The Book of Strange New Things(164)

A voice in his head said: You are going to die here, in this wilderness. You will never see Beatrice again. This flat terrain, these sparse clumps of whiteflower, this alien sky, these insects waiting to lay eggs in your flesh, this woman at your side: they are the contents of your life in its final days and hours. The voice spoke clearly, without accent or gender: he’d heard it many times before, and always been certain it was not his own. As a child, he’d thought it was the voice of conscience; as a Christian, he’d trusted it was the voice of God. Whatever it was, it had always told him exactly what he needed to be told.

‘What’s your earliest memory?’ Grainger asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, after giving it thought. ‘My mum strapping me into a special plastic child seat at a Turkish restaurant, maybe. It’s hard to know what’s a real memory and what’s something you construct afterwards from old photos and family stories.’

‘Oh, don’t be like that,’ she said, in the same tone she might have used if he’d declared that love was merely a meeting of sperm and ovum. ‘Tuska’s big on that idea. No such thing as childhood memories, he says. We’re just playing games with our neurons every day, tossing them around the hippocampus, constructing little fairy tales featuring characters named after people we used to live with. “Your dad is just a flurry of molecular activity in your frontal lobe,” he’ll tell you, grinning that smug grin of his. Asshole.’

She held out her hand. Peter wasn’t sure what she wanted him to do. Then he handed her the water bottle. She drank some. There wasn’t much left.

‘My dad,’ she continued, ‘used to smell of gunpowder. We lived on a farm, in Illinois. He was always shooting rabbits. They were just bugs to him, big furry bugs. I’d ride around on my bicycle, and there’d be dead rabbits everywhere. Then later he’d sweep me up in his arms and I’d smell the gunpowder on his shirt.’

‘A very . . . uh . . . mixed-emotion sort of memory,’ said Peter carefully.

‘It’s a real memory, that’s the important thing. The farm was real, the dead rabbits were real, the smell on my father’s shirt was gunpowder and not tobacco or paint or aftershave. I know, I was there.’ She spoke defiantly, as if doubt had been cast on whether she was there, as if there was a conspiracy among the USIC personnel to reinvent her as a city kid from Los Angeles, the daughter of a Ukrainian dentist, a German Chinese. Two more insects had settled on her, one on her hair, the other on her bosom. She paid them no mind.

‘What happened to your farm?’ asked Peter, for politeness’ sake, when it became evident that the conversation had stalled.

‘Get the f*ck out of my face!’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands to her eyes.

He jerked back, prepared to apologise profusely for whatever he’d said to enrage her, but she wasn’t addressing him. She wasn’t even addressing the insects. With a cry of disgust, she cast a glittering shred first from one eye, then the other. Her contact lenses.

‘The damn air,’ she said. ‘It was trying to get under my contacts, lifting them up at the edges. Creeped me out.’ She blinked. One discarded hydrogel petal was stuck to her shoe, the other lay on the soil. ‘I shouldn’t have done that; my eyesight is not good. You might end up leading me along. Where were we?’

With effort, Peter retrieved the thread of the narrative. ‘You were going to tell me what happened to the farm.’

She rubbed her eyes, experimented with looking out of them. ‘We went broke,’ she said. ‘The farm got sold and we moved to Decatur. We were in Bethany before, we weren’t that far out, but we got ourselves a maisonette in the city, right near the Sangamon River. Well, not like walking distance or anything. But a short drive.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Peter. He realised, with a deep pang of melancholy, that he was not in the least interested. So much for being a people person . . . If he survived, if he got back to civilisation, his career as a minister was over. The minutiae of human beings’ lives – the places they’d lived, the names of their relatives, the names of the rivers they’d lived near, the mundane complexities of the jobs they’d done and the domestic squabbles they’d endured – had ceased to have any meaning for him.

‘Decatur is kind of a boring place now,’ reflected Grainger. ‘But it’s got some pretty amazing history. It used to be called the Soybean Capital of the World. You’ve heard of Abraham Lincoln?’

‘Of course. Most famous of all American presidents.’

She exhaled gratefully, as if they had struck a blow against ignorance together, as if they were the only two educated people in a colony of philistines. ‘Lincoln lived in Decatur, way back in the 1700s or whenever. He was a lawyer then. He became president later. There’s a statue of him with his bare foot on a stump. I sat on that stump when I was a little girl. I didn’t think it was disrespectful or anything; I was just tired.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Peter. Insects were settling on him now, too. In a week or so – maybe in a few days – the two of them would be seedbeds. Maybe, when the time came for them to breathe their last, they should be lying in each other’s arms.

‘I loved what you said at the funeral,’ she said.

‘The funeral?’

‘Severin’s funeral. You made him so real. And I didn’t even like him.’