The Book of Strange New Things (63 page)

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er.’

‘Lover Five?’

‘Yeสี.’

Peter turned to Austin. ‘What’s wrong with her? Why is she here?’

‘She?’ The doctor blinked. ‘Pardon me.’ He reached for a clipboard on which a single sheet was clamped, and, with a scrawl of a pen, he amended the patient’s gender.

‘Well, as you can see from the bandage,’ he continued, escorting Peter to Lover Five’s bedside, ‘she’s sustained a hand injury. A very serious hand injury, I must say.’ He motioned to the gauze mitten. ‘May I?’ This last question was directed at the patient.

‘Yeสี,’ she said. ‘สีhow.’

While the bandages were being unwrapped, Peter recalled the day of Lover Five’s injury: the painting falling from the ceiling, the bruise on her hand, the fervid sympathy offered by her fellow สีฐฉั. And how, ever since then, she’d been protective of that hand, as if the memory of that injury refused to fade.

The white mitten dwindled in size until Austin removed the last of the gauze. A sweet, fermented smell was released into the room. Lover Five’s hand was no longer a hand. The fingers had fused into a blueish-grey clump of rot. It looked like an apple that had sustained a bruise and then been left for weeks.

‘Oh my God,’ Peter breathed.

‘Do you speak his . . . do you speak her language?’ said Austin. ‘Because I’m not sure how to get proper consent here. I mean, not that there’s any alternative to amputation, but even explaining what a general anaesthetic is . . . ’

‘Oh . . . my . . . God . . . ’

Lover Five ignored the men’s conversation, ignored the putrid mess on the end of her wrist. With her uninjured hand, she opened her Bible pamphlet, deftly using three fingers to flip to a particular page. In a clear voice unhampered (thanks to her pastor) by impossible consonants, she recited:

‘
The Lord give them power in their bed of pain, and make them whole again
.’ And, from the same page of inspirational selections from
Psalms
and
Luke
: ‘
The people learned the good new way and followed him. He welcomed them and helped them know God, and healed all them who needed healing
.’

She raised her head to fix her attention on Peter. The bulges on her face that resembled the knees of foetuses seemed to glow.

‘I need healing,’ she said. ‘Or I die.’ Then, after a brief silence, in case there was any ambiguity that should be clarified: ‘I wiสีh, pleaสีe, รี่o live.’

‘My God . . . my God . . . ’ Peter kept saying, ten metres down the hall, as Austin leaned against the edge of his consulting room desk, arms awkwardly folded. The doctor was tolerant of the pastor’s emotional incontinence – he wouldn’t dream of telling him that nothing was achieved by all this groaning and fist-clenching and agitated face-wiping. Even so, as the minutes ticked on, he became more keen to discuss the way forward.

‘She’ll have the best of care,’ he reassured Peter. ‘We have everything here. Not to blow my own horn, but I’m a pretty good surgeon. And Dr Adkins is even better. Remember the great job he did on you? If it sets your mind at rest, he can do her as well. In fact, yes, I’ll make sure he definitely does her.’

‘But don’t you realise what this means?’ cried Peter. ‘
Don’t you fucking realise
what this means?’

The doctor flinched at the unexpected cursing from a man who was, as far as he’d been given to understand, a
bona fide
Christian minister.

‘Well, I appreciate that you’re upset,’ he remarked carefully. ‘But I don’t think we should jump to any pessimistic conclusions.’

Peter blinked tears from his eyes, allowing him to see the doctor’s face in focus. The ragged scar on Austin’s jaw was as conspicuous as ever, but now, rather than wondering how Austin got it, Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death. The wounds on Peter’s arm and leg (healing still), the scabs on his ears (gone now), every trifling scratch and burn and rash and bruise, thousands of injuries over the years, right back to the ankle-bones he’d broken the week before he’d met Bea, his skinned knees when he’d fallen off his bike as a kid, the nappy rash he’d probably experienced as a baby . . . none of them had stopped him being here today. He and Austin were comrades in stupendous luck. The gouge in Austin’s chin, which must have been a gory mess when it was first inflicted, had not reduced the entire head to a slimy lump; it magicked itself into fresh pink flesh.

Nothing shall hurt you
, said Luke.
When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned
, said Isaiah.
The Lord healeth all thy diseases
, said
Psalms
. There it was: there it was, plain as the scar on this smug doctor’s face: the perpetual reprieve the Oasans called the Technique of Jesus.

25

Some of us have work to do

Outside, the sky turned dark, even though it was day. Ominous cloud-masses had formed, dozens of them, almost perfectly circular, like giant moons of vapour. Peter stared at them through the window of his room. Lover One had once assured him that there were no storms on Oasis. It looked like that was about to change.

The giant globes of moisture, as they advanced, became at once more familiar and more alarming. They were swirls of rain, only rain, no different in their motion from the rain-swirls he’d witnessed many times before. But their relationship with the sky around them was not as subtle and freely shifting as usual; instead, it was as though each vast congregation of water-droplets was restrained by an inner gravitational pull, held together like a planet or some gaseous heavenly body. And the spheres were so dense that they had lost some of their transparency, casting an oppressive pall over what had been a bright morning.

There are rain clouds on the way, he thought of writing to Bea, and was hit with a double distress: the memory of the state Bea was in, and deep shame at how inadequate his letters to her were, how inadequate they’d been from the beginning. If he could have described what he’d experienced better, she might not have felt so separated from him. If only the tongue that God lent him when he was called upon to speak in public to strangers could have come to his aid when writing in private to his wife.

He sat at the Shoot and checked for a message. None.

The truth was as plain as a dull blank screen where words had once glowed: she saw no point in responding to him now. Or she was unable to respond – too busy, or too upset, or in trouble. Maybe he should write again regardless, not wait for an answer, just keep sending messages. The way
she
had done for him when he’d first got here, message after message which he’d left unanswered. He searched his mind for words that might give her hope, maybe something along the lines of ‘Hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires can fall, civilisations can vanish into dust . . . ’ But no: the rhetoric of a sermon was one thing; his wife’s grim reality was another. Civilisations did not vanish smoothly and easefully; empires did not set like suns: empires collapsed in chaos and violence. Real people got pushed around, beaten up, robbed, made destitute. Real lives went down the toilet. Bea was scared and hurt, and she didn’t need his preaching.

Bea, I love you, he wrote. I;m so worried about you.

Was it right to spend five thousand dollars of USIC’s money to send those nine impotent little words through space? With barely a moment’s hesitation, he pressed the transmission button. The letters trembled on the screen for two, three, then four minutes, making Peter fear that his feelings had been judged, by some jaded shiftworker elsewhere in the building, to have failed a test, to have sinned against the USIC ethos, attempting to undermine the great mission. Staring at the screen, sweat forming on his brow, he belatedly noticed the typo – a semi-colon instead of an apostrophe. He lifted his hand to fix it, but the words evaporated.

APPROVED. TRANSMITTED, the screen said in a wink.

Thank God for that.

Outside the compound, a rumble of thunder.

Peter prayed.

In every Christian’s life there comes a time when he or she needs to know the precise circumstances under which God is willing to heal the sick. Peter had reached that pass now. Until today, he’d muddled through with the same hodgepodge of faith, medicine and common sense that everyone else in his church back in England was likely to rely on: Drive carefully, take the pills as stated on the package, pour cold water on a scald, get the cyst removed by a surgeon, be mindful that a Christian diabetic needs insulin just as much as an atheist diabetic does, regard a heart attack as a warning, remember that all human beings must die, but remember too that God is merciful and may snatch your life back from the jaws of death if . . . if what? If what?

A few hundred metres from here, confined in a metal cot, lay Lover Five, so small and helpless in that big empty space labelled Intensive Care. Nothing that USIC’s doctors had to offer could fix the rot in her flesh. Amputating her hand would be like cutting the rotten part out of an apple; it was just tidying up the fruit as it died.

But God . . . God could . . . God could what? God could cure cancer, that had been proven many times. An inoperable tumour could, through the power of prayer, miraculously shrink. Sentences of death could be commuted for years, and, although Peter disapproved of charlatan faith-healers, he had seen people wake from supposedly fatal comas, had seen hopelessly premature babies survive, had even seen a blind woman regain her sight. But why did God do it for some Christians and not for others? Such a basic question, too simpleminded for theologians to bother discussing at their synods. But what was the answer? To what extent did God feel bound to respect the laws of biology, letting calcifying bones crumble, poisoned livers succumb to cirrhosis, severed arteries gush blood? And if the laws of biology on Oasis were such that the สีฐฉั couldn’t heal, that the mechanism for healing didn’t even exist, was there any point in praying to God for help?

Dear God, please don’t let Lover Five die
.

It was such an infantile prayer, the sort of prayer a five-year-old might pray.

But maybe those were the best kind.

What with the thunder in the skies outside and the rumble of worry in his own head, it was difficult for him to recognise the knocking at his door for what it was. Eventually he opened up.

‘How are you feeling?’ said Grainger, dressed for going out.

Like hell
, he almost said. ‘I’m very upset and worried about my friend.’

‘But physically?’

‘Physically?’

‘Are you up for going out with me?’ Her voice was firm and dignified; she was wholly back to normal now. Her eyes were clear, no longer red-rimmed; she didn’t smell of alcohol. In fact, she was beautiful, more beautiful than he’d given her credit for before. As well as her usual driving shawl, she wore a white tunic top with loose sleeves that barely reached past her elbows, exposing the network of scars on her pale forearms to public view.
Take me as I am
, was the message.

‘We can’t leave Tartaglione to rot,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to bring him back.’

‘He doesn’t want to come back,’ said Peter. ‘He feels utter contempt for everybody here.’

‘He’s just saying that,’ said Grainger, bristling with impatience. ‘I know him. We used to talk. He’s a real interesting guy, very smart and charming. And sociable. He’ll go insane out there.’

A naked bogey-man from medieval depictions of the damned leapt around in Peter’s memory. ‘He’s insane already.’

Grainger’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s kinda . . . judgemental, wouldn’t you say?’

Peter looked away, too burdened with care to argue. Clumsily, he pretended to be distracted by the demands of unloading the washing machine.

‘Anyway,’ said Grainger, ‘
I’ll
talk to him,
you
don’t have to talk to him. Just get him to come out of hiding. Whatever you did last time, do it again.’

‘Well,’ Peter recalled, ‘I was stumbling around in pitch darkness, delirious, convinced I was dying, loudly reciting a paraphrase of Psalm 23. If that’s what it takes, I’m not sure I could . . . uh . . . replicate the conditions.’

She put her hands on her hips, provocatively. ‘So does that mean you’re not willing to give it a shot?’

And so they set off. Not in the delivery jeep Grainger preferred for her drug and food runs, but in the hearse-like station wagon Peter had commandeered, the one with the bed in the back. Grainger took a while to adjust to driving it, sniffing at its unfamiliar smells, fiddling with its unfamiliar controls, wriggling her buttocks on the unfamiliar shape of its seat. She was a creature of habit. All the USIC staff were creatures of habit, he realised now. There wasn’t a reckless adventurer among them: Ella Reinman’s vetting process made sure of that. Maybe he, Peter, was the closest thing to an adventurer they’d ever allowed to come here. Or maybe Tartaglione was the closest. And that’s why he’d gone insane.

‘I figure he’s more likely to show,’ Grainger explained, ‘if the vehicle’s the same. He probably saw you coming for ages.’

‘It was night.’

‘The vehicle would have lit itself up. He could’ve been watching it from a mile away.’

Peter thought this was unlikely. He was more inclined to believe that Tartaglione had been watching the twinkles in his vat of moonshine, watching musty memories slowly decay inside his own skull.

‘What if we don’t find him?’

‘We’ll find him,’ said Grainger, focusing her eyes on the featureless landscape.

‘But what if we don’t?’

She smiled. ‘You gotta have faith.’ The heavens rumbled.

A few minutes later, Peter said, ‘May I check the Shoot?’

Grainger fumbled on the dashboard, not sure where the Shoot was located in this vehicle. A drawer slid out like a tongue, offering two repulsive objects that looked like large mummified slugs but which, at second glance, were mouldy cigars. Another drawer revealed some sheets of printed paper that had turned rainbow colours and shrivelled to a fragile tissue resembling autumn leaves. Evidently, the USIC personnel had made little or no use of Kurtzberg’s hearse since his disappearance. Maybe they regarded it as cursed with bad luck, or maybe they’d made a conscious decision to leave it just as it was, in case the minister came back one day.