"And what would you call that? I mean if it's just atoms repelling each other then it can't be worthy of note, really. I mean, why should anyone mind?"
"Adam..."
"What makes it real at all?"
For a moment I think about pain again: about forcing friction; forcing atoms to exchange electrons; forcing something to become real. But this is about something else; something beyond that.
"Language," I say. "Everything from the existence of the word real to the existence of the word fucking to the existence of the word wrong."
I place enough emphasis on the word wrong that he takes his hand away from my leg. I close the gap created by my dressing gown and cross my ankles. I know why I can't do this, but reason isn't the same as desire, and I am aware of my blood pumping purposefully around my body, preparing me for something that can't happen: Adam's lips on mine; his dark, hairy chest pressed against my smooth, pale breasts; penetration; oblivion. It's like starving and feeling you have to eat. I'm starving and someone's just presented me with a bowl of food and told me that I can't eat it; that it might be poisoned.
Adam gets off the bed and walks over to the window. The curtains are still closed but he doesn't open them; he just stands there looking at the beige fabric. He sighs.
"This language stuff is what you study, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"It's very different from theology."
"Is it?" I say. "Some of that stuff you were saying the other night at Heather's ... It made me think about Baudrillard and his idea of the simulacrum: a world made up of illusion, of copies of copies of things that don't exist anymore; copies with no original. And Derrida's difference and the way we defer meaning rather than ever really experiencing it. Derrida talks about faith a lot. He wrote a lot about religion."
"It's still not fun, is it? It still has the power to tell you what to do. It's like: Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules. I want something that tells me I don't have to follow the rules."
"Oh, well, maybe then you're back to the existentialists. I think they have more fun. Although the problem there is they don't really know they're having fun."
I think about Camus and The Outsider. I think about the scene where Mersault drinks coffee in the funeral parlor and the way that this is used, later, as evidence that he is a bad person. Having sex in a priory would therefore make you what sort of person?
"So Derrida is not an existentialist?"
"No. But it all comes from the same background: Heidegger; phenomenology."
"And what does that say about life?"
"What? Phenomenology?"
"Yeah."
"Um ... This is all stuff I'm still thinking about, and the way I understand it might not be quite right, but basically it's to do with the world of things: phenomena."
I think back to Lumas's story "The Blue Room," about the philosophers trying to establish whether or not ghosts exist. It reminds me of the time I was first trying to properly understand phenomenology (a process still not complete). I'd been reading Levinas's Discovering Existence with Husserl—Husserl was Heidegger's mentor—and I was trying to come to grips with his work, but it was very difficult. I was lying in the bath, trying not to get the book wet, and, as a thought experiment, asking myself the old question: "Is there a ghost in this room?" I reminded myself that if I were a rationalist, I could answer no, quite confidently, as long as I had already established that ghosts don't exist using logic and a priori statements. You can be a rationalist with your eyes shut. I know ghosts don't exist, so there is no ghost in this room. If you're a rationalist, and you've made your world out of a logic that says that when things are dead they are dead and that's it, then you could be there in a room full of screaming ghouls and still conclude that there is no ghost in the room. If I were an empiricist I'd look for evidence from my senses: I would see that there was no ghost in the room and conclude that if I was not experiencing it, then it wasn't there. I'd got all that. But phenomenology, it seemed to me, wasn't interested in whether or not the ghost was there. Phenomenology seemed to be asking, What the fuck is a ghost, anyway?
I try to summarize this for Adam.
"Basically, phenomenology says that you exist and the world exists but the relationship between the two is problematic. How do we define entities? Where does one entity stop and another begin? Structuralism seemed to say that objects are objects and you can name them anything you like. But I'm more interested in questions about what makes an object. And how an object can have meaning outside of the language we use to define it."
"So everything's just language in the end. There's nothing beyond words. Is that the main point?"
"Kind of. It's not just words though. Maybe 'language' is the wrong term to use in this context. Maybe 'information' is better." I sigh. "This is so hard to put into words. Maybe Baudrillard does it best when he talks about the copy without an original: the simulation. Like, you know the way Plato thought that everything on earth was a copy—or a shadow—of some 'ideal object.' Well, what if we've created a world in which even that shadowy level of reality isn't the final copy? One in which anything that was ever 'real' is now gone, and the copies that referred to things—in other words the language, the signs—don't refer to anything anymore? What if all our stupid pictures and signs don't make reality at all? What if they don't refer out to anything else, but only inward towards themselves and other signs? That's hyperreality. If we wanted to talk about it in Derridean terms we could talk of a world that constantly defers the real. And it is language that does that. It promises us a table, or a ghost, or a rock, but can never actually deliver one for us."
"Isn't it depressing?" Adam asks.
I laugh, but it sounds hollow in here. "Surely no more depressing than your idea that everything is an illusion?"
"But I was talking about an illusion that covers something up. Some definite reality. You're talking about a world where nothing is not an illusion."
"Well, maybe I do want to believe that there's something outside the simulacrum. I don't know. But it is exciting to think about it. Like finding out that everything is just quarks and electrons. I find it exciting because everything you learn about the basic units of things—language, atoms, whatever—you find that they are absurd. That stuff I was telling you the other night about quantum physics: It's so crazy it can't be true. And then what you were saying about truth existing outside reality: I found that exciting as well. There's always another level that we just don't know. The scientists have it down to the quarks and electrons, and the various weird variations of them that come down in cosmic rays and so on, but they don't know if that's it, if they have found indivisible matter—what the Greeks called atomos. It could even be that there's infinite divisibility. And there are still these big questions that no one can solve: What came before the beginning and what will happen after the end. The fact that these big questions still exist is exciting. No one really knows anything very important—and there's still such a lot to know."
"So now we're back to religion."
"I thought you said religion was part of the illusion. I mean, it's made of language like everything else..."
"But faith," he says now. "What's faith made of?" Adam touches the curtains but doesn't open them. "But you can't base anything on faith. Nothing based on faith is true."
"Isn't it? You could argue that we all have faith. We have faith in language, for example."
"Faith doesn't always pay off, though, does it? You don't always get back what you want."
He turns and looks at me. His face is pale and I remember what he said about not feeling "so good" at the moment. But he's still probably the most attractive human being I have ever seen, and for a second I can't believe he is here in this room with me, with his long, unwashed hair and his old grayscale clothes, like there's so much more to him than flesh, so much more than just atoms. How easy it would be to just close my eyes and let him in. But then he'd go away again and I'd b
e left with what I'd done. I don't want him to go away. I can't have sex with him, so I'm going to have to keep him talking. And then maybe we could just go to sleep in each other's arms? Don't be stupid, Ariel. Here that would be as bad as fucking.
"You could say we have faith in a shared culture," I say.
"Based on what?"
"Shared language. I mean, we do share a culture, and that culture is made up of things that we've broken down and labelled, like the way the nineteenth-century natural scientists classified everything. Of course, people still debate all those classifications. Are two similar fish actually one sort offish or two? Is everything different from everything else or the same?"
He's looking at me with the most sulky expression I've ever seen, everything on his face pointing downwards, including his gaze, which now drifts to the floor. But I'm still thinking that I want to drown in him; I want to drown in a pool of sulky, pissed-off Adam. I want him so much more now that he's cross with me for not agreeing to sleep with him. It's as if the lines of force between us have become elastic, and they're trying to contract. Are we different from one another or the same?
He doesn't say anything, so I carry on.
"According to what criteria can you say, This thing ends there, and here's where another thing begins? What exactly is 'being' anyway? Unless you go down to the atomic level, there seem to be no spaces between things. Even empty space is teeming with particles. But when you look at atoms closely you realize there is hardly anything but space. You must have heard that analogy that an atom is like a sports hall with one tennis ball in the middle? Nothing is really connected to anything else. But we create connections between things in language. And we use those classifications and the spaces between them to create a culture such as the one we're now in, in which we both understand that it would be wrong to sleep together in a priory in which I am a guest."
Adam's eyes are hard but his voice is now soft.
"Why is it wrong?"
"Come on, you know why. We'd offend everyone here if they knew what was going on."
"But surely that would be their fault for not understanding about the atoms?"
"Would it? That's not what culture says. Imagine using that as a defense for murder. But judge, I didn't really stab her because the atoms in the knife never touched the atoms in her body. We can't just exit culture because it doesn't suit us. Well, we could—or we could tell ourselves that's what we'd done—but we'd feel guilt, anyway." I sigh. It's so easy to talk like this but it's not easy to explain what I'm actually feeling. What would I say? Adam, I want to see you naked. I want to suck your cock and lie back and let you fuck me but not in a priory because it makes me feel dirty and evil and I'm probably going to die soon and even though I'm not sure I believe in heaven, I have seen an entity that claimed to be a god recently and so I don't want to mess up my chances at the last possible minute.
And then I think of Derrida again. It's as though I'm in some kind of auction and my last bid for purity is this: I'm thinking about his cock in my mouth but I'm not speaking it and I'm not doing it. I'm not letting the atoms get too close.
Adam turns to the window again. This time he opens the curtains and looks out.
"Is it still snowing?" I ask. That reminds me of some quote: Tell me, my dear, does it still snow? But I can't remember where it's from. Maybe in the quote it's not even snow. Maybe it's rain.
"No." He sighs. "I should have stayed at your flat on Tuesday."
"I wouldn't have slept with you then, either."
Are you listening, God?
He nods. "You don't find me attractive."
"It's not that. I think it's more that I don't find myself that attractive."
"That sounds like shit to me."
"Sorry. You're right. But I just can't. I want to—but I just can't."
Now he turns around again. He doesn't look me in the eye, though. There's no connection—whatever the hell that connection is when someone focuses on your eyes and you focus on theirs and for a second it feels like you're machines plugged into the same socket, or even that one of you is the machine and the other is the socket. Machines, sockets, electricity, lines of force ... Our eyes might not connect, but all the other lines of force are still there, pulling me towards him.
"But you do want to? You do want me?" The way he speaks is as if he's been told that he's got a terminal illness but a year to live. Is it possible to take sex this seriously? Is it possible to take sex with me this seriously? Patrick says I "do" things to him but all I really do to him is implicitly promise to provide what I always provide: dirty sex with no strings. But if he never saw me again I don't think he'd care. Do I want Adam? Well, that's easy.
"Yes. But I can't have you. I'm wrong for you."
"You know that I've never..." He lets the sentence drift away, like a snowflake that melts before it lands.
"I know. That's why as well. The thing is that I have. Thousands of times, with hundreds of people."
"Ariel, for God's sake."
"What?"
"Why are you saying it like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you're trying to make yourself seem ... I don't know."
"Like a bit of a slut?"
"I wouldn't put it like that."
"No. You're too nice." I bite my lip.
"Oh, fuck off. You think I'm nice because I used to be a priest. I don't want to be nice. I want..."
"What? You want to be like me? You want to be unnice? You want to be dirty? Well, come on then." I start undoing my dressing gown. "Let's fuck in the priory. Have a little bit of what I've got. Look: Here's some of what I've got." I hold up my arms, wrists facing outwards as though I'm pushing something away. "That's what happened last time someone fucked me."
Adam walks forwards and for a second I imagine that he's on his way to rip open my nightdress and push me down on the bed. Is that what I want him to do? Or do I want him to feel sorry for me with my fucked-up wrists and my hundreds of sexual conquests? But his eyes are as still as fossils as he walks right past me and out of the room. Whatever I do want I'm not going to get it. He's gone.
Half an hour later I'm under the covers in my bed in the cold, still room, alone. Adam never came back, not that I expected him to really. Oh well. I achieved my objective, even if it wasn't in the most elegant way. It's like when someone fills a whole blackboard proving something in mathematics and then someone else comes along and shows that it can be done in one line. I could have just told him I wasn't interested. It would have been a lie but it would have been elegant; more elegant than the maybe/never I've ended up with. Now I don't know if he'll ever want to speak to me again.
But I'm still here, at least: no blond men. I still exist.
Now I can go into the Troposphere.
This time it doesn't take long to go through the tunnel at all. But when I get out the other side it's different. The street I am so used to isn't there anymore. Instead I am in a cluttered town square with gray cobbles, which looks tiny compared with the mansions and castles crowded around it. There must be hundreds of these buildings, although objectively I can see that this should be spatially impossible. Nevertheless, they are "there." Some of them are built in pale stone, others are rendered in a dark, rusty-looking brick and have gothic spires and turrets that seem to reach into the clouds, as if they were trying to claw their way to heaven. Clouds. That's bizarre. There haven't been clouds in the Troposphere before. But it's still nighttime here; maybe I can only see the clouds now because of the full moon. But then I realize that the moon hasn't been here before, either.
There's a statue in the center of the square, shining in the moonlight. It seems to be a copy of Rodin's Le Penseur: a man sitting on a rock with his chin resting on the back of his hand. But as I walk closer I see that this man has a mouse face. It's a statue of Apollo Smintheus without his cape on. An owl hoots and I jump. Last time I heard sound in the Troposphere it wasn't a good sign at all. But nothing else happens
so I decide it's just an owl. How many buildings are there here? An impossible number. It's very hard to describe what is in front of me but there does just seem to be too much stuff: too much information, all packed into such a small space. As well as the scramble of turrets and spires, I can see drawbridges and moats, mounds, smoke from fires, a rainbow bridge, and various flags; behind the buildings are mountains and cliff tops and lakes, all jumbled together like a bunch of landscape photographs overlapping on a crowded wall. In between these grand buildings are other, more familiar places: a couple of tea rooms, a small bookshop, and a shop selling magic tricks. They all seem to be closed, though. One place seems especially compelling, but it's not a building. It's an overgrown garden with high walls and a wrought-iron gate. Inside are a bench and several trees. I want to go in there, but it's locked. The other places here are also closed. Anachronistic neon signs glow pinkly all over the place. Closed. Fermé. Closed for Renovations. Closed. Shut. No Vacancies. What kind of place has gothic castles and towers with pink neon signs everywhere?
Console?
The thing comes up.
You have no choices, says the female voice.
Oh, great. This again. Has the whole thing crashed? Did those men do something to this place that means I just can't access anything anymore?
You have one new message.
What?
You have one new message.
Can I get the message? There's no response. Where's the little envelope that you click on? What is the equivalent here? How do I retrieve a message in the Troposphere? Who would have left me a message, anyway? For a second I imagine some brown paper package with red, green, and black wires coming out of it: a bomb from my enemies. But this doesn't make me feel anything at all and I remember that this is what I like so much about this space: no hot, no cold, no fear.
Something now glows in the console and I notice that's it's Apollo Smintheus's mouse-hole. I didn't notice it before, but it's there now: sitting between what looks like Valhalla and something called the Primrose Tea Shoppe. Am I supposed to go in there? I do want to see Apollo Smintheus. I switch off the console and walk through the white archway and into the room I recognize from before: the empty tables and shelves and the nest in the corner. There's no sign of Apollo Smintheus. I walk through to the other room. The fire is out and there's no one here. But there is a booklet lying on the table.