The End Of Mr. Y (3 page)

‘The Curse of Mr. Y’ was the subject of Burlem’s paper at the conference in Greenwich eighteen months ago, delivered to an audience of four people, including me. Burlem hadn’t then read
The End of Mr. Y
, but instead talked about the probable invention of the ‘curse’ story. He had a rough, sandpaper voice, and a slight stoop that somehow wasn’t unattractive. He talked about the idea of the curse as if it were a virus, and discussed Lumas’s body of work as if it were an organism attacked by this virus, destined, perhaps, to become extinct. He talked about information becoming contaminated by unpopularity, and eventually concluded that Lumas’s book had indeed been cursed, not in a supernatural sense, but by the opinions of people who wanted him discredited.

There was a reception afterwards, in the Painted Hall. It was packed in there: a popular scientist had been giving a talk at the same time as Burlem, and he was holding court in the large Lower Hall, underneath an image of Copernicus. I had considered going to his talk instead, but I was glad I’d chosen Burlem’s. The other people from Burlem’s talk – two guys who looked a bit like a pair of tax inspectors except for their almost white-blond hair, and a sixtyish woman with pink-streaked grey hair – hadn’t hung around, so Burlem and I started on the red wine, drinking too fast, hiding away in the far corner of the Upper Hall. Burlem was wearing a long grey wool trench coat over his black shirt and trousers. I can’t remember what I was wearing.

‘So would you read it, then?’ I asked him, referring, of course, to
The End of Mr. Y
.

‘Of course,’ he said, with his odd smile. ‘Would you?’ ‘Absolutely. Especially after this.’

‘Good,’ he said.

Burlem didn’t seem to know anyone in the Lower Hall, and neither did I. Neither of us attempted to leave our corner and mingle: I’m not very good at it and often offend people by accident; I don’t know what Burlem’s reason was – maybe he just hadn’t been offended by me yet. The whole time I was in the Painted Hall I felt a bit like part of a huge box of chocolates, with the browns, creams, golds and reds of the vast paintings seeming to melt around me. Perhaps Burlem and I were the hard centres that no one was interested in. No one else came to the Upper Hall the whole time we were there.

‘I can’t believe more people didn’t come to your talk,’ I said.

‘No one knows Lumas exists,’ he said. ‘I’m used to it.’

‘I suppose you were up against Mr. Famous, as well,’ I said.

Burlem smiled. ‘Jim Lahiri. He’s probably never heard of Lumas, either.’

‘No,’ I agreed. I’d read Lahiri’s best-selling popular science book about the end of time, and knew he wouldn’t approve of Lumas even if he had heard of him. Popular science can say some pretty wild things these days, but the supernatural is still out, as is Lamarck. You can have as many dimensions as you want, as long as none of them contains ghosts, telepathy, anything that fucks with Charles Darwin, or anything that Hitler liked (apart from Charles Darwin).

Burlem picked up the bottle of wine, refilled both our glasses, and then frowned at me. ‘So why are you here? Are you a student? If you’re working on Lumas, I should probably know who you are.’

‘I’m not working on Lumas,’ I said. ‘I write these little articles for a magazine called
Smoke
. You may not have heard of it. I’ll probably write one on Lumas after this, but I don’t think that counts as “working on” in your sense.’ I paused, but Burlem didn’t say anything. ‘He’s a great person to write about, though, even on a small scale. His stuff ’s pretty compulsive. I mean, even without the

controversies and the curse, it’s still amazing.’

‘It is,’ said Burlem. ‘That’s why I’m working on a biography.’ After he said the word ‘biography’, he looked first at the ground and then up at the painted ceiling high above our heads. I must have been frowning or something, because when he looked back at me he smiled in a crooked, apologetic way. ‘I hate biography,’ he said.

I laughed. ‘So why are you writing one?’

He shrugged. ‘Lumas got me hooked. The only way to write about his texts seems to be to write a biography of his life. It might sell. There’s a vogue for digging up these nineteenth-century eccentrics at the moment and I might as well cash in on it. The department could do with some funding. I could do with some bloody funding.’

‘The department?’

‘Of English and American Studies.’ He told me the name of the university.

‘Have you started on it?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘Yeah. Unfortunately there’s only one biographical detail about Lumas that really does it for me.’

‘The punch?’ I suggested, thinking of Darwin, imagining, for some reason, a huge splashing sound as he fell over after Lumas hit him.

‘No.’ He looked up at the ceiling again. ‘Have you read Samuel Butler at all?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I nodded. ‘Yes – that’s actually how I came to read Lumas. There was a reference in Butler’s
Notebooks
.’

‘You were reading Butler’s
Notebooks
?’

‘Yeah. I like all the stuff about the sugared Hamlets.’

Actually, what I like about Butler is the same thing I like about Lumas: the outlaw status and the brilliant ideas. Butler’s big thing was consciousness; he thought that since we evolved from organic vegetable matter, our consciousness must at some point have emerged from nothing. If we had developed out of nowhere like this, then why couldn’t machines? I’d been reading about this only a couple of weeks before.

‘Sugared Hamlets?’ said Burlem.

‘Yeah. These sweets they were selling in London. Little sweets in the shape of Hamlet holding a skull, dipped in sugar. How great is that?’

Burlem laughed. ‘I bet Butler thought that was hilarious.’ ‘Yeah. That’s why I like him. I like his sense of the absurd.’

‘So presumably you know the rumours about him and Lumas?’ ‘No. What rumours?’

‘That they were lovers; or at least that Lumas was infatuated with Butler.’ ‘I had no idea,’ I said. Then I smiled. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Probably not. But it leads to the biographical detail I’m most interested in.’ ‘Which is?’

‘Have you read
The Authoress of the Odyssey
?’ ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘
The Authoress
… ?’

‘You must read it. It’s Butler arguing that
The Odyssey
was written by a woman. It’s fucking brilliant.’ Burlem ran his hand through his hair and went on: ‘Butler published his own translation of
The Odyssey
alongside it, with some black-and-white plates showing photographs he took of old coins, and landscapes relevant to
The Odyssey
. One of the landscapes, supposedly the basis for the tidal inlet up which Ulysses swam, has a man and a dog in the distance. In the introduction to the book, Butler goes out of his way to apologise for this, and to say that they only appeared when he developed the negative; that they weren’t supposed to be there.’

‘Wow,’ I said, not sure where this was leading. ‘So …’ ‘The man in the picture is Lumas. I’m sure of it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t even know if they travelled together. But the way the man appears in the developed photograph, previously unseen … You can’t see the figure well enough to tell who it is but

… What if it was Lumas? What if it was even his ghost, but before he was dead? I may be a little drunk. Sorry. He had a dog, though, called Erasmus.’

At this point Burlem did a jerky thing with his head, as if he was trying to get water out of one of his ears. He frowned, as if considering a difficult question, and then made another face, suggesting that maybe the question didn’t matter, anyway. Then he raised an eyebrow, smiled, walked over to the table and got another bottle of wine. While he did that, I looked at the vast image beyond him, painted on the back wall. The scene showed what seemed to be a king descending from heaven, alighting on some reddish, carpeted stairs. The stairs almost appeared to be part of the room rather than the painting, and the figures in the image looked like they might be using them to step into reality; into the present.

‘Lumas can drive you a bit crazy,’ he said, when he returned.

‘I like the idea of the photograph, though,’ I said. ‘It reminds me of that story of his, “The Daguerreotype”.’

‘You’ve read that?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. I think it’s my favourite.’ ‘How on earth did you get hold of it?’

‘I got that one on eBay. It was in a collection. I’ve got almost all of Lumas’s books, apart from
The End of Mr. Y
. I found a lot of them on secondhand-book sites.’

‘And this is all for a magazine article?’

‘Yeah. I do it pretty intensively. For a month I’ll live and breathe, say, Samuel Butler. Then I’ll find some link from him to take me to the next piece. The column is called Free Association. I started with the Big Bang about three years ago.’

Burlem laughs. ‘And what did that lead to?’

‘The properties of hydrogen, the speed of light, relativity, quantum mechanics, probability theory, Schrödinger’s cat, the wavefunction, light, the luminiferous ether – which is my personal favourite – experiment, paradox …’

‘So you’re a scientist? You understand all that stuff?’

I laughed. ‘God, no. Not at all. I wish I did. I probably shouldn’t have started with the Big Bang, but when you do, that’s what you get. At some point I went from artificial intelligence to Butler, and now here I am with Lumas. While I’m working on him I’ll probably decide on what link I’m going to follow through next so I can order all the books. I might do something about the history of photography, actually, following through from “The Daguerreotype”. Or I might follow it through to the fourth dimension, and that Zollner book, although that takes me back to science again.’

In ‘The Daguerreotype’, a man wakes up to find a copy of his house in a park across the road, with a large group of people gathered around it. Where has the house come from? People immediately accuse the man of losing his mind and arranging to have a copy of his house built in the park overnight. He points out that this is impossible. Who could have a whole house built overnight? Also, the house in the park does not seem new. It is in fact an exact copy of the ‘real’ house, down to some scuffing on the door panels, and some tarnish on the brass knocker. The only thing that’s different is that his key doesn’t work, and the keyhole seems to be blocked by something. The man initially tries to ignore the house, but soon it takes over his life and he has to try to work out where it has come from. Because of the house in the park he loses his job as a teacher, and his fiancée

runs off with someone else. The police also become involved and accuse the man of all sorts of crimes. The house has some strange properties as well, the main one being that no one can get into it. It is possible to look through the windows at the things inside – a table, a vase of flowers, a bureau, a piano – but no one can smash the windows or break down the door. The house behaves like a solid shape, as if it had no space inside.

One day, when the man in the story has almost lost his wits, a mysterious old man comes to his (real) house with a box full of equipment. He tells the man that he has heard of his predicament and thinks he knows what has happened. He takes out a velvet-lined folding case and explains to the man about the daguerreotype, and how it works. The man is initially impatient. Everyone knows how daguerreotypes work! But then his visitor makes an impossible claim. If humans, three-dimensional beings, can create two-dimensional versions of the things around us, would it be too impossible to assume that four-dimensional beings could make something like a daguerreotype machine of their own, but one that produces not flat, two-dimensional copies of things, but three-dimensional ones? The man is angry and throws the photographer out of the house, thinking that there must be another explanation. However, he is unable to find one and later comes to the conclusion that his visitor must have been right. He finds the man’s card and resolves to call on him immediately. But when the maid lets him into the man’s house, he finds something very strange. The photographer seems to be standing in the drawing room, holding the daguerreotype machine. But it’s not the real man; it’s a lifeless copy.

‘You know what I love about “The Daguerreotype”?’ Burlem said.

‘What?’

‘The unresolved ending. I like it that the man never does find his answer.’

Up until that moment there had been no music in the Painted Hall, just the crackle of voices and laughter echoing around the large rooms. But someone must have remembered that they were supposed to have music on, and the first heavy notes of Handel’s
Dixit Dominus
seeped into the hall, followed by the first line, with all the choral voices tumbling over themselves:
Dixit Dominus Domino meo, sede a dextris meis
.

‘So,’ Burlem said, raising his voice over the music, ‘you work full-time at this magazine, then?’ ‘No. I just write my column every month.’

‘Is that all you do?’ ‘For the moment, yes.’ ‘Can you live on that?’

‘Just about. The magazine’s doing pretty well. I can afford my rent and a few bags of lentils every month. And some books, too, of course.’

The magazine started as a small thing, edited by this woman I met at university. Now there’s a distribution deal and it’s given away in every big record shop in the country. It has proper advertising now, and a designer who doesn’t use glue to put the layouts together.

‘What did you do at university? Not science, I take it.’

‘No. English lit and philosophy. But I am seriously thinking of going back to do science. I think I’m probably going to apply to do theoretical physics.’ I explained that I wanted to be able to actually understand things like relativity, and Schrödinger’s cat, and that I wanted to try to revive the dear old ether. I think I was feeling a bit drunk, so I wittered on about the luminiferous ether for some time. Burlem was familiar with it – it turned out that he ran the nineteenth-century Literature and Science MA at the university – but I still went on at length about how fascinating it was that for ages people couldn’t work out how light could travel in a vacuum, considering that sound couldn’t (you can see a bell in a vacuum, but you can’t hear it go ding). In the nineteenth century people believed that light travelled through something invisible – the luminiferous ether. In 1887 Albert Michelson