Chapter Twenty-two
But so far fear just looks like the inside of an old London Underground train. The seats are covered in tatty green velveteen with a repeating orangy pattern. The floor has a layer of dirt so thick that the real floor could fall away and no one would even notice. The carriages are joined together with creaky mechanisms that you can see (or so I imagine) when you look through the window in the adjoining door. I sit down and a whistle blows. The train starts to move. It slowly creaks its way to the end of the platform and then, suddenly, we're going at what feels like three hundred miles per hour, through a long tunnel and then out onto a landscape I don't recognize. I absurdly think, This must be a Circle Line train, since we're going above ground already; then I realize what's wrong with what I'm thinking, and I stop.
I don't like this landscape. I don't like it at all. The syrupy feeling I have in the Troposphere is now gone, and I feel not simply cold and tired but completely hollowed out, as if all I am is skin. The train speeds up again and I can't help but look out of the window. Looking out of the window feels a bit like when you look on the Internet to find out if your symptoms suggest terminal illness: You know they will, and you know you shouldn't look, but you do. Outside of this window is just one big field. But it's not a green, hopeful field: It's basically mud. And on the mud, I can see burning houses. It should feel just like I do watching the TV news—that hyperreal sense that nothing you see in two dimensions on a screen can ever really happen—but it does not feel like watching TV. The houses that are burning outside aren't just any old semis from the news: They're all the houses I've ever lived in. And I'm inside, and I can't get out; my parents are inside, and they can't get out. I know my sister is already dead. But more than that. This is fear without hope: This is the image of me asleep in my cold bedroom back in Kent, wearing the thick pajamas my mother got me back in the days when we still spent Christmas together. In the image I am not just fast asleep; the smoke from the fire has already knocked me out and now, as I watch, the leg of my pajama bottoms has caught fire and the skin around my ankle is starting to melt. I won't ever wake up again. I am just going to melt, and I won't even know anything about it.
After the fires all I can see are floods: water creeping up and up the outside of the same houses—my houses—until they are completely submerged; until even the people on the roofs, and the people hiding in the attics, are soon dead. My whole family; everyone I've ever known. On one level I know I don't care too much about my family—when did I last see them, after all? But I'm there with them now as we wait for help that does not come; as we accept the moment when the water becomes too high and we all fall into it. There's nothing apart from the water: It's black and cold and it stinks like death. And I'm the first one to go, to stop trying to hold my breath and actually breathe in the black water. That's it. Blackness. My useless body sinks down to where the street used to be. And, in this train of fear, I'm sweating, and my heart's beating so fast that it's like one long heartbeat, or maybe no heartbeat at all.
The worst thing about the images outside is that there is nothing else apart from them. And it's not simply that I cannot see anything beyond the houses and the mud: I know with the deepest certainty possible that there is nothing out there beyond what I can see. There isn't any me here; there is no train. I will die in all those houses and there is nowhere else to escape to. There's no sense that this will ever exist "around the corner" or on TV or be happening to someone else. This is what it must be like to open the door to a dead-eyed man with an axe. This is what it must be like when you haven't fought him off (after all, how could you?) and you're tied up and you know you're going to die. You're not watching this happen to a fictional character; you are experiencing it for reaclass="underline" It's me; it's the end of me. Or, worse: You are like a fictional character, but not one of the leads. You're just one of the victims along the way.
The train lurches on. The alleyways I'd usually never walk down after dark are all there now: a world of dead ends with rapists patrolling the thin dark passages like the ghosts on Pac-Man. I am stabbed a thousand times by people who don't know my name, or what books I like to read, or that if my life wasn't such a mess I'd quite like to get a cat. I watch myself bleed to death like a farm animal in an abattoir, while parts of my own body lie scattered around me, hacked off and discarded. I pray for unconsciousness, but it doesn't come. Oh Jesus. I can't stand any more of this. I feel what it is all like: I'm having an operation but the doctors don't know I'm actually awake. I experience a motorway pileup. I see Adam dying a million different ways. Then I'm killing Adam: I'm killing him in every possible way, and I'm killing everyone else, too. I'm in prison, and I'll never escape. I have no choice.
I have no choice.
I have no choice.
Every millisecond of this horrible journey is an epiphany in which I realize that this is it. This is my last moment of life, and any idea of free will disappeared long ago. And each epiphany is, at the moment I have it, absolutely irreversible. It's not the moment when you think Shit! That was close. It's the moment after that, in a world where you are the unluckiest person on Earth and there's no one to help you and no one to care, especially when everyone you know is already dead....
I can't stand this.
Console? I say, weakly, although I can barely believe that such a thing still exists.
It comes up.
Where do I get off? I ask it.
You get off at your station.
Where is my station?
You have to be able to see it.
What?
You now have no choices.
Well, I knew that.
I want to stand up and go and ask the driver to stop the train, but I know that there is no driver and this isn't really a train. I'm surfing on a wave of fear that's moving faster than ... What did Apollo Smintheus say? Incomprehensible speeds. Think, think. Don't look out of the window. Don't ... I look.
And then I realize that I'm not alone out here. There's actually something worse than being alone with your own worst fears, and I'm just beginning to see what that might be. Faintly—not above, below, in front of, or behind my images of fear, but in some other relation to them—I now sense the howling spectre of something else: layers upon layers of other people's fear. There are misty representations of money burning, of someone being fisted by his own father, of toys that tell you to "fuck off" and then rip out your throat, of the idea that there is no such thing as reality, of someone being abducted by an alien and strapped to a table in a white lab, of nuclear war, of a child drowning, of hundreds of children drowning, of it being all YOUR FAULT, of choking on fish bones, of lung cancer, of bowel cancer, of brain tumors, of spiders—thousands and thousands of spiders, of a prolapsed uterus, of sleep apnea, of eating, of any kind of sex, of rats, of cockroaches, of plastic bags, of heights, of planes, of the Bermuda Triangle, of the live rail, of ghosts, of terrorism, of cocktail parties, of crowds, of the dentist, of choking on your own tongue, of your own feet, of dreams, of grown-ups, of ice cubes, of false teeth, of Father Christmas, of getting old, of your parents dying, of what you might do to yourself, of coffins, of alcohol, of suicide, of blood, of not being able to take heroin again, of the thing behind the curtains, of soot, of spaceships, of DVT, of horses, of fast cars, of people, of paper, of knives, of dogs, of redundancy, of being late, of being seen naked, of scabs, of leap years, of UFOs, of dragons, of poison, of accordion music, of torture, of any kind of authority, of being kicked while you just lie on the ground trying to protect your head until you become unconscious and can't protect yourself anymore.