The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  He cried about his Cubs uniform, eaten by silverfish. Oh, how he cried about that. Each vanished thread of fibre, each pathetic little hole in the useless garments, caused a swelling in his chest and stung his eyes anew. He cried about not having known that the final time he attended the Scout hall was the final time. Someone should have told him.

  He cried about stuff that had happened to Bea, too. The family photograph of her when she was six, with a livid rectangular rash across her mouth and cheeks, caused by the adhesive tape. How could someone do that to a kid? He cried about her doing her homework in the toilet while the kitchen was full of strangers and her bedroom was out of bounds. He cried about other incidents from Bea’s childhood as well; all of them from before he met her. It was as though different vintages of sadness were stored in different parts of his mind, stacked chronologically, and his tear ducts were on the end of electrical wires that didn’t touch any recent decades – just went straight to the distant past. The Bea he wept for was a pretty little ghost conjured up from his wife’s stash of photos and anecdotes, but no less pitiable for that.

  Towards the end of his weeping fit, he cried about the coin collection his father had given him. It was shop-bought but serious, a handsomely packaged starter set that included a French franc, an Italian lira, a 10-drachma bit, a German 50-pfennig with a woman planting a seedling on it, and other commonplace treasures which, to a clueless boy, seemed like relics from an ancient epoch, the prehistoric empire of numismatics. Ah, happy innocence . . . but not long afterwards a schoolfriend murmured in his ear, serpent-like, that this prissy little collection was not valuable at all, and persuaded him to swap the lot for a single coin that had been minted, he said, in 333 AD. It was misshapen and corroded but it had a helmeted warrior engraved on it and Peter fell under its spell. His father was furious, when he found out. He kept saying ‘If genuine . . . ’, ‘If genuine . . . ’ in a fastidiously dubious tone, and lecturing Peter about the extreme commonness of Constantine copper coins, and how damaged this one was, and how the whole damn business of collecting was infested with fakery. Peter kept protesting, hotly, ‘You weren’t there!’, referring not just to the reign of Constantine but also to the moment when a small, impressionable boy was defeated by a bigger, cleverer one. For years, that poisonous repetition of ‘If genuine . . . ’ festered in his mind, proof of everything that was creepy and cold about his father. By the time Peter was ready to understand that the quarrel was bluster and that his dad had simply been hurt, the old man was in his grave.

  About all these things and more, Peter wept. Then he felt better, as if purged. His raw eyelids, which would have needed careful pampering if he’d been anywhere but here, were soothed by the oily moistness of the warm air. His head, which had started to pound towards the end of his crying jag, felt light and pleasantly anaesthetised.

  ‘A very long สีong,’ said Jesus Lover Five, sitting with her back against the lectern. He hadn’t noticed her arrive. This wasn’t the first time she’d come to the church to visit him, at an hour when most others of her kind were sleeping.

  ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’ he asked, heaving himself up on one elbow. He could barely see her; the entire church was lit with nothing more powerful than a couple of oil flames floating in ceramic soup-bowls: toy braziers.

  ‘Awake,’ she said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did.

  He replayed her comment in his head. A very long song. Evidently, to her, his weeping sounded no different from singing. The distress in his voice was lost in translation; she heard only the horn-like music of whimpering, the rhythm of sobs. Maybe she would have liked to join in, but couldn’t make out any words.

  ‘I was remembering things from long ago,’ he explained.

  ‘Long ago,’ she echoed. Then: ‘Long ago, the Lord สีaid รี่o Iสีrael, I have loved you, my people.’

  The quote from Jeremiah surprised him, not because she had managed to memorise it, but because it was from a more modern translation than the King James – the New Living, if he wasn’t mistaken. Did Kurtzberg pick and choose between different Bibles? In the King James, ‘long ago’ was ‘of old’, while the original Hebrew meant something more like ‘from afar’.

  Long ago and far away . . . maybe they were the same thing after all. Rousing himself from his scholarly fog, he opened his mouth to ask Jesus Lover Five why she had quoted that bit of Scripture, what it meant to her.

  But Lover Five’s head was slumped onto her chest. Whatever the reason for her insomnia at home in her own bed, she had found sleep here, with him.

  It was during his second sojourn with the Oasans, also, that Peter experienced his first death. His first dead Oasan, that is.

  He still had no clear idea of the size of the settlement’s population, but was inclined to think that it might be a few thousand, and that the Jesus Lovers represented only a tiny minority of the souls living in this great hive of dwellings. Birth and death must surely be going on as normal inside those amber walls, the same as in any other big town, but he had no access to it – until, one day, Jesus Lover One came and told him that his mother had died.

  ‘My mother,’ he announced. ‘Dead.’

  ‘Oh! I’m so sorry!’ said Peter, instinctively putting his arms around Lover One. He could tell at once that it was the wrong thing to do, like embracing a woman who absolutely doesn’t want to be touched by anyone other than her husband. Lover One’s shoulders cringed, his body stiffened, his arms trembled, his face turned away lest it brush against Peter’s chest. Peter released him and stepped back in embarrassment.

  ‘Your mother,’ he blurted. ‘What an awful loss.’

  Lover One gave this notion some deliberation before responding.

  ‘Mother made me,’ he said at last. ‘If mother never be, I never be alสีo. Mother therefore very imporรี่anรี่ man.’

  ‘Woman.’

  ‘Woman, yeสี.’

  A few more seconds passed. ‘When did she die?’ asked Peter.

  Again there was a pause. Oasans had difficulty choosing the linguistic boxes into which they felt obliged, by others, to put their conceptions of time. ‘Before you came.’

  ‘Before I came to . . . Oasis?’

  ‘Before you came with Word-in-Hand.’

  Last few days, then. Maybe even yesterday. ‘Is she . . . Has there been a funeral?’

  ‘Few . . .?’

  ‘Have you put her in the ground?’

  ‘สีoon,’ said Jesus Lover One, with a pacifying motion of the glove, as if giving his solemn promise that the procedure would be attended to as soon as it was feasible. ‘Afรี่er the harveสีรี่.’

  ‘After the . . .?’

  Lover One searched his vocabulary for a pronounceable alternative. ‘The reaping.’

  Peter nodded, although he didn’t really understand. He guessed that this reaping must be the harvest of one of the Oasans’ food crops, a job so time-sensitive and labour-intensive that the community simply couldn’t fit a funeral into their schedule. The old lady would have to wait. He imagined a wizened, slightly smaller version of Lover One nestled motionless in her bed, one of those cots that already so closely resembled a coffin. He imagined the fluffy wisps of bedding being wrapped around her like a cocoon, in preparation for her burial.

  As it turned out, there was no need to guess or imagine. Lover One, speaking in the same tone he might have used to invite a guest to see a notable monument or tree (if this place had had such things as monuments and trees), invited him to come and see the body of his mother.

  Peter tried and failed to think of a suitable reply. ‘Good idea’, ‘Thank you’, and ‘I’d like that’ all felt wrong somehow. Instead, in silence, he put on his yellow boots. It was a brilliant morning, and the shade inside his church ill-prepared him for the dazzling sunshine.

  He accompanied Jesus Lover One across the scrubland to the compound, taking two steps for every three or four of the Oasan’s.
He was learning many things on this visit, and how to amble was one of them. There was an art to walking slower than your instinct told you to, keeping pace with a much smaller person, yet not appearing exasperated or clumsy. The trick was to pretend you were wading through waist-deep water, watched by a judge who would award you points for poise.

  Side by side, they reached Jesus Lover One’s house. It looked identical to all the others, and had not been adorned with any flags, accoutrements or painted messages proclaiming an inhabitant’s death. A few people were walking around nearby, no more than normal, and they were getting on with business as usual, as far as Peter could tell. Lover One led him around the back of the building, to the patch of ground where clothing was washed and hung, and where children often played with คฐฉ้ฐ, the Oasan equivalent of boules, soft dark balls made of compacted moss.

  Today, there were no children or คฐฉ้ฐ, and the washing line strung between two houses was bare. The yard was given over to Jesus Lover One’s mother.

  Peter gazed at the small body lying uncushioned and uncovered on the ground. It had been stripped of its robe. This alone would have made Peter unable to tell whether he’d known this person or not, as he was still dependent, to a shameful degree, on fabric colour. But even if he’d managed to remember some distinctive aspect of this creature’s physiognomy – some variation in skin texture or the shape of facial bulges – it wouldn’t have helped now, as the body was obscured under a shimmering, shivering layer of insects.

  He looked aside at Jesus Lover One, to gauge how alarmed he should be at this nightmarish spectacle. Maybe when Lover One had set off earlier this morning, the corpse had been free of parasites and they’d all seized their opportunity in his absence. If so, Lover One didn’t seem perturbed by the swarm. He contemplated the insects as calmly as if they were flowers on a shrub. Admittedly, these bugs were every bit as beautiful as flowers: they had iridescent wings, glossy carapaces of lavender and yellow. Their buzz was musical. They covered almost every inch of flesh, giving the corpse the appearance of a twitching, breathing effigy.

  ‘Your mother . . . ’ Peter began, lost for further words.

  ‘My mother gone,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Only her body remain.’

  Peter nodded, striving to hide the queasy fascination provoked in him by the insect horde. Lover One’s philosophical attitude to the situation was perfectly sound – it was what Peter himself would have tried to persuade him to feel, had Lover One been terribly distraught. But the fact that Lover One wasn’t terribly distraught, or didn’t appear to be, confused Peter. It was one thing to deliver a funeral address to a bunch of unbelieving USIC workers, urging them to regard the body merely as a vehicle for the immortal soul; it was quite another thing to be standing next to someone who’d taken that principle so deeply to heart that they could watch their own mother’s body being overrun with insects. Peter’s eyes were drawn to one of the woman’s feet: the bugs, in their restless fidgeting, had exposed the toes. There were eight of them, very small and narrow. He’s assumed, because the Oasans were five-fingered, that they’d be five-toed, too. The mistakenness of that assumption made him realise how far he had to go before he truly understood these people.

  ‘Forgive me for not remembering, Lover One,’ said Peter, ‘but did I ever meet your mother? Before today?’

  ‘Never,’ Lover One replied. ‘Walk from here รี่o our ฐurฐ . . . รี่oo far.’

  Peter wondered whether this was an ironic comment, implying that she’d never summoned up sufficient motivation to visit, or whether it literally meant she’d been too weak or ill to walk the distance. Most likely it was literal.

  ‘My mother begin – only begin – รี่o know Jeสีuสี,’ Lover One explained. He made a gesture in the air, gently rotating his hand to indicate slow, stumbling progress. ‘Every day, we carry your wordสี away from ฐurฐ in our handสี, and we bring them รี่o her. Every day, wordสี go in her like food. Every day, สีhe come more near รี่o the Lord.’ And he turned his face in the direction of Peter’s church, as if watching his mother walk there after all.

  In the days that followed, Peter learned what was really meant by ‘the harvest’. He realised that Jesus Lover One’s reason for fetching him to see the corpse had nothing to do with emotions. It was educative.

  The alighting of the bugs on the flesh was just the first step in an industrious husbandry managed by the Oasans in every detail. The body, Peter learned, had been painted with a poison which intoxicated the bugs so that when they’d finished laying eggs, they were semi-conscious, unable to fly. The Oasans then collected them and, with great care, pulled them to bits. The legs and wings, when ground up and dried, made a fearsomely potent seasoning: one pinch could flavour a vat of food. The bodies yielded a rich nectar which was mixed with water and whiteflower to make honey, or processed into a vivid yellow dye. And, while various members of the Oasan community were busy transforming the insects’ remains into useful materials, the insects’ eggs were busy hatching. Peter was fetched at regular intervals to witness how things were getting on.

  Like most people he’d ever known, except for one frankly barmy biology teacher at school, Peter was not very keen on maggots. Wise and practical though it might be to accept the naturalness of death and decay, the sight of those opportunistic little larvae always disgusted him. But the maggots on the body of Jesus Lover One’s mother were like nothing he’d ever seen before. They were calm and fat, rice-white, each the size of a large fruit-pip. There were many thousands of them, densely packed and pearlescent, and if you stared at them long enough they didn’t look like maggots at all, but like a cornucopia of albino raspberries.

  These, too, the Oasans harvested.

  When, at last, the body of Jesus Lover One’s mother had yielded all the bounty it was going to yield, she lay exhausted on the ground, in the shade of a couple of gently swaying garments that hung on the washing line nearby. Since she was the only Oasan Peter had seen completely naked, he had no way of telling how much of the grotesquery he saw before him was due to decay and how much of it was what he would have found under the clothing of any healthy, living Oasan. Her flesh, which smelled fermented but not foul, had turned grey as clay, and was pitted with pocks and cavities. She had no breasts or anything else suggesting human femaleness – or maleness. The paradigm he had in his head, based on photographs of human corpses in famines and concentration camps, was of flesh shrunk down to a thin parchment of skin to hold the bones together. That wasn’t what confronted him here. Lover One’s mother apparently had no ribs, no skeleton, just solid flesh that was liquefying. The holes eaten into her arms and legs exposed a ribbed black substance like liquorice.

  Monster, was the word that came to his mind as he suppressed a shudder. But then Creatura: created thing, he reminded himself.

  ‘Now we puรี่ her in the ground,’ said Lover One on the third day. There was no urgency or ceremonial portent in his voice, nor was it clear what he meant by ‘now’. As far as Peter was aware, no grave had been dug and there was no evidence of the community preparing for a solemn ritual.

  ‘Would you like me to . . . say something?’ suggested Peter. ‘At the funeral?’

  ‘Funeral?’

  ‘It’s the custom of our . . . ’ he began. Then, ‘When Christians . . . ’ he began again. Then, ‘Where I come from, when a person dies and is being buried, someone usually makes a speech before the body is put into the ground. They talk about the person who’s died, and they try to remind his friends and family about what made that person special.’

  Lover One bowed his head in courtesy. ‘You never know my mother,’ he pointed out, with stonkingly obvious good sense.

  ‘That’s true,’ Peter conceded. ‘But you could tell me some things about her, and I could turn those things into a . . . speech.’ Even as he made the offer, it seemed absurd.

  ‘Word can make no ฐange in my mother now,’ said Love
r One.

  ‘Words can comfort the friends and family left behind,’ said Peter. ‘Would you like me to read from the Book?’

  Jesus Lover One smoothed his hands over an invisible molehill in the air, signalling that this would not be necessary. ‘Kurรี่สีberg give uสี word from the Book, long before.’ And he recited them for Peter’s approval.

  A trickle of lisping nonsense entered Peter’s ears. It took him a few seconds to re-play the meaningless syllables and translate them into a Bible verse, a verse which in fact was not from the Bible but from the Book of Common Prayer:

  ‘Aสีheสี รี่o aสีheสี, duสีรี่ รี่o duสีรี่.’

  For several dozen hours after this incident, Peter lived in fear that some generous soul would bring him, as a special treat, a dish made from maggots. The Oasans were always bringing him snacks and – who knows? – they might think he was getting fed up with whiteflower. Surprise dessert for Father Peter!

  He knew his revulsion was irrational, as the food would no doubt be delicious and probably very good for him too. Moreover he was aware that every country had its culinary challenges which provoked disgust in squeamish foreigners – the Japanese with their giant fish eyeballs and cod semen and still-squirming octopus, the Africans with their goat heads, the Chinese with their bird’s nest soup that was really saliva, and so on. If he’d been ministering in any of these places, chances were he’d be honoured with one of these specialties. Wasn’t there even an Italian cheese that was rotten and maggot-infested? Casu marzu, it was called. (Amazing how he could retrieve that term, which he probably read just once in a magazine years ago, when only yesterday he’d blanked on the name of the street where he lived.)

  Of course, he’d never had to eat any of these outlandish substances. All of his ministries, until now, had been in England. The most exotic thing he’d ever been served, at an outreach convention in Bradford, had been caviar, and his problem hadn’t been the fish eggs themselves, but the money that the organisers had channelled into the catering when they were supposed to be raising funds for the city’s homeless.