Our Tragic Universe (5 page)

I vaguely remembered the first synopsis I’d written for my literary novel, which was at that time called
Sandworld
. It was going to be all about a bunch of youngish, long-haired, thin people living in Brighton. They would take cool drugs and listen to cool music and fuck each other for about 80,000 words and then the novel would end. It fitted with what my agent called the ‘
Zeitgeist
’, but seemed to lack substance, so I’d added a dangerous love-interest for the main character. I also added a philosophy course about hedonism, and made the characters students rather than townies. I wrote lots of pointless sections about nihilism and then deleted them. Then I decided to end the novel with the end of the world, but that didn’t work, so I made it so that the end of the world could just be a fireworks display on Sark, or one of the other Channel Islands – but the reader doesn’t know for sure. Then I put it aside and wrote
another Zeb Ross novel and then another Newtopia novel, because I needed the money.

When I came back to
Sandworld
I deleted most of it, changed the title to
Footprints
, decided to relocate the characters to Devon and started researching some themes about the environment. I made the main character a scientist, and then, perhaps more authentically, a writer who wanted to be a scientist. Recently I’d been trying to make the novel into a great tragedy, but that wasn’t working either. I had realised a while ago that I was always trying to make the novel catch up with my life, and then deleting the bits that got too close, wiping them out like videogame aliens in a space-station corridor. I still didn’t know what to do about it. I’d invented a writer character from New York who deletes a whole book until it’s a haiku and then deletes that, but then I deleted him too. Blammo. Lock and load. In the past few years I’d invented a couple of sisters, called Io and Xanthe, who have lost everything in their lives, a building site with yellow cranes, a run-down B&B owned by a chewed-up old woman called Sylvia, an inconsiderate boyfriend, a married lover, a girl in a coma telling her life story from the beginning in real-time, a life-support machine wired up to the Internet, a charismatic A-level physics teacher called Dylan, a psychic game-show, an extended game of ‘Dare’ that goes wrong, some people trapped in a sauna, a car accident, a meaningful tattoo, dreams of a post-oil world full of flickering candles, a plane crash, an imposter, a character with OCD who follows any written instructions she sees, some creepy junk mail, a sweet teenage boy on a skateboard and various other things, all of which had now been deleted as well. Ducks in a row, then
bang, bang, bang
.

I heard Christopher come up the stairs, walk across the small
landing to the bathroom door and sigh loudly before walking up the next flight of stairs to the bedroom. Was he going to bed already? He went to bed earlier than me, because on weekdays he took the 6 a.m. bus to Totnes to work as a volunteer on a wall-rebuilding project. But it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. He came down the stairs again and tried the bathroom door, which I’d locked.

‘I won’t be a minute,’ I said.

‘Can I come in? I need to piss.’

‘I’m just about to get out. Can you hang on?’

‘I’m desperate. And I want to get ready for bed. Why have you locked the door anyway? Why have you been in there for so long?’

‘I’m going to be like
one minute
. Just hang on.’

He sighed again. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll go and piss in the kitchen sink.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But I will only be a minute if you want to wait.’

I heard him muttering something like ‘I don’t believe this,’ as he went down the stairs again. I wished I knew what to say to him, but I didn’t. I didn’t know what to say about us, or about his father and Milly, or about Josh and his episodes, or about Becca and her bitterness about everything, or indeed about Christopher’s lack of paid work. Could I plot one single thing to say that would make everything better? A Zen koan, maybe fifty words long, could change your whole life; it could, apparently, bring you enlightenment. I knew all about this because the Zeb Ross editorial board had recently rejected a novel where some survivors of a plane crash find a utopian island populated by wise people who tell each other Zen stories all the time. The Zen stories, and indeed the novel itself, had no obviously conventional narrative structure. In one of the
stories, a woman gains enlightenment after the reflection of the moon falls out of a bucket of water she is carrying. Another told of a woman Zen master who owns a teashop. People who come to her teashop for tea are well treated, but those who come looking for Zen are beaten with a red-hot poker. In the novel, which I had quite liked but pretended not to, each of the main characters is given a koan, kind of a Zen riddle, to work on, and their lives start to change. But their enlightenment is all about cheering up, doing simple things well, not being too high and mighty, and accepting the unfathomable nature of the universe. Christopher, like most people, didn’t like his universe being unfathomable, so I doubted that a Zen koan would help him. Mind you, he did like doing simple things well. He spent every day rebuilding sections of dry-stone wall, after all.

He was broken when I met him, and beautiful. We’d gone to bed together for the first time not long after I’d split up with Drew. Everyone wanted to talk to me about the split, or blame me because Drew had been hospitalised, even though it wasn’t my fault. I just wanted to talk to Christopher; although he didn’t say much in those days, we seemed to have a special connection. We both recycled everything we could, and both moaned about Becca and Ant leaving all the lights on in their huge house. He said he liked me because I was an ‘old-fashioned gal’ who used a fountain pen and played an acoustic guitar. That day we’d met in some greasy spoon that no one else liked, and talked half-seriously about running away from Brighton and getting working passages on a ship Christopher had heard of. We wouldn’t escape on a plane, of course, because of the environment. Then we drank all day. Christopher had lived in a shared
house near the police station. His bedroom walls were painted magnolia and there was a mattress on the floor, and nothing else. I was wearing a new pair of blue knickers with white lace on the edges, and he laughed at them. ‘What are you wearing those for?’ he’d said. And I thought that meant he wanted me naked, right then, and I threw them in the corner and got under the lumpy duvet and put the spliff he passed me into an ashtray and waited. In some ways I was still waiting. Nothing happened that night except for his long, brown hair spreading out on the pillow, and him stroking my arm until we both fell into a stoned sleep. It didn’t seem to matter much. Back then, life felt like something that would happen in the future, not now; and it felt as if you could easily fit the cosmos into a single poem.

After I’d dried off and said goodnight to Christopher I settled down on the sofa with
The Science of Living Forever
. It was dark and quiet outside the cottage, and the only sounds I could hear were the occasional
ack, ack
s of the seagulls, and the odd door slamming up the hill as people got back home from the pub. Sometimes boats would blare their foghorns from way out at sea, but there were no foghorns tonight. I was tired, and glad I had only one chapter and an epilogue to read. In the last chapter of his book, Kelsey Newman discussed the visions of heaven in all the major world religions, and argued that the Omega Point, essentially the God constructed at/by/in the end of time, was very similar to the Gods we already know. He quoted from the Bible, the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Torah and the Buddhist scriptures to show that the prophets from
history knew all about the Omega Point, and its eternity and power. Was the Omega Point so different from the Hindu God that manifests itself in everything? Was it so different from the Buddhist idea of the interconnectedness of all living things? When the Bible talks about God being the ‘alpha and omega’, the beginning and end, surely this is what is meant?

As I was reading, I was wondering about basing a Zeb Ross novel on Newman’s book. I imagined a girl-hero who decides to rescue humanity from this artificial, shrink-wrapped universe at the end of time. Perhaps she’d have to kill herself in order to get to the Omega Point, and then she’d have to overthrow it, or convince it to let the universe go. This would undoubtedly be rejected by the Zeb Ross editorial board, though, even though I was on it. For one thing, Zeb Ross didn’t write about unanswerable mysteries beyond the universe. All the plots, however puzzling, had to have neat resolutions, and anything mysterious had to be ultimately explainable using GCSE-level science or common sense. So, for example, if there was wailing in an attic, and the attic was empty, a Zeb Ross hero would show that there was no ghost, but actually a secret room concealed between the top floor and the attic, where a disturbed teenager was hiding – the long-lost cousin of the hero, perhaps, who would now move into the spare room and would be able to help him fit in better at school. Also, no hero in a Zeb Ross novel could ever commit suicide, even if you could prove, using GCSE-level science, that this would not be the end of her. Along with suicide, Zeb Ross novels were not permitted to contain anorexia, drug use, the words ‘fuck’ or ‘cunt’, cannibalism or self-harm. There were a few other things too, all printed on a sheet that we gave to new ghostwriters.

Maybe there was some other way of plotting this end-of-universe novel; I could certainly have used Newman’s ideas in one of my Newtopia novels, if I was still writing them. Did I miss them? I wasn’t sure. I was tapping my pencil on my leg, and my thoughts were going
tap, tap, tap
too, and I was quite distracted by the time I reached the first lines of Newman’s epilogue. I had been wondering whether to skip it altogether. But it was quite arresting.

‘So now you won’t mind’, Newman wrote, ‘if I tell you something shocking. You are already dead. You died a long time ago, probably billions of years ago. In fact, you are already immortal, although you may take a few more lives to properly realise it. You are currently living, and re-living, in what I will term the
Second World
, which has been created by the Omega Point as a place where you prepare for the rest of eternity. No one knows much about the First World. It probably looked a lot like the world we are living in now, for reasons I will come to in a moment. It is the world whose scientists originally created the possibility of the Omega Point, and thus ensured the immortality of all its beings. You were certainly one of those beings once. How do we know for sure that we are in the Second World and not the First World? Remember that the Omega Point is infinitely powerful. It can, and therefore will, use its
Energia
to create an infinity of universes that look just like the one you are in right now. There is therefore an infinity-to-one chance that we are
not
living in a universe created by the Omega Point; it is mathematically impossible for us not to be. Compared with the infinity of time in a simulated universe, the physical life of the universe was a mere sneeze. It is far more likely that we are in a post-universe, which is eternal, than in a finite
universe, which must be long-gone. So why are we stuck in this Second World? I have just written a whole book telling you that you will go to Heaven when you die, and now I’m telling you that you are already dead, and living in a world that is distinctly unheavenly. But here’s where things get exciting. In my next book I will explain in detail how to leave the Second World for the last time and embark on the Road to Perfection, which will take you to the Heaven that I have shown is mathematically not just possible, but inevitable. For now, I will conclude with a few remarks about the nature of the Second World, and the purpose of its creation.

‘No one knows’, he went on, ‘what Heaven will be like. It’s unimaginable. But one thing we can say for certain is that all of us, immortal beings though we may be, are not ready for it yet. We were originally wired up for roughly a hundred years of life in a terrestrial environment, and so this is when we begin our immortal lives – just as the Bible says. However, your human brain – and I will show you the science behind this in the next book – has room inside it to store a thousand years’ worth of memories. The Omega Point could give it even more. The Road to Perfection is the place you go after you die for the last time in the Second World. It is where you set about collecting these memories, and it can be whatever you want it to be. The Omega Point will find a perfect partner just for you, if that’s what you want, and together you can go on great adventures. On the Road to Perfection, you will have a new, improved body, with no aches, pains or defects. You will be consciously immortal and enlightened. But only the properly individuated Self can cope with all this. And to become truly individuated, and to be able to succeed in your great Quest on the Road to Perfection,
you need to learn how to become a hero in this world. In short, you get out of the Second World by becoming truly yourself, and overcoming all your personal obstacles. Then you will be ready for enlightenment and transcendence.