by Michel Faber
Struggling to his feet, he almost dropped the planet from between his fingers, which had grown numb with cold. He experimented with holding the globe differently, using the palms of his hands, fingers slackened, to spread the pressure. This was a success: perhaps the planet was less fragile than it had first appeared. He stood holding it like this for a while, allowing the tropical seam to warm his hands until the sensitivity returned to his fingertips.
Walking slowly home, mindful of the road, God carried his extraordinary find, revolving it whenever its changing weather began to prickle the flesh of his palms. Eventually he was bold enough to try embracing the planet. Again, success. By the time God was almost home, he was running, the planet cradled securely in the crook of one arm.
He hung it up in his bedroom, suspended from the ceiling. It was the only place for it, really. Resting it on a surface, like a table or a dresser, was too risky: some part of it might get gradually squashed, or come to grief for lack of light, or perhaps the whole globe might even roll off and be smashed on the floor. He’d considered keeping it on the floor to begin with, but this was out of the question too: he might kick it in a moment of carelessness or fury, and besides, it was too beautiful a thing to look down on.
So, he dangled it from the light in the centre of his room, attached by a few threads of cotton to the lightbulb just above. He’d removed the lampshade from the bulb, to give his planet maximum light, and to eliminate distractions: there ought to be only one focus of attention up there. God’s planet looked beguiling and perfect, revolving almost imperceptibly but constantly in the breeze from the window, elevated to a level where no other toys were visible. For, though God still played with his other toys, he knew they were objects of a different order: sturdier, more useful; less complex, less special. There were toys which could, on the right day, amuse him so intensely that he forgot his planet existed, but as soon as he remembered, he was well aware that his planet was, unlike his other toys, unique.
Apart from playing at home, God continued to go out to the abandoned universe and rummage around the garbage. As usual, his eyes would goggle at the strange new things he found there. Incandescent rods, impossibly dense metals, bottled gases which plumed out in the shape of a star when smashed free, huge fluffs of silver fibre spilling out of the bins like foam, bright yellow protective clothing with holes in it, enigmatically specific crystal implements still snug in their black rubber cases, handwritten code-books whose densely inscribed pages were washed to a pastel blur, whole binfuls of computer disks smashed to shrapnel, and – too big for the bins to contain – broken engines of paradox. All the materials of universe-making were being thrown out here.
None of this mattered to God. He was concerned not with the universe’s past or future but only with its present. He would play while there were things to play with, even if they came from the garbage. What else was there to do?
Inevitably, because God’s planet was suspended from the ceiling, he paid most attention to it when he was lying in bed, looking up from his pillow. Tired out from playing all day, he would notice the little blue-green world through eyes already half closed. Usually he fell asleep then, and dreamed of travelling there, shrunk down to the appropriate size. These were funny dreams, highly romantic, with the almost holy air of myth and nonsense. Typically he would be, at one and the same time, his normal self, looking up at the planet from his bed, and a tiny, grown-up version of himself, wandering around on the planet, looking up through the impenetrable heavens as if for a glimpse of his own face. In these dreams, his tiny, grown-up self was constantly surrounded by other people, beset by responsibilities, driven by a mission; and yet, perversely, he craved aloneness and the freedom to play in silence.
Always by the end of the dream there would be some sort of crisis in which the citizens of his blue-green planet imprisoned him, determined to keep him there for ever; in nightmares, they even tried to bury him alive, so that he might, in time, enter the anonymity of the earth’s crust as a sprinkling of irreclaimable atoms. Gasping for breath, he would wake in a shroud-like tangle of bedsheets.
Despite these occasional nightmares, he never lost his sense of the little planet’s beauty and charm. A miraculous egg of confluences, it was innocent and clever, making mountains out of molten sludge, rainforests out of water and dirt, fresh water out of salt. It was alchemy achieved by instinct, the instinct of a world which was not aware of itself, but which had none the less found a use even for the spent breaths of plants.
Often, having intended to go to sleep, he would be captivated by the planet’s gentle glow of ingenuity, and leap out of bed to discover it all over again. Standing on a chair, he would peer at the globe with a magnifying glass, almost touching the spongy skin of its atmosphere.
The magnifying glass was a pretty good one, also found in the bins at the back of the universe, but there were limits to what he could see through it. Extremes of weather, so thrilling in theory, were a disappointment from where he stood. Seen from the outside, even the fine distinctions he hoped to make between one kind of cloud and another – cirrus, altostratus, cumulonimbus and so on – were often impossible, as one kind shrouded another, layer upon layer. It was all fog, really, like a haze of tiredness over God’s eyes. As for hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning, hail, falling snow, even rain: these were phenomena he would never see, no matter how intently he squinted. For, when there were clouds in the sky, they hid these spectacular sights from him; when there were no clouds, these sights did not exist to be seen.
The first time God realised this, perched on his wobbly chair in the middle of the room, he was sickened by how perfectly he was excluded, and hung his head.
His planet was so small, and he so big. Whole oceans were scarcely bigger than his hand, few countries as large as the eyes with which he strained to see them. Of course he delighted in being able to see the whole picture, in the round, but at the same time he longed for the details. Through a clear patch of sky, he could just about see the wood, providing the wood went on forever, but he saw no trees. Sometimes the frustration provoked him to fantasise unreasonably: to see not just a single tree but an infant sapling – no, better still: a tiny, tight-furled bud edging out, like a frog paw from charred forest cinders.
Yet, what he could see was so good that his dissatisfaction never lasted, and often he would stand staring at his planet for so long that his neck ached and his eyes stung and his bare feet went numb. He would watch clouds go ripple-shaped when they passed over mountain ridges, or turn into white banners around the tip of a peak. He would watch glaciers edging away from the poles like bubbles of fat around the white of a frying egg; he would note that the colour of an entire subcontinent had changed from parched brown to lush green, as if it had just decided it was bored with infertility.
He became familiar with the unique shape of each landmass, even small islands which were lost in the blue of the oceans if he so much as blinked. The largest continent, some of which merged with the globe’s icy top, was the most various in smell. Every millimetre of it produced a different aroma, subtly mingled like an exotic ratatouille. The earthy scent of agriculture would murmur under a pall of incinerated carbons; a sweet whiff of monsoon would swirl around the stink of fleshly decay; an intriguing hint of fresh strawberries could be traced travelling across vast landscapes pungent with diesel and sodium. At its southern extremes, the largest continent hung down in two points like the collar of a shirt; its bulge of mountains poked up over the collar like an ugly face. Two of the other land-masses reminded him of faces, too: they were of almost the same massive size, very similar in shape, separated by an ocean, but both old men in profile – disappointed, long-faced old men, enduring stoically. The larger of the two smelled of blood, fresh blood, as if it were perspiring it constantly.
Of course God knew about all the people on his planet. Millions of them, too many millions for a child to count. Their cities studded every solid part of the globe except the ice-floes, and
even these he examined from time to time, just in case. Though there was no way of being sure, God guessed that it was from the largest continent, with its collar full of humankind, that he first began to hear the voices.
For ages he took these voices to be from his own dreams, for they came to him as he was hesitating in the doorway of sleep, already wrapped in his blankets and the dark. In time, he realised they had nothing to do with his dreaming, but were spiralling down to his bed through the black space between him and his little planet, like motes of sonic pollen.
The voices were at first so faint that they meant no more to God than the rustling of his own pillowcase. However, after a while, either because he learned to listen more keenly or because the voices were louder, he was sometimes able to catch their drift. Not that it was necessarily the loudest voices which reached his ears; there was some odd scientific principle at work, causing almost all the millions of human exclamations to dissipate in the troposphere, while just a few were snatched up into outer space, gathering volume in exact proportion to the distance they travelled.
Occasionally God did hear a great cry which must have been uttered by a large number of people in unison: affirmations of praise and encouragement to Allah, Elvis, Victory, Freedom, Hitler – entertainers, perhaps, or sports teams. They meant little to God, these repetitions of a single, meaningless word, floating down to him out of context. Other, quieter fragments of speech, the little cries and conversations of individuals, had more chance of making sense to him.
It was the timbre of a voice which appealed to him more than anything, the music of it, which carried with it an echoing picture of the speaker and the speaker’s circumstance. From fragments of a few words each, he could visualise enough to make him feel he’d been part of a life other than his own. Sometimes he was the one who had spoken, sometimes the one spoken to. He was child, man, woman, at any random moment from humidicrib to hospice. He felt himself lifted into a sled by strong gloved hands and a voice describing what the journey was going to feel like. He felt the texture of someone’s naked shoulder as they wept about something he didn’t understand. Anxious friends patted him on the back as he coughed and spluttered over an expensive meal. He hoped his son would do well at school, that his daughter would be all right with such an idiot for a husband, that Santa Claus would give him a Galaxy Mobile.
No voice, as far as God was aware, ever came to him twice, or if it did, he certainly didn’t recognise it. He did, however, learn to recognise particular calibrations of feeling – specific flavours or harmonics of emotion. Some exclamations, though stridently passionate, did not move him, and he would fall asleep even as they harangued. Others, meek and barely audible, had the power to shock him awake. For them, he would get up out of bed. Not because his name had been mentioned – his name was used so often he figured there must be no end of Gods on the planet – but because of a certain tone of voice, full of love and longing for the impossible. However sleepy he was, he would climb up on his chair and give the globe an extra nudge, to make time go faster, so that whatever was to happen would happen sooner, and whatever had happened would be longer ago.
Then he would sleep, and dream his dream of visiting his planet and dying there.
Or, if the last voice he’d heard was laughing, he would dream he was playing at the back of the universe, and finding stuff so indescribably cool that he couldn’t even picture it once he woke up.
The strangest dream he ever had, though, was just after he’d heard a child’s voice, almost certainly a young boy’s, whispering down to him on an unusually quiet night.
‘God?’ The voice was shaky, close to tears. ‘Are you there? Can I talk to you?’
There was a pause while God and the other child both held their breath, then nothing. God had lost him.
God jumped up and stood on his chair, putting his face close to the planet as it hung there. Even in the darkness he could see the white of the poles, some jet-streams, clouds. He could not, of course, see the boy who had whispered to him.
‘Hello,’ he whispered back, his lips touching the exosphere. ‘It’s me. I’m right here.’ Clouds formed instantly under his mouth, as if he had fogged a window, but that was all. No doubt there would soon be weather too extreme to measure, in exchange for this attempt at conversation, but he was too sleepy to wait for it. His eyeballs felt swollen and he was shivering.
In bed, he fell into sleep as if from a height, as if he were a single, soft-spoken word falling through space. Then he dreamed of going to the back of the universe, his favourite place for finding new toys. This time, however, he heard, as he approached, the sound of someone rummaging there ahead of him. It was another child, the same size as himself, emerging bum-first from the charred shell of an ancient generator. God dashed forward in an ecstasy of loneliness, desperate to be as close as possible before the child turned to show him if it was a boy or a girl.
He ran and ran, all night, for ever and ever, until, in the morning, he woke, remembering nothing, except that it had been good, and he was happy.
Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne
TWO FAIRLY YOUNG ladies, having been friends since convent days, still lived together in a small cosy house. They were terribly used to one another, and took turns to do the scrambled eggs in the mornings.
Miss Fatt, who was not fat, regularly performed such tasks as extracting the different-coloured hairs from the bath plughole, scrubbing the dried toothpaste froth off the bathroom sink, and other jobs which Miss Thinne, who was not thin, detested. Miss Thinne took care of such tasks as washing and ironing, and her friend considered this a fair exchange.
Physicalities are important in this story: Miss Fatt was a slender woman with long legs, big breasts and a face like Marilyn Monroe’s. Miss Thinne was likewise a slender woman with long legs, big breasts and, in her case, a face like Greta Garbo’s, but fuller in the cheeks. Had they been in the habit of wearing each other’s clothes they might have been mistaken for each other, at least in bad light.
But they weren’t in the habit of wearing each other’s clothes (however perfectly these might have fitted), because they considered themselves to be as different as chalk and cheese. This conviction (a totally mistaken one) was based on things like the division of the housework. How could they be even similar, they thought, if one of them retched while the other hummed contentedly over a toilet bowl? How could strangers have trouble telling them apart, when one of them spent three hours a week ironing, and the other had ironed for perhaps three hours in her whole lifetime?
However, there are deeper truths than division of labour, and in reality Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne were so much alike that they were almost a single organism, growing in two pale branches from an invisible root in the heart of the house.
On a typical day, the alarm went off at seven in the morning, and one of the women would reach out of bed and turn it off, this responsibility being accepted in turns, as the alarm clock was shifted nightly from one bedside table to the other. Miss Fatt might get out of bed, put on her slippers, and shuffle into the kitchen to make breakfast.
At the breakfast table, she and Miss Thinne would talk in the drab private language developed by people who share too many minutes of the day.
After breakfast, the women got dressed, Miss Fatt in her Wonderbra and fashionable clothes, Miss Thinne in her white uniform and regulation cardigan. Then they left for work in the car they shared, Miss Thinne getting off at the Community Health Centre, and Miss Fatt driving on to wherever she was wanted that day.
Occasionally she wasn’t wanted anywhere and would drive back home, but usually she had plenty of work, what with her Marilyn Monroe looks.
A Typical Miss Thinne Day
Miss Thinne’s duties as a community nurse were many, and she enjoyed every single one of them. She was one of those health-care professionals who had the knack of generating a sort of breezy warmth impossible to distinguish from genuine affection. This allowed her to get along with anyone,
especially the sick and elderly.
‘How are you today, Mrs Carbioni?’ she might ask, while changing the dressing on that woman’s perennial ulcer, or:
‘There you go, love,’ as she set a plate of food in front of a shuddering old crone, or:
‘Have you given some thought to what I told you last week about smoking, Mr Sangster?’
She could be motherly when required, or sisterly, or like a devoted daughter. She never failed to get what she wanted, which was the best for her patients.
Her colleagues pronounced her a marvel.
‘Eleanor’s a marvel,’ they said.
At morning tea back at the Community Health Centre there was congenial chat among the nurses. Each nurse discussed her patients’ worsening problems around a large laminex table.
‘Mr Simek is forgetting to go to the toilet and he can’t seem to manage the phone anymore. Becoming very uncooperative too – a real pain!. I think he’ll have to be moved out of home pretty soon.’
‘Poor old soul. He was a lovely dignified man only a few years ago.’ This was Miss Thinne talking, of course.
‘Yes, I suppose he was … It seems so long ago now, I’d sort of forgotten. You remember them all so well!’
‘Eleanor’s a marvel where that’s concerned.’
Miss Thinne blushed, not out of modesty but almost out of shame for being so ideally suited to her chosen profession, as well as so ideally suited to her chosen home life and the companion who went with it: so ideally suited, in other words, to life altogether.
Late in the afternoon she would leave the Health Centre and, if she didn’t see the car waiting by the side of the road with Miss Fatt reading a magazine against the steering wheel, she would stroll to the bus stop.