Console?
It comes up.
What do I do now? I ask it.
Read the Departures Board, it tells me.
So much for the timetable existing on my console.
All the screens seem to be showing departures. Are there no arrivals here? I stop in front of one of them and read the information on it. And then I don't know what to think. There don't seem to be any times on the board; there are just lots and lots of platform numbers. And the train lines are called Fear, Love, Anger, Frustration, Disgust, Pain, Ecstasy, Hope, Comfort.... Every abstract emotion you can think of is there. And, oddly, there's room for them all on a screen the size of a portable television.
How do I use this system? I ask the console.
You find a platform and board a train.
But which platform?
Where are you trying to get to ?
Myself. Oh—do I use the coordinates?
No. The coordinates only relate to your position on the Troposphere. I believe you are trying to get out of the Troposphere.
So ... What do I do, then?
You join with a train of thought relating to the state of mind of the person you want to rejoin: in this case, yourself. And you alight when you get there.
The console is mildly annoying me, so I close it down. Trains of thought. It's obvious and frustrating at the same time. Who invented this weird system? And then I think, I did. I invented everything here. Except ... I didn't invent Apollo Smintheus, and I didn't invent those KIDS. I sigh and look at the board again. If I am going to get back to myself, it looks as though I'm going to have to identify an emotion I know I was experiencing at the time I want to get back to.
And I'm thinking: Time travel, to the past, using emotions? Einstein wouldn't have approved of this. I'm not sure I approve of this. And I don't know how you really distinguish between emotions, anyway. I have enough trouble (intellectually) distinguishing between things. But emotions are not even things. They don't really exist outside the mind. But I'm going to have to do this, anyway. OK. When I was in the hotel room, what was I feeling? Hope? Sort of. I hoped that I'd find Burlem through Molly. But it wasn't a strong feeling. Does it have to be a strong feeling?
The console opens up in my mind, even though I didn't ask it to.
You have one new message, it tells me, and then it closes itself again. I open it back up.
Where is the message? I ask it.
There's a glow on the screen and I follow it over to a news kiosk just beyond the Departures Board. There is one newspaper in a small rack outside and I pick it up. It's not a newspaper.
A Guide to the Underground, it says on the front. By Apollo Smintheus.
I open it up.
You now have no new messages, says the console.
In my previous work I alluded to a vulnerability that a mind may have to the world of all minds. I feel that this now needs greater explanation. As you are aware, consciousness itself is a sprawling landscape with many open doors from one mind to another. The landscape and the doors are metaphors. The openings may just as well be tunnels through a coral reef, or wormholes in space. In most cases, information in the Troposphere is stored where it is created: in the "mind space" of that individual. However, there are several cases of information, which is more dynamic and, you may say, "global" (not that the Troposphere is a globe, of course). What you call "emotions" are types of information that are shared among minds in the Troposphere. The human experience of emotion can be said to be like a wind blowing across an infinite, curved desert, or a planet orbiting its sun. (And it is only ever "like"; it never "is." Emotion is a whole world of metaphor itself, a type of being that shows itself only in not showing itself—as the symptom and never the thing.) You choose to "see" it as an underground train travelling along an infinite, looping track. Minds are not passengers on these trains: They are the stations themselves—sometimes open; sometimes closed. When the station is open, the train of emotion can roar through. When the station is open, it is also open to other things: other open minds or, perhaps, people attempting to achieve Pedesis.
Emotion could simply be termed "motion." Indeed, I remember that this word used to simply mean movement, or a transference from one thing to another. In this world-made-of-language, meaning never really becomes obsolete. In this case, the motion is of something that has no mass (motion itself) and so the meaning it carries can travel at incomprehensible speeds: speeds fast enough to take you backwards. All you have to do is get on a train and find the right station.
I look at the Departures Board again. I think myself back into that hotel room. I'd just had a bath, I remember: I was trying to wash Patrick's horrible desire away. I was trying to forget that I'd just had sex for money. I was ... What? I was afraid, of course—although I think I knew I'd lost the Project Starlight men for the time being. What else? I was sad, because I knew I'd never see Adam again. But I'm so used to sadness and disappointment that they don't even register.
Which train do I get on?
The platform for "sadness" is number 1225. The platform for "disgust" is number 69. I'm not sure I want to board a train of sadness, or a train of disgust. What about pain? But I wasn't actually in pain.
I think back to the moments I have been able to enter other people's minds. With Molly it was that moment—that pang—when she thought about Hugh, and the pain of having to go all over town looking for him. With Maxine it was easy: She was worrying the whole time about being fat and smelly. And now I think I understand this "vulnerability to the world-of-minds." You have a strong emotion and something in your mind opens, slightly, and at the moment of emotion your mind connects with all the others that are feeling the same thing. Or maybe I don't understand. It actually sounds a bit flaky to me, put like that. As an idea, it doesn't have the hard lines of Derrida or Heidegger. Oh well. I think harder, but I'm not sure I was feeling anything very definite in that room. But ... Hang on. Surely it doesn't matter how far back I go, as long as I aim for some moment before I came into the Troposphere. So when did I last feel strong emotion? What about the fear I felt as I drove away from the priory? That tumbling-over-itself sick feeling as I waited for the black car to slither out of some side street and start following me. I look at the Departures Board again. Fear: Platform 7. I can't see this working, but I'll give it a try.
I start the long walk down the endless concrete tunnel, ignoring signs to Platform 31, Platform 57, and Platform 99. There's no order here. Eventually I find it: Platform 7. I walk down a set of aluminium steps and see that the train is already there; it's an old rusty thing that reminds me of the oldest and nastiest Northern Line trains that would always seem to grind to a halt just outside Camden. Isn't it a bit lucky that the train is already here? But from down here I can see all the other platforms, all with trains sitting in them. Just as the screens upstairs suggested: There are no arrivals here, only departures. And then I realize that the train isn't "really" here at all. It's just a metaphor—just like everything else here. I rotate the tarnished silver handle and pull the door towards me. Whatever the metaphor is—and whatever this experience "really" looks like—I am left in no doubt that I am now climbing inside fear itself.