The Book of Strange New Things (59 page)

‘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 through 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.

‘You brought a
cat
here?’ the other man marvelled. ‘USIC’s allowing
pets
now?’

‘No, it was . . . it happened at home.’

Tartaglione patted Peter’s knee. ‘Now, now. Be a good little camper, don’t lose Brownie points. Don’t use the H-word. The H-word is
verboten
!
È finito
!
Distrutto
!
Non esiste
!’

The linguist was making theatrical motions with his palms, shoving the word
home
back into its gopher-hole each time it popped up. Peter suddenly hated him, this poor crazy bastard, yes, he hated him. He closed his eyes tight and opened them again, and was bitterly disappointed that Tartaglione was still there, that the darkness and the alcohol stink were still there, when what
should
be there when he opened his eyes was the place he should never have left, his own space, his own stuff, Bea. He moaned in grief. ‘I miss my wife.’

‘None of that! None of that!’ Tartaglione sprang up, waving his arms about. His bare feet thumped a mad rhythm on the floor, and he emitted a bizarre ‘
sh!-sh!-sh!-sh!
’ as he danced. The effort of it triggered an extended burst of coughing. Peter imagined loose fragments of lung swirling in the air like nuptial confetti.

‘Of course you miss your wife,’ muttered Tartaglione when he’d calmed down slightly. ‘You miss every damn thing. You could fill a book with all the things you miss. You miss dandelions, you miss bananas, you miss mountains and dragonflies and trains and roses and . . . and . . . fucking junk mail for Christ’s sake, you miss the rust on the fire hydrants, the dogshit on the pavement, the sunsets, your dumbass uncle with the lousy taste in shirts and the yellow teeth. You want to throw your arms around the old sleazeball and say, “Uncle, what a great shirt, love your aftershave, show me your porcelain frog collection, and then let’s promenade down the old neighbourhood, just you and me, whaddaya say?” You miss snow. You miss the sea,
non importa
if it’s polluted, bring it on, oil spills, acid, condoms, broken bottles, who cares, it’s still the sea, it’s still the ocean. You dream . . . you dream of newly mown lawns, the way the grass smelled, you swear you’d give ten thousand bucks or one of your kidneys if you could have just one last whiff of that grass.’

To emphasise his point, Tartaglione sniffed deeply, a stage sniff, a sniff so aggressive it sounded as if it might damage his head.

‘Everyone at USIC is . . . concerned about you,’ said Peter carefully. ‘You could get transported home.’

Tartaglione snorted. ‘
Lungi da me, satana
!
Quítate de delante de mí
! Haven’t you read the USIC contract? Maybe you need help translating the lingo? Well, I’m your man. Dear highly skilled misfit: We hope you enjoy your stretch on Oasis. There’s chicken tonight! Or something very like it. So settle in, don’t count the days, take a long view. Every five years, or maybe sooner if you can prove you’re batshit insane, you can have a trip back to the festering scumhole you came from. But we’d rather you didn’t. What you wanna go back there for? What’s the point? Your uncle and his goddamned frog collection are gonna be history soon. Everything’s gonna be history soon.
History
will be history.’ He paced back and forth in front of Peter, his feet scuffling the dirty floor. ‘USIC concerned about me? Yeah, I’ll bet. That fatso chink dude, forget his name, I can just see him lying awake at nights thinking,
I wonder if Tartaglione is OK. Is he happy? Is he getting enough vitamins? Do I hear a bell tolling, has a clod been washed away by the sea, is a piece of the continent gone, am I just a little fucking diminished here?
Yeah, I can feel the love. Who’s on love duty today?’

Peter dipped out of consciousness for a second or two. The flesh of his brow was contracting tight against his skull, pushing in on the bone. He remembered once having a fever, some sort of forty-eight-hour flu, and lying helpless in bed while Bea was at work. Waking in the middle of the day half-deranged and parched with thirst, he was puzzled to feel a hand on the back of his head, lifting it from the pillow, and a glass of iced water raised to his lips. Much later, when he was better, he found out that Bea had travelled all the way home to give him that drink, and then all the way back to the hospital, in what was supposed to be her lunch break.

‘I would have survived,’ he’d protested.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I love you.’

When Tartaglione spoke again, his tone was philosophical, almost apologetic. ‘No use crying over spilt milk, my friend. Let it go rancid and live for
mañana
. The unacknowledged USIC motto, wise words, wise words, worthy of being tattooed on every forehead.’ A pause. ‘Hell, this place ain’t so bad. I mean this place I’ve got here:
casa mia
. It’s more cheerful in daylight. And if I’d known you were coming, I’d’ve had a bath, you know. Maybe trimmed the old
barba
.’ He sighed. ‘I had everything here once.
Tutte le comodità moderne. Todo confort
. Torches, batteries, shaver for my pretty face, paper to wipe my ass on. Pens, too. Prescription glasses, magnification 3.5. The world was my mollusc.’