Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

‘So who named this place Oasis?’

‘A little girl from Oskaloosa, Iowa.’

‘You’re kidding.’

She cast him a bemused glance. ‘You didn’t read about it? It’s gotta be the only thing the average person knows about this place. There were articles about this little girl in magazines, she was on TV… ’

‘I don’t read magazines, and I don’t have a TV.’

Now it was her turn to say, ‘You’re kidding.’

He smiled. ‘I’m not kidding. One day I got a message from the Lord saying, “Get rid of the TV, Peter, it’s a huge waste of time.” So I did.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to take you.’

‘Straight,’ he said. ‘Always straight. Anyway: this little girl from… uh… ’

‘Oskaloosa. She won a competition. “Name A New World”. I’m so amazed you didn’t hear about it. There were hundreds of thousands of entries, most of them unbelievably wrong. It was like a nerd jamboree. The USIC staff in the building where I worked kept an internal dossier of the worst names. Every week we’d have new favourites. We ended up using them for a competition we ran ourselves, to name the janitor’s supply room. “Nuvo Opportunus”, that was a great one. “Zion II”. “Atlanto”. “Arnold” — that had real pizzazz, I thought. “Splendoramus”. Uh… “Einsteinia”. I forget the rest. Oh, yeah: “Traveller’s Rest”, that was another one. “Newfoundplanet”. “Cervix”. “Hendrix”. “Elvis”. They just kept on coming.’

‘And the little girl?’

‘She got lucky, I guess. There must’ve been hundreds of other people who came up with “Oasis”. She won $50,000. The family needed it, too, because the mother had just lost her job, and the father had been diagnosed with some kind of rare disease.’

‘So how did the story end?’

‘Just like you’d expect. The dad died. The mom talked about it on TV and became an alcoholic. Then the media moved on and you never got to know what happened next.’

‘Can you remember the girl’s name? I’d like to pray for her.’

Grainger butted her palms against the steering wheel irritably, and rolled her eyes upwards. ‘Puh- lease . There were a million Americans praying for her, and it didn’t stop her life going down the toilet.’

He shut up, faced front. They drove in silence for forty seconds or so.

‘Coretta,’ she said at last.

‘Thank you,’ said Peter. He tried to picture Coretta, so that she wouldn’t be just a name to him when he prayed. Any sort of face was better than none at all. He thought of the children he knew, the kids in his congregation back home, but the ones that sprang to mind were too old or too young or the wrong sex. In any case, as a minister, in his own church, he wasn’t so involved with the little ones; Bea took them into another room for play activities during his sermons. Not that he was unaware of them while he preached: the walls were so thin that if he paused for effect between sentences, the silence was often filled by laughter or snatches of song or even the galumphing of small feet. But he didn’t know any of the kids particularly well.

‘This Coretta,’ he said, pushing his luck with Grainger. ‘Is she black or white?’ One child had popped into his memory: the daughter of that new Somali couple, the cheeky girl who was always dressed like a miniature nineteenth-century Southern belle… what was her name? — Lulu. Adorable kid.

‘White,’ said Grainger. ‘Blonde hair. Or maybe a redhead, I forget. It was a long time ago, and there’s no way of checking.’

‘Can’t look her up?’

She blinked. ‘Look her up?’

‘On a computer or something?’ Even as he said it, he realised it was a stupid suggestion. Oasis was far beyond the reach of any information superhighways; there were no world-wide webs laden with morsels of trivia, no industrious search engines offering up millions of Oskaloosas and Corettas. If what you wanted to know was not to be found in the stuff you’d brought along with you — the books, the magic discs, the memory sticks, the old copies of Hydraulics magazine — you could forget it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not thinking clearly.’

‘This atmosphere will do that to you,’ she said. ‘I hate the way it pushes . Right inside your ears , even. Never lets up. Sometimes you just wanna… ’ She didn’t pursue the thought, just puffed a mouthful of breath upwards, dislodging a damp lock of hair from her forehead. ‘There’s no point talking about it with the guys here. They’re used to it, they don’t have a problem with it, they don’t notice it anymore. Maybe they even enjoy it.’

‘Maybe they hate it but don’t complain.’

Her face went stiff. ‘OK, message received,’ she said.

Peter groaned inwardly. He should have thought the implications through before opening his mouth. What was wrong with him today? He was usually so tactful. Could it be the atmosphere, as Grainger said? He’d always imagined his brain as a wholly enclosed thing, safe inside a shell of bone, but maybe, in this strange new environment, the seal was more permeable and his brain was being infiltrated by insidious vapours. He wiped sweat off his eyelids and made an effort to be a hundred per cent alert, facing front and peering through the dirt-hazed windscreen. The terrain was looser, less stable, the closer they came to their destination. Particles of clammy soil were being thrown up by the tyres and enveloping the vehicle in a kind of halo of filth. The outline of the native settlement seemed grim and unwelcoming somehow.

Suddenly, the magnitude of the challenge hit home. Until now, it had been all about him and his ability to keep himself in one piece: to survive the journey, to recover from the Jump, to adjust to the strange new air and the shock of separation. But there was so much more to it than that. The scale of the unknown remained just as immense whether he was feeling well or unwell; he was approaching monolithic barriers of foreignness which existed oblivious to him, indifferent to how rested or unrested he was, how bleary-eyed or attentive, how keen or dull.

Psalm 139 came to his mind, as it so often did when he needed reassurance. But today, the reminder of God’s omniscience was no comfort; instead, it heightened his own sense of unease. How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand . Each and every mote of dirt flung up by the vehicle’s wheels was like a truth that he needed to learn, a ridiculously large number of truths which he had neither the time nor the wisdom to grasp. He was not God, and maybe only God could do what needed to be done here.

Grainger switched on the windscreen wipers once more. The view went smeary for a while, then the glass cleared and the native settlement was revealed afresh, lit up now by the rising sun. The sun made all the difference.

Yes, the mission was daunting and, yes, he wasn’t in the best shape. But here he was, on the threshold of meeting an entirely new kind of people, an encounter chosen for him by God. Whatever was fated to happen, it would surely be precious and amazing. His whole life — he understood that now, as the façades of the unknown city loomed up before him, harbouring unimaginable wonders — his whole life had been leading up to this.

‘Well,’ said Grainger, ‘here we are.’ Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘Uh… yes,’ he said, swaying in his seat. The dizziness he’d felt back at the base had come over him again. ‘I’m probably over-excited. It’s my first time, after all.’