The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  He shook his head and started again. “I don’t think it even had anything to do with Quon. After my daughter was killed, my wife ran away, and my son was taken … there was a great emptiness. I never did remember my own name. ‘Gideon’ was a name left in a note. Of course, that’s what I remember now, now that we’ve got it all back …” He paused a long while and then added, “It doesn’t feel the way we hoped it would, does it? Having our true memories.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “Perhaps we expected more. Perhaps there were things we forgot long before Day Zero,” he said. “But at least I now know what I have to do.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Get off this beach. Get my son. Find my wife.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  Kayle nodded, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and gave it to me. It was a drawing of a house on a hill beside four crosses. Or were they tombstones?

  Angerona had drawn the same image for me in the sand with a wooden stick, an incomprehensibly long time ago.

  “I’ve seen this before,” I said.

  “Angerona. She had my wife’s memories. Sarah’s memories. So, in a way, Sarah was right here, on the beach with me all along. Angerona also knows where Sarah is,” he said, holding up the page. “She’s known all along, and she’s decided to come with me. She wants to join my family; I don’t think she has family of her own.”

  “I see.” My heart ached to hear him speak about his family. I recalled nothing of Sarah, his wife, but, of course, those memories had been reserved for him alone. A story of a beautiful woman who’d lived in a house of students, who had once kissed him on the cheek, commencing their future love.

  But Andy—I missed Andy.

  Kayle took the paper back from me and slipped it away. “I don’t know what happened after we found Andy in that room in Chang’e,” he said.

  I was startled that he recalled it too.

  “I was holding him …” Kayle continued, “There were memories, endless memories, and then I was here. I can’t explain it. Can you?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Strange days.”

  “Well, maybe it’s happened already,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The Renascence. Maybe this is the start of collective consciousness, as was always intended. Maybe we’re sharing a dream right now. Maybe that was a dream. Or maybe we got more help than we realised.”

  I thought back to the scripts we’d been made to learn and recount to The Body in the white house. Perhaps there were some seeds of truth in those words after all.

  (Evolution demands more. In the end, we will not need to be the fittest, for competition itself will cease to exist for us. Subsequently, we will neither disown nor denounce the remaining organisms with which we share the planet. We will simply exist in a state of being of which they will have no concept and to which they will have no access, on an alternate stream of time—within the one true reality)

  “Indeed,” Kayle said.

  He watched as the sun sank over the brink of the ocean. Then he stood and dusted the sand off his pants.

  “I couldn’t have found him without you, you know,” he said, tucking his dreadlocks behind his ears. “I was lost, and didn’t even know it. You helped me.”

  “Kayle,” I said. I needed to tell him who I was and what I had done. I couldn’t bear to hear him praising me, not after all the pain I had caused him and his family. “I—”

  Kayle held up his hand, a sign for me to stop, not say any more.

  “I know, Jack,” he said. “I know what happened. And I forgive you. I forgive you and I thank you.”

  Without another word, Kayle scuffed out the print his body had left in the sand, and it was as if he had never sat beside me. He strolled away and I watched as he headed along the beach towards the communers. Bonfires were burning bright, a celebration of recently acquired selfdom. I caught the final sliver of sunlight, the last breath in a dying thing.

  I forgive you and I thank you.

  His words lingered on the cool and misty scent of the ocean. I released a long breath, a breath I’d been holding for a lifetime. As it left my body, a sensation I hadn’t felt in longer than I could remember, even with a lifetime of memories at my disposal, flushed through me. Whether I deserved it or not, I could not say, but I felt it.

  (Remember, Kayle. Victory isn’t getting what we want. It’s getting what’s owed to us. And what’s owed is balance. Balance between right and wrong, the guilty and the innocent, the saved and the damned. We might not ever have the Utopia we’ve dreamed about—I’m not even sure it’s what we really want—but balance: it’s the first step towards retrieving Man’s stolen destiny. Towards peace)

  The sky dimmed overhead and the stars began to make an appearance. I stood on that beach and thought: perhaps that was what we’d always needed to evolve. We would never move on, together, as one, unless we settled our debts with each other. Kayle had lost a child and his pain was now mine. He had forgotten to reclaim his family and I had remembered enough to lead him to his son. Perhaps, after everything, that other earth had finally succeeded in helping us. Perhaps, after Quon’s death, that one unifying thought entrusted to nine astronauts had finally been shared with the world—and one day, if we made sure to remember, we would all find a way to connect.

  In the months that followed, communers slowly made their way off the beach to find their ways in the world. Trawlers arrived every few weeks to take them home. The beach grew quieter. The tents and shacks stood empty. Work stations were dismantled. Gideon said nothing more to me after that last time we spoke, and he and Angerona climbed aboard the last trawler and sailed into their future—one I would never know anything about.

  I watched from the beach as they stood on the deck and left the shore. I had decided I wouldn’t be going anywhere. Not until a man came down from the woods to tell me I was living a lifetime in a night, that I was in Chang’e 11, that I’d fallen from that tall tree to my death, was bobbing on the raft, or this wasn’t the same world (or universe) at all. No matter how long I lived on that beach, I would always leave room for any one of those possibilities. I might be trapped, but I would never be fooled. Not ever again.

  Gideon and Angerona looked back at me from the deck as the trawler chugged away. He raised his arm and waved and I waved back.

  Then they were gone, forever.

  After they’d left, I walked across the desolate stretch up to the white house on the hill. I threw out what I wouldn’t need, moved in my bed and the few trinkets from my tent: a blunt knife, a broken umbrella and a box of clipped pictures. I walked to Moneta’s dome of plants and herbs. I swept it out, tore out the weeds and watered the dry, neglected soil.

  I made a fire on the beach and sat beside it, remembering the nights the communers had once danced around it in hope of summoning the gods of reason and meaning. I watched the tide swell and wondered if one day the water would rise to claim me, as once, in a strange and faded dream, I had believed would happen. The sun set before me, stroking the sky with dark and beautiful shades of red.

  I put the past to rest like a tired child, bared myself to the universe, and prayed for the grace of another day.

  Just one more day to call my own.

  Day One.