Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

‘Well, as you can see from the bandage,’ he continued, escorting Peter to Lover Five’s bedside, ‘she’s sustained a hand injury. A very serious hand injury, I must say.’ He motioned to the gauze mitten. ‘May I?’ This last question was directed at the patient.

‘Yeสี,’ she said. ‘สีhow.’

While the bandages were being unwrapped, Peter recalled the day of Lover Five’s injury: the painting falling from the ceiling, the bruise on her hand, the fervid sympathy offered by her fellow สีฐฉั. And how, ever since then, she’d been protective of that hand, as if the memory of that injury refused to fade.

The white mitten dwindled in size until Austin removed the last of the gauze. A sweet, fermented smell was released into the room. Lover Five’s hand was no longer a hand. The fingers had fused into a blueish-grey clump of rot. It looked like an apple that had sustained a bruise and then been left for weeks.

‘Oh my God,’ Peter breathed.

‘Do you speak his… do you speak her language?’ said Austin. ‘Because I’m not sure how to get proper consent here. I mean, not that there’s any alternative to amputation, but even explaining what a general anaesthetic is… ’

‘Oh… my… God… ’

Lover Five ignored the men’s conversation, ignored the putrid mess on the end of her wrist. With her uninjured hand, she opened her Bible pamphlet, deftly using three fingers to flip to a particular page. In a clear voice unhampered (thanks to her pastor) by impossible consonants, she recited:

‘ The Lord give them power in their bed of pain, and make them whole again .’ And, from the same page of inspirational selections from Psalms and Luke : ‘ The people learned the good new way and followed him. He welcomed them and helped them know God, and healed all them who needed healing .’

She raised her head to fix her attention on Peter. The bulges on her face that resembled the knees of foetuses seemed to glow.

‘I need healing,’ she said. ‘Or I die.’ Then, after a brief silence, in case there was any ambiguity that should be clarified: ‘I wiสีh, pleaสีe, รี่o live.’

‘My God… my God… ’ Peter kept saying, ten metres down the hall, as Austin leaned against the edge of his consulting room desk, arms awkwardly folded. The doctor was tolerant of the pastor’s emotional incontinence — he wouldn’t dream of telling him that nothing was achieved by all this groaning and fist-clenching and agitated face-wiping. Even so, as the minutes ticked on, he became more keen to discuss the way forward.

‘She’ll have the best of care,’ he reassured Peter. ‘We have everything here. Not to blow my own horn, but I’m a pretty good surgeon. And Dr Adkins is even better. Remember the great job he did on you? If it sets your mind at rest, he can do her as well. In fact, yes, I’ll make sure he definitely does her.’

‘But don’t you realise what this means?’ cried Peter. ‘ Don’t you fucking realise what this means?’

The doctor flinched at the unexpected cursing from a man who was, as far as he’d been given to understand, a bona fide Christian minister.

‘Well, I appreciate that you’re upset,’ he remarked carefully. ‘But I don’t think we should jump to any pessimistic conclusions.’

Peter blinked tears from his eyes, allowing him to see the doctor’s face in focus. The ragged scar on Austin’s jaw was as conspicuous as ever, but now, rather than wondering how Austin got it, Peter was struck by the scar’s essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death. The wounds on Peter’s arm and leg (healing still), the scabs on his ears (gone now), every trifling scratch and burn and rash and bruise, thousands of injuries over the years, right back to the ankle-bones he’d broken the week before he’d met Bea, his skinned knees when he’d fallen off his bike as a kid, the nappy rash he’d probably experienced as a baby… none of them had stopped him being here today. He and Austin were comrades in stupendous luck. The gouge in Austin’s chin, which must have been a gory mess when it was first inflicted, had not reduced the entire head to a slimy lump; it magicked itself into fresh pink flesh.

Nothing shall hurt you , said Luke. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned , said Isaiah. The Lord healeth all thy diseases , said Psalms . There it was: there it was, plain as the scar on this smug doctor’s face: the perpetual reprieve the Oasans called the Technique of Jesus.

Outside, the sky turned dark, even though it was day. Ominous cloud-masses had formed, dozens of them, almost perfectly circular, like giant moons of vapour. Peter stared at them through the window of his room. Lover One had once assured him that there were no storms on Oasis. It looked like that was about to change.

The giant globes of moisture, as they advanced, became at once more familiar and more alarming. They were swirls of rain, only rain, no different in their motion from the rain-swirls he’d witnessed many times before. But their relationship with the sky around them was not as subtle and freely shifting as usual; instead, it was as though each vast congregation of water-droplets was restrained by an inner gravitational pull, held together like a planet or some gaseous heavenly body. And the spheres were so dense that they had lost some of their transparency, casting an oppressive pall over what had been a bright morning.

There are rain clouds on the way, he thought of writing to Bea, and was hit with a double distress: the memory of the state Bea was in, and deep shame at how inadequate his letters to her were, how inadequate they’d been from the beginning. If he could have described what he’d experienced better, she might not have felt so separated from him. If only the tongue that God lent him when he was called upon to speak in public to strangers could have come to his aid when writing in private to his wife.

He sat at the Shoot and checked for a message. None.

The truth was as plain as a dull blank screen where words had once glowed: she saw no point in responding to him now. Or she was unable to respond — too busy, or too upset, or in trouble. Maybe he should write again regardless, not wait for an answer, just keep sending messages. The way she had done for him when he’d first got here, message after message which he’d left unanswered. He searched his mind for words that might give her hope, maybe something along the lines of ‘Hope is one of the strongest things in the universe. Empires can fall, civilisations can vanish into dust… ’ But no: the rhetoric of a sermon was one thing; his wife’s grim reality was another. Civilisations did not vanish smoothly and easefully; empires did not set like suns: empires collapsed in chaos and violence. Real people got pushed around, beaten up, robbed, made destitute. Real lives went down the toilet. Bea was scared and hurt, and she didn’t need his preaching.

Bea, I love you, he wrote. I;m so worried about you.

Was it right to spend five thousand dollars of USIC’s money to send those nine impotent little words through space? With barely a moment’s hesitation, he pressed the transmission button. The letters trembled on the screen for two, three, then four minutes, making Peter fear that his feelings had been judged, by some jaded shiftworker elsewhere in the building, to have failed a test, to have sinned against the USIC ethos, attempting to undermine the great mission. Staring at the screen, sweat forming on his brow, he belatedly noticed the typo — a semi-colon instead of an apostrophe. He lifted his hand to fix it, but the words evaporated.