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 centre. 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 tomorrow, 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 daytime?’
‘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 realise 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 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 any more.’
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 realises 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 grey 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 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 realised 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 colour 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 any more. 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 then 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 realise 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 PhD. A chapter on Lumas about the blurring between fiction and non-fiction, 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 realise 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 for ever. 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 then 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 any more. 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 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 colours 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 re-read 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 for ever. 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 recognise all of them, but after a while they organise 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 recognise. 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 pices 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.
0111011101101000011000010111010001110100011010000110 0101011001100111010101100011011010110110100101110011 011001110110111101101001011011100110011101101111011 0111001110111011010000110000101110100011101000110100 0011001010110011001110101011000110110101101101001011 0011011001110110111101101001011011100110011101101111 011011100111011101101000011000010111010001110100011 010000110010101100110011101010110001101101011011010 01011100110110011101101111011010010110111001100111 0110111101101110011101110110100001100001011101000111 0100011010000110010101100110011101010110001101101011 0110100101110011011001110110111101101001011011100110 0111011011110110111001110111011010000110000101110100 011101000110100001100101011001100111010101100011011 0101101101001011100110110011101101111011010010110111 00110011101101111011011100111011101101000011000010111 0100011101000110100001100101011001100111010101100011 011010110110100101110011011001110110111101101001011 0111001100111011011110110111001110111011010000110 00010111010001110100011010000110010101100110011101 010110001101101011011010010111001101100111011 011110110100101101110011001110110111101101110
And then everything goes white and I’m out of the tunnel.