The Book of Strange New Things

  I pick him up. He’s still breathing, but shallowly. The base of his tail is shredded and one eye looks gouged out but he’s alive and I think he recognises me. Ten minutes later I’m at the vet’s. It’s before opening hours but I must have kicked and screamed because they open up for me. He lifts Joshua from my arms and gives him an injection.

  ‘OK, it’s done,’ he says. ‘Do you want to take him home or leave him here?’

  ‘What do you mean, take him home?’ I say. ‘Aren’t you going to do anything for him?’

  ‘I just did,’ he says.

  Afterwards, he tells me he had no way of guessing I was willing to pay any amount of money for surgery. ‘Nobody’s bothering with that sort of thing nowadays,’ he says. ‘I can go for five, six hours without anyone coming in, and then when someone finally walks through the door with a sick pet, all they want is for it to be put to sleep.’ He puts Joshua into a plastic bag for me. ‘I won’t charge you,’ he tells me.

  Peter, I’m only going to say this once. This experience is not educational. It is not instructive. It is not God moving in mysterious ways, it is not God figuring out exactly what sublime ultimate purpose can be served by me stepping on Joshua’s leg and everything after. The Saviour I believed in took an interest in what I did and how I behaved. The Saviour I believed in made things happen and stopped things happening. I was deluding myself. I am alone and frightened and married to a missionary who’s going to tell me that the fool has said in his heart there is no God, and if you don’t say it it will just be because you’re being diplomatic, because in your heart you’re convinced I made this happen through my faltering of faith, and that makes me feel even more alone. Because you’re not coming back to me, are you? You like it up there. Because you’re on Planet God. So even if you did come back to me, we still wouldn’t be together. Because in your heart you’d still be on Planet God, and I’d be a trillion miles away from you, alone with you by my side.

  IV

  IN HEAVEN

  23

  A drink with you

  The bites were poisonous after all. He was sure of it. Underneath the bandages, the wounds looked clean, but the damage was done. The network of veins and arteries inside his flesh was industriously polluting all his organs with infected blood, feeding his brain with venom. It was only a matter of time. First he would become delirious – he felt that coming on already – and then his system would shut down, kidneys, liver, heart, guts, lungs, all those mysteriously interdependent globs of meat which needed poison-free fuel to keep functioning. His body would evict his soul.

  Still seated at the Shoot, he lifted his face to the ceiling. He’d been staring at Bea’s words so long that they’d burned into his retinas and now re-appeared above him, illegible as mildew. The lightbulb hanging above his head was one of those energy-saving ones, more a coil than a bulb, like a segment of radioactive intestine suspended from a wire. Above that, a thin lid of ceiling and roof, and above that . . . what? Where in the universe was Bea? Was she above him, below him, to his right or to his left? If he could fly, if he could launch himself through space faster than the speed of light, what good would it do him? He had no idea where to go.

  He mustn’t die in this room. No, no, not in this sterile cubicle, sealed inside a glorified warehouse of concrete and glass. Anywhere but this. He would go . . . out there. To the สีฐฉั. Maybe they had a cure. Some sort of folk remedy. Probably not, given how loudly they’d lamented when they saw him get bitten. But he should die in their company, not here. And he mustn’t see Grainger; he must avoid her at all costs. She would waste what little time he had left, trying to keep him at the base, trying to drag him to the infirmary where he would die under pointless observation and then be reduced to a storage problem, rammed into a shelf of a mortuary refrigerator.

  How long have I got, Lord? he prayed. Minutes? Hours? Days? But there were some questions that one must not ask of God. There were some uncertainties one must face alone.

  ‘Hi,’ he said to the porky woman with the snake tattoo, the gate-keeper to his escape. ‘I don’t think you ever told me your name. But it’s Craig, isn’t it? “B. Craig”, as the nameplate on your door has it. Nice to see you again, B.’

  She looked at him as though he was covered in hideous sores. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Just a bit . . . underslept,’ he said, eyeing the vehicles parked behind her in the bay. There were half a dozen, including the one Grainger used for her drug deliveries. He hoped Grainger was fast asleep in bed, drooling into her pillow, keeping those pretty, scarred arms safe under the sheets. He wouldn’t want her to feel responsible for what he was about to do. Better to put pressure on Craig, who, like everyone else here, would be indifferent to his death. ‘What’s the “B” stand for?’ he said.

  The woman frowned. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I would like to . . . uh . . . requisition a vehicle.’ Inside his head, banked up on his tongue, he had a barrage of speech ready to push her objections aside, to steamroller her reluctance. Do what I want. Do what I want. You were told from the beginning I would require a vehicle; now it’s happening just as you were warned it would, so don’t be difficult, don’t resist me, just say yes. ‘Just for an hour or two,’ he added, as the sweat prickled his eyebrows. ‘Please.’

  ‘Sure.’ She gestured towards a black station wagon that reminded Peter of a hearse. ‘How about this one? Kurtzberg used it all the time.’

  He swayed on his feet. The victory was too easy; there must be a catch. ‘Fine with me.’

  She opened the door and let him slide in. The key was already in the ignition. He’d expected to have to sign papers, produce a driving licence, or at least exert some serious psychological pressure. Maybe God was cutting through the obstacles for him. Or maybe this was just the way things worked here.

  ‘If you’re underslept,’ said Craig, ‘maybe you shouldn’t drive.’

  Peter glanced over his shoulder. Kurtzberg’s bed – actually a small mattress with a floral coverlet and matching pillow – was right there in the back.

  ‘I’ll get all the sleep I want, soon,’ he assured her.

  He drove into the wilderness, towards . . . Freaktown. Its official name escaped him for the moment. Peterville. New Zion. Oskaloosa. Please rescue Coretta from trouble, Lord. May your presence be felt in the Maldives.

  His brain felt swollen, bulging out against his eyeballs. He shut his eyelids tight, to keep his eyeballs in. It was OK to do that while driving. There was nothing to collide with, no road to veer off or stay on. Only the general direction was important. And, he wasn’t actually sure if he was going the right way. This vehicle had the same navigation system as Grainger’s, but he had no idea how to use it, no idea what buttons to push. Bea would be able to figure it out, if she were given a –

  He pressed his foot on the accelerator. Let’s see how fast this thing could go. There was a time for taking things easy and a time for really moving.

  Was he really moving? It was hard to tell in the dark. The headlights illuminated only an abstract swathe of the terrain and there were no landmarks. He might be travelling at dangerous speed or he might be marooned in the soil, tyres churning endlessly, getting nowhere. But no: he could see clumps of whiteflower whizzing past like reflective strips on a highway. He was making progress. Progress away from the USIC base, at least – he couldn’t be sure he was getting any closer to the สีฐฉั settlement.

  If only this vehicle were a living creature, like a horse or a dog, it would sniff its way unerringly back to the place Kurtzberg had visited so many times before. Just like Joshua when he –

  An ugly sound startled him. It was a human cry, right here in the vehicle with him. It was his own voice. It was his own cry. He bashed the steering wheel with his fists, butted the back of his head repeatedly against the seat. A brick wall would have been better.

  He wiped his eyes and peered through the front window. In the distance, dimly, he could see somethin
g looming up from the tundra. Architecture of some sort. He’d been travelling a few minutes only, so it couldn’t be the settlement yet. Unless, in his delirium, time had telescoped, so that he’d driven for hours in what seemed like seconds, or unless he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. But no. The looming thing was two huge spherical structures: the Big Brassiere. He was heading in the wrong direction.

  ‘Christ!’ It was his voice again. He’d slipped and forgotten to say ‘Crisis’. He must calm down. God was in control.

  He pressed a button on the navigation screen. It glowed brighter, as if delighted to be touched. The words CENTR POWER FAC manifested near the top, with an arrow that symbolised his vehicle pulsing underneath. He pushed some more buttons. No other destinations came up; instead, he was quoted various data about temperature, water level, oil, speed, fuel consumption. With a grunt of frustration, he wrenched the steering wheel ninety degrees, sending a flurry of damp soil flying. The Big Brassiere, the Centrifuge, the Mother, whatever the damn thing was called, receded into the darkness as he sped into unknown territory.

  Within another few minutes, he saw the shapes and colours of the Oasan settlement. It wasn’t possible, it just wasn’t possible, it should be an hour yet before he got here, and yet . . . the blockish, uniform architecture, the flat roofs, the lack of pinnacles or poles of any sort, the amber glow . . . As he drove closer and closer, his vehicle’s headlights illuminated lozenge-shaped bricks. Unmistakable. The poison must have deranged his sense of time.

  He was approaching from an unfamiliar angle and couldn’t get his bearings. Grainger’s usual arrival point was the building with the white star and the illegible residue of WEL WEL COME clinging to its outer wall like bird cack. But he was not with Grainger now. Never mind: his church was the true landmark. Set apart from the town, it would stand out in the bare prairie, hologrammed into life by the headlights.

  He drove around the perimeter, looking for his church. He drove and drove. His high beam picked out nothing more substantial than pallid clumps of whiteflower. Eventually, he saw tyre-tracks in the soil: his own vehicle’s. He’d come full circle and there was no church. It was gone; it had been destroyed and every trace of it removed as if it had never existed. These people had rejected him, cast him off in one of those unfathomable flashes of antipathy that missionary history was so full of – cruel severances that came out of nowhere, revealing that all the intimacy you thought you’d forged was just an illusion, a church built on quicksand, a seed planted in windblown topsoil.

  He stopped the vehicle and switched off its engine. He would walk into the settlement, lost and befuddled, and he would try to find someone he knew. He would call ‘Jesus Lover . . . ’ – no, that would be ridiculous. He would call . . . ‘คฐڇ๙ฉ้’. Yes, he would call ‘คฐڇ๙ฉ้’, he would call ‘ฐคڇฐฉ้’, he would call all the สีฐฉั names he could remember. And eventually someone – a Jesus Lover or more likely not a Jesus Lover – would be intrigued by his bellowing and come to him.

  He opened the car’s door and stumbled out into the humid night. There were no lights in the settlement, no signs of life. Unsteady on his feet, he lurched sideways, almost bashing his shoulder against the wall of the nearest building. He steadied himself against the polished bricks with his palm. As always, they felt warm and sort of alive. Not alive like an animal, but alive like a tree, as if each brick was a bulge of hardened sap.

  He’d walked only a few metres when his hand plunged suddenly into empty space. A doorway. No string-of-beads curtain hanging in front of it, which was odd. Just a big rectangular hole in the building, with nothing visible inside but darkness. He ventured in, knowing that at the opposite end of the chamber there would be another door which would open out onto a network of laneways. He moved gingerly through the claustrophobic black space, shuffling one small step at a time in case he blundered face-first into an internal wall, or was apprehended by gloved hands, or tripped on some other obstacle. But he reached the far side without encountering anything; the room seemed to be completely empty. He found the back door – again, just a hole without a curtain – and emerged into the lane.

  Even in daylight, all the สีฐฉั lanes looked much the same; he’d never negotiated them without a guide. In the dark, they felt more like tunnels than pathways, and he advanced painfully slowly, hands outstretched, like a man newly blinded. The สีฐฉั might not have eyes, but they had something else that allowed them to move confidently through this maze.

  He cleared his throat, willing himself to call out names in an alien language he imagined he’d learned quite well, but which he now realised he had only the feeblest grip on. Instead, he remembered the 23rd Psalm, his own paraphrase of it, carefully devised to remove consonants. He’d sweated blood over it and now, for some reason, it came to him.

  ‘The Lord be he who care for me,’ he recited as he shuffled through the darkness. ‘I will need no more.’ This voice was the same one he used for preaching: not strident, but quite loud and with each word articulated clearly. The moisture in the atmosphere swallowed the sounds before they had a chance to carry very far. ‘He bid me lie in green land down. He lead me by river where no one can drown. He make my soul like new again. He lead me in the path of Good. He do all this, for he be God. Yea, though I walk through the long dark corridor of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your care wand make me feel no harm can come. You feed me even while unfriendly men look on in envy. You rub healing oil on my head. My cup runneth over. Good unfolding and comfort will keep me company, every day of my life. I will dwell in the home of the Lord for ever.’

  ‘Hey, that’s good!’ cried an unfamiliar voice. ‘That’s good!’

  Peter whirled around in the dark, almost losing his balance. In spite of the fact that the words were friendly, he was adrenalised with instinctive, fight-or-flight fear. The presence of another male (for the voice was definitely male), a male of his own species, somewhere very nearby but invisible, felt as life-threatening as a gun-barrel to the temple or a knife in the side.

  ‘I take my hat off to you! If I had a goddamn hat!’ the stranger added. ‘You’re a pro, what can I say, sheer class! The Lord is my shepherd without a fucking shepherd in sight. Only a couple of “t”s and “s”s in the whole damn thing!’ Curses aside, the sincerity of the admiration was clear. ‘You wrote that for the สีฐฉั, right? Like, Open up for Jesus, this won’t hurt. A banquet with all the bones taken out, a meal in a milkshake, thesaurus semolina. Bravo!’

  Peter hesitated. A living shape had materialised from the gloom behind him. As far as he could make out, it was human, hairy and naked. ‘Tartaglione?’

  ‘Got it in one! Put it there, palomino! Come va?’ A bony hand grasped Peter’s. A very bony hand. The fingers, though strong, were skeletal, pressing spoke-like phalanges into Peter’s softer flesh.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ said Peter.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ was the drawled reply. ‘Just hanging out, shootin’ the breeze. Watching the grass not grow. Happy campering. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I . . . I’m the minister,’ said Peter, divesting his hand from the stranger’s. ‘The pastor for the สีฐฉั . . . We built a church . . . It was right here . . . ’

  Tartaglione laughed, then coughed emphysemically. ‘Beg to disagree, amigo. Nobody here but us cockroaches. No gas, food, floozies or floorshows. Nada.’

  The word was released like a bat into the humid night, and disappeared. All of a sudden, a lightbulb went on in Peter’s brain. He wasn’t in C-2 at all: he was in the settlement that the สีฐฉั had abandoned. There was nothing here but air and brick walls. And a naked madman who’d slipped through the net of human civilisation.

  ‘I got lost,’ Peter explained, feebly. ‘I’m sick. I think I’ve been poisoned. I . . . I think I may be dying.’

  ‘No shit?’ said Tartaglione. ‘Then let’s get drunk.’

  The linguist led him thro
ugh the dark into still more dark, then through a doorway into a house where he was made to kneel and told to get comfy. There were cushions on the floor, large plump cushions that might have been cannibalised from a couch or armchair. They felt mildewy to the touch, like the decaying peel of orange or lemon. When Peter sat on them, they sighed.

  ‘My humble abode,’ said Tartaglione. ‘Après the exodus, moi.’

  Peter offered a grunt of gratitude, and tried to breathe through his mouth rather than his nose. Oasan interiors usually smelled of nothing much except food and the honeydew air currents that continually flowed through the windows and lapped around the walls, but this room managed to reek of human uncleanness and alcoholic ferment. In its centre stood a large object which he’d thought at first was a sleeping crib, but which he now identified as the source of the liquor stink. Maybe it was a sleeping crib, serving as an alcohol storage tub.

  ‘Is there any light?’ asked Peter.

  ‘You bring a torch, padre?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then there isn’t any light.’

  Peter’s eyes simply couldn’t adjust to the darkness. He could see the whites – or rather yellows – of the other man’s eyes, a bristle of facial hair, an impression of emaciated flesh and flaccid genitals. He wondered if Tartaglione had developed, over the months and years he’d lived in these ruins, a kind of night vision, like a cat.

  ‘What’s wrong? You choking on something?’ asked Tartaglione.

  Peter hugged himself to stop the noise coming from his own chest. ‘My . . . my cat died,’ he said.