The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  Satisfied with what she’d done, she pressed the transmission button. The text trembled on the screen while, elsewhere in the compound, another pair of tired eyes examined it. Then it vanished.

  ‘Another five thousand bucks down the hatch,’ said Grainger, with a shrug.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Each of your Shoots costs about five thousand dollars to send,’ she said. ‘And each of your wife’s also, of course, to receive.’ She wiped her face with her hands, breathing deeply, trying to suck much-needed energy from her own palms. ‘Another reason why the personnel here aren’t communicating daily with a bunch of pals back home.’

  Peter tried to do a mental calculation. Maths wasn’t his strong suit, but he knew the number was appallingly big. ‘Nobody told me,’ he said.

  ‘We were told not to tell you,’ she said. ‘No expense spared for the missionary man.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘USIC wanted you real bad,’ said Grainger. ‘You were, like, our first VIP.’

  ‘I never asked . . . ’

  ‘You didn’t need to ask. My . . . guidelines were to give you anything you wanted. Within reason. Because, you know, before you came, things were getting kinda . . . strained.’

  ‘Things?’ He couldn’t imagine what things. A spiritual crisis amongst the USIC personnel?

  ‘Our food supply got cut off for a while. No more whiteflower from our little friends.’ Grainger smirked sourly. ‘They come across so meek and mild, don’t they? But they can be very determined when they want to be. We promised them a replacement for Kurtzberg, but they thought it was too slow in coming. I guess Ella Reinman was ploughing through a million priests and pastors, poking them to see what was inside, then flunking them. Next pastor please! What’s your favourite fruit? How much would you miss Philadelphia? Frying ducklings alive – OK or not OK? What would it take to make you lose patience with my stupid questions and wring my scrawny neck?’ Grainger’s hands mimed the action, her thumbs crushing her interrogator’s windpipe. ‘Meanwhile in Freaktown, our little friends couldn’t wait. They flexed the only muscle they could flex, to make USIC hurry up and find you.’ Observing the bemusement on his face, she nodded, to signal that he must stop wasting energy on incredulity and just believe.

  ‘How bad did it get?’ said Peter. ‘I mean, did you starve?’

  Grainger was annoyed by the question. ‘Of course we didn’t starve. It just got . . . expensive for a while. More expensive than you wanna think about.’

  He tried to think about it and discovered she was right.

  ‘The stand-off wouldn’t have been such a big deal,’ she went on, ‘if only we could grow stuff ourselves. God knows we’ve tried. Wheat. Corn. Maize. Hemp. Every seed known to man has gone into this soil. But what comes up is not impressive. Vanity farming, you could call it. And of course we tried growing whiteflower too, but it was the same story. A few bulbs here, a few bulbs there. Like cultivating orchids. We just can’t figure out how those guys get it to grow in large amounts. What the hell do they fertilise it with? Fairy dust, I guess.’

  She fell silent, still seated in front of the Shoot. She’d spoken in a dull, enervated tone, as though it was a stale subject, a humiliation too pathetic and tedious to revisit yet again. Gazing down at her face, he wondered how long it had been – how many years – since she had been truly, deeply happy.

  ‘I want to thank you,’ he said, ‘for helping me. I was in . . . a bad state. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

  She didn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘Got somebody else to help you, I guess.’

  ‘I don’t just mean the message. I mean, coming to find me. As you said, I could have died.’

  She sighed. ‘It actually takes a lot for someone to die. The human body is designed not to quit. But yeah, I was worried about you, driving off like that when you were sick.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘That part wasn’t difficult. All our vehicles have collars with bells on, if you get my drift. The tough part was getting you into my car, ’cause you weren’t rousable. I had to wrap you in a blanket and drag you along the ground. And I’m not strong.’

  The vision of what she’d done for him flared up in his mind, even though he had no memory of it. He wished he had a memory of it. ‘Oh, Grainger . . . ’

  She stood up abruptly.

  ‘You really love her, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Your wife.’

  ‘Yes. I really love her.’

  She nodded. ‘I thought so.’

  He wanted to embrace her, hesitated. She turned away.

  ‘Write her as much as you want,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the cost. USIC can afford it. And anyway, you saved our bacon. And our chicken, and our bread, and our custard, and our cinnamon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

  From behind, he laid his hands on her shoulders, aching to let her know how he felt. Without looking round, she took hold of his hands with her own, and pulled them hard against her chest, not as low as the bosom, but near the sternum, where her heart beat.

  ‘And remember,’ she said. ‘When you mention USIC, keep it nice. No accusations, no end of the world.’

  I’ll be back, he’d told Flores, just to shut her up, just to smooth his getaway, but now that he had a chance to think it over, a promise ought to be a promise. Grainger was gone now, the message to Bea was sent. He should find out what Dr Austin had on his mind.

  He showered, washed his hair, massaged his scabby scalp. The water swirling around his feet was brownish, gurgling down the plughole like tea. On his two admissions to the USIC infirmary he must have introduced more bacteria into their sterile environment than they’d encountered in all the years previous. It’s a wonder they didn’t dunk him in a vat of disinfectant the size of Tartaglione’s booze bath before consenting to treat him.

  Shower finished, he dried himself carefully. The cannula puncture had already healed up. Various scratches from earlier on were crusted over. The bite wound on his arm was doing nicely; the one on his leg stung a bit, and looked a bit swollen, but if it got worse a quick course of antibiotics would fix it. He replaced the bandages and dressed in jeans and T-shirt. His dishdasha was so rank from Tartaglione’s hooch that he considered giving up on it, but he stuffed it in the washing machine instead. The CONSERVE WATER – COULD THIS LOAD BE HAND-WASHED? placard was still in place, complete with its ARE YOU OFFERING, LADY? addendum. He half-expected the graffiti to have been erased by some routine intruder, some multi-tasking engineer or electrician assigned to inspect everybody’s rooms for stuff that might offend the USIC ethos. Nothing would surprise him now.

  ‘Good to see you,’ said Austin, appraising Peter’s conventional attire with obvious approval. ‘You’re looking much better.’

  ‘I’m sure I smell better,’ said Peter. ‘I’m sorry I stank up your surgery.’

  ‘Couldn’t be helped,’ breezed the doctor. ‘Alcohol is evil stuff.’ That was as close as he was going to come to mentioning Grainger’s unprofessional insobriety. ‘You’re walking a bit stiffly,’ he observed, as the two of them moved from the doorway into the consulting room. ‘How are your injuries?’

  ‘They’re fine. I’m just not used to wearing clothes – these sorts of clothes – anymore.’

  Austin smiled insincerely, no doubt adjusting his professional assessment of how well Peter was doing. ‘Yes, there are days I quite fancy coming to work naked,’ he joked, ‘but the feeling passes.’

  Peter smiled in return. One of his flashes of pastoral instinct, like the one he’d had about Lover One’s inconsolable sadness, came to him now: this doctor, this ruggedly good-looking New Zealand male, this man called Austin, had never had a sexual relationship with anyone.

  ‘I want to thank you,’ said Austin, ‘for taking our conversation seriously.’

  ‘Conversation?’

  ‘About the natives’ health. About getting them to come to us so we can check them out, diagnose wha
t they’re dying of. Obviously you’ve been spreading the word.’ And he smiled again, to acknowledge the unintended evangelical meaning of the phrase. ‘At long last, one of them has.’

  Long last. Peter thought of the distance between the USIC base and the สีฐฉั settlement, the time it took to drive there, the time it would take to walk. ‘Oh my . . . gosh,’ he said. ‘It’s so far.’

  ‘No, no,’ Austin reassured him. ‘Remember Conway? Your Good Samaritan? Apparently he wasn’t satisfied with the signal strength of some doodad he installed at your church. So he went there again, and lo and behold – he came back with a passenger. A . . . friend of yours, I gather.’

  ‘Friend?’

  Austin extended his hand, motioned towards the corridor. ‘Come with me. He’s in intensive care.’

  The term stuck a cold spike into Peter’s guts. He followed Austin out of the room, down the hallway a few steps, and into another room marked ‘ICU’.

  Only one patient lay in the spotless twelve-bed facility. Tall IV drip stands, gleaming new and with transparent plastic sheaths still hugging their aluminium stems, stood sentinel by each empty bed. The lone patient wasn’t hooked to a drip, nor was he attached to any other tentacles of medical technology. He sat erect against pillows, tucked up to the waist in pure white linen, his faceless, hairless kernel of head-flesh unhooded. In the great rectangle of mattress, designed to accommodate American bodies the size of BG’s, he looked pathetically small. His robe and gloves had been replaced with a thin cotton hospital gown, pale grey-green like stale broccoli, the colour Peter associated with Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, but that didn’t mean he was Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, of course. With a shame so intense it was close to panic, Peter realised he had no way of knowing who this was. All he knew was that the สีฐฉั’s right hand was wrapped in a bulbous mitten of white gauze. In the left hand, he clutched a shabby toiletries bag – no, it wasn’t a bag, it was . . . a Bible pamphlet, one of Peter’s hand-sewn assemblages. The paper had been dampened and dried so many times it had the texture of leather; the loose strands of wool were yellow and pink.

  Seeing Peter enter, the สีฐฉั cocked his head to one side, as if puzzled by the minister’s bizarrely unfamiliar raiment.

  ‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’

  ‘Lover Five?’

  ‘Yeสี.’

  Peter turned to Austin. ‘What’s wrong with her? Why is she here?’

  ‘She?’ The doctor blinked. ‘Pardon me.’ He reached for a clipboard on which a single sheet was clamped, and, with a scrawl of a pen, he amended the patient’s gender.

  ‘Well, as you can see from the bandage,’ he continued, escorting Peter to Lover Five’s bedside, ‘she’s sustained a hand injury. A very serious hand injury, I must say.’ He motioned to the gauze mitten. ‘May I?’ This last question was directed at the patient.

  ‘Yeสี,’ she said. ‘สีhow.’

  While the bandages were being unwrapped, Peter recalled the day of Lover Five’s injury: the painting falling from the ceiling, the bruise on her hand, the fervid sympathy offered by her fellow สีฐฉั. And how, ever since then, she’d been protective of that hand, as if the memory of that injury refused to fade.

  The white mitten dwindled in size until Austin removed the last of the gauze. A sweet, fermented smell was released into the room. Lover Five’s hand was no longer a hand. The fingers had fused into a blueish-grey clump of rot. It looked like an apple that had sustained a bruise and then been left for weeks.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Peter breathed.

  ‘Do you speak his . . . do you speak her language?’ said Austin. ‘Because I’m not sure how to get proper consent here. I mean, not that there’s any alternative to amputation, but even explaining what a general anaesthetic is . . . ’

  ‘Oh . . . my . . . God . . . ’

  Lover Five ignored the men’s conversation, ignored the putrid mess on the end of her wrist. With her uninjured hand, she opened her Bible pamphlet, deftly using three fingers to flip to a particular page. In a clear voice unhampered (thanks to her pastor) by impossible consonants, she recited:

  ‘The Lord give them power in their bed of pain, and make them whole again.’ And, from the same page of inspirational selections from Psalms and Luke: ‘The people learned the good new way and followed him. He welcomed them and helped them know God, and healed all them who needed healing.’

  She raised her head to fix her attention on Peter. The bulges on her face that resembled the knees of foetuses seemed to glow.

  ‘I need healing,’ she said. ‘Or I die.’ Then, after a brief silence, in case there was any ambiguity that should be clarified: ‘I wiสีh, pleaสีe, รี่o live.’

  ‘My God . . . my God . . . ’ Peter kept saying, ten metres down the hall, as Austin leaned against the edge of his consulting room desk, arms awkwardly folded. The doctor was tolerant of the pastor’s emotional incontinence – he wouldn’t dream of telling him that nothing was achieved by all this groaning and fist-clenching and agitated face-wiping. Even so, as the minutes ticked on, he became more keen to discuss the way forward.

  ‘She’ll have the best of care,’ he reassured Peter. ‘We have everything here. Not to blow my own horn, but I’m a pretty good surgeon. And Dr Adkins is even better. Remember the great job he did on you? If it sets your mind at rest, he can do her as well. In fact, yes, I’ll make sure he definitely does her.’

  ‘But don’t you realise what this means?’ cried Peter. ‘Don’t you fucking realise what this means?’

  The doctor flinched at the unexpected cursing from a man who was, as far as he’d been given to understand, a bona fide Christian minister.

  ‘Well, I appreciate that you’re upset,’ he remarked carefully. ‘But I don’t think we should jump to any pessimistic conclusions.’

  Peter blinked tears from his eyes, allowing him to see the doctor’s face in focus. The ragged scar on Austin’s jaw was as conspicuous as ever, but now, rather than wondering how Austin got it, Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death. The wounds on Peter’s arm and leg (healing still), the scabs on his ears (gone now), every trifling scratch and burn and rash and bruise, thousands of injuries over the years, right back to the ankle-bones he’d broken the week before he’d met Bea, his skinned knees when he’d fallen off his bike as a kid, the nappy rash he’d probably experienced as a baby . . . none of them had stopped him being here today. He and Austin were comrades in stupendous luck. The gouge in Austin’s chin, which must have been a gory mess when it was first inflicted, had not reduced the entire head to a slimy lump; it magicked itself into fresh pink flesh.

  Nothing shall hurt you, said Luke. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, said Isaiah. The Lord healeth all thy diseases, said Psalms. There it was: there it was, plain as the scar on this smug doctor’s face: the perpetual reprieve the Oasans called the Technique of Jesus.

  25

  Some of us have work to do

  Outside, the sky turned dark, even though it was day. Ominous cloud-masses had formed, dozens of them, almost perfectly circular, like giant moons of vapour. Peter stared at them through the window of his room. Lover One had once assured him that there were no storms on Oasis. It looked like that was about to change.

  The giant globes of moisture, as they advanced, became at once more familiar and more alarming. They were swirls of rain, only rain, no different in their motion from the rain-swirls he’d witnessed many times before. But their relationship with the sky around them was not as subtle and freely shifting as usual; instead, it was as though each vast congregation of water-droplets was restrained by an inner gravitational pull, held together like a planet or some gaseous heavenly body. And the spheres were so dense that they had lost some of their
transparency, casting an oppressive pall over what had been a bright morning.

  There are rain clouds on the way, he thought of writing to Bea, and was hit with a double distress: the memory of the state Bea was in, and deep shame at how inadequate his letters to her were, how inadequate they’d been from the beginning. If he could have described what he’d experienced better, she might not have felt so separated from him. If only the tongue that God lent him when he was called upon to speak in public to strangers could have come to his aid when writing in private to his wife.

  He sat at the Shoot and checked for a message. None.

  The truth was as plain as a dull blank screen where words had once glowed: she saw no point in responding to him now. Or she was unable to respond – too busy, or too upset, or in trouble. Maybe he should write again regardless, not wait for an answer, just keep sending messages. The way she had done for him when he’d first got here, message after message which he’d left unanswered. He searched his mind for words that might give her hope, maybe something along the lines of ‘Hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires can fall, civilisations can vanish into dust . . . ’ But no: the rhetoric of a sermon was one thing; his wife’s grim reality was another. Civilisations did not vanish smoothly and easefully; empires did not set like suns: empires collapsed in chaos and violence. Real people got pushed around, beaten up, robbed, made destitute. Real lives went down the toilet. Bea was scared and hurt, and she didn’t need his preaching.

  Bea, I love you, he wrote. I;m so worried about you.

  Was it right to spend five thousand dollars of USIC’s money to send those nine impotent little words through space? With barely a moment’s hesitation, he pressed the transmission button. The letters trembled on the screen for two, three, then four minutes, making Peter fear that his feelings had been judged, by some jaded shiftworker elsewhere in the building, to have failed a test, to have sinned against the USIC ethos, attempting to undermine the great mission. Staring at the screen, sweat forming on his brow, he belatedly noticed the typo – a semi-colon instead of an apostrophe. He lifted his hand to fix it, but the words evaporated.