Chapter 2B

Richard, Saturday 6th March
The dreams are back again as they have been virtually every night, but with a new and rather scary clarity and a kind of wild rollercoaster intensity. I feel confused and disoriented as I get up the morning after – only the splitting headache and tendency to throw up tells me for sure that this world, rather than the one I have spent the night in, is the real one (or perhaps I should say a real one).
Did I call the dream domain a world? I didn't mean it in the strictly technical sense of the word, but it does make me wonder... at least wonder if the dreams mean anything. I shake my head trying to clear it and then wish I hadn't – it hurts like hell.
I feel a little better after a strong cup of coffee and some of the suspicious-coloured pills the doctor gave me – these ones are pain-killers, I flushed the ones that were supposed to help me sleep down the toilet when they did nothing to keep the dreams at bay but made waking life seem like a dream too. As the caffeine and whatever's in the pills start to kick in, I feel a little surer that this is reality and that the dreams are not, and that I'd be chasing mirages if I tried to read any significance into their content. It's just faulty hardware.
I'm in a contemplative mood – I guess this is what's known as falling into a brown study, although to me the phrase has always conjured up images of plunging through the ceiling of an oak-panelled room lined with bookshelves. It's very hard not to brood on things in this state of mind, and I cast about for something I can think about to blot all the other stuff out of my mind, from the weirdness with Zoë to the monstrous paradox now facing my existence.
My section of the Mysteries course is over, with all that means for the issue of how much trouble a fling with Zoë might or might not get me into. Maybe I can concentrate on the banal administrative fact of having a change of timetable on Fridays, attempt to ignore the web of potential repercussions and, I don't know, sort of meditate. That doesn't work, obviously, but it leads me back to my stream of reminiscences from the day before.
In my internal reliving of the saga of me and Zoë, I'd got as far as the run-up to the course. Despite Silas's displays of contempt, and the prevailing belief that my involvement was purely in the interests of “getting some fit birds in the building“, Colin and I actually saw it as an interesting challenge and a chance to be more creative than usual. I even tried to persuade Weinmann to change the overall title (Mysteries in Physics for Non-Scientists sounded awfully boring) but he mistakenly assumed I was joking when I suggested Night of the Living Dead Cats.
Also of course there was the chance to prove Silas wrong in his “it's not that easy” attitude and his facile disdain for a bunch of students he hadn't even met, but most of all in his smug conviction that he's always bloody right about everything. “Some intellectual lightweights want to pretend they know all about quantum mechanics as well as postmodernism,” he'd said in that first meeting, and that made me determined to prove I can teach them all about quantum mechanics. I might even get to learn what postmodernism is in the process.
Not all about quantum mechanics, of course, certainly not the mathematical details, but the outline, the broad strokes, a way to visualise the key concepts; these guys don't want to be scientists, just to know we're on about. Silas sometimes acts as if we're some kind of sect with a duty to keep our esoteric secrets hidden from the uninitiated – maybe he should have become a Mason or an Illuminatus instead of a university lecturer.
Colin's task, now that I've finished with my part of the course, will be to make them think about why time goes forwards instead of backwards, and once he'd agreed to be part of it he began amassing an impressive collection of material: literary quotes (T. H. White's Once and Future King with its backwards-living Merlin, and the Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse Five) to make the point that it isn't obvious, backwards film clips of eggs being smashed up to illustrate what an irreversible process is, conjuring tricks involving packs of cards to demonstrate points about disorder and probability. From time to time he would come rushing into the staff club with his laptop, excited like a little boy and insisting we had to watch something, and then hoot with laughter while an egg gathered itself up from a mess on a stone floor, became whole and flew up in the air. I occasionally wondered if he was quite all right in the head.
Meanwhile I raised doubts about my own sanity by disappearing into the technicians' room with large amounts of beer to discuss concepts like shading, hidden detail and “whiz lines” with Mick. Mick is the departmental technician and he was the key to translating my ideas into visual form.
Unashamed geek that he may be, he's actually very entertaining company and usually happy to slip out to the pub for a game of pool when I'm fed up with everyone else in the department. More to the point he's also a computer graphics wizard, and when I suggested he might be able to turn my explanations into a visual symphony for the price of a few beers, he danced about slightly and slapped his hands together as he said “Yeah, no worries, actually that's well cool, I've just got a 30-day free trial on some wicked new graphics software.”
Physically, Mick reminds me of one of those unusual nocturnal primates, with huge ears and eyes and chaotic hair, and a slightly disconcerting way of staring motionless at something before suddenly springing into action. I could almost see the branch bouncing beneath him somewhere in the rain forest as the animal seizes locusts:
“I need to, you know, like, persuade someone in high places that the department needs it, so if you could do a bit of a sort of recommendation type thingy that would be just the...” he suddenly switched into an impression of Weinmann: “...just the, er, biscuit, as it were.”
Someone (I still don't know who, although I suspect Colin) actually went to the trouble of collecting quotes from what they called our “new-found hobby of drinking beer and playing with computers in the evenings” and sticking them on the notice board on a sheet of A4, headed The Dick and Mick Show in some kind of amusing font.
I realise I've been staring at the wall of my kitchen for some time now, and make a half-hearted effort to make myself some lunch. I'm not really hungry and the collection of miscellaneous edibles that I manage to scrape together looks a bit sad sitting there on its plate. I bite into some cheese and make myself chew.
I'm feeling increasingly lonely and paranoid, sitting here in solitude and subconsciously trying to avoid the subject of my huge unshareable secret. It would do me good to get out of the flat, but I'm strangely reluctant to make the effort, some kind of anti-social instinct telling me to hide away from the outside world and lose myself in thought and memory.
The next memory in the slide show with which the hidden parts of my mind are attempting to suppress thoughts of yesterday morning is of my reaction to seeing The Dick and Mick Show on the notice board as I came in one day last term to settle a nagging doubt Silas had planted in my mind.
It's not a load of balls, it's a collection of spheres. That could stay, I reckoned – it was almost witty.
You can have cartoon-style whiz lines if you want but take a look at these trailbacks, aren't they cool? I think they're better than drugs. That was clearly a Mick quote, so it could stay too.
Is he a famous scientist then? He looks a bit daft in that hairdo, doesn't he? Or did they all wear wigs in them days of yore?
Mick again. All fairly harmless, especially if it was Colin, although it might be Silas who would be more malicious about it.
The reason I had come in that day was the comment Silas had made implying that the students on the new course were all going to be from Theology. What were theologians like? Would they be terribly straight-laced and conservative? Or maybe they'd all be frustrated nymphomaniacs... no, enough of that line of thought. I felt a little embarrassed to be bothering Weinmann with what was probably just paranoia, but I reckoned I'd feel happier if I could find out a few details about the students.
Weinmann was as vague as usual. “Not quite finalised,” he said in such a dreamy and indistinct tone that the words hardly had the strength to crawl across his beard, his mind evidently on higher things, “but we've got a rough idea. Mostly philosophy, I think, and the odd psychologist. Yes, I know they scare you,” he looked at me with strangely wide eyes, “we all think they can see into our heads but they can't really.”
“Er, actually I don't...”
“Then there's a theologian or two – I know, I know...” (what exactly did he know?) “...and one or two from History and English, oddly enough. I think that's what gave Colin the idea for his... er... literary introduction for Entropy and the Arrow of Time... you know ... show we're not illiterate, er, geeks, as it were...”
I eventually persuaded him to show me a provisional list of students, I'm not sure now what I really expected to learn from it. Oddly enough, the names that stuck in my mind were Zoë Meredith from Philosophy and Psychology (it sounded like a sexy name, and I hoped she would live up to it... little did I know...) and Joe Gowk from English, which just sounded like a mad name (again, little did I know).
And so everything comes back to Zoë again. I sigh and look at the clock. I've been sitting here staring into space for another hour. It's not good for me.
To be perfectly honest of course, it wasn't the students I was worried about. I was finding an excuse to think about something else, just as today I'm sitting here staring at the wall and going over the last few weeks in my mind instead of trying to get on with my possibly insane plans or even with normal life.
What was really scaring me back then was the headaches and the recurring dreams, which were disturbing enough even before their latest enhancement, last night's new in-your-face quality. Megalomaniac dreams like the one with the anatomically scrambled girls in it or another recent one where soldiers in huge helmets tramped by terrifying everyone around me while I stood there with a strangely euphoric feeling which came from knowing there was nothing they could do to me. That one will now be repeated in the new high definition format, I fear, and so will the others, the scarier dreams: one where I'm wanted for murder, and a whole lot of fragmented ones like a medley of extracts from apocalyptic films.
The reason I remember that particular day, with the student list and the humorous quotes from me on the notice board, was that the dreams, headaches and associated vomiting finally convinced me to consider the possibility that it might all be a symptom of something. The same day I went to talk to Weinmann, I began the process of registering with a GP – I'd never actually bothered since moving here seven years ago – and was amazed and a little depressed by the amount of bureaucracy involved.
I seemed to have upset the system by actually having some symptoms that I wanted to see the doctor about – I was supposed to have done all the paperwork first, when I was in perfect health.
I was allowed ten minutes to describe my symptoms to a certain Dr. Eglington, who wasn't going to be my GP anyway. Dr. Eglington scribbled down a prescription for the lurid pink pills sitting in front of me and the others which are now getting some slimy invertebrates off their tiny trolleys at the sewage works, and told me to come back another time for some blood tests.
Back then I succeeded in putting it out of my mind for the time being, all the more so in the wobbly adrenalin rush and slight tremor of stage fright which struck me that bright but freezing February morning, a month ago now, when I walked into the Heisenberg lecture theatre to explain the weirdness of modern physics to a class which rather conspicuously included several of the most beautiful women I had spoken to for months.
Now I'm not doing at all well at putting it out of my mind. I force myself to phone Colin and Mick and see if they fancy a pint.