The Book of Strange New Things(56)
He’d been awake for hours, resting his cheek on his upflung arm so that his eyes were in line with the horizon. The sun was rising. It was the end of the long night, his fifth night spent among the Oasans.
Not that he was among the Oasans now, strictly speaking. He was alone on his improvised hammock, strung aloft between two pillars of his church. His church-in-progress. Four walls, four internal pillars, no roof. No contents except for a few tools and coils of rope and vats of mortar and braziers of oil. The braziers of oil were cold now, glimmering in the dawn light. Far from serving any religious purpose? they had a purely practical function – throughout the long dark spell, for the duration of each working ‘day’, they were ignited to throw light on the proceedings, and extinguished again when the last of the Oasans had gone home and ‘Father Pe???er’ was ready to retire.
His congregation were labouring as fast as they could to build this place, but they weren’t here with him today; not yet. They were still asleep, he supposed, in their own houses. Oasans slept a lot; they got tired easily. They’d work for an hour or two, and then, whether the task had been arduous or not, they would go home and rest in bed for a while.
Peter stretched in his hammock, recalling what those beds looked like, glad he wasn’t in one now. They resembled old-fashioned bathtubs, sculpted out of a sort of tough, dense moss, as lightweight as balsa wood. The tubs were lined with many layers of a cotton-like material, swaddling the sleeper in a loose, fluffy cocoon.
Three hundred hours ago, when he first succumbed to tiredness after the great exhilarations of his first day, Peter had been offered such a bed. He’d accepted it, in deference to his hosts’ hospitality, and there had been much ceremonial well-wishing for a good long rest. But he hadn’t been able to sleep.
For one thing, it was daytime, and the Oasans felt no need to darken their bedchambers, positioning their cots right under the brightest sunbeams. He’d climbed in anyway, squinting against the glare, hoping he might lose consciousness through sheer exhaustion. Unfortunately, the bed itself was an obstacle to sleep; the bed, in fact, was insufferable. The fluffy blankets were soon drenched with sweat and vapour, they exuded a sickly coconutty smell, and the tub was slightly too small, even though it was larger than the standard model. He suspected it had been carved specially for him, which made him all the more determined to adjust to it if he could.
But it was no good. As well as the absurd bed and the excessive light, there was also a noise problem. On that first day, there were four Oasans sleeping near him – the four who called themselves Je??u?? Lover One, Je??u?? Lover Fif???y-Four, Je??u?? Lover ??even???y-Eigh??? and Je??u?? Lover ??even???y-Nine – and all four of them breathed very loudly, creating an obnoxious symphony of sucking and gurgling. Their cots were in another room, but Oasan houses had no closeable doors, and he could hear the sleepers’ every breath, every snuffle, every glutinous swallow. In his bed back home, he was used to the barely audible breathing of Bea and an occasional sigh from Joshua the cat, not this kind of racket. Lying in the house of the Oasans, he reconnected with a long-forgotten episode from his past life: the memory of being lured off the street by a charity worker and put in a hostel for rough sleepers, most of them alcoholics and addicts like himself. The memory, too, of sneaking out of there in the middle of the night, back onto the bitter streets, to look for his own quiet space to doss down in.
So: here he was in a hammock, suspended in his half-built church, in the open air, in the absolute desert stillness of the Oasan dawn.
He had slept well and deeply. He’d always been able to sleep outdoors: a legacy of his homeless years, perhaps, when he’d lain comatose in public parks and doorways, lain so still that people would mistake him for a dead body. Without alcohol, it was a bit more difficult to drift off, but not much. The intrusiveness of the vaporous Oasan atmosphere was easier to deal with, he felt, if he surrendered himself to it. Being indoors and yet not truly enclosed was the worst of both worlds. The Oasans’ houses weren’t sealed and air-conditioned like the USIC base; they were ventilated by open windows through which the insidious atmosphere swirled freely. There was something disconcerting about lying tucked up in a bed, and imagining every minute that the surrounding air was lifting the blankets with invisible fingers and slipping in beside you. Much better to lie exposed, wearing nothing but a single cotton garment. After a while, if you were sleepy enough, you felt as though you were reclining in a shallow stream, with the water flowing gently over you.
On waking today, he’d noted that the exposed flesh of his arms was intricately patterned with diamond-shaped welts, the after-impression of the net. It gave him a crocodilian appearance. For a minute or two, until the marks faded, he enjoyed the fantasy of having turned into a lizard-man.
His hosts had taken his rejection of their bed very well. On that first day, several hours after the formal commencement of communal sleep, when Peter had already been sitting upright for a long while, praying, thinking, fidgeting, taking sips from his plastic bottle of water, filling in the time before he dared to offend everyone by escaping outside, he sensed a presence enter his room. It was Jesus Lover One, the Oasan who’d first welcomed him to the settlement. Peter considered pretending to have been jolted out of a deep sleep, but decided that such childish dissembling would fool no one. He smiled and waved hello.
Jesus Lover One walked to the foot of Peter’s cot and stood there, head bowed. He was fully dressed in his blue robe, complete with hood, boots and gloves, his hands clasped in front of his abdomen. The lowered head and the cowl obscured his grisly visage, allowing Peter to imagine human features in that shadowy occlusion.