The Raft: A Novel (31 page)

Pirates.
What kind of pirates were these people? A large family? A band of businessmen? A tribe of some kind? A rugged crew and a whip-cracking captain with a hook for a hand? And just how much did they know of the botanical death trap they were about to enter?

I crossed over the narrow hanging bridge and hopped onto the deck of the first house. Beneath the deck, the vast blanket of the trees swayed in the wind. All I could think of was the
strangeness
of my visit to the cabin. It hung in my mind, insistent and urgent.

I could not shake the sense I was being manipulated, one moment being shepherded by one bizarre brother and the next by the other, a prop passed between deranged performers in a type of twisted theatre I didn’t understand.

I shook myself free from the thought and stared into the distance. Clouds were pulling together on the horizon, the thin dark line at their base foretelling rain. I left the deck and went inside. There was still no sign of Anubis. I passed along the corridor and made my way to the tiny bathroom at the far corner of my bedroom.

The bathroom was cramped but sufficient. Light slipped in through the gaps in its wooden walls. A grubby tub stood in the corner, a brown puddle of undrained water at the centre. A dying hornet floated on its back in the puddle, kicking its crooked black legs in the air, its misshapen wings hanging drenched and torn and useless at its sides. It was the only other creature I had seen on the island …

(
The hornet landed on his face and stung him,
Moneta’s voice drifted into my head, delicate and feathery.
He shuddered, froze in his spot, and shrieked. I looked up. A second hornet was spiralling down from above towards him, and a third. Soon there were hundreds, literally hundreds of them, descending from the trees and engulfing him as he flung his arms out madly and let off a high and unearthly screech
)

I rinsed my face under the tap. I looked into the cracked and spotty mirror against the wall and rubbed the baggy skin beneath my eyes. I could hardly recognise myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my face. I looked older. Craggy. Exhausted. My eyes were set deep in their sockets. My beard climbed high up the sides of my cheeks, dark and rough. Deep lines scored my forehead. There was a cut beside my nose, already dried and scabbed, and the insides of my ears were thick with grime. I ran my hands through my hair, pulling the long brown strands behind my ears, and dried my hands on a grimy hand towel hanging over the pipe that looped beneath the basin.

I left the bathroom and made my way back down the corridor.

The father’s door was open, and once again I looked inside. He was awake, staring off into the far corner of the room. He didn’t seem so much in a state of serenity as surrender—a man who had, in some indeterminable way, given up on a long fight. He turned his head and stared at me without blinking.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name’s Kayle.”

He looked me up and down.

“How’d you get here?”

“I—”

“Well, hey-hey.” A cheerful voice came from the corridor. Startled, I turned to see Anubis standing at the entrance to the kitchen, smiling at me.

“Hey,” I said, and when I looked back at the old man, his head was turned again, his gaze on the opposite corner of the dim room, as if we hadn’t conversed at all.

Anubis approached me, slid between me and the door and pulled it shut.

“He needs his rest,” he said. “Come on. Give me a hand.”

At the back of the house there was a surprisingly large stretch of flat, grazed land. The perimeter of the land had been fenced with rough logs of wood. Wire-mesh divided a cordoned area into small squares. In one square were chickens and hens, stomping their thin, reptilian feet, clucking and putting on a show for each other. In another section, there were a few goats. The rest of the closed land had been reserved for vegetables—rows of onions, carrots, beets, beans, potatoes, pumpkins and tomatoes—as well as tufts of herbs. Rusted tools hung on nails against the back wall of the house, dented metal buckets hid in uncut grass. A rough lean-to kept a stack of firewood and bags of seed dry. Everything, it seemed, ticked at a cool and languid pace.

It was an impressive subsistence farm, certainly, and Anubis seemed to be the only one on the island capable of attending to it. We were standing in the chicken coop. I’d passed him the large sack of seed I’d carried from the wooden shelter and was now watching as he fed them. They jerked their heads towards the food and then turned away, and then back, almost as if they didn’t believe it was real.

“So you went to see my buh-bub-brother,” Anubis said, folding the top of the thick woven bag and tucking it into itself. “He tell you anything worthwhile?”

“He told me to come around tomorrow,” I replied. “He mentioned a dream he had, but I’m not sure why.”

“Mm. Dreams. He likes his dreams.”

He stood, arched his back and twisted his neck to loosen his muscles. He grabbed the seed and carried it to the side of the fence, and dusted his hands together.

“It was really dark,” I said. “And he’s not blind, is he? Does he really live there?”

“Pretty much. He knows his way around in there, and I ruh-ruh-reckon he can see way more than either of us ever could. But he’s not scared of the light—”

“He’s resentful of it,” I finished his sentence, and he nodded. He ushered me out of the coop and closed the warped wire gate behind him.

“So you gonna go?” he asked.

“Go where?”

“Back to the cabin.”

“I think so.”

“He intrigued you,” he said. It may have been a question, but it came across as a statement.

“He did.”

“Me too, sometimes. But intrigue doesn’t keep you fed. Muddying it out on a mound of chicken shit, that keeps you fed. I’m not sure he always gets that.”

We walked together back to the house. He rinsed his hands in a trough of water at the back door and patted them down on his pants.

“They’re gonna be here,” Anubis added. “The pirates. They’ll probably make their way into the jungle by noon tomorrow, if I were to guess. An hour later there’ll be a mound of well-fed corpses down there. You’ll never see anything like it in your life, Raft Man. And that,” he said, opening the door and waving me in, “is what intrigues
me.
”

For the rest of the day I could not shake the feeling there was something I was not being told. There was Anubis, seemingly taking care of the workings of the island, and then there were the other two, content to only haunt it. The question was why any of them were there at all. Were the three estranged occupants content to simply drift purposelessly across the ocean, until the trees grew into the windows and under their doors, impatient to appease their appetite for fresh flesh? What had happened to the ship that had brought them there? Had Anubis never made his way back down to the shore to look for it, to try to get away?

That night, I had dinner with Anubis at the kitchen table, but we said almost nothing to each other. After dinner I went straight to bed. My curiosity about the brother in the cabin had grown. Although I wasn’t convinced it would be worth returning (regardless of what I had told Anubis), I felt once again the pull to decide, a strange persuasion of whispers and voices from an external source.

When I awoke the next morning, my door was unlocked. I came out onto the deck but Anubis was not there. The other island, however, was right against the beach. It was too far away to see any detail; no people yet. But they had arrived—for better or for worse.

Finally, I made my way back down the stairs and into the jungle. The cabin was easier to find this time, but still as mystically odd as it had been the day before.

I knocked on the yellow door, it creaked open, and I stepped back into darkness.

The door swung closed behind me. Eventually the soft voice said: “There’s an armchair to your left. Please. Have a seat.”

I felt my way to the armchair and settled into it. It was surprisingly comfortable.

“There was once a king,” said the same voice from the day before. “A mortal king who had been cursed by the gods with an insatiable hunger. One day, fed up with his curse, he raised his fist to the heavens in anger. As he did, he noticed how delicious and plump his own fist was, and, giving in to his hunger, proceeded to eat himself, including his own mouth, which, of course, he had to leave for last.”

“Your brother says you can see the future.”

“Does he?”

There was another drawn out silence, and then, as I sat comfortably in the dark before that unseen man, the unearthly voice went on …

Becoming God

M
y brother doesn’t really understand what it is I can do. He has an idea, but he doesn’t really know. I can see the future sometimes. There is no limit to what I can see and no control over when I see it. Sometimes I see billions of years into the future. Sometimes only three or four minutes. There is no period in the future that is any more or less available to me. Time doesn’t work like that.

The future is always only the future, whether it’s thirty seconds away or thirty million years, but I’m able to form an insightful if somewhat incomplete model of what I see. I’m not sure, though, from whose perspective it is that I see these future happenings. I’ve seen the earth once the sun has burned itself out and this planet has become nothing but a cold and barren graveyard, so these can’t be my revelations, but they feel guided, focused in some way, as if this consistent perception of events is coming from somewhere.

But that’s too far and too much to think about. There’s no need to go into it right now, because it is a futile exercise for both of us. We are people in the present, with problems of the present. So what can I tell you? To give you your “idea,” the idea that has been promised, I should mention that over my travels I have seen the outcome of human evolution. I’ve gone to enough points in the future to have quite a clear picture of how we turn out, and it is fascinating. This picture is not only of the end of Man, but of the birth of God.

God, you see, has always been the benchmark. Every endeavour we’ve undertaken has been to acquire the characteristics and abilities of God—or rather, the concept of God that we conveniently created for ourselves like a kind of beautified self-portrait.

Well, there’s no need for further conjecture, no guesswork needed. I have seen how it happens. I have looked into the future and I have seen how it turns out for us. How we become God. If you are interested, I can do my best to explain what I have managed to puzzle together.

I cannot guarantee this is information you should be allowed to know but I think you
should
know it because of someone you will meet one day soon. Someone who will put you to the test in order to find your son. He may try to deceive you, as he does all people of the indomitable
now
, and you should be prepared for that meeting, when it comes.

So I’ll tell you.

Based on what I have seen, as we evolve, the first thing to occur will be the merging of our senses. Humans of the future look very different from us, and it took me a while to understand why. After enough trips into the years ahead, meeting a few of these future humans, I ended up formulating a hypothesis of my own.

It goes as follows: for now we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and so on—and this is sufficient for our most basic needs. Sufficient, but not perfect. Our brains need to build bridges between these separate organs to form a coherent “picture.” Since we hear and see with different organs, there are still limitations to the complexity of the “picture” we can see.

Over time, however, as our processing abilities increase, so will the demands made of our senses. The bridges between our senses will shorten and vanish altogether. One day it will be harder to distinguish between the eye and the ear. We will see and hear with the same organ, and this will make perception more accurate. The same will apply to the rest of our senses.

Our separate organs will evolve into a single sensory organ that sees, hears, tastes, touches and smells at once. Perception will be amplified. The need for the compartmentalisation of the body will be diminished. Eventually, the organs of our body will unify to become a single, shapeless mass of intellect and consciousness, capable of absorbing information, processing and communicating on multiple levels and in all directions.

We will then close the gap between our own individual being and the beings of others. Communication, after all, is a form of connection, and as with the bridges between the eye and ear, the spaces between ourselves must shorten too, before vanishing altogether. Two minds will merge into one body, and then three in one. And then four, and five, and so on, until all of humankind is a meta-entity—an Argos of supreme consciousness. Later, we will evolve out of the prison of matter itself, like the stem from a buried seed, until we become a matter-less, all-powerful, all-knowing consciousness.

After all, life is the will to connect.

And this will is all life has over chaos. If you offer nothing to life you will be trimmed like the fat from a piece of meat. Similarly, if you choose to sit on a throne—to monopolise—you are doomed to stagnation, to collapse back into chaos.

This is obvious, isn’t it?

And yet this remains the simplest and most misunderstood truth of all.

Yes and no

“A
nd I have seen this. In here. In the darkness and in my dreams. This process has happened before in previous universes and this will happen again. I’ve seen how this will happen. Or rather, how this is
supposed
to happen. I say ‘supposed to’ because something else has happened. Something I could not foresee. There’s been an intervention.”

“Day Zero.”

“Precisely,” the voice returned. “The process was stunted. We’re being held back from evolving.”

I sat up in my seat and leaned forward. I could now make out the faintest silhouette of a man before me. “But why?” I asked.

“Why?” the figure said. “I cannot say. I do not know the motives of the forces that exist, only what I see of our future. You’ve seen it in your dreams as a large glowing ball in the sky. Others have too. But for whatever reason, this glowing orb is wilful. Why Day Zero occurred, I cannot tell you, because I do not know. Remember, my visions are fragmented and what I know has been pieced together from mere glimpses of what is to come. But there is someone who
does
know. A man. I’ve seen him once or twice in my visions and he sees me. It is the only time someone in my visions has been aware of my presence—watching me watch him at various points in the future. I don’t know how he is capable of doing this, but he is.”