For Couze Venn
All Western faith and good faith become engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange – God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
Jean Baudrillard
Indeed it is even possible for an entity to show itself as something which in itself it is not.
Martin Heidegger
Contents
Title Page Dedication Part One Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three: The End Of Mr. Y Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Part Two Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Part Three Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Twenty – One Twenty – Two Twenty – Three Twenty – Four Twenty – Five Twenty – Six Twenty – Seven Epilogue Acknowledgements Copyright
Not only is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all, except in so far as thinking has made it so.
Samuel Butler
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. I’m on my way to the side door out of the building when 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 hologram people 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 grey 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 grey, 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 grey 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