The Book of Strange New Things(75)
‘Listen to your heart beat,’ said Peter. ‘Feel the ever-so-slight tremor inside your chest as your body miraculously keeps functioning. It’s such a gentle tremor, such a quiet sound, that we don’t appreciate how much it matters. We may not have been always aware of it, we may scarcely have given it a thought from day to day, but we were sharing the world with Art Severin, and he was sharing it with us. Now the sun has come up on a new day, and Art Severin has changed. We are here today to face up to that change.’
The mourners numbered fifty-two. Peter wasn’t sure how big a proportion of the total USIC staff this was. There were only six women, including Grainger; the rest were males, making Peter wonder if Severin had failed to win the respect of his female colleagues, or whether this simply reflected the gender distribution of the base. Everyone was dressed in the clothes they might usually wear at work. Nobody wore black.
BG and Tuska stood in the forefront of the crowd. Tuska, clad in a loose green shirt, military camouflage trousers and his trademark tennis shoes, was nevertheless almost unrecognisable, having shaved off his beard. BG was unmistakable as ever, the biggest body in the room, his facial hair maintained with scalpel-fine precision. A white T-shirt clung to his musculature like paint. A wrinkled white sirwal hung off his hips, its cuffs puddling over incongruous polished shoes. His arms were folded across his chest, his face composed and imperiously tolerant. A few people in the ranks behind him were looking more quizzical, nudged off-balance by the eulogy’s opening salvo.
‘Arthur Laurence Severin died young,’ said Peter, ‘but he lived many lives. He was born in Bend, Oregon, forty-eight years ago, to parents he never knew, and was adopted by Jim and Peggy Severin. They gave him a happy and active childhood, mostly in the open air. Jim repaired and maintained campsites, hunting lodges and military outposts. Art could drive a tractor by the time he was ten, operate a chainsaw, shoot deer, all that dangerous stuff that kids shouldn’t be allowed to do. He was all set to take over the family business. Then his adoptive parents divorced and Art started getting into trouble. His teenage years were spent in and out of juvenile corrective institutions and rehabilitation programmes. By the time he was old enough to go to jail, he already had a long record of crack cocaine abuse and DUI offences.’
The mourners were not so blank-faced now. A thrill of unease was passing through them, a thrill of interest and anxiety. Heads tilted, brows knitted, lower lips folding under top ones. Faster breathing. Children drawn in by a story.
‘Art Severin got time off for good behaviour and was soon back on the streets of Oregon. But not for long. Frustrated at the lack of employment opportunities in the US for young ex-crims, he relocated to Sabah, Malaysia, where he started a tool supply business with some drug dealing on the side. It was in Sabah that he met Kamelia, a local entrepreneur who supplied female companionship to the timber industry. They fell in love, married, and, although Kamelia was already in her forties, produced two daughters, Nora and Pao-Pei, always known as May. When Kamelia’s brothel was shut down by the authorities and Art’s business was squeezed by competition, he found work in the timber trade, and it was only then that he first discovered his lifelong fascination with the mechanics and chemistry of soil erosion.’
With measured assurance, Peter began to walk towards the coffin. The hand in which he had been holding his Bible swung at his side, and everyone could see that his thumb was pressed against a small scrap of hand-scribbled paper inside the Scripture.
‘Art Severin’s next life was in Australia,’ he said, gazing down at the casket’s lustrous surface. ‘Sponsored by a company that recognised his potential, he studied geotechnics and soil mechanics at the University of Sydney. He graduated in record time – this young man who’d dropped out of high school only nine years before – and was soon being headhunted by engineering firms because of his deep understanding of soil behaviour, and also because of his custom-made equipment. He could’ve made a fortune in patents, but he never saw himself as an inventor, merely as a worker who, as he put it, “got mad at crap tools”.’
There was a murmur of recognition in the crowd. Peter laid his free hand on the coffin lid, gently but firmly, as if laying it on Art Severin’s shoulder. ‘Whenever he found that the available apparatus couldn’t deliver the quality of data he demanded, he simply designed and built technology that would. Among his inventions was . . . ’ (and here he consulted the scrap of paper inside his Bible) ‘ . . . a new sampling tool for use in cohesionless sands below ground-water level. Among his academic papers – again, written by this man whose high school teachers considered him a hopeless delinquent – were “Undrained triaxial tests on saturated sands and their significance to a comprehensive theory of shear strength”, “Achieving constant pressure control for the triaxial compression test”, “Stability gain due to pore pressure dissipation in a soft clay foundation”, “Overhauling Terzaghi’s principle of effective stress: some suggested solutions to anomalies at low hydraulic gradients”, and dozens more.’
Peter closed his Bible and hugged it to his abdomen, directly under the crucifix-shaped stain. His dishdasha had been laundered and pressed, but fresh sweat was already spreading in patches all over it. The assembled mourners were perspiring too.
‘Now, I’m not going to pretend I have much of a clue what those titles mean,’ said Peter with a faint grin. ‘Some of you will. Others won’t. The important thing is that Art Severin turned himself into a world-renowned expert on something more useful than taking drugs. Although . . . he didn’t let his old skills lapse entirely. Before he worked for USIC, he used to smoke fifty cigarettes a day.’ A ripple of chuckles passed through the crowd. There had been a solitary, suppressed snort earlier on when he’d referred to the female companionship supplied by Kamelia’s business, but this laughter now was unashamed, relaxed.