The Book of Strange New Things (44 page)

Anyway, enough of that. My hand is throbbing from typing this and your head is probably throbbing from having to read it. I’m sorry. I should lighten up. A workman from the window company is thumping about downstairs, fixing the bathroom. I’d given up hope; I’m ashamed to say I’d even given up praying for it. After all, I’d been told that the waiting list stretched ahead for weeks. But lo and behold: bright and early this morning, the guy showed up and said his boss had told him to shift his schedule around and do our place first. God forgets nothing!

My darling Peter, please write. It doesn’t have to be the definitive statement on everything. A few lines would make me so happy. One line even. Just say hello.

Your loving wife,

Bea

He felt feverish and dehydrated. He walked to the fridge and had a swig of water, then stood for a minute with his hot forehead pressed against the cool shell of the machine.

He sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet lay the loose pages of a Bible chapter he was adapting for his flock.
Luke 3
. John the Baptist announcing that there was someone coming soon ‘the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose’. Oh, that awkward word ‘latchet’. And its even more awkward alternatives, ‘strap’ and ‘shoelace’. He’d considered ‘leather band’, but there was the additional problem that Oasans’ footwear had no straps or laces and the entire concept might require explanation, which might be more trouble than it was worth, theologically speaking. If only he could think of an equivalent detail to replace the shoe stuff with . . . ‘whose (something) I am not worthy to (something)’ . . . Obviously, to mess around with the metaphors and similes of Jesus was unacceptable, but this was John, a mere mortal, no more divine than any other missionary, his utterances no more sacred than Peter’s own. Or were they? The Oasans had made it clear that they preferred their Scripture as literal as possible, and his misguided attempt to translate ‘manna’ as ‘whiteflower’ had caused murmurs of –

‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?’

He flinched. The voice – low-pitched, male and loud – had spoken right near his ear. He wheeled round. No one had entered the room. And God, surely, did not resort to four-letter words.

Dear Bea, he wrote,

I’m so sorry for my silence. I’ve been busy, true, but that’s not the reason I haven’t been writing. The real reason is hard to explain but it certainly isn’t that I’m angry with you and CERTAINLY not because I don’t love you.

This mission has turned out very different from what I anticipated. The things I expected to have a lot of trouble with have gone astonishingly smoothly but I feel out of my depth in other ways I never imagined. I assumed that I would be fighting an uphill battle to minister to the Oasans and that it would take me weeks, maybe even months, to construct even the flimsiest, most provisional bridge between these very foreign minds/hearts and the love of God awaiting them on the other side. But what has actually tested me beyond my abilities is the gulf that has opened up between you and me. I don’t mean an emotional gulf, in that my feelings for you have changed in any way. I mean a barrier that circumstances has pushed between us. Of course, physically, we are a huge distance apart. That doesn’t help. But the main thing I’m having to confront is that our relationship, until now, has totally depended on us being together. We’ve always seen and done things as a team and discussed everything as it’s come up, day by day, minute by minute – even second by second. Suddenly we’re on different paths. And your path has veered off in a frighteningly strange direction.

All these disasters that are befalling the world – the tsunamis and earthquakes and financial meltdowns or whatever – are just so alien to my life here. They don’t feel real. I’m ashamed to admit this because obviously to the people suffering through them they’re very real indeed but I have enormous trouble getting my head around them. And I very quickly reach a point where I think ‘If she tells me about one more disaster my brain will seize up.’ Of course I’m horrified by this failure of compassion, but the more I strain to overcome it the worse it becomes.

Another problem is that I find it almost impossible to talk about the Oasans to anyone who doesn’t know them. Not just to you, to the USIC guys as well. My communion with my new brothers and sisters in Christ seems to happen on a different plane, as though I’m speaking their language even though I’m not. Trying to describe it afterwards is like trying to explain what a smell looks like or what a sound tastes like.

But I must try.

The basics: The church is built. We worship in it regularly. I’ve taught the Oasans adapted versions of hymns that they can sing without too much difficulty. (The insides of their faces aren’t like ours; they have throats but I’m not convinced they have tongues.) I read to them from the Bible, which they insist on calling The Book of Strange New Things. They have a marked preference for the New Testament over the Old. Thrilling OT adventure stories like Daniel in the lions’ den, Samson & Delilah, David & Goliath, etc, don’t connect with them. They ask comprehension-type questions but you can tell that even on an ‘action’ level they don’t really get it. What floats their boat is Jesus and forgiveness. An evangelist’s dream.

They are gentle, kind, humble, hardworking people. It’s a privilege to live amongst them. They call themselves Jesus Lover One, Jesus Lover Two, etc. Jesus Lover One was the very first convert, dating back to the early days of Kurtzberg’s ministry. I wish I could show you pictures as I’m hopeless at describing them. Their behaviour is not that distinctive compared to ours, eg, I wouldn’t call some of them extrovert & others introvert, some good-humoured & others bad-tempered, some well-balanced & others crazy, etc. They’re all pretty low-key and the differences between them are quite subtle. It would take a novelist’s skill to capture those nuances in words and, as I’ve discovered to my embarrassment, I totally lack that skill. Also, they look physically very similar. Pure, unadulterated genetic stock. I never thought about this before coming here, but when we need to tell the difference between people, we get a lot of help from all the cross-breeding and migration that’s gone on in human history. It’s given us such a smorgasbord of different physical types – caricatures almost. By ‘we’ and ‘us’ I mean people in the cosmopolitan West, of course. If we were rural Chinese, and somebody asked us to describe someone else, we wouldn’t say, ‘She’s got straight black hair, dark brown eyes, she’s about five foot three’ and so on. We’d have to get more into the nuances. Whereas in the West there’s so much diversity we can say ‘He’s six foot two with blonde frizzy hair and pale blue eyes’, and that immediately sets him apart from the crowd. Bea, I’m rambling here but the point is that the Jesus Lovers would all look the same to you except for the colours of their robes. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’, I guess. In a future letter I’ll tell you about the contributions that some of the individual Jesus Lovers have made to the church.

He paused; recognised that Bea might have reason to doubt he would keep his promise. He racked his brains.

For example, he went on, Jesus Lover Five finally delivered her painting to be hung on the ceiling with the others. (Oh how I wish you could see them.) Her painting shows Salome and the two Marys outside Christ’s tomb, with the risen Jesus manifesting to them. He has His arms spread and He looks as though he’s made of light. It’s dazzling, I don’t know how she managed to achieve this with just pigment and cloth; it hits your eyeballs like car headlights on a dark night. You look up to the ceiling when you’re singing or preaching and you see this crucifix-shaped creature up there, blazing out of the dimness. So that’s Jesus Lover Five. A very talented lady (or maybe gentleman – I’m still not 100% sure).

What else should I tell you? I’m struggling to think, which is incredible because so many significant, precious things have happened on this mission and I see so much evidence of God’s grace during each hour that I spend in these people’s company. So many moments when, if you could only have been by my side, I’m certain we would have exchanged a glance that said: ‘Yes! God is at work here.’

He broke off and stretched. He was coated with sweat, from his greasy brow to the tips of his fingers. His naked buttocks squelched on the vinyl seat. Maybe it had been a mistake to turn off the air conditioning and let this stagnancy take hold. He got to his feet and walked to the window. Another tumbleweed of rain was on its way, swirling across the scrublands towards the base. In five minutes it would be here, streaming down the windows. He looked forward to that. Although there was something sad about enjoying rain on the other side of a glass barrier. He should be out there.

Tired, he threw himself on the bed for a minute. The dishdasha hung between him and the window, silhouetted against the brilliance of daylight. He shielded his eyes with his hands, shuttering his peripheral vision so that he could see the dishdasha without the glare on either side; the garment changed colour from dark grey to white. Optical illusions. The subjectivity of reality.

He thought of Bea’s wedding dress. She’d insisted on getting married in white, in a church, and on him wearing a white suit. An odd decision for two people who usually avoided ostentation and formality. Plus, there would be alcohol at the reception. He’d wondered if it mightn’t be better all round if they just ducked into a registry office in their casuals. No way, said Bea. A registry office wedding would be giving in to shame about their past. As if to say: a guy who used to crawl around in shit-smeared public urinals has no right to repackage himself in a spotless suit; a woman with Bea’s family history should forget all about standing up in a church dressed in white. Jesus died on the cross precisely to wipe out that sort of shame. It was like the angel in
Zechariah 3:2–4
taking off the priest’s filthy clothes.
Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment
. A clean slate. And there was no bolder celebration of a clean slate than the wedding of Peter and Beatrice.

And in the end, quite a few of the guests got sloshed but Peter didn’t touch a drop. And everyone read their speeches from pre-prepared scripts and he hadn’t written a thing but when the time came God gave him inspiration and he spoke about his love for Beatrice in elegant, flowing sentences that made people weep.

Then he and his wife went home and Beatrice lay on their bed with her white gown still on, and he thought she was having a rest before getting changed but it soon became obvious that she was inviting him to join her. ‘We might get it dirty,’ he said, ‘and it was so expensive.’ ‘All the more reason,’ she said, ‘not to shove it into a box with a bunch of mothballs after one day. It’s actually a very nice dress. It feels good to touch.’ And she guided his hand.

She must have worn that dress twenty, thirty times after that. Always indoors, always without any ceremonial flourish or spoken allusion to its symbolic significance: merely as though she’d decided, on a mundane whim, to wear a white dress that evening rather than a green one; an embroidered bodice rather than a V-necked jumper. He never wore his wedding suit again, though.

The rain hit the window at last. Peter lay on his bed as the semen cooled on his midriff. Then he got up, showered again, and returned to the Shoot. The cursor on the screen was still blinking under the word .here

18

I need to talk to you, she said

The news that Dr Matthew Everett had died meant nothing to Peter. He’d never met the man. He visited doctors as seldom as possible and, before the obligatory tests that gave him a clean bill of health for the Oasis mission, it had been ages since he’d set foot in any sort of clinic. A doctor had once threatened him that if he continued drinking he would be dead within three months. He’d continued drinking for years. Another doctor, affiliated in some way with the police, had branded him psychopathic and was keen to get him locked up in an institution. Then there was the registrar at Bea’s hospital who’d made trouble for her when she ‘developed an unprofessional attachment to a patient with a history of substance abuse and manipulative behaviour’.

No, doctors and Peter had never got on. Not even in the years since he’d become a Christian. When medical practitioners heard about your faith, they didn’t respond like most people – with bemusement or combative scorn, ready to get into an argument about why-does-God-allow-suffering. Rather, they kept their faces blank and their conversation non-committal, and you felt they were making a mental note in some sort of file on your health issues:
Irrational religious beliefs
, right under
Blepharitis
and
Rosacea
.

‘You should go see Doc Everett,’ several USIC people had told him since his arrival. They meant: to check that you’re back in shape after the Jump, or, to get treatment for that sunburn. He’d made polite noises and carried on regardless. And now Doctor Everett was dead.

The fatality had come out of the blue and reduced the USIC medical team from six to five: two paramedics, a nurse called Flores, an MD and surgeon called Austin, and Grainger.

‘It’s very bad this has happened,’ said Grainger when Peter met up with her outside the pharmacy. ‘Very bad.’ She wasn’t wearing her shawl this morning, and her hair was slick with water, newly washed. It sharpened her features, accentuated the scar on her forehead. He imagined a younger Alexandra Grainger, dead drunk, pitching forwards, her head splitting open against a metal tap, blood in the sink, blood on the floor, so much blood to be mopped up when she was hauled away.
You’ve been there
, he thought.
I’ve been there too
. Beatrice, much as he loved her, had never been there.

‘Were you close?’ he said.

‘He was a nice guy.’ Her frown and preoccupied tone suggested that her personal relationship with Everett was irrelevant to how bad a thing his death was. Without any further conversation she escorted Peter from the pharmacy into a passageway that led to the medical centre.