The Book of Strange New Things

by Michel Faber

  They are gentle, kind, humble, hardworking people. It’s a privilege to live amongst them. They call themselves Jesus Lover One, Jesus Lover Two, etc. Jesus Lover One was the very first convert, dating back to the early days of Kurtzberg’s ministry. I wish I could show you pictures as I’m hopeless at describing them. Their behaviour is not that distinctive compared to ours, eg, I wouldn’t call some of them extrovert & others introvert, some good-humoured & others bad-tempered, some well-balanced & others crazy, etc. They’re all pretty low-key and the differences between them are quite subtle. It would take a novelist’s skill to capture those nuances in words and, as I’ve discovered to my embarrassment, I totally lack that skill. Also, they look physically very similar. Pure, unadulterated genetic stock. I never thought about this before coming here, but when we need to tell the difference between people, we get a lot of help from all the cross-breeding and migration that’s gone on in human history. It’s given us such a smorgasbord of different physical types – caricatures almost. By ‘we’ and ‘us’ I mean people in the cosmopolitan West, of course. If we were rural Chinese, and somebody asked us to describe someone else, we wouldn’t say, ‘She’s got straight black hair, dark brown eyes, she’s about five foot three’ and so on. We’d have to get more into the nuances. Whereas in the West there’s so much diversity we can say ‘He’s six foot two with blonde frizzy hair and pale blue eyes’, and that immediately sets him apart from the crowd. Bea, I’m rambling here but the point is that the Jesus Lovers would all look the same to you except for the colours of their robes. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’, I guess. In a future letter I’ll tell you about the contributions that some of the individual Jesus Lovers have made to the church.

  He paused; recognised that Bea might have reason to doubt he would keep his promise. He racked his brains.

  For example, he went on, Jesus Lover Five finally delivered her painting to be hung on the ceiling with the others. (Oh how I wish you could see them.) Her painting shows Salome and the two Marys outside Christ’s tomb, with the risen Jesus manifesting to them. He has His arms spread and He looks as though he’s made of light. It’s dazzling, I don’t know how she managed to achieve this with just pigment and cloth; it hits your eyeballs like car headlights on a dark night. You look up to the ceiling when you’re singing or preaching and you see this crucifix-shaped creature up there, blazing out of the dimness. So that’s Jesus Lover Five. A very talented lady (or maybe gentleman – I’m still not 100% sure).

  What else should I tell you? I’m struggling to think, which is incredible because so many significant, precious things have happened on this mission and I see so much evidence of God’s grace during each hour that I spend in these people’s company. So many moments when, if you could only have been by my side, I’m certain we would have exchanged a glance that said: ‘Yes! God is at work here.’

  He broke off and stretched. He was coated with sweat, from his greasy brow to the tips of his fingers. His naked buttocks squelched on the vinyl seat. Maybe it had been a mistake to turn off the air conditioning and let this stagnancy take hold. He got to his feet and walked to the window. Another tumbleweed of rain was on its way, swirling across the scrublands towards the base. In five minutes it would be here, streaming down the windows. He looked forward to that. Although there was something sad about enjoying rain on the other side of a glass barrier. He should be out there.

  Tired, he threw himself on the bed for a minute. The dishdasha hung between him and the window, silhouetted against the brilliance of daylight. He shielded his eyes with his hands, shuttering his peripheral vision so that he could see the dishdasha without the glare on either side; the garment changed colour from dark grey to white. Optical illusions. The subjectivity of reality.

  He thought of Bea’s wedding dress. She’d insisted on getting married in white, in a church, and on him wearing a white suit. An odd decision for two people who usually avoided ostentation and formality. Plus, there would be alcohol at the reception. He’d wondered if it mightn’t be better all round if they just ducked into a registry office in their casuals. No way, said Bea. A registry office wedding would be giving in to shame about their past. As if to say: a guy who used to crawl around in shit-smeared public urinals has no right to repackage himself in a spotless suit; a woman with Bea’s family history should forget all about standing up in a church dressed in white. Jesus died on the cross precisely to wipe out that sort of shame. It was like the angel in Zechariah 3:2–4 taking off the priest’s filthy clothes. Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment. A clean slate. And there was no bolder celebration of a clean slate than the wedding of Peter and Beatrice.

  And in the end, quite a few of the guests got sloshed but Peter didn’t touch a drop. And everyone read their speeches from pre-prepared scripts and he hadn’t written a thing but when the time came God gave him inspiration and he spoke about his love for Beatrice in elegant, flowing sentences that made people weep.

  Then he and his wife went home and Beatrice lay on their bed with her white gown still on, and he thought she was having a rest before getting changed but it soon became obvious that she was inviting him to join her. ‘We might get it dirty,’ he said, ‘and it was so expensive.’ ‘All the more reason,’ she said, ‘not to shove it into a box with a bunch of mothballs after one day. It’s actually a very nice dress. It feels good to touch.’ And she guided his hand.

  She must have worn that dress twenty, thirty times after that. Always indoors, always without any ceremonial flourish or spoken allusion to its symbolic significance: merely as though she’d decided, on a mundane whim, to wear a white dress that evening rather than a green one; an embroidered bodice rather than a V-necked jumper. He never wore his wedding suit again, though.

  The rain hit the window at last. Peter lay on his bed as the semen cooled on his midriff. Then he got up, showered again, and returned to the Shoot. The cursor on the screen was still blinking under the word .here

  18

  I need to talk to you, she said

  The news that Dr Matthew Everett had died meant nothing to Peter. He’d never met the man. He visited doctors as seldom as possible and, before the obligatory tests that gave him a clean bill of health for the Oasis mission, it had been ages since he’d set foot in any sort of clinic. A doctor had once threatened him that if he continued drinking he would be dead within three months. He’d continued drinking for years. Another doctor, affiliated in some way with the police, had branded him psychopathic and was keen to get him locked up in an institution. Then there was the registrar at Bea’s hospital who’d made trouble for her when she ‘developed an unprofessional attachment to a patient with a history of substance abuse and manipulative behaviour’.

  No, doctors and Peter had never got on. Not even in the years since he’d become a Christian. When medical practitioners heard about your faith, they didn’t respond like most people – with bemusement or combative scorn, ready to get into an argument about why-does-God-allow-suffering. Rather, they kept their faces blank and their conversation non-committal, and you felt they were making a mental note in some sort of file on your health issues: Irrational religious beliefs, right under Blepharitis and Rosacea.

  ‘You should go see Doc Everett,’ several USIC people had told him since his arrival. They meant: to check that you’re back in shape after the Jump, or, to get treatment for that sunburn. He’d made polite noises and carried on regardless. And now Doctor Everett was dead.

  The fatality had come out of the blue and reduced the USIC medical team from six to five: two paramedics, a nurse called Flores, an MD and surgeon called Austin, and Grainger.

  ‘It’s very bad this has happened,’ said Grainger when Peter met up with her outside the pharmacy. ‘Very bad.’ She wasn’t wearing her shawl this morning, and her hair was slick with water, newly washed. It sharpened her features, accentuated the scar on her forehead. He imagined a younger Ale
xandra Grainger, dead drunk, pitching forwards, her head splitting open against a metal tap, blood in the sink, blood on the floor, so much blood to be mopped up when she was hauled away. You’ve been there, he thought. I’ve been there too. Beatrice, much as he loved her, had never been there.

  ‘Were you close?’ he said.

  ‘He was a nice guy.’ Her frown and preoccupied tone suggested that her personal relationship with Everett was irrelevant to how bad a thing his death was. Without any further conversation she escorted Peter from the pharmacy into a passageway that led to the medical centre.

  The medical centre was surprisingly big for the number of personnel it served. It was built on two levels and had many rooms, some of which were only half-furnished and waiting to be kitted out with equipment. Two of the three operating tables in the surgical theatre were shrouded in plastic wrapping. One particularly large space that Peter peeked into as he passed was painted a cheerful yellow and almost blindingly inundated with daylight from bay windows. It was empty apart from some stacked boxes neatly labelled NEO-NATAL.

  The morgue had the same seldom-visited, overly spacious feel as most of the centre, even though it was possibly busier than it had ever been: three of the five remaining medical staff were gathered there once Grainger walked in, and Peter was politely introduced – firm handshakes, head-nods – to Dr Austin and Nurse Flores. ‘Glad to meet you,’ said the chimpanzee-like Flores, not sounding glad at all, and sat straight back down in her chair, arms folded over her dowdy uniform. Peter wondered what nationality she was. She was four foot ten, tops, and her head looked shrunken. Whatever genetic code had produced her was very different from the one that had produced him. She was almost as alien-looking as the Oasans.

  ‘I’m from England,’ he said to her, not caring how gauche he sounded. ‘Where are you from?’

  She hesitated. ‘El Salvador.’

  ‘Isn’t that in Guatemala?’

  ‘No, but we’re . . . neighbours, you could say.’

  ‘I heard about the volcano in Guatemala.’ His mind went into overdrive as he attempted to recall enough details from Bea’s letter to support a conversation with Flores. But she held up one wizened hand and said:

  ‘Spare me.’

  ‘It’s just so awful to think – ’ he began.

  ‘No, really: spare me,’ she said, and that was the end of that.

  For a few seconds, the mortuary lapsed into silence, apart from a rhythmic groaning sound that was not human in origin. Dr Austin explained that this noise was coming from the freezers, due to their having been only recently switched on.

  ‘It just didn’t make sense to keep a room full of freezers running with nothing in them, year after year,’ he elaborated. ‘Especially before we got our energy usage properly sorted out.’ Austin was Australian, by the sound of him, or perhaps a New Zealander; athletic, muscular, with movie-star good looks apart from an untidy scar gouged into his jawline. He and Flores had been absent from Severin’s funeral service, as far as Peter could recall.

  ‘You’ve done very well, lasting all this time,’ said Peter.

  ‘Lasting?’

  ‘Not needing to switch the freezers on. Until now.’

  Austin shrugged. ‘In the future, as this community grows, we’ll need a morgue for sure. In the future, we’ll probably have murders, poisonings, all the thrills and spills you get when your population passes a certain point. But these are early days. Or were.’

  The freezers groaned on.

  ‘Anyway . . . ’ sighed Austin, and unlatched the drawer containing the deceased, as though Peter had finally requested to see Dr Everett and shouldn’t be kept waiting. Austin pulled at the handles and the plastic crib slid out, exposing the naked body as far as the navel. Matthew Everett’s head was nestled on a wipe-clean pillow and his arms lay supported on banana-shaped cushions. He was a presentable middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair, a permanent vertical frown creasing his brow, and dimpled cheeks. His eyes were almost but not quite closed, and his mouth hung open. There was a pale dusting of frost on his tongue, and subtle ice-twinkles on his pale flesh. Other than this, he looked well.

  ‘Of course we’ve had a few deaths over the years,’ conceded Austin. ‘Not many; well below average for a community this size, but . . . it happens. People have diabetes, heart conditions . . . Their pre-existing pathology catches up with them. But Matt was healthy as a horse.’

  ‘My horse died,’ said Grainger.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ said Austin.

  ‘I used to have a horse, when I was a kid,’ said Grainger. ‘He was wonderful. He died.’

  There was nothing to say to that, so Austin pushed the drawer shut again and fastened the latches. Once again, Peter was struck by the simplicity of the technology: no computerised locking system to be placated with a keypad or a coded swipe-card, just a drawer with a couple of handles. He realised all of a sudden that this simplified design was not the result of cheapskate make-do, a weird mismatch between USIC’s colossal wealth and a penchant for outmoded discards. No, these freezers were new. And not just new, but custom made. Some obstinate designer had paid extra for nineteenth-century practicality, had bribed a manufacturer to leave out the computerised sensors, microchipped programs, flashing lights and smart options that an up-to-date mortuary freezer would contain.

  Dr Austin washed his hands in a sink, using a cake of astringent-smelling soap. He dried himself with an ordinary clean towel, then unwrapped a stick of chewing gum and popped it in his mouth. He held the packet out to Peter, a generous gesture since gum was an imported item.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Peter.

  ‘God knows why I eat it myself,’ mused Austin. ‘Zero nutritional value, a ten-second hit of sugar, and your salivary glands give your stomach the message that there’s food on the way – which there isn’t. Complete waste of time. And bloody expensive here. But I’m addicted.’

  ‘You should try คฉ้รี่ค,’ said Peter, recalling the pleasant sensation of this plant between his fingers, the burst of sweet juice on his tongue as his teeth first pierced its tough hide, the delicious pulp that yielded hints of fresh flavour even after half an hour of chewing. ‘You’d never want gum again.’

  ‘Beg pardon?’

  ‘คฉ้รี่ค.’

  Austin nodded tolerantly. Probably adding Speech impediment to his mental file of the pastor’s health issues.

  Silence fell, or what passed for silence in the USIC morgue. Peter thought that the freezers were groaning a bit less noisily than before, but maybe he was just acclimatising to the sound.

  ‘Did Dr Everett have family?’ he asked.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ said Austin. ‘He didn’t talk about it.’

  ‘He had a daughter,’ said Grainger quietly, almost to herself.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Austin.

  ‘They were estranged,’ said Grainger.

  ‘It happens,’ said Austin.

  Peter wondered why – given that this meeting wasn’t exactly abuzz with convivial chatter – somebody didn’t just hand over a dossier on Everett and set a deadline for the funeral address.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘I imagine I’ll be doing a funeral service?’

  Austin blinked. The concept had caught him by surprise. ‘Uh . . . Maybe,’ he said. ‘Not for a while, though. We’re keeping him at negative temp. Frozen, in other words. Until another pathologist arrives.’ He glanced over to the mortuary drawers, then out the window. ‘The big concern, of course, is whether there’s anything in this environment that might cause people to become ill. That’s been a concern from the start. We’re breathing air we’ve never breathed before, eating food that’s totally new to our digestive systems. So far, all the evidence suggests it’s not a problem. But only time will tell. Lots of time. And it could be very bad news that we’ve now got a man who had no health problems whatsoever, no reason for him to die, and he’s dead.’

  Peter began to shiver. He�
��d worn as much clothing as he could tolerate nowadays, even within the USIC base – his dishdasha, a loose sweater, jogging pants, tennis shoes – but it wasn’t enough to withstand the chill of the mortuary. He wished he could fling open the window, let the comforting balmy atmosphere swirl in.

  ‘Have you done a . . . uh . . . ’ The word had slipped out of his vocabulary. Without even intending to, he sliced at the air with an invisible scalpel.

  ‘Autopsy?’ Austin shook his head ruefully. ‘Matt was the one who had the skills in that area. That’s why we’ve got to wait. I mean, I can do autopsies if they’re straightforward. I could’ve determined a cause of death for Severin; that was no mystery. But if you’ve got no clues, you’re better off with an expert. And our expert was Matt.’

  No one spoke for a minute. Austin seemed lost in thought. Grainger stared down at her shoes, which tapped restlessly in the air. Flores, who hadn’t uttered a peep since introducing herself, gazed out the window. Maybe she was dumbstruck with grief.

  ‘Well . . . ’ said Peter. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘Can’t think of anything off-hand,’ said Austin. ‘We were actually wondering if there’s anything we can do to help you.’

  ‘Help me?’

  ‘Not with your . . . ah . . . evangelising, obviously,’ the doctor smiled. ‘But medically.’

  Peter’s fingers flew up to his brow, touching the flaking skin there. ‘I’ll be more careful next time, I promise,’ he said. ‘Grainger’s given me some excellent suntan lotion.’

  ‘Sunscreen,’ Grainger corrected him irritably. ‘SPF 50.’

  Austin said: ‘I actually meant the natives. The Oasans, as you call them. We’ve been supplying them with basic medicines virtually since we first got here. It’s the only thing they seem to want from us.’ He smirked in deference to Peter’s mission. ‘Well, just about the only thing. But you know, not one of them has ever shown up here for treatment. Not one! Which means not one of them has ever been checked out or diagnosed properly. We would love to know what’s up with them.’