“What can we do with gold?” I ask. The next stage, post-blisters, is the shivers, and they have come over me. This rings like any other fever: shivers and a temperature, and then sickness and then my muscles will all ache, and it will take me a while before I even begin to feel human again. That’s why we draw straws.
He lays it down flat. “Don’t know. It was your harvest, anyway. You can work out what you do with it. You could take it to some of the groups in the towns, try and get something for it.” These are the rules: we do the harvest, we share the take with the camp. If it can’t be shared, we try and trade it with one of the other settlements we’ve found. They’re all in the same way as us, but they might have use for our junk. But I’m the one who has to do the deal; that way, I’ll be providing for the camp. We each feel ownership and good reason for going out there, going through what we do; and the camp gets money to fix itself up, to feed us all, to buy shared provisions. It’s like taxes, I’m assured. I’m told that this system used to work perfectly well.
I sleep with the disc under my pillow, and I can feel it during the night when I turn and turn, and my skin scrapes against it. It scratches me, cold against my shoulder.
I am not better when I wake up. I’ve had post-outside sickness before, so many times, but never like this. We’ve stopped asking what it’s doing to us, because that’s counterproductive. Once we went to a hospital and we tried to use their machines but we couldn’t get them to work, so it was fingers jabbing at them for hours, and when we got back we were all so much more sick than we were when we left. We lost Joe that day as well, because he was so sick before we even went. He couldn’t stand the journey, being out there for that long. You see it at its worst, then: blisters on the eyes. I never take my goggles off out there now, not after seeing that. So I have felt sick before, but never like this. I wonder if this is what it’s like when it sets in: when it gets deeper to you. I wonder if I am going to die. I have a paper bucket from a fast-food restaurant to be sick into – we took hundreds of them one time when we went out, reasoning that we couldn’t wash plates or whatever, so they might come in useful one day – and I have to use it as soon as I am awake, vomiting into it. Blood and soot, it looks like.
It’s natural to wonder if you’re going to die from it, I tell myself. I tell myself that I’ll be fine. No question. I hold the bucket and I shudder, and the bucket starts to collapse on the sides from my grip. No question at all.
Paul and the others stand in the doorway and watch me. I catch them; I wonder what they are talking about. No, I know what they are talking about. I’m that sure I know.
I tell them that I am feeling better, which is a lie, but I am worried about the farm that they could send me to. We have a shotgun, which they used to use to hunt rabbits here. I can imagine Paul pulling the trigger, so I tell them that I am feeling better. I stand up, and everything swims. My skin is on fire, and the sweat runs down it. It doesn’t soak in; it’s as if I am rejecting it. I stumble out of my tunnel. It’s colder here, and I can feel that. It’s nice. I lean against the wall and drop the sheet from my shoulders and press against the stone.
The others are standing around a table. There is a record player on it, one of the really old ones. I’ve never seen one used like that; with a long brass horn sticking out of the side. The golden disc from the harvest is on top of it. I see it, now: it’s a record. Of course it’s a record.
Paul grins. “I washed it, while you were sick. There’s little grooves all around it, see?” I can, if I squint. My eyes feel wrong, but I don’t say anything. I stay back, in the darkness, so that they can’t see how bad I really am. “So I went and got this from upstairs, what used to be the music rooms. I remembered that one of them survived.”
There are candles around the record player on the table, as if this is some sort of sacrifice. All ten of us are here, watching; Paul runs the plug on it to an extension cable, and Ella gets onto the treadmill and starts running. We wait for the lights to turn green. Usually takes five minutes; now, that seems like forever. I shut my eyes. I can see something in my eyelids: where the blood is pulsing, red and black. It makes me feel dizzy.
“And we are go,” Paul says. He picks up the arm from the player and puts the tip – the needle, I remember, that’s what it’s called – onto the disc. It spins, and there’s a crackle, and we expect noise. I shut my eyes and wait, again, but then it comes, as a wave. It steals us, and we are floating. I open my eyes: we are pressed to the walls, hoisted up. Paul is screaming but I cannot hear him. Everything is distorted. The record is spinning, going even faster than the player. The player tears itself apart, pulling and yanking and distorting itself as the record whirs. Lumps of metal and wood and plastic fly off, and the player is held on the table as if a tiny tornado is wrapped around it. It glows; it flashes white.
We are not where we were. We are pinned to these walls, but they are not here. I cannot describe who is with us, because they are like ghosts, but made of something, like sound or light, but not either of those things. It hurts to even think of them; to imagine them. They find the thing I saw in the fields, but it’s different. It’s clean. It’s so old, still, but clean. It is a spacecraft where it should not be. Printed on the side, it reads Voyager: its name.
The things that I cannot explain find it, caught in a swirl of liquids and gases, and they drag it to where they live. They crack it open and they find the record. It looks the same. They do not know what it is, and they move around and through it, and they try to decipher it. There is something inside it, an isotope that they cannot understand, and it hurts them. It mingles with them, with their atoms, because this is who they are, what they are made of, and they cannot adapt to it. They degrade. I try to scream at them, and they notice me, but this is not now. This is another time, and they keep trying with the disc. They are dying: whatever is inside this golden record is killing them. They are sick, and they are changing. One of them manages to channel the sound from the record, garbled and distorted through a sad approximation of a mouth: Hello from the children of planet Earth. They know where it came from; who sent this, to kill them. Then they stop dying: they have found a way to take this in, to make it a part of themselves. They were threatened and they survive. They make a decision. They rebuild the spacecraft. They alter it. They send it back to us.
I hear Paul screaming. “The fuck was that?” he yells. “Seriously, now, what the fuck happened there?” I open my eyes, and we are all on the floor. Something is wrong with me: I can barely move. I watch Paul pushing himself to his feet. I want to tell him to stop, but I know what he’s going to do. The record is on the table, and he picks it up and holds it between his hands, and bends it until it snaps. “Oh my god what was that?” he says. Ella and Lars and Rickey and the others are still on the floor as well, but they pick themselves up, and they ask each other if they are okay. They check, to see. They can move. They come to me eventually, and they feel my forehead. I am burning up. They can see how sick I am.
I am worse than I thought I was. I must have been out there for far, far too long. I must have been.
The others drag me to my bed, and they lay me down. Paul can’t get over what we saw, saying over and over how he doesn’t believe it, how it can’t be real, and it’s only this that keeps me grounded: that all of us were in there. Otherwise I might have thought that it was a hallucination, or a vision, or a dream.
They all remark that they have never seen anybody as sick as I am. I think it’s only the distraction of the record’s vision that stops them putting me out of my misery, I really do.
If I had to guess, I would swear that I am about to die. I wake up, and I feel on the cusp of it; and I breathe, sure that it will be my last, because it’s as if I can see it in front of me: the haze of my life, leaving my body.
Or maybe it is just me getting used to this: somehow taking the sickness in. Eventually, that’s how we overcome anything, I suppose. I breathe, and gasp, and it as if air isn’t
what I need, so I choke; but then it’s back. Oxygen saves me, and I take it in, and sleep once more.
When I wake up I don’t know how long I have been asleep for. I climb out my bed find the bottles of water, and I drink it, three bottles, but it all makes me sick. It all makes me feel worse, for some reason, and I cannot keep it in. I cannot even bear it touching me. I get on the floor and lurch, and push it all back out, soaking the floor and myself. I sob, because I am so thirsty.
My foot touches a part of the record: still golden, still cold to the touch, even through my fever. I pick it up, and I press it to my chest. It’s like water over a fire: I am sure that I can hear it sizzling.
I sleep with it held there: comforting to me, and making me feel better. Dragging me back towards who I am.
In the morning, I feel good: the fever broken, my body no longer clammy, my head no longer swimming. I look at myself in the mirrors. All scars of the blisters and pustules have gone. It’s a miracle. It’s when they set in that you’re lost. An early warning system. Paul stands and watches while I turn the showers on, and I ask him if he’s thought any more about what we saw. They run cold, because that’s better. I can’t take the heat now.
“I don’t care what it is,” he says. “I don’t care.”
“But it was important,” I tell him. “I think we sent it up there. We hurt them.”
“There’s no Them,” Paul tells me. “We had a – I don’t know – a mass hallucination. That sort of thing happens when you’re exposed too long.”
“It was real,” I say. “Don’t you want to know what we saw?” I switch the showers off, and he throws me a towel. I put it to one side.
“No,” he says. “I don’t want to know a thing. We’re okay, right?”
“Right.”
“So, that’s fine. You need anything? We’re doing a run.”
“It’s not your turn,” I say. “The record didn’t get us anything, so I still have to contribute. Besides, I saw a Tesco we haven’t tapped. I can find it again. I’ll go tomorrow morning.”
“Fine,” he says. “Your funeral.” Strange phrase, now, because we don’t even bury our dead. We leave the bodies outside. They’re decayed within a few hours. Paul walks off, and I finish getting dressed. My skin is totally dry as I pull on my trousers and my shirt, and I find myself wondering how that happened, because my towel is still on the side, as I haven’t used it yet.
As I’m getting dressed I notice that there is something in my eye. I get close, and lean in, and I stare, and the headache hits me, a shiv in my head. It looks, for a second, as if my eye has dissolved; passed into nothingness. The black part, the white part, the colour: all a mess, swirled together. It looks like a galaxy or something. I blink and it’s gone, and the pain with it.
I stare again, willing it to happen once more.
The others are all still asleep as I watch the sun come up through the outer door. As soon as it’s light enough I put my suit back on, and my helmet, and I take a water bottle from the stash, and I get my bike. Jane asks where we’re going, and I use my last destination. It’s easiest that way: the supermarket was on that road, and Jane is nothing if not predictable. She never changes her routes. I pedal. I am not sweating, not even at all, because I feel cold. In myself, if I touch my skin, it feels cold. Like metal, almost. There is a wind, it feels like, but I can’t see it. Everything else is so still.
Prepare to turn left, Jane says, but I ignore her. I stay forward, like I did before, over the rubble and the remains and the solid ground that looks like it must have done years ago when somebody last bothered to plough it, nothing here to upset it or move it or anything, not even any animals to dig in. There are some somewhere, that’s the rumour. Some of them went underground; maybe others are ruling the cities somewhere. Taking this back for themselves.
I see the supermarket up ahead. I know I have to go there to pillage it, and I have to face whatever’s inside; but I don’t, not yet. I keep pedaling. I haven’t far to go, and I have never ridden so fast in my life.
It is in the field where I left it. It’s not burning any more, which is a relief. I pass the black box and leave the bike there. It’s how it looked in what the record played for us; I can see that now. The same shape, mostly.
It’s nearly my height, lying on its side. I put my hand on it. It courses through me: that feeling of a rising illness, of a sway. I have been out here for too long, I tell myself, but then I know that this is a different feeling. My hand feels numb where it rests on the hull, dead with pins and needles. I peel my glove off and look at it, trying to steady myself, and it dissipates. As I watch it, it seems to pick itself apart. I can see into it; through it, even. I can see millions of tiny parts, glimmering fragments. It’s like staring at a screen up close and being able to see the pixels. It is like mist, or fog, or smoke. My hand passes into the ship. It passes back. I gasp, and I scream, because there is something very wrong with me.
I scramble backwards, to the floor, to the grit and stones, and I stare as my hand pulses: from this vague approximation to something resembling normality. I turn and run, and I grab the bike. The hand still works. When I want it to, it is still my hand. Nothing more, nothing less. Turn around when possible, Jane says, but I ignore her, and I leap onto it, and I start pedaling. I am going, furiously, but then something goes wrong, and it feels as if my suit has caught on the gears; but when I look down, the bottom half of my leg is not there. It is gone, and the fabric dangles, and my shoe has fallen off behind us. We fall, the bike and I, and I push away from the frame and wheels, so I can see myself completely. I pull my trousers off, and it feels as if my leg is still there. They say this, in amputees; and they call it a phantom limb. When my bottom half is out of the trousers, I see my leg, or what remains. Molecules, something, move around the space. They swirl. This is my leg, now: innumerable tiny pieces, every part that makes up my being. I stare at my leg and it comes back. It comes back to me, and it looks as it always did.
There, lying in the road, I form and reform; and I change. I watch this spread up my leg, a rash that’s inside me, that makes me who I am.
I feel so, so vague.
I take my clothes off. I don’t need them, or I can’t use them. I look the same as I always did: the same colour of skin, the same body hair, the same everything. I smell the same. I walk, then, and it’s the same. The same logic to make these parts move.
And then I stop, and I do not concentrate, and I am not my body any more. I am something else. I am everything.
Turn around when possible, Jane says.
I do not know how I got here, to the supermarket, but I am outside it. I feel my body reconstitute itself, pulling itself back into its form.
I think about magnets: about holding them near each other, and feeling that tug as they want to be back together.
I need supplies. I had a shopping list. I cling to this. I walk through the doors, not needing to open them. My body gusts through and then reforms itself. I look to see if there are any water bottles, but there are none. I walk to medicines. There’s a noise from the other end: the people that I heard here before. Ravagers or scavengers or whatever they call themselves. They’ve lived out here too long, and they get sick and diseased, and they wait for death, and then they get used to it, some of them. They have nothing to lose in trying.
One of them runs at me. He passes through me, and he falls to the floor. He howls at me, and I see that even his tongue is pustules and mess. I reach out and touch him, and he begins to burn up. He sweats, and the pustules burst, and he lies there. He’s not dead, I don’t think, because his eyes are open, and they are swirling, miniature galaxies.
The countryside looks like another planet entirely: as if we could roll out the camera crews and start filming, and we could pretend it was Pluto or Jupiter or wherever, somewhere else that we’ve never been, that we never even dreamed we could go. I have a name on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot say it. I cannot say the word, because
it’s not in my language. I rearrange myself – my throat, my mouth, the words – and I speak it. It sounds like nothing else. It is indescribable.
I don’t need to open the airlock. We are not as secure as we thought; and I feel the molecules of the doors as they pass through me. It’s as if I am learning from them. Inside, I feel thirsty. I drink water from a bottle, and I let it sink into me. Yesterday – and I can feel it now – I was rejecting it. I couldn’t assimilate it. Now, I can. Now, the liquid can be a part of me, and the walls and the wind. I pour the rest of the water over my head. It feel it sink in, and I am already dry. I go to the mirror, and when I look, it is as if I am not even there. I come back. I leave. I can be any part of this room. I come back, and I examine myself. It’s curious: how alien this body feels already.
Paul comes in and stares at me. “When did you get back?” he asks. “Jesus, put some clothes on.” He picks up the towel that I had left there and throws it at me again, only this time it passes through me. I feel myself come apart and then reform. I know what the towel is made up of, now: its fibers, its molecular structure. Paul doesn’t say anything else, then. He stares, and he clutches at his head, because to look at me causes him such pain when I am like this, and he turns and he runs. He makes this noise, like I’ve never heard. I wonder if now, somehow, my ears are different? If I hear noise in a different way?
The Lowest Heaven Page 31