The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  She shook her head. No, she said, I need to tell you now. You helped her sit up against the wall of the tent, slipped a pillow behind her back. She settled her child in her arms. He shifted and murmured and she stroked the ridge of his nose, just between his eyes. He quietened and she leaned back and exhaled.

  That’s when Jai-Li, speaking in a low voice and holding her sleeping infant, told you her story.

  A life in the sky

  My father was a talented businessman.

  That was no secret.

  No one could take that away from him.

  But that was as much as one could say about my father with complete certainty. Anything else—well, that depended on whomever was speaking. His partners or proteges may have added he was a leader. Perhaps even a hero. The media may have contended he was one of the top however-many influential people in the world. My mother may have said provider or, sometimes, victim. But if you had asked me, rest assured I’d have said my father was the coldest and most soulless person I had ever known.

  That might surprise you. Even shock you. After all, what kind of reasonable daughter would speak about her father in such a way? Well, unfortunately, that’s the way I felt; no sentiment rolled off my lips more easily.

  You see, my father was the CEO of a corporation called Huang Enterprises. You may remember the company. It was always in the news for some new breakthrough or another. At one point there wasn’t a pie Huang didn’t have its finger deep inside—space travel, genetic engineering, nanotech, asteroid mining, terraforming; they had the monopoly on it all, as if existence itself was up for sale. There wasn’t the leaf of a tree or scale of a fish that didn’t have Huang’s barcode imprinted into it, that wasn’t owned or patented. And my father, as head of this monster, was the Ozymandias of his empire. King of kings, a wrecked colossus. A fair enough comparison, I think, considering the anticlimactic outcome of it all.

  But no man achieves in a single lifetime what Huang Enterprises achieved. The corporation had been in my family for three generations before my father assumed position as its puppeteer and, in some ways, its sad puppet. Three Huang men at the helm of this corporate monstrosity, each of them with their own brand of cold-hearted genius. Behind them, it must be added, three generations of unfortunate women to mop up their muddy footprints.

  Like me.

  I was born on the 152nd floor of the largest city-scraper in the world. You may have seen it. Or perhaps one like it. In the end there were a few of them around and for a while they were quite the fad. Those monolithic towers must seem comical to behold these days—dark, empty and unused—but back then they were glittering megaliths of human ingenuity.

  Our one was known as Huang-345.

  Not very creative, I know, but then my father was committed to creating a legacy of its own mythological proportions. There was never any need for clever references to Babel and Yggdrasil, associations made with similar towers around the world. Not using my family name directly would have been seen as an offence to the end goal of our efforts: to be the inarguable rulers of the universe, the name and force against which all other names and forces would be measured. A family suffering the ultimate delusion of grandeur, some criticised—but then, given all of the Huang family’s accomplishments, who could honestly reduce their achievements to some cliched flight of imagination?

  The city-scraper itself was unmatchable: three hundred and forty-five floors of glass and steel that raced two and a half kilometres into the sky, piercing heaven’s side like the Spear of Destiny. It was as wide as two of those old football stadiums and as self-sufficient as a small city.

  The first hundred and fifty floors housed over a thousand apartments and houses, the most luxurious equipped with swimming pools and gardens. The next thirty floors had two schools, a university, a hospital, a bank, a shopping mall, a theatre and a playing field. Above them: an ice rink, a cinema complex, dozens of restaurants, and a park complete with trees and a pond for swans to float on. These were followed by seventy floors of “work rooms,” conservatories, laboratories and agri-pods, where the majority of the residents (largely scientists and engineers) earned their keep by designing products, growing food, harvesting organs, and experimenting with new technologies—all for the benefit of and under the “good” name of Huang Enterprises.

  Each floor was lit by a holographic, sun-like orb that passed across the ceiling at an illusory depth, giving the sense of great space above us—one impossible sky stacked on top of the other, accessed by twelve white vertical tubes. The tubes commuted between floors, each carrying up to forty people at a time. They could get from the top of the tower to the bottom in less than two minutes if necessary.

  In essence, it was a city in the sky.

  It was also the only home I ever had or ever knew.

  From the day I was born until I was a young teenage girl, I remained in that city-scraper, not once stepping outside into actual, unpatented air and sunlight. That didn’t bother me—not initially. I mean, we accept the world with which we are presented, don’t we? For most of my childhood I never concerned myself with life outside because the idea never lingered long enough to excite me. Outside. Just as we have it on good faith the rest of the known universe is inhospitable for humans, I grew up believing that the rest of the world was an inhospitable place for me.

  Besides, the tower was safe. It contained everything I could possibly need. For a while, I even felt comfortable. I found my way around with ease and grew accustomed to almost every steel inch of it. There always seemed to be more to explore, though, but then, if one is blessed with an ever-curious nature, anything can be explored in endlessly greater detail. That was something I learned from my mother. The plant and animal life in the park didn’t just come into the world and simply be, she once told me. Nor did they reveal each of their secrets in one go. No, they grew and changed and fought to survive, constantly facing the gauntlet of existence, and I observed as much of this as I could with mounting passion.

  Although everyone my age was at school during the day, which was when I was allowed to actually leave our house, there were always familiar people to speak to in the more residential parts of the tower. Ticket conductors, restaurant owners and grounds-keepers, they all knew the young barefoot girl in the pink and yellow dresses flitting about the tower, and they treated me with distant graciousness. It was only much later that I questioned the motives of those overly polite residents. Perhaps most of them deferred to me because I was the daughter of the CEO—but at least this allowed me to gain access to most of the floors and facilities quite easily. Most of the doors of the tower were open to me, and I stepped through them willingly, with a trusting insouciance.

  In fact, in the entire tower, there was only one area I had no desire to explore and roam: my father’s office.

  “Office” really isn’t the word. The room was the Hall of Valhalla itself: incomprehensibly spacious with almost nothing inside. Extraordinarily high ceilings supported by six colossal, shimmering marble pillars. Marble floors. No art. No decor. In some comically hyperbolic way, the obscenely large space was completely bare apart from my father’s small desk.

  The tiny desk sat at the furthest end of the space and it took a person about ten minutes to cross from the large double doors to where he was sitting. It felt much longer than that, though. The walk was a silent one, and when I made it I felt as if I was walking to the gallows. But my father? Part of me believed he covered it each morning to remind himself of how far he’d come in life and how much further he still wanted to go. A form of mental self-flagellation, I suppose. A purging of apathies. If the distance ever became a problem, or an annoyance, he’d know to keep his level of commitment in check.

  On the left side of the room, instead of a wall, there was a gargantuan pane of tinted glass that ran the entire length and height of the office. All that could be seen through it was the surface of an endless carpet of thick white clouds, the vast and unblemished universe above, and th
e bellied curve of the earth in the distance.

  Predictably, it was magnificent.

  Magnificent, and yet I hadn’t ever seen my father spare as much as a glance at any of it.

  Bent over his desk, he burrowed into his work, in a perpetual state of not-wanting-to-be-disturbed, his hard acne-scarred face barely moving. Two black beady eyes flickered intensely as he dragged and tapped digital documents on the large clear screen that hovered in the air above his work space. His maroon tie rested in a perfect knot around his neck like a patient noose. He was a man of terrifying precision, not so much a person as a bloodless vessel for some mathematical, chaos-phobic force in the universe.

  That is the most persistent image I have of my father.

  On the other hand, the memories of my mother are more complicated, and it is about these memories that I truly wish to speak. In my mind there are two versions of her and each wrestles for dominance.

  The first is the mother of my earliest years—when she was a beautiful woman full of life and energy.

  Hand-in-hand we’d walk through the park on the 188th floor and she’d often stop to show me a flower or a butterfly, something or another. She taught me what she knew. She would crouch beside me and her hair smelled of honey, her skin of rose oils. Her hands were powdery and soft, with long piano-playing fingers capable of the lightest and most assured touch. When she smiled, her lips parted effortlessly, revealing perfect white teeth. Her eyes were a red-brown colour I haven’t seen before or since.

  Sometimes I would lie on my stomach on her bed and watch as she sat at her gold dresser to dab on her blush and pencil in her eyeliner. She’d catch my eyes in the mirror and blow me a kiss. Staring at her with my chin in my hands and my bare feet kicking back and forth, I’d imagine she was a dancer preparing to debut in some spectacular show.

  But there was no show.

  No one to impress with her efforts.

  She did it only for herself, if for no other reason than to remind herself that she was still a woman, regardless of my father’s lack of attention.

  I was young, but it was obvious enough.

  The only time I really saw my mother and my father together was at dinner. Around him she would become different—unusually quiet or agreeable. From across the table she’d sometimes slip me a wink and a smile, before returning to her stoic and refined poise. I loved it when she did that. It made me think of the awkward silence over dinner as a game we were playing, to see who could act the stuffiest and most dutiful the longest. But my father, guzzling his meal at the end of the table as if it was nothing more than fuel poured into some giant engine, never had a clue.

  After dinner, however—once my father had returned to his office—the two of us would laugh and chase each other around the house, letting out all of our pent-up mischief and giddiness. We’d collapse into each other’s arms on the bed and I’d twirl her long dark hair around my finger until I drifted into sleep.

  I’m sure you’ll believe me when I say those first few were the best years of my life. There’s honestly nothing I would have changed. But things did change, as things always do.

  One morning she woke to the sensation of a tingling in her arm. My father had already left for work and I was standing at the door, watching her. My mother was sitting upright on her bed, rubbing her left arm with her right hand. As I entered the room, she flicked her head up in surprise. She forced a smile. I smiled back at her. She asked what I wanted to wear, if we should dig out something bright and pretty for the park. Naively reassured, I gave myself a head-start by running out, back towards my bedroom. But no familiar laughter followed me. I stopped and looked over my shoulder. My mother was not behind me. Worry crawled up from my gut like hundreds of small insects, and I knew something was wrong.

  I ran back to her bedroom. I saw my mother’s long bare back, hanging to the floor. Her head was squashed into the tiles at her shoulders, twisted unnaturally to the side.

  I didn’t scream. I didn’t make a sound. I stood rooted to the spot. Surely this inelegantly slumped figure could not be my mother? Surely, when I finally screamed so loudly that I thought I’d torn open my throat, my real mother wouldn’t have just continued to lie there, sprawled crookedly on the cold floor?

  My mother was taken to the hospital on the 152nd floor, but they didn’t help so much as emphasise each horrific component of her new and mysterious condition. She regained consciousness, but there was no relief to be had in this development. Her head was capable of little more than a drugged swivel on her neck. Her eyes were no longer sparkling carnelian gemstones but a dull obsidian, permanently locked on some far-off thing. Over the course of two days, every one of her basic motor functions ceased. Her legs and her arms were the first to go. These were followed by the muscles in her neck and her face. Ultimately, she was incapable of blinking an eye or swallowing water.

  The doctors conducted test after test. She was probed and prodded for days before a panel of experts confirmed she had been infected by a rare, non-contagious virus and there was nothing that could be done to help her.

  This infuriated my father. He was not a man disposed to being told what could not be done, he needed to know what could. He spent all hours on finding a cure, and it was only later that I began to realise that his efforts were based more on the blow to his ego than anything else.

  That sounds harsh, I know, but he offered her no comfort during that time—never sat at her side to hold her lifeless hand, never whispered words of love and hope in her ear.

  The woman in the chair no longer looked like my mother. The colour and life was gone. Her skin hung on her face. Her hair was a mess. Finally, my father surrendered. He settled for an alternative to a cure. This alternative was so monstrous that he could only have decided on it as a means of resolving his own sense of powerlessness. There is no other reason for him to do what he did.

  He had a robot avatar built for her, linked it directly to her brain, and gave her at least the illusion of mobility. From the chair, my shrunken shadow of a mother could control a six-foot human-oid machine, willing it to perform basic actions via thought alone.

  No care had been taken with aesthetics—my father was more concerned with functionality than beauty. This mother was a metallic skeleton bursting with plugs and wires. No voice. No expressions. No heartbeat. Through the cold, mechanical effigy of a human being, however, my mother was once again able to prepare my lunch, to tend to the house and to walk with me through the park.

  In my mind, she had been made into a monster.

  I did try for a short while, mostly for my mother’s sake, but holding those hard metal claws never came close to holding my mother’s soft hands. Looking into its two milky, globular “eyeballs,” I saw none of her familiar warmth—just the mirrored reflections of the environment bouncing off its polished body. It had no colours or textures of its own. Each movement it made was the will of my mother, and that offered a slight consolation, but I’m sure you can understand when I say it was impossible to accept it as any form of replacement.

  I’d enter the kitchen and it would be standing over the counter, either chopping onions, preparing sandwiches, or doing something else one might call “motherly.” The head would pivot mechanically to its side and tip to position me in its line of sight. It would edge towards me, one heavy foot in front of another, and I would take a fearful step or two back. Picking up on my apprehension, the robot would return to the counter to continue its chore, as if I had never entered the kitchen at all.

  We’d go to the park, but as soon as the doors of the tube slid open, I would hurtle ahead. I’d turn to wave, a tight smile screwed on my face. When I had run far enough, I’d duck behind a bush and sit sobbing softly, all the while peeking through the leaves as the robot walked through the park by itself, cranking its head from left to right to find me.

  In the evenings, while the machine was being recharged in its customised wall-unit, I would disappear into my mother’s room and embrac
e the real her—throw my arms around her limp arms, burrow into her bony shoulder—and cry myself to sleep.

  This went on for a few weeks.

  One morning, on one of the days selected for a flushing (when the park was shut down for a session of light-dimming and programmed rainfall), I sat on my bed and observed what I could through the tiny square window in my room. I could see only the faintest outline of a distant mountain range, cloaked in mist. The two and a half peaks (all I had ever been able to see of the range) were at the end of a long horizontal stretch of land. My concept of travel was based mostly upon going up and down, and I had little understanding of exactly how far those mountains extended. I didn’t know whether it would take a few hours or a few days to get to them.

  A knock at my bedroom door drew me away from the window.

  The expressionless robot was standing there, holding up a yellow dress. The dress had a white frill along the neckline and tiny blue flowers printed along the hem. It had been my mother’s favourite (was my mother’s favourite, I should probably say) and she wanted me to wear it that day. The robot left the dress on the edge of my bed and went out.

  After showering and getting dressed, I walked into the kitchen. For the first time, I did not see the robot preparing my breakfast. I moved through the kitchen and entered the living room.

  The robot was sitting at our dinner table, doing nothing. It was simply staring at the wall.

  As I approached, the head revolved in my direction. It stood quickly from the chair and stiffened.

  It walked towards me slowly, each of its heavy feet thumping on the floor, and its right arm extended out. It opened its hand. I stared at the hand for a moment and, sensing that the action was no simple plea for affection, rested my soft hand in the rippled rubber palm. The cold metal fingers closed gently over mine. Then it turned and led me towards the door.

  I was being taken out of the house, although I had no idea where we could be going. I hadn’t yet eaten breakfast. The park was closed. It was still early in the morning and nothing was open. Once out of the house, we walked along the smooth black walkway under the light of the low sunlight orb. It moved slowly from one end of the curved blue ceiling to the other. I looked down. With the orb low and behind, our shadows stretched out ahead of us, reducing the two of us to stick-shaped characters of similar appearance. No skin. No steel. Just two long, black stick people walking hand-in-hand.