by Fred Strydom
Around this time, my mother became sick. She wasn’t sure whether it was connected to these rays, but her symptoms did present themselves as the stories began to go around. She awoke one morning with a headache, which became a migraine, which led to her having a violent seizure. Soon afterwards, she slipped into the first of a series of short comas. Her parents were, of course, devastated. It needn’t be said that they could afford no treatment, no hospitalisation. Her father continued to work, her mother took care of her at home, but each day her condition worsened. She was young, she said, but not too young to understand that it would not be long before she died. It was something she now knew for certain. The imminence of death is felt deep within one long before it occurs, just as someone who has been long at sea smells land before she sees it.
Then, one cold and rainy night, her father came home with a man she had never seen before. She was burning up, shivering in her bed, and the strange man standing over her in his sopping hooded raincoat seemed like a hallucination induced by her raging fever.
Her father stood behind him, holding his hat in his hands, twisting it round and round as if he was trying to open a tight jar. Her mother stepped aside and the man leaned over her. He put his hands under her thin body and lifted her into his arms easily.
It was a hazy memory—she said—being carried out of the house by that strange man. All she could recall was seeing her parents standing in the doorway, watching as she was taken away. She was placed gently on the back seat of a vehicle, a needle was plunged into her arm, the door was shut, and she passed out. She had terrible dreams that night, and she remembered waking intermittently only to realise she was still in the vehicle. Night turned to morning, and then to night, and then to morning again … and still she lay there in her sweat-drenched blanket.
On the third day, the vehicle stopped and the door opened. The large man leaned in and lifted her out. He carried her away from the vehicle, and though she could see little, she could smell the most incredible things. The air was clean, cold and fresh, teeming with the sweet fragrances of flowers, trees and soil. She heard water running over rocks and through crevices. She heard birds cheeping and insects twittering. The man carried her up a large number of steps. At last, he stopped and laid her down on a patch of the greenest and softest grass she had ever seen or felt. He stood, blocking the sun, and said, You must be hungry. That was all. Then he walked away.
She sat up and looked around—her curiosity superseded her physical pain and discomfort—and what she saw stunned her as she had never been stunned since.
A ragged sweep of enormous, snow-tipped mountains stretched below and ahead of her, like the resting place of old, forgotten gods. The green lawn was on the edge of a mountaintop of its own, the steep precipice rolling down to a deep, shadowy valley. On either side of her, trees lined the lawn, powdering the ground with light pink petals. Behind her, a grey temple sat firmly beneath the large rocks.
It was a paradise, she said. A beautiful shelter from the storm of clutter and chaos that had battered the rest of the world into diseased oblivion. And it was to be her new home for just under a year.
The stranger who had collected her from her parents’ house was a man named Sun Zhang. He’d built the place himself and lived there with his three daughters, tall and slender women who welcomed her eagerly, gently stroking her soft hair, handling her as tenderly as a fragile doll that might shatter at any minute. When she had rested they took her on a tour of the temple. The inside of the temple was lit by a myriad of crooked candles. The halls were lined with stone pillars, and each of the few rooms contained nothing more than a mattress on the floor and a small table carrying several slim candles. She was given a room of her own, ate dinner with Sun Zhang and his bowed, respectful daughters each evening, and was encouraged to read various books during the day.
Mr. Zhang was a hard and unruffled man. In the evenings after dinner, he smoked a long wooden pipe by himself. During the day he did little but work in his garden and practice a form of t’ai chi ch’uan she did not recognise. At first she thought he was treating her with an almost resentful aloofness, but soon she realised that he treated her precisely as he did his own daughters, entertaining no idle conversation, with little humour, and demanding utter paternal respect.
He said nothing about her father and mother, or why he had come to collect her from her house inYihezhuang—and she didn’t ask.
Most importantly, and strangely, every day that she stayed there, a bit of her strength returned, a morsel of her energy. She spent her mornings and evenings sitting on the lawn where he had first laid her down. She watched the clouds weave in and about the abundant peaks. She watched the sun move across the sky and thought about her parents, but never asked him to take her back. She couldn’t say why, except that she knew the place was healing her and she trusted Mr. Zhang to return her if he thought it the right thing to do. But, she told me, this was no mere temple on the mountains. There was something else about the place that she only learned much later—something that transcended its beauty and purity.
She learned that Mr. Zhang had once been a very rich businessman. When his wife had died because of a brain tumour many years earlier, he’d left his business and had the temple built on top of the mountain using a special material that, ironically, had provided his wealth in the world of money and men. The temple and the foundation had been built out of a synthetic substance used to counter the negative effects of electromagnetic radiation near power plants, radio towers and pylons. It had once been bought and distributed around the world but funding was low, and most companies abandoned using it altogether, preferring to believe, or even disseminate data that said the harmful effects of electromagnetic frequency pollution had been proved to be negligible.
The result of this, Mr. Zhang explained to her, was that the true benefits of his material had been severely undermined and underutilised. He discovered that the material had other properties: it caused plants and vegetables to grow at alarming rates, to incredible sizes. His mountaintop garden bore the largest and most delicious plums, the reddest, juiciest tomatoes. His new substance could purify water, slow the ageing process, speed up self-healing. Increased altitude, where the air was pure and free, accentuated all of these properties.
This material, it just so happened, was the accidental harbinger of a new natural world, and his temple on the mountains a retreat like no other. A magic existed there. It was a place of life and energy. A true Shangri-La, and a carefully guarded secret. How Mr. Zhang had come to meet her father, and why she had been chosen to stay with him on the mountain with his three beautiful daughters, she never did find out.
One day, at the end of her year, once she had more than overcome her ailment and attained what can only be understood as a “resistance” to the fears and insecurities that had once beset her, he took her back to her parents. His final warning rang in her ears: The world has not changed. While people can temporarily alleviate some of their problems, the real problem isn’t in the air. It’s in the mind. And the mind of Man is sick with rot. Though my home is a secret I urge you to keep, I will give you one final gift: you may, at any point in your life, send one person in need of healing to live with me at my home for a year. I promise you this now, as I once promised your father, and someone else before him. But only one person, and for one year only. I’ll be waiting.
He’d said it after my mother had climbed out of the vehicle and into the dusty streets of home. And then the door of the vehicle closed and he sped away, never to enter into her life again. She knocked on the door of her parents’ shanty. They opened it and cried when they saw her. And her life, although forever changed in the deepest way, continued on as it once had—except that she was never sick. No colds, no flu, not even a migraine, she said. That year on the mountain had strengthened her body in some wonderfully strange and incomprehensible way …
And that’s where the story she told me ended. And I’d go to bed and dream about tha
t place, and wonder if I’d ever see it, if it truly was as real as I had hoped.
It was now obvious that the temple was the Silver Whisper’s intended destination. Though I could only be there for a year, it had been her only option. Hopefully, when my year there was up there’d be somewhere for me to go. Perhaps, she said, Mr. Zhang would be willing to let me stay.
I stared back down at my mother’s digital face. On top of everything, what really lingered now was the reminder that my mother had been sick as a child. She had come away believing she’d been cured for life. But even though cured, her life hadn’t been a happy one. She worried about me, about my father, feared that something might happen and she would not be in a position to save me. Perhaps she saw that his dynasty was heading for some sort of cataclysmic collapse. And if that happened, would she be able to save me? She had to have a plan in place that would get me away, because my father would never put me before his precious dynasty. If anything, he’d keep me in captivity there, let me sink with him in the hopes that the heir I was programmed to deliver would provide some miraculous means of salvation.
Maybe my mother thought he would separate us, keep her from telling me what his plans for me were. Whatever the case, she had worked hard to have an escape plan in place, to save me, to make up for what she had allowed him to do to me. Of course, the one thing my mother never foresaw was the situation that had arisen, where the sickness came back to take her once more, like a devil who had returned to claim a soul bartered for a few untroubled years of good health.
I was filled with the deepest sympathy for her, reminded that she hadn’t always been my mother. She’d once been a young girl. She had endured a childhood of poverty and sickness, an adulthood of loneliness and marital enslavement. She had done her best … until the day the world had become so unbearable she’d had no choice but to leave it …
Beauty. Grace. Wisdom. She’d had each, but life hadn’t cared, hadn’t shown her any favour. What were the rest of us supposed to live by, if anything at all? Tragedy, I learned that day, floats … And then it lands arbitrarily, like a feather from an indifferent bird high in the sky.
The pod left the flat plains of the desert, zigzagging between the gorges of the mountains, swinging around wide bends, gusting a rippling wake across the surface of a narrow lake, bending reeds and gliding slickly over stone slabs. I flattened my hands against the side and looked up to the tops of the rocky cliff-faces. The sun popped in and out of the cracks and gaps, my constant, protective companion.
It was then that an unexpected heaviness filled my head, the weight of a blanket soaked in water. I collapsed back into my seat. I felt nauseous. Outside, the walls of the valleys still raced rearward. The sun struck out, but now the rays were an expanding, blinding sheet that grew whiter and brighter. The heaviness intensified and became a sharp, piercing pain, followed by a penetrating noise.
My mother’s face began to warp and distort. The pod that had whipped over the land so smoothly was now shuddering and shaking …
I’m sure you’ve already guessed. The growing pain, the shrill sound … all happened the moment our memories were wiped clean and humankind lost a link in the unending chain of advancement and accumulated knowledge.
Day Zero, we now call it.
Of course, I had no idea that at that very moment everyone else in the world was suffering in the same way. As that malfunctioning glass bubble spluttered through the rocky vales, I thought it was an environmental factor, some sort of karmic penance even, for daring to leave the tower. These thoughts lingered for a short, bewildered while and then everything ended in sudden, mind-blotting blackness.
Who knew how long I had been out?
It could have been hours, weeks, or months—there was no way to tell. When I came around, my memory was gone, drained like old water from a tub. Everything I’ve just told you has been dug up and pieced together over many years—detail by detail, word by word. I’m like an archaeologist, delicately picking rock from fossil. At that moment, though, when my eyes opened, there was nothing.
I was lying on a bed in a room. I had no memories of the tower, or the pod, or Sun Zhang’s temple on the mountain. For all I knew, my life had begun right there, sprawled on those brown blankets.
The first thing I noticed was a damp patch on the ceiling. The centre of it was dark, bulging—water waiting for the opportunity to burst through. The air was warm and musty, the room small and unfamiliar. I climbed out of bed and walked unsteadily to the door. I turned down a dark corridor, and found myself in a quaint kitchen with sunflower-patterned curtains on the windows and an old refrigerator droning like a disgruntled house spirit. A man and a woman stood near the sink and gawked morosely back at me. They said nothing as I entered. The elderly man was thin and weathered with a balding crown, and he wore faded overalls and mud-caked blue worker boots. The woman was about the same age, her face hidden in a scrub of thick black hair. Rolls of fat swelled from the shoulder straps of her purple dress like baked bread. They didn’t recognise me … no reaction, no change in expression. Then the man turned and left the kitchen as if he’d forgotten to do something out there. The woman sat down on a chair at a round table, fingering the petals of plastic pink flowers in a jar. She ignored me as I stepped to the door that led outside and swung it open.
I was on a farm. Fat, blotchy pigs snarled and fought to secure their places at a mucky food trough. A boy was leaning over the crude, wooden fence, watching them. As I descended the steps of the porch and planted my feet on the muddy earth, he looked at me over his shoulder. He pushed himself off the fence and approached me, took my hand, and led me back to the fence. I leaned against the post alongside him. The sty smelled like rotten vegetables and excrement. Beyond the sty, the few acres of farm were grey and neglected. Clouds tumbled in high winds, sliding patches of shadow across the land like a desperate, migrating herd.
I never did fully remember the three people I saw in the house that weird day, but as the weeks continued, there were more and more clues. I saw myself in photographs on the walls. If the pictures were to be trusted, I had spent my entire life with those strangers. I saw myself as a young child in the woman’s arms. There was a picture of the boy and me bathing together in a steel tub. I saw each of these pictures, yet recalled nothing of the moments.
Over time, their memories slowly came back, but mine didn’t. On several occasions, the man sat me down and tried to convince me that he was my father, the woman was my mother, and the boy, my brother, but I struggled to accept it. Not only did I experience an absence of connection between us, I had also begun to dream of other places and other people.
In my earliest dreams, I saw nothing but a long white elevator. I had flashes of a beautiful woman applying her make-up before the mirror of a large, elaborate dresser. I saw a gigantic room containing nothing but a window that spanned the length of a massive wall, and a small desk. I saw one room drenched in blue light, another containing a floating metallic vehicle.
Night by night, the dreams became clearer and more consuming. By day, I helped my alleged brother on the farm (a boy whose company I had grown to appreciate, although I could never see him as my brother), cooked with my “mother” in the kitchen, and sat at my “father’s” side in the evenings while he watched a fire burn beneath the mantelpiece and drowsed on tumblers of whiskey. But all the while I felt that I was merely pretending to be a part of that rural family.
Sometimes, when everyone was sleeping, I would wake, climb out of my bed, sit by my window and stare off into the outlying mountains. My eyes were always drawn to the same spot—a valley I could just about make out in the obstinate mist that shrouded the land. It was not long before I decided I couldn’t continue in such a way.
One crisp morning, a few months later, I met the boy in the barn beside the house and told him I needed to go. I was carrying nothing but a small bag filled with food, water and a sweater. He asked where I needed to go, and I said I didn’t know. I was be
ing drawn to some place in the mountains; some mysterious location was pulling on me like a magnet, and I knew I could no longer ignore it. He tried to convince me to stay, but when I told him I could not, he decided he’d come with me. He said he would return to the farm, to his mother and father, but he’d go with me as far as he could. I was relieved. I was terrified of what lay ahead and welcomed the thought of his company. I thanked him and we agreed to leave the following day.
We set off in the morning and walked for almost three days. The boy had brought a tent and essential supplies and we camped in bushes when we needed to rest. He tracked and killed small game and we cooked rabbits and pigeons over a fire. The boy said little to me; I knew he was worrying about his parents alone on the farm, but he did not complain, did not once suggest going back. He could see I needed to go on, to reach the place I sensed I needed to find, and he stayed to protect me. Perhaps he too was curious.
On the third day, filthy and exhausted, we saw something in the valley of the mountains—light, reflecting off the surface of an object partially hidden between the rocks. We hurried ahead to examine it further.
It was the pod, half-buried in the dirt, its mirrored exterior layered in rain-streaked dust. Behind it, trees and bushes had been ripped from the damaged soil. It had clearly come crashing down at a great speed …
I must have blacked out when it hit the ground, I said. It’s a good thing your parents found me when they did; I’m not sure I would have survived.
We circled the object for a few minutes, and I could see him trying to make sense of its strange shape.
This is mine, I said. The Silver Whisper. I was escaping the tower and on my way to the temple … From the look on his face I could tell he did not understand a word.
As before, I spoke the word Jai-Li and, with a hiss, a door rolled out. I held my breath, gave the boy a last blank look, and climbed inside.