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 Pythagoras’s theorem. It’s Pythagoras’s 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? 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 in the physical world? 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 memory is already decaying it. 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’m going to need to eat if I’m going back into the Troposphere. Then I’m going to have to work out how to find Burlem.

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 savoury before has lost intensity and become something more like a memory of a meal: that plasticky 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 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. Wholewheat pasta, brown rice. But I can’t cook anything. There’s a box of fruit. 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. A small loaf of sliced 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-EnerG meal replacer. I take one just in case. It’s a brown cylinder, with pink, cheerful lettering. I think about stupid capital letters on products, and then I think iPod. And then: Burlem. That’s where I put all his documents.

Of course.

Back in my room, it doesn’t take too long to set up my laptop and connect up my iPod. I transfer Burlem’s files across and then unplug my iPod and hide it in the bottom of my bag. 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 recognise. 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 realise 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 realised. 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?

I need to find Apollo Smintheus.

When I get back into the Troposphere, I realise 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 seem 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. ‘North-west? 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 are close to someone in the physical world, you can get into their mind via the Troposphere. This kind of makes sense. These guys are right outside the priory, and I had to walk down one metaphorical 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? Are they their POVs? 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 and into the mind of the mouse by the bins, who must have been the first mouse’s – what? – father? Grandfather? 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. I try to relax and let my ‘I’ fall backwards, so that I can properly become Martin and get further into him than just the surface of his thoughts. And – it’s like putting on a new outfit; something too warm, like a jumper on a hot day – my consciousness slows down, and my ‘I’ is now Martin’s . . .

‘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 releasing them from their duties. CIA? Not any more.

‘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 realise that there’s the possibility of impersonality in doing these things, and after that I found 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 empathise 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 mini-drifts 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.’

Martin’s mind – at least his surface thoughts – quieten into a buzz of physical sensations and my own consciousness seems to automatically struggle out of its restrictive costume. My ‘I’ is back. So how do I go into Martin’s memories? The console’s still there, and I recognise 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 seems to have become truth.

‘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 suppress myself as much as I can. 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. And I feel something for this piece of plastic: a desire; a hope; some kind of victory . . . ‘Project Starlight!’ I think . And that’s it: I’m suffocating into him as my ‘I’ seems almost to stop existing at all, and I’m Martin, in the past . . . 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 further 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 any more. Ed’s more into the philosophical side than me; I think that’s fair to say. And I guess I had my own questions about reality, dreams, the past, the future. But mostly we didn’t dwell on that. We talked about pussy, mainly. Yeah – like the time I was in some lady’s head, on a plane to Baghdad (it’s kind of weird that you’re given this power to travel around the whole world in people’s minds and you still find that the most efficient way to go is on an 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. You could be walking around in the physical world with this little voice in your head reminding you of your ATM number, or your mother’s birthday, or the exact wording of a document you saw five years ago. They could read your memories off to you like an autocue. But things got weird when you took your KID into MindSpace with you. I mean, it was great in some ways, having a little buddy with you walking around that crazy landscape . . . But once you were in someone’s mind, you felt a bit like the middle of a Russian doll. The KID, the littlest doll, would now be a voice in both of your heads, and you had to learn to switch off while the KID told the person to do whatever it was you wanted them to do. Because these KIDS – they could actually manipulate reality, or, at least, they could change people’s minds.

We took our KIDS when we left. No one knew they’d stayed with us. They’re dead, of course. All the KIDS are dead. That’s why the project was decommissioned. Any project that kills a hundred children can’t go on, either with government funding or without it. The KIDS simply stayed in MindSpace too long. No one thought it could kill you, if you got lost in it. No one knew how to wake the poor little bastards up.

And now we have only one bottle of formula left from the twenty we took from the storeroom when we went. And what can I say? Surfing in MindSpace is something you just can’t stop doing. So we need the recipe, and the recipe’s in the book. Of course, we don’t just want it for ourselves. Can you imagine how much money there is in this? If we had the recipe, we could sell it for thousands of times the amount they’re planning on charging businessmen to fly to the moon. This is the only time I’ve ever been close to anything of any value. I have to get the book. I have to get the book . . .

I . . . Actually, I have to take a dump. The urgency is like a voice in my head.

‘Ed?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I have to take a dump, man.’

‘For Christ’s sake. Can’t you hold on?’

‘I’ve been holding on for a couple of hours, and I really think I’m going to shit my pants. And how long are we planning to stay here, anyway? It’s almost three a.m.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Ed’s hands are on the steering wheel, even though we haven’t been driving for hours. Now he moves it back and forth as if something is happening; as if we aren’t just sitting here. The steering locks and he curses. ‘Fuck. Jesus.’

‘Sorry, but you know . . . We could wait here for ever and she might never come out.’

Ed hunches his shoulders forward. ‘If she’s in there.’

‘Yeah. If she’s in there. I still think maybe Leeds.’

‘We can’t lose the book.’

‘I know. I want it as much as you do.’

Ed rubs his face. ‘OK. New plan.’

My breath’s coming out all ragged, like a shredded ghost. ‘Go on.’

‘How about we leave here now? Go get some sleep. But we’ll give it to the KIDS as a mission. We’ll send them to trail her.’

I almost ask him how exactly he sees that working, but I need him to agree to give this up now, so I just say ‘OK.’ I think of the pale shag carpet in my imagination and the real chipped linoleum at the motel. Either way, we have to go. I have to go. Something sure is insisting that I leave here now.