The End Of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas Page A

what must be the crucial scene between Mr. Y and the fairground doctor is missing? Or … what? What are the other options? It’s not as if I can just go to a bookshop tomorrow
    and buy a replacement copy, or simply read the page. This book is not on any library record anywhere in the world: it doesn’t even exist in rare manuscript collections. Is this page lost for ever? And why on earth would someone have removed it?

    SEVEN

    M ONDAY MORNING, AND THE SKY is the colour of sad weddings. I’m going in to the university, although I’m fairly sure it’s still shut. But perhaps they’ll have the heating on, anyway. And, as long as our building is still standing, there’ll be free tea and coffee. Will our building be OK? It had better be, because I need to try to break into Burlem’s computer. He’s the only person I know who has ever seen a copy of The End of Mr. Y and maybe there’ll be something on his machine that will tell me where his copy came from, or whom I could contact to arrange to look at the missing page. I didn’t read the last chapter in the end last night. It wouldn’t be right without the missing page. Instead, I listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on my iPod and wrote out everything I thought about the bulk of the novel I had read. I didn’t get into bed until about 3 a. m., so I am not at all awake today. I have never walked up to the university; I don’t even know the right way. All I do know is that it is a steep climb, and I don’t want to go up the way I came down on Friday because I am convinced that the right way must be shorter than that. So I do the only thing I can think of and go to the Tourist Information place by the cathedral. There’s no one there apart from a woman with a grey perm and thin wire glasses. She is busy arranging a display of cathedral mugs, and I have to stand there for a few seconds before she notices me. It turns out that there’s a free map of walking routes around the city, so she gives me one of those and I start following it immediately, walking around past the cathedral walls until I see a sign for the North Gate. I follow the sign and walk past some terraced houses and a noisy mill race opposite a pub where my map tells me to turn left, then right. Then I walk over a bridge and past some stinging nettles up a hill until I come to a footpath, which takes me through a tunnel under the railway: a strange cylindrical space with smooth, graffiti- spattered walls and round orange lights set to come on as you walk underneath them (at least, this is what I assume; perhaps the effect is actually the work of a poltergeist, or simply due to the fact that the lights are broken). I walk along the edge of a shabby suburban park, the kind of place where kids play football and dogs fight on a Saturday afternoon, then down an alleyway, across a main road, past a hairdresser’s and into a housing estate. I think students live here, although it looks like the kind of place you’d come to only when you’d retired or given up life in some other way. All I can see as I walk up the hill are cream-coloured bungalows and front gardens: no graffiti, no playgrounds, no shops, no pubs. The whole place has the kind of stillness you’d expect just before the world ended.
    On days like this I do not feel afraid of death, or pain. I don’t know if it’s the tiredness, the book, or even the curse, but today, as I walk through this housing estate, there’s a feeling inside me like the potential nuclear fission of every atom in my body: a chain reaction of energy that could take me to the limits of everything. As I walk along, I almost desire some kind of violence: to live, to die, just for the experience of it. I’m so hyped up suddenly that I want to fuck the world, or be fucked by it. Yes, I want to be penetrated by the shrapnel of a million explosions. I want to see my own blood. I want to die with everyone: the ultimate bonding experience; the flash at the end of the world.