The Raft: A Novel (24 page)

K raised his can to take a sip but realised it was empty. He looked ahead and saw the faint yellow light of the sun finally breaking through the constant grey.

“I mean,” the old man said, “sooner or later the truth will be apparent to all. Even you. I can tell you’re a sceptic. You’re not one for trusting, are you?”

“No one’s ever given me a reason to expect my trust.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the old man said. “Because you’ll be denying yourself the truth if you don’t open your mind. Denying yourself, and denying your son.”

K nodded and placed the empty can at his feet next to his last one. He cleared his throat and stared into the distance. Beside him, the old man was folding his red towel into a square.

K turned his head. “I didn’t tell you I had a son.”

The old man was smiling. He handed the towel back to K and stood. He fluffed out his jacket and slicked his damp hair back over his head. Then he descended the steps of the porch.

“Looks like the rain is about to stop,” he said finally. He looked back at K. “Thank you for your hospitality. You’re a good man. I can tell you’re not someone who knows how to make things easy for himself. You may not remember much, but what you do remember you hold tight and close to you. It’s understandable. Short-sighted, but understandable.”

The old man walked away, across the soggy earth. Weak drops of rain glittered in the light of the sunshine. K got up from his chair and watched as he headed down the road, gradually disappearing.

K swayed on his feet, suddenly dizzy. The beer rose in his throat and he swallowed hard. He was unnerved by the strange man’s brief visitation. Whatever the man had been talking about while he’d dried himself with K’s towel, one thing was for certain: something was off kilter. Something was wrong. K didn’t know what exactly, but as the rain stopped falling and the clouds broke slowly apart, allowing long angled rays of light to fall across the land, he sensed this above all else.

K could not stop thinking about the old man. At night he closed the windows, locked the doors and made a fire in the living room fireplace. (The quickest memory to return after Day Zero had been the memory of fear itself—irrational and intangible fear—and in a world of strangers, it didn’t take K long to figure out the locks.) He pulled the sofa closer to the fire and poured himself a whiskey. Andy sat on the sofa beside him and they both watched the fire. All the while they said nothing to each other. K had prepared a small, ill-conceived dinner for them both—tuna, beans in tomato sauce and baked potato. It was Andy who had first remembered how to use the can-opener, and a good thing too; the pantry was full of canned foods.

Once they had eaten, they’d changed into more comfortable clothing and made their way to the living room. The rain was intermittent now, falling in short fits and starts. The air was cold and the fire took a while to extend any real warmth. The rest of the house hung in darkness. All that could be seen was the orange glow of the fire on their faces and the dim blue radiance of the moon through the window. All that could be heard was the crackle of burning wood and the clink of whiskey and ice.

K looked at his son lying on the sofa beside him, hugging a purple pillow. He drank his whiskey. He wondered whether the boy had always been so quiet. Perhaps it was a characteristic he had recently acquired. A lack of confidence. A new sadness. Or, simply, Andy as he had always been. Silent and undemanding. K would never know.

The image of the old man in the rain entered his head and a ripple of fear ran through him, setting the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck on end. The man had known he had a son. What else did he know? Who was he really, and, above all, what were his intentions?

Eventually, K’s eyelids grew heavy, weighted by the warm and hypnotic fire and the warm and hypnotic alcohol. He fell asleep on the couch and dreamed, and in his dream the old man was standing in front of the house and K was yelling at him. Saying that he wasn’t welcome, that there was no one else in the house. The man simply ignored the yelling, thanked K for his kindness, and proceeded up the steps of the house. K tried to hold him back but the man moved forward effortlessly, ignoring K’s ineffectually outstretched palms.

Behind him, Andy was standing in the doorway of the house. K shouted for Andy to get back in and close the door, but the boy wouldn’t move, and the old man kept pressing on—impossibly wet (so wet he seemed made of water) and grinning and pushing forward against K’s body with supernatural ease. K’s feet simply slid back on the wooden boards as the drenched stranger walked ever closer to the doorway. Ever closer to K’s son. And in this dream K knew his efforts to hold him back were futile. The old man had the strength of an army at his back. The joy of the devil in his eyes. And K had nothing. No power at all. It was his dream but not his world.

And then he woke up and discovered that it was morning. He was still on the couch. The light of a clear day had spilled into the house and the shadowy atmosphere of the night had given way to the bland details of a cluttered room. The logs of scorching wood were now a warm mound of smoking ash. The glass tumbler was lying on the floor beside a small puddle of stinking whiskey.

Andy was not on the sofa. He must have gone to bed at some point, K thought as he pulled himself upright. He yawned and pushed himself up from the couch.

K called for Andy but there was no response. He walked through the corridor into the empty kitchen. The dirty dishes from their dinner were still sitting on the edge of the sink. K poured himself a glass of water and drank it quickly. Then he grabbed a mandarin from the fruit basket and peeled it as he walked through the rest of the house. He ate each segment slowly, savouring the sweet and natural juices. Finally he opened his son’s bedroom door.

Andy was not on the bed. Instead, K saw a black book placed neatly in the centre of the bed. He grabbed it.

It was a Bible.

Terror struck him instantaneously. The worst possible scenarios stacked up in his mind, layer upon layer, all laced with the gravity of cold fact. He left the room with the book in his hand and ran to the front door. The door was unlocked. Beyond the shadow of a doubt K knew he’d locked it the night before. He swung open the door and found himself on an empty porch. Ahead of him, the green and ordinary land stretched on. The horses in the paddock fanned their tails and huffed. Trees shook lightly in the morning breeze. Nothing was out of place, as far as he could tell. Nothing, except that Andy was not in the house. Not on the property. K was certain of it.

Someone had come into the house in the middle of the night and now Andy was gone.

K glanced down at the black laminated book and opened it. On the first blank page there was a handwritten note.

Beneath the note there was a handwritten reference:
Judges 8:23,
a passage somewhere in the Bible. K did not know his Bible well but paged furiously through the book until he found it. On the page the sentence had been underlined in pencil.

And Gideon said unto them, I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD will rule over you.

Upside down

I
opened my eyes and saw the stars against the thick, black night. A distant satellite moved slowly through them like an impostor trying to make a stealthy escape.

I was still on the raft, bound and powerless, but now everything was silent. I could barely hear the ocean beneath me. If there was life in the ocean, I saw and heard no signs of it. If there was life somewhere up in the stars, they were keeping it to themselves.

I had no idea how long I’d been out there, and no idea how long I was supposed to remain. Had I been there for two days already? Was I into my third day? I could honestly not remember. I remembered a time of clear and sunny weather and a time of grey, overcast sky, but had that occurred in one day or two? I’d blacked in and out several times. I hadn’t even needed to relieve myself, but couldn’t be sure I hadn’t already done so in my affected state.

Apart from the shifting of the stars, I had nothing to orientate me. My ability to distinguish between the ocean beneath and the sky above was slipping; they had become one and the same with their dark depths and shapeless textures. My raft was no longer a sea vessel but an extension of my body. I could barely tell where the surface of my skin ended and the bark of the raft began. We had been fused, the raft and I, and I was no longer attached to the earth by gravity but hovering in a midpoint. She’ol. A limbo. It felt as if I was now the only conscious thing in the universe. The centre and the source of perception. And though I had recently gone through the pains of physical hunger and thirst, the pains were now gone.

At an earlier point, the water had washed over me and run into my nose, burning the back of my throat and causing me to cough frantically. After that it had been so cold my teeth had chattered like glass ornaments quivering on a table in a tremor. But the chattering, too, had stopped. The feeling of cold had faded. Instead, there seemed to be nothing. Nothing but my thoughts.

The satellite moved out of my peripherals. I closed my eyes again. The darkness behind my closed lids was now my only refuge. Maybe, when I opened them, they’d have pulled me back in. Maybe when I awoke, I’d be back on the beach.

The next time I opened my eyes I thought that a few more hours had passed; it was still dark but the constellations appeared to be different. The dark, treacly ocean murmured beneath me, but the night sky …

As the night had worn on, the world had turned and the sky had moved with it, but this wasn’t a simple shifting of stars. This was the same night I’d seen earlier, but there was something different. The layout of the stars had been changed in some inexplicable way. Had I been looking wrongly at them before, or was I looking at them wrongly now? And how much of this night could possibly be left? What had happened to the sun; where was the morning?

The sounds of the ocean returned. I pulled in my fingers and clenched them tightly into fists, embracing the sense of pain caused by my untrimmed fingernails in the clammy and wrinkled meat of my palms. There was no breeze. The air was still, but warm now. I blinked my dry eyes hard, and studied the stars more closely.

It took me a few minutes to grasp what I was seeing.

It
was
the same sky. That was for sure. But somehow, I was looking at everything upside down.

But that’s not possible.

I wouldn’t be able to see the sky from that position because my raft was attached to the shore and anchored by the buoys.

A terrifying notion struck me.

The raft was no longer attached to the shore.

And I was floating freely across the ocean.

Somehow, the rope had snapped and the buoys had failed, but how far had I drifted out? Had I been free from the shore for minutes, hours, or more than a day?

Panic descended. My chest heaved as I fought to catch my breath. The pulse on the side of my head pounded like a small and impatient fist on a door to my mind. I willed myself to think clearly, to regulate my breathing and steady my mind. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath, held it, and then slowly released the thin and empty air.

Okay, Kayle. Think. Think. Think.

I mustered the last energy in my body and tugged my arms as hard as I could. My wrists burned as I strained to free them from the shackles. The straps would hardly move. I tried to kick my legs free of the straps below, hoping the seawater had somehow weakened the restraints. All I managed to do was exhaust myself and, judging by the sensation on my ankles, scrape my skin. Seawater stung as it poured over the fresh grazes. I wondered if Gideon, Theunis and Angerona were still alongside me, and tried to shout their names. My raspy voice was like the first, broken bleats of a newborn animal. Hardly anything escaped my lips. I swallowed air and tried again.

“Gideon! Theunis! Can you hear me!
Gideon!”

I closed my eyes and focused on hearing—something, anything. I waited but there was no sound other than the near and distant purr of endless water. Either my voice was too shallow or they were incapable of answering. Or … I was too far away from them. The raft continued to dip and roll over the surface of the black ocean. And then it moved. It was
rotating.
The stars spun on the axis of my line of sight, and I was now certain: I was far from the shore, out on the vast black ocean, alone.

Dad?

Hm?

Why do we have a moon?

What do you mean?

I know why we have a sun, but why do we have a moon?

Well, if we didn’t have a moon the tides wouldn’t go in and out.

Is that important?

Pretty important.

Why?

If the tides didn’t go in and out, life wouldn’t have come out of the ocean. And humans wouldn’t be here today. We’d probably still be jellyfish.

That’s funny. So if we found another planet like ours, that had people on it, like ours, it would have to have a moon too, right?

I guess so.

A moon like ours?

Or one that was similar.

Another earth and another moon.

That’s right.

Like a mother and a father.