The Book of Strange New Things(76)

‘But we’re getting ahead of the story,’ he cautioned. ‘We’re leaving out some of his lives. Because Art Severin’s next life was as a consultant on major dam-building projects in a dozen countries from Zaire to New Zealand. His time in Malaysia had taught him the value of staying out of the limelight, so he rarely took the credit for his achievements, preferring to let politicians and corporate heads bask in the glory. But glorious indeed were the dams he nurtured to completion. He was especially proud of the Aziz Dam in Pakistan, which, if you’ll forgive an unintended pun, was truly ground-breaking: a rock-filled earth dam with an impervious clay core. The entire project required a high degree of attention to detail, since it was in an earthquake fault zone. It still stands today.’ Peter raised his chin, looked out of the nearest window at the alien emptiness beyond. His congregation looked likewise. Whatever was out there symbolised achievement, hard-won achievement within a vast environment that did not change unless dedicated professionals made it happen. A few eyes glinted with moisture.

‘Art Severin’s next life was not a happy one,’ said Peter, on the move again, as though inspired by Severin’s own restlessness. ‘Kamelia left him, for reasons he never understood. Both his daughters were badly affected by the break-up: Nora turned against him, and May was diagnosed schizophrenic. A few months after a gruelling and expensive divorce settlement, Art was investigated by tax authorities and billed for money he didn’t have. Within a year, he was drinking heavily, on welfare, living in a motor home with May, watching her get worse, and getting sicker and sicker himself, with undiagnosed diabetes.

‘But here’s where the story takes an unexpected direction,’ he said, turning abruptly, making eye-contact with as many of his listeners as he could. ‘May went off her medication, committed suicide, and everybody who’d been watching Art Severin’s decline assumed he would completely hit the skids and be found dead one day in his trailer. Instead, he sorted out his health, tracked down his real father, borrowed some money, shipped himself back to Oregon, and found work as a tour guide. He did it for ten years, refusing offers of promotion, refusing opportunities to get back into the geotechnics industry – until finally USIC came along. USIC made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: the chance to test out, on a grand scale, his theories on the use of soils and soft rocks as engineering materials.

‘That grand-scale testing ground,’ declared Peter, ‘is here. It’s what we are standing on today. Art Severin’s skills helped to take this fantastically ambitious experiment as far as it has reached, and, because of Art’s generous sharing of his expertise, his skills will live on in his colleagues, you who knew him. I’ve talked mostly about Art’s past, a past many of you may have been scarcely aware of, because Art seldom spoke of it. He was, as I’m sure some of you would agree, a hard man to get to know. I won’t pretend to have known him myself. He showed kindness to me on my journey here, but by the time we arrived, we’d exchanged some tense words. I was looking forward to catching up with him later, after I’d settled in to my own work here; I was looking forward to smoothing things over between us. But that’s the way it goes with the dead and those they leave behind. Each of you will have your last memory of Art Severin, the last thing you said to him, the final thing he said to you. Maybe it’s the smile you shared over some detail of your work together, a smile that will mean something more to you now: a symbol of a relationship that was in pretty good order, pretty much ready to be severed clean. Or maybe you’ll remember a look he gave you, one of those what-the-hell-did-he-mean-by-that moments, something that makes you wonder whether there was anything you could or should have done, to make his absence now seem more natural. But either way, we’re struggling to make sense of his unreachability, the fact that he’s in a different dimension from us now, he’s no longer breathing the same air, no longer the same sort of creature. We know there was more to him than the body that’s stored in this casket, just as we know that there’s more to us than our kidneys and our intestines and our earwax. But we don’t have accurate terminology for what that extra thing is. Some of us call it the soul, but what is that, really? Is there a research paper on it that we can read, that will explain the properties of Art Severin’s soul, and tell us how it differs from the Art Severin we knew, the guy with the discoloured teeth and prickly temperament, the guy who found it difficult to trust women, the guy who had a habit of drumming on his knees to rock music that played in his head?’

Peter had been walking forwards slowly, getting closer to his congregation, until he stood within arm’s-reach of the front row. BG’s forehead was contorted with wrinkles, his eyes shone with tears. The woman next to him was weeping. Tuska’s jaw was set, his lopsided grin trembling slightly. Grainger, somewhere in the back row, was bone-pale, her expression softened by pain.

‘People, you know I’m a Christian. For me, that all-important research paper is the Bible. For me, that vital missing data is Jesus Christ. But I know that some of you are of different faiths. And I know that Art Severin professed to have none. BG asked him what religion he was, and he said “I’m nothing”. I never got a chance to discuss with him what he really meant by that. And now, I’ll never get that chance. But it’s not because Art Severin is lying here, dead. No. It’s because this body here isn’t Art Severin: we all know that, instinctively. Art Severin isn’t here anymore; he’s somewhere else, somewhere where we can’t be. We’re standing here, breathing air into those funny spongy bladders we call lungs, our torsos shaking slightly from the pump action of that muscle we call a heart, our legs getting uncomfortable from balancing on our foot-bones too long. We are souls shut inside a cage of bones; souls squeezed into a parcel of flesh. We get to hang around in there for a certain number of years, and then we go where souls go. I believe that’s into the bosom of God. You may believe it’s somewhere different. But one thing’s for sure: it’s somewhere, and it’s not here.’