The Book of Strange New Things (62 page)

‘Hey, I wasn’t serious about the anti-delusional medication,’ she joked as he approached.
Don’t mention what I said in the infirmary
, her eyes pleaded.

‘I need your help,’ he said.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘At least not with me.’

It was a moment before he realised she was referring to driving, to chauffeuring him somewhere that wasn’t good for his health.

‘I just tried to send a message to my wife,’ he said, ‘and it’s been blocked. I’ve got to get through. Please.’

She put down the pencil, closed the folder.

‘Don’t worry, Peter, I can fix it,’ she said. ‘Probably. Depends on how bad a boy you’ve been.’

She stood up, and he noted once again that she wasn’t very tall. Yet at this moment, he felt smaller still; he was the little boy who’d let his brand-new bicycle get stolen, he was the pitiful disgrace slumped on a vomit-stained sofa in the Salford Pentecost Powerhouse, he was the fumbling missionary who’d reached the end of his rope – and each of these Peters could only throw himself on the mercy of a long-suffering female, a mother who might reassure him that he was more valuable than any expensive gift, a wife who might reassure him that he could break a sacred promise and still be loved, a friend who might be able to pull him out of his latest crisis. When it came down to it, it was not Jesus but these women on whose mercy he threw himself, and who must decide if he’d finally gone too far.

His room, when they entered it together, was a mess. His knapsack, filthy from its trips to the field, lay in the middle of the floor, surrounded by loose balls of wool that had fallen off the chair. Loose pills were scattered across the table next to the upended medication bottle and Grainger’s note about what to take if needed, which was odd as he couldn’t remember opening the bottle. His bed was in a shameful state: the bedsheets were so tangled it looked as though he’d been wrestling in them.

Grainger ignored the chaos, sat in his chair and read the letter he’d written to Bea. Her face betrayed no emotion, although her lips twitched once or twice. Maybe she wasn’t a strong reader, and was tempted to mouth the words? He stood at her side, and waited.

‘I’ll need your permission to change this,’ she said when she’d finished.

‘Change it?’

‘Remove a few . . . problematic statements. To get it past Springer.’

‘
Springer
?’ Peter had assumed that whatever had blocked his message was automated, some sort of computer program which sifted language brainlessly. ‘You mean Springer has been reading all my letters?’

‘It’s his job,’ said Grainger. ‘One of his jobs. We multi-task here, as you may have noticed. There are several personnel who check the Shoots. I’m pretty sure right now it’s Springer.’

He stared down at her. There was no shame or guilt or defensiveness on her weary face. She was merely informing him of a detail from the USIC duty roster.

‘You take it in
turns
to read my private letters?’

Only now did it appear to register on her that there might, in some people’s universe, be anything odd about this arrangement. ‘Is that such a big deal?’ she brazened. ‘Doesn’t God read your thoughts?’

He opened his mouth to protest, but couldn’t speak.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, in a down-to-business tone. ‘You want this message sent. So let’s do it.’ She scrolled through his words. ‘The stuff about USIC censoring the magazines has to go,’ she said, pecking at the keyboard with her stubby nails. Letter by letter, the words ‘And even those are censored’, and the twenty after that, disappeared from the screen. ‘Ditto the stuff about the world ending.’ More pecks. She stared at the glowing text, evaluating her amendments. One or two more words caught her eye and she eliminated them. Her eyes were bloodshot and she seemed sad beyond her years. ‘No end of the world,’ she murmured, in a gently scolding tone. ‘Uh-
uh
.’

Satisfied with what she’d done, she pressed the transmission button. The text trembled on the screen while, elsewhere in the compound, another pair of tired eyes examined it. Then it vanished.

‘Another five thousand bucks down the hatch,’ said Grainger, with a shrug.

‘Sorry?’

‘Each of your Shoots costs about five thousand dollars to send,’ she said. ‘And each of your wife’s also, of course, to receive.’ She wiped her face with her hands, breathing deeply, trying to suck much-needed energy from her own palms. ‘Another reason why the personnel here aren’t communicating daily with a bunch of pals back home.’

Peter tried to do a mental calculation. Maths wasn’t his strong suit, but he knew the number was appallingly big. ‘Nobody told me,’ he said.

‘We were told not to tell you,’ she said. ‘No expense spared for the missionary man.’

‘But why?’

‘USIC wanted you real bad,’ said Grainger. ‘You were, like, our first VIP.’

‘I never asked . . . ’

‘You didn’t need to ask. My . . . guidelines were to give you anything you wanted. Within reason. Because, you know, before you came, things were getting kinda . . . strained.’

‘Things?’ He couldn’t imagine what things. A spiritual crisis amongst the USIC personnel?

‘Our food supply got cut off for a while. No more whiteflower from our little friends.’ Grainger smirked sourly. ‘They come across so meek and mild, don’t they? But they can be very determined when they want to be. We promised them a replacement for Kurtzberg, but they thought it was too slow in coming. I guess Ella Reinman was ploughing through a million priests and pastors, poking them to see what was inside, then flunking them. Next pastor please! What’s your favourite fruit? How much would you miss Philadelphia? Frying ducklings alive – OK or not OK? What would it take to make you lose patience with my stupid questions and wring my scrawny neck?’ Grainger’s hands mimed the action, her thumbs crushing her interrogator’s windpipe. ‘Meanwhile in Freaktown, our little friends couldn’t wait. They flexed the only muscle they could flex, to make USIC hurry up and find you.’ Observing the bemusement on his face, she nodded, to signal that he must stop wasting energy on incredulity and just believe.

‘How bad did it get?’ said Peter. ‘I mean, did you starve?’

Grainger was annoyed by the question. ‘Of course we didn’t starve. It just got . . .
expensive
for a while. More expensive than you wanna think about.’

He tried to think about it and discovered she was right.

‘The stand-off wouldn’t have been such a big deal,’ she went on, ‘if only we could grow stuff ourselves. God knows we’ve tried. Wheat. Corn. Maize. Hemp. Every seed known to man has gone into this soil. But what comes up is not impressive. Vanity farming, you could call it. And of course we tried growing whiteflower too, but it was the same story. A few bulbs here, a few bulbs there. Like cultivating orchids. We just can’t figure out how those guys get it to grow in large amounts. What the hell do they fertilise it with? Fairy dust, I guess.’

She fell silent, still seated in front of the Shoot. She’d spoken in a dull, enervated tone, as though it was a stale subject, a humiliation too pathetic and tedious to revisit yet again. Gazing down at her face, he wondered how long it had been – how many years – since she had been truly, deeply happy.

‘I want to thank you,’ he said, ‘for helping me. I was in . . . a bad state. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

She didn’t take her eyes off the screen. ‘Got somebody else to help you, I guess.’

‘I don’t just mean the message. I mean, coming to find me. As you said, I could have died.’

She sighed. ‘It actually takes a lot for someone to die. The human body is designed not to quit. But yeah, I was worried about you, driving off like that when you were sick.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘That part wasn’t difficult. All our vehicles have collars with bells on, if you get my drift. The tough part was getting you into my car, ’cause you weren’t rousable. I had to wrap you in a blanket and drag you along the ground. And I’m not strong.’

The vision of what she’d done for him flared up in his mind, even though he had no memory of it. He wished he had a memory of it. ‘Oh, Grainger . . . ’

She stood up abruptly.

‘You really love her, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Your wife.’

‘Yes. I really love her.’

She nodded. ‘I thought so.’

He wanted to embrace her, hesitated. She turned away.

‘Write her as much as you want,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the cost. USIC can afford it. And anyway, you saved our bacon. And our chicken, and our bread, and our custard, and our cinnamon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

From behind, he laid his hands on her shoulders, aching to let her know how he felt. Without looking round, she took hold of his hands with her own, and pulled them hard against her chest, not as low as the bosom, but near the sternum, where her heart beat.

‘And remember,’ she said. ‘When you mention USIC, keep it nice. No accusations, no end of the world.’

I’ll be back
, he’d told Flores, just to shut her up, just to smooth his getaway, but now that he had a chance to think it over, a promise ought to be a promise. Grainger was gone now, the message to Bea was sent. He should find out what Dr Austin had on his mind.

He showered, washed his hair, massaged his scabby scalp. The water swirling around his feet was brownish, gurgling down the plughole like tea. On his two admissions to the USIC infirmary he must have introduced more bacteria into their sterile environment than they’d encountered in all the years previous. It’s a wonder they didn’t dunk him in a vat of disinfectant the size of Tartaglione’s booze bath before consenting to treat him.

Shower finished, he dried himself carefully. The cannula puncture had already healed up. Various scratches from earlier on were crusted over. The bite wound on his arm was doing nicely; the one on his leg stung a bit, and looked a bit swollen, but if it got worse a quick course of antibiotics would fix it. He replaced the bandages and dressed in jeans and T-shirt. His dishdasha was so rank from Tartaglione’s hooch that he considered giving up on it, but he stuffed it in the washing machine instead. The
CONSERVE WATER – COULD THIS LOAD BE HAND-WASHED?
placard was still in place, complete with its
ARE YOU OFFERING, LADY?
addendum. He half-expected the graffiti to have been erased by some routine intruder, some multi-tasking engineer or electrician assigned to inspect everybody’s rooms for stuff that might offend the USIC ethos. Nothing would surprise him now.

‘Good to see you,’ said Austin, appraising Peter’s conventional attire with obvious approval. ‘You’re looking much better.’

‘I’m sure I
smell
better,’ said Peter. ‘I’m sorry I stank up your surgery.’

‘Couldn’t be helped,’ breezed the doctor. ‘Alcohol is evil stuff.’ That was as close as he was going to come to mentioning Grainger’s unprofessional insobriety. ‘You’re walking a bit stiffly,’ he observed, as the two of them moved from the doorway into the consulting room. ‘How are your injuries?’

‘They’re fine. I’m just not used to wearing clothes – these sorts of clothes – anymore.’

Austin smiled insincerely, no doubt adjusting his professional assessment of how well Peter was doing. ‘Yes, there are days
I
quite fancy coming to work naked,’ he joked, ‘but the feeling passes.’

Peter smiled in return. One of his flashes of pastoral instinct, like the one he’d had about Lover One’s inconsolable sadness, came to him now: this doctor, this ruggedly good-looking New Zealand male, this man called Austin, had never had a sexual relationship with anyone.

‘I want to thank you,’ said Austin, ‘for taking our conversation seriously.’

‘Conversation?’

‘About the natives’ health. About getting them to come to us so we can check them out, diagnose what they’re dying of. Obviously you’ve been spreading the word.’ And he smiled again, to acknowledge the unintended evangelical meaning of the phrase. ‘At long last, one of them has.’

Long last
. Peter thought of the distance between the USIC base and the สีฐฉั settlement, the time it took to drive there, the time it would take to walk. ‘Oh my . . . gosh,’ he said. ‘It’s so
far
.’

‘No, no,’ Austin reassured him. ‘Remember Conway? Your Good Samaritan? Apparently he wasn’t satisfied with the signal strength of some doodad he installed at your church. So he went there again, and lo and behold – he came back with a passenger. A . . . friend of yours, I gather.’

‘Friend?’

Austin extended his hand, motioned towards the corridor. ‘Come with me. He’s in intensive care.’

The term stuck a cold spike into Peter’s guts. He followed Austin out of the room, down the hallway a few steps, and into another room marked ‘
ICU
’.

Only one patient lay in the spotless twelve-bed facility. Tall IV drip stands, gleaming new and with transparent plastic sheaths still hugging their aluminium stems, stood sentinel by each empty bed. The lone patient wasn’t hooked to a drip, nor was he attached to any other tentacles of medical technology. He sat erect against pillows, tucked up to the waist in pure white linen, his faceless, hairless kernel of head-flesh unhooded. In the great rectangle of mattress, designed to accommodate American bodies the size of BG’s, he looked pathetically small. His robe and gloves had been replaced with a thin cotton hospital gown, pale grey-green like stale broccoli, the colour Peter associated with Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, but that didn’t mean he
was
Jesus Lover Twenty-Three, of course. With a shame so intense it was close to panic, Peter realised he had no way of knowing who this was. All he knew was that the สีฐฉั’s right hand was wrapped in a bulbous mitten of white gauze. In the left hand, he clutched a shabby toiletries bag – no, it wasn’t a bag, it was . . . a Bible pamphlet, one of Peter’s hand-sewn assemblages. The paper had been dampened and dried so many times it had the texture of leather; the loose strands of wool were yellow and pink.

Seeing Peter enter, the สีฐฉั cocked his head to one side, as if puzzled by the minister’s bizarrely unfamiliar raiment.