by Fred Strydom
“Hello!” the man yelled over the sound of the rain. He tugged at his black jacket and trotted towards the porch.
K stood and fixed his eyes on the man.
The man waved a hand, looked up at the sky, and smiled. “I’m sorry to bother you!” he continued. “But you wouldn’t mind if an old traveller took a moment to get out of this terrible weather, would you?”
K turned back to the open house door behind him, and then back to the man, beckoning him with a hand to step onto the porch. The old man nodded and hurried up the steps. He shook out his jacket and ran his hand through his thin white hair. He smiled and rubbed his shoulders. He had a strong, hard face and bright blue eyes rolled up in layers of wrinkled skin. Thin tufts of white hair grew from his ears and a big brown mole on his left eyebrow sprouted a small white tuft of its own, like smoke from a miniature volcano.
K took another sip of his beer.
“I’ve been out there for days,” the man said. “Hierdie weer. This rain just won’t let up, will it? At first you can handle it, but you can take just so much before it starts to drive you a little mad.”
“Let me get you a towel,” K said, and the man nodded. K went inside the house and grabbed a big red towel from the cupboard. As he passed along the corridor he looked in on his son, still on the floor, still reading his comic. He closed the boy’s bedroom door and returned to the porch.
“O, dankie, meneer. That’s perfect,” the old man said, rubbing it hard against his head. He threw it over his shoulders. “So sorry to have bothered you.”
“It’s no bother at all.”
The old man smiled again and looked around for somewhere to sit. K gestured towards a wooden chair and the man took a seat. For a while they simply sat in silence.
K turned and studied the old man again. “Where were you going?” he asked.
“Oh, here and there. I’m a walker, you know. God gave me two feet and I intend to use them till they’re ready to pack in.”
God. K thought about the word. It was a new memory for the day, the idea of God. He hadn’t had a thought about the notion of God until then.
“Where are your things?” K asked. The man carried nothing on him, not even a water bottle, or a plastic bag with a few supplies in it. It may have been a blunt question, but the stranger had asked to share K’s one and only sacred space in the world.
“I don’t need anything. I carry and spread the word of God, and that seems to do me just fine.”
K refrained from saying that at the very least an umbrella would have been a good idea. The word of God wouldn’t keep you dry.
“You see,” the man said, as if reading K’s mind, “I could have packed myself a raincoat or umbrella, but then I wouldn’t have had this wonderful opportunity to meet you. That’s how it works, the way I see it anyway. And when someone like you invites me to take shelter from the inclement weather, the view is sometimes better. I can step out of the storm completely and observe it objectively. I get a chance to think about what a storm is and where it comes from, instead of only dealing with it. Dealing with it has its place, and I’ve done that to the bone. Now it’s time to dry off and look back on it. This is the time to acknowledge the storm as a holy thing without begrudging it. Without the lies of despair.”
“You think despair is a lie?”
“It is in God’s country.”
K didn’t respond. He drank his beer.
“You know,” the old man said, “When I came around from the day—the day I forgot everything—God was the one thing I remembered. I actually had a Bible in my hand at the time. Even though I couldn’t read a word of it, even though I recalled nothing of myself or where I had come from, God’s truth was still in me, like the low heat at the centre of a cold stone. Because, you see, God doesn’t need our memories to be real. God exists regardless. Whether we’re asleep. Whether we’re dead. And whether we’re thinking about something else entirely. The truth doesn’t go away when we close our eyes, you know.
“God’s stories came back to me bit by bit. Each time they did it sounded to me precisely the way it must have sounded to the first of the saved: incredible, mind-blowing revelations from a big booming voice in the sky. They were miracles, you know. These slow recollections. And they did not stop coming until I was left with no choice but to get up and share them with the world. And so I started walking. Going from empty head to empty head, telling them the truth. People need that.”
“Do they?”
“Indeed. For instance, you’re here on the hill by yourself, but do you know what’s going on down there below?”
“Where below?”
“In the towns.”
“No, what’s going on?”
“There is a group of people visiting families in your very town. Going into people’s homes and asking them questions. This group call themselves the New Past. They’re keen to know how much people remember of their lives before the resetting. I’ve been told that the group in this particular town is actually one small part of a bigger movement taking place all over the world. They’re very interested in what people are thinking and doing with their lives now that we’ve all been set to zero.
“And on my travels I’ve seen things. Big trucks being filled with men, women and children. You can see their faces through the windows of the trucks, no expression on them at all, they look just like dumb cattle. There are others in the street watching them being driven out of town, and those people don’t have any expressions either, bless them.
“I met a man once while walking and tried to share the word of God with him. But he wouldn’t have any of it. He said my beliefs were archaic. He said my truth was not the truth at all. He said the only memories that had returned to me were the memories of old lies. And then he proceeded to tell me about the real truth, according to him. The truth of the New Past. How we were lost, not because of what we failed to remember, but because we’d been denied the habit of lying to ourselves. Day Zero, he called it, the day we went “cold turkey” on the elaborate lies of our old lives. It was a purging, he said. A means of coming clean of ourselves. He was a very interesting man. I explained to him that the Bible was about the very same principles, really. I said that what he was talking about was what I believed also. We realised after time that we were really talking about the same thing, his beliefs and my own. And then we went our separate ways. It was a beautiful meeting of married minds, really. Him with his side and mine with my own, but realising that our ideas were really one and the same. And the more I thought about it, the more of what he said made sense to me. The old habits of the old lies. The subsequent purging, or as I like to put it, the baptism by amnesia. The same truth, it seems, appears to all in one form or another. Don’t you think?”
K raised his can to take a sip but realised it was empty. He looked ahead and saw the faint yellow light of the sun finally breaking through the constant grey.
“I mean,” the old man said, “sooner or later the truth will be apparent to all. Even you. I can tell you’re a sceptic. You’re not one for trusting, are you?”
“No one’s ever given me a reason to expect my trust.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the old man said. “Because you’ll be denying yourself the truth if you don’t open your mind. Denying yourself, and denying your son.”
K nodded and placed the empty can at his feet next to his last one. He cleared his throat and stared into the distance. Beside him, the old man was folding his red towel into a square.
K turned his head. “I didn’t tell you I had a son.”
The old man was smiling. He handed the towel back to K and stood. He fluffed out his jacket and slicked his damp hair back over his head. Then he descended the steps of the porch.
“Looks like the rain is about to stop,” he said finally. He looked back at K. “Thank you for your hospitality. You’re a good man. I can tell you’re not someone who knows how to make things easy for himself. You may not remember much, but what
you do remember you hold tight and close to you. It’s understandable. Short-sighted, but understandable.”
The old man walked away, across the soggy earth. Weak drops of rain glittered in the light of the sunshine. K got up from his chair and watched as he headed down the road, gradually disappearing.
K swayed on his feet, suddenly dizzy. The beer rose in his throat and he swallowed hard. He was unnerved by the strange man’s brief visitation. Whatever the man had been talking about while he’d dried himself with K’s towel, one thing was for certain: something was off kilter. Something was wrong. K didn’t know what exactly, but as the rain stopped falling and the clouds broke slowly apart, allowing long angled rays of light to fall across the land, he sensed this above all else.
K could not stop thinking about the old man. At night he closed the windows, locked the doors and made a fire in the living room fireplace. (The quickest memory to return after Day Zero had been the memory of fear itself—irrational and intangible fear—and in a world of strangers, it didn’t take K long to figure out the locks.) He pulled the sofa closer to the fire and poured himself a whiskey. Andy sat on the sofa beside him and they both watched the fire. All the while they said nothing to each other. K had prepared a small, ill-conceived dinner for them both—tuna, beans in tomato sauce and baked potato. It was Andy who had first remembered how to use the can-opener, and a good thing too; the pantry was full of canned foods.
Once they had eaten, they’d changed into more comfortable clothing and made their way to the living room. The rain was intermittent now, falling in short fits and starts. The air was cold and the fire took a while to extend any real warmth. The rest of the house hung in darkness. All that could be seen was the orange glow of the fire on their faces and the dim blue radiance of the moon through the window. All that could be heard was the crackle of burning wood and the clink of whiskey and ice.
K looked at his son lying on the sofa beside him, hugging a purple pillow. He drank his whiskey. He wondered whether the boy had always been so quiet. Perhaps it was a characteristic he had recently acquired. A lack of confidence. A new sadness. Or, simply, Andy as he had always been. Silent and undemanding. K would never know.
The image of the old man in the rain entered his head and a ripple of fear ran through him, setting the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck on end. The man had known he had a son. What else did he know? Who was he really, and, above all, what were his intentions?
Eventually, K’s eyelids grew heavy, weighted by the warm and hypnotic fire and the warm and hypnotic alcohol. He fell asleep on the couch and dreamed, and in his dream the old man was standing in front of the house and K was yelling at him. Saying that he wasn’t welcome, that there was no one else in the house. The man simply ignored the yelling, thanked K for his kindness, and proceeded up the steps of the house. K tried to hold him back but the man moved forward effortlessly, ignoring K’s ineffectually outstretched palms.
Behind him, Andy was standing in the doorway of the house. K shouted for Andy to get back in and close the door, but the boy wouldn’t move, and the old man kept pressing on—impossibly wet (so wet he seemed made of water) and grinning and pushing forward against K’s body with supernatural ease. K’s feet simply slid back on the wooden boards as the drenched stranger walked ever closer to the doorway. Ever closer to K’s son. And in this dream K knew his efforts to hold him back were futile. The old man had the strength of an army at his back. The joy of the devil in his eyes. And K had nothing. No power at all. It was his dream but not his world.
And then he woke up and discovered that it was morning. He was still on the couch. The light of a clear day had spilled into the house and the shadowy atmosphere of the night had given way to the bland details of a cluttered room. The logs of scorching wood were now a warm mound of smoking ash. The glass tumbler was lying on the floor beside a small puddle of stinking whiskey.
Andy was not on the sofa. He must have gone to bed at some point, K thought as he pulled himself upright. He yawned and pushed himself up from the couch.
K called for Andy but there was no response. He walked through the corridor into the empty kitchen. The dirty dishes from their dinner were still sitting on the edge of the sink. K poured himself a glass of water and drank it quickly. Then he grabbed a mandarin from the fruit basket and peeled it as he walked through the rest of the house. He ate each segment slowly, savouring the sweet and natural juices. Finally he opened his son’s bedroom door.
Andy was not on the bed. Instead, K saw a black book placed neatly in the centre of the bed. He grabbed it.
It was a Bible.
Terror struck him instantaneously. The worst possible scenarios stacked up in his mind, layer upon layer, all laced with the gravity of cold fact. He left the room with the book in his hand and ran to the front door. The door was unlocked. Beyond the shadow of a doubt K knew he’d locked it the night before. He swung open the door and found himself on an empty porch. Ahead of him, the green and ordinary land stretched on. The horses in the paddock fanned their tails and huffed. Trees shook lightly in the morning breeze. Nothing was out of place, as far as he could tell. Nothing, except that Andy was not in the house. Not on the property. K was certain of it.
Someone had come into the house in the middle of the night and now Andy was gone.
K glanced down at the black laminated book and opened it. On the first blank page there was a handwritten note.
This has been done for your own sake. This is what is best for your son and for yourself. You are a good man but you remember too much. You would not have let him go willingly, and so this had to be done. It is the only way. There are bigger forces at work. We all have a role to play. Do not look for your son. You will not find him. But he is well and safe, and it is in all of our best interests that he remains well and safe for as long as possible. Trust this and you can go on to live a life of your own. If you do not trust in this you will live in the lie of your own despair.
It is your choice.
Beneath the note there was a handwritten reference: Judges 8:23, a passage somewhere in the Bible. K did not know his Bible well but paged furiously through the book until he found it. On the page the sentence had been underlined in pencil.
And Gideon said unto them, I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD will rule over you.
Upside down
I opened my eyes and saw the stars against the thick, black night. A distant satellite moved slowly through them like an impostor trying to make a stealthy escape.
I was still on the raft, bound and powerless, but now everything was silent. I could barely hear the ocean beneath me. If there was life in the ocean, I saw and heard no signs of it. If there was life somewhere up in the stars, they were keeping it to themselves.
I had no idea how long I’d been out there, and no idea how long I was supposed to remain. Had I been there for two days already? Was I into my third day? I could honestly not remember. I remembered a time of clear and sunny weather and a time of grey, overcast sky, but had that occurred in one day or two? I’d blacked in and out several times. I hadn’t even needed to relieve myself, but couldn’t be sure I hadn’t already done so in my affected state.
Apart from the shifting of the stars, I had nothing to orientate me. My ability to distinguish between the ocean beneath and the sky above was slipping; they had become one and the same with their dark depths and shapeless textures. My raft was no longer a sea vessel but an extension of my body. I could barely tell where the surface of my skin ended and the bark of the raft began. We had been fused, the raft and I, and I was no longer attached to the earth by gravity but hovering in a midpoint. She’ol. A limbo. It felt as if I was now the only conscious thing in the universe. The centre and the source of perception. And though I had recently gone through the pains of physical hunger and thirst, the pains were now gone.
At an earlier point, the water had washed over me and run into my nose, burning the back of
my throat and causing me to cough frantically. After that it had been so cold my teeth had chattered like glass ornaments quivering on a table in a tremor. But the chattering, too, had stopped. The feeling of cold had faded. Instead, there seemed to be nothing. Nothing but my thoughts.
The satellite moved out of my peripherals. I closed my eyes again. The darkness behind my closed lids was now my only refuge. Maybe, when I opened them, they’d have pulled me back in. Maybe when I awoke, I’d be back on the beach.
The next time I opened my eyes I thought that a few more hours had passed; it was still dark but the constellations appeared to be different. The dark, treacly ocean murmured beneath me, but the night sky …
As the night had worn on, the world had turned and the sky had moved with it, but this wasn’t a simple shifting of stars. This was the same night I’d seen earlier, but there was something different. The layout of the stars had been changed in some inexplicable way. Had I been looking wrongly at them before, or was I looking at them wrongly now? And how much of this night could possibly be left? What had happened to the sun; where was the morning?
The sounds of the ocean returned. I pulled in my fingers and clenched them tightly into fists, embracing the sense of pain caused by my untrimmed fingernails in the clammy and wrinkled meat of my palms. There was no breeze. The air was still, but warm now. I blinked my dry eyes hard, and studied the stars more closely.