The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  And, from the first page, he read Psalm 23. ‘The Lord be He who care for me. I will need no more . . . ’ and so on, until he reached ‘I will dwell in the home of the Lord for ever.’

  Then he read it again.

  And again.

  Each time he read it, more of the Oasans read it aloud with him. Were they reading or reciting? It didn’t matter. Their communal voice was swelling, and it sounded melodious and clear, almost entirely free of vocal impairments. ‘He bid me lie in green land down. He lead me by river where no one can drown. He make my สีoul like new again. He lead me in the path of Good. He do all thiสี, for He be God.’

  By the fifth repetition, his own voice was lost in the mighty unison.

  15

  Hero of the moment, king of the day

  A wise man once asked Peter: ‘Do you know what you are?’

  ‘What I am?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was a question that could mean so many things, depending on who was posing it. It had, for example, been uttered to him on several occasions by angry thugs who’d supplied the answer themselves – ‘A stupid cunt’, or some similar insult – and then beat him up. It had been asked of him by officials and bureaucrats who regarded him, for one reason or other, as a thorn in their side. It had been said affectionately and admiringly too, by people who went on to tell him he was ‘a total sweetie’, ‘a treasure’, or even ‘my rock’. Big things to live up to.

  ‘I try not to think about myself too much. I hope I’m just a man who loves God.’

  ‘You’re a people person,’ the wise man said, nodding decisively. ‘That will take you a very long way.’ The wise man was the pastor of a church that Peter would soon inherit. He was an elderly soul, and had that special mixture of benign tolerance and stoic disappointment typical of a minister who’d been in the job too long. He was intricately familiar with all the ways his parishioners were resistant to change, all the ways they could be a pain in the arse – though he would never use such language, of course.

  ‘You like people. That’s actually quite rare,’ the old pastor went on.

  ‘Isn’t it basic human nature to be sociable?’

  ‘I’m not talking about that,’ said the old man. ‘I don’t think you’re necessarily that sociable. A bit of a loner, even. What I mean is, you’re not disgusted or irritated by the human animal. You just take them as they come. Some people never get fed up with dogs; they’re dog people. Doesn’t matter what sort of dog it is, big or small, placid or yappy, well-behaved or naughty – they’re all lovable in their own way, because they’re dogs and dogs are a good thing. A pastor should feel that way about human beings. But you know what? – not many do. Not many at all. You’ll go far, Peter.’

  It had felt odd to be told this, with such certitude, by a sage old-timer who wasn’t easily fooled. Peter’s co-existence with his fellow humans had not always been a happy one, after all. Could someone who’d behaved as badly as he did when he was in his teens and twenties – lying and breaking promises and stealing from any altruistic fool who gave him the benefit of the doubt – truly be said to love people? And yet the old pastor was well aware of his history. There were no secrets between shepherds.

  Now, Peter was sitting cross-legged, dazzled by the light, half-delirious. Right in front of him, also cross-legged, sat a small boy – himself when eight or nine years old. He was a Cub Scout. He was proud and happy to be a Cub Scout, possessor of a green shirt and sewn-on badges and arcane knowledge about knots and tent pitching and the proper way to light a fire. He was looking forward to becoming a fully-fledged Scout soon, not just a Cub, so that he could learn archery and go hiking in the mountains and save the lives of strangers who had been buried under avalanches or bitten by snakes. As it turned out, he would never get to be a Scout – his family circumstances would soon become too awkward, and the Cubs membership would be cancelled and his uniform would sit neatly folded in the cupboard until finally the silverfish ruined it – but at eight he didn’t know that yet, and he was sitting cross-legged in his shorts and neckerchief, almost levitating with pleasure to be here amongst his wolf pack.

  Sweat trickled from his brow into his eyes. He blinked and the blurry world sharpened into view. The child sitting before him was not himself at the age of eight. It was not even a child. It was Jesus Lover Seventeen, a creature unlike him in almost every imaginable way, except that she, or he, or it could sit cross-legged and clasp hands in prayer. Her robe was spinach-green, and so were her soft boots, albeit speckled with brown dirt. The sun, almost directly overhead, cast a shadow under her hood, swallowing her face in blackness.

  ‘What are you thinking, Jesus Lover Seventeen?’ he asked.

  There was, as always, a pause. The Oasans were unaccustomed to thinking about thinking, or maybe they just found it difficult to translate their thoughts into English.

  ‘Before you came,’ said Jesus Lover Seventeen, ‘we were all alone and weak. Now, รี่ogether, we are สีรี่rong.’

  There was something poignant about the fact that her tongue, or vocal cords, or whatever it was she spoke with, could manage the words ‘alone’ and ‘weak’ without much trouble, but that the words ‘together’ and ‘strong’ were almost impossible for her to utter. Her petite form made her look all the more vulnerable, but then everyone sitting round about her was petite and vulnerable-looking, too, with their thin arms and narrow shoulders and grubby mittens and booties. He might be ministering to a tribe of children and shrunken old people, a tribe that had lost all its full-sized men and women.

  That wasn’t a fair view of them, of course; it was a failure to perceive their bodies as the norm, and his own as the aberration. He tried as hard as he could to adjust his vision, until the hundred-odd beings squatting before him grew to a mature scale, and he became a hulking monster.

  ‘The Book,’ suggested Jesus Lover One, from his preferred spot near the middle of the congregation. ‘Give word from the Book.’

  ‘The Book,’ several other voices agreed, relieved, perhaps, to be voicing two words that did not humiliate them.

  Peter nodded, to signal he would comply. His Bible was always close to hand, shrouded in plastic wrapping inside his rucksack to keep the moisture out, and the Oasans would make noises of appreciation whenever he brought it to light. But oftentimes he didn’t even need to fetch it, because he had such an exceptional memory for Scripture. He looked inside his head now, and almost instantly found something appropriate, from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. His brain was a weird organ, that’s for sure; sometimes he visualised it as a grubby cauliflower covered with scars and scorch-marks from the life he’d led, but at other times it seemed more like a spacious storehouse in which whatever verses he needed at any given moment were on display, already underlined.

  ‘Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners,’ he quoted, ‘but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God.’

  A murmur of approval – satisfaction, even – emanated from the brightly dressed creatures sitting before him. The Bible verses were like a particularly mellow alcoholic drink that had been passed around. This was King James liquor – the real stuff. Oh, sure, the Oasans were grateful for the paraphrased booklets Peter had prepared for them. The pages were already much-thumbed, rippled with damp, and the words had been sung and recited often in these long, balmy days that he and his flock had spent together. And yet, Peter could tell that the booklets were not quite the solution he’d hoped they would be. They were referred to as ‘our Word-in-Hand’, a phrase which delighted him at first, until he realised that it served to differentiate the booklets from the genuine Book of Strange New Things. The hand-made pamphlets were seen as a local home-brew, a moonshi
ne compromise, whereas the big King James, with its machine-tooled faux-leather cover and gold-embossed spine, was considered pure and definitive – the True Source.

  Now, drinking in the verses from Ephesians, the Oasans were truly contented. Their hooded heads hung lower, casting all their faces into even deeper shadow. Their clasped hands moved gently in their laps, as though re-tracing, re-savouring, the rhythm of the rhetoric. Such subtle movements were their equivalent of a Southern Baptist congregation hollering ‘Hallelujah!’

  Fond as he was of the King James, Peter was uneasy about the awe it inspired among his flock. It was just a translation, after all, with no greater claim to authenticity than many other translations. Jesus hadn’t expressed himself in Jacobean English, nor had Paul or the Old Testament prophets. Did the Oasans understand that? He doubted it. Which was a shame, because once it dawned on you that everyone who wasn’t a native speaker of Canaanite Hebrew, Koine Greek or Galilean Aramaic was at an equal disadvantage, you could relax and feel that Scripture in your own tongue was as good as Scripture in anyone else’s. Yet he thought he detected, in the Oasans, a sense of inferiority, which troubled him. He didn’t want to be like some old-fashioned imperialist missionary, poncing about like Moses in a safari suit, capitalising on a misconception that he was from the same tribe as Jesus and that God was an Englishman.

  He’d considered gently disabusing the Oasans of their veneration of ‘the Book’, with an informative talk on the various languages that lay behind the seventeenth-century text, but decided that such a lecture would only make things more complicated, especially since the Oasans were very attached to key scriptures they’d learned in Kurtzberg’s time, and Kurtzberg had evidently been a King James fan. And no wonder. Any Christian preacher who loved language was bound to love the King James: you just couldn’t beat those cadences. So maybe, when dealing with these people, 100%-proof Jacobean followed by a chaser in plain English was the way to go.

  ‘What Saint Paul is saying to his new friends,’ Peter explained, ‘is that once you’ve heard the word of God, it doesn’t matter how foreign you are, how far away you live. You become part of the community of Christians, all the Christians who’ve ever existed, including the ones who were alive when Jesus walked the earth. Then Paul goes on to compare us to a house. A house is built from many bricks or stones fitted together to make a big structure, and all of us are stones in the house that God is building.’

  Dozens of hooded heads nodded. ‘All are สีรี่oneสี.’

  ‘We built our church together,’ said Peter, ‘and it’s a beautiful thing.’ Almost in choreographed formation, the Oasans turned their heads to look at the church, a building they considered so sacred that they set foot in it only for formal services, despite Peter’s urging that they should treat it as their home. ‘But you – all of you, gathered together here today, just sitting in the sun – are the real Church that God has built.’

  Jesus Lover Five, in the front row as always, swayed to and fro in disagreement.

  ‘ฐurฐ iสี ฐurฐ,’ she stated. ‘We are we. God iสี God.’

  ‘When we are filled with the Holy Spirit,’ said Peter, ‘we can be more than ourselves: we can be God in action.’

  Jesus Lover Five was unconvinced. ‘God never die,’ she said. ‘We die.’

  ‘Our bodies die,’ said Peter. ‘Our souls live for ever.’

  Jesus Lover Five pointed a gloved finger straight at Peter’s torso. ‘Your body noรี่ die,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it will die,’ said Peter. ‘I’m just flesh and blood like anyone else.’ He certainly felt his flesh-and-bloodness now. The sun was giving him a headache, his buttocks were going numb and he needed to pee. After a some hesitation, he relaxed his bladder and allowed the urine to flow out onto the soil. That was the way it was done here; no point being precious about it.

  Jesus Lover Five had fallen silent. Peter couldn’t tell if she was persuaded, reassured, sulking or what. What had she meant, anyway? Was Kurtzberg one of those Lutheran-flavoured fundamentalists who believed that dead Christians would one day be resurrected into their old bodies – magically freshened up and incorruptible, with no capacity to feel pain, hunger or pleasure – and go on to use those bodies for the rest of eternity? Peter had no time for that doctrine himself. Death was death, decay was decay, only the spirit endured.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said to those assembled. ‘What have you heard about life after death?’

  Jesus Lover One, in his self-appointed role as custodian of the Oasans’ history in the faith, spoke up.

  ‘Corinthian.’

  It took Peter a while to recognise the word – intimately familiar to him, and yet so unexpected here and now. ‘Corinthians, yes,’ he said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Corinthian,’ Jesus Lover One said again. ‘Give word from the Book.’

  Peter consulted the Bible in his head, located Corinthians 15:54, but it wasn’t a passage he’d ever felt moved to quote in his sermons, so the exact wording was indistinct – something corruptible something-something incorruption . . . The next verse was memorable enough, one of those Bible nuggets that everybody knew even if they ascribed it to Shakespeare, but he figured Jesus Lover One wanted more than a one-liner.

  With a grunt of effort, he got to his feet. A hum of anticipation went through the crowd as he walked to his rucksack and extracted the Book from its plastic sheath. The gold-embossed lettering flashed in the sun. He remained standing, to give his muscles a change of tension, as he flicked the pages.

  ‘So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption,’ he recited, ‘and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’

  Reading the words aloud, Peter reconnected with why he hadn’t ever used them in his sermons. The sentiments were sound enough but the rhetoric was a bit more bombastic than he felt comfortable with. To do those words justice, you’d need a highly dramatic delivery, a touch of thespian pomp, and he just wasn’t that kind of orator. Low-key sincerity was more his style.

  ‘What Paul is saying here,’ he explained, ‘is that when we give our souls to Christ, the part of us that dies and decays – the body – is clothed with something that cannot die or decay – the eternal spirit. So we have nothing to fear from death.’

  ‘Nothing,’ echoed several of the Oasans. ‘Fear.’

  Peter’s second sojourn in the place USIC called Freaktown was as bewildering and exciting as the first. He got to know the Oasans better – that was to be expected – but he also saw changes in himself, changes he couldn’t articulate but which felt profound and important. Just as the atmosphere penetrated his clothes and seemed to pass through his skin, something unfamiliar was permeating his head, soaking into his mind. It wasn’t in the least sinister. It was as benign as benign could be.

  Not all of it was enjoyable, though. Halfway into his stay, Peter went through a strange phase which, looking back on it afterwards, he could only call the Crying Jag. It happened during one of the long, long nights and he woke up somewhere in the middle of it with tears in his eyes, not knowing what he had dreamt to make him weep. Then, for hours and hours, he continued to cry. Upsurges of sorrow just kept pumping through his bloodstream, as if administered at medically supervised intervals by a gadget inside his body. He cried about the weirdest things, things he had long forgotten, things he would not have imagined could rank very high in his roll-call of griefs.

  He cried for the tadpoles he’d kept in a jar when he was a kid, the ones that might have grown into frogs if he’d left them safe in their pond instead of watching them turn to grey sludge. He cried for Cleo the cat, stiff on the kitchen floor, her matted chin stuck to dried gravy on the rim of her plate. He cried for lunch money he’d lost on the way to school; he cried for a stolen bicycle, recalling the exact feel of its rubbery handles in h
is palms. He cried for the bullied classmate who killed herself after her tormenters squirted ketchup in her hair; he cried for the swallow that flew against his bedroom window and fell lifeless to the concrete far below; he cried for the magazines that kept arriving for his father each month, shrinkwrapped, long after his father had left home; he cried for Mr Ali’s corner newsagency and off-licence that went out of business; he cried for the hapless anti-war marchers pushing on through the bucketing rain, their placards drooping, their children sullen.

  He cried about the ‘Quilts For Peace’ that his mother sewed for charity auctions. Even when her fellow Quakers took pity and put in a few bids, those quilts never fetched much because they were gaudy patchworks that clashed with every décor known to civilised man. He cried for the quilts that had gone unsold and he cried for the quilts that had found a home and he cried for the way his mother had explained, with such lonely enthusiasm, that all the colours symbolised national flags and the blue and white could be Israel or Argentina and the red polka dots were Japan and the green, yellow and red stripes with the stars in the middle could be Ethiopia, Senegal, Ghana or Cameroon depending on which way you were sleeping.