The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  She nodded, slowly and emphatically, to signal that he need not complete the thought. ‘You feel . . . in lack of God. You feel you can be no Father any more.’ She turned aside, looked at the doorway through which he had come, the doorway that led to the outside world. Somewhere in that direction was the settlement where she’d first accepted Jesus into her heart, the settlement that now lay empty and abandoned. ‘Father Kurรี่สีberg alสีo came รี่o thiสี feeling,’ she said. ‘Father Kurรี่สีberg became angry, สีpoke in a loud voiสีe, สีaid, I am no Father now. Find another Father.’

  Peter swallowed hard. The Bible booklet he’d sewn lay curled up on the blanket near his useless arse. Back in his quarters, there were so many balls of brightly coloured wool still waiting to be used.

  ‘You are . . . ’ said Lover Five, and paused to find the right word. ‘ . . . man. Only man. God iสี more big than you. You carry the word of God for a while, then the word become รี่oo heavy, heavy รี่o carry, and you muสีรี่ reสีรี่.’ She laid her hand on his thigh. ‘I underสีรี่and.’

  ‘My wife . . . ’ he began.

  ‘I underสีรี่and,’ she repeated. ‘God join you and your wife รี่ogether. Now you are unjoined.’

  In a flash Peter recalled his wedding day, the light through the church windows, the cake, the knife, Bea’s dress. Sentimental daydreams, as irreclaimably lost as a bug-eaten Scout uniform tossed in a bin and taken away by garbagemen. He forced himself to think instead of his own house as it was now, surrounded by filth and debris, the interior plunged into darkness, and, half-hidden in those haunted shadows, the shape of a woman he couldn’t recognise. ‘It’s not just that we’re apart,’ he said. ‘Bea’s in trouble. She needs help.’

  Lover Five nodded. Her bandaged hand screamed louder than any words of recrimination that there could be no trouble more serious than the trouble she was in. ‘สีo,’ she confirmed, ‘you will fulfil the word of Jeสีuสี. Luke: you will leave the nineรี่y-nine in the wilderneสี, and look for the one who iสี loสีรี่.’

  He felt his face redden as the parable found its mark. She must have learned it from Kurtzberg.

  ‘I’ve talked to the doctors,’ he said wretchedly. ‘They’re going to try their best, for you and for . . . the others. They won’t be able to save your hand, but they might be able to save your life.’

  ‘I am happy,’ she said. ‘If สีaved.’

  He shifted uncomfortably on his perch at the edge of her bed. His left buttock was going numb and his back was getting sore. In a few minutes from now, he would be out of this room and his body would revert to normal, restoring normal blood circulation, pacifying disturbed neurological activity, soothing over-extended muscles, while she was left here to contemplate the rotting of her flesh.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you right now?’ he said.

  She thought for a few seconds. ‘สีing,’ she said. ‘สีing only with me.’

  ‘Sing what?’

  ‘Our สีong of welcome for Father Peรี่er,’ she said. ‘You will go away, I know. Then I hope you will come back, in the สีweeรี่ by and by. And when you come back, we will สีing again the สีame สีong.’ Without further prelude, she began. ‘Amaaaสีiiing graaaสีe . . . ’

  He joined in at once. His voice, hoarse and muted in speech, found strength when called upon to sing. The acoustics in the intensive care unit were actually better than in his church, where the humid atmosphere and the throng of bodies always dampened the sound; here, in this chilly concrete cavity, with only empty beds, dormant machinery and metal IV stands for company, ‘Amazing Grace’ reverberated rich and clear.

  ‘Waaaas bliiiind,’ he chanted, ‘but nooooow I seeeee . . . ’

  The length of her breaths, even though she shortened them for his sake, made the song last a very long time. He was exhausted by the end.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lover Five. ‘You will go now. I will remain alwayสี . . . your brother.’

  There was no message from Bea.

  She was finished with him. She’d given up.

  Or maybe . . . maybe she had committed suicide. The state of the world, the loss of Joshua, the loss of her faith, the rift in their marriage . . . these were terrible griefs to bear, and maybe she just hadn’t been able to bear them. As a teenager, she’d been suicidal. He’d almost lost her then, without even knowing she was there to lose.

  He opened a fresh page on the Shoot. He must trust that she was still alive, still able to receive his messages. The blank screen loomed so large: so much blankness to envelop whatever meaning he might attempt to put there. He thought of quoting or paraphrasing the bit in 2 Corinthians 5 about the house ‘not made with hands’ that awaits us if our earthly home is destroyed. Sure, it was a Bible quote, but maybe it was relevant in a non-religious context, like BG tapping his own chest to indicate that home wasn’t bricks and mortar, home could be anywhere.

  A voice came to him and said, Don’t be stupid.

  I’m coming home, he wrote, and that was all.

  Having promised that he would return, he was aware that he had no idea how to make it happen. He clicked on the green scarab icon, and the Shoot revealed the three paltry options on his menu: Maintenance (repairs), Admin and Graigner. None of them seemed quite right. He clicked on Admin and wrote:

  I’m sorry, but I need to go home. As soon as possible. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back sometime in the future. If so, it would need to be with my wife. I’m not trying to blackmail you, I’m just saying that’s the only way I could do it. Please respond and confirm when I can go. Sincerely, Peter Leigh (Pastor).

  He re-read what he had written, deleted everything from I don’t know to the only way I could do it. Too many words, too much explanation. The essential message, the one which demanded action, was simpler than that.

  He stood up, stretched. A sharp sting on his leg reminded him of the injury there. The wound was healing well, but the flesh was tight along the suture line. He would always have a scar, and it would occasionally hurt. There were limits to what the miraculous human organism could repair.

  His dishdasha, hanging on the washing line, was dry now. The blurry marks of the ink crucifix had been almost obliterated, faded to the palest lilac. The hems were so badly frayed they looked as if they’d been deliberately manufactured that way, as a fluffy frill. ‘You don’t think it’s too girly, do you?’ he recalled Bea saying, when they first took the garment out of its shrinkwrap. Not only did he recall the words, but also the sound of Bea’s voice, the expression in her eyes, the light on the side of her nose: everything. And she’d said: ‘You can be naked underneath. If you want.’ She was his wife. He loved her. Surely somewhere in the universe, allowing for the laws of time and space and relativity, there must be a place where that could still be possible.

  ‘Imagine you’re in a tiny inflatable dinghy, lost at sea,’ Ella Reinman had suggested to him, during those endless interviews on the tenth floor of the swanky hotel. ‘Far in the distance, there’s a ship; you can’t tell whether it’s moving toward you or away. You know that if you try to stand up and wave, the dinghy will capsize. But if you sit still, nobody will see you and you won’t get rescued. What do you do?’

  ‘Sit tight.’

  ‘Are you sure? What if the ship is definitely moving away?’

  ‘I’d have to live with that.’

  ‘You’d just sit and watch it go?’

  ‘I’d pray to God.’

  ‘What if there was no answer?’

  ‘There’s always an answer.’

  His calmness had impressed them. His refusal to embrace wild, impulsive gestures had helped him make the grade. It was the calmness of the homeless, the calmness of the สีฐฉั. Without knowing it, he’d always been an honorary alien.

  Now, he was pacing his quarters in a frenzy, an animal trapped in a
cage. He needed to be home. Get going, get going, get going. The needle in the vein, the woman saying This will sting some, then blackness. Yes! Come on! Every minute of delay was a torment. Pacing around, he almost tripped on a discarded shoe, seized hold of it, hurled it across the room. Maybe Grainger, in her quarters, was doing the same. Maybe they should go berserk together, share the bourbon. He really wanted a drink.

  He checked the Shoot. Nothing. Who was supposed to read his message anyway? Some off-duty engineer or kitchenhand? What kind of a fucking system was this, where there was no one in charge, no one with an office you could barge into, no one you could grab by the shirt? He paced his quarters some more, breathing too heavily. The floor, the ceiling, the window, the furniture, the bed: it was all wrong, wrong, wrong. He thought of Tuska, delivering his Légion Étrangère spiel, all that stuff about the weaklings who’d gone crazy, climbing the walls, begging to ‘go ho-ome’. He could still taste Tuska’s sarcasm. Smug bastard!

  Eighteen minutes later, on his Shoot, there was an answer from Admin.

  Howdy. Forwarded your request to USIC hq. Typical response timelag is 24 hrs (even big shots got to sleep sometimes) but I predict they will say yes. Diplomacywise it might have been good to make some noises about coming back to finish your mission but hey its not my business to tell you how to win friends & influence people. I wasnt scheduled to do my next flight for another month but what the heck Ill make the best of it, maybe get some new tennis shoes, buy an ice cream, visit a steakhouse. Or a whorehouse! Just kidding. Im a fine upstanding pilgrim, you know me. Stand by and Ill give you the word when its time to go. Au reviore, Tuska

  As soon as Peter finished reading these words, he leapt up, knocking his chair over, and jumped exultant into the air, clenching his fists like a sportsman granted victory against the odds. He would have yelled Hallelujah, too, if it hadn’t been for the searing spasm that shot through his injured leg. Crying in pain, laughing in relief, he fell to the floor, curled up like a bug, or a thief who’d broken his ankles, or a husband who was clutching his wife’s flesh rather than his own.

  Thank you, he breathed, thank you . . . but who was he thanking? He didn’t know. He only knew that thanks were due.

  27

  Stay where you are

  His name was Peter Leigh, son of James Leigh and Kate Leigh (née Woolfolk), grandson of George and June. He was born in Horns Mill, Hertford, Hertfordshire. The names of his cats, in the order that he’d owned them, were Mokkie, Silky, Cleo, Sam, Titus and Joshua. When he returned home, he would have another cat, from an animal refuge, if such places still existed when he got back. As for his own child, he would call him, or her, whatever name Bea wanted. Or maybe Kate. They would discuss it when the time came. Maybe they’d wait until the baby was born, and see what its personality was. People were individuals from Day One.

  He stood as straight as he could in his soul-destroying room in the USIC base and appraised himself in the mirror. He was a thirty-three-year-old English male, deeply tanned as if he’d been on a long holiday to Alicante or some such Mediterranean resort. But he did not look fit. His chin and collarbones were worryingly sharp, sculpted by inadequate diet. He was too thin for the dishdasha, although he looked even worse in Western clothes. There were a few small scars on his face, some of them dating from his alcoholic years, some more recent and delineated with neat crusts. His eyes were bloodshot and there was fear and grief in them. ‘You know what would sort you out?’ a fellow dosser once said to him as they stood in the rain waiting for a homeless shelter to open. ‘A wife.’ When Peter asked him if he spoke from experience, the old wino only smiled and shook his grizzled head.

  The USIC corridors that had once seemed like a maze were now familiar – too familiar. The familiarity of a prison. The framed posters hung in their appointed places, marking his progress through the base. As he walked towards the vehicle bay, the glazen images gazed sightlessly down at him: Rudolph Valentino, Rosie the Riveter, the dog in the basket with the ducks, the smiling picnickers by Renoir. Laurel and Hardy caught frozen, stoic, forever interrupted in their hopeless attempt to build a house. And those 1930s construction workers suspended high above New York . . . they would be suspended there eternally, never finishing their lunch, never falling off their girder, never growing old.

  He pushed through the last door and was greeted by the smell of engine grease. For his farewell visit to the สีฐฉั, he wanted to travel to C-2 himself, alone, not as a passenger in someone else’s car. He cast his eyes over the vehicle bay in search of the person who was manning it today, hoping it might be someone he’d never met before, someone who knew nothing about him except that he was the VIP missionary man who should be given whatever he asked for, within reason. But the person bending into the engine of a jeep, canopied by the open hood, had a rump he recognised. It was Craig again.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, knowing even as he opened his mouth that oratory would get him nowhere.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, only half-acknowledging him as she continued to slather the engine innards with lubricant.

  Their negotiation was short and sweet. He could hardly blame her for refusing to hand over a vehicle, given what happened last time. Maybe she’d been criticised by her fellow USIC personnel for allowing him – clearly off his head – to drive Kurtzberg’s hearse into the night, only to need emergency rescue later, while the vehicle had to be schlepped back to base in a separate trip. Craig was all smiles and casual body language, but the subtext was: You are a pain in the ass.

  ‘There’s a drug and food exchange scheduled just a few hours from now,’ she said, as she wiped her hands on a rag. ‘Why not go along for the ride?’

  ‘Because this is goodbye. I’m saying goodbye to the สีฐฉั.’

  ‘Goodbye to the what?’

  ‘The Oasans. The native people.’ The freaks in Freaktown, you fat idiot, he thought.

  She chewed on this. ‘You need your own vehicle to say goodbye in?’

  He hung his head in frustration. ‘If I’m shoulder to shoulder with USIC personnel, it might look like I was using you guys as . . . uh . . . bodyguards. Emotional bodyguards, if you see what I mean.’ Craig’s direct yet unfocused stare told him that no, she didn’t see. ‘It might look like I didn’t want to face them on my own.’

  ‘OK,’ said Craig, idly scratching her snake tattoo. Seconds passed, making it obvious that her ‘OK’ did not mean ‘In that case, I will give you a car’; it did not even mean ‘I understand why that might worry you’; it meant ‘So be it.’

  ‘Also,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure that Grainger will want to be going out to the settlement today.’

  ‘Won’t be Grainger,’ said Craig breezily, and consulted a printed roster. ‘Grainger is off-duty for . . . ’ She flipped pages, scanning for the name. ‘The foreseeable,’ she summarised at last, and flipped back to today. ‘It’ll be . . . Tuska and Flores.’

  Peter looked over her shoulder, at all the greased-up vehicles he could drive out of this place if only she wasn’t in the way.

  ‘Your choice,’ she grinned, and he understood that sometimes there is no choice at all.

  ‘I see you standing on the shore of a huge lake,’ Bea had said, the last time he’d held her in his arms. ‘It’s night and the sky is full of stars.’ And she had shared her vision of him preaching to a multitude of unseen creatures in fishing boats, bobbing on the sea. Perhaps they’d both known that it was a dream, that nothing like that would really happen. It was another sunny, torpid day on Oasis, and the natives were dozing in their cots, or making food for their foreign guests, or washing clothes, or spending time with their children, hoping that their flesh would survive unharmed until the sun set and they were cocooned in their cots again. Maybe they were praying.

  Filling in time before the appointed hour for his ride, Peter considered what, if anything, to take with him to the settlement. A stack of half-finished booklets lay on the table, next to some balls of wool. He picked
up the nearest, a paraphrase of Revelation, Chapter 21. He’d reduced the number of ‘s’ sounds to four, and gotten rid of all the ‘t’s: that was probably as much as he could achieve.

  And there I found a new heaven and a new earth, for the heaven and the earth from before were gone. And I heard a loud voice from heaven declaring, Behold, God will dwell with you, and you will be His very own people, and God will be your very own God. And there will be no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain. And God upon the throne said, Behold, I make everything new.

  To avoid the need for explanations that might go nowhere, he’d omitted Jerusalem, the sea, the tabernacle, the apostle John, the bride and the husband, men, and a few other things. The God of this pamphlet no longer wiped tears from eyes, partly because those words were too difficult to pronounce, partly because, after all this time, it was still a mystery whether the สีฐฉั had eyes or wept. Peter reconnected with how long he’d sweated to think of an alternative word for ‘true’. All that labour, and for what? The only words he had to offer them now were ‘sorry’ and ‘goodbye’.

  ‘Beautiful day,’ said Tuska, and it was. The atmosphere was putting on a show for them, as if in honour of a momentous occasion. Two huge columns of unfallen rain, one to the west and the other to the east, had drifted towards each other and were now mingling in their topmost reaches, forming a glistering arch in the sky. It was a long way off yet, miles probably, but it conjured the illusion that they were about to pass under a colossal portal made of nothing more substantial than water droplets.

  ‘Gotta admit,’ said Tuska, ‘view-wise, that’s a nine out of ten.’

  ‘Rear windows are shut, I hope?’ said Flores. ‘Don’t want those drugs to get rained on.’

  ‘Yes, they’re shut,’ said Peter. Tuska and Flores, stationed in the front seats, had barely said a word to him since the jeep had left the compound. He felt like a child stashed in the back, allowed to come along for no better reason than that he couldn’t be left unattended, and with nothing to do on the journey but hope that his parents didn’t quarrel.