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The End of Mr. Y
By Thomas, Scarlett Harvest Books
Copyright © 2006 Thomas, Scarlett
All right reserved. ISBN: 0156031612
Chapter One
You now have one choice.
You . . . I'm hanging out of the window of my office, sneaking a cigarette and trying to read Margins in the dull winter light, when there's a noise I haven't heard before. All right, the noise--crash, bang, etc--I probably have heard before, but it's coming from underneath me, which isn't right. There shouldn't be anything underneath me: I'm on the bottom floor. But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think about other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time; then I think, Fucking hell, it's an earthquake, and I drop my cigarette and run out of my office at roughly the same time that the alarm starts sounding.
When alarms sound I don't always run immediately. Who does? Usually an alarm is just an empty sign: a drill; a practice. As I'm on my way to the side door out of the building the shaking stops. Shall I go back to my office? But it's impossible to stay in this building when this alarm goes off. It's too loud; it wails inside your head. As I leave the building I walk past the Health and Safety notice board, which has pictures of injured people on it. The pictures blur as I go past: A man who has back pain is also having a heart attack, and various hologrampeople are trying to revive him. I was supposed to go to some Health and Safety training last year, but didn't.
As I open the side door I can see people leaving the Russell Building and walking, or running, past our block and up the gray concrete steps in the direction of the Newton Building and the library. I cut around the right-hand side of the building and bound up the concrete steps, two at a time. The sky is gray, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it's been freeze-framed. Sometimes, on these January afternoons, the sun squats low in the sky like an orange-robed Buddha in a documentary about the meaning of life. Today there is no sun. I come to the edge of the large crowd that has formed, and I stop running. Everyone is looking at the same thing, gasping and making firework-display noises.
It's the Newton Building.
It's falling down.
I think of this toy--have I seen it on someone's desk recently?--which is a little horse mounted on a wooden button. When you press the button from underneath, the horse collapses to its knees. That's what the Newton Building looks like now. It's sinking into the ground, but in a lopsided way; one corner is now gone, now two, now . . . Now it stops. It creaks, and it stops. A window on the third floor flaps open, and a computer monitor falls out and smashes onto what's left of the concrete courtyard below. Four men with hard hats and fluorescent jackets slowly approach the broken-up courtyard; then another man comes, says something to them, and they all move away again.
Two men in gray suits are standing next to me.
"Déjà vu," one of them says to the other.
I look around for someone I know. There's Mary Robinson, the head of department, talking to Lisa Hobbes. I can't see many other people from the English Department. But I can see Max Truman standing on his own, smoking a roll-up. He'll know what's going on.
"Hello, Ariel," he mumbles when I walk over and stand next to him.
Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race. Does he like me? I don't think he trusts me. But why would he? I'm comparatively young, relatively new to the department, and I probably seem ambitious, even though I'm not. I also have long red hair and people say I look intimidating (because of the hair? Something else?). People who don't say I look intimidating sometimes say I look "dodgy," or "odd." One of my ex-housemates said he wouldn't like to be stuck on a desert island with me but didn't say why.
"Hi, Max," I say. Then: "Wow."
"You probably don't know about the tunnel, do you?" he says. I shake my head. "There's a railway tunnel that runs under here," he says, pointing downwards with his eyes. He sucks on his roll-up, but nothing seems to happen, so he takes it out of his mouth and uses it to point around the campus. "It runs under Russell over there, and Newton, over there. Goes--or used to go--from the town to the coast. It hasn't been used in a hundred years or so. This is the second time it's collapsed and taken Newton with it. They were supposed to fill it with concrete after last time," he adds.
I look at where Max just pointed, and start mentally drawing straight lines connecting Newton with Russell, imagining the tunnel underneath the line. Whichever way you do it, the English and American Studies Building is on the line, too.
"Everyone's all right, at least," he says. "Maintenance saw a crack in the wall this morning and evacuated them all."
Lisa shivers. "I can't believe this is happening," she says, looking over at the Newton Building. The gray sky has darkened and the rain is now falling more heavily. The Newton Building looks strange with no lights on: It's as if it has been stubbed out.
"I can't either," I say.
For the next three or four minutes we all stand and stare in silence at the building; then a man with a megaphone comes around and tells us all to go home immediately without going back to our offices. I feel like crying. There's something so sad about broken concrete.
I don't know about everyone else, but it's not that easy for me just to go home. I only have one set of keys to my flat, and that set is in my office, along with my coat, my scarf, my gloves, my hat, and my rucksack. There's a security guard trying to stop people going in through the main entrance, so I go down the steps and in the side way. My name isn't on my office door. Instead, it bears only the name of the official occupier of the room: my supervisor, Professor Saul Burlem. I met Burlem twice before I came here: once at a conference in Greenwich, and once at my interview. He disappeared just over a week after I arrived. I remember coming into the office on a Thursday morning and noticing that it was different. The first thing was that the blinds and the curtains were closed: Burlem always closed his blinds at the end of every day, but neither of us ever touched the horrible thin gray curtains. And the room smelled of cigarette smoke. I was expecting him in at about ten o'clock that morning, but he didn't show up. By the following Monday I asked people where he was and they said they didn't know. At some point someone arranged for his classes to be covered. I don't know if there's departmental gossip about this--no one gossips to me--but everyone seems to assume I'll just carry on my research and it's no big deal for me that he isn't around. Of course, he's the reason I came to the department at all: He's the only person in the world who has done serious research on one of my main subjects: the nineteenth-century writer Thomas E. Lumas. Without Burlem, I'm not really sure why I am here. And I do feel something about him being missing; not loss, exactly, but something.
My car is in the Newton car park. When I get there I am not at all surprised to find several men in hard hats telling people to forget about their cars and walk or take the bus home. I do try to argue-- I say I'm happy to take the risk that the Newton Building will not suddenly go into a slow-motion cinematic rewind in order that it can fall down again in a completely different direction-- but the men pretty much tell me to piss off and walk home or take the bus like everybody else, so I eventually drift off in the direction of the bus stop. It's only the beginning of January, but some daffodils and snowdrops have made it through the earth and stand wetly in little rows by the path. The bus stop is depressing: There's a line of people looking as cold and fragile as the line of flowers, so I decide I'll just walk.
Copyright © 2006 by Scarlett Thomas
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Excerpted from The End of Mr. Y by Thomas, Scarlett Copyright © 2006 by Thomas, Scarlett. Excerpted by permission.
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