The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  So: here he was in a hammock, suspended in his half-built church, in the open air, in the absolute desert stillness of the Oasan dawn.

  He had slept well and deeply. He’d always been able to sleep outdoors: a legacy of his homeless years, perhaps, when he’d lain comatose in public parks and doorways, lain so still that people would mistake him for a dead body. Without alcohol, it was a bit more difficult to drift off, but not much. The intrusiveness of the vaporous Oasan atmosphere was easier to deal with, he felt, if he surrendered himself to it. Being indoors and yet not truly enclosed was the worst of both worlds. The Oasans’ houses weren’t sealed and air-conditioned like the USIC base; they were ventilated by open windows through which the insidious atmosphere swirled freely. There was something disconcerting about lying tucked up in a bed, and imagining every minute that the surrounding air was lifting the blankets with invisible fingers and slipping in beside you. Much better to lie exposed, wearing nothing but a single cotton garment. After a while, if you were sleepy enough, you felt as though you were reclining in a shallow stream, with the water flowing gently over you.

  On waking today, he’d noted that the exposed flesh of his arms was intricately patterned with diamond-shaped welts, the after-impression of the net. It gave him a crocodilian appearance. For a minute or two, until the marks faded, he enjoyed the fantasy of having turned into a lizard-man.

  His hosts had taken his rejection of their bed very well. On that first day, several hours after the formal commencement of communal sleep, when Peter had already been sitting upright for a long while, praying, thinking, fidgeting, taking sips from his plastic bottle of water, filling in the time before he dared to offend everyone by escaping outside, he sensed a presence enter his room. It was Jesus Lover One, the Oasan who’d first welcomed him to the settlement. Peter considered pretending to have been jolted out of a deep sleep, but decided that such childish dissembling would fool no one. He smiled and waved hello.

  Jesus Lover One walked to the foot of Peter’s cot and stood there, head bowed. He was fully dressed in his blue robe, complete with hood, boots and gloves, his hands clasped in front of his abdomen. The lowered head and the cowl obscured his grisly visage, allowing Peter to imagine human features in that shadowy occlusion.

  Lover One’s voice, when it came, was hushed so as not to wake the others. A soft, suppressed sound, eerie as the creak of a door in a distant building.

  ‘You are praying,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Peter.

  ‘I alสีo am praying,’ said Lover One. ‘Praying in hope for the hearing of God.’

  The two of them were silent for a while. In the adjacent room, the other Oasans snortled on. Eventually, Lover One added:

  ‘I fear all my praying go aสีรี่ray.’

  Peter replayed the half-dissolved word in his mind several times. ‘Astray?’ he echoed.

  ‘Aสีรี่ray,’ confirmed Lover One, unclasping his hands. With one he pointed upwards. ‘God abide there.’ With the other he pointed downwards. ‘Prayer go here.’

  ‘Prayers don’t travel in space, Lover One,’ said Peter. ‘Prayers don’t go anywhere; they just are. God is here with us.’

  ‘You hear God? Now?’ The Oasan raised his head in rapt attention; the cleft in his face quivered.

  Peter stretched his cramped limbs, aware suddenly of a full bladder.

  ‘Right now, I only hear my body telling me I need to pass water.’

  The Oasan nodded, and motioned for them to go. Peter clambered out of the cot and found his sandals. There were no toilets in Oasan dwellings, as far as he’d been able to tell during the first twenty-odd hours of his visit. Wastes were disposed of out-of-doors.

  Together, Peter and Jesus Lover One left the bedchamber. In the adjacent room, they passed the other sleepers, who lay swaddled in their cocoons, immobile as corpses apart from their raucous respirations. Peter tip-toed; Lover One walked normally, the velvety skin of his boots making no noise on the floor. Side by side they passed through a vaulted corridor, and emerged through a curtain of beads into the open air (if the air on Oasis could ever truly be called open). The sun shone into Peter’s swollen eyes, and he was even more aware of how sweaty and itchy the bedding had made him.

  Glancing back at the building he’d emerged from, he noticed that, in the hours since his arrival, the Oasan atmosphere had been applying its energies to the WEL COME on the outer wall, loosening the paint’s purchase, transforming it into a perspirous froth that now trickled towards the ground, the letters blurred into Cyrillic patterns.

  Jesus Lover One saw him looking at the remains of the message. ‘Word on wall สีoon gone,’ he said. ‘Word, in memory, abide.’ And he touched his chest, as if to indicate where memory abided for his kind, or maybe he was signalling heartfelt emotion. Peter nodded.

  Then Jesus Lover One led him through the streets (could unpaved paths be called streets, if they were wide enough?), further into the settlement. There was no one else about, no sign of life, although Peter knew that the throng of people he’d met earlier in the day must be in there somewhere. The buildings all looked the same. Oblong, oblong, oblong; amber, amber, amber. If this settlement and the USIC base constituted the only architecture on Oasis, then this was a world where aesthetic niceties weren’t wanted and utilitarianism ruled. It shouldn’t bother him, but it did. All along, he’d assumed that the church he would build here should be simple and unpretentious, to give the message that its outward form didn’t matter, only the souls inside; but now he was inclined to make it a thing of beauty.

  With every step, he grew more desperate to piss, and wondered if Lover One was going to unnecessary lengths to find him a private place to do it. Oasans themselves had no such concern for privacy, at least not when it came to toilet matters. Peter had seen them expelling their wastes freely in the streets, unheedful of the loss. They’d be walking along, solemnly focused on where they were going, and then, out of the bottom of their robes, a trail of turdlets would patter onto the earth: grey-green pellets that didn’t smell and, if accidentally stepped on by other people, disintegrated into a powdery pulp, like meringue. Nor did the faeces linger long on the ground. Either the wind blew it away, or it got swallowed up by the earth. Peter had not seen any Oasan expelling liquid waste. Perhaps they didn’t need to.

  Peter most certainly needed to. He was just about to tell Lover One that they must stop right now, anywhere, when the Oasan came to a halt in front of a circular structure, the architectural equivalent of a biscuit tin, but the size of a warehouse. Its low roof was festooned with chimneys . . . no, funnels – large, ceramic-looking funnels, like kiln-fired vases – all pointing up at the sky. Lover One motioned Peter to enter through the beaded doorway. Peter obeyed. Inside, he was faced with a jumbled array of vats and canisters and kegs, each different and hand-made, each fed from tubes that snaked up to the ceiling. The containers were arranged around the sides of the room, leaving the centre free. An artificial pond, the size of a backyard swimming pool in the wealthier parts of Los Angeles, glimmered with pale emerald water.

  ‘Waรี่er,’ said Lover One.

  ‘Very . . . clever,’ Peter complimented him, having rejected the word ‘resourceful’ as too difficult. The sight of the full pond and the dozens of tubes fogged with moisture made him only more convinced that he was about to wet himself.

  ‘Enough?’ enquired Lover One, as they turned to leave.

  ‘Uh . . . ’ hesitated Peter, nonplussed.

  ‘Enough waรี่er? We paสี now?’

  At last, Peter understood the misunderstanding. ‘Pass water’ – of course! Such collisions between the literal and the colloquial – he’d read about them so often in accounts of other missionary expeditions, and had promised himself he would avoid ambiguity at all times. But Lover One’s acquiescence to his request had been so low-key, so smooth, that there was no hint of a communication glitch.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said P
eter, and strode ahead of Lover One, to the middle of the street, where he hitched up his dishdasha and allowed the urine to squirt free. After what seemed like several minutes of pissing he was ready to turn and face Jesus Lover One again. And as soon as he did, Jesus Lover One released a solitary ball of faeces onto the ground. A gesture of respect for an unfathomable ritual, like kissing a European the correct number of times on the correct sides of the face.

  ‘Now, again, you สีleep?’ The Oasan pointed back the way they’d come: back towards the sweat-drenched coconut-stinky tub in the house of snorers.

  Peter smiled non-committally. ‘First, take me to where our church will be. I want to see it again.’

  And so the two of them had walked out of the settlement, across the scrubland, to the chosen site. Nothing had been built yet. The site was marked with four gouges in the soil, to demarcate the four corners of the future structure. And, inside those demarcations, Peter had scratched the basic design of the interior, explaining to the seventy-seven souls gathered around him what the lines represented. Now that he saw his drawing again, on the deserted patch of earth, after a gap of many hours and through eyes bleary with exhaustion, he saw it as the Oasans might have seen it: crude, mysterious gouges in the dirt. He felt unequal to the task ahead of him: grossly so. Bea would no doubt counsel him that this meant he was confusing objective reality with the amount of sleep he’d had, and of course she’d be right.

  The site contained a few other traces of the Jesus Lovers’ assembly. The small posset of vomit that one of the infant Oasans had disgorged during Peter’s opening speech. A pair of boots, specially made as a gift for Peter, but several inches too small for him (a mistake which appeared to cause neither embarrassment nor amusement: just mute acceptance). A semi-transparent amber water jug, almost empty. A metallic blister foil (medicine courtesy of USIC) from which the last tablet had been expressed. Two scattered cushions, on which a couple of the younger children had snoozed when the grown-ups’ discussion strayed too far into invisible realms.

  Peter hesitated for a few seconds, then fetched the cushions and arranged them one near the other. Then he lowered himself to the ground, pillowing his head and his hip. His weariness immediately began to drain out of his flesh, as if seeping into the soil. He wished he was alone.

  ‘You were unสีaรี่iสีfied in our bed,’ Jesus Lover One remarked.

  The sibilant cluster in the third word rendered it unintelligible to Peter. ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite hear what you just . . .?’

  ‘You were . . . unglad,’ said Lover One, clenching his gloves with the effort of finding a pronounceable word. ‘In our bed. สีleep came never.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ conceded Peter, with a grin. ‘Sleep came never.’ Honesty was the best policy, he felt. There would be misunderstandings enough without creating more with diplomacy.

  ‘Here, สีleep will come for you,’ Lover One observed, indicating, with a wave of his gloved hand, the open space around them.

  ‘Yes, here sleep will come for me.’

  ‘Good,’ concluded the Oasan. ‘Then all will be well.’

  Would all be well? There seemed reason to hope that it would. Peter had a good feeling about his ministry here. Already, inexplicably felicitous things had happened – small things, true, not strictly miraculous, but enough to indicate that God was taking a special interest in the way things were panning out. For example, when he’d told the story of Noah and the Flood (at the Oasans’ request) and, at the precise instant that the heavens opened in the Scripture, it started raining for real. And then there was that amazing occasion, after they’d all stopped work for the night and the braziers had been extinguished and they’d been sitting there in the dark, when he’d recited the opening verses of Genesis (again at their request) and, at the exact instant that God said ‘Let there be light’, one of the braziers had sputtered back into life, bathing them all in a golden glow. Coincidences, no doubt. Peter was not a superstitious person. Much closer to genuine miracles, in his opinion, were the sincere declarations of faith and fellowship from these people so incredibly different from himself.

  Then again, there had been a few disappointments. Or not exactly disappointments, just failures to communicate. And he couldn’t even figure out why these encounters had fallen flat; he didn’t understand what it was he hadn’t understood.

  For example, the photographs. If he’d learned one thing over the years, it was that the best – and quickest – way of forging intimacy with strangers was to show them photos of your wife, your home, yourself when younger and decked out in the fashions and haircuts of a bygone decade, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your pets, your children. (Well, he didn’t have children, but that in itself was a talking point. ‘Children?’ people would always say, as if they hoped he was saving the best photos for last.)

  Perhaps what had gone wrong with his show-and-tell with the Oasans was that the group was too large. Seventy-odd people examining his photos and handing them on, almost all of those people contemplating an image that was unrelated to the commentary he was giving at that point. Although, to be honest, the responses of the Jesus Lovers who’d been sitting right nearby, who had the opportunity to make the connection between the image and his explanation of it, were just as hard to fathom.

  ‘This is my wife,’ he’d said, extracting the topmost of the photographs from the plastic wallet and handing it to Jesus Lover One. ‘Beatrice.’

  ‘Beaรี่riสี,’ repeated Jesus Lover One, his shoulders contorting with effort.

  ‘Bea for short,’ said Peter.

  ‘Beaรี่riสี,’ said Jesus Lover One. He held the photograph gently in his gloved fingers, at a strict horizontal angle, as if the miniature Beatrice posing in her mulberry-coloured jeans and imitation cashmere sweater was in danger of sliding off the paper. Peter wondered if these people could even see in the conventional sense, since there was nothing on their faces he could identify as an eye. They weren’t blind, that was obvious, but . . . maybe they couldn’t decode two-dimensional images?

  ‘Your wife,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Hair very long.’

  ‘It was, then,’ said Peter. ‘It’s shorter now.’ He wondered if long hair was attractive or repulsive to those who had none at all.

  ‘Your wife love Jeสีuสี?’

  ‘She certainly does.’

  ‘Good,’ said Jesus Lover One, handing the photograph to the person next to him, who accepted it as though it were a sacrament.

  ‘This next one,’ said Peter, ‘is the house where we live. It’s in a satellite . . . uh . . . a town not far from London, in England. As you can see, our house is much the same as the houses all around it. But inside, it’s different. Just like a person can look the same as those all around him, but inside, because of his faith in the Lord, he’s very different.’ Peter looked up to assess how this simile was going over. Dozens of Oasans were kneeling in concentric circles around him, waiting solemnly for a rectangle of card to be conveyed towards them. Apart from the colours of their robes and some slight variations in height, they all looked the same. There were no fat ones, no musclebound ones, no lanky lunks, no bent-backed crones. No women, no men. Only rows of compact, standardised beings squatting in the same pose, dressed in garments of identical design. And, inside each of their hoods, a coagulated stew of meat that he could not, could not, simply could not translate into a face.

  ‘Needle,’ said the creature called Jesus Lover Fifty-Four, shuddering. ‘Row of needle. Row of . . . knife.’

  Peter had no idea what he was talking about. The photograph, which showed nothing more than a drab ex-council house and a flimsy metal fence, was handed on.

  ‘And this one,’ he said, ‘is our cat, Joshua.’

  Jesus Lover One contemplated the photo for fifteen or twenty seconds.

  ‘Jeสีuสี Lover?’ he asked at last.

  Peter laughed. ‘He can’t love Jesus,’ he said. ‘He’s a
cat.’ This information was greeted with silence. ‘He’s not . . . He’s an animal. He can’t think . . . ’ The word ‘self-consciously’ came to his mind, but he rejected it. Too many sibilants, for a start. ‘His brain is very small. He can’t think about right and wrong, or why he’s alive. He can only eat and sleep.’ It felt like a disloyal thing to say. Joshua could do a lot more than that. But it was true he was an amoral creature, and had never worried about why he’d been put on the earth.

  ‘We love him, though,’ Peter added.

  Jesus Lover One nodded.

  ‘We alสีo love thoสีe who have no love for Jeสีuสี. However, they will die.’

  Peter doled out another picture. ‘This one,’ he said, ‘is my church back home.’ He almost repeated BG’s wisecrack about not winning any architecture prizes, but managed to swallow the words. Transparency and simplicity were what was called for here, at least until he figured out how these people ticked.

  ‘Needle, สีo many needle,’ said one of the Oasans whose Jesus Lover number Peter hadn’t yet learned.

  Peter leaned forward to look at the picture upside-down. There were no needles anywhere to be seen. Just the ugly blockish exterior of the church, lent a modicum of style by a faux-Gothic arch in the metal gate surrounding the building. Then he noticed the spikes on the tops of the railings.

  ‘We need to keep the thieves out,’ he explained.

  ‘Thief will die,’ agreed one of the Oasans.

  Next in the pile was another photo of Joshua, curled up on the duvet with one paw shielding his eyes. Peter shuffled the picture to the back of the pile and selected another.

  ‘This is the back yard of the church. It used to be a car park. Just concrete. We got the concrete ripped up and replaced with soil. We figured people could walk to church or maybe find parking in the street . . . ’ Even as he spoke, he knew that half of what he was saying – maybe all of it – must be incomprehensible to these people. Yet he couldn’t stop. ‘It was a risk. But it paid . . . it was . . . it led to success. It led to a good thing. Grass grew. We planted shrubs and flowers, even some trees. Now the children play out there, when the weather is warm. Not that the weather is often very warm where I come from . . . ’ He was babbling. Get a grip.