The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  ‘It’s extraordinary the way you can be driven through a landscape for hours and yet not notice the most striking thing about it,’ reflected Peter. ‘All that rain, and none of it collected in lakes or reservoirs . . . I wonder how the Oasans cope.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Roussos. ‘It rains every day. They get what they need when they need it. It’s like, on tap.’ He held up his plastic mug to an imagined sky.

  ‘In fact,’ added Mooney, ‘it would be a problem if the ground didn’t soak it up. Imagine the floods, man.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Peter, suddenly remembering. ‘Have you heard about the Maldives?’

  ‘The Maldives?’ Roussos looked wary, as though suspecting that Peter was about to launch into an evangelistic parable.

  ‘The Maldives. A bunch of islands in the Indian Ocean,’ said Peter. ‘They got wiped out by tidal waves. Almost everyone who lived there is dead.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Mooney, impassive, as though Peter had just imparted a fragment of knowledge from a branch of science outside his own.

  ‘Wiped out?’ said Roussos. ‘That’s bad.’

  BG returned to the table with a steaming mug of coffee in each fist.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Peter, taking hold of his. There was a jokey message printed on it: YOU DON’T NEED TO BE HUMAN TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS. BG’s said something different. ‘Hey, I’ve just realised,’ said Peter. ‘These mugs are real plastic. I mean, er . . . thick plastic. I mean, not Styrofoam, not disposable . . . ’

  ‘We got better things to transport halfway across the universe than disposable cups, bro,’ said BG.

  ‘Yeah, like Hershey bars,’ said Mooney.

  ‘Like Christian ministers,’ said BG, without a hint of mockery.

  My dear Bea, wrote Peter an hour later.

  No reply from you yet, and maybe it’s a bit soon for me to be writing you another letter. But I couldn’t wait to tell you – I’ve just had a MOST eye-opening conversation with some of the USIC guys. It turns out I’m not the first Christian missionary that’s been sent here. Before me, there was a man called Marty Kurtzberg. A Baptist apparently, despite the Jewish name. His ministry was welcomed by the natives, but then he disappeared. That was a year ago. No one knows what became of him. Of course the men joke that the Oasans probably ate him, like in those old cartoons of missionaries tied up & getting boiled in a pot by hungry savages. They shouldn’t talk like that, it’s racist, but anyway I know in my heart that these people – the Oasans, that is – aren’t dangerous. Not to me, anyway. Maybe that’s a rash assessment, since I’ve only met one so far. But I’m sure you recall the times when you & I were witnessing for the Lord in some unfamiliar place/context, and we suddenly sensed that we should beat a hasty retreat if we wanted to stay alive! Well, I don’t get that feeling here.

  Despite the cannibalism jokes, USIC and the Oasans have what appears to be quite a decent trading relationship. It’s not the colonial model of exploitation that you’d expect. There’s a regular exchange of goods, formal and low-key. The Oasans provide us with basic foodstuffs. As I understand it, the main thing we’ve been giving the Oasans is medicines. There’s not a great variety of plants growing here, which is surprising given the amount of rain. But since most medicines are made from plants I suspect that the scope for discovering/making analgesics, antibiotics, etc, here has been limited. Or maybe this is USIC’s evil plan to get the locals hooked on drugs? I won’t be able to make authoritative statements about that until I know these people better.

  Anyway, are you sitting down? – because I have some amazing news that may knock you flat. The Oasans want only one thing (besides medicines) – the word of God. They’ve been asking USIC to supply them with another pastor. Asking?– Demanding! According to the men I just spoke to, they (Oasans) have let it be known, politely, that their continued co-operation with USIC’s activities depends on it! And here’s you and me thinking that USIC was being fantastically generous in offering me this opportunity to come here . . . Well, far from me being here under sufferance, it turns out the whole project may depend on me! If I’d known this before, I would have INSISTED that you came too. But then maybe USIC would have passed me over in favour of someone else, someone less troublesome. There must have been hundreds of applicants. (I still don’t understand Why Me. But perhaps the right question is Why Not?)

  Anyway, it’s clear that I’ll be given whatever assistance I require in the setting up of my church. A vehicle, building materials, even labourers. The way things are shaping up, it looks like my yoke is going to be easier than that of just about any missionary since the beginning of Christian evangelism. When you think of Saint Paul, getting beaten up, stoned, shipwrecked, starved, imprisoned . . . I’m almost looking forward to my first setback! (ALMOST)

  He paused. That was all he wanted to say but he felt he should make some reference to the Maldives. And then felt guilty for feeling he should, rather than wanting to.

  Love,

  Peter

  After he vomited up the coffee, he felt better. He wasn’t much of a coffee drinker at the best of times – it was a stimulant, after all, and he’d weaned himself off artificial stimulants years ago – but the stuff BG had presented him with tasted foul. Maybe it was made of Oasan flowers, or maybe the combination of imported coffee and Oasan water was bad news. Either way, he felt better rid of it. In fact, he felt almost normal. The effects of the Jump were leaving his system at last. He took a long swig of water straight from the tap. Delicious. He would drink only water from now on.

  Energy returned to his body, as though each cell was a microscopic sponge that swelled in gratitude for being fed. Maybe it was. He strapped on his sandals and left his quarters, ostensibly to get the hang of his surroundings but also to celebrate feeling vigorous again. He’d been cooped up too long. Free at last!

  Well, free to walk the labyrinth of the USIC base. A welcome change from his room, but not exactly the wide open prairie. Just empty corridors, brightly lit tunnels of wall, ceiling and floor. And every few metres, a door.

  Each door had a name tag on it – surname and initial only – with the person’s job description in larger letters. Thus, W. HEK, CHEF, S. MORTELLARO, DENTAL SURGEON, D. ROSEN, SURVEYOR, L. MORO, ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGIST, B. GRAHAM, CENTRIFUGE ENGINEER, J. MOONEY, ELECTRICAL ENGINEER, and so on. The word ‘engineer’ came up often, as did professions ending in ‘-ist’.

  No sound came through those doors, and the corridors were likewise silent. Evidently, the USIC staff were either at work or hanging out in the cafeteria. There was nothing sinister in their absence, no reason to feel spooked, yet Peter felt spooked. His initial relief at being able to reconnoitre alone, unwatched, gave way to a hankering for signs of life. He walked with increasing pace, turned corners with increasing resolution, and was met each time with the same rectangular passageways and rows of identical doors. In a place like this, you couldn’t even be sure if you were lost.

  Just as he was starting to sweat, needled with memories of being trapped in juvenile corrective institutions, the spell was broken – turning another corner, he almost collided, chest-to-chest, with Werner.

  ‘Whoa! Where’s the fire?’ Werner said, patting his fat torso as if checking that the surprise hadn’t done him any harm.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Peter.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘That’s good,’ nodded Werner, cordial but in no mood to chat. ‘Stay with it, man.’ A catchphrase or a caution? Hard to tell.

  Within seconds, Peter was alone once more. His moment of panic had passed. He could see now that there was a difference between wandering around in an unfamiliar building and being trapped in a prison. Werner was right: he needed to get a grip.

  Back in his own quarters, Peter prayed. Prayed for guidance. No answer came to him, at least not immediately.

  The alien – the Oasan – had begged him to return to the settlement as soon as he could. So .
. . should he go right away? The claustrophobia that had threatened him in the corridors suggested that he still wasn’t fully back to normal – he wasn’t a panicker, usually. And it wasn’t long since he’d been fainting, vomiting and hallucinating. Perhaps he should continue resting up until he was a hundred per cent sure he was himself again. But the Oasan had begged him to return, and USIC hadn’t brought him all this way for him to lie in bed staring at his toes. He should go. He should go.

  The thing was, it would mean being out of contact with Bea for a number of days. That would be hard on both of them. Yet, in the circumstances, there was no avoiding it; the best he could do was delay his departure just a little while longer, so that they had more time to write to each other first.

  He checked the Shoot. Nothing.

  Come back สีoon, Peรี่er, oh very สีoon, สีooner than you can. Read for uสี the Book of สีรี่range New Thingสี. He could still hear the Oasan’s voice, wheezy and strained as though each word was well-nigh impossible to produce, a bleat from a musical instrument made of preposterously ill-suited materials. A trombone carved out of a watermelon, held together with rubber bands.

  But never mind the physicalities: here were souls hungry for Christ, waiting for him to return as he had promised.

  But had he promised, in so many words? He couldn’t recall.

  God’s answer resounded in his head. Don’t make everything so complicated. Do what you came here for.

  Yes, Lord, he responded in turn, but is it OK if I wait for just one more letter from Bea?

  Frazzled from waiting, he went out into the corridors again. They were silent as before, still empty, and smelled of nothing, not even floor cleaner, although they were very clean. Not showroom-pristine or shiny, but free of noticeable dirt or dust. Sensibly clean.

  He’d been wrong to feel claustrophobic. Only a few of the passageways were enclosed; others had windows, big ones with sunshine beaming in. How could he have missed this before? How had he managed to choose only the windowless passageways? That was the sort of thing crazy people did – instinctively choosing the experiences that confirmed their own negative attitudes. He was a past master of stuff like that; God had shown him a better way. God and Bea.

  He walked along, re-reading the names on the doors, trying to commit them to memory in case he ever needed to know where to find someone. He was struck anew by how odd it was that none of the doors was fitted with a lock, just a simple handle which any stranger could open.

  ‘You planning to steal my toothpaste?’ Roussos had teased when Peter remarked on this earlier on.

  ‘No, but you might have possessions that are very individual to you.’

  ‘You planning to steal my shoes?’

  Peter had stolen someone’s shoes once, and considered mentioning it, but Mooney interrupted:

  ‘He wants your muffins, man! Watch your muffins!’

  By coincidence, Peter noted the nameplate of F. ROUSSOS, OPERATING ENGINEER on one of the doors, and walked on. Seconds later, he noted another name in passing and then almost lost his balance when it registered on his consciousness: M. KURTZBERG, PASTOR.

  Why was he so surprised? Kurtzberg was missing in action, but no one had said he was dead. Until his fate was established, there was no reason to reallocate his quarters or remove his name. He might return anytime.

  On impulse, Peter knocked at the door. There was no answer. He knocked again, louder. Again, no answer. He should, of course, move on. But he did not. Within moments, he was standing inside the room. It was a room identical to his own, in design and décor at least. The window blind was shut.

  ‘Hello?’ he called quietly, to verify that he was alone. He tried to convince himself that Kurtzberg, if he had been here, would have urged him to come in, and although this was probably true, it didn’t alter the fact that it was wrong to enter a stranger’s home uninvited.

  But this isn’t a home, is it? he thought to himself. The USIC base isn’t a home for anybody. It’s just one big workplace. Self-justifying sophistry? Perhaps. But no, it was an instinct that went deeper than that. Bea would have sensed it too. There was something weird about the USIC personnel, something Bea could have helped him articulate. These people had been living here for years; they obviously enjoyed a degree of camaraderie; and yet . . . and yet.

  He stepped deeper into Kurtzberg’s apartment. There was no evidence of any other illicit visits before this one. The atmosphere was stale, and a film of dust covered the flat surfaces. There was no Shoot on the table, just a bottle of filtered water (half-empty and pure-looking) and a plastic mug. The bed was unmade, with one pillow hanging off the edge, poised to fall, placidly established in that poise, set to hang there for ever. Spread out on the bed was one of Kurtzberg’s shirts, its sleeves upflung as if in surrender. The armpits were discoloured with mildew.

  Disappointingly, there were no documents anywhere to be seen: no diaries or notebooks. There was a Bible – a neat paperback Revised Standard Version – lying on a chair. Peter opened it, riffled through the pages. Kurtzberg, he soon realised, was not the sort of person who underlined verses that struck him as particularly significant or who scribbled annotations in the margins. There was nothing here but pristine Scripture. Peter, in his own sermons, would occasionally tell a joke or an aphorism to drive home a point, and one of the dictums he enjoyed quoting, whenever he sensed that people in the congregation were staring at his grubby, decrepit, dog-eared New Testament, was ‘Clean Bible – dirty Christian. Dirty Bible – clean Christian.’ Marty Kurtzberg obviously did not subscribe to this view.

  Peter opened the wardrobe. A formal suit jacket, in powder-blue linen, hung there, next to a pair of white slacks with faint grey stains on the knees. Kurtzberg was a compact man, no taller than five foot six, and his shoulders were narrow. Two more coat-hangers were cloaked in shirts of the same kind as the one on the bed, replete with classy silk ties slung loosely around the collars. On the bottom of the wardrobe lay a pair of leather shoes, polished to a gleam, and a wadded-up pair of cream socks that were furry with mould.

  I’m not going to learn anything here, thought Peter, and turned to leave. As he turned, though, he noticed something lying under the window, a litter of what looked like flower petals. On closer inspection, it proved to be torn fragments of adhesive bandage. Dozens of them. As if Kurtzberg had stood at the window, staring out at goodness knows what, and ripped up an entire packet of Band-Aids one by one, into shreds as small as possible, letting them fall at his feet.

  After his visit to Kurtzberg’s quarters, Peter lost all motivation to explore the USIC compound any further. A pity, because this was his chance to make up for forgetting all the orienteering info Grainger had told him on arrival. Walking around was good exercise, too; no doubt his muscles needed it, but . . . well, to be truthful, this place made him depressed.

  He wasn’t sure why. The compound was spacious, clean, cheerfully painted, and there were plenty of windows. OK, a few of the corridors were a bit tunnel-like, but they couldn’t all face onto the sky, could they? And OK, a few pot plants here and there might have been nice, but USIC could hardly be blamed if the soil of Oasis didn’t support ferns and rhododendrons. And it wasn’t as if no attempt had been made to finesse the décor. At regular intervals in the corridors hung nicely framed posters that were intended, presumably, to raise a smile. Peter noted perennial favourites like the photo of the worried-looking kitten hanging upside-down from a twig, captioned OH, SHIT…, the dog sharing his basket with two ducks, Laurel and Hardy cluelessly attempting to build a house, the elephant balancing on a ball, the convoy of forward-striding cartoon men in Robert Crumb’s ‘Keep On Truckin’, and – at impressive size, from chest-height to just under the ceiling – Charles Ebbets’ famous monochrome of construction workers eating lunch on an iron girder suspended vertiginously above the streets of Manhattan. A little further on, Peter wondered whether the 1940s propaganda painting titled We Can Do It!, sh
owing ‘Rosie the Riveter’ flexing her well-muscled forearm, was intended sincerely to inspire the personnel, or if it had been fixed there with a wink of irony. In any case, some sly graffitist had added, in felt-tip, NO THANKS ROSIE.

  Not all the pictures alluded to construction projects and tough challenges; there was a quotient of art-for-art’s-sake as well. Peter noted several classic screenprints by Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec, a collage by Braque or someone of that ilk, and a giant photograph labelled ‘Andreas Gursky: Rhine II’ that was almost abstract in its simple stripes of green field and blue river. There were also facsimiles of old movie posters featuring matinee idols from the far distant past: Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Marlene Dietrich, even Rudolph Valentino. Something for everybody. The range couldn’t be faulted, really, although there was a curious absence of any image that evoked a specific, currently existing spot on Earth, or a passionate emotion.

  Craving fresh air, Peter headed for the nearest door that led outside.

  Whether the ocean of humid air that rushed to greet him when he emerged into the sunshine could be called ‘fresh’ was, of course, debatable. It certainly wasn’t stagnant. Wisps of it lifted locks of his hair to caress his scalp, while other currents slipped into his clothing and sought out the flesh he’d tried to keep covered. But it was better this time. His dishdasha was a single layer between him and the atmosphere, and once it became damp – which happened within seconds – it hung off him loosely, a bit heavy on the shoulders but comfortable everywhere else. The fabric, though thin enough not to be stifling, was tightly woven enough to conceal the fact that he wore nothing else underneath, and stiff enough not to cling. The atmosphere got on well with it.

  He walked briskly along the tarmac, along the outer wall of the USIC building, taking advantage of the shade cast by the concrete monstrosity. The sandals allowed his feet to breathe; the sweat between his toes evaporated as soon as it formed. The air tickled his shins and ankles, which ought to have been unpleasant but was really quite delightful. His mood was much improved, the unease he’d felt indoors already forgotten.