"Hi, Adam. I'm Heather. This is Ariel. Here's your desk and your notice board is right here and I'm so sorry but look at what I've done to the shelves already..." I'm vaguely aware of the high-pitched laugh again, and Heather saying something else. I'm not sure if Adam's listening to her at alclass="underline" His eyes are locked on mine. I have no idea why, but I have an urge to walk across the room and merge with him: not to kiss, not to fuck, but to merge. It's ridiculous—he's way too young for me. I think he's going to break this deep, infinite stare any second, but he doesn't. Could this go on forever? No. Suddenly I think about Patrick and everything else to do with my sordid past and I rip the moment in two by turning around and looking at my computer screen instead. For the first time I notice all the dust around its edges. Everything seems dirty. I look back to Adam again, but now he's busy reassuring Heather about the shelves.
"I really don't have anything," he's saying. "Look."
He's showing her his box. Inside are three blue pencils, a university diary, a red notebook, and a Bible.
"You do travel light," Heather says.
Adam shrugs. "You keep the shelves. I'm just grateful for the desk."
He sits down at the desk and starts up the computer. Heather keeps talking to him and from listening to their conversation I learn that Adam is working on nothing more exciting than planning some MA seminars for the coming term. I'd usually find this kind of conversation boring, but Adam's voice is so mesmerizing that I can't help but listen. I can't place his accent. First I think it's South London; then I revise it to South London with a hint of New Zealand. Then I revise it further to New Zealand with a hint of Irish. Then I give up and start thinking again about going home. I can't develop feelings for a guy who carries a box around with a Bible in it, especially not when I can still feel Patrick's spunk dribbling down my legs. Oh, I'm so gross. I get up and start putting on my coat.
"So," Heather's saying. "I think we should all celebrate." She's looking at me. "Ariel? Oh, are you off? What do you think?"
"Huh?" I say, putting the homoeopathy books in a bag to take home with me.
"Dinner, my house tonight? I was thinking that I can tell you about LUCA and Adam can tell us about how God made Man and we can all get really drunk. Well, we can. I'm guessing Adam doesn't drink. What do you think, Adam?"
"I'll come only if I can drink," he says.
I smile at Heather. "Er, yeah. It does sound good."
"Fantastic," she says. "Seven? Here's my address." She scribbles something down on a piece of paper and gives it to me.
This time when I get to the Newton car park there aren't any men standing around and all the yellow tape has torn and is flapping loosely in the wind. Beyond that, the broken building stands unevenly with scaffolding half-erected around it. My car is the only vehicle now parked here and I'm glad I can take it away. I always expect my car to be warm when I get into it but as usual it's refrigerator-cold, slightly damp, and smells of cigarette smoke. Still, it starts first time.
The traffic's heavy going into town, and as I approach the level crossing I see the lights start to flash and the big gates slowly come down. Shit. That means I'm going to be stuck here for about ten minutes. There's a bus in front of me, sticking out at an awkward angle and half-blocking the other side of the road, and the few cars that got through before the level crossing went down start trying to maneuver around it. There's a bakery on this side of the road, just beyond a pub, so I get out of the car and go to buy some bread. There's a woman in the bakery who smiles at me as if everyone I've ever known has just died. On my way back I realize the reason for the awkward angle of the bus: It's a white van, parked on the curb outside the pub. The lettering on the side of it says SELECT AMUSEMENTS. After a couple of seconds a man comes out of the pub wheeling an ancient-looking fruit machine with wires hanging out of the back. He leaves it on the pavement while he opens the back doors of the van. As I walk past, I can see six or seven other upright machines inside, all with tarnished buttons, each presumably bearing the fingerprints of thousands and thousands of people. There's a second man in the back of the van polishing one of the machines with a white cloth. Once he sees that his colleague is back with the new machine, he stops doing this and jumps down to help lift the machine into the back of the van and then strap it in. For a moment I suddenly think the machines are alive, and these men are taking them prisoner. Then the gates come up, the traffic starts to move again, and I jump back in my car and drive off. I get to the filling station without any problems and buy five pounds' worth of petrol.
I rent a parking space from the Chinese restaurant around the back of my flat and luckily today no one else has parked in it by mistake. After I've had some soup, I go and get in the bath with two of the homoeopathy books: Kent's Lectures on the Materia Medica and a rather strange-looking volume called Literary Portraits of the Polychrests. I'm going to read about Carbo Vegetabilis, then I'm going to go and buy some. It doesn't matter how dirty I am, or that I want to pretend there's nothing wrong with me, or that I desperately want to see Adam's face again, or that I should think about getting back to my thesis and my new piece for the magazine. This is my mission. This isn't real life. Real life is letting men fuck you over their desks (and enjoying it, which is somehow the worst thing). Real life is regularly running out of money, and then food. Real life is having no proper heating. Real life is physical. Give me books instead: Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book; I'd give anything for that. Being cursed by The End of Mr. Y must mean becoming part of the book; an intertextual being: a book-cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg. Things in books can't get dirty, and real life is, well, eventually it's dust. Even books become dust, like the crumbled remains H. G. Wells's Time Traveller finds in the museum. But thoughts are clean.
Before I start reading I think an experimental thought, just for a second. What if this is real life? What if I am cursed and I'm going to die, just like Lumas and everyone who read The End of Mr. Y in the 1890s? If I really thought this was real, some survival instinct would make me stop doing it, surely? But if it's not real, why am I bothering? I pick up the first book, Kent's Lectures, and start to read about Carbo Vegetabilis.
We will take up the study of Vegetable Charcoal—Carbo-veg. It is a comparatively inert substance made medicinal and powerful, and converted into a great healing agent, by grinding it fine enough. By dividing it sufficiently, it becomes similar to the nature of sickness and cures folks.
The Old School use it in tablespoonful doses to correct acidity of the stomach. But it is a great monument to Hahnemann. It is quite inert in crude form and the true healing powers are not brought out until it is sufficiently potentized. It is one of those deep-acting, long-acting antipsoric medicines. It enters deeply into the life, in its proving it develops symptoms that last a long time, and it cures conditions that are of long standing—those that come on slowly and insidiously.
What follows is basically a long list of symptoms that can be cured by this medicine in homoeopathic doses. Not much of it seems particularly interesting or gives any indication as to why this would be the "special" medicine chosen for Lumas's concoction. I read of sluggishness, laziness, and vomiting of blood. Then I read down the page and learn that people who need Carbo-veg are also cold and cadaverous. I close this book and pick up Literary Portraits of the Polychrests. The flap informs me that it should be possible to "read" or decode characters in literature in the same way as one reads a person with an illness. I can see how that would work: all those little symptoms I read about before, all the emphasis on knowing whether someone feels worse at eleven A.M. (sulphur) or four P.M. (lycopodium). I open the Portraits book and read the following: