THERE’S A YOUNG WOMAN IN my office. She’s about my age, or a bit younger, and has thick black glasses and short, blonde, 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 PhD 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 post-doctoral 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 any more.’
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, grey and off-white clothes. Under his black thigh-length cotton jacket is an open grey 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, corpse-like 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 for ever? 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 mesmerising 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 manoeuvre 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 realise the reason for the awkward angle of the bus: it’s a white van, parked on the kerb 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 Homoeopathic 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 practising 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. 1M 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:
Is it any wonder that it is carbon that holds this mystique? Carbon is nothing less than the compression of life itself, which becomes the fuel for our furnaces and machines that themselves provide the fuel for life. Carbon, to which all living things eventually return (ashes to ashes, dust to dust), must be the most mysterious of all substances and in that respect the alignment with death is unavoidable. But carbon is also life. It is the beginning of life and its end. In potency it retains not physical substance but energy, which is meaning. And the meaning of carbon is both simple and complex. Life. Death. The limit of all things.
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 any more; 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 semi-darkness. 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.