The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

‘Everybody who’s been there.’

  ‘Who’s been there?’

  ‘Grainger . . . ’

  ‘Grainger doesn’t venture further in than the perimeter.’ Even as he spoke the words, he was alarmed at his inability to keep the judgemental overtone out of his voice. ‘I don’t think she’s ever set foot inside an Oasan’s house.’

  Berns raised an eyebrow at the word ‘Oasan’, but she caught on instantly. ‘So what is it like? How do they live?’

  ‘Well, their living spaces are kind of . . . minimalist. I wouldn’t use the word primitive. I think that’s how they prefer it.’

  ‘So no electricity.’

  ‘They don’t need it.’

  ‘What do they do all day?’

  It took all his focus to hide from Berns how exasperated this question made him. ‘Work. Sleep. Eat. Talk to each other. Same as us.’

  ‘What do they talk to each other about?’

  He opened his mouth to reply, but found that the part of his brain where he went to fetch the answers was filled with incomprehensible babble, abstract whispers in a foreign language. How strange! When he was with the Oasans and overheard them conversing, he was so used to the sound of their voices, and so familiar with their body language, that he almost thought he understood what they were saying.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can you say “Hello, pleased to meet you” in their language?’

  ‘Sorry, no.’

  ‘Tartaglione used to try that one out on us all the time . . . ’

  Tuska snorted. ‘That’s what he thought it meant. He was just repeating what those guys said to him when they met, right? Hell, it could’ve been “Step right up, dude, it’s a long time since we’ve eaten Italian!”’

  ‘Jeez, Tuska,’ said Berns, ‘can you quit it with the cannibal jokes? These guys are totally harmless.’

  Tuska leaned across the table, fixing his gaze on Peter. ‘Which reminds me: you didn’t answer my question. You know, before Frank Sinatra so rudely interrupted us.’

  ‘Uh . . . can you refresh my memory . . . ?’

  ‘How can you tell that these guys are “good people”? I mean, what do they do that’s so good?’

  Peter gave this some thought. Trickles of sweat were tickling the back of his neck. ‘It’s more that they don’t do anything bad.’

  ‘Yeah? So what’s your role?’

  ‘My role?’

  ‘Yeah. A minister is there to connect people to God, right? Or to Christ, Jesus, whatever. Because people commit sins and they need to be forgiven, right? So . . . what sins are these guys committing?’

  ‘None that I can see.’

  ‘So . . . don’t get me wrong, Peter, but . . . what exactly is the deal here?’

  Peter wiped his brow again. ‘Christianity isn’t just about being forgiven. It’s about living a fulfilled and joyous life. The thing is, being a Christian is an enormous buzz: that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. It’s deep satisfaction. It’s waking up in the morning filled with excitement about every minute that’s ahead of you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tuska, deadpan. ‘You can just see that radiating off of the folks in Freaktown.’

  Berns, worried that the two men were about to have a serious dispute, touched Peter’s forearm and directed his attention to his dinner plate. ‘Your flapjack’s getting cold.’

  He looked down at the rolled-up pancake. It had dried out somewhat, and resembled a rubber dog bone.

  ‘I think I’ll have to leave the rest of this,’ he said. He got to his feet, realising as he did so that he was unbearably sleepy, and that he’d been mistaken to think he was in any state for socialising. It took all his effort to move smoothly, rather than lurch like a drunk. ‘I think I need to lie down for a bit,’ he said. ‘Please excuse me.’

  ‘Decompression,’ said Tuska, and winked.

  ‘Get yourself rested,’ said Berns. And, as he shambled towards the exit: ‘Don’t be a stranger, now.’

  Back in his quarters, he collapsed on the bed and slept for half an hour or so, then woke with an urgent need to vomit. He spewed the undigested pancake into the toilet bowl, drank some water, and felt better. He wished he had a stalk of คฉ้รี่ค to chew on, to keep his mouth fresh without needing to drink. In the settlement, he’d grown accustomed to drinking very little, probably less than a litre a day, despite the heat. Taking in any more just felt excessive, like trying to pour a bucket of water into a small bottle. Your body wasn’t big enough to hold it all; your system was pushed to find a way of getting rid of it.

  The dishdasha was still damp but drying fast. In anticipation of being able to put it on again, he stripped down to his underpants. Then, a few minutes later, he took those off too. They irritated him.

  Peter, why aren’t you writing to me? wrote Bea in the most recent of her messages, freshly arrived. I know you must be very busy but things are difficult here and I’m having trouble coping without your support. I’m just not used to spending day after day without any contact. I won’t deny that being pregnant is probably making me feel extra vulnerable and I don’t want to come across like a needy, hormonal female but on the other hand the silence from you is deafening.

  He felt the blood flush into his face, right to the tips of his ears. He was failing his wife, he was failing his wife. He had promised he would write every day. He’d been busy and bewildered and Bea understood that, but . . . he’d broken his promise and was still breaking it, over and over. And now, under pressure of the anguish he’d caused, she was telling him straight.

  If only she’d sent him just that first paragraph – a five-line message – maybe he could have shot a five-line response back, instantly. A quick shot of reassurance. But there was more. So much more.

  I’m off work, she went on. My right hand is bandaged up and apart from the hygiene issue I can’t nurse one-handed. It’s not serious, but it will take a while to heal. It was my own stupid fault. The bathroom window is broken, as you know, and Graeme Stone said he would come and fix it but when days went by and he didn’t show up I phoned him and he was very embarrassed – he’s moved away. To Birmingham. ‘That’s sudden,’ I said. Turns out his mum’s house was ransacked last week by a gang of thugs and she was left for dead. So he’s moved in with his mum. He’ll take care of her and fix up the place at the same time, he says. Anyway, I phoned up a window repair company next but they said there’s a huge backlog because of all the storms and vandalism recently, and it could be a long wait. Our bathroom is a mess, muck everywhere, it’s too cold to wash in there, I’ve been washing at the kitchen sink, and the wind keeps slamming doors all through the house. Plus it’s not safe, anyone could climb in. So I thought I’d replace the broken pane with a sheet of plastic and some duct tape, and before I knew it I had a gash in my hand. Lots of blood, five stitches. This morning I washed myself left-handed at the kitchen sink while the wind howled through the house and the surviving windows rattled and the toilet door slammed constantly. I had a bit of a cry, I must admit. But then I reminded myself of the extreme suffering and misfortune all over the world.

  You won’t have heard, but a volcanic eruption has destroyed one of the most densely populated cities in Guatemala, I’m not going to attempt to spell the name of the place but it sounds like an Aztec deity. Anyway, a volcano called Santa Maria blew its stack and spewed ash and lava for hundreds of miles around. The people had 24 hours warning, which only made it worse. There were zillions of vehicles jammed onto the roads, everybody was trying to escape with as many of their possessions as they could carry. Roof racks with half a house teetering on top, bicycles with baby cots balanced on them, crazy stuff like that. Cars were trying to take shortcuts through shops, cars were trying to drive on top of other cars, trapped motorists were smashing through their own windscreens to climb out because they couldn’t open the doors, the army wanted to demolish some buildings to widen the bottlenecks but there were too many people in the way. There was n
owhere for planes to land or take off, the entire region just became one vast mass grave. People with only seconds to live were filming the lava with their phones and sending the footage to their relatives overseas. And get this: THERE IS NO RESCUE EFFORT. Can you imagine that? There’s nothing and nobody to rescue. The city has ceased to exist, it’s just part of the volcano now, it’s a geological feature. All those people had so many reasons to live and now what are they? Just chemical traces.

  The ash cloud is colossal and has stopped planes flying, not just over central America but all over the world. Flights had only just resumed after the bombing of Lahore Airport and now they’re grounded again. The airline that took you to the USA has gone out of business. I felt such a surge of distress when I heard that, a lurch in my gut. I remembered standing at Heathrow watching the planes take off and wondering which one was yours and looking forward to you coming back. The airline going bust seems symbolic. It’s like a sign that you won’t be able to come home.

  Everywhere, things are breaking down. Institutions that have been around forever are going to the wall. We’ve seen this happening for years, I know, but it’s accelerating suddenly. And for once, it’s not just the underdogs that suffer while the elites carry on as usual. The elites are being hit just as hard. And I’m not only talking about bankruptcy. Some of the wealthiest people in America were murdered last week, dragged out of their homes and beaten to death. Nobody knows exactly why, but it happened during a power blackout in Seattle that lasted four days. All the systems that keep the city functioning ground to a halt. No pay cheques, no automatic teller machines, no cash registers, no electronic security locks, no TV, no traffic control, no petrol (I didn’t know petrol pumps need electricity to work, but apparently they do). Within 48 hours there was widespread looting and then people started killing each other.

  The situation here in the UK is not so stable either. It’s got rapidly worse since you left. Sometimes I feel as though your leaving caused things to fall apart!

  And there was more. And, in the backlog of previous messages, more still. An inventory of things that were going wrong in the house. Complaints about farcically difficult communications with utilities companies. The sudden impossibility of obtaining fresh eggs. Riots in Madagascar. Joshua pissing on the bed; the washing machine being too small for a queen-sized duvet; the local launderette having closed down. The cancellation of the church’s Saturday morning crèche service. Martial law in Georgia. (Georgia in the Russian Federation or Georgia in the USA? He couldn’t remember whether Bea had made this clear, and he didn’t feel like trawling through the screeds again to check.) Mirah and her husband emigrating to Iran, leaving Mirah’s £300 debt to Bea unpaid. A power surge that blew all the lightbulbs in the house. Government-employed ‘nutrition experts’ defending steep rises in the price of full-cream milk. Smashed windows and ‘For Sale’ signs at the Indian restaurant across the road. Bea’s morning sickness and what she was taking to suppress it. The sacking of a prominent UK government minister who, in a newspaper interview, had described Britain as ‘completely fucked’. Bea’s unrequited cravings for toffee cheesecake and for intimacy with her man. Updates on mutual acquaintances whose faces Peter could not call to mind.

  But, through it all, the uncomprehending hurt that he wasn’t writing to her.

  This morning, I was so frantic about you, I was sure you must have died. I’d been counting the hours until you were due back from the settlement and as soon as I figured you were back, I checked for messages every two minutes. But . . . nothing. I had visions of you dying of an exotic disease from eating something poisonous, or being murdered by the people you’re ministering to. That’s how most missionaries die, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of any other reason why you would leave me in the dark for so long. Finally I cracked and wrote to that USIC guy, Alex Grainger – and got a reply almost immediately. He says you’re fine, says you have a beard now. Can you imagine how I felt, begging a stranger for hints of how my own husband is doing? I’ve eaten many slices of humble pie in my life but that one was hard to swallow. Are you sure you’re not angry with me, deep down, for getting pregnant? It was bad of me to stop taking the Pill without telling you, I know that. Please, please forgive me. I did it out of love for you and out of fear that you would die and there’d be nothing of you left. It wasn’t a selfish thing, you must believe me. I prayed and prayed about it, trying to figure out if I was just a female hankering for offspring. But in my heart, I can’t see it. All I see is love for you and for the baby that will carry some of you into the future. OK, I broke our agreement that we would wait, and that was wrong, but remember we also had an agreement that you would never drink again and then you went AWOL from the Salford Pentecost Powerhouse and I had to pick up the pieces. I understand why you went off the rails and we got over it and it’s in the past, and I’m tremendously proud of you, but the point is that you made me a solemn promise and you broke it, and life went on and so it should. And although I hate to appear as though I’m jockeying for higher moral ground, your going on a bender in Salford wasn’t done out of love, whereas my getting pregnant was.

  Anyway, enough of that. My hand is throbbing from typing this and your head is probably throbbing from having to read it. I’m sorry. I should lighten up. A workman from the window company is thumping about downstairs, fixing the bathroom. I’d given up hope; I’m ashamed to say I’d even given up praying for it. After all, I’d been told that the waiting list stretched ahead for weeks. But lo and behold: bright and early this morning, the guy showed up and said his boss had told him to shift his schedule around and do our place first. God forgets nothing!

  My darling Peter, please write. It doesn’t have to be the definitive statement on everything. A few lines would make me so happy. One line even. Just say hello.

  Your loving wife,

  Bea

  He felt feverish and dehydrated. He walked to the fridge and had a swig of water, then stood for a minute with his hot forehead pressed against the cool shell of the machine.

  He sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet lay the loose pages of a Bible chapter he was adapting for his flock. Luke 3. John the Baptist announcing that there was someone coming soon ‘the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose’. Oh, that awkward word ‘latchet’. And its even more awkward alternatives, ‘strap’ and ‘shoelace’. He’d considered ‘leather band’, but there was the additional problem that Oasans’ footwear had no straps or laces and the entire concept might require explanation, which might be more trouble than it was worth, theologically speaking. If only he could think of an equivalent detail to replace the shoe stuff with . . . ‘whose (something) I am not worthy to (something)’ . . . Obviously, to mess around with the metaphors and similes of Jesus was unacceptable, but this was John, a mere mortal, no more divine than any other missionary, his utterances no more sacred than Peter’s own. Or were they? The Oasans had made it clear that they preferred their Scripture as literal as possible, and his misguided attempt to translate ‘manna’ as ‘whiteflower’ had caused murmurs of –

  ‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?’

  He flinched. The voice – low-pitched, male and loud – had spoken right near his ear. He wheeled round. No one had entered the room. And God, surely, did not resort to four-letter words.

  Dear Bea, he wrote,

  I’m so sorry for my silence. I’ve been busy, true, but that’s not the reason I haven’t been writing. The real reason is hard to explain but it certainly isn’t that I’m angry with you and CERTAINLY not because I don’t love you.

  This mission has turned out very different from what I anticipated. The things I expected to have a lot of trouble with have gone astonishingly smoothly but I feel out of my depth in other ways I never imagined. I assumed that I would be fighting an uphill battle to minister to the Oasans and that it would take me weeks, maybe even months, to construct even the flimsiest, most provisional bridge between these very foreign minds/hearts and the lov
e of God awaiting them on the other side. But what has actually tested me beyond my abilities is the gulf that has opened up between you and me. I don’t mean an emotional gulf, in that my feelings for you have changed in any way. I mean a barrier that circumstances has pushed between us. Of course, physically, we are a huge distance apart. That doesn’t help. But the main thing I’m having to confront is that our relationship, until now, has totally depended on us being together. We’ve always seen and done things as a team and discussed everything as it’s come up, day by day, minute by minute – even second by second. Suddenly we’re on different paths. And your path has veered off in a frighteningly strange direction.

  All these disasters that are befalling the world – the tsunamis and earthquakes and financial meltdowns or whatever – are just so alien to my life here. They don’t feel real. I’m ashamed to admit this because obviously to the people suffering through them they’re very real indeed but I have enormous trouble getting my head around them. And I very quickly reach a point where I think ‘If she tells me about one more disaster my brain will seize up.’ Of course I’m horrified by this failure of compassion, but the more I strain to overcome it the worse it becomes.

  Another problem is that I find it almost impossible to talk about the Oasans to anyone who doesn’t know them. Not just to you, to the USIC guys as well. My communion with my new brothers and sisters in Christ seems to happen on a different plane, as though I’m speaking their language even though I’m not. Trying to describe it afterwards is like trying to explain what a smell looks like or what a sound tastes like.

  But I must try.

  The basics: The church is built. We worship in it regularly. I’ve taught the Oasans adapted versions of hymns that they can sing without too much difficulty. (The insides of their faces aren’t like ours; they have throats but I’m not convinced they have tongues.) I read to them from the Bible, which they insist on calling The Book of Strange New Things. They have a marked preference for the New Testament over the Old. Thrilling OT adventure stories like Daniel in the lions’ den, Samson & Delilah, David & Goliath, etc, don’t connect with them. They ask comprehension-type questions but you can tell that even on an ‘action’ level they don’t really get it. What floats their boat is Jesus and forgiveness. An evangelist’s dream.