empty space is teeming with particles. But when you look at atoms closely you realize there is hardly anything but space. You must have heard that analogy that an atom is like a sports hall with one tennis ball in the middle? Nothing is really connected to anything else. But we create connections between things in language. And we use those classifications and the spaces between them to create a culture such as the one we're now in, in which we both understand that it would be wrong to sleep together in a priory in which I am a guest."

Adam's eyes are hard but his voice is now soft.

"Why is it wrong?"

"Come on, you know why. We'd offend everyone here if they knew what was going on."

"But surely that would be their fault for not understanding about the atoms?"

"Would it? That's not what culture says. Imagine using that as a defense for murder. But judge, I didn't really stab her because the atoms in the knife never touched the atoms in her body. We can't just exit culture because it doesn't suit us. Well, we could—or we could tell ourselves that's what we'd done—but we'd feel guilt, anyway." I sigh. It's so easy to talk like this but it's not easy to explain what I'm actually feeling. What would I say? Adam, I want to see you naked. I want to suck your cock and lie back and let you fuck me but not in a priory because it makes me feel dirty and evil and I'm probably going to die soon and even though I'm not sure I believe in heaven, I have seen an entity that claimed to be a god recently and so I don't want to mess up my chances at the last possible minute.

And then I think of Derrida again. It's as though I'm in some kind of auction and my last bid for purity is this: I'm thinking about his cock in my mouth but I'm not speaking it and I'm not doing it. I'm not letting the atoms get too close.

Adam turns to the window again. This time he opens the curtains and looks out.

"Is it still snowing?" I ask. That reminds me of some quote: Tell me, my dear, does it still snow? But I can't remember where it's from. Maybe in the quote it's not even snow. Maybe it's rain.

"No." He sighs. "I should have stayed at your flat on Tuesday."

"I wouldn't have slept with you then, either."

Are you listening, God?

He nods. "You don't find me attractive."

"It's not that. I think it's more that I don't find myself that attractive."

"That sounds like shit to me."

"Sorry. You're right. But I just can't. I want to—but I just can't."

Now he turns around again. He doesn't look me in the eye, though. There's no connection—whatever the hell that connection is when someone focuses on your eyes and you focus on theirs and for a second it feels like you're machines plugged into the same socket, or even that one of you is the machine and the other is the socket. Machines, sockets, electricity, lines of force ... Our eyes might not connect, but all the other lines of force are still there, pulling me towards him.

"But you do want to? You do want me?" The way he speaks is as if he's been told that he's got a terminal illness but a year to live. Is it possible to take sex this seriously? Is it possible to take sex with me this seriously? Patrick says I "do" things to him but all I really do to him is implicitly promise to provide what I always provide: dirty sex with no strings. But if he never saw me again I don't think he'd care. Do I want Adam? Well, that's easy.

"Yes. But I can't have you. I'm wrong for you."

"You know that I've never..." He lets the sentence drift away, like a snowflake that melts before it lands.

"I know. That's why as well. The thing is that I have. Thousands of times, with hundreds of people."

"Ariel, for God's sake."

"What?"

"Why are you saying it like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you're trying to make yourself seem ... I don't know."

"Like a bit of a slut?"

"I wouldn't put it like that."

"No. You're too nice." I bite my lip.

"Oh, fuck off. You think I'm nice because I used to be a priest. I don't want to be nice. I want..."

"What? You want to be like me? You want to be unnice? You want to be dirty? Well, come on then." I start undoing my dressing gown. "Let's fuck in the priory. Have a little bit of what I've got. Look: Here's some of what I've got." I hold up my arms, wrists facing outwards as though I'm pushing something away. "That's what happened last time someone fucked me."

Adam walks forwards and for a second I imagine that he's on his way to rip open my nightdress and push me down on the bed. Is that what I want him to do? Or do I want him to feel sorry for me with my fucked-up wrists and my hundreds of sexual conquests? But his eyes are as still as fossils as he walks right past me and out of the room. Whatever I do want I'm not going to get it. He's gone.

Half an hour later I'm under the covers in my bed in the cold, still room, alone. Adam never came back, not that I expected him to really. Oh well. I achieved my objective, even if it wasn't in the most elegant way. It's like when someone fills a whole blackboard proving something in mathematics and then someone else comes along and shows that it can be done in one line. I could have just told him I wasn't interested. It would have been a lie but it would have been elegant; more elegant than the maybe/never I've ended up with. Now I don't know if he'll ever want to speak to me again.

But I'm still here, at least: no blond men. I still exist.

Now I can go into the Troposphere.

This time it doesn't take long to go through the tunnel at all. But when I get out the other side it's different. The street I am so used to isn't there anymore. Instead I am in a cluttered town square with gray cobbles, which looks tiny compared with the mansions and castles crowded around it. There must be hundreds of these buildings, although objectively I can see that this should be spatially impossible. Nevertheless, they are "there." Some of them are built in pale stone, others are rendered in a dark, rusty-looking brick and have gothic spires and turrets that seem to reach into the clouds, as if they were trying to claw their way to heaven. Clouds. That's bizarre. There haven't been clouds in the Troposphere before. But it's still nighttime here; maybe I can only see the clouds now because of the full moon. But then I realize that the moon hasn't been here before, either.

There's a statue in the center of the square, shining in the moonlight. It seems to be a copy of Rodin's Le Penseur: a man sitting on a rock with his chin resting on the back of his hand. But as I walk closer I see that this man has a mouse face. It's a statue of Apollo Smintheus without his cape on. An owl hoots and I jump. Last time I heard sound in the Troposphere it wasn't a good sign at all. But nothing else happens so I decide it's just an owl. How many buildings are there here? An impossible number. It's very hard to describe what is in front of me but there does just seem to be too much stuff: too much information, all packed into such a small space. As well as the scramble of turrets and spires, I can see drawbridges and moats, mounds, smoke from fires, a rainbow bridge, and various flags; behind the buildings are mountains and cliff tops and lakes, all jumbled together like a bunch of landscape photographs overlapping on a crowded wall. In between these grand buildings are other, more familiar places: a couple of tea rooms, a small bookshop, and a shop selling magic tricks. They all seem to be closed, though. One place seems especially compelling, but it's not a building. It's an overgrown garden with high walls and a wrought-iron gate. Inside are a bench and several trees. I want to go in there, but it's locked. The other places here are also closed. Anachronistic neon signs glow pinkly all over the place. Closed. Fermé. Closed for Renovations. Closed. Shut. No Vacancies. What kind of place has gothic castles and towers with pink neon signs everywhere?

Console?

The thing comes up.

You have no choices, says the female voice.

Oh, great. This again. Has the whole thing crashed? Did those men do something to this place that means I just can't access anything anymore?

You have one new message.

What?

You have one new message.

Can I get the message? There's no response. Where's the little envelope that you click on? What is the equivalent here? How do I retrieve a message in the Troposphere? Who would have left me a message, anyway? For a second I imagine some brown paper package with red, green, and black wires coming out of it: a bomb from my enemies. But this doesn't make me feel anything at all and I remember that this is what I like so much about this space: no hot, no cold, no fear.

Something now glows in the console and I notice that's it's Apollo Smintheus's mouse-hole. I didn't notice it before, but it's there now: sitting between what looks like Valhalla and something called the Primrose Tea Shoppe. Am I supposed to go in there? I do want to see Apollo Smintheus. I switch off the console and walk through the white archway and into the room I recognize from before: the empty tables and shelves and the nest in the corner. There's no sign of Apollo Smintheus. I walk through to the other room. The fire is out and there's no one here. But there is a booklet lying on the table.

A Guide to the Troposphere, it says on the cover. By Apollo Smintheus.

Is this the message? I open the booklet.

You now have no new messages, says the console.

So the booklet is the message. OK. I sit down on the rocking chair and begin reading. The whole document is only about three pages long, but the script is large.

The Troposphere is not a place.

The Troposphere is made by thinking.

(I am made from prayer.)

The Troposphere is expanding.

The Troposphere is both inside your universe and outside it.

The Troposphere can also collapse to a point.

The Troposphere has more than three directions and more than one "time."

You are now standing in the Troposphere but you could call it anything.

The thought is all thought.

The mind is all minds.

This dimension is different from the others.

Your Troposphere is different from others'.

You achieve Pedesis via proximity in

Geography (in the world)

Tropography (in the Troposphere)

Ancestry (in the mind)

The choices the Troposphere gives you relate to proximity alone.

(Except when information is scrambled.)

You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds.)

You can also jump from person to ancestor in the world of memory.

This is all memory.

The Troposphere is a different shape from the physical world to which it (loosely) corresponds. For this reason it is sometimes more efficient to travel in the Troposphere and sometimes more efficient to travel in the physical world (see diagram).

Disclaimer: This diagram is a scaled-down version of a higher-dimensional calculation. It will be correct for journeys of a short or noncomplex nature. Pedesis that takes the ancestral route over many generations will (probably) lead to inaccuracies.

Note: Units of distance/time in the Troposphere work out as roughly 1.6 times that of their equivalent in the physical world. An "hour" in the Troposphere will last for 1.6 physical-world hours, i.e., ninety-six minutes.

Converting time to distance should be done in the usual way.

Distance is time in the Troposphere.

You cannot die in the Troposphere.

You can die in the physical world.

"You" are whatever you think you are.

Matter is thought.

Distance is being.

Nothing leaves the Troposphere.

You could probably think of the Troposphere as a text.

You could think of the Troposphere that you see as a metaphor.

The Troposphere is, in one sense, only a world of metaphor.

Although I have attempted it here the true Troposphere cannot be described.

It cannot be expressed in any language made from numbers or letters except as part of an existentiell analytic (see Heidegger for more details).

The last point could have been clearer. What I mean to say is that experiencing the Troposphere is also to express it.

End.

Chapter Eighteen

Back on my bed and it's only just gone midnight. I have to try to write down as much as possible of Apollo Smintheus's document before I forget it. I have to be able to think about it in the real world. What does it all mean? The thought is all thought. The mind is all minds. Is that what the Troposphere is? All minds? Perhaps I already knew that. Perhaps that's what I suspected. If that's the case, is the city in my mind so big that it has a little shop or house or, indeed, castle for every consciousness in the world? What were all those castles about, and why were they all shut? What is consciousness? Do worms have it? They must, if mice do. If I wanted to get in the mind of a worm in Africa, how would I go about that?

One thing is clear. Time does work differently in the Troposphere. I don't quite understand what distance/time travelled in the Troposphere is, but it seems obvious that when you come out of it, more time has passed than when you were inside. The first thing I do is draw out the diagram as I remember it. It's basically Pythagorean theorem. It's Pythagorean theorem but applied to space and time. I struggle to recall all the popular science books I've read over the years. Gravity works in a similar way, doesn't it? Isn't that what Newton said: The force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between two objects multiplied by their masses? But there's nothing in Apollo Smintheus's document about mass. It's all about distance and time. Indeed, he seems to be suggesting that, in the Troposphere, distance is the same thing as time. I know that's true in the "real" universe as well. It's called space-time. But you don't notice it in your normal life. You can't mess around with time by taking a trip to the shops, or even a trip to the moon. If you want to mess with time you have to fly away from Earth very fast in a spaceship, and keep travelling at something close to the speed of light without accelerating or decelerating. Then, if you come back, you'll find that "more" time has passed on Earth relative to you in your spaceship. What seems to happen in the Troposphere is the opposite of this. Or is it in fact the same? My stomach grumbles. I'm going to have to eat again soon.

But I can't stop thinking about the castles and towers with their ornate spires and heavy drawbridges. As I write out the lines You could think of the Troposphere that you see as a metaphor. The Troposphere is, in one sense, only a world of metaphor, I wonder what the castles, if they are metaphors, represent. And then I also wonder: When you go into the Troposphere, do you immediately get access to the consciousnesses "closest" to yours? And if so, did all the castles belong to the religious people in this building? And who decided that they would be castles? Did they; or did I?

I finish writing out the document. I think it's almost right. It's easier than I thought to remember, but then I think about what Apollo Smintheus has told me and it becomes clear that my Troposphere (because it's different for everyone) is in my mind. This document is now a memory. But then memory isn't that reliable and I do need this to be a document in the real world, a text I can go back to. Memory is already decaying it, though. I look at one line I've written: You can jump from person to person in the physical world. It doesn't look right. Have I left something out? I scrunch my forehead, as if this will make my memories rub together and create a kind of friction of remembrance. It works. You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds). OK. I don't know what this means but at least it's there on paper.

I yawn. My body wants to sleep—and eat—but my mind wants to keep doing this: to keep answering questions until there aren't any more questions. I glance back over my list. I have to smile when I see the reference to Heidegger. What's Apollo Smintheus doing thinking about Heidegger? But some instinct tells me that Apollo Smintheus knows how to explain things to people in their own personal language, and my language does include terms like existentiell and ontical, as well as their grander counterparts: existential and ontological. I've never forgotten what I read of Being and Time, although not finishing it is one of the big regrets of my life. I remember those terms because they're the ones I wrote so many notes about, all in the margins of the book.

When I read Being and Time I always thought of it as Being and Lunchtime: It was my private joke with myself for the month it took me to read the first one hundred pages. It took that long because I read it only at lunchtime, over soup and a roll in a cheap café not far from where I was living at the time in Oxford. That house had no heating at all, and it was damp. I spent the winters with chest infections and the summers with a house full of insects. I tried to spend as little time there as possible. So every day I'd go to the café and sit there for an hour or two reading Being and Time. I think I managed about three or four pages a day. As I remember this, I can't help wondering: Does Apollo Smintheus know this, too? Does he know about the day the café closed for renovations and I stopped going there? Does he know that I started having an affair with a guy who wanted to meet me at lunchtimes, and that I left Heidegger for him?

I wish I'd finished the book. I wish I'd brought it with me. But who takes Being and Time with them as an essential object when running away from men with guns? I get out of bed. There's a freestanding antique bookcase by the wall. It has a glass front and a little silver key. I look through the glass and see lots of texts written by Pope John Paul II, including a book of his poetry. There are thick brown Bibles and thin white Bible commentaries; all dusty. No thick blue books. No Being and Time. As if I thought there would be.

My stomach makes another peculiar noise, as though it's a balloon being blown up. I need to eat. I need fuel. I also need to start trying to find Burlem. How the hell am I going to do that? I wouldn't even know where to start. Except ... Shit! Of course. I've still got the contents of his hard drive on my iPod. Does it need charging up? I walk away from the bookshelves and look through my bag. It's there, and it has almost a full battery. Fine. But I don't have a full battery: If I'm going to stay up doing this then I need to eat.

The corridor is dark and cold. I can't believe I'm on my way to steal food from a priory kitchen. Is it actually stealing? I'm sure that if anyone else was awake and I could ask them they'd tell me to help myself. That's what people usually say to guests, isn't it? At least I haven't had sex here; I haven't had sex in the priory with an ex-priest.

I wonder where Adam is. Is he in one of the other guest rooms? I imagine bumping into him in the corridor and taking back everything I said earlier on. But I'm not sure you can take back everything I said. My insides spiral into themselves as I briefly imagine touching him; touching him anywhere. It doesn't begin as a sexual thought, but it soon becomes one. I imagine licking his legs and scratching his back. As my mind spirals more tightly, everything falls away. There are no men with guns; there is no priory. In an impossible half hour with Adam, a half hour without context, what would I want to do? We could do anything. How far would I go? How far would be enough to smother this desire? Jagged, violent images dance in my mind like broken glass and I sigh as the fantasy breaks down. Perhaps nothing will ever really satisfy me.

The kitchen door is closed but unlocked. Inside it is dark, but some heat is still coming from the range, and there's an orange glow of fuel burning in there. I don't switch on the light; the orange glow is just bright enough to see by. The smell of stew that was so savory before has lost intensity and become something more like a memory of a meal: that plasticy food smell you often get in institutions. I try a couple of cupboard doors before I find the pantry. There are large red and silver tins of biscuits, all stacked on top of one another. There are about twenty catering-sized tins of baked beans. There is powdered milk and condensed milk. There are several loaves of bread. What can I eat? What should I eat? What will actually give me energy I can use to stay in the Troposphere? I recall advice columns from several years' worth of my ex-housemates' women's magazines. Complex carbohydrates. That's the kind of thing I need. Whole wheat pasta, brown rice. But I can't cook anything. There are lots of cereals but, I'm guessing, no soya milk. There's a box of fruit. Bananas. I'm sure I remember that bananas are a good source of something or other. I take three and then, after thinking about it, I take the whole bunch. I can take some with me when I go. What else? Hurry up, Ariel, before you're caught raiding the bloody pantry. A small loaf of brown bread. A jar of Marmite. A bottle of lemonade. For Christ's sake. I'm going to travel to another world on Marmite sandwiches, bananas, and lemonade. The thought is absurd. Just before I close the pantry I see something else: several huge tubs of Hi-Energy meal replacer. I take one just in case. It's a brown cylinder, with pink, cheerful lettering.

Back in my room I stash all the food items in the bottom of my bag, except for three slices of bread and three bananas and the lemonade. It doesn't take too long to set up my laptop and connect my iPod. I close iTunes as soon as it opens up and instead go to My Computer and scan through until I see the iPod showing as Removable Drive (E:). I transfer Burlem's files to my desktop and then unplug my iPod and hide it in the bottom of my bag with the food.

Outside I can hear the wind picking up and I imagine a blizzard, something like the LUCA numbers gone viral, even though Adam said the snow had stopped. I eat three bananas, each wrapped in a slice of brown bread. I sip lemonade. I browse files. I learn that Burlem's CV is out of date, even though he seemed to go through a phase of applying for jobs in the States about three years ago. I learn that he was halfway through a novel when he disappeared (and, I wonder, did he take the file with him? Did he ever finish it?). The first chapter is quite good, but obviously doesn't have anything in it that will help me find him. I can't help reading the rough plan as well before I move on. It's only a page long. The novel is about a young academic who has an affair with a colleague who then gets pregnant by him. His wife finds out about the affair (but not the child) and divorces him, but the colleague's husband believes the child to be his. When he dies, the child is told the truth about her parentage and begins a tentative relationship with her biological father. The narrator lives alone with only books for company, and wishes he could see more of his daughter. After I close that document, I keep searching through the files. I find all the parts of the application process Burlem had to go through to get his professorship. I find letters to his bank manager. But there's nothing at all that suggests that he planned disappearing, that he planned to leave the university and never come back. There are more letters. There's one to a Sunday newspaper, complaining about a cartoon that mocked Derrida the weekend after his death. I smile at that, remembering seeing the cartoon and hoping someone would write in. There's a letter to someone I don't recognize. Molly. There's no surname. It's written in a strange style, the kind of style you'd use to talk to a child. Then I realize it is to a child. It's written to a child—or perhaps a teenager—at a boarding school. Burlem's promising to go and see her soon, and to give her money. What would Burlem be doing with a schoolgirl? My mind fills with unpleasant thoughts.

Then I open the file of the novel again. The kid in the book is called Polly.

I read the letter again. This is Burlem's daughter; of course it is. Shit. He never mentioned this to me. I just thought he was an unmarried—or, I guess, possibly divorced—guy in his fifties. I didn't know that he had a troubled past, although I should have realized. He certainly always looked like a man with a troubled past.

There's no address on the letter apart from Burlem's. But now I find other letters—a whole list of them below the ones to the bank manager—that make sense. They are all to a Dr. Mitchell and are on subjects such as fees, bullying, and extra tuition. Then I look at the bank manager letters and find instructions to set up a direct debit to a school in Hertfordshire. The reference is Molly Davies. Now I get it. Burlem's paying for his daughter to go to boarding school. There's an address on these letters. The address of the school.

My mind's buzzing. Could I get to Burlem through her?

Now I need to go back into the Troposphere. I need to find Apollo Smintheus.

When I get there I realize that the town square has more than four corners. The same castles are standing around with the same neon pink signs, still looking like impossibilities. The owl hoots again.

"Apollo Smintheus?" I say.

Nothing.

I call up the console.

You have no choices, it says.

"Can I still use the Apollo Smintheus card?" I ask it.

The Apollo Smintheus card has expired.

Fuck. I thought he said I'd have it for a couple of days.

I wander around the square but everything really is shut. There's a road leading out of the square and I take it. With each step I think of Apollo Smintheus's "rough calculation," that each unit of distance/ time in the Troposphere is worth 1.6 in the "real" world. So what is a footstep? How much time does this take me? If I take a hundred steps, and it takes me, say, two minutes, when will I wake up in the priory? How far would I have to go to miss breakfast? How far would I have to go to be pronounced dead? I walk on, past a couple of car parks and a jazz club. On the other side of the road there's a run-down strip club with black oily streaks down its white façade, as if it recently caught fire. Neither of these places has a name, but the strip club has silhouettes of girls on poles, and the jazz club has a picture of a saxophone. The jazz club is on a corner, and there are concrete steps leading down towards an alleyway, at the end of which is a cinema and another car park. None of these buildings seems to be closed. There are no pink neon signs here. Without really thinking about it, I enter the jazz club. But there's no music and no smoke.

You now have one choice.

You ... I'm cold and I need to take a shit. But it looks like we're going to sit here all night. Ed's got the heat on full but my feet are still like blocks. There's snow on the ground outside and the wind's picked up, too. The sign on the church across the street rattles back and forth. Who is Our Lady of Carmel? The word makes me think of caramel; a lady made out of caramel or something. The car smells of coffee and junk food. There are sandwich wrappers all over the floor. I kick one of them and it makes a thin, plastic, broken noise.

"What's that?" says Ed.

"Sandwich wrapper," I say. "Sorry."

Ed says nothing. His eyes are pure pupil.

"Maybe she isn't in there," I say.

"Look, the priest knows about the churches and she's screwing him, right?"

"Yeah, but..."

"And he 'comes here when things go wrong.' Why wouldn't he ask her to come, too? They'll know that as long as they stay in there we can't do anything. Maybe she knows, anyway. Who knows how long she's had the book? She could have been surfing MindSpace for years."

"I say the book's on its way to Leeds."

"Where is Leeds, anyway?"

I shrug. "Northwest? It's not close to here."

"Shit."

"We'll get the book."

"We didn't get it last time."

"We'll get it."

I'm ... Oh fuck. I'm in the mind of one of the blond men. Martin. Martin Rose. OK, Ariel. Don't let him know you're here. But how do you tiptoe around in someone's mind. Shhh. Do I stay or do I go? Console? The thing appears like a slide transparency and now, as I/Martin look over at Ed, his face is busy with an overlay of images. Someone's baking something. Someone else is driving on a freeway. Another person is looking up at a blue sky. What are these images? I remember Apollo Smintheus's document:

You achieve Pedesis via proximity in

Geography (in the world)

Tropography (in the Troposphere)

Ancestry (in the mind)

OK. So if you get close to someone in the world you can get into their mind (but surely only via the Troposphere?) This kind of makes sense. These guys are right outside the priory, and I had to walk down a street to find them. I don't understand what Tropography might be. But Ancestry. Is that what I'm seeing now? Are these images something to do with Martin's parents and grandparents? There are only three of them. That's not much ancestry. In the mouse's mind there were hundreds of images. Come on, Ariel. Think ... But I don't want to think too loudly in case I alert Martin to the fact that I'm here. I am almost intrigued enough to try one of the images in the console to see what will happen, but something tells me that this would be a big mistake. When I last did this, with the mice, I managed to jump from the cupboard under my sink to the backyard. Who knows where I'd end up if I jumped here. Maybe somewhere in America. How would that translate in the Troposphere?

"Ed?"

"What?"

"If she just stays put in there there's not much we can really do."

"Right."

"Does she know that?"

Ed shrugs. (There's been a doorway hovering faintly over him the whole time, but now I can see another image in the console. It's an image of the interior of a car and a blond man.... It's me. It's Martin. So I could choose to be Ed now? Is that right? Shall I jump? Shall I do it? No. Stay safe.)

"We could burn it down," I say, not really meaning it. I didn't come here to burn down churches—or shoot priests. We've been given a second chance to take the book and OK, we've gotten a little crazy. But on the other hand we don't have much formula left and so this whole thing feels urgent. Our CIA cards will only get us so far; especially if someone chose to actually call the number and speak to our ex-boss. What would he say? No, haven't seen those boys since they joined Project Starlight. Haven't seen them since I signed the form re-leasing them from their duties. CIA? Not anymore.

"That's not a terrible idea," says Ed. "At least we'd warm up."

"It is a terrible idea. Forget I ever said it."

"Why? Smoke them out. It's a great idea."

I look out through the windshield. I'm thinking that I have a problem with shooting priests, but I could hurt her: Ariel Manto. I guess she'll be expecting it. That makes it easier. The first time it wasn't so easy: I remember vomiting into the toilet in some pale blue diner out West. I held on to the bowl and there was blood on it afterwards; blood from my hands. The next person I killed was a piece of scum anyway and was expecting it. That made me realize that there's the possibility of impersonality in doing these things, and after that I found I could do it without really being there. As though you're there but you're not there. You have a haze in your mind and afterwards you just wipe it. Then again, all this time in MindSpace makes you empathize with people more. But still, we need to get rid of the people who know the secret—once we know the secret ourselves. I kick the sandwich container again and Ed glares at me. Every so often the wipers go off and more snow accumulates in these minidrifts on the edges of the windshield. On the right, just in front of us, there's the priory: the little red-brick building. Could I get out of the car and set it alight? How do you set fire to something? Isn't it hard, especially in the snow? We'd need gas to do it, and some kind of kindling, and a lighter.

"I don't think it's that easy to set fire to a place," I say.

"So how in God's name are we going to get them out?"

"I don't know."

A long pause.

"I'm cold."

"So am I."

So how do I go into Martin's memories? That's what I want to know. The console's still there, and I recognize the "button" for Quit. I switch off the console, just by thinking it closed. Now I'm just sitting there in Martin's presence, haunting him without him knowing anything about it. I can't let him know I'm here. But I want his memories. I want to know what he knows. Mr. Y did it in the book, so I should be able to do it, too, now that fiction has become truth and my world is so closely connected to the world of the book.

Childhood! I think, experimentally. I try to give it the kind of jaunty, authoritative exclamation mark I give when I think Console! Nothing happens. I try to merge a little more with Martin. I feel what he feels. I stop trying to be me at the same time as I am him. I focus on all the shit in my gut, and how I'm not even sure if I want the formula as much as I want to be in a clean, air-freshened bathroom, with my bare feet on a cream shag-pile carpet, taking a dump, clearing all the waste from my system. I try it again. Childhood! And suddenly there it is: an image of a plastic toy; this thing that changes from a robot into a car and then back again. Project Starlight! I think...

Now I'm in a white room with electrodes on my head and chest. This is weird. This is different from the early parts of the study, where I had to hold pictures of triangles, circles, and squares and try to transmit them to Ed in another room. This feels more like the remote viewing experiment—not that I was any good at that. Other guys were travelling to Iraq in their minds and drawing out pictures of weapons dumps and biotech factories, deep underground. I couldn't find any of that shit when I went to Iraq in my mind. A couple of camels: They said I imagined them. But this is something completely different. They've given me some formula from a clear test tube, and now they've plugged me into this machine. I'm sitting on something that looks like an electric chair crossed with a dentist's chair. But ... Then I'm in another world.

When I come out and finish filling in the questionnaire, they tell me I've been to a place called MindSpace. I'm like, What the hell is MindSpace? No one wants to tell me. But pretty soon I'm running errands for them; taking trips to Iraq but not looking for weapons this time. Not that there are any to find—not according to Ash, the guy in charge of that part of the program. I remember he once said to me that the skill of remote viewing is twofold: 1) find what's there and 2) find whatever they tell you to find. So I don't look for weapons in Iraq. I read people's minds. No one lets me go close to Saddam, though. I'm not good enough for that. Plus, my security clearance is a little uncertain. After all, Ed and I were recommended for this after things got out of hand in New Orleans and we shot right to the top of the transfer list. And a transfer into a wacky paranormal project? There's no better way to relieve yourself of a couple of crooked agents. Anyway, once the project was in full swing, my missions involved people much farther down the pack of cards than Saddam. Two of Diamonds; Three of Spades. I'd go out there, come back, and then some guy would come in from the military to question me. That became my job. Ed and I joked that we should get new titles: Mind Agents—something like that.

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 anymore. 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 airplane) 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. But the kid could actually manipulate reality or, at least, he could change people's minds. If no minds needed changing, the kid could do other things as well, such as retrieve your lost memories. All you had to do was look at a document once and it was recorded in your mind. OK—so not many people can retrieve documents from their minds like that, even after they've read them two or three times. But these kids could read them to you as if your mind was just an autocue.

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 forever 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.