The Raft: A Novel (8 page)

Kayle struggled to care about any of it. He was tired of his students asking what he thought, of the teaching staff sharing their speculations. As for the push from Western governments, well, to Kayle it sounded like little more than old men using some dull, political pretence to validate a childlike curiosity for the other kid’s new toy.

He drove through the familiar countryside of Tulbagh, passing twisted woods and open pastures. The sun sparkled on the hood of the silver autovehicle and the pitch of the engine’s smooth hum grew in proportion to its acceleration. Kayle turned into the town and drove through the narrow streets.

He passed the local cafeteria and the shoe shop, the bank and the small police station, and the memorial square where people sat on the concrete steps behind the fountain and ate their packed breakfasts in the bright morning light. As the AV turned in and out of streets, Kayle saw familiar faces preparing to open their businesses for the day. Some of the shop owners waved as he passed, and he nodded or waved back.

Kayle rubbed his chin, glanced again at his son in the mirror, and pulled up outside the schoolyard. As usual, the road was packed with double-parked autovehicles, the pavements crowded with mothers urging children into the school yard. Children hurtled to meet their friends, their dark rucksacks hanging from their backs.

Andy opened the back door.

Hey, big guy
, came Kayle’s reminder, and the boy leaned over the front seat and kissed his father on the cheek. Kayle held him close for a brief moment before letting go. Then Andy sprang from the car and slammed the back door behind him, disappearing into a mob of chatting mothers and hyper-excited children.

Kayle drove back the way he came, but stopped at the local store to grab a small carton of milk. He made small talk with the old man behind the counter, wished him a good day, and left. As he drove he continued listening to the news about Chang’e 11 and the astrominers; the media were repeating what little they knew, adding tidbits of new information as if each was a revelation.

Kayle drove under an arch of trees, overhanging full and green, casting a blanket of shadow speckled with leaves of light. The tint of the windscreen automatically softened in the shade. Kayle passed through the suburbs, watching as residents took out their trash or hurried their tardy children into the backs of large AVs. A man raked leaves. Two women, one bobbing a shirtless young boy in her arms, chatted over the fence between their houses.

The newscaster droned on: the latest speculation on the Chang’e 11 story was that a large and unknown source of energy seemed to be pulsating from a location in China. There were concerns over radiation. The Chinese government had neither confirmed nor denied that the strange radiating energy had any direct relation to Chang’e 11 …

Kayle entered the small business district of the town and the tint on the windscreen adjusted to the direct glare of the sun. He pulled up to a traffic light and stopped. A few other AVs pulled up beside him. They waited together for the lights to change.

Kayle did a quick mental review of his upcoming lecture, “Secular Voices in Ancient Israel.”

His thoughts were interrupted by an odd sensation building inside his head. He blinked his eyes hard and forced a yawn. It was nothing. Perhaps he hadn’t had enough water to drink. Perhaps he’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him …

The sides of the streets were busier now, families, young stragglers, old couples walking their designer dogs: the blood of human life was pumping through the concrete veins of the town. On the radio, the newswoman was still talking, her voice distorted.

Kayle switched it off.

He touched the side of his head. He was feeling dizzy and the first pangs of a headache were creeping in, not so much a pain as an aching heaviness. He must be coming down with something. Or perhaps it was stress—“The Silent Killer” that the posters in the doctor’s office warned against. After all, there was tension at home, he’d been having peculiar dreams. Perhaps he was having some kind of psychosomatic—

s c r e e e e e e e e e c h

It rang through his ears, the sound of two metal plates being scraped against each other. Kayle shook his head and shut his eyes, trying to force the sound back to the cruel place it had come from.

This isn’t normal. This isn’t right.

His hands clutched the wheel. He opened his eyes. The large woman in the vehicle to his right was grabbing her face, shaking her head. The same symptoms as his.
No. That doesn’t make sense.
It was just a coincidence.

He looked to his left. The driver in the next lane was forcing two fists into the temples of his head like the clamps of a wood-shop vice.

The traffic lights were green, but nobody moved. People on the sides of the road had stopped. Families, stragglers, old couples—everyone suspended in a state of agony. Some were leaning against store walls, clutching their skulls. Some were bent over, throwing up on the pavement.

Kayle didn’t understand. The noise, the dizziness, was originating from inside
his
brain. So how could they all be hearing and feeling the same thing? He tried to hold the thought but the screech in his head was intensifying and his eyes were becoming frighteningly sensitive to the harsh morning sun. Sunlight struck him like an angry god, cutting through his retinas, reaching in to ruin him with a single touch.

Kayle sat immobile now, completely paralysed by the sound and the light and the aching heaviness. His last rational thought before blacking out was of his son and his wife. Were they in a similar state, wherever they were? Would he ever see them again?

A man nobody on earth knew opened his eyes. He was sitting behind the wheel of a car. At first he did not know enough to register he’d awoken at all, only that there was light pouring into his head. A wall of light and a wave of sounds that eventually organised itself into shapes and allowed him his first bit of sense.

He was looking through a windscreen. The windscreen of a car. Beyond, smoke rose and spread, stretching up from the crumpled bonnets of two wrecked vehicles.

The man closed his eyes, calming himself in the darkness. He knew he could not keep them closed. He would have to open them again.

When he did, the world was clearer, but not his understanding. Gradually, a thought entered, and then another that tried to say the same thing, until he became aware of one thing only:
Wrong.

Everything was wrong.

He held out his trembling hands but did not know who they belonged to, where the scar on the back of his knuckle came from, how many years had weathered his skin. He fixed his eyes on the two cars that had smashed into each other. They were smoking and steaming as if they had engaged in some violent kiss that had bound then broken them forever. But the man did not know they were cars at all. He could not recall their shapes nor did he know the purpose they served. They were strange physical abstractions, signifying nothing. He knew nothing, understood nothing. Nothing of himself or the world.

He turned, saw a large woman sitting in the car beside him, in the front seat, staring into space. She turned, looked at him, no expression on her face.

Their gaze shared nothing but mutual bewilderment.

The man had to get out. He had to breathe.

He looked at the side of his car. No handle, no button. He pushed hard—it wouldn’t open. He looked around. A rectangular glass screen, the blue outline of a hand. He lifted his hand, looked at it. The hand on the screen … The same shape as
his
hand. He pressed his palm down, onto the glowing contour. The side of the car opened, startling him. He stepped out. He stood and the blood rushed to his head. He swooned. Steadied himself. Breathed deeply, then looked around.

A line of cars stretched out behind him. Each dazed occupant looked back at him. The man scanned the street. People, ambling slowly, dragging their feet. Drifting in a quiet stupor.

The man walked forward, stumbling into the sides of cars. He looked up to the sky. Wispy clouds drifted overhead. The sun shone strong, exposing an absurd, meaningless world.

The man wandered to the side of the road. A few people huddled silently in the shade. The small group proved a strange mix of people—an old woman, a young dark-skinned boy, a man in a grey suit and yellow tie, a portly woman with large breasts sagging under her baggy t-shirt.

The man squinted at her chest. There were colourful words on her shirt, but he could not read them. Squiggles and shapes. Meaningless … like everything else surrounding him.

Still, the clouds drifted and the sun shone as usual. The buildings were still standing, food was still cooking in the pans on stovetops in restaurants, the televisions in the shop windows were still flickering. Not a leaf of a tree had moved out of place.

He walked along the street. The details of the new world around him filled his blank mind: flowerpots on the windowsills of white shops, chalk scrawled on a black signboard, a steel gate swinging on its hinges outside the boutique. He recognised none of these objects.

He caught his reflection in the window of an electronics store. A man with a hard jaw, a wide sharp nose, sad and sloped eyes—the face of a stranger. He pushed a finger into the fleshy centre of his cheek. His mirrored likeness did so too. He was, indeed, looking at himself. His eyes refocused and a television image swam forward on the visual-glass—the studio background for a weather channel. No weather-person was standing before the image to offer predictions for the week’s forecast. All he could see was an indecipherable map and a smattering of mystic numbers.

He approached the open doorway of a grocery store, stopping to peer inside. There were people in the store. A few people sat on the floors of the aisles, opening packets from the shelves, eating the contents. Tins rolled across the tiled floors. A lone baby cried in a shopping trolley.

The man sauntered further down the street. A fire hydrant spurted water into a gutter.
Thirsty.
The man realised he was thirsty. He got down on his knees and drank from the gutter, cupping the water in his hands. The blue tie around his neck dropped forward. He grabbed it and studied it quizzically. He pulled at it, but the peculiar accessory only tightened on his neck. He slipped his fingers into the loop around his neck and tugged outwards until it loosened. Finally, he whipped it up and over his head and threw it on the ground.

He walked on.

He passed three more car wrecks: a small silver one mounted across a lamppost, a white one with its side stripped by a brick wall, a long black one that had shattered the front window of a food mart. Two of the drivers were standing in front of their wreckages, staring indifferently at the crumpled steel boxes. The third driver, still in the car suspended diagonally against the pole, was still in his front seat, unconscious or dead. The man spared a glance for them all but did not stop walking.

He climbed over a low wall and into a public park. His sweaty skin cooled in the shade of dense green canopies. Dead leaves wheeled across the ground in a warm wind. The sun cut through the leaves above, spindles of light spearing in and out of the gaps.

In the centre of the park, between the trees, an old woman was bent over a refuse drum, rummaging through trash. She pulled out a black wrapper dripping with yellow liquid, and put it in her mouth. She sucked on the plastic and turned to look as the man in the red shirt went by.

The man walked through the park and out onto the narrow winding roads of a small residential area. Large houses, tucked behind bushy front yards, beige outside walls crawling with pink and purple bougainvillea, gimmicky postboxes, an unmanned length of hosepipe lying like a snake on an outside lawn, water looping into the grass. The man swung his head from side to side as he walked, but still he saw nothing familiar.

The man walked. Suburb after suburb, a stretch of road lined with restaurants and cafeterias, a pool hall, an art supplies shop. He crossed the perfectly green grass of a school rugby field, walked beside a concrete canal. The more he saw of the world, the less he grasped. His head was filled with more and more unrelated details and none of them added up to a helpful sum of this strange world’s parts. The complexity of it all exhausted him. When his feet began to hurt, he stopped to sit. When he grew bored, he walked on. He did this for most of the day.

Once the sun had moved almost all the way across the sky, burning at its worst, he came across a bridge. A group of people were lying in the shade beneath: men and women in suits, children, teenagers, office workers, schoolteachers, policemen—a random assortment of people. He ducked under the bridge to join them and sat, finally out of the scalding sun. The people under the bridge looked at him silently. He remained there until the sun went down and the world was swathed in darkness. The group curled up close to each other, holding on like hopeless refugees from a faraway place they could no longer recognise as their home, and went to sleep.

In the morning the sun returned and one by one they awoke and left the underside of the bridge. The man woke and watched with tired eyes as each person ambled away. He lifted his head from the concrete and wiped away the bits of sand and stone embedded in the skin of his cheek. He cricked his neck and his back, and then made his way out into the vivid world. He was no closer to remembering where he was or how he had come to be there, but now he felt something other than confusion: a mist of despair swirling up and around him.

As he walked, he encountered a few more of the world’s mundanities: an unattended fruit stall, a black dog chained to a post, barking frantically from behind a wire fence, an abandoned merry-go-round creaking softly in the wind.

A few hours later the man in the dank red shirt came across something that finally brought him to a stop: the sight of a woman walking towards him. He paused and stared at her. She stared back at him. She was wearing a black shirt and a ruffled orange skirt. She had long bleach-blonde hair. The roots were beginning to show and two curls framed her face.