"Thanks," I say to Apollo Smintheus. "I mean, for..."
What am I thanking him for? The coffee? Being here? Potentially rescuing me?
"Hmm," says Apollo Smintheus.
"Are you here because I prayed?"
He sips his coffee. His gray paw looks like a key ring I saw once, made of a lucky rabbit's foot: hard and gray and dead. But the rest of him seems so alive it's crazy. After all, eight-foot-tall mouse gods don't actually exist. But he breathes like a person, and his long gray nose looks as though it would feel hard and warm if I were to touch it. Not that I would ever touch it. Another odd thing about Apollo Smintheus is that when I sit opposite him I feel as though I'm sitting opposite a very distinguished professor.
"Not exactly," he says.
"Why are you here?"
"Because you're going to do something for me. Or—perhaps it's easier to say that you have already done something for me. But you don't know what it is yet."
"I'm confused."
"I know."
"Look. Can I just ask you some questions, really quickly? I think I'm in trouble and I've got to get halfway across the Troposphere before I..."
"You are in trouble."
My shoulders sag. "I know. I think I might not be able to get back to myself in time. In fact, I think I already know that I'm not going to make it."
"I agree."
"And I think there's a chance I might die."
"Yes, well..."
"Well, what?"
"Being in the Troposphere, as you call it. If you're here, you're already dead."
Something in my body tries to release adrenaline, but it doesn't work like that in here. The scene in front of me blurs and then comes back.
"Oh fuck. Oh fuck." I grip the table in front of me. "So I'm too late?"
"Too late for what?"
"To go back. To find Burlem."
"You can go back."
"But ... You said ... Being here." I close my eyes and then open them again. "Am I dead?"
"This world, the world-of-minds. It leads to death. You know that."
"Do I?"
"If you gave it any thought you'd realize." He laughs, and it's like watching a CGI animation, except that I can feel the warm, humid air around me change when he breathes into it. "I'm sorry. You didn't call me back here for riddles. Why don't you just ask your questions."
"OK."
"But you'd better be quick, because we've still got to discuss this little commission you're going to take on for me—and we've also got to work out how to get you out of here, which isn't actually going to be that easy."
"OK. Well I'll keep it quick then. Am I ... Am I safe for a moment?"
Apollo Smintheus gestures to the TV screen. It flickers into life. In grainy black and white I can see the interior of a hospital. The camera is focused on a bed where a girl lies unconscious. There's a drip attached to her arm.
"Is that me?" I say. But I already know it is.
"The pub landlord was alerted when you didn't come down for breakfast and then failed to check out. He went into your room and found you unconscious. When he couldn't wake you he called an ambulance. You're in a coma, officially."
"Oh God."
"You've travelled a great distance here. That takes a long time."
"Apollo Smintheus?" I'm still looking at the screen.
"Yes."
"Am I mad?"
"No. Not in the way you understand the word."
"This isn't some coma fantasy ... Like a dream?"
"Well, this is a little like dreaming, but obviously it's the reverse. Why don't you ask your questions."
I stop looking at the TV screen and look at him instead.
"Every time you say something I have more questions," I say.
"Like?"
"Well, how is this dreaming in reverse?"
"Dreaming takes you into your unconscious. This is not your unconscious."
Suddenly, things start click-clicking in my mind. I haven't really yet had the chance to think deeply about Apollo Smintheus's document, but I've obviously absorbed it, because now I start making the connections.
"This is ... consciousness itself," I say.
"Indeed."
"Everyone's thoughts, everyone's consciousness. But made into an elaborate metaphor that I can navigate. But this space doesn't really look like this—like you said before. There's no coffee, no table, no TV. But presumably I wouldn't be able to see whatever it is made of ... And ... And I can jump into other people's minds because they're all connected. They're all made out of the same thing."
"Very good. What are they made out of?"
"Do I know?"
"Yes. You should do."
I think about everything I know about consciousness. I start with Samuel Butler and his idea that consciousness is something that evolves, and that there's no reason machines—or bits of plastic, or whatever—can't become conscious, as long as they inherit the consciousness from us. We evolved from plants, I remember him arguing, and plants aren't conscious. So consciousness can evolve from nothing at all, just as life must also have done, once. We can merge with machines and become cyborgs and eventually the machine part of us might become conscious. But how would that happen? And how did it happen with the animals that first became conscious; who made consciousness for us? There must have been a moment when the first flicker of consciousness happened. What caused that sudden leap into consciousness? I've always liked these questions best of all Butler's writings, but they're not going to help me here, I don't think. What else do I know about consciousness? I know I don't like the idea of the collective unconscious. I don't like the idea of primordial symbols that exist outside the more arbitrary system of signifiers and signifieds. I prefer Derrida's idea of a gaping absence being the thing that creates reality and presence—not a weird B-movie interface full of snakes and witches and creepy jesters.
I think about Heidegger again, and realize there's so much I don't know. From what I can remember, Heidegger's special word for consciousness (or, at least, the kind of consciousness that most humans seem to have) is Dasein: literally a kind of being that is able to ask questions about its own being. For Heidegger, being cannot be considered without the idea of time: You can only be present in the present, and you can therefore only exist in the sense that you exist in time. Dasein can recognize and theorize its own being. It can wonder, "Why am I here? Why do I exist? And what is existence, anyway?" And Dasein is therefore constructed out of language: logos; that which signifies.
Lacan made the psychoanalytic argument that consciousness is connected with language—that our jump from being unconscious, gurgling babies into being part of the "symbolic order" (i.e., having a conscious world) happens at exactly the same moment that we acquire language. This is the same moment that we realize that we are separate beings in the world. We are not our mothers (thank Christ). We become something called a self, that can exist only because others do.
But the world is made from language (or, at least, my world is made from language), and we know how unreliable that is. It's a simulacrum: a closed system just like mathematics, where everything only makes sense because it isn't something else. The numeral 2 only means something because it is not 1 or 3. House only exists because it isn't a boat or a street. I am only me because I am not someone else. This is a system of existence with no signifieds; only signifiers. The whole system of existence is a closed system floating on nothing, like a locked hovercraft.
Think, Ariel. This isn't a fucking essay.
No. I'm lost inside consciousness and trying to work out what the hell it is.
Which kind of reminds me of something....
"We haven't got too much more time," Apollo Smintheus warns me.
I look up at the screen. I'm still lying there, just as unconscious as I was before.
"This whole place is made of language," I say. "That's why I come here down a tunnel made of language—all language from the beginning of time. Pe
ople's thoughts get stored here somehow..."
"Very good."
"And you're made out of a special language: prayer."
"Yes."
"But I don't understand. Why can't I see the true Troposphere? Surely it's just numbers and letters? I mean, if it's language, it's made to be understandable."
"Language written on what?"
I shrug. "I don't know." For some reason I'm imagining a big tablet in the sky, like a cosmic version of the Rosetta stone. Every time someone thinks or says or does something, it gets recorded there. But if that's all it was I would be able to see it. I mean—we'd all be able to see a giant stone tablet floating in the sky. Maybe this really is all just imaginary.
"You're going to have to give this some more thought," Apollo Smintheus says.
"Yes...," I start to say.
"But not now. Now we've got to get you out of here."
"I...," I begin.
Apollo Smintheus looks at his watch. "What?"
"Why do you care?"
"Oh, because you're going to do something for me."
"And what is that?"
"I'll tell you on the way."
We're walking out of the desert and into a suburban space, with little white houses with blue doors. It's nighttime again, but the silvery light is back. Each house has a window box outside with blue flowers, and a neat front garden. Each garden is dewed with moisture and covered with shiny little cobwebs. Apollo Smintheus has been explaining to me what he wants me to do for him, and it's completely nuts.
"You want me to go back to 1900?"
"Yes. And there's no point in arguing because in a sense you've already done it. That's why I'm here helping you now."
I ignore as much of that as I can. "You want me to go back to 1900 and mess with the head of a retired schoolteacher who bred 'fancy mice'?"
"Yes, that's right. Miss Abbie Lathrop. As I just explained to you, she virtually invented the laboratory mouse. Go to any lab and you'll find mice there bred from her original stock. I'll give you an example. The C56/BL6/Bkl. This is a strain of mouse that you can buy from any distributor. They are all black, all inbred, and all originated from Miss Abbie Lathrop's stock—the mating of male 52 and female 57, to be precise."
"Why?" I say, as my brain tries—and fails—to process any of this. "Why do you want me to do this?"
"The boys in Illinois tend to pray to me to do something about the plight of the laboratory mouse. Well, I can't think of anything better than wiping out the woman who invented them, can you?"
"But I can't wipe anyone out!"
"Oh really? You're saying you haven't changed people's minds since you've been in here? Got people to do things they wouldn't ordinarily have done? Isn't that how you escaped from the men in the car?"
"But..." This is frustrating me. "That was happening in real time. You can't change the past. What about paradoxes?"
"Everything that happens in the Troposphere happens in the past, in your sense."
"And paradoxes?"
"Oh, at the moment everything's a bit of a paradox. It wouldn't matter."
I see images in my mind of men in white coats bending over tanks of mice. One minute they're examining some creature with an ear growing on its back, or a tumor; the next minute there's nothing in the tank. But if the woman who bred the mice had been stopped from doing it way back in 1900, then the mice would never have been there. The men would therefore not be there. The whole world would change. I try to explain this to Apollo Smintheus.
"Oh, no," he says mildly. "No. That wouldn't be a problem. The mice would all just dissolve into the air, I think. The world wouldn't change. No one would notice."
"But..."
"You've already done it, so there's no point arguing."
"If I've already done it, then why are there still mice in cages in laboratories?" I ask.
"Are there?" he says. "I can't see any."
"And what about you? If there were no lab mice, then maybe the cult in Illinois wouldn't ever have formed, and you would never exist..."
"Oh, I've been around since the Greeks. Anyway, part of being a god is doing things to destroy yourself. It's like being a human. We're all trapped in the same economy."
There are so many paradoxes here that I'm developing a headache. At least I have a little more energy now. That must be from the drip attached to my physical body in the hospital.
"She's called Miss Abbie Lathrop," he says again, "and she lives on a farm in Massachusetts. You'll need to get to her towards the end of 1899. I'll leave you a message with the full details when you come back."
At least he doesn't want me to do this right now.
"But..."
"What?"
"I do have one more rather important question," I say.
"Which is?"
"Won't it kill me? I mean, going back less than a month would have finished me off if you hadn't come to help me. And—no offense—I still don't know if I'm going to get out of here alive."
"I don't know why you're so fond of this 'life.'" Apollo Smintheus sighs. "But don't worry. I'm going to show you something I think you'll find useful."
"What is it?"
"The underground system. I think that's an OK translation."
"The underground system? What, like trains?"
"Yes. That is how your mind would see this. Yes, I think it will be trains."
The suburbs are getting more dense. We're walking down a steep hill and I can see a main road glowing at the bottom of it. There's still no traffic, of course. No traffic, no rubbish, no people. We turn right once we get to the road and walk along a row of brightly lit department stores that are interspersed every so often with large gray office blocks. We walk on a little more and I begin to experience the sensation of there being more edges than there should be on all the things around me. I can see large off-white tenement buildings that have multidimensional launderettes and jazz bars as their outsides. There is way too much stuff here, and I can almost feel the density of the landscape physically pressing on me. Just when I think I can't stand it anymore, Apollo Smintheus points to some concrete steps up ahead that seem to burrow down underneath the street. As we get closer I realize that this looks just like the entrance to a London tube station.
"Here we are," he says. "It's not the easiest way to navigate the Troposphere, but it's the easiest way to get back to yourself."
I start walking down the steps; then I realize he's not following me and I stop.
"Aren't you coming?" I say.
"Oh, I can't go down there."
"So what do I do?"
"You should have a timetable with you, on that thing ... The interface..."
"What, my console?"
"If that's what you call it, yes."
"But where am I trying to get to?"
"Yourself. I would suggest alighting at yourself before coming into the Troposphere this time. Then you can avoid the unpleasantness of the hospital visit, and those men catching up with you and so on."
"What, you mean there's going to be a station marked Ariel Manto, pub in Hertfordshire, five minutes before embarking on the journey by which she discovered the way to get back here in the first place? I mean, the paradoxes..."
"When will you stop talking about paradoxes? Your whole world is a paradox. Officially it has no beginning and no end. Nothing about it makes any sense, but it's what you seem to have created."
But I'm not really listening. I'm thinking, So the men do catch up with me, then, in the hospital scenario. I have to get out of here. Is this going to work? I don't know. But I am totally lost here in this too-dense, dark place: a city at night that I've somehow created, that somehow relates to the minds of all the people "outside." We've walked for about, what, ten Troposphere minutes to get here? It's hard to tell.
Then I hear it: the squeak of wheels. Apollo Smintheus hears it, too. His gray face crimples into a frown, and his ears twitch.
"You'd better go," he says.
"What is it?" I say.
But then it's clear what it is. The two blond KIDS are coming down the hill: one on a skateboard and the other on a rusty bike. They're still quite far off, maybe only a quarter of the way down.
"Go," says Apollo Smintheus. "I'll do something about them."
"What if they follow me?"
"They can't go underground. Just go, now. Don't let them see you're here."
"But presumably they already know I'm here. I mean..."
"They're not following you. You're still lost. They've been following me. But I can deal with them. Just go, before they see you."
He walks off, towards the KIDS. I wonder what he's going to do to them.
"Apollo Smintheus?"
"I'll see you when you get back," he calls over his bony shoulder.
The sky is still dark, and there's another brief flash like lightning as I run down the steps. Am I safe now? I must be. But that was pretty close. I can't hear my footsteps; all I can hear is an echoey sound of dripping. The visibility down here isn't very good; every so often there's a dim orange light fixed to the concrete ceiling, but nothing other than that. As my run turns into a walk, I try to look behind me, but I can't see anything. There are more shadows than light down here. But I created this space, I think. Why didn't I just give it more lights? I try to think more light into the space, but nothing happens. It's as if this is what an underground station is, for me; and there's no way I can change my ideas about it. I keep half walking and half running through the tunnel, going deeper and deeper underground. But I can't hear anything behind me and, after several minutes of this, I conclude I am safe—for now. Now I am worried that long concrete tunnel will never end, or change. Then, suddenly, there are signs everywhere, and some dim, black-and-white computer screens presumably showing departures and arrivals. I notice that there are now stairs leading down on either side of the tunnel. The sign on the left says PLATFORM 365; the one on the right says PLATFORM 17. Where is the sense here? And how on earth am I going to work out how to get back to myself in this system?