The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  “I was away for four or five hours—went to the gym, did some errands—and then I came back, right? Except, you know what, guess who was still there in the doorway when I pulled the car in? Fang. Standing in the doorway in her pink and yellow pyjamas, sucking her thumb, smiling like a mannequin.”

  “Okay …”

  “She’d been standing there the entire time I was gone, Shen. Standing in the doorway for five hours!”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know? Christ!” Quon slammed his glass on the counter. “I don’t know. But I do. I do know. Her hair was exactly the same as when I left. She was still in those goddamn pyjamas. She was still sucking her thumb, and not a single thing had changed in the house. The dishes were still all out. The egg shells were still on the counter. The bed was unmade. Nothing had been done. And I know my wife, Shen. You know my wife. That would never pass. No. Whoever or whatever was at the house, that was not my wife.”

  Shen swigged his Coke. Maybe he should have ordered something harder, he thought. Quon was staring him down, waiting for a reaction.

  “I don’t know, Quon,” Shen said, finally.

  “Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know you do. Now. Do you want to tell me about your wife?”

  Shen rubbed his hand around the glass, gathering the condensation on his fingers. “She’s younger,” he said finally. “She’s younger than I remember.”

  “Younger. Ha! Yes. Not the woman you left behind, is she? Okay. How about this—what do you remember about us being up there?”

  “Up where?”

  “In Chang’e 11, Captain. What’s the last thing you remember about our mission?”

  “The last thing? What do you mean?”

  “Anything,” Quon said. “Do you really remember anything? Anything specific? Re-entry? Do you actually remember the day we landed?”

  “Of course I do. It was only a couple of months ago.”

  “Was it really? So you remember it. Great. Give me one memory of it. One story. Detail. Anything.”

  Shen smiled. Quon was having him on. The entire conversation was some kind of weird wind-up. Of course he could remember it.

  “Okay, well—” he began, playing along. “The day we landed. Let’s see. We … uh …” He paused. He trawled through his memories, but where there should have been facts and feelings about the event, there was nothing, a void. He could not even access the next available memory. A black hole had materialised in his head and it was sucking in the weak light of what he should have known.

  “Forget the arrival,” Quon said. “What about this place? Home. Hell, let’s talk about this very bar. Do me a favour. Close your eyes.”

  “Quon …”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Shen did as he was told.

  “When you stepped into this bar, ten minutes ago, what did you notice first?” Quon asked.

  “Um. The bar counter.”

  “What else?”

  “Two men playing pool.”

  “Right. Go on.”

  “And—I don’t know, Quon—you. Sitting on the stool.”

  “Who was behind the bar?”

  “A barman.”

  “Barman. Okay. What was he doing?”

  “Taking stock.”

  “Hm. Open your eyes.”

  Shen blinked hard. At first he could not tell what he was expected to see. As he looked around, however, he noticed certain details had changed. The barman was not a barman, but a young and beautiful woman. She was fidgeting at the till. The two men playing pool weren’t behind him as he was sure they had been a moment earlier; they were wearing expensive suits and halfway through a card game at a small table. There wasn’t even a pool table.

  “What’s going on?” Shen asked. “How did—”

  “What I saw when I came in here,” Quon said, “is probably what you’re seeing right now. Once you told me what you saw, I projected my environment onto you, as if your mind was a screen. Don’t ask me how.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s as if there’s something, someone maybe, trying to rectify the discrepancies between us. To balance our perceptions and create a synchronicity between our conscious minds. It’s failing. But it’s trying. Trying to make us believe the same lie.”

  “What lie?”

  “Captain Shen. You know what I think?” Quon asked. He ran his finger over the counter. “I think this isn’t home at all. It looks like home. It feels like home. But we’re not on earth. We haven’t returned from our mission. We’re still out there, and whatever, or wherever, this place is, it’s trying to make us think we’ve returned.”

  “That’s ridiculous. No. We landed. Two months ago.”

  Quon turned back to the bar. “No. No. These environments have been downloaded from our memories. Everything we see here we’ve seen before. Perhaps we’re being shown a world that we want to see. Our beautiful, ageless wives, for example. But there are glitches. This place is full of them. Look,” he held up his glass. It was a tumbler with a few last drips of whiskey sloshing at the bottom. “You ordered two Cokes. I wanted another whiskey. So mine’s a whiskey. Has been all along.”

  Shen took a moment to process what he was being told. He watched as the stunning young lady behind the counter diced a lemon. She looked up at him, thinking he needed to be served, but he waved his hand gently, and she turned back to her task. “There must be an explanation for all of this,” he said.

  “I’ve just given you one.”

  “Have you spoken to the others?”

  “The others? The crew. They’re not here.”

  “Where are they?”

  Quon shrugged and tapped his glass on the counter, signalling the barmaid to fill it up. He smacked his lips.

  “Living in their own projections, I suppose. Stuck in their own lies. Who knows?”

  The barmaid filled the glass and Quon beckoned her closer with his finger. She leaned over the counter and Quon whispered something in her ear. Once he had spoken, she headed back to her lemon. Shen thought it was odd, What secret could Quon have with a barmaid? but did not consider it for long. He was studying the bar for clues. The missing pool table. The card players.

  His mind played over the events of the past two months—if it had been two months at all. Was it a dream? Was he dreaming right then? Had he really just walked back from his apartment or had he simply been in the same nowhere Quon had postulated, fabricating a past for himself as he went along?

  He thought about his wife’s face. Her unnaturally young face. He thought about the extra rooms in the corridor. He thought about those wasted kids in the diner, eyeing him as he went by. He even thought about the taxi driver whose face he had not seen. Did the man even have a face, or was he only a back that could not be turned? There had been two black cue balls hanging from the driver’s rear-view mirror, but even though Shen knew he’d seen them, the mental image of what he’d really seen was different. In his mind, the totems hanging from the mirror were two playing cards, twisting on a string: a king of hearts and a joker.

  Christ.

  Where were they? Were they still in Chang’e 11? Was this a kind of simulation, and if so, who was controlling it? Who was controlling them? Shen rubbed his temples with his fingers and told himself to breathe. Quon’s drunk. This is a joke. A prank. We’re home. On earth. We returned.

  “Okay …” Shen continued the discussion, pulling himself together. “All right. I’ll play along, and then how about you and I hit the road? If what you’re saying is true, and this is all some kind of a trick, where are we, Quon? And how do you suppose we get out?”

  Quon smiled wryly and added, “I think I might know, Captain. After all, I’m the scientist. But as Heisenberg himself proposed, a good scientist must be completely removed from the equation in order to yield accurate results.”

  As he completed his final statement, the barmaid lunged towards Quo
n with the knife in her hand, extended her arm over the counter, and slit his throat cleanly from side to side.

  A sea of rooftops

  “You had a nightmare,” said the owner’s son. He was lying on the bunk bed beneath me. I pulled out my pillow, squeezed it into shape and put it back behind my head.

  “I suppose so,” I said, coming back to waking reality after plummeting from an impossibly tall tree.

  “I think you were falling,” the boy said. “It seemed like you were falling. You were saying your son’s name.”

  “I was?”

  I pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes. I had a headache. More than likely, I was dehydrated. For more than a week I had been ill, running a fever and sweating in my sleep. I was only just beginning to feel vaguely normal. We had been at sea for almost three weeks and I’d spent most of it in bed. I’d been struck by spells of delirium and disorientation. I once found myself waking up in the bathroom after a somnambulistic stroll in the night, throat dry and head pounding. Members of the island took me back to bed and did their best to settle me. Another time, the owner of the island, a tall bearded man who always wore a ragged old red baseball cap and smoked brown hand-rolled cigarettes, was sitting at my bedside after a particularly troubling night. He said we’d had a conversation but I didn’t remember it. He said I thought he was a man named Jack Turning.

  (“Whoever that fellow is or was to you, friend,” he said. “You sure didn’t like him much.”)

  On better nights, as I lay there weak but awake, I could do nothing but work my way through the memories of recent events—memories culminating with the sound of a gun exploding in the hands of a young man who’d mistaken me for his father. The sound still rang in my ears, his words echoes in the crooked halls of my mind: I was your son. And you left me here. You forgot me. You forgot me.

  Sometimes, I thought I was still trapped in that dark and menacing jungle. I imagined the ceiling of the room was covered in fruit—sweating, bulbous fruits that looked scarcely as appetising as I had once thought them. For at least a week after being welcomed onto this new island I struggled to keep food down after meals and had an almost rabid aversion to drinking water. The mornings were clearer, and I’d remember that we’d long left that island of mind-altering fruits and carnivorous trees, and were now on another island altogether. An island that, by comparison, was a kind of secular monastery.

  Both the bed-bound geneticist and I had been offered passage on the second smaller island with its community of nomadic seafarers. We had taken them up on their offer—left that overgrown island to drift unmanned across the sea—and become their welcomed guests. They were a hardy and upbeat group who believed in a simple way of living, and I liked them instantly. When I told them where I had come from, how I had been set adrift on a raft, they said they knew about the communes. They’d heard about the New Past and The Renascence, but had decided that until they were caught and dragged off they would never readily submit themselves to a cause they didn’t completely understand. Whatever the purpose of the communes might be, they insisted, they didn’t care. That was where the discussion ended before the generous food and strong alcoholic malts were served to celebrate our arrival.

  The inhabitants of the island also assured us, with no real plan or destination of their own, that they would gladly take us wherever we wished to go. The old geneticist later asked if he could stay with them—his agricultural know-how was certainly of prodigious value—and they welcomed him as a permanent addition to their community. I, on the other hand, decided I could not stay.

  I had to find Andy, my son, I explained.

  I had to go on.

  I climbed down from the bunk bed and grabbed a mug of water off the boy’s desk. He was lying on his stomach and reading some kind of magazine. It was yellowed and tattered, but I could still see the faded images of beautiful houses with their landscape gardens. Dining-table sets and exquisitely crafted furniture. Polished silverware and extravagant crystal chandeliers. Matching drapes and duvet covers. It had been years since I’d seen any of those things.

  The captain’s son was no older than thirteen or fourteen years old. I wondered what he imagined as he turned the pages, looking at the trappings of what must have seemed like a fantastical place, the paraphernalia of an extinct alien world, once populated by aliens with extinct alien interests. He’d probably never seen anything as indulgently decorative in his life.

  “Did people actually have all of these things?” he asked.

  “I guess they tried,” I said.

  I left the room and the house and walked onto the balcony outside. The day was hot and sunny, the sky blue and cloudless. The old geneticist, his name was Klaus I learned later, was sitting on a chair, surveying the ocean. A hundred-metre stretch of plant-life circled the balcony—patches of low shrubs and bushes. A low stone wall surrounded the island, and stretching in all directions beyond that was the ocean—the endless, inconstant ocean. There were three rain-stained villas behind us, built on a mound in the centre of the island. A few palm trees hung over the villas, more for shade than anything else. The entire island was only a fraction of the size of the geneticist’s abandoned one (it took me less than twenty minutes to walk all the way around), but there were no devious tricks up its synthetic sleeves, and it seemed to be all the community of twelve needed to call a home.

  “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” Klaus said as I stood alongside him. Since the first time we’d met, the colour had returned to his face, he’d put on a healthy amount of weight, and there was a pleasant lightness to his character. A far cry from the frantic man I had found chained to his bed.

  “I am,” I said, and cleared my throat.

  I stood there silently, sharing his view of the open water.

  “The world is an unforgiving place,” he said. “The only real commitment we can make is to spend our lives trying to make sense of it. The only real problem is that it doesn’t. Are you sure you won’t stay?”

  A few days after we’d boarded the second island, I had mentioned the prophecy of the sea of rooftops. It turned out the captain had once seen a place matching the description. He even had an idea of how to get there. That alone was enough for me. Perhaps I was a desperate fool, putting stock in some weird words uttered in a dark cabin by a man of questionable sanity, but I had nothing else to go on. Without those words, I didn’t know where to begin. I asked the captain if he’d take me to that place, and he said he would.

  “I can’t stay,” I said to Klaus. “This is a good home. But this is not my home.”

  “Do you have a home, Kayle?” he asked.

  “I believe so,” I replied. I sucked in the cold sea air. “My son is my home.”

  Klaus looked at the ocean.

  After a while, he said, “There’s something I should tell you. Before we left my island, I had a very strange thought. A very strange thought, indeed. It came to me out of nowhere, as if it had been put in my head by someone. I’m not sure if that makes sense?”

  “I know that feeling,” I said.

  “Something prompted me to take something from the island. A kind of souvenir, perhaps, or possibly more important than that. But the idea was to give it to you. It’s something I believe you should have. I’m not sure why.”

  Klaus took an object wrapped in a plastic bag from his lap. He unfolded the plastic carefully and withdrew a large, shiny apple. I took the apple from him and studied it. It was smooth and green. A perfect specimen.

  “It’s from the jungle. Of course, I don’t have to tell you not to eat it. You know that. But trust me when I say I think you should keep it. It won’t go bad. It won’t rot. It’ll last for as long as you need it. And somehow I know you will need it.”

  He handed the plastic bag to me and I took it gingerly and wrapped it up. Even then I could smell its venomous sweetness.

  “It’s the most peculiar thing,” Klaus said. “The thought to give you this. You might think
it cruel, after everything you’ve already been through—to burden you with this. But I feel like I’m doing the only right thing I’ve ever done in my life. I have not been a man of clear judgement in the past. Now, I hope that I am being wise.”

  I laid my hand on his shoulder.

  “I’ll take care of it,” I said.

  The island sailed on for another week before I was finally called from my room. At the time, I was playing chess with the owner’s son. Somebody came to the room and said I should go down to the wall at the edge of the island. I toppled my king, explaining to the boy that he’d checkmated me with his last move, shook his hand gravely, and left.

  I didn’t need to reach the wall. As soon as I stepped outside I saw it, passed to me from a stranger’s dream: a sea of rooftops.

  The man in the cabin had been right.

  Houses and buildings rose above the surface of the ocean. It had once been a residential suburb of some kind, now it was a deep watery graveyard revealing nothing but an assortment of sloping rooftop tombstones. There were hundreds of them.

  Our island drifted between the contorted, leafless tops of soggy trees. A pair of rugby poles jutted from a submerged field. Wooden boxes bobbed beside a headless mannequin in the attic of a big house. Chairs and desks floated in water-filled offices. A peeled and faded plastic billboard warned that driving under the influence of alcohol made you a murderer.

  It was hard to say whether the suburb had once dipped into the ocean or the ocean had risen to claim it. We passed slowly between the roofs of derelict buildings, many metres above where people had once driven their cars and walked their dogs and met their friends and done their business, and what struck me hardest was the deathly stillness. The ocean was flat, with not the faintest breath of wind. And reaching from it, the rotting top of a sunken ghost town stretching bleakly for the sky. Further along, the water became shallower and the island had drifted as far as it could go. A strip of marshy shore lay in the distance, long and straight, extending in both directions.