Yvonne sips her tea. "Well, you have got a problem, haven't you?"
"I know. I think I was just putting the whole thing off until I could just get in touch with Saul. I thought maybe he'd get in contact nearer the deadline, but of course he won't know that his computer's going to go into storage and ... God. Sorry to bother you with this, but I thought if anyone would know what to do it would be you."
I'm being careful not to mention the word "password" too much. I have a feeling that if I make this the problem it will sound a lot more dodgy than simply "I need a document and I don't know how to get it." And I think joking about hacking helps, but it is a risk.
"Have you tried Computing Services?" she asks.
"Not yet. I just thought they'd basically tell me to go away. I mean to them I could be anybody. And it is a bit of a weird thing to ask for. I mean, obviously you understand, but I'm not sure they would."
"Do you want me to give them a call?"
"Oh, would you? Thanks so much, Yvonne."
"I'll authorize the new password request and get one of them over to sort it all out for you. When Professor Burlem comes back he'll need to set a new password, but his old one will have expired, anyway. I don't know when they'll be able to get over to you, but do you want to let me know when they've been and we'll come and do the desks then?"
By twelve o'clock the technician still hasn't come and I'm beginning to feel hungry. If I could get hold of a bread roll I could make a chocolate sandwich (which wouldn't be the worst lunch I've ever had) but who knows if the canteen is even open. I try to open the university Web site so I can log on to the Intranet and see which of the various restaurants and cafeterias are open, but all I get is an Error 404 message instead of the front page. No wonder no one's here. Anyone who'd logged on to the university site to see whether it was open again would surely have feared the worst from this. I sigh. Even chocolate on its own wouldn't be the worst lunch I've ever had—in fact, it's practically gourmet—but some bread to go with it would be great, and the rolls in the canteen are only ten pence. I write a note for my door and pin it up. BACK IN FIVE MINUTES. I just hope he doesn't come and go away again.
The Russell Building is, like the Stevenson Building on the west of the campus, built in the shape of a four-petalled cyber-flower with a small set of cloisters in the middle. I haven't spent much time in the Stevenson Building, because the students all say that it is exactly the same as the Russell Building but "the other way around," which sounds impossibly confusing, especially considering that the Russell Building is confusing enough on its own. I only seem to get lost in the Russell Building at the beginning of the academic year, when all the new students are around and everybody seems confused, and it's as if the confusion leaks out of everyone's minds and infects everyone else.
Now I go out of the English Building through the side door, and under the walkway that leads to one of the Russell side doors. I go up some concrete steps, and then down some more, until I come to the mouth of a long, white corridor with a worn tiled floor and whitewashed walls. When the students are around this space seems almost normal but now it feels like the medical wing of an abandoned 1960s space station, or someone's idea of one. They keep broken university furniture in one of the rooms along here. I can hear my footsteps as I walk, and for the first time ever I get the sensation that there could be no one in the whole building apart from me.
The tables in the dining hall are laid out in a geometric pattern that seems accidental until you go up to the Senior Common Room and look down. From up there you realize that the long tables all point towards the cathedral, which is itself framed in the large windows at the back of the hall. It all makes sense, from up there, the whole thing, and you feel as if you are part of one picture, and nothing on the perfect line joining you with the cathedral really exists. You're in the dark, and the cathedral is framed in a rectangle of light. One time I had to go into this dingy room off Reception to search the slide projectors for a transparency I'd left behind after a seminar, because this librarian was basically going to kneecap me if I didn't get it back. As well as my slide (The Runner by Vittorio Corona) I found another one in the box: It showed the cover of Baudrillard's The Illusion of the End. On the way down to the canteen I held it up in the only light available: the window at the back of the hall, and that's when I saw what it was. The slide was all melted on the back but not the image: The image was perfect. But when I tried to pick out some of the detail I realized I was looking at the cathedral through the slide, and the two images became one. After that I fell in love with the slide and took it back to my office and tried to find a way of projecting it onto my wall. But I couldn't work it out and I don't know where the slide is now. I read more Baudrillard after that.
Today the tables are there in their usual formation but there are no jugs of water and no people and the whole thing is, as I had feared, closed. I could go to one of the other buildings but it seems pointless for a bread roll, so I walk back to my room and eat two bars of chocolate on their own. Then I have a coffee and a cigarette and settle down to wait for the technician. I try not to feel sad that this is possibly my last day alone in my office, but it is difficult. I suppose I won't be able to talk to myself in here anymore, or smoke out of the window, or fall asleep under the second desk. Will the new people want the blind set at a different angle? Will they want to bring potted plants? It's all too much to think about.
To pass the time, I open up the Internet browser on my machine and do a search for the word Troposphere. I don't expect anything to come up but then I find out that it does exist. It's a part of Earth's atmosphere: the place where most weather takes place. Could Lumas have missed that? I assumed the word was made up. I do the search on the OED instead, and find that the earliest use of the word was in 1914. So Lumas invented it first, but no one took any notice. But then why would they? It's only a novel, after all. After I've read the whole entry I do a search for The End of Mr. Y, just to see if there's any information online that I haven't seen before.
When you search for The End of Mr Y on the Internet, you usually get three links. One is an old abstract of the paper Burlem gave at the Greenwich conference. Another is a thread from a discussion board on a rare books site, where someone has left a request for the book and no one has replied. The third is a little more mysterious. It's basically a fan site, with a black background and some Gothic flourishes, and as far as I know it used to have quite a lot of information on the book. There was a page on the curse, and another page speculating about why there are almost no copies left in the world. The author of the Web site seemed to have concocted a conspiracy theory that the U.S. government had tracked down and destroyed all the known copies, including the one in the German bank vault (which, according to this guy, had once belonged to Hitler). He didn't say why this would be so, but hinted at some powerful secret that no one knew. I think the real story is simply that there were not very many copies of the book printed in the first place, and when a book has over a hundred years to fall into obscurity, it's pretty easy for it to simply disappear. Anyway, about six months ago, or maybe a bit more, the Web site closed down. I check it today and it's the same as it was last time I looked at it. There's no error message or anything, but the front page simply says, "They shut me up and I went away."