The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  Behind us, the sun was beginning to set. The temperature started to drop as the darkening sky welcomed its first few stars for the night.

  The islanders had suggested I stay with them until morning, but I’d told them I would be okay; I needed to keep moving.

  I was sitting at the front end of a rowboat, holding a black bag of food and supplies prepared by two kind women. The captain’s son sat at the back of the boat and rowed me to shore, like Charon, the Greek ferryman of the dead. The wooden boat moved silently over blackening waters. I watched as the island shrunk away, dimming to a silhouette in the setting sun. Ahead of us rose the land, no mountains or hills of any kind, only swampy coastline and an expanse of flatness lurking in the darkness beyond. No people. No houses. No signs pointing the way. Nothing but reeds and mud.

  The boat pulled to the shore and I climbed out into the sickly warmth of the marsh. My feet sank into the mud, releasing a strong smell of decay. The eldest son shook my hand and wished me well, and then pushed off into the water again. He rowed back to his island as I tramped my way up the marsh to solid ground. I beat the mud off the sides of my shoes and buttoned my jacket to the neck. I didn’t know which way to go, but began to walk anyway, across a grim and barren new land.

  It was a world without colour. After turning inland, I found myself walking the ashen streets of an abandoned ashen town, studying each worn and weathered remainder. Dead trees hung on the sides of the street, tall skeletons clutching thick white sheets of spider web between their leafless branches. There was an empty school with broken windows and grassless fields, enclosed by rusted fences. Nothing but memories existed inside the houses, once quaint but now rundown and forbidding. A red bus lay overturned across the road, like a big bloodied animal, its wheels missing and seats long since removed. Crows squawked from a hanging rooftop gutter, eyeing me as I walked past.

  I had no idea where the people of the town had gone. Perhaps they had been relocated to communes. Perhaps the town had been struck by disease. I wondered with every breath whether some deadly bacteria had already begun to incubate in my warm, living lungs. If so, there was nothing I could do about it.

  I kept walking.

  I passed a faded poster on a lamppost advertising a rock show (HOMESICK WHORES—DEAD IN CONCERT!) and a billboard reminder to vote in the “upcoming” municipal elections. A spinach quiche was on special at the local deli, on Sundays there were free orchestral performances in the park. A number of cars had been abandoned in the middle of the street, their doors open as if the drivers had chosen to get out and make a run for it.

  I stopped to look through the window of a corner shop, the interior lit by nothing but the moon. The shelves were not entirely cleared—some cans and boxes had fallen to floor. Whatever had occurred there in the final moments had been quick and chaotic, I decided—an act of horrific desperation.

  I knew I should not stay long.

  I walked for some time before noticing a pillar of smoke coiling up into the moonlit sky—smoke and yellow light and the smell of burning. I turned off the street and walked in the direction of the smoke.

  I passed through alleys and crossed wildly overrun yards and finally arrived at the source of the smoke and light: a house on fire. Flames lashed ferociously at the air and I felt the intense warmth even though I was on the opposite side of the street. The fire was almost too bright to watch, magnificent in its complete consumption of the house. Above, the sparks and smoke twisted upwards like a stairway into the sky. I could not tear my eyes away.

  It was then that I noticed a dark figure standing in front of the house. A man. He stood motionless. His lone presence alarmed me and I wondered if he’d started the fire and was now relishing in his own doing. I crossed the street towards him. The fire rumbled and crackled, and the flaming bar of a window frame came loose, crashing to the ground.

  The man stood with his back to me and all I could tell was that he was tall and hefty. He was carrying nothing with him and his muscular arms hung loosely at his sides. His hair looked wild and bushy, and the light from the fire played in it, creating a nimbus around his head.

  I approached him cautiously.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The man turned his big head. His face was shaped by the brilliant light. He was the last person I had expected to see in that forsaken place.

  It was Gideon.

  The Blue Caribou

  The day I was picked up to be taken to the commune on the beach, I was staying at the Blue Caribou Motel, a highway ramshackle for tired night drivers and cheapskate holidaymakers. I’d been there for months. I didn’t remember booking myself into the room, but at some point after my son had been taken, I must have left the house with a kind of delirious plan to get away from the world.

  I was the only person staying at the Blue Caribou. There weren’t even owners on the premises. Perhaps after Day Zero they didn’t remember they were the owners, and took off without bothering to lock up. So I must have grabbed one of the keys hanging on a sheet of chipboard behind the counter (a key to Room 73, to be precise) and let myself in. I don’t remember, but that’s what I must have done.

  While the rest of the amnesiacs wandered the world, I wandered the halls and yard of the motel. When I felt like it, I went behind the bar in the dining room and poured myself drinks. There was a freezer of food at the back of the kitchen and I helped myself when I wanted. In the outside area, a bean-shaped pool full of green water was encircled by a selection of white plastic deckchairs, warped by the sun. I’d make use of all of these, and at the end of my motel-loitering day, would return to my room. This went on until the morning I woke up and the man with no expression was standing in my room.

  The room was a mess, strewn with empty bottles, unwashed dishes and cutlery. I had taken towels from a number of other rooms and they were hanging over the electric heater, the bathroom basin and the shower rail. The curtains had been drawn and a long strip of daylight shone through the gap where they hadn’t quite closed.

  The man looming over me was that uncommon combination of very old and very tall, wearing a long coat and a pair of roundframed sunglasses. He told me to take a shower and get dressed. I didn’t argue. I put up no resistance, believing that perhaps the jig was up—my long, free use of the motel had come to an end. I slid out of bed and showered and shaved and dressed myself, and then met back up with him at the pool area. The sun was already scorching the earth, and though I’d showered I could smell the alcohol seeping from my pores. The man in his absurdly heavy coat was standing at the edge of the swampy pool and staring at a lone brown hill in the centre of the surrounding desert.

  He asked how long I’d been staying there and I said I didn’t remember. He asked my name and I said, “Kayle Jenner.” He then told me that no Kayle Jenner had signed himself into the motel (he’d checked the books).

  I said maybe I’d just walked in after discovering there was nobody there. The thought didn’t seem to surprise him. The world had already gone mad. Nobody knew who they were and where they belonged, anyway. At least I had been resourceful.

  He asked where I was from and I said I’d had a house, and a family, but now the daughter was dead, the wife had run away, and the son had been taken. After all of that, the house had become too big—or was it too small?—so I’d left it and moved into the Blue Caribou.

  I said these things to the man in the brown coat but wasn’t sure if I believed my own words … I’d done so much drinking at the motel bar I could barely hold a thought in the searing midday sun.

  He asked who had taken my son and I said I didn’t know; I’d just woken up one morning and he was gone. He must have believed me because he said he had a way of helping me. These were confusing times for us all, he said, but his people had the answer. His people had figured a way of bringing the world together once more.

  I asked what he meant and he told me that in order for me to reconnect with my son, I’d have to go with him. He wouldn’t ta
ke me to my son, not exactly, but he’d help set in motion a sequence of events that would lead to us being … “reunited, if you will.”

  That’s when I asked his name, and he said his name didn’t matter. What mattered was he belonged to a group called the New Past. The New Past, he explained, had the answer. We didn’t need to be lost anymore. There was a way of being found—a way for us all. To make it work, however, we’d need to commit to the cause. We couldn’t be afraid of a few new rules.

  Only much later did I realise it had been the perfect pitch and plan, designed to recruit more than enough willing participants: in that post-contextual world, rules were exactly what we desired.

  He told me to get my things together and go with him. There was no reason for me to stay at the motel (on some level I’d probably expected to die in room 73, of either booze or old age), so I packed almost nothing and ended up doing as he said. I grabbed a seat on a bus full of strangers and was taken to the coast, where we were each shown a list of random boat names. We could choose the boat of our choice, and wherever that boat went, that’s where we would go too. We went along with it, hoping there was a grand reason for all the fuss. On the boat, we were given the first volume of a script called The Age of Self Primary. If we remembered how to read, we were told we had to study it.

  It was there, on that same boat, that I first met Gideon.

  There was something both different and familiar about the man the first time I saw him. Gideon didn’t read the scripts. He wasn’t interested. He sat on the side of the boat and chose to take in the view. I walked over and grabbed a seat beside him; the sky was showing off a striking arrangement of red and grey clouds, like hot ash. Everyone else was spread out over the boat, cramming the scripts, knowing they’d be tested as soon as they arrived on the beach. Gideon preferred the scenery. I remember him saying, “There’s a fine line between hope and delusion. Like that last strip of light on the horizon before the sun goes down.”

  He said nothing else. But I knew from that moment, having already picked that same boat to ensure our parallel fates, we were bound by something greater than what we both no longer knew.

  Gideon sat near the window of a dark and empty house, eating from a container of roasted vegetables I’d taken out of my bag of provisions. Through the window we could both observe as the house outside toppled to a flaming heap. Gideon explained that he’d set the house on fire in the hope of drawing someone’s attention. He’d had no reason to expect it would be me.

  “I washed up here on my raft,” Gideon explained. “Less than a day ago. I don’t know how the rope came undone, but one moment I was attached to the beach and the next I was drifting on the ocean. I thought it was only me. I was terrified at first, thought I was lost forever, that no one would ever find me and I’d die out there, alone and helpless. But then I passed out. When I woke up, I was here. In truth, I have no idea how I really got here.”

  “What about your restraints?”

  “They were loose when I washed up.”

  Gideon had decided to stay the night in the house beside the one on fire. We’d thrown a brick through the glass back door and searched the rooms, but found very little: no food in the kitchen and any blankets, pillows and sheets had been taken. We’d turned on the taps in the bathroom and waited as the groaning pipes spluttered nothing but cold and undrinkable brown water. Expecting no further favours of our appropriated home, we sat on the carpeted floor of the main bedroom. The closet was empty but for a few mismatched hangers. The mattress on the bed was missing, revealing a skeleton of wood and springs. Framed pictures of a family still hung on the walls (they seemed happy enough, young and doing their best), which meant they hadn’t cleared those closets and taken that mattress themselves; the house had been raided after they’d hastily left.

  “How can this be … possible?” I said, struggling with the logistics of his story. “I’ve been away for weeks and we’re nowhere near the commune. There’s no way you could have survived such a trip … The coincidence is too great. It doesn’t make any sense. None of it.”

  “It seems,” Gideon said calmly, “that I have.”

  “… and there’s no way we would have run into each other in this place,” I said, watching as the house next door came furiously undone. I thought about Moneta’s Burt in the woods and Anubis’s Burt on the island. I thought about the unlikely timing of Jai-Li’s pregnancy. So many astonishing coincidences … and now this. “I’m not sure how, or even why, but this has been arranged,” I said.

  Gideon picked out a slice of potato and handed the container back to me. I put the lid on and slipped it back in my bag.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” Gideon said. “And if we wake and we’re both still here, still in this town, we’ll at least have enough to make a plan.”

  “And if we’re not here? If we wake up and we’re somewhere else …”

  Gideon lay on his back and released a long, expired breath. “Then we are only dreaming. And none of it matters.”

  Those were his last words for the night. The burning house crackled and smoked. It had drawn the attention of no one else—the place was truly abandoned. Nothing there but the crows and the spiders. For a brief moment, it felt as if the entire world had ended during the blink of an eye, and no one had let us know.

  We awoke the next morning in the cold and empty house and did one final search for anything we could take with us. I grabbed a knife and can-opener, a few boxes of matches, a solar-powered flashlight, a bar of pink soap and a clean dishcloth. Gideon found bandages and antiseptic oils in the bathroom cabinet. After our rummage, we took to the streets. I smashed through the front window of the corner store and gathered what food I could (cereal bars, biscuits, crackers, cans of pilchards, mixed veggies and biryani), and met up with Gideon outside. He’d found a rucksack of his own and two rolled-up blankets, which he’d held in place with leather belts. We tried to take one of the many vehicles with no luck. Even if we’d fully recalled how to operate them, the solar cells were dead and beyond resumption.

  By day, the town had revealed no saving graces. A cloak of thin dull clouds hung overhead, blotting the sun and making everything bleaker. Emptier. The crows on the roof of a library watched us go by, and one squawked loudly, mockingly, and it was easy to put words to his raucous tone: Good luck out there, walkers. Nothing to eat but dirt and shit where you’re going.

  And then we made our way down the road beside the burning house, and started walking as I had been advised, out of the town and along a long and vacant highway.

  The town was far behind us, and on either side of the highway there was nothing but desert and dry pastures. We’d been walking for hours. The flat landscape extended forever in all directions, offering nothing.

  We saw the crumbling husk of a brick house long since stripped of its roof, windows and doors. It squatted near a meadow where two black cows and a few grey sheep still ambled and grazed. Somebody had lived in that husk once, I thought. Someone had called that shell a home. As we passed, I imagined the place restored: a neatly-tiled roof, glimmering windows, the walls plastered and painted, the garden green and trimmed and bursting with flowers, the chimney exhaling smoke from a well-tended fire on a winter’s night. I imagined someone daydreaming out the window, the life that once occupied that crumbly remainder.

  We walked until we reached the boom of a five-lane toll (jammed by a line of empty trucks and cars). A little further on a dark concrete tunnel sliced into a rugged mountain. The beam of my flashlight offered little as we made our way in, but we stuck to the centre of the musty throughway. After two-point-seven kilometres (or so the green sign board at the entrance had promised), we walked out into the full force of a brightening day. We wandered through soundless valleys, shadowed by high mountain peaks. A flock of birds soared far above, circled, and vanished.

  Before the sun began to set, we turned off the road and found a hollow in the side of a mountain. We unrolled our blankets, gathered woo
d, and made a fire. Gideon opened a can of mixed vegetables, heated it over the fire, and we worked our way through it. It was a rich and tasty concoction, sopping in a spicy juice, and it went down well. I thought about the apple. I could smell it. I wanted to eat it too. The thought of its delicious juices seized me. I could feel them trickling down my chin, feel my mouth opening to bite into delicious sweetness. Klaus meant it for when we had nothing else to eat, I argued with myself. I was wrong, of course. That wasn’t why he had given it to me. I reached deeper into myself and somehow found the strength to repel the urge. I pushed all thoughts of the apple away and took another helping of the canned food.

  Several small milky-white scorpions scampered through the dust and we kicked them away. A blue half-moon glowed over the edge of a rocky cliff and leaves rustled in a warm wind. We heard dogs snarling in the distance, probably fighting over the flesh of some dead thing.

  “Let’s make a bigger fire,” Gideon said, and we did. We each grabbed a sharp wooden stick and kept it at our sides. We spoke about nothing, but I was glad he was there. I was grateful for the strange stroke of fate that had brought us together again. I probably wouldn’t have managed the journey alone, I realised. Earlier in the day I had explained what I was hoping to do; he’d had no objections to the idea and since he had no plans of his own he’d agreed to come along. “You’re lucky you remember your son so well,” he’d said. “You feel pain. You feel hope. Doubt. Love. You feel all these things, simply because you recall him. You are lucky, Mr. Kayle.”

  My stomach was pleasantly fed and I was tired after a day of walking. I leaned back on the blanket and was asleep before my head hit the dust.

  I woke to the sound of grunting and growling. I opened my eyes and took a second to remember where I was: the cave. The fire was already dead, smoking limply. Behind it, three lean dogs with matted black fur were tugging viciously on the ends of some object.