APOLLO SMINTHEUS IS TIED TO a chair, and he looks very pissed off.
‘Oh, thank you,’ he says, when we untie him.
He stands up, sways a little, and then sits back down again.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Those little brutes.’
‘They’ve gone now,’ I say. ‘Well, I think they have.’
‘And you two are reunited,’ he says.
I’m wondering whether Apollo Smintheus has told Adam about the dangers of staying in here too long: whether he’s shown him a screen of himself in the physical world, like he did with me. Where is Adam’s body? Is it still in the priory? I wonder if anyone has found him and saved him. I remember those images of Apollo Smintheus in my dreams: You owe me. You owe me. And I wonder if it was Apollo Smintheus who got into Adam’s dreams, and why he wanted him to come in here as well.
It’s a horrible thought, but for a second I imagine that it’s a punishment: because I took my time coming back; because I haven’t yet completed his mission.
‘Where’s the address?’ I ask him. ‘I need to know how to get to Abbie Lathrop.’
‘Don’t you want coffee first?’ he asks.
‘No. I just want to go. I’m going to see Adam back to the physical world, and then I’m going to go straight off and do this. I don’t have much time.’
Apollo Smintheus seems to narrow his eyes slightly.
But Adam’s quicker to speak. ‘I’m coming with you,’ he says to me.
‘You can’t,’ I say. ‘Don’t you know . . . ?’
‘Know what?’
I look at Apollo Smintheus, who doesn’t seem to want to catch my eye. Then I look at Adam again. His big eyes are as warm and clear as a midsummer morning. They’re so deep, I think again. But here, they don’t look like fossils from the past, they just look like a promise of the future.
‘But what do his eyes look like in the physical world?’ I think.
‘You’re not supposed to stay in here too long,’ I say.
‘Did I not mention that . . . ?’ Apollo Smintheus says.
Adam looks at me. ‘I’ve been in your mind, Ariel,’ he says. ‘And, on the way back to your mind, Saul Burlem’s and Lura’s. I know everything.’
‘But . . .’
His eyes leave mine. ‘I wasn’t going to talk about this now.’
‘Talk about what?’
‘I think it’s already too late. There was a very big storm yesterday. Apollo Smintheus said that when you get weather in the Troposphere . . .’ But I’m not listening properly. Why didn’t Apollo Smintheus save Adam? Why didn’t he tell him to go back?
Sadness in here feels like a warm flannel. But it’s still sadness; the warm flannel is over my face, and I can’t breathe properly.
‘It can’t be too late! Apollo Smintheus must have told you about the trains?’
‘I did,’ says Apollo Smintheus. ‘Well, sort of.’
‘He told me there was a way I could get back to where I’d started. But I didn’t want to go back there. I wanted to find you.’
‘But Adam . . .’
‘What?’
‘Adam, you can’t . . . You didn’t . . .’
‘I think I’ll leave you two to it now,’ says Apollo Smintheus. ‘Here’s that address for Abbie Lathrop.’ He produces a slim white business card, very similar to the one he first left for me: the one I found on the street after I’d done Pedesis for the first time. I take the card and look at it. When I look up, he’s gone. I’m here on my own with Adam.
‘I don’t like it in here that much,’ says Adam. ‘Let’s go outside.’
There is no outside, I think. Not any more.
But I follow him down the jumbled-up street, anyway. We pass a car showroom and a small haberdashery. I want to cry, but it doesn’t work. I don’t think you can cry in here. But raindrops start falling softly from somewhere above me, and when I look up, the night sky seems wet and glossy.
We end up in a meadow by a river. The bright moon seems to touch every part of the black water, and moves through the tall yellow grass like gentle fingers. There are benches that face the water, and Adam sits on one of them. I sit on one, too. The wood isn’t cold. Like everything else in here, it doesn’t seem to have a temperature. Tiny drops of rain still fall from the sky, but they don’t feel wet.
‘Ariel,’ says Adam, taking my hand.
‘Why did you do this?’ I ask him.
‘I wanted to know . . .’ he says.
‘Know what?’
He shrugs. ‘Just to know. I couldn’t go back.’
‘But . . . Why did you want to find me?’
‘I just had to. And I missed you.’
I breathe in for a long time. Then I sigh. ‘I missed you, too. But . . .’
‘What?’
‘Shit. Adam. Why?’
He shrugs again. ‘Apollo Smintheus told me you needed me.’
‘I would have found you when I got out. I’d . . .’
Adam looks away from me and out onto the river. An owl hoots.
‘Fuck,’ I say. ‘So it’s all too late. Nothing means anything any more. Everything’s . . .’
‘Don’t say it,’ Adam says. ‘Just come with me.’
He takes my hand and we stand up. We walk down the path, past thousands of trees that seem to reach up into heaven. Moonlight strobes on their leaves, and bats flicker in and out of the trees like shadow puppets against the black of the sky. Soon we come to a clearing: a circle of thick, soft grass, surrounded by trees. We walk into the clearing, and Adam immediately pulls me towards him.
‘Ariel,’ he says. And he kisses me.
But what’s happening? This kiss is a million kisses. This kiss is every kiss. Our lips seem to press together with the force of ten thousand hurricanes, and when his tongue meets mine it feels like the softest electricity: a million-volt shock happening in slow motion, one electron at a time, where each electron is the size of the sun.
And in the sky, there’s lightning.
The rain starts to hammer the ground, but I can’t feel it.
Adam is pulling me down onto the grass.
As I close my eyes, I can see that there are tornadoes everywhere, but I can’t even feel a breeze. All my clothes have gone. I’m so naked it’s as if I don’t even have skin. Adam’s taut body moves down onto mine. And when he enters me, it’s as if I’m being turned inside out, and the whole world is penetrating me; and that means I contain everything.
Afterwards we both lie there on the ground, shaking. I know everything about Adam now, and he knows everything about me.
‘Oh . . .’ says Adam.
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh . . . Is that . . . ?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t know what I was going to ask.’
‘Yes, I do. You were going to ask if that’s what sex is like usually.’
He takes my hand. ‘Well, something like that.’
‘And the answer is no.’
‘But we’d never done it before,’ he says, and I can see him smiling in the moonlight.
I imagine tornadoes around the Shrine of St Jude. But maybe he’s right.
I put my head on his shoulder and he puts his arm around me. I feel so small and warm, like I’m an acorn he’s holding in the palm of his hand. But at the same time I feel as if I’m the one holding onto him. He only exists here now. And if I do this, and then go back . . . Don’t think, Ariel. Just have this moment. But if there’s no Troposphere, I won’t be able to see Adam ever again. Perhaps I’ll go back and find that I don’t even know who Adam is. Perhaps I won’t miss him, because I’ll never know I knew him.
But if the book is the only thing that disappears? If I make it so it was never written?
Then maybe I did know Adam. Maybe he did move into my office. Maybe the railway tunnel did collapse. But not because of Burlem. And maybe I became a PhD student, anyway. Maybe Burlem still did the conference in Greenwich, but on another subject. Maybe he talked about Samuel Butler. I would have gone to that. We still would have talked, and we still would have got pissed together, and we still wouldn’t have had sex, and everything would be more or less the same.
I can sort of see how that might work.
But Adam would still be dead.
Perhaps I’d wake up from a scary dream about men chasing me, and there’d be a knock at the door, and a policeman would be telling me that he just passed away in his sleep. A tragic mystery. But don’t be stupid. No policeman would come and tell me anything. They’d tell his relatives, and I wouldn’t even be invited to the funeral because no one would have known we were involved. Perhaps I’d read about it in the university newsletter, or in one of those ‘Sad news’ e-mails.
I sit up.
‘Where are you going?’ Adam asks sleepily.
‘I’ve got to . . . Well, basically, I’m going to 1900,’ I say.
‘And I’m coming, too.’
‘Are you sure you want to?’
Adam sits up and shakes his head. ‘We’ve just shared the most amazing experience that I’ve ever had,’ he says. ‘And I’m not leaving you. Not ever.’ He pauses. ‘Not until you have to go back.’
I don’t know what to say next. Until I have to go back. I didn’t have any lunch. Who knows how much time I’ve got? You can only use the underground system if you are alive. But does it even matter now whether I am alive or dead? I really don’t know.
‘So what do you think? Should we aim for America, and then go back in time?’ Adam asks. ‘Or the other way around?’
‘Hm?’
We’re walking hand-in-hand back towards town, the moon racing us down the river and winning. The way I feel with him now is hard to describe. It feels as if we’ve already grown old together. I know, already, that we’re going to die together.
But he’s already dead.
‘Pedesis,’ he says. ‘How shall we do it?’
‘I think we’re going to have to go back and forwards around the world in order to jump the time,’ I say. ‘We can aim for Massachusetts later. In fact, maybe we should be aiming for one of Abbie Lathrop’s descendants, and then carefully jumping backwards from there. I’m not actually sure what would happen if we missed her. Say we jumped back ten years too far or something. You can’t exactly go forward in time here – well, you can, but it has to be in real time. We’d be stuck in Massachusetts for ten years.’
Adam sighs. ‘I think you know more than me about doing this.’
‘I’m not sure. I mean, I managed to find Saul Burlem, but only because I found out about his daughter and found her in the physical world. I don’t really know how to approach this problem. It’s over a hundred years. It’s huge.’
We walk through a gate, and then the river goes off to the left while we walk towards the right, past some old boat-building sheds towards the city.
I frown. ‘Surely you know as much as I do about this?’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘You’ve been in my mind. You must know everything.’
‘I’m not sure I do know everything,’ he says. ‘Your mind is very complicated. Everything I know about You . . . It’s real and unreal all at once. No . . . That’s not a very good description. It feels ghostly in some way. As if I thought I was there – I thought I was you – but now it’s just a dream. I remember it all, but it doesn’t make sense yet. That’s the only way I can describe it.’
I think about the moment when he penetrated me in the clearing, and how I knew then that what we were doing wasn’t physical. It was as if I was the void and he was everything real, and the sensation of him entering me was like the largest presence filling the smallest absence. Our minds were making love, and in the moment when I came I saw his whole life as if I was him and I was dying.
I felt the humiliation of my father’s belt.
I knew what it was to be hungry.
I walked in bare feet over brown, dusty earth.
I kept worms as a science project, but really I thought of them as my pets.
My father smashed up my wormery when he was drunk.
My mother never said anything.
(They’re both dead and I don’t miss them; I miss what could have been.)
Those hot, wet evenings when my cousins would stay over.
The ghost stories that frightened me.
The little bell I would ring during Mass, when I was an altar server.
The cold echoey church, and the way it comforted me because the violence in the Bible was on such a large scale that it made my father’s actions seem small. I inverted my life, so what was real became unreal, and everything that was said in church was the truth and everything else was a lie.
My father never saying he was proud of me, even though I joined the church for him, because it was the only thing I could see that meant something to him, the man who didn’t like rugby or cricket, who said that sports were for ‘poofters’ and arts for ‘nonces’, and school didn’t prepare you for the real world, and that men should work and pray and do nothing else. The excessive alcohol consumption was somehow never factored into his philosophy of life.
The night I told my cousins about the Holy Ghost, to scare them.
And on another occasion I told them all they’d go to hell.
When I decided to go into the seminary for all the wrong reasons.
The morning my father discovered me in bed with Marty, my cousin.
The hollow look in his eyes when he looked at me after that.
Trying to make myself holy. Blank. Blank. Blank.
Adult life: I’m trying to be a father for everyone . . .
But I look at women. I try masturbation, but I hate myself.
I try self-flagellation. It just makes me feel more aroused.
When the priest from the village rapes my sister, I feel as though I did it.
My father abandons the church.
My father is God now.
I am going to eliminate all desire from my life.
(. . .)
I know him, but I don’t know it all: I wasn’t connected to his mind for long enough. I don’t know what’s in the gaps. There’s still an eternity of knowledge of him that I don’t have. And I want it now as much as I want to breathe.
We’re in the city again now, walking towards the place where Apollo Smintheus’s mouse-hole was. It isn’t there any more, but the street is still exactly the same apart from that. This was where I emerged into the Troposphere from Burlem and Lura’s house. All I’d have to do to get back to the physical world would be to carry on walking. I could go back and tell Burlem and Lura that I simply failed. Then Adam could live in the Troposphere, and I could come and visit him.
But that’s not possible. That would be the same as only having him as a memory.
‘Why don’t you hate me?’ I say, even though I already know the answer.
‘What do you mean?’
He’s holding my hand so tightly that it might break. I don’t care.
‘Well, you know everything now. All the sex. All the . . . everything.’
‘I understand it all, though,’ he says. ‘I know you.’
‘Yeah. I know what you mean.’ We stop outside a pawnshop. I’m not sure why. Then I see the café glowing somewhere inside it. It’s the dimensional problem again.
‘Shall we have coffee before we go?’ Adam asks.
‘Troposphere coffee,’ I say. ‘How can I refuse?’
We sit at a table outside, and after a couple of tries we realise that all you have to do is think coffee for it to appear. Well, actually, it takes a bit more effort than that. You have to think coffee and believe it will appear, and then it does.
‘Why did you come looking for me?’ I ask. ‘The last time I saw you I really pissed you off; I could see that. I shouldn’t have said . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Maybe not. But why?’
‘Would it be stupid to say that I thought I’d fallen in love with you?’
I look down on the table. ‘Um . . .’
‘Sorry. I’m not that good with words. Well, I am good with words, but not these sorts of words. Oh, that actually does sound stupid. Why did I fall in love with you? On reflection, it wasn’t a great move – well, objectively speaking. But . . .’ He sighs. ‘I couldn’t help it.’ Now he runs his hands through his hair. ‘Oh. I can’t explain.’
‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘I don’t understand why you feel that way, but . . .’
‘What?’
‘I was going to say I’m glad you do. But I’m not sure. You’d be alive, if it wasn’t for me – and The End of Mr Y.’
‘Yeah. But.’ He closes his eyes and then opens them again. ‘I wouldn’t have this.’ He opens his hands as if he’s holding the world, but there’s nothing in them. He just means that I should look around and see what he would be holding, if his hands could hold ideas, and metaphors, and multidimensional buildings.
‘Why do you see the same thing I see?’ I ask.
‘Hm?’
‘You see the same thing I see. The same Troposphere. I thought this was the inside of my mind?’
‘It is.’
‘Then . . .’
‘I died inside your mind.’
‘Oh.’ I get that Troposphere pain, briefly, like a dull blade cutting me up inside, slow and dirty. I can’t think about this. ‘What was your Troposphere like?’
‘Very similar. A city. But it was daytime. There were more parks. But it did have a graffiti problem that yours doesn’t have.’
‘It was daytime here once, as well,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what happened to that.’
‘Oh, well. I like night. It’s romantic.’
‘Like that meadow and the river,’ I say. ‘ That space was very romantic. But I’m not sure those came from my mind. It’s funny . . .’
He tips his head over to one side for a second. I think we both know what happened when we made love by the river. His mind is inside me. ‘Hm. Yeah. Both our minds at once. And all the minds in the world are in here with us . . . We could do and see anything.’
‘Adam . . .’ I reach for his hand across the table. ‘I want . . .’
But that sounds wrong here. This isn’t a place for wanting.
‘What?’
‘You. But wanting sounds wrong. I wish we were still in that meadow . . .’
‘Mm. Why don’t we go back?’
‘No. I owe Apollo Smintheus. I’d be dead, if it wasn’t for him.’
‘We’ll do his mission, and then Lura’s mission, and then . . .’
‘Yeah.’ And then. ‘OK.’ I finish my coffee. ‘Let’s go.’
Adam finishes the last of his coffee.
‘Mice,’ he says, suddenly.
‘What?’
‘Why don’t we use mice?’
‘For what? Oh . . . I see. Go back to Abbie Lathrop using mice. Wouldn’t that take ages? I mean, to get back a hundred years using Pedesis, we’d really need to be crossing continents every few jumps. Remember that time is distance in the Troposphere. The more distance we can cover in the physical world, the more time we can jump through in here.’
As I say the phrase, I feel something like déjà vu. That expression: Time is distance in the Troposphere. I keep hearing it, and I keep saying it, but I don’t know what it means. The Troposphere is made from thoughts. Distance in the Troposphere is just the arrangement of thoughts. What do I already know?
Distance = time.
Matter = thought.
So what if there’s another equation to add:
Thought = time?
Then, I guess, thought really is everything. And it makes sense: time isn’t measured in anything other than thought. The only thing that separates today from yesterday is thought.
‘What are you thinking?’ Adam asks.
I laugh. He can see what I’m thinking: it’s all around him.
‘What?’
‘I’ll tell you on the way,’ I say.
‘Hang on. We don’t even know where we’re going yet.’
‘Oh. Yes. You’re right. OK – do you understand about the distance thing?’
‘Yeah. I think so. If I’m in someone’s head, and I can see all their ancestors, I can jump to any of them. If one of them lives in Norfolk, and I’m in Kent, I’ll go back maybe a couple of weeks at the same time as I do the jump. But if one of them lives in Africa, and I’m in Kent, I could maybe go back a couple of years.’
‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘So maybe we find a well-travelled family to go back through.’
‘Look up,’ Adam says.
I do. I can see the black sky hanging there like something I just clicked on, with the moon like a big digital button. But its light is still real, draped over the buildings and the street. Just beneath the sky, I can see the grey tower blocks that seem to be everywhere in the Troposphere, just rising out of the ground and pointing upwards.
‘What am I looking at?’ I ask.
‘The tower blocks,’ he says. ‘Where the animals live.’
‘Why do the animals live in tower blocks?’
‘I don’t know: this is your metaphor.’
‘Oh. I suppose I wouldn’t think of them as shops. People are shops. People are part of an economy in a much more direct way . . .’ I shake my head. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Well, let’s find some mice.’
‘But the time . . . ?’
‘We’ll see how far we have to jump before we get into a lab mouse, and then it should be just millisecond jumps all the way back to Abbie Lathrop, surely?’
‘I don’t think all lab mice are descended from her stock,’ I say. ‘I can’t remember what Apollo Smintheus said. Damn.’
Console? It comes up.
‘Can you see that, too?’ I ask Adam.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
‘Hm. I wonder if it’s possible to send messages on this thing?’
But we don’t have to. There’s the broken sound of a small engine struggling to fire, and then a red scooter comes around the corner.
‘Good plan,’ says Apollo Smintheus, getting off. ‘Mice. I like it.’
‘So where do we start?’
‘I’ll take you to a descendant. But that’s all I can do.’
I want to say thanks, except that I’m doing this for him, anyway.
But I do owe him.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
We all walk towards an office block. There’s an entryphone, but Apollo Smintheus manages to get us buzzed in by saying something I don’t understand in that unfamiliar language of his. While we walk up a set of concrete stairs, I try to plan this, but there isn’t too much time. But surely what Adam said is right. Apollo Smintheus said before that all of these mice are inbred. We should be able to go back to Abbie Lathrop directly. We should . . . Apollo Smintheus has stopped outside a door. And Adam is opening it.
You now have one choice . . .
You . . . I . . . We’re walking quickly over bare floorboards, and our claws are going click-click-click as we move. It’s like the sound of Lura’s knitting needles, but in a much larger, more bare space.
‘Adam?’ I say.
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t think we’re a lab mouse.’
‘I know.’
I become aware of the mouse registering our voices – or, actually, only my voice – and I immediately know that we shouldn’t communicate with each other like this. The mouse . . . I can hear sounds in my mind, and I try to run away from them. Faster, along the wood. I haven’t eaten for several hours, and I remember that if I run down here, and then follow my own scent through the large gap in the wall, that I will probably find something.
Console!
It appears. I can see lots of images. Most of them are moving, but one is still.
‘I’m going to let you do all the choosing,’ Adam says. ‘I’m not even going to look.’
‘OK. But shhh. I don’t want to disturb the mouse.’
‘Sorry.’
Voices, voices. I can hear a person, but I can’t see her. I remember another time when I heard voices like this, and there was pain. And then hands on my back, but hands gloved with something that wasn’t shiny and smooth, and then sickening movement in the dark, and then freedom: Something I had never known before.
This new voice sounds like that one, a little. But all voices are danger.
I fix my mind on the static image in the console. Something tells me that this could be the lab animal. The mouse we’re in now was freed. I can sense that from his memories. But . . .
We switch. And . . .
You now have one choice.
You . . . I can hear something muffled and distant.
‘No!’ It’s Adam screaming. ‘Ariel, no . . .’
But I can’t hear him because I am screaming, too. But I can’t even hear that properly because the pain stops me registering anything very much. I want to die . . . I don’t know what death is, but there’s something in my mind that does, and understands that I should be able to move, and that there shouldn’t be metal spikes in my eyes, that if they weren’t there I would have less pain in my head, and maybe I’d be able to see. What is seeing? The world is a black slab, and I have never known anything apart from this. Each day it takes an effort to draw air into my lungs, and that’s what I spend my life doing, just trying to breathe . . .
‘Jump again,’ Adam’s saying. ‘Oh, God . . .’
The pain is like nothing I have ever felt before.
The console is still there, faintly.
I don’t think I’ve got any legs. I don’t think I have ever walked.
Everything is black. I pick an image from the console: any image.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I . . . We are standing at the entrance to a maze. A new world! How exciting. Maybe this is finally going to be the way out. I’ve been down this passage before. And this one. I can smell the food at the end. It’s the same stuff again, but it keeps me alive, and it keeps me doing this. I’m only halfway down an unfamiliar passage, when a gloved hand picks me up, and the feeling of the material against my fur smells the same as the walls of my world, and all my life I have been comforted by these smells. Now I am being placed down again: my feet touching the glass. Where’s my reward? This is the wrong tank. Where’s the sawdust? This doesn’t smell like my tank. I can see the same symbols on the ground (and which I can now read, and which say HappiMat(, but something is terribly wrong. Fear pierces me like the needles my carers use on me every day. My brothers and sisters are lying around me, but they’re not trying to fight me or mount me. They smell different. I walk over and look at them. I nuzzle one of them with my nose: he’s cold. They are all just lying there like the wet cloths our carers sometimes leave in the tanks when they have finished wiping off some of the smell. I walk over and sniff them . . . They’re not right. They’re . . . Ow! Get off. Another gloved hand takes hold of me, but this one isn’t gentle . . .
‘Ariel!’
‘Sorry.’
We jump.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I . . . We’re being injected again. I don’t know what is worse: the sensation of the cold, sharp needle going in, or the sensation of it coming out, again. Once it’s in, I want it out, but once it’s out, I feel dizzy, and I can’t make my nest properly and . . . I don’t actually care about my nest. I feel something warm and wet creeping down my legs. I just want to sleep. My nest smells sour now, but I need to sleep. I can’t even be bothered to lick myself clean.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I . . . We can’t breathe because of all the smoke. I can’t move my head.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I . . . We are flying through the air, and then landing with an awkward bump, and then flying again. My friend is flying as well, and another mouse I haven’t seen before, and all around us people are laughing; although I can’t understand the language, something in my mind can hear the carers saying, ‘Stop juggling the mice, Wesley.’ I am very dizzy, and I want to go back in my tank.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I . . . We can’t understand why this keeps happening. I keep making my nest in exactly the way I like it (the way my mother taught me), and then I find it’s gone. The hand takes it away. And then the hand gives me more nesting material, and I start building again. Every night I sleep on bare glass, despite all the nests I have made.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I . . . We can’t sleep with these lights on all the time.
You now have one choice.
You . . . I . . . We
You now have one choice.
You . . . I . . .
You now have one choice.
You . . .
You now have one
You now have
You now
You
You
You
You
You
We’re now jumping so fast that it feels like a fluid journey, just as Mr Y described in the book. It takes a lot of concentration, although it is hard to concentrate when you’re essentially surfing on a wave of pain, fear, humiliation – and the constant simple desire for a warm, quiet nest. This a wave of death: a wave of dead black bodies and dead white bodies and gloved hands and bony fingers and the pain of the needle and the pain of the tumours and the blindness and trying to lick off your own blood when it’s still pouring out of you, and being left with your legs and back broken in a pile of other broken bodies and still thinking that there’ll be food at the end, and that the carers will put you back in your tank just as they always do after something bad happens.
While I surf, Adam tries to locate details.
Most of the labs have calendars on the walls.
And I notice that, as we go back, the lights become dimmer, and the tanks become smaller. There are no more HappiMats.(tm) We hear sirens and explosions, and we travel through labs that all smell of metal and gunpowder. But each tiny jump is a new kind of pain. By the time we reach 1908, I have bled thousands of pints of blood, and vomited and pissed myself and fallen asleep in my own shit, and each time – every moment – I have just wanted to crawl into my nest, because something I am born with tells me it’s good and comfortable in my nest, but all the time I have known that there’s something not right about my existence. I either don’t have a nest, or someone has taken it away, or I simply know that there shouldn’t be glass walls around it.
We slow down as the calendars start showing 1907, 1906, 1905 . . .
And then there she is. She’s lifting our friend out of a box full of sawdust.
In the console, the black mouse she is holding is blurred.
And we jump. We’re in.