"I'm not sure. I mean, I managed to find Saul Burlem, but only because I found out about his daughter and found her in the physical world. I don't really know how to approach this problem. It's over a hundred years. It's huge."
We walk through a gate and then the river goes off to the left while we walk towards the right, past some old boat-building sheds towards the city.
I frown. "Surely you know as much as I do about this?" I say.
"Why?"
"You've been in my mind. You must know everything."
"I'm not sure I do know everything," he says. "Your mind is very complicated. Everything I know about you ... It's real and unreal all at once. No ... That's not a very good description. It feels ghostly in some way. As if I thought I was there—I thought I was you—but now it's just a dream. I remember it all, but it doesn't make sense yet. That's the only way I can describe it."
I think about the moment when he penetrated me in the clearing and how I knew then that what we were doing wasn't physical. It was as if I was the void and he was everything real, and the sensation of him entering me was like the largest presence filling the smallest absence. Our minds were making love, and in the moment when I came I saw his whole life as if I was him and I was dying.
I felt the humiliation of my father's belt.
I knew what it was to be hungry.
I walked in bare feet over brown, dusty earth.
I kept worms as a science project, but really I thought of them as my pets.
My father smashed up my wormery when he was drunk.
My mother never said anything.
(They're both dead and I don't miss them; I miss what could have been.)
Those hot, wet evenings when my cousins would stay over.
The ghost stories that frightened me.
The little bell I would ring during Mass, when I was an altar server.
The cold echoey church, and the way it comforted me because the violence in the Bible was on such a large scale that it made my father's actions seem small. I inverted my life, so what was real became unreal, and everything that was said in church was the truth and everything else was a lie.
My father never saying he was proud of me, even though I joined the church for him, because it was the only thing I could see that meant something to him, the man who didn't like rugby or cricket, who said that sports were for "poofters" and arts for "nonces" and school didn't prepare you for the real world and that men should work and pray and do nothing else. The excessive alcohol consumption was somehow never factored into his philosophy of life.
The night I told my cousins about the Holy Ghost, to scare them.
And on another occasion I told them all they'd go to hell.
When I decided to go into the seminary for all the wrong reasons.
The morning my father discovered me in bed with Marty, my cousin.
The hollow look in his eyes when he looked at me after that.
Trying to make myself holy. Blank. Blank. Blank.
Adult life: I'm trying to be a father for everyone...
But I look at women. I try masturbation but I hate myself.
I try self-flagellation. It just makes me feel more aroused.
When the priest from the village rapes my sister I feel as though I did it.
My father abandons the church.
My father is God now.
I am going to eliminate all desire from my life.
(...)
I know him, but I don't know it alclass="underline" I wasn't connected to his mind for long enough. I don't know what's in the gaps. There's still an eternity of knowledge of him that I don't have. And I want it now as much as I want to breathe.
We're in the city again now, walking towards the place where Apollo Smintheus's mouse hole was. It isn't there anymore, but the street is still exactly the same apart from that. This was where I emerged into the Troposphere from Burlem and Lura's house. All I'd have to do to get back to the physical world would be to carry on walking. I could go back and tell Burlem and Lura that I simply failed. Then Adam could live in the Troposphere and I could come and visit him.
But that's not possible. That would be the same as only having him as a memory.
"Why don't you hate me?" I say, even though I already know the answer.
"What do you mean?"
He's holding my hand so tightly that it might break. I don't care.
"Well, you know everything now. All the sex. All the ... everything."
"I understand it all, though," he says. "I know you."
"Yeah. I know what you mean." We stop outside a pawnshop. I'm not sure why. Then I see the café glowing somewhere inside it. It's the dimensional problem again.
"Shall we have coffee before we go?" Adam asks.
"Troposphere coffee," I say. "How can I refuse?"
We sit at a table outside, and after a couple of tries we realize that all you have to do is think coffee for it to appear. Well, actually it takes a bit more effort than that. You have to think coffee and believe it will appear, and then it does.
"Why did you come looking for me?" I ask. "The last time I saw you I really pissed you off; I could see that. I shouldn't have said..."
"It doesn't matter."
"Maybe not. But why?"
"Would it be stupid to say that I thought I'd fallen in love with you?"
I look down on the table. "Um..."
"Sorry. I'm not that good with words. Well, I am good with words, but not these sorts of words. Oh, that actually does sound stupid. Why did I fall in love with you? On reflection, it wasn't a great move—well, objectively speaking. But..." He sighs. "I couldn't help it." Now he runs his hands through his hair. "Oh. I can't explain."
"It's OK," I say. "I don't understand why you feel that way but..."
"What?"
"I was going to say I'm glad you do. But I'm not sure. You'd be alive if it wasn't for me—and The End of Mr. Y."
"Yeah. But." He closes his eyes and then opens them again. "I wouldn't have this." He opens his hands as if he's holding the world, but there's nothing in them. He just means that I should look around and see what he would be holding, if his hands could hold ideas, and metaphors, and multidimensional buildings.
"Why do you see the same thing I see?" I ask.
"Hmm?"
"You see the same thing I see. The same Troposphere. I thought this was the inside of my mind?"
"It is."
"Then..."
"I died inside your mind."
"Oh." I get that Troposphere pain, briefly, like a dull blade cutting me up inside, slow and dirty. I can't think about this. "What was your Troposphere like?"
"Very similar. A city. But it was daytime. There were more parks. But it did have a graffiti problem that yours doesn't have."
"It was daytime here once as well," I say. "I don't know what happened to that."
"Oh well. I like night. It's romantic."
"Like that meadow and the river," I say. "That space was very romantic. But I'm not sure those came from my mind. It's funny..."
He tips his head over to one side for a second. I think we both know what happened when we made love by the river. His mind is inside me. "Hmm. Yeah. Both our minds at once. And all the minds in the world are in here with us ... We could do and see anything."
"Adam..." I reach for his hand across the table. "I want..."
But that sounds wrong here. This isn't a place for wanting.
"What?"
"You. But wanting sounds wrong. I wish we were still in that meadow..."
"Mmm. Why don't we go back?"
"No. I owe Apollo Smintheus. I'd be dead if it wasn't for him."
"We'll do his mission, and then Lura's mission and then..."
"Yeah." And then. "OK." I finish my coffee. "Let's go."