Читать книгу The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber - Страница 10

2

He would never see other humans the same way again

The USIC chauffeur emerged from the gas station with a bottle of Tang and a spotless, supernaturally yellow banana. Dazzled by the sun, he scanned the forecourt for his tanked-up limousine and its precious foreign cargo. That cargo was Peter, who was using this fuel stop to stretch his legs and attempt one last call.

‘Excuse me,’ said Peter. ‘Can you help me with this phone?’

The man seemed flummoxed by this request, jerking his hands around to indicate that they were both full. In his dark blue suit, complete with tie, he was overdressed for the Florida heat, and was still suffering some residual stress from the plane’s delayed arrival. It was almost as if he held Peter personally responsible for the turbulent atmospheric conditions over the North Atlantic ocean.

‘What’s the problem with it?’ he said, as he balanced the drink and the banana on the sun-blazed surface of the limousine’s roof.

‘Probably nothing,’ said Peter, squinting down at the gadget in his palm. ‘I probably don’t know how to use it properly.’

That was true. He wasn’t good with gadgets, and used a phone only when circumstances forced him to; the rest of the time it would hibernate in his clothing, eventually becoming obsolete. Every year or so, Beatrice would tell him what his new number was, or what her new number was, because yet another service provider had become too frustrating to deal with or had gone bust. Businesses were going bust with alarming frequency these days; Bea kept up with stuff like that, Peter didn’t. All he knew was that memorising two new telephone numbers every year was not easy for him, despite his ability to memorise long passages of Scripture. And his unease with technology was such that if he pressed the gadget’s call symbol and nothing happened – as he’d just done, here in the blinding limbo of Florida – he couldn’t imagine what to do next.

The chauffeur was keen to resume the drive: there was still a long way to go. Biting off a mouthful of banana, he took hold of Peter’s phone and examined it mistrustfully.

‘Has this got the right kinda card in it?’ he mumbled as he chewed. ‘For calling . . . ah . . . England?’

‘I think so,’ said Peter. ‘I believe so.’

The chauffeur handed it back, non-committal. ‘Looks like a healthy cellphone to me.’

Peter stepped under the shade of a metal canopy that overhung the fuel pumps. He tried once more to tap the correct sequence of symbols. This time, he was rewarded with a staccato melody: the international code followed by Bea’s number. He held the metal lozenge to his ear and stared out at the unfamiliarly blue sky and the sculpted trees surrounding the truckstop.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ he said.

‘ . . . ello?’

‘Can you hear me?’ he said.

‘ . . . hear you . . . ’ said Bea. Her voice was enveloped in a blizzard of static. Random words jumped out of the phone’s tiny amplifier like stray sparks.

‘I’m in Florida,’ he said.

‘ . . . middle . . . night,’ she answered.

‘I’m sorry. Did I wake you?’

‘ . . . love you . . . how are . . . know what . . . ?’

‘I’m safe and sound,’ he said. Sweat was making the phone slippery in his fingers. ‘Sorry to be calling you now but I may not get another chance later. The plane was delayed and we’re in a big hurry.’

‘ . . . e . . . o . . . in the . . . me . . . guy know anything about . . . ?’

He walked further away from the vehicle, leaving the shade of the metal canopy. ‘This guy knows nothing about anything,’ he murmured, trusting that his words were being transmitted more clearly to her than hers were to him. ‘I’m not even sure if he works for USIC.’

‘ . . . haven’t ask . . . ?’

‘No, I haven’t asked yet. I will.’ He felt a bit sheepish. He’d spent twenty, thirty minutes in the car with this chauffeur already and hadn’t even established if he was an actual USIC employee or just a driver for hire. All he’d learned so far was that the photo of the little girl on the dashboard was the driver’s daughter, that the driver was newly divorced from the little girl’s mother, and that the mother’s mom was an attorney who was working hard to make the driver regret the day he was born. ‘It’s all very . . . hectic at the moment. And I didn’t sleep on the flight. I’ll write to you when I’m . . . you know, when I get to the other end. Then I’ll have plenty of time and I’ll put you in the picture. It’ll be just like we’re travelling together.’

There was a rush of static and he wasn’t sure if she had fallen silent or if her words were being swallowed up. He raised his voice: ‘How’s Joshua?’

‘ . . . first few . . . he just . . . o . . . ink . . . side . . . ’

‘I’m sorry, you’re breaking up. And this guy wants me to stop talking. I have to go. I love you. I wish . . . I love you.’

‘ . . . you too . . . ’

And she was gone.

‘That your wife?’ said the driver when Peter had settled back into the vehicle and they were pulling out of the truckstop.

Actually, no, Peter felt like saying, that was not my wife, that was a bunch of disassembled electronic noises coming out of a small metal device. ‘Yes,’ he said. His almost obsessional preference for face-to-face communication was too difficult to explain to a stranger. Even Beatrice had trouble understanding it sometimes.

‘And your kid’s called Joshua?’ The driver seemed unconcerned by any social taboo against eavesdropping.

‘Joshua’s our cat,’ said Peter. ‘We don’t have children.’

‘Saves a lot of drama,’ said the driver.

‘You’re the second person in two days who’s told me that. But I’m sure you love your daughter.’

‘No choice!’ The driver waved one hand towards the windscreen, to indicate the whole world of experience, destiny, whatever. ‘What does your wife do?’

‘She’s a nurse.’

‘That’s a good job. Better than an attorney anyways. Making people’s lives better instead of making them worse.’

‘Well, I hope being a minister achieves the same thing.’

‘Sure,’ said the driver breezily. He didn’t sound sure at all.

‘And what about you?’ said Peter. ‘Are you a USIC . . . uh . . . staff member, or do they just hire you for taxi jobs?’

‘Been a driver for USIC for nine, ten years,’ said the chauffeur. ‘Goods, mainly. Academics sometimes. USIC holds a lot of conferences. And then every now and then, there’s an astronaut.’

Peter nodded. For a second he imagined the driver picking up an astronaut from Orlando Airport, pictured a square-jawed hulk in a bulbous space suit lumbering through the arrivals hall towards the placard-wielding chauffeur. Then he twigged.

‘I’ve never thought of myself as an astronaut,’ he said.

‘It’s an old-fashioned word,’ conceded the chauffeur. ‘I use it out of respect for tradition, I guess. The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that’s always been there, and the next minute it’s just a memory.’

Peter looked out the window. The motorway looked much the same as a motorway in the UK, but there were giant metal signs informing him that splendid attractions like the Econlockhatchee River and the Hal Scott Regional Nature Preserve were somewhere nearby, hidden beyond the windbreaks. Stylised illustrations on billboards evoked the joys of camping and horseback riding.

‘One of the good things about USIC,’ said the driver, ‘is that they have some respect for tradition. Or maybe they just recognise the value of a brand. They bought Cape Canaveral, you know that? They own the whole place. Must have cost them a fortune, and they could’ve built their launch site somewhere else, there’s so much real estate up for grabs these days. But they wanted Cape Canaveral. I call that class.’

Peter made a vague noise of agreement. The classiness – or otherwise – of multinational corporations was not a subject on which he had strong opinions. One of the few things he knew about USIC was that it owned lots of formerly defunct factories in formerly destitute towns in sloughed-off parts of the former Soviet Union. He somehow doubted that ‘classy’ was the right word for what went on there. As for Cape Canaveral, the history of space travel had never been of the slightest interest to him, even as a kid. He’d not even noticed that NASA had ceased to exist. It was the sort of nugget of useless information that Beatrice was liable to unearth while reading the newspapers that would later be put underneath Joshua’s food bowls.

He missed Joshua already. Beatrice often left for work at dawn, when Joshua was still fast asleep on the bed. Even if he stirred and miaowed, she would hurry off and say, ‘Daddy will feed you.’ And sure enough, an hour or two later, Peter would be sitting in the kitchen, munching sweet cereal, while Joshua munched savoury cereal on the floor nearby. Then Joshua would jump on the kitchen table and lick the milk dregs from Peter’s bowl. Not something he was allowed to do when Mummy was around.

‘The training is tough, am I right?’ said the chauffeur.

Peter sensed he was expected to tell stories of military-style exercise regimens, Olympic tests of endurance. He had no such tales to tell. ‘There’s a physical,’ he conceded. ‘But most of the screening is . . . questions.’

‘Yeah?’ said the driver. A few moments later, he switched on the car radio. ‘ . . . continues in Pakistan,’ an earnest voice began, ‘as anti-government forces . . . ’ The chauffeur switched to a music station, and the vintage sounds of A Flock of Seagulls warbled out.

Peter leaned back and recalled some of the questions in his screening interviews. These sessions, held in a boardroom on the tenth floor of a swanky London hotel, had gone on for hours at a time. One American woman was a constant presence: an elegant, tiny anorexic, who carried herself like a famous choreographer or retired ballet dancer. Bright-eyed and nasal-voiced, she nursed glass mugs of decaffeinated coffee as she worked, aided by a changeable team of other interrogators. Interrogators was the wrong word, perhaps, since everyone was friendly and there was an odd sense that they were rooting for him to succeed.

‘How long can you go without your favourite ice-cream?’

‘I don’t have a favourite ice-cream.’

‘What smell reminds you most of your childhood?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe custard.’

‘Do you like custard?’

‘It’s OK. These days I mainly have it on Christmas pudding.’

‘What do you think of when you think of Christmas?’

‘Christ’s Mass, a celebration of Jesus’s birth, held at the time of the Roman winter solstice. John Chrysostom. Syncretism. Santa Claus. Snow.’

‘Do you celebrate it yourself?’

‘We make a big deal of it in our church. We organise presents for disadvantaged children, put on Christmas dinner at our drop-in centre . . . A lot of people feel horribly lost and depressed at that time of year. You have to try to get them though it.’

‘How well do you sleep in beds that aren’t your own?’

He’d had to think about that one. Cast his mind back to the cheap hotels he and Bea had stayed in when they’d participated in evangelist rallies in other cities. The friends’ sofas that converted into mattresses of a kind. Or, further back still in his life, the tough choice between keeping your coat on so you’d shiver less, or using it as a pillow to soften the concrete against your skull. ‘I’m probably . . . average,’ he said. ‘As long as it’s a bed and I’m horizontal, I think I’m fine.’

‘Are you irritable before your first coffee of the day?’

‘I don’t drink coffee.’

‘Tea?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Sometimes you’re irritable?’

‘I don’t get annoyed easily.’ This was true, and these interrogations provided additional proof. He enjoyed the sparring, felt he was being tested rather than judged. The rapid-fire questions were an invigorating change from church services where he was expected to orate for an hour while others sat silent. He wanted the job, wanted it badly, but the outcome was in God’s hands, and there was nothing to be gained by getting anxious, giving dishonest answers or straining to please. He would be himself, and hope that that was enough.

‘How would you feel about wearing sandals?’

‘Why, will I have to?’

‘You might.’ This from a man whose feet were sheathed in expensive black leather shoes so shiny that Peter’s face was reflected in them.

‘How do you feel if you haven’t accessed social media for a day?’

‘I don’t access social media. At least I don’t think so. What do you mean exactly by “social media”?’

‘It’s OK.’ Whenever a question got tangled, they tended to change tack. ‘Which politician do you hate most?’

‘I don’t hate anyone. And I don’t really follow politics.’

‘It’s nine o’clock at night and the power fails. What do you do?’

‘Fix it, if I can.’

‘But how would you spend the time if you couldn’t?’

‘Talk to my wife, if she was at home at the time.’

‘How do you think she’ll cope if you’re away from home for a while?’

‘She’s a very independent and capable woman.’

‘Would you say you’re an independent and capable man?’

‘I hope so.’

‘When did you last get drunk?’

‘About seven, eight years ago.’

‘Do you feel like a drink now?’

‘I wouldn’t mind some more of this peach juice.’

‘With ice?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Imagine this,’ the woman said. ‘You visit a foreign city and your hosts invite you out for dinner. The restaurant they take you to is pleasant and lively. There’s a large transparent enclosure of cute white ducklings running around behind their mother. Every few minutes, a chef grabs one of the ducklings and tosses it into a vat of boiling oil. When it’s fried, it gets served up to the diners and everyone is happy and relaxed. Your hosts order duckling and say you should try it, it’s fantastic. What do you do?’

‘Is there anything else on the menu?’

‘Sure, lots of things.’

‘Then I’d order something else.’

‘You could still sit there and eat?’

‘It would depend on what I was doing in these people’s company in the first place.’

‘What if you disapproved of them?’

‘I’d try to steer the conversation towards the things I disapproved of, and then I’d be honest about what I thought was wrong.’

‘You don’t have a problem specifically with the duckling thing?’

‘Humans eat all sorts of animals. They slaughter pigs, who are much more intelligent than birds.’

‘So if an animal is dumb it’s OK to kill it?’

‘I’m not a butcher. Or a chef. I’ve chosen to do something else with my life. That’s a choice against killing, if you like.’

‘But what about the ducklings?’

‘What about the ducklings?’

‘You wouldn’t feel compelled to save them? For example, would you consider smashing the glass enclosure, so they could escape?’

‘Instinctively, I might. But it probably wouldn’t do those ducklings any good. If I was really haunted by what I saw in that restaurant, I suppose I could devote my whole life to re-educating the people in that society so they would kill the ducks more humanely. But I would rather devote my life to something that might persuade human beings to treat each other more humanely. Because human beings suffer so much more than ducks.’

‘You might not think so if you were a duck.’

‘I don’t think I would think much about anything if I were a duck. It’s higher consciousness that causes all our griefs and tortures, don’t you think?’

‘Would you step on a cricket?’ interjected one of the other questioners.

‘No.’

‘A cockroach?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re not a Buddhist, then.’

‘I never claimed to be a Buddhist.’

‘You wouldn’t say that all life is sacred?’

‘It’s a beautiful concept, but every time I wash, I kill microscopic creatures that were hoping to live on me.’

‘So where’s the dividing line for you?’ the woman rejoined. ‘Dogs? Horses? What if the restaurant was frying live kittens?’

‘Let me ask you a question,’ he said. ‘Are you sending me to a place where people are doing terrible, cruel things to other creatures?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then why ask me these sorts of questions?’

‘OK, how about this one: Your cruise ship has sunk, and now you’re stuck in a life raft with an extremely irritating man who also happens to be homosexual . . . ’

And so it went on. For days and days. So long, in fact, that Bea lost patience and began to wonder if he should tell USIC that his time was too precious to waste on any more of these charades.

‘No, they want me,’ he’d reassured her. ‘I can tell.’

Now, on a balmy morning in Florida, having earned the corporation’s stamp of approval, Peter turned to face the driver and posed the question to which, in all these months, he hadn’t been given a straight answer.

‘What is USIC, exactly?’

The driver shrugged. ‘These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does. Time was when a car company made cars, a mining company dug mines. It’s not like that anymore. You ask USIC what they specialise in and they tell you things like . . . Logistics. Human resources. Large-scale project development.’ The driver sucked the last of the Tang through a straw, making an ugly gurgling sound.

‘But where does all the money come from?’ said Peter. ‘They’re not funded by the government.’

The driver frowned, distracted. He needed to make sure his vehicle was in the correct lane. ‘Investments.’

‘Investments in what?’

‘Lots of things.’

Peter shielded his eyes with one hand; the glare was giving him a headache. He recalled that he’d asked the same question of his USIC interrogators, at one of the early interviews when Beatrice was still sitting in.

‘We invest in people,’ the elegant female had replied, shaking her artfully clipped grey mane, laying her scrawny, delicate hands on the table.

‘All corporations say that,’ Beatrice remarked, a bit rudely he thought.

‘Well, we really mean it,’ said the older woman. Her grey eyes were sincere and animated by intelligence. ‘Nothing can be achieved without people. Individuals, unique individuals with very special skills.’ She turned to Peter. ‘That’s why we’re talking to you.’

He’d smiled at the cleverness of this phrasing: it could function as flattery – they were talking to him because it was obvious he was one of these special people – or it could be a preamble to rejection – they were talking to him to maintain the high standards that would, in the end, disqualify him. One thing was for sure: the hints that he and Bea dropped about what a fine team they’d make if they could go on this mission together fell like cookie crumbs and disappeared into the carpet.

‘One of us needs to stay and look after Joshua, anyway,’ said Bea when they discussed it afterwards. ‘It would be cruel to leave him for so long. And there’s the church. And the house, the expenses; I need to keep working.’ All valid concerns – although an advance payment from USIC, even a small fraction of the full sum, would have covered an awful lot of cat food, neighbourly visits and heating bills. ‘It just would have been nice to be invited, that’s all.’

Yes, it would have been nice. But they were not blind to good fortune when it was offered. Peter had been chosen, from among many others who were not.

‘So,’ he said to the driver, ‘how did you first get involved with USIC?’

‘Bank foreclosed on our house.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Bank foreclosed on just about every damn house in Gary. Repossessed them, couldn’t sell them, let them fall apart and rot. But USIC made us a deal. They took on the debt, we got to keep the house, and in exchange we worked for them, for like, grocery money. Some of my old pals called it slavery. I call it . . . humanitarian. And those old pals of mine, they’re in trailer parks now. And here’s me, driving a limousine.’

Peter nodded. He’d already forgotten the name of the place where this guy was from, and he had only the vaguest grasp on the current health of the American economy, but he understood very well what it meant to be thrown a lifeline.

The limousine cruised gently to the right and was cloaked in cooling shade from the pine trees on the verge. A wooden road sign – the sort that normally advertised campsites, roadside grills or log-house holidays – announced an imminent turn-off for USIC.

‘You go to any sinking city in the country,’ continued the driver, ‘and you’ll find lots of people in the same boat. They may tell you they’re working for this or that company, but scratch underneath, and they’re working for USIC.’

‘I don’t even know what the letters in “USIC” stand for,’ said Peter.

‘Search me,’ said the driver. ‘A lot of companies these days got meaningless names. All the meaningful names have been taken. It’s a trademark thing.’

‘I assume the US part means United States.’

‘I guess. They’re multinational, though. Somebody even told me they started up in Africa. All I know is, they’re good to work for. Never screwed me around. You’ll be in good hands.’

Into thy hands I commend my spirit, Peter naturally thought. Luke 23:46, fulfilling the prophesy of Psalms 31:5. Except that it wasn’t clear into whose hands he was about to be delivered.

‘This will sting some,’ said the black woman in the white lab coat. ‘In fact, it will be real unpleasant. You’ll feel like a pint of cold yoghurt is travelling up your veins.’

‘Gee, thanks. I can hardly wait.’ He settled his head uneasily in the padded polystyrene hollow of his coffin-like crib and tried not to look at the spike that was approaching his tourniquetted arm.

‘We wouldn’t want you to think there was anything wrong, that’s all.’

‘If I die, please tell my – ’

‘You won’t die. Not with this stuff inside you. Just relax and think nice thoughts.’

The cannula was in his vein; the IV drip was activated; the translucent substance moved into him. He thought he might vomit from the sheer ghastliness of it. They ought to have given him a sedative or something. He wondered if his three fellow travellers were braver than him. They were nestled in identical cribs, elsewhere in the building, but he couldn’t see them. He would meet them in a month from now, when he woke up.

The woman who had administered the infusion stood calmly watching over him. Without warning – but how could there be any warning? – her lipsticked mouth started to drift to the left of her face, the lips travelling across the flesh of her cheek like a tiny red canoe. The mouth did not stop until it reached her forehead, where it came to rest above her eyebrows. Then her eyes, complete with eyelids and lashes, moved down towards her jawline, blinking normally as they relocated.

‘Don’t fight it, just go with it,’ the mouth on the forehead advised. ‘It’s temporary.’

He was too frightened to speak. This was no hallucination. This was what happened to the universe when you were no longer able to hold it together. Atoms in clusters, rays of light, forming ephemeral shapes before moving on. His greatest fear, as he dissolved into the dark, was that he would never see other humans the same way again.