The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  It took me a few minutes to grasp what I was seeing.

  It was the same sky. That was for sure. But somehow, I was looking at everything upside down.

  But that’s not possible.

  I wouldn’t be able to see the sky from that position because my raft was attached to the shore and anchored by the buoys.

  A terrifying notion struck me.

  The raft was no longer attached to the shore.

  And I was floating freely across the ocean.

  Somehow, the rope had snapped and the buoys had failed, but how far had I drifted out? Had I been free from the shore for minutes, hours, or more than a day?

  Panic descended. My chest heaved as I fought to catch my breath. The pulse on the side of my head pounded like a small and impatient fist on a door to my mind. I willed myself to think clearly, to regulate my breathing and steady my mind. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath, held it, and then slowly released the thin and empty air.

  Okay, Kayle. Think. Think. Think.

  I mustered the last energy in my body and tugged my arms as hard as I could. My wrists burned as I strained to free them from the shackles. The straps would hardly move. I tried to kick my legs free of the straps below, hoping the seawater had somehow weakened the restraints. All I managed to do was exhaust myself and, judging by the sensation on my ankles, scrape my skin. Seawater stung as it poured over the fresh grazes. I wondered if Gideon, Theunis and Angerona were still alongside me, and tried to shout their names. My raspy voice was like the first, broken bleats of a newborn animal. Hardly anything escaped my lips. I swallowed air and tried again.

  “Gideon! Theunis! Can you hear me! Gideon!”

  I closed my eyes and focused on hearing—something, anything. I waited but there was no sound other than the near and distant purr of endless water. Either my voice was too shallow or they were incapable of answering. Or … I was too far away from them. The raft continued to dip and roll over the surface of the black ocean. And then it moved. It was rotating. The stars spun on the axis of my line of sight, and I was now certain: I was far from the shore, out on the vast black ocean, alone.

  Dad?

  Hm?

  Why do we have a moon?

  What do you mean?

  I know why we have a sun, but why do we have a moon?

  Well, if we didn’t have a moon the tides wouldn’t go in and out.

  Is that important?

  Pretty important.

  Why?

  If the tides didn’t go in and out, life wouldn’t have come out of the ocean. And humans wouldn’t be here today. We’d probably still be jellyfish.

  That’s funny. So if we found another planet like ours, that had people on it, like ours, it would have to have a moon too, right?

  I guess so.

  A moon like ours?

  Or one that was similar.

  Another earth and another moon.

  That’s right.

  Like a mother and a father.

  Sure, Andy, like a mother and a father.

  The ocean moved like a blanket being flapped out beneath me, carrying me across the surface of the earth. The raft drifted beneath the sun and the moon, and I passed through the darkness of the night and the light of the day as if they were the rooms of a strange old house. After a while, I lost track of the time and stopped counting the hours and days.

  When I did manage to get some sleep I had dreams of flying. I’d dream of being as light as a mote of ash and of rising ever upwards into the sky. I’d rise through the clouds and the sun would touch my face. I’d look down and see the ocean glittering far below, and there, like a miniature cartoon, the raft where my body lay open and taut like a torture victim on a medieval stretching rack. But then I’d awaken to remember that I was that man on the rack and that I wasn’t rising anywhere. And I’d wish I could fall asleep again. I’d wish I were still dreaming of being light as ash … rising …

  Now and again I thought about the beach and the commune, about my son, but when I tried to hold onto the thoughts they became jumbled and senseless. My memories were distant relics, fragile artifacts covered in dust and time. If I blew too hard, tried to see them more clearly, I was afraid they’d simply disintegrate like ancient paper.

  The sun baked my skin by day; icy winds froze my blood at night. At times, I felt as if I was expanding and contracting like an alloy that would crack, and that’s when I tried my best to meditate. I remembered reading about monks who could alter the beat of the heart with only their minds and tried desperately to tap into that sacred and elusive ability. Occasionally I could blot it all out, and think of absolutely nothing, but my meditative abilities were unexceptional, and wandering thoughts intruded upon the stillness of my mind like loud-mouthed heathens in a mountaintop temple.

  The raft continued for two days, or was it three? I had no idea. It sailed on and on, until one day the sun rose to an ominously dull morning. The sky lightened but there was no colour, no streaks of yellow and red. Not long after, the first few drips of rain landed on my face. I opened my mouth and swallowed as much of it as I could. The clouds darkened. The droplets came down harder, faster and furious. The wind howled like a warrior psyching itself up for battle.

  And then the storm arrived. The raft rocked wildly. The sky closed in like the walls of a womb, birthing an abomination of thunder, lightning, wind and rain. For hours I was beaten by the rain. The raft tipped up as the sea rose beneath it. I was passed over the waves and rushed feet-first back into the ocean, struggling to catch my breath as the grey water crashed over me. The raft plunged into the ocean like a diving bird making a catch, before bobbing violently to the surface, returning me to the blistering barrage of rain.

  I took deep breaths when I could, not knowing when and for how long I’d have to be under the water again. Sometimes I mistimed it and submerged just upon exhaling. Water rushed through my mouth and nose into my lungs and stomach. I returned to the surface gagging and vomiting, choking and drowning.

  One particular wave knocked the wind out of me completely, and I fought to catch a breath. Lightning flashed and I caught a glimpse of a wave rising beside me like a giant hand. It came down over me, shoving me under the icy sea. The raft descended into the darkness before catapulting to the surface. It sprang from the ocean, flinging me into the air. I came down body first and upside down. I was now in the water but strapped to the underside of the raft.

  This is the end. For the first time I fully believed that I wouldn’t make it. I peered into the depths, holding my breath and wrenching my limbs on their tight straps. The raft would never turn back over. Soon I would have to breathe out, and that would be it. My lungs would fill with water and I would die.

  Lightning must have struck the ocean at that point because blue light filled the darkness beneath me, flashing it into a jagged byzantine of deep-sea caverns and crevices. I felt like an alien pinned to the ceiling of a strange and inhospitable underworld. Lightning struck again. As it shot into the abyss below, throwing twisted new shapes onto those walls of shadows, something else appeared: a large mass, moving of its own accord. Something very big and very much alive. A drawled and sonorous song soon filled my submerged ears: the song of a whale. Even as the waves crashed and the thunder boomed somewhere overhead, even as the fear of my pathetic death took hold, the song of the whale was stunningly beautiful. Lightning flashed a third time, and I saw the mass rising up quickly towards me. I felt the impact of the whale’s back against my spread body as I was hurled into the open air. The raft landed right side up and I was once again exposed to the sky. Old air rushed from my lungs and I sucked in the rain and the wind. I reached for my throat without thinking, and only after my right hand sank to my side did I realise that it was no longer bound. I grabbed hold of the strap that had once shackled me.

  I coughed and spat the water from my lungs. One of the planks of the raft snapped under me and the splintered wood grazed my back. As my raft lifted and dipped over an
other big wave, I saw—in the flash of yet another bolt of lightning—a large tail and fin elegantly rising from the ocean. The fin hung suspended in the air for a moment, waving like the hand of a gracious royal, and then it went back down, vanishing into the black and angry ocean.

  Time slowed to a gentle crawl, but now there was no fear in me. Instead, my mind lost all contact with my body. All I was aware of was a sense of depleting energy and consciousness. I saw nothing, heard nothing. I became a constituent of the chaos itself. I was eroding, the way a jagged rock is whittled to a smooth pebble.

  Finally the sun came up and the waves died. The clouds separated, thinned to impotent wisps. The wind moved on and the air warmed. Within a few hours the fickle world was an oven again, and I was the overcooked order of the day.

  My senses reconnected with my body—I was a person again—and with sensation came the full throes of pain and exhaustion. I was beyond thirsty. I had been dried out like a slab of meat on a hook in the desert sun. The salt had crusted on my skin and every inch of me burned. I had no idea how far I was from the beach—the safe and predictable beach—but was sure I’d been ushered out as far as was possible by the most powerful and wilful forces on earth.

  The raft continued across the surface of the ocean. There were no sounds other than the gentle slapping of water at my sides and the whistling breeze overhead. Another ordinary day in the world, nothing of any consequence noted down or remembered. No, in spite of everything, I knew that above much else. It was another ordinary day in a very old world, and as always I moved through it, tired and alone on my broken raft.

  Fruit

  Mr. Kayle. Mr. Kayyyyyyle … it’s your old friend Jack Turning here. Wake. Up.

  The first thing I became aware of when I came around was the pinch of a crab’s claw on my nose. It had a firm grip and was trying to clamber up my face with its many pointed legs. I plucked it off and opened my eyes. The light of the sun cut through my retinas. The tall silhouettes of trees swayed against the sun and from somewhere nearby came the sound of the ocean washing softly ashore.

  I was on a beach.

  The raft had washed up on an embankment, quite a distance from the shore. The front end of it was buried in white sand. I quickly realised this was somewhere new. Somewhere new and somewhere deserted. There were no signs of life.

  I wiped the sand off my face and my skin burned at the lightest touch. Carefully, I undid the strap across my neck then gingerly lifted my head from the raft and proceeded to undo the rest of my straps. My body ached as I stretched to my side to undo my left arm and then forward to undo my feet. Eventually, painfully, I managed to free myself entirely.

  I got to my feet and studied my surroundings again. At the edge of the beach began a wilderness of trees and bushes, running the length of coastline as far as I could see. They were like no plant life I had ever seen. The trunks were thick towers, stretching far into the sky, aligned alongside each other like perfectly positioned pylons. Beyond the wall of oversized trees was what looked like a dense jungle running up a large green hill in the distance. This was not mainland. This was an island.

  But the tide …

  I turned to examine the sea.

  There was something uncannily unnatural about the way the waves washed up the shore. The water didn’t foam at all but ran clearly, with a slightly greater speed than waves usually do—more in the way water laps cleanly and forcefully against the edges of a lake on a windy day. Nothing about it seemed right.

  I stepped off the raft and lurched onto the sand. The sand didn’t feel right, either. It didn’t even look right. I bent to pick up a handful and opened my palm.

  It was like no sand I’d even seen—soft flakes instead of grains and almost metallic in the way they shimmered in the sun. They could have been finely crushed shells but that seemed unlikely; each gleaming flake seemed identical to the next one, almost synthetic. I dusted my hand on my pants and rubbed off the last bits between my fingers.

  “Hellooo!” I shouted into the jungle, but there was no response. The trees caught the wind and they swayed and shrilled in their fixed spots. I looked back over the ocean and noticed something else, far off in the distance.

  There was another small island out there, ten maybe twenty kilometres away. I wondered what it was, whether it had been there all along. But never mind that island; I still hadn’t explored the one I was on. I turned to look into the jungle again. I knew I should go into it, explore, get a better idea of where I was and what was on offer. For a while, though, I’d stay on the beach and get my strength back. Find some food, drink some water. The last thing I needed was to be in a weakened state, being chased down by a wild cat or bitten by a venomous spider.

  But my instincts were telling me something else. It wasn’t the treachery of nature, the natural hazards of an untamed world that had me unsettled and scared. This place had been tamed. Arranged. Manufactured to look and feel like an island. And all the while I stood there, staring into the thick jungle, I felt I was being watched.

  I found a bowl-shaped rock filled with rainwater and drank it dry. The water filled my shrunken stomach and I didn’t feel like eating, even though I knew I should look for food, something solid. I put off foraging and instead pulled the raft up against a tree and slept there that night. The night was warm and accommodating, but I slept fitfully. I had nightmares of being bound and on the ocean. When I finally awoke, I was briefly unsure about where I was, but the shiny sand and the uncharacteristically tall and smooth-trunked trees soon reminded me.

  My energy was drained. I lay in the rising sun for hours, trying to regain my strength. Eventually, I managed to get up and make my way to the shoreline. When I looked up, I noticed something peculiar about the other island—it seemed closer than it had been the day before. It was a small island—more of a ship-sized islet than an island—but now I could make out the volcanic shape of it, the faint hue of green undergrowth and the rise of the central peak. I walked down to the water’s edge and peered out at the floating island. It could have been a trick of light or trick of the mind (I hadn’t exactly been in the clearest and most perceptive state the moment I’d awoken), but I could have sworn it was closer than it had been. By three or four kilometres, at a guess.

  Even stranger, when I looked down into the water, it seemed my own shore did not stretch out gradually beneath the tide, the way it would on any normal beach. There was a sudden drop, as if I was standing on a cliff. Less than a foot from the edge of the dry sand I could look directly down into the dark abyss of the ocean. It was like peering over the side of a boat. A large fish fluttered a metre down into the ocean, and then, to my surprise, disappeared under the shore.

  I didn’t have the strength to dwell on these observations: I was suddenly ravenous. I found a large branch near the fringe of the jungle, took off my shirt and created a kind of net, which I then attached to the branch. I leaned over the edge of the island, dipped the branch and shirt under the water, and spent at least an hour scooping water until eventually I was able to catch a fish.

  I hoisted the thrashing fish to the shore and killed it. I had no way of making a fire, but decided to skin and gut it, tear off the head and tail, and eat it raw. Each salty sliver slipped uneasily down my throat. When I was done, I stretched out on the beach under the harshening sun. The sky was perfectly blue. At a great height, birds crossed overhead. I didn’t know where I was, but no longer cared. I was simply relieved to be off the sea.

  I spent some time thinking about what had happened, how my raft had come free at all (Had the rope broken? Had it been cut?), but even these thoughts seemed irrelevant to my situation. Whatever the reason, I was here now. Stranded on the strange new beach of a strange new island. It was time to focus on surviving—and on finding my way to my son, because the truth was, whether the rope had been deliberately cut or had snapped on its own, I was free from the commune.

  Starving. Exhausted. Free.

  I closed my eyes,
settled my mind, and sailed once more to sleep.

  The next day I woke up feeling better. It was time to go into the jungle. I tied the raft to a young tree further up the beach and headed inland, beyond the wall of impeccable trees—smooth and identical, standing like ancient warriors on eternal watch.

  The jungle was thick and wet. The canopy overhead had knitted together so that only a few shafts of light managed to cut through. They ran into the undergrowth at angles like rungless ladders. Each beam revealed wispy floating strands, like human hair, dancing in the warm, dank air.

  One of the first things I noticed was the lack of any wildlife—no birds, no creatures scuttling through the trees. If not for the occasional spider web strung like necklaces of wobbly water droplets, I would have thought the jungle devoid of animal life. I stepped carefully through the undergrowth, keeping my wits about me. This was not a normal place. Not a normal jungle.

  I walked for what must have been ten minutes before an astonishing new part of the jungle revealed itself.

  Fruit.

  The trees were now garlanded in clusters of bright and luscious fruit. This new vegetation didn’t make sense either. The variety of fruit was contradictory to what I remembered about where and how fruit was grown. In the orchard beyond the paddock in the house I had left behind me, apples grew next to apples, and oranges nowhere near those at all. Bananas were tropical fruits, that fact floated in as I looked at the trees. So maybe they belonged here, in this clammy, humid forest. But here an orange tree grew beside an apple tree beside a banana tree, all hanging thick with the largest and most colourful fruits, big enough to feed two or three people. And that wasn’t all. I saw pineapples the size of watermelons, watermelons scattered like boulders. There were unusual fruits too. Mulberries and pomegranates. Jujubes and kumquats. Quinces and lychees and kiwi fruit.