The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  In the days and weeks that followed, both he and his wife were connected by the stark reality of their pain, if nothing else. They tried to talk each other through it. They saw somebody, some counsellor. It was considered healthy for them to pour out their grief in tears and nightly wails and fits of remorse—but then Sarah stopped, as if she’d cried herself dry and turned to dust. She shut down. She wandered the house in a trance. Her ability to care about the rest of her life slipped away with everything else. Now, five months later, there was little improvement. Heaven knows, Kayle was hurting as well. He missed his baby girl and went to cry in the bathroom, but for God’s sakes, he was trying. For Andy’s sake, if for anything and anyone. Was she even trying anymore? Could she be so selfish? Was he being selfish? He didn’t know what to think—who was right, who was wrong—but anger welled up in him like warm, thin bile as he watched her. He turned and went back inside, flushing it away.

  He walked into the kitchen, instructed the room to play Abbey Lincoln and put on the kettle for a cup of coffee. The twiddling jazz piano filled the house. While the water boiled, he went down the hall into his son’s room and woke him for school. Andy sat up and rubbed his eyes, against the whole idea. His father patted him on the shoulder and told him to get up and be in the bathroom in three and a half minutes, big guy, before returning to the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

  Kayle’s first lecture was only in a couple of hours—enough time for the two of them to have breakfast together and for Kayle to drop Andy at school before going to the university.

  Andy sat at the kitchen table. He watched as his father plated up his eggs and the slice of toast that had had some advertisement for women’s shoes etched into it by their smart appliance. He smeared his butter over Up to 60% off all high-heels at Guillian’s! and bit into it. They sat and ate their breakfast together, saying little. Kayle asked about school and Andy’s answer was predictable; for him school was always the same old drag. They finished their breakfast, cleared their plates, and Andy went to pack his bag while Kayle shaved and changed. He grabbed a red shirt and chose a blue tie, a combination Sarah had always disliked, but she’d already left. She’d probably remark on it when he came home from work. By then he’d have been gone all day, offending everyone’s good taste. By then it would be too late.

  The music haunting the rooms was now Beethoven’s “Adagio un poco mosso.” It escaped the windows through the soft white curtains that waved gently in the cool wind. Outside, Brandy and Whiskey, the two horses in their paddock, stood apart from each other and nibbled on the grass. Beyond the paddock, the green land rolled forever beneath the brilliant yellow sun.

  Andy climbed into the backseat of the AV and dumped his bag at his feet. Kayle placed his hand on the ignition screen and the car hummed to life—the red bars on the solar-electrometer climbing as the car charged itself for the day’s driving. Kayle sighed and leaned his elbow on the lowered window, rubbing his face and pinching the bridge of his nose. He studied the blank expression on his son’s face in the rear-view mirror. The boy was staring back at the house. It rested on its overgrown plot like a primitive Woodhenge from a time nobody remembered.

  Andy hadn’t been doing well. His grades had slipped. His friends had stopped calling. He was obviously wrestling with his own emotions. Not only had a daughter been lost, but a sister too. Kayle had to remember that, and keep remembering that. He had to be prepared to be patient.

  The car beeped—it was ready to serve them. Kayle lowered the brakes and headed for the gate at the end of the gravel driveway. As he hit the narrow track leading to the public road, a cloud of orange dust hid the beams of the horse paddock, shrouding the shrinking house.

  Kayle switched on the radio. A female news broadcaster was halfway through a story he had caught drift of a week earlier: Chang’e 11, the Chinese space-mining vessel that had left earth almost forty years earlier—the one that had famously lost communication and vanished without a trace—had somehow returned. According to the news, what was most peculiar was that the crew of nine astrominers had virtually no recollection of where they had been for forty years. Even stranger, they had not aged a day. It was a fascinating story and one that had captured the imaginations of people around the world. According to the news, however, the Chinese government was keeping it under wraps. There was growing international pressure on China to release more details (arguing that the return of Chang’e 11 constituted a case of global security), especially since the vessel had been back for a while and the world had only recently been allowed to know these few details.

  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 do
gs: 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 len
gth 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.