The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  ‘You know, Peter, I’m surprised you got through the USIC screening process. Real surprised, as a matter of fact.’ For several beats, he kept Peter waiting for elaboration. ‘If you look at the guys and gals working here, you’ll find that pretty much all of us are . . . ah . . . free agents. No wives or husbands back home. No steady girlfriends, no dependent children, no moms checking the mailbox. No strings.’

  ‘Because of the high risk of us dying on the way here?’

  ‘Dying? Who’s dying? We’ve had one accident in all these years and it had nothing to do with the Jump, it was a freak thing that could’ve happened to a commercial jet plane on its way to LA. The kinda thing insurance companies call an Act of God.’ He winked, then got back to the point. ‘Nah, the screening process . . . it’s about conditions here. Life here. What can I say? “Isolated” would be a fair word for it. The big risk, for anybody, is going crazy. Not psycho-killer, axe-murderer crazy, just . . . crazy. So-o-o . . . ’ He drew a deep, indulgent breath. ‘So it’s best if you’ve got a team of individuals that understand what it’s like to be in permanent . . . limbo. To have no other plans . . . nowhere else to go . . . nobody in the picture who particularly gives a damn. Know what I’m saying? People who can deal with that.’

  ‘A team of loners? Sounds like a contradiction in terms.’

  ‘It’s the Légion Étrangère is what it is.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Tuska leaned forward, in storyteller mode now. ‘The French Foreign Legion,’ he said. ‘An elite army corps. They fought in lots of wars back in the day. A great team. You didn’t have to be French to join. You could come from anywhere. You didn’t have to tell them your real name, your past, your criminal record, nothing. So, as you can imagine, a lot of those guys were trouble with a capital T. They didn’t fit in anywhere. Not even in the regular army. It didn’t matter. They were Legionnaires.’

  Peter considered this for a few seconds. ‘Are you saying everybody here is trouble with a capital T?’

  Tuska laughed. ‘Ah, we’re pussycats,’ he schmoozed. ‘Fine and upstanding citizens one and all.’

  ‘In my interviews with USIC,’ reflected Peter, ‘I didn’t get the impression I could’ve lied about anything. They’d done their research. I had to get medical checks, certificates, testimonials . . .’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Tuska. ‘We’re all hand-picked here. My analogy with the Legion is not that there’s no questions asked. Far from it. My analogy is that we can deal with being here, period. Legio Patria Nostra, that was the motto of the Legionnaires. The Legion Is Our Homeland.’

  ‘Yet you’ve been back,’ observed Peter.

  ‘Well, I’m the pilot.’

  ‘And BG and Severin; they went back a couple of times too.’

  ‘Yeah, but they spent years here in between trips. Years. You’ve seen Severin’s files. You know how much time he spent in this place, doing his job every day, drinking green water, pissing orange piss, moseying on down to the mess hall every evening and eating adapted fungus or whatever the hell it is, maybe leafing through some year-old magazines like you’d find in a dentist’s waiting room, going to bed at night and staring at the ceiling. That’s what we do here. And we deal with it. You know how long the first USIC workers here lasted? The first couple batches of personnel, in the very early days? Three weeks, on average. We’re talking about ultra-fit, highly trained, well-adjusted people from loving families blah blah blah. Six weeks, max. Sometimes six days. Then they would go out of their skulls, weeping, begging, crawling up the walls, and USIC would have to send them back. Back ho-ome.’ While uttering this last word, he made a grandiloquent sweep of his arms, to add a sarcastic halo of importance to the concept. ‘OK, I know USIC has a lot of money. But not that much money.’

  ‘What about Kurtzberg?’ said Peter quietly. ‘And Tartaglione? They didn’t go home, did they?’

  ‘No,’ conceded Tuska. ‘They went native.’

  ‘Isn’t that just a different way of adapting?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Tuska with a hint of mischief. ‘You just came back from Freaktown and now you’re going again. What’s your hurry? Don’t you love us anymore?’

  ‘Yes, I love you,’ said Peter, aiming for a light, good-humoured tone that might simultaneously convey that he really did love everyone here. ‘But I wasn’t brought here . . . uh . . . USIC made it clear I shouldn’t expect . . . ’ He faltered, dismayed. His tone was neither bantering nor sincere; it was defensive.

  ‘We’re not your job,’ summarised Tuska. ‘I know that.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Peter noticed that Grainger had entered the mess hall, ready to drive him to the settlement. ‘I do care,’ he said, suppressing the urge to bring up Severin’s funeral, to remind Tuska how hard he’d tried to come up with something decent at short notice. ‘If you . . . if anyone actually . . . reached out to me, I’d be there for them.’

  ‘Sure you would,’ the pilot shrugged. Leaning back in his seat again, he noticed Grainger edging nearer, and gave her a casual salute.

  ‘Your chariot awaits,’ announced Grainger.

  Rather than taking the cafeteria exit and walking round the building to where the vehicle was parked, Grainger escorted Peter through a maze of internal corridors, postponing when they’d have to wade into the muggy air. This route through the base took them past the USIC pharmacy, Grainger’s domain. It was shut and Peter would have walked right by without noticing it, if not for the bright green plastic cross mounted on its otherwise nondescript door. He paused for a proper look, and Grainger paused with him.

  ‘The serpent of Epidaurus,’ he murmured, surprised that whoever had made this cross had bothered to embellish it, in silver metallic inlay, with the ancient symbol of the snake encircling the staff.

  ‘Yeah?’ she said.

  ‘It symbolises wisdom. Immortality. Healing.’

  ‘And “Pharmacy”,’ she added.

  He wondered if the door was unlocked. ‘What if someone shows up while we’re gone, wanting you?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ she said.

  ‘USIC doesn’t keep you that busy?’

  ‘I do lots of other things besides the drugs. I analyse all the food, to check we’re not poisoning ourselves. I do research. I pitch in.’

  He hadn’t meant to make her justify her wage; he was only curious about that door. Having burgled quite a few pharmacies in his time, he struggled to believe that a storehouse of pharmaceutical goodies wouldn’t be a temptation for even one of the people here. ‘Is it locked?’

  ‘Of course it’s locked.’

  ‘The only door in the whole place that’s locked?’

  She shot him a suspicious glance. He felt she’d peered straight into his conscience, eavesdropping on his guilty memory of trespassing in Kurtzberg’s quarters. What had possessed him to do that?

  ‘It’s not that I think anybody would steal anything,’ she said. ‘It’s just . . . procedure. Can we go now?’

  They walked to the corridor’s end, where Grainger took a deep breath and opened the door to the outside. The cool, neutral air of the interior was sucked from behind them into the atmosphere beyond, exerting a tug on their bodies as they stepped out of the building. Then the flood of gaseous moisture enveloped them, a shock as always, until you got used to it.

  ‘I overheard you tell Tuska you love him,’ said Grainger as they approached the vehicle.

  ‘He was bantering,’ said Peter, ‘and I was . . . uh . . . bantering back.’ The air currents ruffled his hair, ran under his clothing, blurred his vision. Distracted, he almost blundered against Grainger, having followed her to the driver’s side before he remembered that he should be heading for the passenger’s side. ‘But on a deeper level,’ he said, as he backtracked, ‘yes, it’s true. I’m a Christian. I try to love everybody.’

  They took their seats in the front of the van and slammed the doors shut, sealing themselves into the air-conditioned cabin. The short time they
’d spent in the open air had been enough to dampen their skin all over, so that they both shivered at the same instant, a coincidence which made them smile.

  ‘Tuska isn’t very lovable,’ Grainger remarked.

  ‘He means well,’ said Peter.

  ‘Yeah?’ she said tartly. ‘I guess he’s more fun if you’re a guy.’ She dabbed her face dry with a hunk of her shawl and, peering up into a mirror, brushed her hair. ‘All that sex talk. You should hear him sometimes. Real locker room stuff. So much hot air.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want it to be more than hot air, would you?’

  ‘God forbid,’ she scoffed. ‘I can imagine why his wife left him.’

  ‘Maybe he left her,’ said Peter, wondering why she was drawing him into this peculiar conversation, and why they weren’t moving yet. ‘Or maybe it was a mutual decision.’

  ‘The end of a marriage is never a mutual decision,’ she said.

  He nodded, as if deferring to her greater wisdom on this point. Still she made no move to start the vehicle. ‘Are there any married couples here?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. We’ve got work to do, we’ve all got to get along.’

  ‘I get along with my wife,’ he said. ‘We’ve always worked together. I wish she was here.’

  ‘You think she’d enjoy it here?’

  He almost said, That wouldn’t matter, she’d be with me, then realised how incredibly arrogant that would sound. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘My guess is she wouldn’t be a happy bunny,’ said Grainger. ‘This is not the place for a real woman.’

  You’re a real woman, he wanted to say, but his professional intuition warned him against it. ‘Well, there are a lot of women working here,’ he said. ‘They seem real enough to me.’

  ‘Yeah? Maybe you need to look at them a bit closer.’

  He looked at her a bit closer. A pimple had flared up on her temple, on the tender skin stretched tight just above her right eyebrow. It looked sore. He wondered if she was pre-menstrual. Bea got flare-ups of acne at certain times of the month, and was liable to start strange conversations full of non sequiturs, criticise work colleagues – and talk about sex.

  ‘When I first started working here,’ Grainger went on, ‘I didn’t even notice that nobody hooked up with anybody else. I figured it was probably going on behind my back. The way BG talks, and Tuska . . . But then time goes by, years go by, and you know what? – it never happens. Nobody holds hands. Nobody kisses. Nobody skips work for an hour and comes back with their hair all mussed up and their skirt inside their panties.’

  ‘Do you want them to?’ The decorous reserve of the Oasans had made him less impressed than ever with the reckless ruttings of humans.

  She sighed, exasperated. ‘I’d just like to see some signs of life sometimes.’

  He stopped short of telling her that she was being too harsh. He only said: ‘People don’t have to be sexually active to be alive.’

  She looked at him askance. ‘Hey, you’re not . . . uh . . . I forgot the word . . . when priests take, like, a vow . . . ?’

  ‘Celibate?’ He smiled. ‘No. No, of course not. You know I’m married.’

  ‘Yeah, but I didn’t know what the deal was. I mean, there are all kinds of deals between a man and a woman.’

  Peter shut his eyes, tried to transport himself back to the bed with the yellow duvet, where his wife lay naked and waiting for him. He couldn’t picture her. Couldn’t even picture the yellow duvet, couldn’t even recall the precise hue. Instead, he saw the yellow of Jesus Lover Five’s robe, a distinct canary-yellow he’d trained himself to be able to distinguish from other yellows worn by other Jesus Lovers, because she was his favourite.

  ‘Ours is . . . the full thing,’ he assured Grainger.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’ Whereupon, with a touch of her hand, the engine kindled into life.

  14

  Lost in the mighty unison

  His body jerked erect. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said.

  ‘Was I out for long?’

  She consulted the dashboard. ‘Maybe twenty minutes. A catnap. At first, I figured you were deep in thought.’

  He checked the view through the side window, then faced front. The landscape looked exactly the same as when he’d nodded off.

  ‘Not much to look at, I know,’ said Grainger.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘I just haven’t been sleeping well.’

  ‘Happy to help, go right ahead.’

  He examined her face, trying to judge whether she was annoyed with him, but she’d put on dark glasses at some point during the drive, and her whole head was ablaze with sunlight.

  ‘Your lips,’ she said, ‘are too dry. You’re not drinking enough.’ Keeping one hand on the wheel, she used the other to fetch up a water bottle from the floor between her legs. She handed it over to him, only momentarily taking her eyes off her driving, and fetched up another bottle for herself. Hers was already opened; his was still sealed.

  ‘Remember to keep drinking,’ she said. ‘Dehydration is a killer. And be careful in the sun. Don’t get burned like last time.’

  ‘You’re talking like my wife,’ he said.

  ‘Well, maybe between the two of us, we can keep you alive.’

  He uncapped the bottle and drank deep. The colourless liquid was chilled and it tasted harsh – so harsh that he almost coughed. As discreetly as he could, he glanced at the label, which read, simply, WATER: $50 PER 300ml. She was giving him an expensive imported gift.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, trying to sound chuffed, while actually thinking how strange it was that someone who’d lived on Oasis longer than him could fail to appreciate the superiority of the local water. When his mission was over and he had to return home, he would certainly miss the taste of honeydew.

  Near the end of the long drive, Peter decided that the Oasan settlement deserved a better name than C-2 or Freaktown. He’d tried to find out what the Oasans themselves called it, so he could refer to it by that name, but they appeared not to understand the question, and kept identifying their settlement, in English, as ‘here’. At first he assumed this was because its real name was unpronounceable, but no, there was no real name. Such marvellous humility! The human race would have been spared a great deal of grief and bloodshed if people hadn’t been so attached to names like Stalingrad, Fallujah and Rome, and simply been content to live ‘here’, whatever and wherever ‘here’ might be.

  Even so, ‘Freaktown’ was a problem, and needed fixing.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, when the settlement was within sight. ‘If you had to give this place a new name, what would you call it?’

  She turned towards him, still wearing her dark shades. ‘What’s wrong with C-2?’

  ‘It sounds like something you’d see on a canister of poison gas.’

  ‘Sounds neutral to me.’

  ‘Well, maybe something less neutral would be an improvement.’

  ‘Like . . . let me guess . . . New Jerusalem?’

  ‘That would be disrespectful to the ones who aren’t Christians,’ he said. ‘And anyway, they have a lot of trouble pronouncing “s” sounds.’

  Grainger thought for a minute. ‘Maybe this is a job for Coretta. You know, the girl from Oskaloosa . . . ’

  ‘I remember her. She’s in my prayers.’ Anticipating that Grainger might have trouble with this, he immediately lightened his tone. ‘Although, maybe this isn’t a job for Coretta. I mean, look at “Oasis” – it has two “s”s in it. Maybe she’s really hooked on “s”s. Maybe she’d suggest “Oskaloosa”.’

  The joke fell flat and Grainger remained silent. It seemed his mention of prayer had been a mistake.

  Abruptly the wilderness ended and they were driving into the town’s perimeter. Grainger steered the vehicle towards the same building as before. The word WELCOME, in man-sized letters, had been painted afresh o
n the wall, although this time it read WEL WEL COME as if to add emphasis.

  ‘Just drive straight to the church,’ said Peter.

  ‘The church?’

  He doubted she could have failed to notice the construction site last time she picked him up, but, OK, fine, she needed to play this game and he would indulge her. He pointed towards the horizon, where the large, vaguely Gothic structure, still lacking a roof or a spire, was silhouetted against the afternoon sky. ‘That building there,’ he said. ‘It’s not finished, but I’ll be camping out in it.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But I still have to do my drug delivery.’ And she jerked her head towards the paint-daubed building they’d just left behind.

  Glancing backwards, he noted all the vacant space in the rear of the vehicle, and the box of medicines in the middle of it. ‘Sorry, I forgot. Would you like some moral support?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I really don’t mind staying with you for as long as it takes. I should have remembered.’

  ‘Not your job.’

  She was already steering the car across the scrubland towards the church. There was no point trying to persuade her to turn back and get her drug delivery over with first, even though he was convinced she’d be less stressed if she had company, less spooked if someone of her own kind was at her side. But he couldn’t push. Grainger was a touchy character – and getting touchier the longer he knew her.

  They slowed to a standstill, alongside the western wall of the church. Even without the roof on, the building was big enough to cast shade all over and around them.

  ‘OK, then,’ said Grainger, removing her sunglasses. ‘Have a good time.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be interesting,’ said Peter. ‘Thanks again for driving me here.’

  ‘All the way to . . . Peterville,’ she quipped, as he unsealed the car door.

  He laughed. ‘Out of the question. They have trouble pronouncing “t” sounds too.’

  The humid atmosphere, kept at bay for so long, swirled gleefully into the cabin, licking their faces, clouding the window, slipping into their sleeves, stirring the locks of their hair. Grainger’s face, small and pale inside her swaddle of headscarf, was balmed over with perspiration within a couple of seconds. She frowned irritably, and sweat twinkled in the lush brown hairs where her eyebrows almost met.