The Raft: A Novel (37 page)

“Okay …” Shen continued the discussion, pulling himself together. “All right. I’ll play along, and then how about you and I hit the road? If what you’re saying is true, and this is all some kind of a trick, where are we, Quon? And how do you suppose we get out?”

Quon smiled wryly and added, “I think I might know, Captain. After all, I’m the scientist. But as Heisenberg himself proposed, a good scientist must be completely removed from the equation in order to yield accurate results.”

As he completed his final statement, the barmaid lunged towards Quon with the knife in her hand, extended her arm over the counter, and slit his throat cleanly from side to side.

A sea of rooftops

“Y
ou had a nightmare,” said the owner’s son. He was lying on the bunk bed beneath me. I pulled out my pillow, squeezed it into shape and put it back behind my head.

“I suppose so,” I said, coming back to waking reality after plummeting from an impossibly tall tree.

“I think you were falling,” the boy said. “It seemed like you were falling. You were saying your son’s name.”

“I was?”

I pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes. I had a headache. More than likely, I was dehydrated. For more than a week I had been ill, running a fever and sweating in my sleep. I was only just beginning to feel vaguely normal. We had been at sea for almost three weeks and I’d spent most of it in bed. I’d been struck by spells of delirium and disorientation. I once found myself waking up in the bathroom after a somnambulistic stroll in the night, throat dry and head pounding. Members of the island took me back to bed and did their best to settle me. Another time, the owner of the island, a tall bearded man who always wore a ragged old red baseball cap and smoked brown hand-rolled cigarettes, was sitting at my bedside after a particularly troubling night. He said we’d had a conversation but I didn’t remember it. He said I thought he was a man named Jack Turning.

(
“Whoever that fellow is or was to you, friend,” he said. “You sure didn’t like him much.”
)

On better nights, as I lay there weak but awake, I could do nothing but work my way through the memories of recent events—memories culminating with the sound of a gun exploding in the hands of a young man who’d mistaken me for his father. The sound still rang in my ears, his words echoes in the crooked halls of my mind:
I was your son. And you left me here. You forgot me. You forgot me.

Sometimes, I thought I was still trapped in that dark and menacing jungle. I imagined the ceiling of the room was covered in fruit—sweating, bulbous fruits that looked scarcely as appetising as I had once thought them. For at least a week after being welcomed onto this new island I struggled to keep food down after meals and had an almost rabid aversion to drinking water. The mornings were clearer, and I’d remember that we’d long left that island of mind-altering fruits and carnivorous trees, and were now on another island altogether. An island that, by comparison, was a kind of secular monastery.

Both the bed-bound geneticist and I had been offered passage on the second smaller island with its community of nomadic seafarers. We had taken them up on their offer—left that overgrown island to drift unmanned across the sea—and become their welcomed guests. They were a hardy and upbeat group who believed in a simple way of living, and I liked them instantly. When I told them where I had come from, how I had been set adrift on a raft, they said they knew about the communes. They’d heard about the New Past and The Renascence, but had decided that until they were caught and dragged off they would never readily submit themselves to a cause they didn’t completely understand. Whatever the purpose of the communes might be, they insisted, they didn’t care. That was where the discussion ended before the generous food and strong alcoholic malts were served to celebrate our arrival.

The inhabitants of the island also assured us, with no real plan or destination of their own, that they would gladly take us wherever we wished to go. The old geneticist later asked if he could stay with them—his agricultural know-how was certainly of prodigious value—and they welcomed him as a permanent addition to their community. I, on the other hand, decided I could not stay.

I had to find Andy, my son, I explained.

I had to go on.

I climbed down from the bunk bed and grabbed a mug of water off the boy’s desk. He was lying on his stomach and reading some kind of magazine. It was yellowed and tattered, but I could still see the faded images of beautiful houses with their landscape gardens. Dining-table sets and exquisitely crafted furniture. Polished silverware and extravagant crystal chandeliers. Matching drapes and duvet covers. It had been years since I’d seen any of those things.

The captain’s son was no older than thirteen or fourteen years old. I wondered what he imagined as he turned the pages, looking at the trappings of what must have seemed like a fantastical place, the paraphernalia of an extinct alien world, once populated by aliens with extinct alien interests. He’d probably never seen anything as indulgently decorative in his life.

“Did people actually have all of these things?” he asked.

“I guess they tried,” I said.

I left the room and the house and walked onto the balcony outside. The day was hot and sunny, the sky blue and cloudless. The old geneticist, his name was Klaus I learned later, was sitting on a chair, surveying the ocean. A hundred-metre stretch of plant-life circled the balcony—patches of low shrubs and bushes. A low stone wall surrounded the island, and stretching in all directions beyond that was the ocean—the endless, inconstant ocean. There were three rain-stained villas behind us, built on a mound in the centre of the island. A few palm trees hung over the villas, more for shade than anything else. The entire island was only a fraction of the size of the geneticist’s abandoned one (it took me less than twenty minutes to walk all the way around), but there were no devious tricks up its synthetic sleeves, and it seemed to be all the community of twelve needed to call a home.

“I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” Klaus said as I stood alongside him. Since the first time we’d met, the colour had returned to his face, he’d put on a healthy amount of weight, and there was a pleasant lightness to his character. A far cry from the frantic man I had found chained to his bed.

“I am,” I said, and cleared my throat.

I stood there silently, sharing his view of the open water.

“The world is an unforgiving place,” he said. “The only real commitment we can make is to spend our lives trying to make sense of it. The only real problem is that it doesn’t. Are you sure you won’t stay?”

A few days after we’d boarded the second island, I had mentioned the prophecy of the sea of rooftops. It turned out the captain had once seen a place matching the description. He even had an idea of how to get there. That alone was enough for me. Perhaps I was a desperate fool, putting stock in some weird words uttered in a dark cabin by a man of questionable sanity, but I had nothing else to go on. Without those words, I didn’t know where to begin. I asked the captain if he’d take me to that place, and he said he would.

“I can’t stay,” I said to Klaus. “This is a good home. But this is not my home.”

“Do you have a home, Kayle?” he asked.

“I believe so,” I replied. I sucked in the cold sea air. “My son is my home.”

Klaus looked at the ocean.

After a while, he said, “There’s something I should tell you. Before we left my island, I had a very strange thought. A very strange thought, indeed. It came to me out of nowhere, as if it had been put in my head by someone. I’m not sure if that makes sense?”

“I know that feeling,” I said.

“Something prompted me to take something from the island. A kind of souvenir, perhaps, or possibly more important than that. But the idea was to give it to you. It’s something I believe you should have. I’m not sure why.”

Klaus took an object wrapped in a plastic bag from his lap. He unfolded the plastic carefully and withdrew a large, shiny apple. I took the apple from him and studied it. It was smooth and green. A perfect specimen.

“It’s from the jungle. Of course, I don’t have to tell you not to eat it. You know that. But trust me when I say I think you should keep it. It won’t go bad. It won’t rot. It’ll last for as long as you need it. And somehow I know you
will
need it.”

He handed the plastic bag to me and I took it gingerly and wrapped it up. Even then I could smell its venomous sweetness.

“It’s the most peculiar thing,” Klaus said. “The thought to give you this. You might think it cruel, after everything you’ve already been through—to burden you with this. But I feel like I’m doing the only right thing I’ve ever done in my life. I have not been a man of clear judgement in the past. Now, I hope that I am being wise.”

I laid my hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

The island sailed on for another week before I was finally called from my room. At the time, I was playing chess with the owner’s son. Somebody came to the room and said I should go down to the wall at the edge of the island. I toppled my king, explaining to the boy that he’d checkmated me with his last move, shook his hand gravely, and left.

I didn’t need to reach the wall. As soon as I stepped outside I saw it, passed to me from a stranger’s dream: a sea of rooftops.

The man in the cabin had been right.

Houses and buildings rose above the surface of the ocean. It had once been a residential suburb of some kind, now it was a deep watery graveyard revealing nothing but an assortment of sloping rooftop tombstones. There were hundreds of them.

Our island drifted between the contorted, leafless tops of soggy trees. A pair of rugby poles jutted from a submerged field. Wooden boxes bobbed beside a headless mannequin in the attic of a big house. Chairs and desks floated in water-filled offices. A peeled and faded plastic billboard warned that driving under the influence of alcohol made you a murderer.

It was hard to say whether the suburb had once dipped into the ocean or the ocean had risen to claim it. We passed slowly between the roofs of derelict buildings, many metres above where people had once driven their cars and walked their dogs and met their friends and done their business, and what struck me hardest was the deathly stillness. The ocean was flat, with not the faintest breath of wind. And reaching from it, the rotting top of a sunken ghost town stretching bleakly for the sky. Further along, the water became shallower and the island had drifted as far as it could go. A strip of marshy shore lay in the distance, long and straight, extending in both directions.

Behind us, the sun was beginning to set. The temperature started to drop as the darkening sky welcomed its first few stars for the night.

The islanders had suggested I stay with them until morning, but I’d told them I would be okay; I needed to keep moving.

I was sitting at the front end of a rowboat, holding a black bag of food and supplies prepared by two kind women. The captain’s son sat at the back of the boat and rowed me to shore, like Charon, the Greek ferryman of the dead. The wooden boat moved silently over blackening waters. I watched as the island shrunk away, dimming to a silhouette in the setting sun. Ahead of us rose the land, no mountains or hills of any kind, only swampy coastline and an expanse of flatness lurking in the darkness beyond. No people. No houses. No signs pointing the way. Nothing but reeds and mud.

The boat pulled to the shore and I climbed out into the sickly warmth of the marsh. My feet sank into the mud, releasing a strong smell of decay. The eldest son shook my hand and wished me well, and then pushed off into the water again. He rowed back to his island as I tramped my way up the marsh to solid ground. I beat the mud off the sides of my shoes and buttoned my jacket to the neck. I didn’t know which way to go, but began to walk anyway, across a grim and barren new land.

It was a world without colour. After turning inland, I found myself walking the ashen streets of an abandoned ashen town, studying each worn and weathered remainder. Dead trees hung on the sides of the street, tall skeletons clutching thick white sheets of spider web between their leafless branches. There was an empty school with broken windows and grassless fields, enclosed by rusted fences. Nothing but memories existed inside the houses, once quaint but now rundown and forbidding. A red bus lay overturned across the road, like a big bloodied animal, its wheels missing and seats long since removed. Crows squawked from a hanging rooftop gutter, eyeing me as I walked past.

I had no idea where the people of the town had gone. Perhaps they had been relocated to communes. Perhaps the town had been struck by disease. I wondered with every breath whether some deadly bacteria had already begun to incubate in my warm, living lungs. If so, there was nothing I could do about it.

I kept walking.

I passed a faded poster on a lamppost advertising a rock show (
HOMESICK WHORES—DEAD IN CONCERT
!) and a billboard reminder to vote in the “upcoming” municipal elections. A spinach quiche was on special at the local deli, on Sundays there were free orchestral performances in the park. A number of cars had been abandoned in the middle of the street, their doors open as if the drivers had chosen to get out and make a run for it.

I stopped to look through the window of a corner shop, the interior lit by nothing but the moon. The shelves were not entirely cleared—some cans and boxes had fallen to floor. Whatever had occurred there in the final moments had been quick and chaotic, I decided—an act of horrific desperation.

I knew I should not stay long.

I walked for some time before noticing a pillar of smoke coiling up into the moonlit sky—smoke and yellow light and the smell of burning. I turned off the street and walked in the direction of the smoke.

I passed through alleys and crossed wildly overrun yards and finally arrived at the source of the smoke and light: a house on fire. Flames lashed ferociously at the air and I felt the intense warmth even though I was on the opposite side of the street. The fire was almost too bright to watch, magnificent in its complete consumption of the house. Above, the sparks and smoke twisted upwards like a stairway into the sky. I could not tear my eyes away.