1. Adelheid of Augsburg
In 1384, when she had just turned fifty years old, Adelheid of Augsburg began receiving mystical visions of the creation of the universe.
These visions were written down by her confessor, an Italian monk named Ormanno. At first, Adelheid had only experienced a warm, glowing light and a heat that seemed to spread from the inside of her body. After a few weeks of these ecstatic trances, she became aware of a structure she later referred to as the Tabernacle. Sometimes she describes the Tabernacle as a ‘chest’ or ‘box,’ sometimes as a ‘house’ or the ‘mansion of God,’ with its ‘great Gate’ and its ‘heavenly wheels.’ The Tabernacle is white and cube-shaped, made from ‘a pure substance like ivory,’ and it opens up at the front to reveal, inside, the lofty heights of Heaven above and the slowly spinning crystal wheel of our material world below. On the face of the Tabernacle, beside the great Gate, were two further wheels, which Adelheid compared to the clock recently erected in Augsburg, that turned to mark ‘the greater day, the greater year, and the greater will of God.’
Adelheid of Augsburg was from the Gosse family, a long-established burgher clan. Her father had owned a profitable paper mill in the city. She had been married twice, once at fifteen and again at twenty-eight. Both husbands died within three years of their wedding day: Johannes was thrown from a horse; Albert had a fatal apoplexy. She inherited a respectable fortune and was a capable accountant. She had no children. Nobody offered to be her third.
After weeks in which she was brought before the Tabernacle every night, God finally permitted her to witness the moment of creation:
Holy, holy is this house. Holy are its sheer walls, in holy stillness are its wheels. I quaked in love and terror before this splendid throne, and I saw the hand of God. With his great hand God sundered open the lesser portal, and caused the great Gate of the Tabernacle to swing open, and I saw the hand of God fill the Tabernacle with dark stuff and chaos and the clay of the earth, and he laid it upon the crystal wheel. And God caused the Tabernacle to be sealed, and he said, let there be light. Immediately through the portcullis of the Gate I could see a bright and holy fire flood the Tabernacle, pouring out of the Heavens to bathe the world in his Love. There was no sun below the heavens, and no separation within the firmament, yet the crystal wheel spun, and all was filled with the humming of the numberless angels…
It was after this vision that she began seeking advice from Ormanno. His knowledge was often invaluable in helping make sense of these visions. For instance, Adelheid had seen words inscribed on the outer walls of the Tabernacle, which she was unable to comprehend, or even remember clearly when she emerged from her visions. But Ormanno understood them. On the great Gate was written PRIMO, which means the first. Another message above one of the outer wheels, which she rendered as IACET POTENTO, was very close to the Latin for he causes the powerful to lie down flat, and Ormanno knew that somewhere on the Tabernacle there must be a corresponding message about how he causes the humble to stand up tall.
After that, the hand of God withdrew. Every night, Adelheid witnessed the crystal wheel revolving under the light of Heaven. Eventually waters rose from the clay of the earth, and then separated. She understood that each revolution of the crystal wheel marked a year of earthly time: she had been permitted to witness the entire history of the world, from Creation to Judgement, before she died. This particularly excited Ormanno: if she could count the number of revolutions, they would be able to calculate how many years remained until the end of the world.
Years passed. The hand returned. It opened up the great Gate and stirred about the stuff of Creation. Christ had come to earth.
Adelheid became an anchoress. She was walled into a small cell in the cathedral, barely large enough for her to lie down in. Her days were spent in a devotional trance, numbering the years of the world. The walls of her cell were crowded with tally marks. She continued to describe her visions to Ormanno, and he continued to write them down, even though they were always the same. The light, the turning of the wheel, the humming of infinite angels. Her descriptions grew desperate. Meditating on the holy evenness of that fire that never flickers, or the orbits of the planets just discernable on the crystal wheel.
After three years in her cell, Adelheid of Augsburg revealed to her confessor that when Judgement Day came, it would not be to the glory of trumpets, but the sound of a single bell. She died the same day.
Based on her numbers, Ormanno announced that the world would end in Anno Domini 1994. He had her visions printed and published in a lavish edition, with much of the funding coming from her estate. The visions of Adelheid very quickly became a sensation; even more quickly, they were forgotten again. Unlike other medieval mystics, Adelheid never heard the voice of God, never received any theological precepts, never learned anything about the nature of man or charity or sin. She witnessed the entire history of the universe, but she was too far away to see anything actually happen. It was diverting to have a date for the end of the world, but the visions themselves were dull, and there were other, more interesting prophets with other, more urgent dates.
The Revelation of the Beginning and End of the World went almost entirely unremembered until 1994, when it sparked a brief chiliastic panic, mostly spreading through Usenet boards. Despite her prediction, the year came and went without ending, but the panic did introduce a lot of nerdy early internet users to the exhaustive study of the Tabernacle. Among them was Teo Göz, who was at the time still an undergraduate in history at Coldharbour Landfill Polytechnic University. Early in 1995, he suddenly realised that he too had seen the Tabernacle, perched next to the sink in his lightly fetid bedsit. He couldn’t explain how, or why, but Adelheid of Augsburg had been receiving mystical visions of a Samsung M6234 Primo microwave oven.
It took some time for Göz’s discovery to be fully recognised; for obvious reasons, much of the academic community was highly resistant to his ideas. But in the end, the sheer weight of evidence spoke for itself. Symposiums of historians of medieval Europe, distinguished in their gowns, all gathered around a microwave. Staring in anguish at the little marker, between five and ten minutes on the M6234’s timer dial, that indicated the optimum microwaving time for a jacket potato.
2. Laurentius Clung
By all accounts, the reformist theologian Laurentius Clung was the single most unpleasant man of the sixteenth century. Dedicated to the proposition that God brought humanity into a life of suffering solely to punish us for being lesser than him, and that all souls eventually make their way to Hell, Clung seemed to view it as his mission to make sure everyone else was as unhappy as possible until then. Widely hated, he fled his native Holland and ended up seeking protection in the house of the Huguenot nobleman Philippe, Duc d’Ervance. Philippe was a stern, embittered man of sixty-eight, and he saw in Clung’s theology a firm religious justification for the vague disdain for other people he had felt his entire life. He offered Clung safety, a generous pension, and the opportunity to preach on Sundays in the nearby town of Feissy-Deux-Trous. Clung readily accepted; in return, he immediately set about ruining the Duc’s life. In his sermons, he blasted the people of Feissy-Deux-Trous: ‘You must all be the very foulest of sinners, or else God would not have sent such a crusted weakling to be your lord.’ He instructed the Duc’s servants to stop secretly spitting in his food, and start doing it right in front of his face. For his own part, Clung took to bursting into the Duc’s chamber in the middle of the night and driving him naked out of bed with blows from a stick. ‘Out, wretched one, out, sinner, catamite, spindle-shanks, out; if the Lord did not hate you, he would not have made you so old.’ He kept beating the Duc through the halls of Ervance and eventually out into the grounds. After doing this a few times in a particularly frosty winter, the Duc took ill and quickly died. He had no living relatives; his estate (along with Feissy-Deux-Trous) was sacked by forces loyal to the arch-Catholic Duc du Guise. Clung slipped away during the massacre and later emerged in England. But the story goes that while he was on his deathbed, Philippe asked Clung why he had repaid his generosity with so much harshness. Clung stared at him without emotion. ‘Because you exist,’ he said.
Clung’s time at Ervance was brief, and no major writings were composed during his stay. Still, it’s significant for historians, because it was here that Laurentius Clung fell in love.
Until the discovery of the Ervance Document, the evidence for his one short romance was slight. Clung wrote a diary, in which he listed all his sins daily and begged to be sent immediately to Hell; for three weeks, the list of his sins included, progressively, ‘tenderness, in failing to entirely despise a sinner,’ ‘fiendish tenderness,’ ‘abominable tenderness,’ ‘abominable tenderness of the most perverse and filthy kind,’ ‘monstrous tenderness as would shame the Pope and all his buggering-boys,’ ‘tenderest wretchedness,’ and, finally, ‘vile abysses of tenderness, and I have blackened myself beyond Lucifer in kissing her hand.’ After that, the sin of tenderness no longer appears. This episode was, to put it mildly, out of character. Clung was the only person in history to have hated absolutely everything; shortly before he came to France he had published a pamphlet in which he describes the good dark earth that nourishes all men as ‘a common cesspit and a common larder, by which swinish men feast on the fruit of their own turds,’ and birdsong as ‘the din of a fallen world’s daily lauds to Satan.’ He should have been entirely incapable of loving something as obviously sinful as a woman. So for some time, the accepted opinion was that he hadn’t: Clung had simply added sins he’d never actually committed in a fit of self-hatred. (He also occasionally described himself as a murderer.) And yet.
The Ervance Document was first uncovered in 1943 by SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Gosse, who had taken over Château Ervance as his private headquarters. Gosse was, like the Duc before him, a stern and bitter man. The last scion of a noble Swabian mercantile dynasty, his parents and older brothers were among the ten hostages executed in the last desperate days of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Like the Duc, he was also a profound admirer of Clung, who had, as Gosse wrote in a letter, ‘taught me the most aristocratic of all arts, which is that of disgust.’ For Gosse, these writings were a scandal: it was unbearable that his hero could have lapsed in his universal hatred, even for a moment. At the same time, he couldn’t bear to destroy anything in Clung’s hand. The text was reburied on the grounds of the château, defaced wih a brief note of apology from Gosse. It was not discovered again until 2007, when Professor Teo Göz and a research team from London Coldharbour University uncovered the papers while searching for the Tibetans of Ervance.
The object of Laurentius Clung’s tenderness was one Clotilde, a prosperous miller’s daughter from the village of Vauges near Feissy-Deux-Trous. In the Document, Clung records his shock at seeing her at one of his sermons. ‘At once I am seized by the wicked desire to speak sweet lies to the collection of criminals and imbeciles I see before me, to say that their condition is not merely wretched, and that God is capable of regarding them with something other than hatred, as I am…’ Clung searches for some theological justification for his delicate feelings. Sometimes, he notes, ‘angels of the Lord have been sent to walk on the earth, as those that Lot’s people would have defiled.’ And, indeed, ‘God himself came in the person of Jesus Christ, to tread the same sordid sphere he hates.’ Could it be, he wonders, that ‘God may again allow some mote of his goodness to fall upon this wicked world, so by the contrast we might better see it for the filthy sewer it is?’ He invited Clotilde to walk with him along the banks of the river. ‘Not a step was made but I reminded her: Clotilde, you must remember that you are ugly, stupid, and evil; your foulness reeks to very heaven; the God who made you does not love you, and I regard you with the purest hatred as well. At which she sweetly and decorously replied: yes, so I have learned, you are right to hate me, and every night I weep for my depravity. My own sin is agonising. If I simply wished to lay with the putrid woman, that would only be a corruption of my desires, which are already corrupt. But to find her so pleasant! To want to forgive her! This is a corruption of my moral sense and my knowledge of good and evil, and so much the worse.’ After kissing her hand, he produced ten pages of frantic scribbling, in which he begs to be removed from temptation and sent directly to Hell. But in the last lines, he suddenly switches tack. ‘Sometimes, he writes, ‘a terrible thought arises: that God did not build this world to punish us, nor as a gift for us, but that he has a purpose for this great contraption that is entirely his own, and pays us no mind at all.’
The next day, Clung witnessed Clotilde sneezing and then wiping her nose on her sleeve. The last pages of the Ervance Document contain an extended invective against women:
Woman is God’s instrument for increasing the number of men; since men are vile and made only to suffer, it is right that this instrument should be viler still. A woman’s entire being is in various slimes. She oozes and rheums from every orifice; the words that emerge from her wet mouth are are slimy, weak, and of no account; the thoughts in her head have all the firmness and constancy of bog-slop; most of all, she slimes in that repulsive portal from which inter faeces et urinam nascimur. Every foulness flows from here; blood, phlegm, and men. Only a creature as depraved as man could ever think to regard the instrument of his punishment, this oozing gate through which his and all misery entered the world, with lust. In lusting after woman, man proclaims his punishment deserved.
According to church records, Clotilde went on to marry a man named Estienne Guilland. The family survived the sack of Feissy-Deux-Trous intact. They had four children. They were happy.
3-4. The Tibetans of Ervance
In his Tribune column from October 13th, 1944, George Orwell tells an interesting story. During the liberation of France, the Allies were capturing large numbers of not just German troops, but soldiers from many other countries pressed into service by the Wehrmacht. Among them were large numbers of anti-Soviet Russians, but Orwell’s informant had heard about two soldiers from somewhere much deeper in the great centre of Asia, who spoke no Russian or any other language known to their British captors. ‘A professor of Slavonic languages, brought down from Oxford, could make nothing of what they were saying. Then it happened that a sergeant who had served on the frontiers of India overheard them talking and recognized their language, which he was able to speak a little. It was Tibetan!’ Somehow, these wandering Tibetans had come down from their plateau, fallen into the hands of the Soviets, conscripted, captured by the Germans, and forced to man the defences in Normandy. The two men had fought on both sides of the biggest war in human history, but ‘all this time they had been able to speak to nobody but one another, and had no notion of what was happening or who was fighting whom.’
In Cambodia, Brian Fawcett provides some further details. The two Tibetans were peasants from Gyêgumdo in what’s now the Chinese province of Qinghai. They’d been making a pilgrimage to Lhasa, where they were planning to join a monastery. However, they got caught in a snowstorm, lost their bearings, and strayed into China. They were captured by bandits along the Lancan River, who headed north to join the Communists in Yan’an. At some point the Tibetans escaped and wandered aimlessly through the parched wildernesses until they were finally picked up by the Soviet authorities in Tashkent, given a rifle, and told to defend the socialist motherland against fascism. Fawcett provides one important addition to Orwell’s story: the answer to ‘the riddle of their unlikely survival and their profound, elastic passivity in the face of hardship after hardship.’ He explains that ‘for ten years, these two men had believed that they were dead… They had survived because from the very first days of their ordeal they believed they were dead men caught in an unpredictable bardo, or netherworld.’
(Other people from very different corners of the world have made the same identification. When the Farako of central Mali first encountered French officials, they identified them with the spirits of the dead, who were powerful and vengeful and also as white as bone. When the French attempted to explain things—that they came from a distant continent called Europe where everyone had white faces—it failed to alter their impression. These invaders came from the underworld; they were the returning dead. Only the dead could live such strange, mechanical, disconnected lives. In Farako, to go to Europe still means to die. But the desert is growing now, the land is drying out, and thousands of Farako are making the dangerous journey in caravans across the Sahara and in dinghies across the sea, to seek out a better life for themselves in the cities of the underworld.)
Both Orwell and Fawcett miss some significant details in the story of the wandering Tibetans. The two Tibetans were interned by the British at Château Ervance, which had previously been an SS fortress and was now a major Allied POW camp. And the translation was not provided by some old India hand, but by a fellow captive: SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Gosse. In 1938, Gosse had joined Ernst Schäfer’s SS expedition to Tibet, possibly to seek out the mystical kingdom of Agartha and the birthplace of the Aryan race, probably just to assess the Tibetan plateau as a possible staging ground for an eventual invasion of British India. During the trip, he had picked up a rough working knowledge of Tibetan, and a profound distaste for Nyingma Buddhism. Gosse grumbled that the Tibetan these men spoke was atonal and antiquated, more like the thousand-year-old language of the Gyubum than the ordinary speech he’d actually encountered up on the plateau. But he could make himself understood. Through Gosse, the British officers tried to explain to the Tibetans that they were not dead but actually just in a very distant country called France, and if they wanted, the British would provide them with passports so they could return to Gyêgumdo. The Tibetans said no.
A bardo is not quite the same as a netherworld: ordinary waking life is a bardo state; dreams take place in another. There is a bardo accessible through meditative trance. But the bardo the two peasants had found themselves in was the sidpa bardo, the bardo of becoming, the one we experience after death. Sidpa bardo is the interzone between one life and the next, the junkyard of earthly existence, packed with the detritus and runoff of worlds. This is where gods and buddhas take on their fearsome forms, and to pass through sidpa bardo involves suffering many frightening visions. Because this bardo state is made of unstructured waste-thought leaking out from all other bardos, it is always flickering, impermanent. You will see a world you do not understand, and you will see it in ruins. Every city you pass through is bombed. Every person you meet falls dead in battle. You will be attacked by demons and wild animals. But sidpa bardo is educative; the point of these visions is to prepare you for being born again. The entire Second World War had been fought solely to teach these two Tibetan peasants some secret for their next life. They believed they had learned that secret. They had no interest in returning to Gyêgumdo. They did not want the war to have been in vain.
A bardo is thin. With enough practice, it’s possible to see into the night bardo while you’re still awake, or into the luminous bardo of pure understanding while you’re still alive. From within the bardo of changes the Tibetans saw all these temporary states laid one over another, thin as dreams, and the black ooze beyond all worlds. In their last days at Château Ervance, they were unable to look at Otto Gosse without laughing. They recognised him as another wandering soul, but his bardo was not the same as theirs. The sole remaining heir of Adelheid of Augsburg lived in a tiny white box with a revolving wheel inside.
In 2007, Teo Göz arrived at Château Ervance, hoping to find some evidence of the Tibetans and their stay there. Instead, he dug up the anguished ramblings of a sixteenth-century preacher who had once lived on the same site. According to the Ministry of Defence archives, the two nameless ‘Tatars’ captured at Normandy had never been formally released. Several prisoners had died in the camp, but none of the bodies buried there belonged to a Tibetan. The peasants had simply vanished. As if they’d walked straight out of the world.
5. Teo Göz
In Turkish, göz means eye.
Teo Göz was nineteen years old when he founded the discipline of retrochronology. His discovery, that a fourteenth-century incunabulum contained accurate schematics for a Samsung M6234 Primo microwave oven, had proved that information could be transmitted backwards in time. Before, there had been trinkets and hoaxes: an Egyptian carving that looked a bit like a filament light bulb, or some Quimbaya figurines that looked a bit like aeroplanes. In the light of the Revelation of the Beginning and End of the World, these were unearthed again. Could it be? For a brief moment, every mad theorist was suddenly respectable. Science had to take seriously the possibility of Genghis Khan’s snowmobile or Tutankhamun’s TV. But it was only a moment. All other claims were false or inconclusive. Retrochronology became a very dry branch of textual scholarship. You spend years poring over every old manuscript you can get your hands on, looking for something temporally out of place. But there’s nothing. Everywhere, time plods on, and it only plods one way.
By this point Dr Teo Göz was one of the world’s foremost public intellectuals, and he was bored. He’d made his great discovery by getting high, going on the internet, and staring at his microwave. His research continued in a similar vein. Around him, the former Coldharbour Landfill Polytechnic University had become a global centre for retrochronology. All the stoners and losers that had once populated the place were gone, replaced by a cast of strange, deformed men who knew a lot about different types of vellum. They gave him the doctorate without even asking. Göz didn’t even like history that much, not really; he’d only decided to study it because he thought it would be like Indiana Jones. Sometimes he bought a ready meal, put it inside the microwave, and watched it spin until it was done.
When he was thirty, Dr Göz experienced what has now been described as the first of his skunk-induced psychotic breaks. He sold his microwave to a private collector for an undisclosed but enormous amount. The press kept reporting that this was the microwave that Adelheid of Augsburg had witnessed in her visions six hundred years ago, which it obviously wasn’t; it was just the same make and model. There were a lot of M6234s out there. But he didn’t contradict them. He immediately ploughed the money into what he called ‘practical retrochronology.’ This mostly involved spurious archaeological digs, on the basis that something weird might have happened there in the eleventh century. There was a Swedish village where, in 1741, an old woman saw something like a Chinook helicopter in the sky; he paid the villagers to dig up their own gardens. They found nothing worthwhile. A book of hours from San Benedetto in Salerno featured a doodle in the margins that bore a striking resemblance to Sonic the Hedgehog. Göz rummaged around for weeks in there before giving up. The story of the Tibetans of Everance barely had anything to do with retrochronology, but at this point he seemed to be digging just for the sake of it. The château’s well-mannered gardens were all turfed up. That one did result in a miraculous find, even if it ended up being the wrong kind of miracle. But Göz was on the hunt now. What were the chances that these pages would have been annotated by the only European to have spoken to the Tibetans in their own language? What were the chances that the last of the Augsburg Gosses should have ended up here?
Göz spent the next few years trying to reconstruct the life of the former SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Gosse. This was murkier than he’d expected. A lot of the documents were classified. Gosse had been tried after the war and sentenced to nine years in a military prison; afterwards, he’d spent a while hanging around the centre of Asia—in Afghanistan, in Kashmir, in Nepal, always during moments of violent upheaval. He must have made connections in that prison. A man with his talents would always be useful, and he and the Allies were no longer on opposite sides. By 1960 he was in Turkey, training anti-Bolshevik exiles from the Soviet steppe. He’d worked with some of the exact same people before, back when they were going to carve out the Reichskommissariat Turkestan. Silent, sinister sheep-herders from the alien world within our own. When they looked at you, it was like ten thousand miles of empty steppe bearing down on a single point. At night, his little army of Khazaks and Kyrgyz would burst into the homes of left-wing journalists or Kurdish separatists and hack them to pieces with swords. One day the people of the mountains and plains would rise up against godless communism; until then they made themselves useful. Otto Gosse adopted a Turkish name: he called himself Oğuzhan Göz. When he was in his sixties, he married a Turkish woman less than half his age. They had a daughter, Asya, and a son, Aslan. Aslan had a son of his own, and called him Teo…
It wasn’t him. Some other person called Teoman Göz. Totally unrelated. Göz managed to find his namesake on Facebook; he ran a garage in Bursa. His own ancestors weren’t creepy Nazi aristocrats; they were from a village in Cyprus. But what the fuck was going on?
After that discovery things spiralled. Göz flew to South Korea to meet with the Samsung technicians who’d designed the M6234. Had they experienced any flash of revelation? Had the precise arrangement of dials maybe appeared to them in a dream? Why make it like this? He hadn’t expected much insight out of the sort of people who designed microwaves for a living, but by now he was desperate. In fact, one of the lead designers, Gu Sang-Guk, turned out to be a devout evangelical Christian. He explained that God does nothing without a purpose, and when he created the natural laws that govern the universe, he knew those laws would also end up governing the most cost-effective design for an affordable plastic microwave. God had determined the right shape for the galaxies and the right shape for consumer electronics, and all of it worked to further his plan for salvation. It was Gu Sang-Guk’s joy to bring some small piece of that divine plan into being. The visions of Adelheid of Augsburg hadn’t surprised him one bit, but he thought Samsung’s more recent models came even closer to expressing God’s will. Like the MS23T5018AE, which featured an enamelled ceramic interior for easy cleaning, simple touch controls, and a triple distribution system that gives you perfectly even cooking every time.
A second psyhotic break was already brewing, but Göz’s experience at Samsung pushed him off the edge. He was arrested in the middle of Yongsan Electronics Market, bellowing in strangers’ faces about how the defrost setting kills angels. He had destroyed fifteen million won worth of kitchen appliances. The police knew who he was; they agreed not to pursue the matter further if he left the country at once. He took a flight from Incheon International Airport to Shanghai, and then another to Chengdu. At this point his colleagues lost all contact with him. He was in the mountains. He was going to Gyêgumdo.
Gyêgumdo was not like he’d expected. The ancient trading post had been swallowed up by the city of Yushu, which was hemmed in by the high yellow hills but slopped along the valley as far as the eye could see. Its buildings nodded to traditional Tibetan architecture, but they all looked like they were built yesterday. In fact, Göz discovered, they were; Yushu had been practically levelled by a 6.9 magnitude earthquake back in 2010. The population were Tibetan, but all the street signs were in Chinese. The old monasteries were surrounded by shopping districts in faux-traditional style where loudspeakers played loud rap songs, also in Chinese, inviting you to try some bubble tea or a fresh grilled hot dog. So much noise, surrounded by so much god-haunted wilderness. Nobody in the monasteries wanted to talk to Göz about sidpa bardo or the black ooze beyond the world. Instead, the monks invited him to leave an offering of food or money before the fibreglass idol of some terrifying-looking Tibetan deity. Göz sought out old people, asked if they knew anything about two peasants who’d gone on pilgrimage to Lhasa and never come back. But a lot of people had wandered away from Gyêgumdo over the years, and few of them ever returned, and anyway a lot had happened in this part of the world since 1934.
Göz managed to secure an audience with the lama of the Jyekundo Dondrubling Gompa. The lama had a big photo of Xi Jinping on the wall of his office. He was very excited to partner with London Coldharbour University on research projects to study the heritage of the Yushu Autonomous Tibetan Prefecture. He wanted to know how the university awarded its grants. Would funding come directly from the university, or would it come out of departmental budgets? He gave Göz a tour of a few parts of the monastery off-limits to ordinary pilgrims. In the kitchen, there was a fridge stacked with red cans. ‘Coca-Cola,’ he said. ‘Very good.’ In a courtyard two monks were working on a mandala. A sipé khorlo, in which the entire universe is held in the jaws of Yama, god of death. The universe took the form of a square, containing the endlessly revolving wheel of samsara. To the right were two smaller wheels, representing the sun and the moon. The figure of the Buddha, pointing towards these spheres, showed that it’s possible to transcend the cycles of earthly existence. A comet leaped from the Buddha’s finger to indicate the optimum microwaving time for a baked potato.
A full account of Teo Göz’s travels and findings was mailed from the China Post office near Yushu Radio and Television University to the Vice-Chancellor of Coldharbour. CCTV footage shows the world’s most famous historian walking out of the city and into the high mountains. His letter ends:
I am convinced that all of history is a message, and this message is addressed specifically to me. The message tells me that this thing I take to be the material universe is actually something else. It is a machine, a contraption, built for an entirely different purpose I cannot possibly understand. Maybe it’s only a toy. Somehow, I’ve become trapped inside this machine, and I’ve confused it for the world, but it is not. I think the message is telling me how to escape.
Helicopters scoured the grey highlands of Qinghai. Nothing was ever found.
