The implication is that having “downloaded”, having purged it all from my system, I should feel able to move on, to “upgrade” even. In which case, I should view this “confession” of mine as something fundamentally positive - a way of bringing dark, chaotic emotions out into the light so that they can be processed and filed away in an orderly fashion. Ultimately, I should see the outcome as a hard-fought victory for the healing, pattern-giving force that was championed by Pete in his article about that experiment involving particles of light.
But try as I might to make myself believe all that, I can’t do it. The truth is that by the end, this account had only one purpose – to persuade Susan to come back to me. And in that, it has failed utterly. It’s been months since I emailed the final chapters to her, hoping that she would relent. I have heard nothing since and I still have no idea where she is. Her flat is up for sale and no amount of pleading with the estate agent will persuade him to divulge her current address.
Meanwhile, I sit here re-reading this account, wondering what the point of it was and picking at the cracks which are evident in my version of events. It is an old habit that I have never managed to shake off. When I was a child, I used to spend hours building elaborate cities in my bedroom, combining all manner of disparate toys into sprawling model metropoli. Yet I was never satisfied when they were complete. Some devastating imaginary catastrophe would always have to befall them so that I could knock them down and have my imaginary construction workers rebuild them in a different configuration. I suppose that what I enjoyed about this game was playing God. But I was a fickle, callous God, constantly dreaming up alternatives which required the annihilation of His existing creations.
And in re-reading this account, I have sensed that childish God reawakening. These days He works in more sophisticated ways. Quantum physics has greatly enhanced His destructive powers, allowing Him to exploit miniscule flaws at the sub-atomic level which will ultimately expand into vast, catastrophic fault lines.
Appropriately enough, His starting point on this occasion is that strange experiment with light that Pete was so obsessed by. You see, there is another explanation for what happens in the experiment, which Pete conveniently ignored. According to this alternative theory, the interference pattern produced by the single particle can be explained by the existence of multiple universes – an infinite number of universes, in fact. The same goes for all the “fine tuning” that Pete referred to. After all, with an infinite number of universes, it would not be especially surprising that – by sheer accident rather than by design – one of them happened to have all the right properties to support our existence. The upshot of this is that human observers exert no “pattern giving” influence. On the contrary, everything is, essentially, just an accident.
But let me explain how my digression into the realm of quantum physics is relevant to this account. My theory about what happened is based on Pete having overheard my final conversation with Kay – and having then decided to exact some sort of elaborate revenge upon me. But if Pete had really overheard what I said to Kay, why hadn’t he been more aggressive towards me when he came running after me as I was leaving the house? After all, I had suggested that he was not Jonah’s father. And why, in the light of this information, had he given me all his precious notes? If he had known that, then surely I would have been the last person he would have trusted with them? Was it not more probable that he didn’t overhear any of the conversation? And even if he had, how would he have had time to concoct such an elaborate scheme to exact his revenge? Finally, was it not more probable that the car accident was just that – an accident – and not the outcome of some devious plot conceived by Pete a matter of hours before his death?
In the aftermath of Pete’s death, I had become infected with the same paranoid tunnel-vision that had afflicted him in those final few months before the accident. I wanted to find someone to blame. Ultimately, I wanted to make sense of an event which made no real sense. So it was natural for me to try to join up the random pieces of information at my disposal into some kind of coherent, connected narrative which would explain why these events had occurred. If that involved making Pete into an implausibly devious character, who had planned the whole thing from the start, then I was prepared to ignore any evidence to the contrary. And so I blinded myself to the possibility that the events of that night were nothing more than an accident. That particular explanation simply wasn’t something I wanted to believe.
So there you have it – it was all an accident, end of story.
But maybe I have alighted on this idea that it was all a series of unfortunate but wholly random occurrences precisely because it absolves me of all blame for what happened. It allows me to overlook the fact that I was instrumental in creating this whole sorry mess. I had sown the seeds of it long ago, first through my relationship with Kay (without whom the “messages” would never have been written) and then through the messages themselves - which I had left to fester like mould in the darkness of cyberspace, never suspecting that they would be capable of infecting other people with their bitter, unforgiving poison. I was also the one who encouraged Pete to write for all those geeky magazines, which set him off on the path to technological martyrdom. And shortly before his death, when I could have helped him, I chose instead to ratify his paranoid delusions about the forces of darkness. All of which must surely mean that there is some pattern to these events - albeit a rather bleak one that can only be seen with the benefit of hindsight.
But then again, maybe I have only come up with that explanation because I find the possibility that all these events were accidental even more frightening. Maybe I can’t bear the thought that all this anguished self-examination has been a futile exercise. After all, if everything that has happened was essentially an accident, then no matter how hard I look, no coherent pattern will ever emerge - at least, not one that can be sustained for any length of time under the pressure of detailed scrutiny.
And so it goes on. The more I think about it, the more theories I come up with, only to spot tiny flaws in them - whereupon the cracks widen into fissures and the theories split in two, multiplying like bacteria.
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