Wonders of a Godless World

by Andrew McGahan

  But right then the ground trembled. An aftershock. There had been others, but this was the strongest. People screamed, dust rose, and dread took hold of me. I would be buried again, the mountains would not let me go. All the pain of climbing out from under those rocks and marching all those miles, none of it mattered. The earth recognised no suffering, rewarded no effort. It would kill me as unthinkingly as it had tried to the first time.

  The midwife was watching me still, her eyes on mine, and she saw my terror. My anger too. My outrage. And I think that’s what decided her—if I was alive enough to feel fear and fury, then I was alive enough to save.

  The aftershock passed, and I was put into a wagon. They gave me a mouthful of water and a crust of bread. Then we rattled off down the road. The jolting of the wheels was agony, but I didn’t mind—food was warming my belly, and I was propped up so that I was facing backwards and could watch as the village dwindled away behind us. I was going to live. I believed it finally. I was escaping from those cold walls of stone and ice. And I swore that I would never return to that valley again.

  A government official was riding beside me. He was writing reports, and in time he turned to me and asked my name, his pen poised above the paper. And in a whisper I told him. A lie. I gave myself a new name—just a made-up name, the first that came into my head. And I gave myself a new home too, a town far away. I was, I said, merely a traveller, a salesman, caught up in the disaster. I knew no one in the valley, had no family there, and had lost all my possessions when the earthquake struck.

  He wrote down everything I said and, as simply as that, the person who was me was pronounced deceased—or he soon would be, along with everyone else, when they discovered the fate of my village—and the new me came officially into existence. Take note of that, my orphan. It was my very first death.

  Meanwhile, after a slow and painful trip, we arrived in a town called…ah well, I’d hoped to show you on the globe…it was the closest large town. There I was treated in a proper hospital—although, again, a very primitive place by today’s standards. I don’t recall much about it. My wounds had become infected, and I grew very sick, lapsing in and out of consciousness. But I recovered—it must have taken some weeks—and when I was finally awake and alert once more, I discovered an amazing thing. My foot had healed.

  Oh, it was gnarled and ugly, but there was flesh there, it was a proper limb again, whole and functional. And I remembered—I knew for certain—that I’d ripped the entire thing away, leaving only a stub of shattered ankle. The doctors should have amputated it. A foot could not regrow from nothing.

  Yet it had. My whole body, in fact, had seemingly repaired itself. It was crisscrossed with scars, yes, but much less so than it should have been. You can imagine my confusion. Had it really happened? Had I actually been buried by the landslide and then torn myself free of it? Had I perhaps been caught in a smaller rock fall and merely imagined the rest? Might my village still be standing?

  But the hopeful fantasy was soon dispelled. I heard other patients in my ward talking. The earthquake was real, and the landslide. Everyone knew now that a village far up in the valley had been buried, and that a giant dam had blocked the river. Fifty-four people were presumed dead. The sum population of the village. Myself included, as far as anyone else knew.

  But there I was, not only miraculously alive, but miraculously hale as well. Here was a mystery to ponder. The earth had crushed me, it had declared that I should die, and it was impossible that mere flesh and blood could survive against a mountain. But I had. I caressed the scar tissue of my leg, wondering. What was I to do with this new life, this impossible life, this second life?

  I found that one desire burnt in me brighter than all others—the desire to learn. I was, I realised while lying in that hospital, an ignorant man. When I had looked up on that terrible night and seen the face of the mountain fracture and fall, I had felt fear, yes, and anger, but the root of those emotions was confusion. I had not understood what was happening. I was too ignorant. The processes of the earth—even though I’d spent all my short life living upon it, a peasant familiar with the soil—were a mystery to me.

  A frightening mystery, as my nightmares attested. Physically I was recovering, but mentally I was still bleeding and broken, scarcely able to sleep for cold sweats and fits of screaming. Paranoias haunted me—that another earthquake was going to strike, that a tremendous flood was on its way, that the ground, if I ever dared venture outside again, would open up and swallow me.

  In short, I no longer trusted the earth. I suspected, almost, a conscious malice in it towards my person. And no man can live like that. So I decided I would spend my new life studying the very thing I feared. I would devote myself to understanding the workings of the world. I would learn why the earthquake had struck my valley that day, and why it was that all my friends and family had died.

  But more—I would learn about floods too, and volcanoes, and storms. Can you see what I wanted to do? It was the violence of the world that I sought to comprehend. I had to somehow fathom those moments when the natural forces turn on man and destroy him so casually—because if I could understand what caused those events, then I could strip them of their mystery. And if I could strip them of their mystery, then I could strip them of their terror and their power over me. And end my nightmares.

  Ah yes…a grand plan.

  Of course, I’m sure I didn’t think in those terms while I lay in hospital. I was just a goatherd who could barely read or write. All I really knew was that I never wanted to feel so stupid and afraid as I had the day the mountain fell on me.

  So I set out to get an education.

  It wasn’t easy for someone like me, penniless and homeless. But there were jobs in the cities, and schools and libraries too, so to the cities I went. I worked all day in factories or dockyards—and struggled by night over my books, learning to read and write properly. I hired tutors with my meagre wages. And then, when I was reasonably literate, I spent my evenings in the libraries. And hired more tutors. And passed the basic school exams. And then began to prowl the corridors of universities.

  I made note of the fields I would need to study. Geology. Hydrology. Meteorology. Oceanography. Chemistry. Physics. All just words to me then, many of them disciplines in their merest infancy. And all out of reach for a poor man anyway. But then, only three years after the landslide, a great war broke out across much of the world. It lasted four years, and not only did millions die, but revolutions came, and whole societies were turned upside down, including my own. Me—well, all that matters is, again, I managed to survive. And afterwards, all the education that had been denied to me by poverty was suddenly made available, if I had the desire and the intellect to seize it.

  I had the desire and the intellect.

  So I went to university, and my long study began. And for ninety-two years, it has gone on. Oh, not always as a humble student, no—but the tales of my many careers and fortunes and failures can wait for the moment. All you need know for now, my orphan, is that in one way or another, ever since that landslide, I have been examining this world. And I can safely say that my understanding of the earth is now unequalled. No one else knows nearly as much about this planet as I do. No one else can read its signs or appreciate its subtleties or untangle its complexities as well as I.

  And yet for all that, I’m nothing—compared to you.

  I sensed it, even as they wheeled me into this place. My sleep was disturbed by a presence. There was someone close by, someone with powers. Comatose, I reached out with my thoughts and went searching among the minds around me, only to discover that I was in a madhouse, and that most of those at hand were insane or catatonic or senile. The mind I actually wanted, for some reason, remained hidden. So I waited. I was sure that the presence would sense me too before long, and seek me out in its turn.

  But what irony! My only regular visitor was a retarded girl who came to change the sheets. A girl whose mind, on the surface at lea
st, was blank. A girl I dismissed, summarily, as being of no use to me. What a fool I was!

  But meanwhile I felt the earth trembling minutely, and I calculated that there must be a volcano nearby, and that soon it would erupt, in minor fashion. I decided that I may as well be outside to watch. It was no trouble to plant the necessary thought in a nurse’s head, hence I was there when it all happened.

  And I saw, disbelieving, what you did.

  I saw how easily you read the faint vibrations in the earth, long before any machine could have registered them; when even I, for all my expertise, could only just detect the activity. I saw how you knew, innately, where to look for the source of the tremors, and I saw how your mind pierced the earth to see down to the magma chamber. I saw that you knew exactly what form the eruption would take, how long it would last, and how little damage it would do. I watched you laugh in the face of the blocks falling from the sky, and stand firm as the pyroclastic flow rolled down the mountainside.

  No one else could have done that. Not the cleverest scientist alive today, with all the most sensitive instruments that technology can produce. Even I can’t do that. Oh, I can analyse a volcano’s behaviour better than anyone…but I could never simply glance at an eruption and instantly know its every detail, as you did that day.

  And so, as the ash rained down, I finally looked—really looked—inside your head, and discovered the miracle that is there. Such a shock. Like all the idiot doctors and nurses in this benighted place, I thought you were just a simple child who knew no better. When all the time you are a wonder. This world and all its secrets, from the heights to the depths, lie open to you. That’s why I want to help you, my orphan.

  Because only you can help me.

  11

  Sunrise found the orphan still awake. She was in her hut, alone. There was no voice inside her head. The foreigner, after his long unburdening, had fallen silent. Exhausted again, perhaps. Either way, she was glad to have her thoughts to herself. Most unexpectedly, his story had disturbed her.

  Oh, at first she had been thrilled. A wonder, he had called her. Capable of doing things no one else, not even he, could do. And to hear him say that she could be useful to him, that she could help him—why, it was perfect!

  Yes…but was it too perfect?

  The very acuteness of her happiness gave the orphan pause, and all the doubts she thought she had banished came creeping back. Was it possible that she wanted this too badly? Was there not a starving part of her that had come awake in these last days, ravenous for exactly what the foreigner was offering? To be admired? To be needed? To be better and cleverer than everyone else?

  Was it delusionally perfect? Could it be that, in her loneliness and deprivation, she was being deceived by madness after all?

  Take the foreigner’s tale of surviving the landslide and living all those years since—well, how had that happened? What made it possible? How could his foot grow back, or his appearance change? How could he reach into other people’s minds? He had explained none of these things. And maybe he couldn’t. If this was all made up in the orphan’s head, then of course he would have no explanation for his powers, because there was no explanation for them. It was a fantasy.

  Even the very incident of the landslide. Was there really a far-off valley of stone and ice where, long ago, a mountain had fallen and buried a village? How could she find out? It was the sort of knowledge, she guessed, that might be located in books but that was no use to her. The old doctor might also know, but without speech, how could she even make him understand the question?

  There was no way. She was alone with this. If she wanted surety, she would have to find it on her own, her only resources her eyes and ears and the immediate world around her. So, of all the things the foreigner had shown her, was there anything nearby that she could check in person? Something she had not already known, and could not have known, until he had revealed it to her?

  She was curled on her bed, staring across the room to the window. Through the glass the upper reaches of the volcano were visible in the dawn, its slopes still mottled with ash, but her eyes were far away, unseeing.

  Proof. It was a matter of finding proof.

  And then suddenly she did see.

  She leapt from the bed, went to the window. The mountain! She remembered now. On the day that she had flown with the foreigner, they had soared across the peak, and there, hidden in a crack at the summit, invisible from anywhere else, she had seen a strange little tree. So all she had to do, to prove to herself that she wasn’t delusional, was climb to the mountaintop and look. If the tree was really there…

  Ha. How simple! And why not go right now? What was to stop her? Nothing at all. Grinning to herself—how much better she felt already—she was dressed in a few moments, and then heading through the door.

  Outside, it was a warm, hazy morning. A low clatter came from the kitchen, but otherwise the hospital was still asleep. She could be halfway up the mountain before breakfast! Yet she hesitated for an instant, because…well, she didn’t quite know why. She wasn’t breaking any rule. She wasn’t forbidden to leave the grounds. She was an adult, responsible for herself. It was just that she’d never gone anywhere on her own before. But then, she’d never had anywhere to go on her own before.

  Well, now she did. And it was important. Excited again, the orphan walked along the rear fence, past the vegetable garden, until she came to a large hole in the wire. Ducking through it, she tramped across a strip of wasteland, and then she was in the jungle. There was a path there that climbed through the undergrowth. She took it, and after a short ascent she emerged at a grassy height that overlooked the hospital.

  This far the orphan had been before, on picnic outings with the patients and the staff. It was a pleasant spot, with a wide view extending over the jungle to the town, and beyond to the plantations. But today she wasn’t interested in the view. She was interested in the path. From here, it began to climb the mountain proper, leaving the jungle and following a long ridge that thrust down from the volcano’s peak.

  That way she had never been. She stared up. It looked an unfriendly route, rocky and bare, and scabrous with ash that had been partially washed away by rain. The slope was steeper than she remembered, too. So steep that the summit itself was hidden. But the path was still discernible. Indeed, someone had walked on it recently—there were tracks trodden into the ash, climbing away out of sight.

  Reassured, the orphan started up, her solid legs pumping steadily, her head bent forward to watch her feet. And at first she felt that she was making good progress, rising swiftly along the path. But gradually the incline steepened, and the last greenery thinned away to ash and rock and brown tufts of grass. The sun lifted above the haze and grew hot. The orphan began to sweat and puff. She hadn’t thought to bring any water, and there was no breeze. She remembered how, in her flight with the foreigner, it had been so deliciously cool when they were drifting above the island. Maybe it would be the same when she reached the summit.

  She paused to gaze up. There was no doubt, the mountain was bigger than she had realised. The peak was still hidden by the slope above, and the terrain had grown alarmingly rugged—what had looked from the distance like mere stones were actually waist-high boulders that she had to either skirt or climb over. Turning back, she was surprised to see that now the hospital and the town were hidden too. She was high on the mountain, but staring out she could see only a haze of blue that might have been sky or might have been the far-off ocean, she couldn’t tell which.

  Climbing was nothing like flying. There was no freedom of floating above the world. If anything, gasping for breath in the humid air, she felt heavier and more chained to the earth than usual. But she turned and plodded on, and when she looked up again she saw that, at last, the path reached a crest above her. She hurried upwards, but then her spirits toppled as she breasted the rise. Before her the ridge, which from below had seemed to climb all the way to the summit, actually fell away again
.

  She stared down into a deep ravine cut from the mountainside. Ash lay thick and black about its walls, and its floor was rent by fissures. A pale steam jetted from the ground here and there, hanging like a dirty fog over the stones, and a biting tang assailed her nostrils. She knew where she must be. This was the rift where the eruption had taken place. Only beyond it did the land rise again, springing into rocky cliffs that sheared—straight up, it seemed—towards the final peak, still far above.

  The orphan sagged despairingly. Her path had vanished, and even if she made it to the foot of the cliffs, she would never be able to climb them. She had misjudged the mountain entirely, and now it was showing her what a fool she was.

  Yes…but even so, was her tree up there?

  She studied the summit, half-wreathed in shreds of cloud. Was there a hint of foliage protruding just at the pinnacle, from a hollow in the rock? Maybe. Maybe. But it was so far away. It was impossible to be sure. She had wasted her time. Her face felt flushed with embarrassment. She was worse than a fool. She was slow and stupid and should never have come.

  And then suddenly she wasn’t alone.

  The tree is there.

  Ah. So he had returned from wherever he had been.

  I’ve been right here. Watching you. To her deep annoyance, he sounded amused by her efforts. I can’t believe you just walked out your door and started to climb this mountain without even a second thought.

  If it was so funny, then why didn’t he make it simpler for her—why didn’t he fly her, right now, to the top again?

  What would that prove? You know that when we fly, our bodies don’t go with us. And if your body doesn’t actually go to the summit, then whether you see the tree there or not, you still won’t be sure it’s real.

  Then how could she be sure?