The Book of Strange New Things (61 page)

It was not the light of Afterlife; it was the light of a hospital. Yes, he remembered now. He had broken his ankles, running from the law, and he’d been taken to hospital and pumped full of anaesthetic so that mysterious figures in masks could mend his splintered bones. There would be no more running; he would have to take what was coming to him. A woman’s face floated down over his own. The face of a beautiful woman. Bending over him as if he was a baby in a crib. On her bosom, a name tag that said Beatrice. She was a nurse. He liked her instinctively, as though he’d been waiting for her to turn up all his life. He might even marry her one day, if she said yes.

‘Bea,’ he croaked.

‘Try again,’ said the woman. Her face grew rounder, her eyes changed colour, her neck shortened, her hair rearranged itself into a boyish cut.

‘Grainger,’ he said.

‘You got it,’ she said wearily.

‘Where am I?’ The light hurt his eyes. He turned his head aside, into a pale green cotton pillow.

‘In the infirmary,’ said Grainger. ‘Whoah – keep that arm still, it’s got an IV drip in it.’

He did as he was told. A thin tube dangled against his cheek. ‘How did I get here?’

‘I told you I’d always look out for you, didn’t I?’ said Grainger. Then, after a pause: ‘Which is more than you can say for God.’

He let his tethered arm fall back onto the coverlet and smiled. ‘Maybe God is working through you.’

‘Yeah? Well, as a matter of fact there’s medications for thoughts like that. Lurasidone. Asenapine. I can prescribe you some anytime you’re ready.’

Still squinting against the light, he craned his head round to look at the bag that fed his intravenous line. The liquid in it was transparent. Glucose or saline, not blood.

‘The poison,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

‘You weren’t poisoned,’ said Grainger, with a tinge of exasperation in her voice. ‘You just got dehydrated, that’s all. You didn’t drink enough. You could have died.’

He laughed, and the laughter morphed into sobs. He laid his fingers on his chest, roughly where the inky crucifix was or used to be. The fabric was sticky and cold. He’d poured Tartaglione’s vile liquor down his chin and onto his breast, pretending to drink it. Here in the sterile air conditioning, its sweet stench of ferment was bad enough to choke the breath.

‘Did you bring Tartaglione back?’ he asked.

‘Tartaglione?’ Grainger’s voice was augmented by muted exclamations of surprise from elsewhere in the room: they were not alone.

‘You didn’t see him?’ said Peter.

‘He was there?’

‘Yes, he was there,’ said Peter. ‘That’s where he lives. Out in the ruins. He’s not a well man. He probably needs to go home.’

‘Home? Well, fancy that.’ Grainger sounded bitter. ‘Who would’ve thought it.’

Moving out of his range of sight, she did something he couldn’t identify, some emphatic or even violent physical action which caused a clattering noise.

‘Are you all right, Grainger?’ A male voice, half-sympathetic, half-cautioning. The doctor from New Zealand. Austin.

‘Don’t touch me,’ said Grainger. ‘I’m fine. Finefinefine.’

Peter realised all of a sudden that the alcohol he could smell was not emanating solely from his own clothing. There was an additional tang in the air, a spirits tang, which might have been created by tearing open a few dozen disposable surgical wipes, but could just as easily have come from a few shots of whiskey. Whiskey consumed by Alex Grainger.

‘Maybe Tartaglione is happy where he is.’ A female voice this time. Flores, the nurse. She spoke calmly, as though to a child, as though a cat had been sighted in a tree and a naïve youngster was insisting that somebody should climb up to rescue it.

‘Oh, yeah, I’m sure he’s happy as a clam,’ retorted Grainger, her sarcasm escalating so fast that Peter was no longer in any doubt she was disinhibited by booze. ‘Happy as the day is long. Hey, you like that? – “As the day is long”. That’s a pun, right? Or maybe not a pun . . . Maybe irony? What would you call it, Peter?’

‘Might be best to let our patient recover a bit more,’ suggested Austin.

Grainger ignored him. ‘Tartaglione was a real Italian, did any of you know that? Like, genuine. He grew up in Ontario, but he was born in . . . I forget the name of the place . . . he told me once . . . ’

‘Perhaps not relevant to our work here just now?’ suggested Austin. Masculine as his voice was, it had taken on a slightly whiny edge. He wasn’t used to dealing with unreasonable colleagues.

‘Right, right,’ said Grainger. ‘None of us come from anywhere, I forgot, excuse me. We’re the Foreign fucking Legion, like Tuska keeps saying. And anyway, who’d want to go home? Who’d want to go home when everything
there
is so fucked up and everything
here
is so fantastic? You’d have to be crazy, right?’

‘Please, Grainger,’ warned Flores.

‘Don’t do this to yourself,’ said Austin.

Grainger started to weep.

‘You’re not human, you people. You’re just not fucking human.’

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Flores.

‘What do
you
know about need?’ cried Grainger, hysterical now. ‘Keep your fucking hands off me!’

‘We’re not touching you, we’re not touching you,’ said Austin.

There was another crash of toppled equipment: a metal IV-stand, perhaps. ‘Where’s my daddy?’ Grainger whimpered, as she stumbled out. ‘I want my daddy!’

After the door slammed, the infirmary went quiet. Peter wasn’t even sure if Austin was still around, but fancied he could hear Flores fussing about, beyond his field of vision. His neck was stiff and he had a pounding headache. The liquid in his IV bag drained unhurriedly into his vein. When it was all gone and the bag hung limp and wrinkled as a condom, he asked to be allowed to leave.

‘Dr Austin wanted to discuss something with you,’ said Flores, as she unhooked him. ‘I’m sure he’ll be right back.’

‘Later, maybe,’ said Peter. ‘I really have to go now.’

‘It would be better if you didn’t.’

He flexed his fist. The puncture wound where the cannula had just been removed oozed bright blood. ‘Can I have a Band-Aid on this?’

‘Of course,’ said Flores, rummaging inside a drawer. ‘Dr Austin said he was sure you would be very . . . ah . . . anxious to have a confab with him. About another patient here.’

‘Who?’ Peter was itching to get out; he must write to Bea as soon as possible. He should have written to her many hours ago, instead of driving off in a haze of melodrama.

‘I couldn’t say,’ said Flores, frowning her monkey frown. ‘If you’ll just care to wait . . . ’

‘Sorry,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll be back. I promise.’ He knew even as he uttered these words that they might be a lie, but they had the desired effect: Nurse Flores stepped backwards, and he was out of there.

With nothing to show for his ordeal but a small ball of cotton wool taped to his wrist, he walked to his quarters, unsteady on his feet but stubbornly alive. Various USIC employees passed him in the corridors, looking askance at his pitiful appearance. Only a few metres shy of his room, he met Werner.

‘Hi,’ said Werner, holding two chubby fingers aloft as he passed by. It was a gesture that could have signified any number of things: a wave that was too lazy to employ the whole hand, a casual approximation of the peace symbol, an unwitting echo of a Christian benediction. More likely, it signified nothing except Werner’s determination to get on with his engineering or hydraulics or whatever, without having to concern himself with desperate-looking weirdos.

‘Well, bless you,
too
, pal,’ Peter felt like calling out to the disappearing Chinese. But that would be sarcasm. He must avoid that, it was a sin to have even considered it, a lapse, a disgrace. He must cling to his sincerity. It was all he had left. There must be no bile in his soul, no barb in his speech. To love without discrimination, to mean all creatures well, even a rabid dog like Tartaglione, even a waste of space like Werner: that was his sacred duty as a Christian, and his only salvation as a person. As he opened the door of his quarters, he counselled himself to expunge all dislike of Werner from his heart. Werner was a poor lamb, precious in the eyes of the Lord, a charmless creep who couldn’t help being a charmless creep, a geeky orphan who’d grown into a specialised form of survivor. We are all specialised forms of survivor, Peter reminded himself. We lack what we fundamentally need and forge ahead regardless, hurriedly hiding our wounds, disguising our ineptitude, bluffing our way through our weaknesses. No one – especially not a pastor – should lose sight of that truth. Whatever he did, however low he sank, he must never stop believing all men were his brothers.

And all women.

And all สีฐฉั.

Dear Bea, he wrote,

There is nothing I can say that would make what happened to Joshua feel like anything other than obscenely unfair. He was a wonderful, delightful creature and it hurts me so much to think of him dead and how he died. It’s awful to be reminded in such a brutal way that Christians have no magic immunity to the evil actions of malicious people. Faith in Christ leads to amazing blessings and strokes of good fortune, as we’ve observed together many times, but the world remains a dangerous place and we remain – merely by being human – vulnerable to the horrors that humans can cause.

I’m angry too. Not at God, but at the sick bastards who tortured Joshua. I should love them, but I want to kill them, even though killing them wouldn’t bring Joshua back. I need time to work through my gut feelings and I’m sure you do too. I’m not going to tell you to forgive these boys because I can’t forgive them myself yet. Only Jesus was capable of that level of grace. All I will say is that I have caused great grief to others and I have been forgiven. I once robbed a house that had boxes of cancer drugs in the bedroom, piles of them. I know they were cancer drugs because I rummaged through them in case there was anything I could use. I stole a box of analgesics and left the rest scattered on the floor. In the years since, I’ve often thought about what effect that must have had on those people when they got home from the hospital or wherever they’d gone that day. I don’t mean the analgesics – they could have replaced those pretty quickly, I expect. I mean the fact that they got robbed on top of everything else they were going through, that there was no mercy, no allowance made for their already impossible circumstances. The boys who tortured Joshua did that to us. What else can I say? I’m not Jesus.

But I am still your man. We’ve been through so much together. Not just as a Christian husband-and-wife team, but as two animals who trust each other. Whenever I think of the gulf that’s come between us, I’m sick with sorrow. Please accept my love. In sermons sometimes, I’ve told people that what I was enchanted by, in that hospital ward when we first met, was the light of Christ that shone out of you. I believed that when I said it, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I devalued you in order to score an evangelistic point. There is a light in you that’s intrinsic to who you are, a marvellous spirit that would dwell in you even if you weren’t a Christian, a spirit that will continue to make you special even if your rejection of God proves to be permanent. I love you and want you regardless of your religious faith. I miss you. Don’t let go.

I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that I’m not interested in what’s going on in the world – our world, that is. Please tell me more. Everything you can think of, anything that strikes you. There is no news here whatsoever – no newspapers, not even outdated ones, no access to any information about current affairs, no history books or indeed books of any sort, just puzzle books and glossy magazines about hobbies and professional pursuits. And even those are censored. Yes, there’s an industrious little USIC censor vetting all the magazines and tearing out any pages they don’t approve of!

I finally met Tartaglione, the linguist who went missing. He’s a very addled individual, but he told me the truth about USIC’s agenda. Contrary to our suspicions, they aren’t here for imperialist or commercial reasons. They think the world is ending and they want to make a new start on Oasis. They’re getting the place ready. For who, I don’t know. Not for the likes of you, evidently.

He paused in his typing, re-read what he’d written, considered deleting everything after Don’t let go. In the end he erased Not for the likes of you, evidently, added Love, Peter and pressed the button to transmit.

For the usual several minutes his words trembled on the screen, waiting to be released. Then, superimposed on the text like a burn from a branding iron, a terse warning manifested in livid letters:

NOT APPROVED – SEEK ASSISTANCE.

He stood at Grainger’s door and knocked.

‘Grainger!’ he yelled. ‘Grainger! Open up, it’s me, Peter!’ No reply.

Without even looking up and down the corridor to check if anyone was watching, he opened the door and barged into Grainger’s quarters. He would drag her out of bed if she was asleep. Not violently, you understand. But she must help him.

The layout of her quarters was identical to his; her space equally Spartan. She wasn’t in it. Her bed was made, more or less. A white shawl hung on the clothesline, hitched up to the ceiling. A constellation of water-drops glimmered on the inside of the shower cubicle. A half-empty bottle of bourbon, labelled simply
BOURBON
in red block-letters on a white sticker, and priced at $650, stood on a table. Also displayed on the table was a framed photograph of a craggy-faced middle-aged man wearing heavy winter clothes, cradling a shotgun. Behind him, under an ominous grey sky, the Grainger family farm was covered in snow.

Ten minutes later, he found Charlie Grainger’s daughter in the pharmacy, a place where he ought not have been surprised to find her, since she was, after all, USIC’s pharmacist. She was seated at a counter, dressed as usual, her hair neat and still a little damp. When he walked in, she was writing in an old-fashioned ring-binder, with a pencil clutched awkwardly in her short fingers. Honeycombs of modular shelving, mostly vacant but punctuated here and there with petite plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, towered over her. She was calm, but her eyelids were raw from crying.