Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

Peter walked back to the coffin, laid his hand on it once again.

‘I can’t say for sure if Art Severin really, truly believed he was nothing more than the contents of this coffin. If so, he was wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t get into another argument with him now; maybe it’s in bad taste. But Art: forgive me, forgive us, we’ve got to tell you: you weren’t nothing. It wasn’t true that you were going nowhere. You were travelling on the great human journey, and yesterday you broke through the final checkpoint, and you’ve reached the destination. You were a brave man who lived many lives, and each life required more courage than the last, and now you’re in the next life, where your body won’t let you down anymore, and you don’t need insulin and you don’t crave nicotine, and nobody betrays your trust, and every mystery you racked your brains about is clear as day now, and every hurt you ever suffered is OK now, and you’re feeling pity for us down here, still dragging our heavy bodies around.’ There was a grunt of surprise from the audience: BG had lifted his massive arm to wipe his eyes, and his elbow had accidentally bumped against someone’s skull.

‘Art Severin,’ proclaimed Peter — and, despite the muffled acoustics of the room, there seemed somehow to be a churchy reverb after all — ‘we are here today to dispose of your old cage of bone, your parcel of flesh. You don’t need that stuff anymore. It’s crap tools. But if it’s all right with you, please let us keep a few little souvenirs: our memories. We want to keep you with us, even as we let you go. We want you to live on in our minds, even though you’re living somewhere bigger and better than that. One day, we too will go where souls go, where you have travelled before us. Until then: Goodbye, Arthur Laurence Severin. Goodbye.’

Back in his own quarters, after he’d spent some time with a few of the mourners who hadn’t wanted to leave even after the coffin had been consumed, Peter seated himself once more in front of the Shoot. His clothing was sodden with sweat. He wondered how long the interval was between full water supplies to the shower. His head buzzed with the intimacies and confidences that USIC employees had just shared with him, facts about their lives that he must store in his memory, names he must make sure not to forget. His wife’s unopened capsules hung suspended on the screen. Nine more messages he hadn’t had time to read until now.

Dear Peter,

Excuse what will probably be a short, garbled message. I’m tired out. Sheila Frame and the two kids — Rachel and Billy — were here all afternoon and most of the evening. For them it was the weekend, but I’d worked an early shift, after a late shift the day before. Rachel is a handful. Still kind of sweet but full of borderline obsessive-compulsive habits, quite exhausting to watch. Hormones, I suppose. You wouldn’t recognise her, physically. Looks like a porn starlet/pop star/heiress party girl — the usual mix for pubescent females these days. Billy is painfully polite and shy. Small for his age, and a bit chubby with it. Barely spoke the whole time he was here, and obviously undergoing agonies of embarrassment the more chatty/nervy his mother became. Sheila smelled a little boozy, or maybe it was just very strong cologne, I don’t know. She’s buzzing with stress, the whole house is still full of it even though they left an hour ago. How I wished that you and I could have tackled them together — one of us calming Sheila down, the other relating to the kids, maybe taking it in turns. I don’t know why they stayed so long; I can’t imagine I was much use to them. Billy’s one and only moment of candour was when I parked him in front of my computer to play a game. He took one look at the Noah’s Ark display and his whole face flinched like someone had hit him. He told me that the snow leopard is extinct. The last surviving specimen died in a zoo a few weeks back. ‘The snow leopard was my favourite,’ he said. Then he sat down at the computer and within about 30 seconds he was lost in a realistic prison interior, shooting the guards’ heads off, blowing doors open, getting killed.

Must go to bed immediately. Up at 5.30 tomorrow morning. I drank some of the wine that Sheila brought, so she wouldn’t be self-conscious about drinking alone. I will regret it when that alarm clock goes off!

Please tell me a little more about how your mission is going. I want to talk specifics with you. It feels so strange not to. Peter, it HURTS not to. I feel like I’m your sister or something, sending you a long screed of complaint, chattering about things that you can’t possibly care about. I’m still the same person you’ve known, the one you can always rely on to give you perspective and confirmation. I just need to have a clearer sense of what you’re seeing and doing and experiencing, my darling. Give me some names, some particulars. I know you can’t right now, because you’re at the settlement and there’s no way to read this message. But when you get back. Please. Take some time out to reflect. Let me be there for you.

MUST go to bed now.

Love,

Bea.

Peter rocked on the chair, overloaded with adrenalin, but also tired. He wasn’t sure if he should, or even could, read Beatrice’s other eight messages without answering this one. It felt cruel, perverse, not to respond. As though Bea were calling out to him, over and over, and he was ignoring her cries.

Dear Bea, he wrote on a fresh page.

Today I conducted a funeral. Art Severin. I didn’t know he was a diabetic; he died suddenly while I was away at the settlement. I was given a comprehensive file on his life and about three hours to prepare something. I did my best. Everyone seemed to appreciate it.

Love,

Peter

He stared at the words on the screen, aware that they needed expansion. Details, details. A woman called Maneely had confessed to him that she hadn’t given a thought to Christianity since she was a small child, but that she’d felt the presence of God today. He considered telling Bea that. His heart was thumping strangely. He left his message in draft form, unsent, and opened another capsule.

Dear Peter,

Are you sitting down? I hope so.

Darling, I’m pregnant. I know you’ll think that’s not possible. But I stopped taking the Pill a month before you left.

Please don’t be angry with me. I know we agreed to wait another couple of years. But please understand that I was scared you’d never come back. I was scared there’d be an explosion at the launch and your mission would be over before it began. Or that you’d disappear somewhere along the way, just disappear into space, and I would never even know what became of you. So, as the departure date got closer and closer, I got more and more desperate for some part of you to be here with me, no matter what.

I prayed and prayed about it but just didn’t feel I’d got an answer. In the end I left it in God’s hands whether I would be fertile so soon after coming off the Pill. Of course it was still my decision, I’m not denying that. I wish the decision had been ours together. Maybe it was — or could have been. Maybe if we’d discussed it, you would have said it was exactly what you’d been wanting to suggest yourself. But I was terrified you’d say no. Would you have? Just tell me straight, don’t spare me.

Whatever you feel, I hope it makes some difference to you that I’m proud and thrilled to be carrying your baby. Our baby. By the time you come back, I’ll be 26 weeks along the way and getting pretty enormous. That’s assuming I don’t have a miscarriage. I hope I don’t. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, and we could try again, but it would be a different child. This one I’m carrying feels so precious — already! You know what I was thinking when you made love to me on the way to the airport? I was thinking, I’m ready, this is the moment, this is exactly the right moment, all it needs now is one tiny seed. And I bet that was when it happened. Looking back, almost certainly, that was when it happened.