The Book of Strange New Things(18)
Shoot through space, little light beams, and bounce off all the right satellites to reach the woman I love! But how can these words, translated into blinks of binary code, travel so impossibly far? I won’t quite believe it until I get a reply from you. If I can be granted that one small miracle, all the others will follow, I’m sure.
Love,
Peter
He slept, and awoke to the sound of rain.
For a long time he lay in the dark, too weary to stir, listening. The rain sounded different from rain back home. Its intensity waxed and waned in a rapid cyclical rhythm, three seconds at most between surges. He synchronised the fluctuations with his own breathing, inhaling when the rain fell softer, exhaling when it fell hard. What made the rain do that? Was it natural, or was it caused by the design of the building: a wind-trap, an exhaust fan, a faulty portal opening and closing? Could it be something as mundane as his own window flapping in the breeze? He could see no further than the slats of the Venetian blind.
Eventually his curiosity got the better of his fatigue. He staggered out of bed, fumbled for the bathroom light, was momentarily blinded by halogen overkill. He squinted at his watch, the only item of apparel he’d kept on when he’d gone to bed. He’d slept . . . how long? . . . only seven hours . . . unless he’d slept thirty-one. He checked the date. No, only seven. What had woken him? His erection, perhaps.
The bathroom was in all respects identical to a bathroom one might expect to find in a hotel, except that the toilet, instead of employing a flush mechanism, was the kind that sucked out its contents in a whoosh of compressed air. Peter pissed slowly and with some discomfort, waiting for his penis to unstiffen. His urine was dark orange. Alarmed, he filled a glass with water from the tap. The liquid was pale green. Clean and transparent, but pale green. Stuck to the wall above the sink was a printed notice: COLOR OF WATER IS GREEN. THIS IS NORMAL AND CERTIFIED SAFE. IF IN DOUBT, BOTTLED WATER & SOFT DRINKS ARE AVAILABLE, SUBJECT TO AVAILABILITY, FROM USIC STORE, $50 PER 300ml.
Peter stared at the glass of green liquid, parched but wary. All those stories of British tourists drinking foreign water while on holiday and getting poisoned. Delhi belly and all that. Two reassuring Scripture quotations came to his mind, ‘Take no thought for what ye shall drink’ from Matthew 6:25 and ‘To the pure, all things are pure’ from Titus 1:15, but those were clearly meant for other contexts. He looked again at the placard for the bottled alternative: $50 PER 300ml. Out of the question. He and Bea had already discussed what they would do with the money he earned on this mission. Pay off their mortgage. Rebuild the nursery room of their church so the children had more light and sunshine. Buy a van adapted for wheel-chairs. The list went on and on. Every dollar he spent here would cross something worthwhile off it. He lifted the glass and drank.
It tasted good. Divine, in fact. Was that a blasphemous thought? ‘Oh, give it a rest,’ Beatrice would no doubt advise him. ‘There are more important things in the world to fret about.’ What things might there be to fret about in this world? He would find out soon enough. He stood up, flushed the toilet, drank more of the green water. It tasted ever-so-slightly of honeydew melon, or maybe he was imagining that.
Still naked, he walked to the bedroom window. There must be a way of raising the blind, even though there were no switches or buttons in sight. He felt around the edges of the slats, and his fingers snagged in a cord. He tugged on it and the blind lifted. It occurred to him as he continued pulling on the cord that he might be exposing his nakedness to anyone who happened to be passing by, but it was too late to worry about that now. The window – one large pane of Plexiglass – was wholly revealed.
Outside, darkness still ruled. The area surrounding the USIC airport complex was a wasteland, a dead zone of featureless bitumen, dismal shed-like buildings, and spindly steel lamps. It was like a supermarket car park that went on for ever. And yet Peter’s heart pumped hard, and he breathed shallowly in his excitement. The rain! The rain wasn’t falling in straight lines, it was . . . dancing! Could one say that about rainfall? Water had no intelligence. And yet, this rainfall swept from side to side, hundreds of thousands of silvery lines all describing the same elegant arcs. It was nothing like when rain back home was flung around erratically by gusts of wind. No, the air here seemed calm, and the rain’s motion was graceful, a leisurely sweeping from one side of the sky to the other – hence the rhythmic spattering against his window.
He pressed his forehead to the glass. It was blessedly cool. He realised he was running a slight fever, wondered if he was hallucinating the curvature of the rainfall. Peering out into the dark, he made an effort to focus on the hazes of light around the lampposts. Inside these halo-like spheres of illumination, the raindrops were picked out bright as tinfoil confetti. Their sensuous, undulating pattern could not be clearer.
Peter stepped back from the window. His reflection was ghostly, criss-crossed by the unearthly rain. His normally rosy-cheeked, cheerful face had a haunted look, and the tungsten glow of a distant lamppost blazed inside his abdomen. His genitals had the sculptured, alabaster appearance of Greek statuary. He raised his hand, to break the spell, to reorient himself to his own familiar humanity. But it might as well have been a stranger waving back.
My dear Beatrice,
No word from you. I feel as though I’m literally suspended – as though I can’t let out my breath until I have proof that we can communicate with each other. I once read a Science Fiction story in which a young man travelled to an alien planet, leaving his wife behind. He was only away for a few weeks and then he returned to Earth. But the punchline of the story was that Time passed at a different rate for her than it did for him. So when he got back home, he discovered that 75 earth years had sped by, and his wife had died the week before. He arrived just in time to attend the funeral, and all the old folks were wondering who this distraught young man might be. It was a cheesy, run-of-the-mill Sci-Fi tale but I read it when I was at an impressionable age and it really got to me. And of course now I’m scared it will come true. BG, Severin and Tuska have all been to Oasis & back several times over the years and I suppose I should take that as proof that you’re not wrinkling up like a prune! (Although I would still love you if you did!)