The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  Enough about my routine & uneventful life without my dear husband. Please tell me what’s been happening with you. I wish I could see your face. I don’t understand why the technology that allows us to communicate with each other like this can’t stretch to sending a few pictures as well! But I suppose that’s being greedy. It’s miraculous enough that we can read each other’s words at such a mind-boggling distance. Assuming you can still read them, of course . . . Please write soon to let me know you’re all right.

  I feel I ought to have more specific questions & comments about your mission, but to be frank you haven’t told me very much about it. You’re more of a speaker than a writer, I know that. There have been times I’ve sat in the congregation when you’ve preached, and I see you glancing down at your notes – the same notes I’ve seen you scribbling the night before – and I’m aware that on that little scrap of paper there’s just a few disjointed phrases, and yet this wonderful, eloquent, coherent speech comes out, a beautifully formed story that keeps everyone spellbound for an hour. I admire you so much at those times, my darling. I wish I could hear what you’re saying to your new flock. I don’t suppose you’re writing any of it down afterwards? Or keeping a record of what they’re saying to you? I don’t feel I KNOW these people at all; it’s frustrating. Are you learning a new language? I suppose you must be.

  Love,

  Bea

  Peter rubbed his face, and the sweaty, oily dirt accumulated into dark, seed-like particles in the palms of his hands. Reading his wife’s letter had made him agitated and confused. He hadn’t felt that way until now. For the duration of his stay with the Oasans, he’d been calm and emotionally stable, just getting on with the job. If he’d been occasionally bewildered, it was a happy sort of bewilderment. Now he felt out of his depth. There was a tightness squeezing his chest.

  He moved the Shoot’s cursor to the next capsule in chronological sequence, and opened a message that Beatrice had sent him a mere twenty hours after the last. It must have been the middle of her night.

  I miss you, she wrote. Oh, how I miss you. I didn’t know it would feel like this. I thought the time would fly and you would be back. If I could just hold you once, just hug you tight for a few minutes, I could cope with your absence again. Even ten seconds would do it. Ten seconds with my arms around you. Then I could sleep.

  And, next day:

  Horrible, ghastly things in the news; I can’t bear to read, can’t bear to look. Almost took the day off work today. Sat weeping in the toilets at break time. You are so far away, so incredibly far away, further away than any man has ever been from his woman, the sheer distance makes me ill. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Forgive me for spilling my guts like this, I know it can’t be helping you do whatever you’re doing. Oh, how I wish you could be in touch now. Touching me. Holding me. Kissing me.

  The words hit him hard. They were the sort of thing he’d wanted to receive from her but now that he’d received them, they caused him distress. A fortnight ago, he had missed her sexually and craved confirmation that she felt the same. She’d assured him that she missed him, that she wanted to hold him, sure, but the overall tone of her letters was sensible, preoccupied, as though his presence was a luxury rather than a necessity. She’d seemed so self-reliant, he’d wondered if he was indulging in testosterone-fuelled self-pity – or if that’s how she saw it.

  Once he’d taken his place among the Oasans, this insecurity had evaporated. He didn’t have time for it. And, trusting in the easy mutuality that he and Bea had always enjoyed, he’d assumed – if he thought about it at all – that Bea was in the same state of mind, that she was simply getting on with the daily business of life, that her love for him was like the colour of her eyes: constantly there, but not in any way an impediment to useful activity.

  Instead, while he’d been laying the stones of his church and dozing happy in his hammock, she was in pain.

  His fingers hung suspended over the keyboard, poised to respond to her. But how could he, when she’d written nine more messages to him, in hours and days that were already gone from her, but of which he knew nothing?

  He opened another capsule.

  Dear Peter,

  Please don’t worry about me. I’ve got a grip now. I don’t know why I went off the deep end like that. Too little sleep? The atmosphere has been oppressive these last few weeks. Yes, I know I said it was a beautiful weather here and that’s true, in the sense that it’s warm and sunny. But at nights it’s close and rather hard to breathe.

  A large chunk of North Korea was wiped out a few days ago. Not by a nuclear strike, or even a nuclear accident, but by a cyclone called Toraji. It came off the Sea of Japan and swept inland ‘like a ceremonial sword’ (I didn’t make that simile up, obviously). Tens of thousands dead, probably more than a million homeless. The government denied the severity of the damage at first, so all we had were satellite pictures. It was surreal. Here’s this woman in a tailored yellow outfit, with immaculate hair and manicured nails, standing in front of this giant projected image, pointing at the various smudges and blobs, interpreting what they mean. You got the message that there were lots of wrecked houses and dead bodies in there somewhere, but all you could see was these beautifully buffed hands gesturing over what looked like an abstract painting.

  Then the government let some South Korean and Chinese aid workers in, and the proper video footage started coming through. Peter, I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t seen. Maybe that’s why I got so frantic about missing you. Of course I love you and miss you and need you. But I also needed to see these things WITH you, or else be spared from seeing them at all.

  I saw a huge concrete enclosure, like a giant pig kennel, or whatever you call the enclosures where they farm pigs, the roof of it just peeping out of a huge lake of slimy water. A team of men were hacking at the roof with pick-axes, not achieving much. Then they blew a hole in it with explosives. A weird mixture of soupy stuff gurgled out of the hole. It was people. People and water. Half-blended, like . . . I don’t want to describe it. I will never forget it. Why do we get shown these things? Why, when we can’t help? Later I saw villagers using dead bodies as sandbags. Rescue workers with candles strapped to their heads, the candle-fat running down their cheeks. How can such things be possible in the 21st century? I’m watching a high-resolution video clip that was recorded with a micro-camera hidden in somebody’s hat-brim or whatever, and yet the technology of life-saving is straight from the Stone Age!

  I want to write more, even though I don’t want to remember. I wish I could send you the images, even though I also wish I could erase them from my mind. Is it the lowest form of selfishness to want to share the burden like this? And what IS my burden, exactly, sitting on my sofa in England, eating liquorice allsorts, watching foreign corpses swirling around in muddy whirlpools, foreign children queuing for a scrap of tarpaulin?

  Someone at work said to me this morning, ‘Where is God in all this?’ I didn’t rise to the bait. I can never understand why people ask that question. The real question for the bystanders of tragedy is ‘Where are WE in all this?’ I’ve always tried to come up with answers to that challenge. I don’t know if I can at the moment. Pray for me.

  Love,

  Bea.

  Peter clasped his hands. They were tacky with grime: new sweat on old sweat. He stood up and walked to the shower cubicle. His erection nodded comically with each step. He positioned himself under the metal nozzle and switched on the water, letting it douse his upturned face first. His scalp stung as the stream penetrated his matted hair, finding little scratches and scabs he hadn’t realised were there. Stone-cold at first, the water warmed up fast, dissolving the dirt off him, enfolding him in a cloud. He kept his eyes closed and let his face be bathed, almost scalded, under the pressurised spray. He cupped his testicles in his hands, and, with his wrists, pressed his penis hard against his belly until the semen came. Then he soaped himself up from head to toes, and washed thoroughly.
The water that swilled around the plughole was grey for longer than he would have thought possible.

  When he was clean, he continued to stand under the hot stream, and might have remained there for half an hour or more, if the water hadn’t suddenly sputtered to a trickle. An LED display inside the shower dial flashed 0:00. He hadn’t twigged the significance of the gauge until now. Of course! It made perfect sense that duration of water use should be limited by a built-in timer. It’s just that USIC were an American corporation and the idea of a frugal, resource-conscious American corporation almost defied belief.

  As soon as the drain stopped gurgling, he was able to discern that a noise he’d been aware of for a while, which he’d attributed to the pipes, was in fact someone knocking at the door.

  ‘Hi,’ said Grainger when he opened it. Her eyes barely flickered at the sight of him standing there wet, clad only in a bath towel knotted around his waist. She had a dossier clutched to her bosom.

  ‘Sorry, I couldn’t hear you,’ he said.

  ‘I knocked real loud,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose I expected there to be a doorbell, or a buzzer or an intercom or something.’

  ‘USIC isn’t big on unnecessary technology.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that. It’s one of the unexpectedly admirable things about you.’

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ said Grainger. ‘You say the sweetest things.’

  Behind him, the Shoot emitted a soft noise, like an electronic sigh: the sound it made when its screen went dark to conserve power. He remembered North Korea.

  ‘Have you heard about North Korea?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a country in . . . uh . . . Asia,’ she said.

  ‘There’s been a terrible cyclone there. Tens of thousands of people are dead.’

  Grainger blinked hard; flinched, almost. But a moment later, she’d regained her composure. ‘That’s tragic,’ she said. ‘Nothing we can do about it, though.’ She held the dossier out to him. ‘Everything you always wanted to know about Arthur Severin but were afraid to ask.’

  He took the file. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘The funeral is in three hours.’

  ‘Right. How long is that in . . . uh . . . ’ He gestured vaguely, hoping that a wave of his hand might convey the difference between time as he’d always known it and time here and now.

  She smiled, patient with his stupidity. ‘Three hours,’ she repeated, and raised her wrist to display her watch. ‘Three hours means three hours.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting quite so little notice,’ he said.

  ‘Relax. Nobody’s expecting you to write fifty pages of rhyming poetry in his honour. Just say a few words. Everyone understands you didn’t know him too well. That kind of helps.’

  ‘The impersonal touch?’

  ‘It’s what the great religions offer, isn’t it?’ And she lifted her wristwatch again. ‘I’ll come and collect you at 1330.’

  She left without another word and shut the door behind her, at exactly the instant that his towel fell off.

  ‘We are gathered here,’ said Peter to the hushed and solemn assembly, ‘to honour a man who, only one sunrise ago, was a living, breathing person just like us.’

  He cast a glance towards the coffin that sat on a rack of metal rollers in front of an incinerator. Instinctively, everyone else in the room looked at it, too. The coffin was made of recycled cardboard, with a lustrous gloss of vegetable glaze to give it that solid-wood effect. The rack was just like the ones attached to x-ray machines at airports.

  ‘A person who drew air into his lungs,’ Peter continued, ‘lungs that were a bit the worse for wear, perhaps, but still working fine, delivering oxygen to his blood, the same blood that’s pumping in all of us as we stand here today.’ His voice was loud and clear without amplification, but lacked the reverb resonance it was granted in churches and assembly halls. The funeral room, while large, was acoustically cramped, and the furnace inside the incinerator generated a noise like a distant jet plane passing by.

  ‘Listen to your heart beat,’ said Peter. ‘Feel the ever-so-slight tremor inside your chest as your body miraculously keeps functioning. It’s such a gentle tremor, such a quiet sound, that we don’t appreciate how much it matters. We may not have been always aware of it, we may scarcely have given it a thought from day to day, but we were sharing the world with Art Severin, and he was sharing it with us. Now the sun has come up on a new day, and Art Severin has changed. We are here today to face up to that change.’

  The mourners numbered fifty-two. Peter wasn’t sure how big a proportion of the total USIC staff this was. There were only six women, including Grainger; the rest were males, making Peter wonder if Severin had failed to win the respect of his female colleagues, or whether this simply reflected the gender distribution of the base. Everyone was dressed in the clothes they might usually wear at work. Nobody wore black.

  BG and Tuska stood in the forefront of the crowd. Tuska, clad in a loose green shirt, military camouflage trousers and his trademark tennis shoes, was nevertheless almost unrecognisable, having shaved off his beard. BG was unmistakable as ever, the biggest body in the room, his facial hair maintained with scalpel-fine precision. A white T-shirt clung to his musculature like paint. A wrinkled white sirwal hung off his hips, its cuffs puddling over incongruous polished shoes. His arms were folded across his chest, his face composed and imperiously tolerant. A few people in the ranks behind him were looking more quizzical, nudged off-balance by the eulogy’s opening salvo.

  ‘Arthur Laurence Severin died young,’ said Peter, ‘but he lived many lives. He was born in Bend, Oregon, forty-eight years ago, to parents he never knew, and was adopted by Jim and Peggy Severin. They gave him a happy and active childhood, mostly in the open air. Jim repaired and maintained campsites, hunting lodges and military outposts. Art could drive a tractor by the time he was ten, operate a chainsaw, shoot deer, all that dangerous stuff that kids shouldn’t be allowed to do. He was all set to take over the family business. Then his adoptive parents divorced and Art started getting into trouble. His teenage years were spent in and out of juvenile corrective institutions and rehabilitation programmes. By the time he was old enough to go to jail, he already had a long record of crack cocaine abuse and DUI offences.’

  The mourners were not so blank-faced now. A thrill of unease was passing through them, a thrill of interest and anxiety. Heads tilted, brows knitted, lower lips folding under top ones. Faster breathing. Children drawn in by a story.

  ‘Art Severin got time off for good behaviour and was soon back on the streets of Oregon. But not for long. Frustrated at the lack of employment opportunities in the US for young ex-crims, he relocated to Sabah, Malaysia, where he started a tool supply business with some drug dealing on the side. It was in Sabah that he met Kamelia, a local entrepreneur who supplied female companionship to the timber industry. They fell in love, married, and, although Kamelia was already in her forties, produced two daughters, Nora and Pao-Pei, always known as May. When Kamelia’s brothel was shut down by the authorities and Art’s business was squeezed by competition, he found work in the timber trade, and it was only then that he first discovered his lifelong fascination with the mechanics and chemistry of soil erosion.’

  With measured assurance, Peter began to walk towards the coffin. The hand in which he had been holding his Bible swung at his side, and everyone could see that his thumb was pressed against a small scrap of hand-scribbled paper inside the Scripture.

  ‘Art Severin’s next life was in Australia,’ he said, gazing down at the casket’s lustrous surface. ‘Sponsored by a company that recognised his potential, he studied geotechnics and soil mechanics at the University of Sydney. He graduated in record time – this young man who’d dropped out of high school only nine years before – and was soon being headhunted by engineering firms because of his deep understanding of soil behaviour, and also because of his custom-made equipment. He could’ve made a fortune in patents, but he never saw hi
mself as an inventor, merely as a worker who, as he put it, “got mad at crap tools”.’

  There was a murmur of recognition in the crowd. Peter laid his free hand on the coffin lid, gently but firmly, as if laying it on Art Severin’s shoulder. ‘Whenever he found that the available apparatus couldn’t deliver the quality of data he demanded, he simply designed and built technology that would. Among his inventions was . . . ’ (and here he consulted the scrap of paper inside his Bible) ‘ . . . a new sampling tool for use in cohesionless sands below ground-water level. Among his academic papers – again, written by this man whose high school teachers considered him a hopeless delinquent – were “Undrained triaxial tests on saturated sands and their significance to a comprehensive theory of shear strength”, “Achieving constant pressure control for the triaxial compression test”, “Stability gain due to pore pressure dissipation in a soft clay foundation”, “Overhauling Terzaghi’s principle of effective stress: some suggested solutions to anomalies at low hydraulic gradients”, and dozens more.’

  Peter closed his Bible and hugged it to his abdomen, directly under the crucifix-shaped stain. His dishdasha had been laundered and pressed, but fresh sweat was already spreading in patches all over it. The assembled mourners were perspiring too.

  ‘Now, I’m not going to pretend I have much of a clue what those titles mean,’ said Peter with a faint grin. ‘Some of you will. Others won’t. The important thing is that Art Severin turned himself into a world-renowned expert on something more useful than taking drugs. Although . . . he didn’t let his old skills lapse entirely. Before he worked for USIC, he used to smoke fifty cigarettes a day.’ A ripple of chuckles passed through the crowd. There had been a solitary, suppressed snort earlier on when he’d referred to the female companionship supplied by Kamelia’s business, but this laughter now was unashamed, relaxed.