by Michel Faber
APPROVED. TRANSMITTED, the screen said in a wink.
Thank God for that.
Outside the compound, a rumble of thunder.
Peter prayed.
In every Christian’s life there comes a time when he or she needs to know the precise circumstances under which God is willing to heal the sick. Peter had reached that pass now. Until today, he’d muddled through with the same hodgepodge of faith, medicine and common sense that everyone else in his church back in England was likely to rely on: Drive carefully, take the pills as stated on the package, pour cold water on a scald, get the cyst removed by a surgeon, be mindful that a Christian diabetic needs insulin just as much as an atheist diabetic does, regard a heart attack as a warning, remember that all human beings must die, but remember too that God is merciful and may snatch your life back from the jaws of death if . . . if what? If what?
A few hundred metres from here, confined in a metal cot, lay Lover Five, so small and helpless in that big empty space labelled Intensive Care. Nothing that USIC’s doctors had to offer could fix the rot in her flesh. Amputating her hand would be like cutting the rotten part out of an apple; it was just tidying up the fruit as it died.
But God . . . God could . . . God could what? God could cure cancer, that had been proven many times. An inoperable tumour could, through the power of prayer, miraculously shrink. Sentences of death could be commuted for years, and, although Peter disapproved of charlatan faith-healers, he had seen people wake from supposedly fatal comas, had seen hopelessly premature babies survive, had even seen a blind woman regain her sight. But why did God do it for some Christians and not for others? Such a basic question, too simpleminded for theologians to bother discussing at their synods. But what was the answer? To what extent did God feel bound to respect the laws of biology, letting calcifying bones crumble, poisoned livers succumb to cirrhosis, severed arteries gush blood? And if the laws of biology on Oasis were such that the สีฐฉั couldn’t heal, that the mechanism for healing didn’t even exist, was there any point in praying to God for help?
Dear God, please don’t let Lover Five die.
It was such an infantile prayer, the sort of prayer a five-year-old might pray.
But maybe those were the best kind.
What with the thunder in the skies outside and the rumble of worry in his own head, it was difficult for him to recognise the knocking at his door for what it was. Eventually he opened up.
‘How are you feeling?’ said Grainger, dressed for going out.
Like hell, he almost said. ‘I’m very upset and worried about my friend.’
‘But physically?’
‘Physically?’
‘Are you up for going out with me?’ Her voice was firm and dignified; she was wholly back to normal now. Her eyes were clear, no longer red-rimmed; she didn’t smell of alcohol. In fact, she was beautiful, more beautiful than he’d given her credit for before. As well as her usual driving shawl, she wore a white tunic top with loose sleeves that barely reached past her elbows, exposing the network of scars on her pale forearms to public view. Take me as I am, was the message.
‘We can’t leave Tartaglione to rot,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to bring him back.’
‘He doesn’t want to come back,’ said Peter. ‘He feels utter contempt for everybody here.’
‘He’s just saying that,’ said Grainger, bristling with impatience. ‘I know him. We used to talk. He’s a real interesting guy, very smart and charming. And sociable. He’ll go insane out there.’
A naked bogey-man from medieval depictions of the damned leapt around in Peter’s memory. ‘He’s insane already.’
Grainger’s eyes narrowed. ‘That’s kinda . . . judgemental, wouldn’t you say?’
Peter looked away, too burdened with care to argue. Clumsily, he pretended to be distracted by the demands of unloading the washing machine.
‘Anyway,’ said Grainger, ‘I’ll talk to him, you don’t have to talk to him. Just get him to come out of hiding. Whatever you did last time, do it again.’
‘Well,’ Peter recalled, ‘I was stumbling around in pitch darkness, delirious, convinced I was dying, loudly reciting a paraphrase of Psalm 23. If that’s what it takes, I’m not sure I could . . . uh . . . replicate the conditions.’
She put her hands on her hips, provocatively. ‘So does that mean you’re not willing to give it a shot?’
And so they set off. Not in the delivery jeep Grainger preferred for her drug and food runs, but in the hearse-like station wagon Peter had commandeered, the one with the bed in the back. Grainger took a while to adjust to driving it, sniffing at its unfamiliar smells, fiddling with its unfamiliar controls, wriggling her buttocks on the unfamiliar shape of its seat. She was a creature of habit. All the USIC staff were creatures of habit, he realised now. There wasn’t a reckless adventurer among them: Ella Reinman’s vetting process made sure of that. Maybe he, Peter, was the closest thing to an adventurer they’d ever allowed to come here. Or maybe Tartaglione was the closest. And that’s why he’d gone insane.
‘I figure he’s more likely to show,’ Grainger explained, ‘if the vehicle’s the same. He probably saw you coming for ages.’
‘It was night.’
‘The vehicle would have lit itself up. He could’ve been watching it from a mile away.’
Peter thought this was unlikely. He was more inclined to believe that Tartaglione had been watching the twinkles in his vat of moonshine, watching musty memories slowly decay inside his own skull.
‘What if we don’t find him?’
‘We’ll find him,’ said Grainger, focusing her eyes on the featureless landscape.
‘But what if we don’t?’
She smiled. ‘You gotta have faith.’ The heavens rumbled.
A few minutes later, Peter said, ‘May I check the Shoot?’
Grainger fumbled on the dashboard, not sure where the Shoot was located in this vehicle. A drawer slid out like a tongue, offering two repulsive objects that looked like large mummified slugs but which, at second glance, were mouldy cigars. Another drawer revealed some sheets of printed paper that had turned rainbow colours and shrivelled to a fragile tissue resembling autumn leaves. Evidently, the USIC personnel had made little or no use of Kurtzberg’s hearse since his disappearance. Maybe they regarded it as cursed with bad luck, or maybe they’d made a conscious decision to leave it just as it was, in case the minister came back one day.
Grainger’s fingers found the Shoot at last, and swivelled it over Peter’s lap. He switched it on: everything looked and behaved as it should. He checked for messages from Bea. Nothing. Maybe this particular machine was not configured like the others. Maybe its promise of connection was an illusion. He checked again, reasoning that if Bea had sent a message, a few extra seconds could make all the difference between its not-yet-having-arrived and its arrival.
Nothing.
The sky continued to darken as they drove further. Not exactly black as sackcloth, but certainly ominous. Thunder boomed again.
‘I’ve never seen it like this,’ he said.
Grainger glanced cursorily out the side window. ‘I have,’ she said. Then, sensing his scepticism, she added: ‘I’ve been here longer than you.’ She shut her eyes and breathed deep. ‘Too long.’
‘What happens?’
‘Happens?’
‘When it goes dark like this?’
She sighed. ‘It rains. It just rains. What do you expect? This place is one big anti-climax.’
He opened his mouth to speak. To defend the awesome beauties of this planet, or else to make some comment about the USIC project, he would never know which, because as he opened his lips, a fork of lightning split the sky, the windows flared with a blinding flash, and the vehicle was struck from above as if by a colossal fist.
Shuddering from the bang, the car rolled to a standstill.
‘Jee-zus!’ cried Grainger. She was alive. They were both alive. And not just that: they were ho
lding each other by the arm, squeezing tight. Animal instinct. Embarrassed, they unclasped.
No harm had come to them, not even a hair on their head was singed. The Shoot suspended over Peter’s lap had gone blank, its screen reflecting his own bone-white face. On the dashboard in front of him, all the glowing words and symbols were gone. Grainger reached forward to prompt the ignition and was exasperated to find that the engine failed to revive.
‘That’s not supposed to happen,’ she said. Her eyes were a little wild; she was possibly in shock. ‘Everything should still be working fine.’ She kept turning the ignition, to no avail. Fat raindrops began to splash against the windows.
‘The lightning must have blown something,’ said Peter.
‘Impossible,’ said Grainger. ‘No way.’
‘Grainger, it’s amazing enough that we survived.’
She was having none of it. ‘A car’s the safest place to be in a thunderstorm,’ she insisted. ‘The metal shell acts as a Faraday cage.’ Observing the incomprehension on his face, she added: ‘Grade-school science.’
‘I must have been away from school that day,’ he said, as she examined, prodded and tickled controls and gauges that were clearly dead. The odour of fried circuitry began to seep into the cabin. The downpour clattered against the windows, which fogged up until Peter and Grainger were confined inside an opaque casket.
‘I cannot believe this,’ said Grainger. ‘All of our vehicles are designed to take punishment. They’re built like cars used to be, before people started to load them full of dumb-ass technology that breaks down all the damn time.’ She pulled the headscarf off. Her face was flushed, her neck wet with sweat.
‘We need to think,’ said Peter gently, ‘about what to do.’
She leaned her head back against the seat, stared up at the roof. The patter of the rain beat out a military rhythm, like soldiers from a long-past millennium walking into battle with their snare drums slung on their hips.
‘We’ve only been driving for a few minutes,’ Grainger said. ‘The base may still be in sight.’ Reluctant to step outside the vehicle and get soaked, she twisted round in her seat and tried to look out the back window. There was nothing to see except fogged glass and the bed. She swung open the door, letting in a gleeful swarm of humid air, and hove herself into the rain. She stood next to the car for twenty seconds or more, her clothing trembling and flapping as it got pelted. Then she took her seat again and shut the door.
‘No sign,’ she said. Her tunic was drenched, transparent. Peter could see the delineation of her bra, the points of her nipples. ‘And no sign of C-1, either. We must be exactly halfway.’ She stroked the steering wheel in frustration.
The rain passed over. The sky brightened up, casting pearly light on their bodies. Tendrils of air nudged under Grainger’s sleeves, visibly lifting the sodden fabric, travelling underneath like swollen veins. They penetrated Peter’s clothing, too, slipping inside his T-shirt, up his trouser-cuffs, tickling the hollows of his knees. They were especially keen to get past the tight ruck of denim around his genitals.
‘Walking back would take us an hour,’ said Grainger. ‘Two hours, max.’
‘Have the tyres left tracks in the dirt?’
She went out again to check. ‘Yes,’ she said, on her return. ‘Straight and clear.’ One last time she turned the ignition, casually and without looking at it, as if hoping to trick the engine into performing despite itself.
‘Looks like Tartaglione made a deal with God,’ she said.
They packed carefully for the journey. Grainger filled a tote bag with first-aid provisions. Peter found a mildewed old briefcase of Kurtzberg’s, removed a New Testament which had fused into a solid block, and replaced it with a couple of plastic two-litre bottles of water.
‘I wish there was a shoulder-strap for this,’ he said, testing the briefcase in his grip. ‘These bottles are heavy.’
‘They’ll be lighter as we drink them,’ said Grainger.
‘It’ll rain again, twice, before we’re at the base,’ prophesied Peter.
‘What good will that do us?’
‘You just lift your head and open your mouth,’ he said. ‘That’s how the สีฐฉั – the natives – do it.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Grainger, ‘I’d rather not do it the way the natives do it.’
The outside of the vehicle, they noted, was disfigured with scorch-marks. A web of damage tattooed the hubcabs, and all four tyres had deflated. The vehicle had ceased to be a vehicle and begun its metamorphosis into something else.
Peter and Grainger followed the tyre-tracks back towards the USIC compound. Grainger was a good walker, shorter-legged than her companion but with a brisk enough pace for him not to need to hobble his speed. They covered a decent distance in a short time, and despite the flatness of the land the vehicle grew rapidly smaller in retrospect and then vanished altogether. As they walked on, the tracks became more difficult to discern in the rain-smoothed soil; there was ambiguity between man-made and naturally occurring patterns. The sky’s ominous pall evaporated and the sun shone bright and constant. Grainger took swigs from one of the water bottles; Peter was OK to wait. He was more hungry than thirsty. In fact, the gnaw of appetite distracted him as he walked.
The ground was not the best terrain for progress on foot, but they must have covered two miles at least in the first hour. In the second hour perhaps the same. The USIC base obstinately refused to manifest on the horizon. All traces of their outward journey were by now erased from the soil. They were, of course, hopelessly lost.
‘If we retrace our steps to the car, USIC may send someone to check it out,’ suggested Peter, ‘eventually.’
‘Yeah,’ said Grainger. ‘Eventually. When we’re dead.’
They were both taken aback to hear the word spoken so prematurely. Even though the mistake they’d made hung obvious in the air, there was an etiquette of optimism to be observed.
‘You came to fetch me,’ Peter reminded her.
She laughed out loud at his naivety. ‘That was on my own initiative, it had nothing to do with USIC. Those guys wouldn’t rescue their own mothers. I mean, literally. Why do you think they’re here in the first place? They’re cool, they might as well have SHIT HAPPENS tattooed on their foreheads.’
‘But they’ll notice you’re missing.’
‘Oh, I’m sure. Somebody will come to the pharmacy for a tube of wart-killer and I won’t be there and they’ll think, Hey, no sweat, a few warts ain’t so bad. And when I don’t turn up to test tomorrow’s food, Hey, it’s just a formality, we’ll eat it anyway. Maybe mention it at the next meeting.’
‘I can’t believe they’d be so unconcerned,’ said Peter, but his voice was weakened by uncertainty.
‘I know these guys,’ said Grainger. ‘I know how they operate. They noticed Kurtzberg and Tartaglione were missing – after God knows how long. What did they do? Did they send vehicles out in all directions, driving day and night until they covered every inch of a fifty-mile radius? Forget it, baby. Chill out and read a magazine. Flex a bicep. The fucking world is falling apart and it still doesn’t rate as an emergency. Do you really think they’re gonna panic over us?’
‘I would hope so,’ said Peter.
‘Well, hope is a fine thing,’ she sighed.
They walked further, and began to tire.
‘Maybe we should stop walking,’ said Peter.
‘And do what instead?’
‘Rest a while.’
They sat on the earth and rested a while. Two cotton-wrapped, pink mammals marooned on a dark ocean of soil. Here and there, a few small clumps of whiteflower grew, sweating in the sunshine. Peter reached out to one near his foot, plucked off a fragment and put it in his mouth. It tasted bad. How strange that a substance which, when ingeniously processed, cooked and seasoned, could be delicious in so many ways, should be so unpleasant in its pure form.
‘Enjoying that?’ said Grainger.
; ‘Not much,’ he said.
‘I’ll wait till we’re back at the base,’ she said, lightly. ‘Good menu today. Chicken curry and ice cream.’ She smiled, willing him to forgive her earlier lapse of morale.
Not much refreshed, they walked on. And on. Grainger had drunk half a water bottle by now, and Peter drank his fill direct from the sky when, just as he’d foretold, another rain-shower drenched them.
‘Hey!’ called Grainger as he swayed erect and awkward, his head tilted back, Adam’s apple bobbing, mouth wide open to the downpour. ‘You look like a turkey!’
Peter put on a grin, as Grainger’s comment was clearly meant in fun, but he felt his grin falter as he realised that he’d forgotten what turkeys looked like. All his life he’d known, starting from the first day his parents had shown him a picture of one in a book. Now, in his brain’s storehouse, where so many Bible passages lay spotlit ready for quoting, he searched for a picture to go with ‘turkey’, and there was none to be found.
Grainger noticed. Noticed and was not pleased.
‘You don’t remember, do you?’ she said, as they sat down together once more. ‘You’ve forgotten what a turkey looks like.’
He confessed with a nod, caught out like a naughty child. Until now, only Bea had ever been able to guess what he was thinking.
‘Mental blank,’ he said.
‘That’s what happens,’ said Grainger, solemn and intense. ‘That’s what this place is about, that’s how it works. It’s like one huge dose of Propanolol, erasing everything we ever knew. You mustn’t let them break you.’
Her sudden vehemence discomfited him. ‘I . . . I’m probably just . . . absent-minded.’
‘That’s what you’ve gotta watch,’ she said, hugging her knees, contemplating the empty tundra ahead of them. ‘Absence. The slow, insidious . . . disposal of everything. Listen: you wanna know what got discussed at the last USIC personnel meeting? Besides technical stuff and the bad smell in the loading bay behind H wing? I’ll tell you: whether we really need all those pictures hanging in the hallways. They’re just a dusting and cleaning problem, right? An old photo of a city on earth somewhere, way back when, with a bunch of guys eating lunch on a steel girder, it’s cute but we’ve seen it a million times walking past it, it gets old, and anyway those guys are all dead, it’s like being made to look at a bunch of dead people, so enough already. Blank walls: clean and simple: end of story.’