The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  By the time winter arrived, I knew that most of us would not survive it. There would be less than a handful of us by the time the leaves returned to the trees. This turned out to be true. People died in quick succession. The woods were riddled with graves, and day by day our numbers shrank. One night, Angerona began coughing and spitting blood, and less than a day after the symptoms had first appeared, I was digging a hole for her too.

  Within two months of that final winter only Gideon and I remained. We moved up to the house on the hill and made a fire with the furniture. Outside, the wind and the rain thrashed and thumped the earth. Gideon made the occasional practical suggestion, but apart from that said almost nothing to me. I didn’t mind. All I wanted was to keep warm—warm and fed. That was what hope was reduced to. It was difficult to fish and find food. Some days we didn’t eat at all and would go to sleep early, hoping the new day would bring with it some small, trifling fortune.

  Then Gideon started coughing.

  The first dry cough came in the middle of the night, Death’s knuckles rapping on our door. I knew as soon as I heard it. Soon I would be alone. I loathed the thought.

  I covered him with more blankets and started a fire in the centre of the room. He was sweating profusely, shivering beneath his blankets. I told him to hold on, just hold on. But I had seen enough of the disease to know what was coming.

  I kneeled beside him on my old knees and wiped his hot forehead with a damp cloth. The first spurt of blood came from his mouth and I stumbled back. I edged closer, trying to pretend I hadn’t seen it, continuing to pat his head and wipe his mouth.

  He grabbed my thin wrist with his big hands and turned to his side.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kayle.”

  He hadn’t called me Mr. Kayle in years.

  I told him to save his energy and pulled the blankets up to his shoulders.

  “We had an adventure once,” I said. “You and I. Not in this world, but somewhere. It was an incredible adventure, and I couldn’t have done it without you. I remember that.”

  I could hear the blood gurgling in his throat. I sat at his side through the night, until the gurgling came to an end and he closed his eyes and died.

  I pulled the blanket over his face and walked to the window. Outside, the rain was falling on the place we had once called a commune. Lightning cracked over the ocean. This is it, I thought. This is the culmination of my long and pointless life.

  I walked to my blankets and lay down. The last stick of furniture in the house was burning. Soon everything would go cold and dark. I rolled myself in my blankets and tried to sleep. But it wasn’t easy, not with my own dry and determined cough.

  By morning the storm had ended and the weather cleared. I wrapped Gideon’s body in the rest of the blankets and slid him to the door of the white house. My cough had worsened and I was sweating uncontrollably, but if there was one thing I’d get done before collapsing somewhere, it would be to give Gideon a proper burial. My last duty in this life. I rested his body on two long logs, clutched the ends and dragged him up through the soggy soil of the woods. I struggled, my frail body weakening with every step. The sun glimmered on the leaves of the trees. Water trickled from the canopies above. All around were the broken remnants of the commune—tattered tarps and tent frames. The area was deathly still but for the ceaseless slapping and gurgle of the waves through the vegetation.

  My knees trembled and my arms began to shake and I lowered the logs to catch my breath. I put my hand to my mouth, coughed, and when I pulled my hand away, saw what I had been anticipating: blood.

  “Kayle, is it?”

  I looked up. The blurry figure of a person stood at the top of a muddy ridge. I blinked and the blur took shape—a man in a coat and a hat. He stood still, sneering down on me. He gripped a tree trunk and swung himself down to my level, his boots splashing in the wet dirt. He grabbed the rim of his hat and tipped it, then circled me slowly. I tried to turn with him, but could hardly stand. He hunkered down and pulled the blanket off Gideon’s face.

  “That’s not very pleasant,” he said, and whipped the blanket back before rising to his feet.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, slowly slipping a pair of leather gloves off his hands. He tucked the gloves into the top pocket of his coat and patted it. “You don’t. But you’d like to, I take it. Or would have liked to, I should say. You don’t have much desire or will left, do you?” He circled back to a stump of wood and sat down, crossing his legs. “It’s a funny thing, human will. So cherished, and yet so fragile. So easy to break. Look at you, for example. You had will. You had hope. But where is it now? Gone. And what did it take to erode? Nothing but time. Lots and lots of time. That’s it. All your dreams and desires crumbled by the weight of time.”

  “Who are you?” I croaked.

  “It’ll come to you. It’s been a while since you last thought about me—well, a while to you, anyway.”

  He was waiting for me to say something, but I couldn’t tell what. I was struggling to breathe and keep upright.

  “No? Nothing?” he said, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, like a strange woodland creature. “That’s okay. I understand. Time is the great divider. Relentless. Incorruptible. It weeds out the meaningless and leaves the meaningful … Although, mind you, the funny thing is, over enough time even the most meaningful of things becomes meaningless. Things like hope. A pathetic, ineffectual charm you people hang around your necks to ward off the evil spirits.

  “That’s all I had to do to break your will, Kayle—dismantle your hopes. I simply had to flood you with a deluge of time, like an ocean washing over one little shell. And given time your will and your hope to find me became … meaningless.”

  “Quon?” I hadn’t thought of him in years but his name came back in a clear flash.

  He sniggered. “Correct. Now I don’t know why Shen bothered to send you to find me, Kayle. That I haven’t figured out. He was obviously up to his tricks. I’m terribly sorry I had to do this to you—make you play out an entire lifetime in a moment—but that’s really all I could think of doing to prevent you from arriving at my doorstep to do whatever foolish thing you’ve got planned. It was the only way for me to break you, hold you back from completing your mission. All I had to do was give you time and you discouraged yourself. Easy enough.”

  I clenched my teeth, fighting back tears. “I knew it,” I said. “All this time, I knew …”

  “You knew. So what? What did you do with what you knew? Nothing. Nothing at all, old chap.”

  “Where am I, really?”

  “In a cave. In the desert, sleeping beside Gideon.”

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to dive forward and grab him, tear him apart with my hands, but my hands, my bony, spotted hands, could tear at nothing.

  Quon’s voice changed its tone. Still musing, but with a harder edge to it, the bantering note falling away. “I know you’re looking for your son—that’s obvious—but that can’t be the only reason you were sent to find me. No, there’s something else. Something I’m missing. The problem, however, the reason I can’t snatch it out of your mind, is because you don’t really know the big plan either, do you? Shen didn’t tell you. He was just using you. He did that.” He tapped a finger on his chin, pondering. “But using you for what?”

  He stood again, dusting off the back of his coat. “All right, you know what? I’ve changed my mind. I was going to leave you here, make you believe in all of this nonsense, probably until you lost your sanity, but I have to admit, my curiosity is quite overwhelming. So see if you can pull yourself together. A tall order, no doubt, after a lifetime of dashed hopes and broken dreams—but if you can, and if there’s anything left of you, stop by Chang’e 11. I’d be more than happy to meet you.”

  He paused then and added with a slight smile, “Just don’t expect things to end in your favour. I’m inclined to be a little … playful with peopl
e’s memories. I can easily make you think you’re living a whole other life, like that!” He snapped his fingers. “One even longer than this, and far more boring.”

  I coughed and dropped to my knees. I grabbed my throat and bent over. Blood ran through my beard and onto the forest floor. I wasn’t just spitting; I was retching at the knowledge that had come so late—so impossibly late. Quon stood over me and patted me on the back.

  “There, there, old chap,” he said. “It’s a lot to process. I’m not going anywhere. Take all the time in the world.”

  I opened my eyes. Air rushed into my lungs. I knew instantaneously that I was my younger self. My body didn’t ache; my flesh was firmer and tauter on my bones. I was in a cave on the edge of the desert, lying beside Gideon. I felt a gush of emotion—panic, joy and bewilderment. I could barely comprehend where I had been, and for how long. I put my hands to my face and sobbed. I had hoped I would return to the cave, but had lost all faith the moment would come. Now I was back, but not all of me. Something had been taken away, just as Quon had willed. Something in me had been broken by a mountain of wasted years, by the memories of an entire life that had never happened at all.

  The world will be ash

  When Gideon woke up, I was sitting at the entrance to our shallow mountainside cave, watching the sun creep up from behind the long, dull hem of the horizon. I’d been up for hours, studying every detail I could of the world, alert to flaws, on the lookout for clues. I rubbed the sand on the floor of the cave between finger and thumb, and it felt reassuringly gritty. I strained my ears to listen to every sound of the night, the clicking scurry of a scorpion, the manic whooping call of some wild animal. I wanted proof positive that what I was seeing was real. Either that, or it didn’t exist at all.

  Gideon sat on a cold rock beside me and wrapped his arms around his knees. Whether he was real or not, it was good to see him so young, and alive and well. As far as my memory allowed, I had seen his grey-faced corpse only the day before.

  “I’m not sure I can do this,” I said, shaking my head. The sun was beginning to ascend, hitting the wall of yellow light that lined the edge of the world. “I can’t do this.”

  Gideon said nothing for a moment, and then asked, “What happened?”

  “Quon knows we’re coming.”

  “You saw him in your dream?”

  I didn’t respond. How could I explain what had happened, that I had lived an entire lifetime in a night? In my mind, I was still that old man and I had felt every minute of every day for countless years. My back had straightened and my blood had warmed. My bones had toughened upon waking, but my will had not.

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “What he did to me … I … I just don’t know. I can’t tell if any of this is real. I’ve been sitting here, listening to the night, waiting for the sun … hoping that when it finally came up I’d know. But it’s here now and I still can’t be sure.”

  “What did you see in your dream?”

  “It wasn’t a dream. It was a lifetime. I lived an entire life in a night, as real to me as all of this.”

  I looked out over the desert, and my voice grew quieter as I continued. “I was on the beach. I grew old. I watched you die and I carried your body to your grave. After that, I woke up. I can’t entirely explain it—it feels like I lived a lifetime; it feels like I was only asleep a night. But now, I can’t believe in anything. You. Me. This place. My son. I want to believe it, but there’s nothing I can’t doubt. Nothing. And the worst thing is, I’ve seen the end, and it’s absolutely meaningless. All of it. Nothing comes to anything. Nothing means anything, no matter what we do. No matter what we hope for.”

  “Whatever Quon showed you was to make you think this way, Mr. Kayle,” Gideon said. “He wants you to lose hope.”

  “That’s just it,” I interrupted him. “I can’t tell if you’re really saying this, or if it’s him, or me. No matter what you say, I’ll never be sure of it! Whatever he did, it worked. I’m sorry, my friend. I’m not sure there’s enough left of me to go on.”

  Gideon sighed. The sun was almost halfway up and the air was warming, taming the icy end of night. I went back all those many (imaginary?) years to Moneta, who had once made her choice. She had lost faith in the world, in memory, and ended her life. Her words slid into my jumbled thoughts: One day, even the sun will burn out and everything will go dark. This earth will be a rock. We’ll be ash. There’ll be no meaning behind us ever having existed.

  “You’re right,” Gideon said. “There’s nothing we can’t doubt. But that has always been the case. And maybe this is all a dream. Maybe it’s always been a dream. But at least we still have a choice, Mr. Kayle—the only real choice—because if this is nothing but a dream, we still have a choice. Either we end it all … or we try to make it the best dream we can.”

  Gideon stood up and rubbed his big hands on the sides of his shirt. His dark forearms were encrusted in sweat and dust. He swept his dreadlocks behind his ears. Bands of yellow sun and dark blue sky gleamed in his eyes. The dips and mounds in the plateau of desert sand threw exaggerated shadows towards us. In the far centre sat the black silhouette of Chang’e 11, looking like a crude replica of the beached whale we’d once found.

  “Look, I don’t know what you went through. I would be a fool to pretend to understand. But whatever Quon showed you, Mr. Kayle, he did so because he is trying to stop you continuing. Think about it. Why would he want to do that? He’s scared of you. This Quon fancies himself a god, yes? Well, I don’t know much, but I have never known a true god to ever be scared of a man.”

  We made our way across the desert under the full sun. The further we walked out into the open plain, the further we were from the refuge of the mountain. There was no place to hide, to stop and recover from the heat. The ground beneath us was hard and cracked. My feet were blistering in my shoes; my tongue was swollen and dry. Chang’e 11 broadened across the horizon with every step we took, rising ever upwards and outwards, but my thoughts dragged behind me like a heavy rock I had been cursed with carrying.

  (So see if you can pull yourself together, Kayle—it might be a tall order after a lifetime of dashed hopes and broken hearts—but if you can, and there’s anything left of you, stop by Chang’e 11)

  I fought my way through the lies of the past, retraced my steps to the beginning of my journey out. As I looked back on the sad slippage of life on the beach, the disease, the death, that night’s lifetime began to reveal itself as a forgery. The memories of my return to the beach were weakening and vanishing, time was contracting and regaining normal proportions. It was easier to pick up where I had left off before the life Quon had grafted onto mine. Gideon had been right. It was a lie.

  (Someone will put you to the test in order to find your son. He may try to deceive you, as he does to all people of the indomitable Now, and you should be prepared for that meeting, when it comes. So I’ll tell you)

  Quon had done it because he didn’t want us coming—but why? I searched for a reason. It was there, I knew, a thread woven loosely through my experiences, one that I only needed to grab and pull taut, if I could just find it. Moneta’s connection to Anubis, Anubis to the family of robots, and the family to Jai-Li. What had been the point of it all? If Shen had planned all this, as Father implied, what outcome did he hope for? Why had he gone to the effort of guiding us through these many back doorways, simply to help a man he didn’t know find his son? There had to be something more to it, something bigger. There was something Shen was expecting of us that we were not expecting of ourselves.

  (Time is the great divider. Relentless. Incorruptible. It weeds out the meaningful from the meaningless, and over enough time, the funny thing is, even the most meaningful of things become meaningless)

  Gideon and I kept walking, edging across the hot and sterile land, coming ever closer to the mountainous vessel. Gideon gave me a bottle of water and I sipped from it. The water did nothing. We were burning up. The earth seemed to
harden with every step, straining my knees. My mind tumbled with memories.

  (You see, my father was the CEO of a corporation called Huang Enterprises)

  Though it was still far ahead, we could now make out the details of the vessel’s structure—thick and immense black plates of wrought iron welded crudely to form what appeared to be a giant mechanical armadillo. There was nothing remotely refined about its design. This monstrous machine, created to haul millions of kilograms of raw ore across the universe, was now a castle from an ancient era, a religious site awaiting its pilgrims.

  (And my father, as head of this monster, was the Ozymandias of the empire. King of kings, a wrecked colossus. A fair enough comparison, I think, considering the anticlimactic outcome of it all)

  Rough stone walls had been built around the perimeter to form a type of citadel—to protect the vessel from the world or, perhaps, the world from the vessel. Two sealed iron gates hung in the centre of the jagged wall, supported by two massive obelisks on either side.

  I felt my knees go weak beneath me, and stopped to bend over and breathe. Gideon put his hand on my back, though I could tell he was faring no better.

  “We can’t stop,” he said. “Not here. We’ll die if we stop.”

  “Andy,” I said, panting. “I need to find Andy. That’s it. Then we go home.”

  Home. What home? All I knew was that wherever we were, and wherever Andy was, it was not and would not ever be home. Home was peace, wherever peace resided.

  Gideon turned and helped me up to stand, adding, “Then we go home.”

  (I ran into her, just as I’d imagined, and then I cried. She asked me what had happened. She asked me where I’d been, but I said nothing. She kissed me on the top of my head, rubbed my back in circles, and said to me the words I’d hoped to hear, but at that moment they sounded like the most impotent little words I’d ever heard: It’s okay, sweet pea, everything’s going to be all right)