The Book of Strange New Things(137)
I start back at work tomorrow. Rebecca tells me that Goodman has gone on holiday! Is that good news or what! And my hand has healed up very nicely. There was still some tingling in the nerves before but that’s completely gone now.
I went out to the supermarket today and there was more stock on the shelves than there’s been for ages. I remarked on it to the manager and he gave me such a smile. ‘We aim to please,’ he said. I suddenly realised what a nightmare he’s been living through; it’s only a lousy supermarket but it’s his baby. Speaking of which – did I already mention No Morning Sickness? Just cravings, cravings, cravings. But in the supermarket, I scored – wait for it (I certainly have!) – a chocolate dessert! I suppose it’s kind of trivial to claim that God delivers chocolate when you really, really want it. But maybe he does.
Chocolate and cashmere pullovers. Weirdly exotic things they seemed to him, under the vast sky of Oasis, observing the incremental progress of ? from horizon to horizon. And of course he’d been reminded of Matthew 6:25 when he’d read Bea’s letter. But he knew she was touchy lately and might not appreciate being reminded of Jesus’s cautions against getting too concerned with food and clothes. The main thing was that she felt encouraged and restored. She’d been in danger of slipping adrift from God’s protection and now she was back in it. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lord, he prayed. He trusted she was doing the same.
USIC had promised him that they would build a transmitter for Shoot access right near his church very soon, maybe even before his next visit to C-2. So this was the last time he would be out in the field without the chance to share his day-to-day impressions with Bea. Once the Shoot was in place, neither of them would be unreachable anymore.
Bea’s mention of Claire and Keith troubled him slightly. He couldn’t remember ever having met them. Were they members of the church, or acquaintances from somewhere else? People from Bea’s hospital? She spoke as though their identity didn’t need explaining. Claire, apparently, had a body almost identical to Bea’s. He strained to recall seeing his wife standing next to another female who looked very similar. A woman in a lilac cashmere pullover. Nothing came.
Jesus Lover Nine padded over to him, cradling a small pot of whiteflower sweetmeats. She angled the pot forwards, to indicate: have some. He took one. It was delicious but marinaded in a saucy paste that left dark brown marks on the fingers. Lover Nine’s gloves were filthy; they would need washing when she got home. Her robe was grubby, too. Quite a few of the ????? were a bit soiled today, because before the language lesson they’d been digging a hole for the transmitter.
Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these, he thought.
The communion came to an end, and the ????? went back to their homes, and Peter went into his church and slept for a spell. How long? A while, a while. He’d lost touch with whether it was technically day or night or ‘2200 plus’ or whatever stupid formula the USIC people expected him to use, but he was attuned to the rhythms of the ????? by now and when he awoke he had a sense that it must be very early morning and it probably was.
A shaft of light illuminated his lower body, emphasising the sharp contours of his pelvis and the concave valley under his ribcage. He was all bone and sinew, like a dancer or an inmate of a concentration camp. The taut flesh pulsed with his heartbeat. He wasn’t hungry, though. Just thirsty. The light was flickering on his abdomen. Why was it flickering? Rain must be on the way. He decided to leave the water bottle untouched by his pillow and to wait for the heavens to open instead.
Outside, naked, he stood watching, his hair flapping with the force of what was approaching. It would be a particularly heavy downpour, he could tell. Four gigantic bodies of water, stacked in a vast pyramidal formation, rolled forwards, constantly threatening to merge into one but somehow remaining discrete. Three of them swirled in slow, stately fashion and the fourth spun with centrifugal frenzy. Best to hold tight to something. He braced himself against the wall.
When the deluge hit, it was exhilarating but also scary. The wind rushed past him through the church and he heard the thump and clatter of loose objects being thrown about. One gust almost lifted him off his feet. But the rain was cool and clean and luxurious. He opened his mouth and let it pour in. He felt as though he was diving and swimming – and surfacing, always surfacing – without having to move a muscle.
When it was over, he was dazed and numb and unsteady on his feet. A cursory inspection of the church interior showed no serious damage. Jesus Lover Seventeen’s painting, a recent arrival he hadn’t yet had time to attach to the ceiling, had been hurled across the floor and the edges of its cloth were frayed, but the picture was unharmed. An Expressionist still-life of a flower, he’d thought at first, but no: what he’d perceived as flower-petals was a circle of robed figures bent backwards in astonishment, and what he’d perceived as the stamen was a man growing from the ground: Lazarus.
He stowed the painting back behind the pulpit, ready for hanging. The rainburst had left him pleasantly sated, and his natural inclination was to lie down and allow his skin to tingle for a while. But he knew there was work to be done. Not the Lord’s work, but manual labour. The whiteflower fields would be sodden, and within a couple of hours many of the plants would have swelled to maturity, while others would be in danger of collapsing into sludge. The time to act was now.
‘God ble?? our reunion, Father Pe???er.’