by Michel Faber
‘But we’re getting ahead of the story,’ he cautioned. ‘We’re leaving out some of his lives. Because Art Severin’s next life was as a consultant on major dam-building projects in a dozen countries from Zaire to New Zealand. His time in Malaysia had taught him the value of staying out of the limelight, so he rarely took the credit for his achievements, preferring to let politicians and corporate heads bask in the glory. But glorious indeed were the dams he nurtured to completion. He was especially proud of the Aziz Dam in Pakistan, which, if you’ll forgive an unintended pun, was truly ground-breaking: a rock-filled earth dam with an impervious clay core. The entire project required a high degree of attention to detail, since it was in an earthquake fault zone. It still stands today.’ Peter raised his chin, looked out of the nearest window at the alien emptiness beyond. His congregation looked likewise. Whatever was out there symbolised achievement, hard-won achievement within a vast environment that did not change unless dedicated professionals made it happen. A few eyes glinted with moisture.
‘Art Severin’s next life was not a happy one,’ said Peter, on the move again, as though inspired by Severin’s own restlessness. ‘Kamelia left him, for reasons he never understood. Both his daughters were badly affected by the break-up: Nora turned against him, and May was diagnosed schizophrenic. A few months after a gruelling and expensive divorce settlement, Art was investigated by tax authorities and billed for money he didn’t have. Within a year, he was drinking heavily, on welfare, living in a motor home with May, watching her get worse, and getting sicker and sicker himself, with undiagnosed diabetes.
‘But here’s where the story takes an unexpected direction,’ he said, turning abruptly, making eye-contact with as many of his listeners as he could. ‘May went off her medication, committed suicide, and everybody who’d been watching Art Severin’s decline assumed he would completely hit the skids and be found dead one day in his trailer. Instead, he sorted out his health, tracked down his real father, borrowed some money, shipped himself back to Oregon, and found work as a tour guide. He did it for ten years, refusing offers of promotion, refusing opportunities to get back into the geotechnics industry – until finally USIC came along. USIC made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: the chance to test out, on a grand scale, his theories on the use of soils and soft rocks as engineering materials.
‘That grand-scale testing ground,’ declared Peter, ‘is here. It’s what we are standing on today. Art Severin’s skills helped to take this fantastically ambitious experiment as far as it has reached, and, because of Art’s generous sharing of his expertise, his skills will live on in his colleagues, you who knew him. I’ve talked mostly about Art’s past, a past many of you may have been scarcely aware of, because Art seldom spoke of it. He was, as I’m sure some of you would agree, a hard man to get to know. I won’t pretend to have known him myself. He showed kindness to me on my journey here, but by the time we arrived, we’d exchanged some tense words. I was looking forward to catching up with him later, after I’d settled in to my own work here; I was looking forward to smoothing things over between us. But that’s the way it goes with the dead and those they leave behind. Each of you will have your last memory of Art Severin, the last thing you said to him, the final thing he said to you. Maybe it’s the smile you shared over some detail of your work together, a smile that will mean something more to you now: a symbol of a relationship that was in pretty good order, pretty much ready to be severed clean. Or maybe you’ll remember a look he gave you, one of those what-the-hell-did-he-mean-by-that moments, something that makes you wonder whether there was anything you could or should have done, to make his absence now seem more natural. But either way, we’re struggling to make sense of his unreachability, the fact that he’s in a different dimension from us now, he’s no longer breathing the same air, no longer the same sort of creature. We know there was more to him than the body that’s stored in this casket, just as we know that there’s more to us than our kidneys and our intestines and our earwax. But we don’t have accurate terminology for what that extra thing is. Some of us call it the soul, but what is that, really? Is there a research paper on it that we can read, that will explain the properties of Art Severin’s soul, and tell us how it differs from the Art Severin we knew, the guy with the discoloured teeth and prickly temperament, the guy who found it difficult to trust women, the guy who had a habit of drumming on his knees to rock music that played in his head?’
Peter had been walking forwards slowly, getting closer to his congregation, until he stood within arm’s-reach of the front row. BG’s forehead was contorted with wrinkles, his eyes shone with tears. The woman next to him was weeping. Tuska’s jaw was set, his lopsided grin trembling slightly. Grainger, somewhere in the back row, was bone-pale, her expression softened by pain.
‘People, you know I’m a Christian. For me, that all-important research paper is the Bible. For me, that vital missing data is Jesus Christ. But I know that some of you are of different faiths. And I know that Art Severin professed to have none. BG asked him what religion he was, and he said “I’m nothing”. I never got a chance to discuss with him what he really meant by that. And now, I’ll never get that chance. But it’s not because Art Severin is lying here, dead. No. It’s because this body here isn’t Art Severin: we all know that, instinctively. Art Severin isn’t here anymore; he’s somewhere else, somewhere where we can’t be. We’re standing here, breathing air into those funny spongy bladders we call lungs, our torsos shaking slightly from the pump action of that muscle we call a heart, our legs getting uncomfortable from balancing on our foot-bones too long. We are souls shut inside a cage of bones; souls squeezed into a parcel of flesh. We get to hang around in there for a certain number of years, and then we go where souls go. I believe that’s into the bosom of God. You may believe it’s somewhere different. But one thing’s for sure: it’s somewhere, and it’s not here.’
Peter walked back to the coffin, laid his hand on it once again.
‘I can’t say for sure if Art Severin really, truly believed he was nothing more than the contents of this coffin. If so, he was wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t get into another argument with him now; maybe it’s in bad taste. But Art: forgive me, forgive us, we’ve got to tell you: you weren’t nothing. It wasn’t true that you were going nowhere. You were travelling on the great human journey, and yesterday you broke through the final checkpoint, and you’ve reached the destination. You were a brave man who lived many lives, and each life required more courage than the last, and now you’re in the next life, where your body won’t let you down anymore, and you don’t need insulin and you don’t crave nicotine, and nobody betrays your trust, and every mystery you racked your brains about is clear as day now, and every hurt you ever suffered is OK now, and you’re feeling pity for us down here, still dragging our heavy bodies around.’ There was a grunt of surprise from the audience: BG had lifted his massive arm to wipe his eyes, and his elbow had accidentally bumped against someone’s skull.
‘Art Severin,’ proclaimed Peter – and, despite the muffled acoustics of the room, there seemed somehow to be a churchy reverb after all – ‘we are here today to dispose of your old cage of bone, your parcel of flesh. You don’t need that stuff anymore. It’s crap tools. But if it’s all right with you, please let us keep a few little souvenirs: our memories. We want to keep you with us, even as we let you go. We want you to live on in our minds, even though you’re living somewhere bigger and better than that. One day, we too will go where souls go, where you have travelled before us. Until then: Goodbye, Arthur Laurence Severin. Goodbye.’
Back in his own quarters, after he’d spent some time with a few of the mourners who hadn’t wanted to leave even after the coffin had been consumed, Peter seated himself once more in front of the Shoot. His clothing was sodden with sweat. He wondered how long the interval was between full water supplies to the shower. His head buzzed with the intimacies and confidences that USIC employees had just shared with him, facts a
bout their lives that he must store in his memory, names he must make sure not to forget. His wife’s unopened capsules hung suspended on the screen. Nine more messages he hadn’t had time to read until now.
Dear Peter,
Excuse what will probably be a short, garbled message. I’m tired out. Sheila Frame and the two kids – Rachel and Billy – were here all afternoon and most of the evening. For them it was the weekend, but I’d worked an early shift, after a late shift the day before. Rachel is a handful. Still kind of sweet but full of borderline obsessive-compulsive habits, quite exhausting to watch. Hormones, I suppose. You wouldn’t recognise her, physically. Looks like a porn starlet/pop star/heiress party girl – the usual mix for pubescent females these days. Billy is painfully polite and shy. Small for his age, and a bit chubby with it. Barely spoke the whole time he was here, and obviously undergoing agonies of embarrassment the more chatty/nervy his mother became. Sheila smelled a little boozy, or maybe it was just very strong cologne, I don’t know. She’s buzzing with stress, the whole house is still full of it even though they left an hour ago. How I wished that you and I could have tackled them together – one of us calming Sheila down, the other relating to the kids, maybe taking it in turns. I don’t know why they stayed so long; I can’t imagine I was much use to them. Billy’s one and only moment of candour was when I parked him in front of my computer to play a game. He took one look at the Noah’s Ark display and his whole face flinched like someone had hit him. He told me that the snow leopard is extinct. The last surviving specimen died in a zoo a few weeks back. ‘The snow leopard was my favourite,’ he said. Then he sat down at the computer and within about 30 seconds he was lost in a realistic prison interior, shooting the guards’ heads off, blowing doors open, getting killed.
Must go to bed immediately. Up at 5.30 tomorrow morning. I drank some of the wine that Sheila brought, so she wouldn’t be self-conscious about drinking alone. I will regret it when that alarm clock goes off!
Please tell me a little more about how your mission is going. I want to talk specifics with you. It feels so strange not to. Peter, it HURTS not to. I feel like I’m your sister or something, sending you a long screed of complaint, chattering about things that you can’t possibly care about. I’m still the same person you’ve known, the one you can always rely on to give you perspective and confirmation. I just need to have a clearer sense of what you’re seeing and doing and experiencing, my darling. Give me some names, some particulars. I know you can’t right now, because you’re at the settlement and there’s no way to read this message. But when you get back. Please. Take some time out to reflect. Let me be there for you.
MUST go to bed now.
Love,
Bea.
Peter rocked on the chair, overloaded with adrenalin, but also tired. He wasn’t sure if he should, or even could, read Beatrice’s other eight messages without answering this one. It felt cruel, perverse, not to respond. As though Bea were calling out to him, over and over, and he was ignoring her cries.
Dear Bea, he wrote on a fresh page.
Today I conducted a funeral. Art Severin. I didn’t know he was a diabetic; he died suddenly while I was away at the settlement. I was given a comprehensive file on his life and about three hours to prepare something. I did my best. Everyone seemed to appreciate it.
Love,
Peter
He stared at the words on the screen, aware that they needed expansion. Details, details. A woman called Maneely had confessed to him that she hadn’t given a thought to Christianity since she was a small child, but that she’d felt the presence of God today. He considered telling Bea that. His heart was thumping strangely. He left his message in draft form, unsent, and opened another capsule.
Dear Peter,
Are you sitting down? I hope so.
Darling, I’m pregnant. I know you’ll think that’s not possible. But I stopped taking the Pill a month before you left.
Please don’t be angry with me. I know we agreed to wait another couple of years. But please understand that I was scared you’d never come back. I was scared there’d be an explosion at the launch and your mission would be over before it began. Or that you’d disappear somewhere along the way, just disappear into space, and I would never even know what became of you. So, as the departure date got closer and closer, I got more and more desperate for some part of you to be here with me, no matter what.
I prayed and prayed about it but just didn’t feel I’d got an answer. In the end I left it in God’s hands whether I would be fertile so soon after coming off the Pill. Of course it was still my decision, I’m not denying that. I wish the decision had been ours together. Maybe it was – or could have been. Maybe if we’d discussed it, you would have said it was exactly what you’d been wanting to suggest yourself. But I was terrified you’d say no. Would you have? Just tell me straight, don’t spare me.
Whatever you feel, I hope it makes some difference to you that I’m proud and thrilled to be carrying your baby. Our baby. By the time you come back, I’ll be 26 weeks along the way and getting pretty enormous. That’s assuming I don’t have a miscarriage. I hope I don’t. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, and we could try again, but it would be a different child. This one I’m carrying feels so precious – already! You know what I was thinking when you made love to me on the way to the airport? I was thinking, I’m ready, this is the moment, this is exactly the right moment, all it needs now is one tiny seed. And I bet that was when it happened. Looking back, almost certainly, that was when it happened.
13
The engine kindled into life
‘And this is where it all started,’ said the woman solemnly. ‘This is what it looked like in the beginning.’
Peter nodded. He kept his jaw rigid and didn’t dare try to make the appropriate interested noises, for fear of breaking into a grin or even laughing out loud. The official opening of this facility was a momentous occasion for everyone gathered here today.
‘We put an extra-thick layer of epoxy on the top of the downstream surface,’ the woman continued, pointing to the relevant parts of the scale model, ‘to control the migration of water through the foundation. These tubes on the downstream side were connected to pressure transducers.’
If she’d been breezy or casual, it wouldn’t be so bad, but she was deadly earnest and that made it funnier, and everybody but him seemed to understand what she was talking about, which made it funnier still. Then there was the inherent comicality of an architectural scale model (so dignified, so full of symbolic importance, and yet so . . . dinky, like something from a children’s playground). And, added to that, the shape of the model itself: two inverted cups joined together, fully justifying the ‘Big Brassiere’ nickname.
The real buildings, from a distance, hadn’t struck him as particularly comical. He’d seen them, along with everyone else, looming on the horizon earlier in the afternoon as USIC’s convoy of vehicles drove across the scrubland, each vehicle ferrying half a dozen employees. The sheer size of the structures, and the fact that one partially obscured the other on approach, made them appear like nothing less than what they were: mighty works of architecture. When the convoy finally cruised to a standstill in front of the foremost structure, the vehicles parked in an area of shade so large that its contours were difficult to tell. Only once Peter and the other USIC personnel were gathered together in the entrance hall, contemplating a replica barely a metre high, was the design of this place revealed in all its bulbous symmetry. The officiating woman, Hayes, an engineer who’d worked closely with Severin, waved her hand in the air over the twin structures, oblivious to the fact that she appeared to be miming a caress of a sofa-sized bosom.
‘ . . . the desired g-level . . . self-weight displacements . . . overtopping simulation . . . ’ Hayes droned on. ‘ . . . uplift pressures with five transducers . . . proximity probe . . . ’
Peter’s urge to laugh had passed. Now, he could scarcely keep awake. The entrance h
all was stiflingly warm and poorly ventilated; it felt rather like being enclosed inside an engine – which was basically what it was, of course. He swayed slightly on his feet, took a deep breath, and made an effort to stand straighter. Bubbles of trapped sweat squelched in his sandals; his eyes stung and Hayes became blurry.
‘ . . . recorded in real time . . . ’
He blinked. Hayes muddled back into focus. She was a tiny woman with a military-style masculine haircut and the sort of dress sense that made anything she wore look like a uniform even when it wasn’t. He’d made her acquaintance several days ago in the mess hall when she was shovelling her way through a plate of whiteflour mash and gravy. They’d conversed for ten, fifteen minutes and she’d been perfectly pleasant in a dull sort of way. She was from Alaska, used to like dogs and sledding but was content nowadays to read about them in magazines, and didn’t believe in any religion, although she kept ‘kind of an open mind about poltergeists’, having had a weird experience in an uncle’s house when she was twelve. Her low-pitched monotone was, he’d thought, mildly attractive, reminding him slightly of Bea’s melodious croon. But when delivering a lecture on thermodynamics and dam design, it wasn’t so scintillating.
Even so, the fact that he was having trouble staying awake annoyed him. Boring experiences didn’t normally affect him like this. Usually, he had exceptional tolerance for tedium; homelessness had taught him that. But living in the USIC base was worse than homelessness somehow. He’d been back a week, and his sunburned face had peeled and healed, but his brain wasn’t recovering so well. He was wired and wakeful when he should be sleeping, and dopey when he should be alert. And here he was, nodding off, when he should be admiring the engineering genius of USIC’s brand new Centrifuge & Power Facility.