The Raft: A Novel (6 page)

She smiled and then turned to me. “Do you have any children?”

It was the first time she had enquired about me. As simple as the answer was, I felt lost for words. Eventually, I nodded and said, “Yes. A son.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Do you dream about him?”

I paused and said, “Yes.”

“And somewhere out there he is dreaming about
you.
It’s nice to have a place to meet, hmm? Come, let’s take a walk.”

We left the table and walked through the garden. Moneta glided slowly between her green companions, loving each with a gentle touch, leaning over now and then to smell a leaf or a flower.

She went on to speak about the plants, telling me again that they, like people, have their friends and their enemies. It is important to have both, she said, because that’s how life pushes itself forward. Chamomile encourages other plants to increase their essential oils. Rosemary protects cabbage and beans but dislikes potatoes. Basil brings the best out of tomatoes but can’t stand being near rue. There are allegiances and rivalries in the plant kingdom, just as everywhere else.

Eventually, she came out with: “Some say that in tropical areas a corpse left above ground can be stripped to clean bone in under two weeks. Invertebrates do most of the damage.”

She stuck her finger in the soil of a small fern and smelled it. She rubbed two fingers together to remove the soil and then continued along the path.

“Well, I returned to that place in the woods only four
days
later, out of curiosity, and he was gone.”

“Gone?”

“No body … and not one bone. Nothing, except for that horrible black coat. Entirely gone.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He was taken in, of course,” she said.

“You mean …?”

“Obliterated. I know. It’s difficult to believe. But those woods had broken him down and pulled him in, like my banana peel … all signs of him ever having existed were erased.”

“That’s not possible,” I said.

“No, I suppose it isn’t. And yet …”

She called to Junyap and instructed him to do something. He nodded and ran outside.

“Such a good boy,” she said. “Yes, well. The man was gone. The woods had taken him, and I think I know why.”

“Why?”

“Because he was a mistake.”

The sun was high overhead, piercing the glass dome, the air hung warm and unmoving. I had no idea how Moneta could spend so much time in there. I wiped my forehead with the sleeve of my shirt and puffed a warm, wet breath into the warm, wet air.

“There
are
mistakes. Even in nature. Things that do not belong. The man in the woods—if he was a man at all—was a mistake. He was never meant to be. I know that now. I don’t know where he came from, or where he belonged, but I’ve come to accept that some things don’t come from anywhere, don’t
belong
anywhere. Some things are simply not meant to exist at all. And nature does not take kindly to such abominations. So he was taken. Wiped off the earth. Like mopping up spilled milk. Two weeks. That’s how long it took for the man in the woods to be removed. The trees, it seems, will take the body of a dead thing as quickly as they want it, or want to get rid of it.”

Moneta lifted a hand to my face and stroked the side of my cheek. The skin on the tips of her thin fingers was feathery and dry.

“You’re young,” she went on. “You will see a lot in your time. I can tell. Most of it will slip away from you as the years go on. Don’t concern yourself with what slips away. One day even the sun will burn out and everything will go dark. This earth will be a rock. We will be ash. There’ll be no meaning left behind us, no clue that we existed. There will be no answers, but more importantly, there will be no more questions. Until you realise that, you’ll never puzzle out what it means to be alive. I don’t know it all, but I know that much. So do yourself a favour: leave it all behind. The whole silly, sorry mess of it, and be alive while you can, hm?” She tapped my face and turned back to her plants. “Oh good. Finally. The dahlias are coming out. I’ve been so worried about them.”

She said nothing else. Her final announcements baffled me. They seemed to be in contradiction with what she had said earlier, that memories were not to be tampered with, that the truth of the moment was all that mattered. Now, according to Moneta, nothing mattered. One day, we’d all be ash, and our memories would go along with us, to a meaningless end.

So why bother with the story at all?

I looked around me, lost in a daze. There was nowhere else I had to be—I had no chores for the day—but I sensed Moneta was once again in her own world, strolling like a sheltered queen through the courts of her green kingdom. Her story had been told, I’d moved her bags of fertiliser, dragged her wooden crate, and it was probably time for me to leave. I said goodbye and she smiled absently.

As I stepped out of the glass dome, a cool sea breeze ran over me. Seagulls flapped against the sun, twirling and squawking. The white foam of the blue ocean soothed the hot sands of the beach. In the distance, the three rafts bobbed on the shimmering water—three brown spots, like flotsam.

The scene was tranquil, the offenders seemingly inert, but I knew better. There was nothing passive about being out there. Nobody returned from the raft the same person they’d been before. Something deep within their minds was lost or altered. I’d seen some of the liveliest members of the commune reduced to vacant-eyed loiterers, passive and submissive. Others would do nothing but stare at the ocean for hours on end, as if they’d seen something out there the rest of us could never comprehend. Some retreated into themselves completely, petrified to even greet anyone, let alone dishonour The Renascence and risk being sent back to the rafts. Others would reveal the truth in nightmarish screams as they slept. I’d lie in my tent and hear them moan and shriek, knowing everyone else was hearing it too. It was clear that the physical torture of being on the raft was relieved only by a sort of madness most of us hoped we’d never experience.

Still, something was lost in the spectatorship, like looking into a glass of water and forgetting water is the birthplace of life. Or listening to an old woman’s story and remaining oblivious to what the Greeks had called her pneuma, the Hindus her atman, the Christians her soul.

Junyap ran to me. He held out a peach-coloured envelope and I took it from him.

“What’s this?”

“Sunsengnim. Yi-mo says you must open it, but you mustn’t open it now. Yi-mo says you’ll know when. She trusts you. Yi-mo trusts you because she’s told you she trusts you. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

He grinned with relief. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

“It was nice to meet you too.”

At that, he darted away from me to resume his chores. I looked at the envelope and slapped it against the palm of my left hand. It was light. I wondered if it was connected to her story about the man in the woods.

You must open it, but you mustn’t open it now.

I walked away from the botanical garden and back down towards the beach. Moneta’s strange story swirled in my head, displacing the emptiness with which I had awoken earlier that day.

The next day, it poured. The rain fell in hard sheets, hammering the land and sea. Thunder rumbled from some far-off place, not so much a boom as a deep groan within a groan, lost within its own rolling echo. Lightning struck the water in the distance like a blue crack in the invisible wall that separated us from the rest of the world.

I sat under an awning beside Gideon, watching the rain. We said nothing. We simply watched and listened. The rain chattered endlessly on the sand and drummed on the tarps of the tents, showing no sign of letting up. Beyond the rain, a thick greyness had fallen, leaving only dark muddled shapes without texture, as if everything had become a weathered old photograph of a place we used to know.

I turned to look at Gideon. He was staring out intently, unflinching as the thunder rumbled again. I drew in my legs and hugged my knees tighter.

Each of the small tents on the beach glowed a faint orange, the lamps within providing the only few dabs of colour in our gloomy, achromatic world. There were no chores to be done. The offenders on the rafts had been pulled back in. The rations of food for the day had been handed out. Now all we could do was wait the weather out.

My mind replayed the details of Moneta’s story. I couldn’t work out why she had chosen me to tell it to.

I thought about telling Gideon, but a deeper part of me said it would be a mistake. I had been entrusted with her story, and though she had not told me to keep it to myself, I sensed the many specific details of her memory were her prize. A memory like an old heirloom that needed to be polished every day and kept in a safe place. The story had been shared in incredibly vivid detail. No one on the beach had told me anything like it before. Whatever I could possibly repeat would undoubtedly be a mere shell of her living, breathing memory—and that, above all, would be the real wrongdoing.

A part of me also knew Gideon appreciated my company precisely because of our silences. I rarely understood what was going through his mind, but for some reason, we’d been drawn to each other’s quiet company. One of the instructions to the commune was to minimise conversation, but sometimes I thought only Gideon and I sat willingly without needing to talk. In another time and another place—a place where sharing a dream or spreading an idea was not only accepted but encouraged—my guess was that Gideon and I might still have been friends, and we’d still probably not need to natter about every passing thought.

“Look,” Gideon said, looking out into the rain.

“I know.”

“No,
look.”

I squinted and saw a man running through the pelting rain, coming out of the grey like an apparition.

It was Daniel.

Daniel walked briskly ahead of us. He was a young man with a lanky frame and the gaunt face of someone at least ten years older. I knew him to be keen to impress at times, but honest and competent. I had liked him since the first time we’d met.

He was yelling, but his words were barely audible beneath the clatter of the rain: “Nooit! It has to be moved! If it dies, it won’t be long before it becomes a health risk to us all! But it’s not going to be easy!”

The pellets of water beat against my face. My eyes fought to stay open. I ran my hand through my hair, slicking it back, and glanced at Gideon beside me. The water didn’t seem to hassle him at all. I looked back along the beach. The commune of tents was far behind us, a cluster of orange dots in the dimness. I wondered how much further we had to go.

Daniel continued: “I don’t know how we’re going to do this! Maybe with rope! Maybe rope and a lot of men!”

As he marched ahead, his feet threw up brown crowns of water. He pointed towards a mound of boulders up ahead. We still weren’t sure why we had been called.

We climbed carefully over the rocks. Foamy water rushed into the gaps below, churning and slapping against the dark stone. My hands struggled to get a grip on the slimy surfaces. As I reached the top the object of our undertaking came into full view: on the shore ahead of us an enormous swollen body lay beached on the sandy shore.

A whale.

Daniel had mentioned nothing on the way over, but not even his obvious eagerness could have prepared me.

It was a black mountain, stretched out, slumped-down flesh crushed by gravity. The rain cascaded over its sides as it moaned and emptied its blowholes in fine, hissing sprays. A thick fin hung limp at its side like the unusable remainder of a gigantic, clipped wing. Near the edge of the sand the black serpentine tail rose, flapped once, and crashed back down. The longer I stared, the less it looked like an animal at all. It was unearthly, almost god-like—something that could just as conceivably have fallen from the sky as washed up from the ocean.

“Have you ever seen such a thing?” Gideon asked.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Never.”

I hopped to the sand and Gideon followed. Daniel ran ahead and climbed up the side of the whale. He stood atop, hands akimbo, looking as if he’d like to stick in a flag and proclaim it the New World.

“Come on!” he shouted.

It rose ever upwards and outward. I could see nothing of the beach or ocean beyond, only a black wall stretching into the sky and across the world. The thought of it passing weightlessly over the watery surface of the earth filled me with fear and respect for the ocean’s secret, unexplored depths. But the same ocean had spat it into this heavy, alien netherworld, perhaps in banishment for some broken rule understood only by the creatures of the deep.

I laid my hand gently on its rough exterior. I had never felt anything like it. Coarse in some places, smooth in others. Still, it was all wrong. This was not where it was supposed to be, and it was clearly in pain.

“He’s right, Mr. Kayle,” Gideon said, standing a few feet behind me. “It has to be moved back. It can’t stay here. If it dies here it’ll cause problems.”

I ran my fingers along the grainy, curved wall of its long body. It was peppered with clusters of white callosities. Finally, I reached its eye. Its large eyeball rolled in its socket and I leaned to peer into it, as if through a window.

“So, how we gonna do this?” Daniel yelled from above.

“I don’t know,” I said, but I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. “We’ll need more of us. And rope. She’s not going to last long. She’ll probably die of dehydration.”

“How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That it’s a
she
?”

“I don’t know. Is it? A guess.”

“A good guess!” Daniel yelled. “Come to the back and see for yourself!”

He walked the length of the whale and jumped to the sand. I looked at Gideon, a man of few words, but could tell he was just as overwhelmed.

“Go on! Take a look!” Daniel shouted. “Underneath!”

Together Gideon and I followed Daniel to the rear end. I leaned over and Gideon dropped to his haunches.