The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  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 leane
d over and Gideon dropped to his haunches.

  The tail and y-shaped fin of a calf hung from the mother, lying still in the water. Barely half of it had been pushed out, the head was still inside. It was dead—that much was certain to us—before even having taken its first breath.

  “You know why she did this, right? Got herself all beached up?” Daniel said. “Magnetic fields! Disrupted echolocation systems! Electromagnetic activity. I’m telling you! There’s tech being used somewhere. The grids are back up. They’re not telling us, but there’s tech being used by someone out there.”

  The ocean raced up on either side of the whale mother, lifting the baby’s lifeless tail for a moment (offering the illusion that it was still alive) and then retreating. “So, should we take it out? I mean, out of its mother?”

  Gideon and I held back an immediate reply. The rain continued to hurtle so ferociously hard that at one point I thought it had turned to hail. The ocean foamed, folding over itself and charging the shore, passing our knees as it came up and sucking hard on us as it went back out.

  “Not right now,” Gideon said. “That’s my feeling on this. For now, we need to think about getting the mother back into the water, if it’s even possible. The baby is gone. We can’t waste time. Also, she could bleed to death if we try. I don’t know these things. Maybe it’s already too late.”

  I agreed with Gideon. We needed a real plan.

  Ultimately, we came up with less of a plan than a next step: Gideon and I would remain at the whale’s side while Daniel ran back to the commune to call for more help.

  Daniel nodded at that and swiftly left.

  Later, when the rain had finally stopped, he returned with around sixty large men, the log-herders who kept the beach fires stoked. They carried all the rope they’d been able to gather. Gideon and I stepped aside and allowed them to co-ordinate the task.

  They discussed how they’d go about it, and then hurled thick ropes over the whale’s body. For the next hour or so, the men moved over and around her like a group of ants commandeering the corpse of a big, black beetle. In the end, satisfied the net of ropes was sufficiently fixed to her, they called on everyone to assist in the pulling. Gideon and I stepped forward and lined up to grab our section of the rope.

  One of the men shouted a count, and we pulled. We dug our feet into the sand and urged each other on with grunts through clenched teeth. As time moved on, however, it felt as if we’d convinced ourselves we could reposition a mountain with little more than the determination of madmen. Others joined—bigger men than myself—and I gave up my position. I joined Daniel on the hillside, where he had been observing us the entire time. Sweating and drained, I collapsed next to him.

  “How do you get a fifty-ton beached whale to move?” he asked offhandedly, leaning on an elbow and chewing a piece of grass. I didn’t say anything. He stared out and said, “You ask it really nicely.”

  I turned to watch. Down on the beach the seventy-odd men appeared Lilliputian beside the colossal whale, and despite their efforts, hadn’t moved her at all. She moaned and the sounds of her distress reached us in a high-pitched wail. Even the small movements in her tail had ceased.

  “She won’t go,” Gideon said, walking up to us. His shirt was spattered with dark patches of perspiration. “We can forget about this. She won’t go anywhere.”

  I was afraid to agree with him. I watched as the biggest and strongest log-herders in the commune heaved and pulled to no avail. Too much time had passed—she was slowly being crushed under her own weight, waiting for it all to be over.

  By the time the clouds parted to reveal the clear patches of a starry night, the group of large men, exhausted and without any new ideas, finally gave up. One stood and said that it was no use. That they had tried their best. They’d hoped the rising tide would assist in floating the whale back out, but it had sunk too deeply into the sand. There was nothing more to be done. In the morning the whale would be put out of its misery, doused in oil, and burned. If they couldn’t move it, they’d raze it to the ground, he said, since there was no other way to guarantee it didn’t become a decaying health hazard. Everyone agreed and then swiftly decided: they’d end her and set her alight at dawn.

  With no need to consider it further, they rolled up their ropes, left the mother with the carcass of her unborn calf, and marched up the beach to their tents for the night.

  The rest of the night was peaceful and soundless.

  I was lying in my tent and staring at the blank ceiling. I pulled my blanket up to my neck and clutched it firmly with my hands. The image of the calf hanging from its mother wouldn’t leave my mind. This image was spliced with another: a terrible memory of my own, few of them that I had left. As I lay there, caught between sleep and wakefulness, memories and images slipped into and around each other:

  My wife is running from the side of the road with our daughter in her arms. It’s dark and I can hardly see them. But my daughter’s body is limp in her arms, and my wife’s high-heeled shoe comes off her foot as she hurtles towards me through the small bushes. She’s screaming. No, not screaming. It’s a suffocated yelping I’ve never heard her make. Between the yelps, she’s saying, Oh my god, oh my god, oh god, oh my god … and then I see that calf in the whale. I see my daughter. And my wife’s standing in front of me. She shows me my daughter … and it’s the whale calf, and my daughter.

  And they’re dead.

  I opened my eyes in the dark and breathed softly.

  Amid the silence of a sleeping commune, I heard someone cough. The coughing stopped. All that could be heard was the purring of a quiet ocean. I turned to my side and stared at the silhouettes of my few belongings. I felt incredibly alone. I was not meant to be there.

  I whipped the sheet away from me and sat up in my bed. I rubbed my face with my hands and sighed, sprang to my feet and threw on my pants. I grabbed my shirt off the corner post of my bed and put it on. Moving carefully in my dark tent, I found my way to the paraffin lamp on the floor. I lit the wick with a match and the flickering light of the flame revealed the details of my makeshift dwelling.

  I took my paraffin lamp by the wire handle, unzipped the tent, and stepped outside, into the brisk night air. I walked quietly through the sleeping commune.

  The clouds had broken away from each other and were now hovering on the horizon. Millions of stars flickered against the black night, the moon was full and large, beaming bright and blue and dripping over the wrinkled surface of the ocean.

  My lamp swung in my hand as I made my way along the cold, wet sand. I crossed the beach, climbed over the boulders, and approached the black giant.

  The whale heaved as she breathed, droning softly now. I stopped beside her and placed the lamp on the sand. The orange light flared against the side of her body, revealing each of her barnacles. I laid my palms flat on her. I pressed my face against her side and felt the weak vibration of her enormous heart. Closing my eyes, I absorbed her movements. My breathing slowed until I could barely feel it enter and exit my body, and a calm enveloped me.

  I pictured her back in the ocean, where she had belonged: a weightless beast moving effortlessly with her pod, bursting from the waters, touching the sun, twisting, and crashing back in. Once, she had been free to roam every shore on the planet, every dark and unchanging abyss, to bask in the warmth of the ocean’s surface, but now …

  I put my back to the whale and slid down to the sand. I tipped my head back, turning my eyes to the sky. A comet appeared, trailed across the deep dark blue, and vanished into nothing.

  Day Zero

  On a warm Thursday morning in early November, Kayle Jenner got out of bed and kissed his wife goodbye. Sarah always left earlier for work than he did. He’d sleep in while she did her hair and put on her carefully selected outfit. He’d bury himself deep under the white duvet, all the while enduring the banshee shriek of the hairdryer and the irregular trot of her heels across their wooden floors. Just before she walked out the door for w
ork, he’d muster his first bit of strength for the day to rise from his bed, compliment her on her looks, and see her off with a kiss and a wave.

  On that particular morning, he stood at the door with his hands tucked into the pockets of his grey bathrobe and watched her walk to her autovehicle. The metal chimes hanging from the ceiling of the porch played a jangling tune in the morning breeze. The sun fell through the wooden slats above him and cast glowing stripes across the deck.

  Kayle leaned against the doorframe and took in a deep breath. His wife really did look fantastic in her black shirt and ruffled orange skirt. Her hair was done up just the way he liked it, in a ponytail, with two curls falling softly on either side of her face.

  The door of the AV opened. Sarah turned back and smiled at him, offering an awkward half-wave as she held the top of the car door. She had taken to wearing her large sunglasses, and he wished he could see her eyes. Was she wearing them deliberately, to protect him in some way—to save him from some emptiness she couldn’t bear to show? Kayle sighed, and forced a smile.

  Ever since the accident, Sarah hadn’t quite come around to reality. He knew she blamed herself. She should have been keeping an eye on their Maggie. She should have realised their daughter had climbed out of the backseat and made her way to the road. Sarah was the one who’d been sitting in the front, reading some magazine when it happened. That was what she kept going back to, even though Kayle reminded her over and over that he’d left the back door open. If only. I should have. The same endless litany.