The Book of Strange New Things(135)

‘Breakfast’ was ‘???? ???? ??’ – literally, ‘first food after sleep’. A great many ????? words were composites of other words. Or maybe they were phrases, it was hard to tell. The ????? made no distinction. Did that mean they were vague? Well, yes and no. He got the impression there was a word for every thing – but just one. Poets would have a hard time here. And a single word might refer to an activity, a concept and a location all in one, as in ????, which referred to the whiteflower fields, whiteflower in general, and the farming of the crop. Pronouns didn’t exist; you just repeated the noun. You repeated a lot of things.

‘????? ????’ he asked Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight one day, proud that he could manage ‘Your child?’ in the ????? language. A small person, clearly not yet mature, was dawdling near the church, waiting for her to finish her worship and return home.

‘?,’ she confirmed.

Observing the child, he felt sad that there were no children in his congregation. The Jesus Lovers were all grown-ups.

‘Why don’t you keep him by your side?’ he asked. ‘He’s welcome to join us.’

Ten, twenty, thirty seconds went by while they stood there, watching the child watch them. A breeze fluttered the boy’s cowl, and he raised his tiny hands to adjust it.

‘He no love Je??u??,’ Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight said.

‘He doesn’t have to,’ said Peter. ‘He could just sit with you, listen to the singing. Or sleep.’

More time passed. The boy stared down at his boots, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

‘He no love Je??u??,’ Jesus Lover Twenty-Eight said.

‘Maybe in the future.’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I hope.’ And she walked out of the church into the shimmering heat. Mother and son fell into step without a word. They didn’t hold hands, but then ????? seldom did.

How much did her child’s lack of Christian fellowship grieve her? How contemptuous or tolerant was this boy of his mother’s faith? Peter couldn’t tell. And asking Lover Twenty-Eight about it probably wouldn’t yield much insight. The lack of self-absorption he’d noted in these people from the outset went deep into the language itself: there were no words for most of the emotions that humans devoted endless energy to describing. The sort of intimate confab that longtime girlfriends indulged in, analysing whether a feeling was True Love or merely lust, affection, infatuation, habit, dysfunction, blah blah blah, was inconceivable here. He couldn’t even be sure if there was a word for anger, or if ‘??????’ merely denoted disappointment, or a neutral recognition that life wasn’t turning out as planned. As for ‘???’, the word for faith . . . its meaning was not what you’d call precise. Faith, hope, intention, objective, desire, plan, wish, the future, the road ahead . . . these were all the same thing, apparently.

Learning the language, Peter understood better how his new friends’ souls functioned. They lived almost wholly in the present, focusing on the tasks at hand. There was no word for yesterday except ‘ye?????erday’. This didn’t mean the ????? had a poor memory; they just lived with memory differently. If someone dropped a dish and broke it, they would remember next day that the dish was broken, but rather than reliving the incident when the dish fell, they would be preoccupied with the need to make a new dish. Locating a past event in measured time was something they could do with great effort, as a special favour, but Peter could tell they didn’t see the point. Why should it matter exactly how many days, weeks, months or years ago a relative had died? A person was either living amongst them or in the ground.

‘Do you miss your brother?’ he asked Jesus Lover Five.

‘Brother here.’

‘I mean the one that died. The one that’s . . . in the ground.’

She remained utterly still. If she’d had eyes he could recognise, he suspected she would be staring at him blankly.

‘Do you feel pain that he is in the ground?’

‘He feel no pain in the ground,’ she said. ‘Before he go in the ground, he feel pain. Big, very big pain.’

‘But you? Do you feel pain? Not in your body, but in your spirit? Thinking of him, being dead?’

She shuddered gently. ‘I feel pain,’ she conceded after half a minute or so. ‘I feel pain.’

It was like a guilty triumph, extracting this confession from her. He knew that the ????? felt deep emotions, including grief; he sensed it. They weren’t solely practical organisms. They couldn’t be, or they wouldn’t have such an intense need for Christ.

‘Have you ever wished you were dead, Jesus Lover Five?’ He knew her real name now, and could even make a fair stab at pronouncing it, but she’d let him know that she preferred him to call her by her Christian honorific. ‘I have,’ he went on, hoping for a breakthrough in rapport. ‘At various bad times in my life. Sometimes the pain is so great, we feel it would be better not to be alive.’

She was silent for a long while. ‘Be???er be alive,’ she said at last, staring down at one of her gloved hands as if it contained a profound secret. ‘Dead no good. Alive good.’

Getting to grips with the language brought him no closer to understanding the origins of ????? civilisation. The ????? never alluded to what had happened in their collective past and appeared to have no concept of ancient history – their own or anyone else’s. For example, they either didn’t grasp, or considered irrelevant, the fact that Jesus walked the earth several thousand years ago; it might as well have been last week.