I’M SITTING ON MY BED with my thoughts flapping in my mind like chaotic butterflies.
Oh, fuck.
Now I understand why Apollo Smintheus took a special interest in me.
So I can change things in people’s minds – just like the KIDS can. I can make people such as Martin Rose want to go to the toilet so badly that he leaves his stake-out. And I made Wolf refuse to tell Adam where the book was when the Project Starlight men were surely in Adam’s mind, listening in. But I thought everyone could do that. I didn’t think there was anything special about me. Now it turns out that there is. Lura also thinks I could probably think in machine code; that I have that potential. And that’s why Apollo Smintheus wants me to seek out Abbie Lathrop and, through her, to change history. So now Burlem and Lura want me to go even further back and convince Lumas not to write the book at all. They say I can have as long as I want to plan my journey – after all, once the book is gone, then the knowledge is gone. The Project Starlight men will never find the book in the priory because the book will not be there any more. There won’t be any Project Starlight. But I am bothered by paradoxes again: they are pinning me down by my wings. If I had already done this, and been successful, then I wouldn’t need to go. And I don’t have all the time in the world, really. Martin and Ed could come here tomorrow and blow my brains out. The fact that they’re here, in this world, and they want to do this – surely that implies that I have already been unsuccessful?
Except . . . Perhaps time doesn’t work in exactly the way we all think.
But maybe I’d better not think about that too much . . . I’m actually a bit scared of thinking anything, now I know what my thoughts potentially are.
So I wanted knowledge, and I got it. But did I ever want this kind of knowledge? Did I ever want to know that there is no God: that we ARE God? That there’s not necessarily a creator or a reason? We make reason, and only dream of creators: that’s all we can do. But I knew this all along, right? Maybe. But how awful this is: how awful to be proved right; for someone to demonstrate to you that, yes, there’s no Daddy up there who’s going to approve of you because you got the puzzle right. No supreme being is going to clap and give you a special place in heaven because you understood some of Heidegger. God might be up there in the Troposphere, but the Troposphere is simply our thought. And there really is nothing outside of that. Our thoughts spin quarks up and down and smear electrons into whatever we want them to be.
Newtonian cause and effect suggested that someone wound the original clock and set it ticking, and that every single action in the universe could be predicted – if you had something powerful enough on which to do the prediction. There’s no free will in that world: a world where everything can potentially be known. In that world, I’ll get up in the morning and do what I have been programmed to do: as though all my actions are just computer-game dominoes, triggered by other computer-game dominoes. It’s what happens when you try to combine God with science. It’s narrative, pure and simple. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. And the middle is only there because the beginning is; the end is only there because the middle is. And in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.
Take away that cause-and-effect narrative and you have the quantum world, disturbing enough in its own way, with all the possibilities of multiple universes and infinite probability. But if you don’t take it too seriously, and if you factor-in evolution and economics, and everything else that’s taken for granted in our world, then you have at least the illusion of free will. You can decide to become rich. You can grow up to be president. Improbable, but possible.
But in this new world of poststructuralist physics, I have so much free will that nothing means anything any more.
But you believed that before, Ariel. You’ve read Heidegger, Derrida. You got a thrill out of it all: no absolutes. It’s what you believed. Everything depends on everything else.
But I didn’t want it to be true. Or, I wanted it to be true for the closed system of language, in which nothing is ever absolutely true, anyway. I wanted uncertainty. But I didn’t want the world to be made only of language and nothing else.
Maybe that’s why Burlem’s heading for the void.
And that’s where I’d be going, too, if I didn’t have to go into the Troposphere again, with a real possibility that I’ll never come back. But I suppose that Burlem and Lura’s reasoning is clear enough. If I’m going back to change Abbie Lathrop’s mind for Apollo Smintheus, why not just keep going and change Lumas’s mind for the human race? And, of course, what they said made sense. The Troposphere shouldn’t be there. If enough people knew about the Troposphere, we’d have the worst possible scenario: no God – and no free will, either. People would simply be able to control other people’s minds. Those with power could simply manipulate the rest of us to think what they want us to think. Any ‘bad’ or ‘revolutionary’ thoughts could be erased.
Yeah: like I’m going to erase the thoughts of Abbie Lathrop and Thomas E. Lumas.
When I lie down in bed, I can hardly sleep. And when I do drop off, I just find I’m dreaming of Apollo Smintheus again. Most of the dream is the same as the one from the other night, with him saying ‘You owe me’, over and over again. But the other half of the dream is about everything he said about time travel and paradoxes. I’m asking him, ‘But how can I go back in time and change a world that is not already now changed by what I did?’
And he’s saying ‘You already have.’
I get about an hour’s sleep in the end.
When I get up in the morning, the rain has stopped and Burlem’s cooked me porridge. I’m not sure I want porridge: I think I want to smoke a lot, and then go through the kitchen drawers until I find the sharpest knife, and then I want to spend a few hours alone convincing myself that I’m real and I’m human and I mean something. But in the end I just eat the porridge, and then smoke one cigarette with a glass of water. Lura comes down from her study at about ten o’clock.
I’m sitting on one of the yellow sofas, finishing my second cigarette of the day. The fire is dead and I flick the stub into it. Burlem is out walking Planck. Lura makes herself a cup of herbal tea and comes to sit in the armchair.
‘So,’ she says.
I cough a little. ‘So,’ I say back.
‘What a night,’ she says. ‘How do you feel?’
I look beyond her and out through the patio doors. The grass is still damp from the frost last night. I can see the patch of earth that we dug over yesterday, and it looks redder and fluffier than the rest of the garden.
‘I feel completely wasted,’ I say. ‘All that thinking . . . And I didn’t sleep very well.’
‘Oh? Because of the thinking?’
‘Mainly because of bad dreams,’ I explain. ‘Time-travel paradoxes.’
‘Ah. Yes. They’ll keep you up. I used to be married to a world expert on them: I should know.’ Her smile is watery, and I wonder what happened to him. Did he go off with someone whom he’d phone from toilets? Or maybe he died, and Lura got the dog to keep her company. But I can’t ask.
I frown. ‘I was bothered by feet.’
She smiles and sips her tea. ‘Feet?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘The human foot. No one knows exactly how it works – well, not well enough to be able to replicate one. And then there are things like junk DNA and cognitive processes, and the way quantum theory doesn’t match up with gravity, but everyone thinks it must do . . . How does that work?’
‘You may have to explain more clearly,’ she says. ‘How does what work?’
‘Well, clearly no one’s been able to “think” these things into existence, but they do exist. I suppose what I’m trying to ask is how poststructuralist physics accounts for things that exist in the world without explanation, if the explanation is what creates them?’
Lura’s nodding. But she doesn’t speak yet.
‘I mean,’ I say, ‘in the scenario you’ve described, how is there any mystery at all?’
‘Good question,’ she says. ‘Very good question.’
‘Is there an answer?’
She sighs. ‘Yes. I think so. It’s interesting you were thinking about time-travel paradoxes, because . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well, all these questions are really about creation. What is a creator? What does a creator do? When does creation take place? Of course, scientists hate the word “creation” and “creationist”.
Science says it is against creationism, or intelligent design – or at least, it’s against them being taught alongside science, in science classes. But the irony is that there are creators, and they are the scientists.’ Lura sips her tea and then puts it down. ‘And we’re so used to the idea of creation as something that happens in the beginning. First the world was created, then we were created; then things started to happen. That’s the way the story usually goes. But what if it’s the future that creates us, not the past?’
‘Shit . . .’ I say. ‘But . . .’
Lura laughs. ‘But how does that work? It doesn’t; not according to classical physics.’
‘So . . . This is connected to that question I asked last night, about thoughts having “backwards effects”, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re saying that, in the future, someone will come up with a theory that, for example, reconciles quantum physics and gravity, and that this theory makes the world work the way it does now? So scientists are just discovering things that have already happened?’
‘Yes to the first bit, but no to the second. Einstein still created relativity by thinking it,’ she says, picking up her tea again and taking a sip. ‘But someone in the future will do the next bit, and someone else will do the bit after that, and it will all trickle down through history.’
‘So we’re living in a world that has had infinite people in the future thinking about it already,’ I say.
‘No. Because the future hasn’t happened yet. And the future may not be infinite.’
‘But . . .’
‘It’s not a cause-and-effect universe any more, Ariel. Nothing really happens before or after anything else. You could say that, in some way, everything happens at once.’
I think of the train of fear, and the way I was able to return to myself at any point I wanted. But that was because I was moving on something that had no mass, that was able to travel infinitely fast. I was travelling on emotion, not on anything real.
But is thought real? Does thought have mass?
It must do. We’ve already agreed that thought is matter.
Or have we? I’m still not sure about all this.
‘Sorry,’ Lura says. ‘This is a lot to take in.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Don’t be sorry. I want to know it all now, before I go back into the Troposphere. I want . . . Lura?’
‘Yes?’
‘When – and I suppose if – I get back, the book won’t exist, right?’
She nods. ‘I hope that’s what happens.’
‘So you don’t actually know?’
‘No. I don’t know what is going to happen.’
‘It’s possible that I’ll never have met you,’ I say. ‘After all, Saul will never have given his talk, and therefore never met you, and therefore never found the book, and therefore never had to run away. And the Project Starlight men won’t be chasing us all and . . . I won’t actually even know Saul, because I met him at the conference. So I won’t be doing a PhD any more, and . . .’
‘That’s a cause-and-effect universe, though,’ Lura says. ‘I don’t think we are living in a cause-and-effect universe.’
‘So what do you think will happen?’
‘I think the book will go, but everything else will stay the same.’
I remember Apollo Smintheus. The mice would all just dissolve into the air, I think. The world wouldn’t change. No one would notice. I just don’t get it. How can you go back to edit the past and expect it only to change the future a little bit?
‘You think. You don’t know?’
‘Sometimes thinking is knowing,’ she says.
And then I wonder what this is. Is my last trip in the Troposphere an experiment, or something less or more than that? But I have to go. I know all the reasons why. And I am glad Lura is telling me all this before I do. Presumably my thoughts won’t change? I hope not. There’s still so much to think about.
My stomach churns. I’ve made a decision. I’m going to do it this afternoon.
I tell Lura.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I think it’s the right time.’
When Burlem gets back we all have another cup of tea, and they ask if I want lunch before I go, as if I were a weekend guest about to take a train back to London. I should have some lunch, but I don’t have any appetite at all. I don’t want to say goodbye, exactly, and it’s clear that they don’t want to, either. Saying goodbye would be a bit frightening, and it’s not even clear that we are saying goodbye. Perhaps I will be able to find my way back, and perhaps I will still know who they are when I get here.
The black circle on the card. Perhaps I don’t even need that. But I take it out of my bag, anyway.
And so I find myself lying on my bed, just as the sun starts to fade in the sky like a dissolving tablet, wondering if I’ll ever see anything in this world again. I’m sure I no longer need the liquid; so now all that remains is for me to lift the black circle up above my eyes. And I’m blurring away from here. ‘Goodbye,’ I think. I didn’t want to say it before. But suddenly I have to. I have to end this properly. ‘Goodbye, Lura. Goodbye, Burlem. Goodbye . . .’
It’s night-time in the Troposphere, as usual. I’m standing on a familiarly cluttered street, with too many edges and outsides and insides. But I can make sense of it. There are cobbles beneath my feet, but on either side of me there are great looming grey buildings set behind rows of shops, casinos, herbalists, brothels, sex shops, pawn shops and toy shops. There’s a tiny antique bookshop on the corner, and I think: ‘Burlem.’ But I can’t see anything at all that relates to Lura. The neon flickers everywhere. Open. Open. Girls, girls, girls. Some of the signs are just arrows, and when I look at them they seem to be pointing at other arrows. One of them says You are here. Another points to a doorway that, when I approach it, looks like the entrance to a mouse-hole. Do I want to see Apollo Smintheus? I suppose I have to see him. I have to find out exactly where to find Abbie Lathrop. I walk towards the mouse-hole.
And then the sky darkens.
There’s movement. What’s happening? I catch a glimpse of brown, and then blue. That colour blue: where have I seen it before? But I don’t have too much time to speculate, because the next thing that happens is that both the KIDS walk out of the mouse-hole.
‘Aha,’ says one of them, the one in the cowboy suit.
‘Too fucking easy,’ says the other one, his blue cape moving in a non-existent breeze.
They both giggle.
Oh, God.
‘Well, there’s her mind. There’s the gate. Let’s go in and finish this job,’ says the first one.
‘It doesn’t look like everyone else’s minds,’ says the boy in the cape. ‘It’s all full of weeds.’
‘Yeah, well. Who cares, right?’
‘Wait,’ I say.
‘Wait,’ says the one in the cape, mimicking my voice.
‘Yeah, right,’ says the other one. ‘Wait.’
They giggle again.
‘We never get to have any fun in here,’ says the one in the cape.
Shit. Shit. What do I say now?
‘This is going to be the most exciting thing we’ve ever done,’ says the one in the cowboy suit. ‘Woo-hoo!’ He makes a little whooping sound as if his parents have just told him that he can have that toy, or that they are going to the zoo, or that he can stay up late and watch the film with everyone else.
‘I know what happened to you,’ I say. ‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Why? You didn’t kill us,’ says the one in the cape.
‘No, but . . .’ I want to say something about how I understand; about how I think I might be one of them. But nothing comes.
‘Shut up, Benjy,’ says the cowboy. Then, to me: ‘Don’t try to psychoanalyse us, bitch.’
The other one opens his eyes wide, and then laughs.
‘OK, coming through,’ says the other kid. He pulls a skateboard from under his cape. ‘Come on, Michael.’
I’ve got to do something. But what could I possibly do? There aren’t even any weapons here. No metal bars or anything like that – although I get the impression that those things wouldn’t work so well on these two.
Where is Apollo Smintheus?
‘Please help me,’ I think.
‘We’ve already taken care of your lover boy,’ says Michael, the cowboy.
The other one stifles another giggle. I don’t know why he tried to hide it: it’s not as if I can do anything about it.
‘He’s really lost his mind,’ says Benjy. He rotates his finger around by one of his temples. ‘Cuckoo. Cuckoo,’ he says.
Oh, God. What does this mean? Did they get to Adam in the priory? I imagine them sneaking in there somehow, despite everything being closed, and finding him: creeping into his mind like deranged little goblins. What would they do then? Perhaps they tried to persuade him to come out with the book. But they didn’t know the book was there. So what would their motivation have been? Just spite? Or maybe they thought he knew where I’d gone. Maybe they wanted to find that information. And then, for whatever reason, they turned his brain into spaghetti. Just as they’d promised to do to me. Just as they are now going to do to me, because there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
And then I see another shape moving down the street towards us. It’s a man, walking alone. At first I think it’s Apollo Smintheus, but this figure isn’t quite as tall. And then the shape comes closer, and I realise that it’s a man running.
It’s Adam.
‘Are you sure you succeeded with that?’ I ask the boys.
And I’m grinning now. Adam’s carrying two rocket launchers, one slung over each arm. Where on earth . . . ? And then I see that he’s carrying something else, too. A white paper bag with twisted edges, like a bag of old-fashioned sweets. What is happening? Am I dreaming this? No. This is real. As real as anything can be.
The KIDS turn to see what I’m looking at.
‘Oh. It’s the priest,’ says Benjy.
‘Bor-ing,’ says Michael.
‘Hello,’ I say, as Adam hands me one of the rocket launchers.
‘Ariel,’ he says, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes. ‘At last.’
‘Where the . . . ? I mean, how did you get these?’ I ask him.
‘Oh, I met God,’ he says. ‘It’s great in here, isn’t it?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Well, apart from these little fuckers.’
‘Oh, no,’ squeals Benjy, stamping his foot. ‘We got the wrong guy.’
‘Whoops,’ says Michael.
‘Wolf,’ I think for a moment. They saw me with Wolf.
‘I told them you were involved with Patrick,’ Adam says.
‘How do you know about Patrick?’ I ask.
‘I’m afraid I know everything,’ Adam says. ‘I’ll tell you how in a moment.’
He raises the rocket launcher and aims it at Michael.
‘Adam,’ I say, aiming mine at Benjy, but more shakily.
‘What?’
‘We can’t. They’re just kids.’
‘Yeah,’ says Benjy. ‘It’s not fair.’
He begins to cry. Then Michael starts crying, too.
‘You said you were going to get us some sweets,’ says Benjy. ‘But instead, you’re going to hurt us. You’re just like all grown-ups. I hate you.’
I notice they don’t say kill. And I remember what Apollo Smintheus said. Nothing can be killed in the Troposphere. So how are we ever going to get rid of these kids? And why is Adam here? I don’t understand anything about what’s going on.
‘Do you want some sweets instead?’ Adam asks, lowering the gun.
Michael’s lip is trembling. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Me, too,’ says Benjy. ‘Me, too.’
Michael is now wringing his hands together. Benjy seems unable to stand still. He’s jiggling about like a toddler who wants to go to the toilet.
‘OK. Well, don’t eat them all at once,’ says Adam.
He walks over and hands Michael the white bag.
‘Share them,’ he says, as Michael immediately dips his hand into the bag.
‘Ow, get off,’ says Michael, as Benjy tries to force his hand in at the same time.
‘Boys,’ says Adam.
They both manage to take a fistful of pink, yellow and green sweets from the bag. They stuff them into their mouths until their faces look so inflated they might burst.
‘Why are you giving them sweets?’ I ask Adam.
‘Watch,’ he says.
As the boys eat the sweets, they seem to fade, slightly. At first I think I might have something in my eyes, and so I rub them. But of course your eyes can’t go wrong in here. They boys really are dissolving into the landscape.
‘They’re disappearing,’ I say.
‘They’re on the way to God,’ Adam says. ‘The guns would have done the same thing. They’re just, um . . .’
‘Metaphors,’ I say. ‘Like everything in here.
‘Yeah.’
The boys have now almost completely disappeared. Another minute passes and they’ve gone, and all that’s left is the empty white paper bag.
‘What exactly is God going to do to them?’ I ask.
‘Free them,’ Adam says. ‘Make them properly dead.’
‘Can God do that?’ I ask.
Adam nods. ‘He may not have created everything, but He’s good as a manager.’
I laugh. ‘That sounds like the kind of thing you’d read on one of those fluorescent posters they have outside churches.’
‘Yeah, well,’ says Adam, laughing too.
And then I realise: we’re together, alone, in the Troposphere. Adam is actually here. Or, at least, it certainly seems that way.
‘Adam,’ I say softly.
He walks closer to me. So much for not feeling anything in the Troposphere. The syrupy feeling intensifies to a point where it’s almost uncomfortable, but only in the sense that an orgasm is uncomfortable. And everything in me seems to slow down. This doesn’t feel like it would in the physical world: There’s no racing pulse; no sweaty hands. My body feels like a misty landscape, melting into its sky.
‘Ariel,’ he says.
We put down the weapons and embrace. It feels as though a million years pass, with us standing like this.
‘I found the book,’ he whispers. ‘And the vial of liquid. I came to find you.’
‘How did you find me?’ I ask. ‘The Project Starlight men couldn’t do it. I thought I covered my tracks quite well. I . . .’
‘Shhhh,’ he says, into my hair.
‘Really,’ I say. ‘I have to know. Did God help you?’
‘No. God doesn’t approve of what we’re doing.’
‘Then . . . ?’
‘The mouse-god. Apollo Smintheus. He said he’d show me where to find you. But those boys seemed to want to tag along as well, and everywhere we went, they went, too. I thought I’d be able to do something about them before you came back in and opened up the gateway. I was almost too late.’
‘What do you mean?’ I say. ‘What gateway?’
‘They can only get into your mind by themselves when you’re actually in here. Otherwise they have to go with Ed and Martin. You know that already, but you’ve probably forgotten.’
‘So you’ve been inside my mind,’ I say. It’s not a question. I know the answer.
‘Yes. But you bounced me out when you first went into the church. But I just jumped back in when you left the church. I just waited in the Troposphere in between.’
‘How did you find the book?’ I ask.
‘I dreamed it,’ he says. ‘I dreamed everything.’
‘What?’ I say. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that,’ he says. ‘I dreamed you putting it in the bookcase, and I dreamed you accidentally letting the vial fall off the chair and roll under the bed. Later, when I was in your mind, I saw it all again, like déjà vu.’
‘Oh . . .’ I say. I’m not exactly sure what I want to say next. ‘So . . .’
I don’t want to let go of Adam, but I do.
‘Have you seen Apollo Smintheus?’ he asks me.
‘No,’ I say.
‘I don’t know what happened to him. He was supposed to be watching out for those KIDS.’
‘His mouse-hole is just there,’ I say, and we walk towards it.
And inside me, two things are happening. One is that my whole body feels like a smile. I’m not alone in here any more. I can actually talk to someone. Not just that: the someone I can talk to is Adam, the person I thought I’d never see again, and the person I think I love. But the smile keeps warping into a question mark. And I can’t bear to ask, or even think about it. How long has he been in here?