Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

He hoped he’d invested the last word with sufficient resonance to signal that this was the end of his speech. Evidently he had: the audience emitted a mass murmur, applauded and waved. Even the baby, catching the prevailing mood, extended his tiny gloves. The room, so hushed in the preceding minutes, was once again filled with cooing and conversation; the people who’d briefly been transformed into an audience turned back into a crowd. Peter bowed and retreated to his former spot against the wall.

For one instant, in the midst of the renewed celebrations that followed, his mind was tickled by a thought of his own baby, growing inside the body of his wife far away. But it was just a thought, and not even a properly formed thought — a half-glimpsed reflection of a thought, which couldn’t compete with all the commotion right in front of him: the brightly dressed crowd, the excited gestures, the unearthly cries, the watchful newborn with its spindly limbs, hero of the moment, king of the day.

On the fifth day, a day of rain and almost unbearable beauty, it slipped Peter’s mind that Grainger was coming for him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to come, and it wasn’t that she’d ceased to be real to him. Every now and then, during the three hundred and sixty-odd hours leading up to their scheduled rendezvous, she had been in his thoughts. He wondered, for example, if she would let him help her with her next drug delivery; he recalled the scars on her forearms and speculated about what anguish might have led her younger self to inflict them; and sometimes, at nights before drifting off, he replayed a fleeting vision of her pale, troubled face. However, his life here among the Oasans was very full, and there were so many things he must try to hold in his head. Observe the opportunity , as Ecclesiastes urged him. Be not ignorant of anything great or small .

Oh, he didn’t forget to pray for Charlie Grainger and Coretta, and he thought of Grainger each time he did so. But when he woke up on the morning of the fifth day, the long night was finished, the sun had risen, and the rains were drawing near — and that was that. His appointment with USIC’s moody pharmacist was erased from his brain.

Keeping track of schedules had never been his strong suit anyhow. The longer he spent among the Oasans, the less point he could see in clinging to ways of telling time that were, frankly, irrelevant. A day for him had ceased to feel like twenty-four hours and it certainly didn’t consist of 1,440 minutes. A day was a span of daylight, divided from the next by a spell of darkness. While the sun shone, he would stay awake for twenty, maybe twenty-five hours at a stretch. He didn’t know exactly how long, because his father’s watch had stopped working, ruined by damp. Sad, but there was no point grieving.

Anyway, life wasn’t about measurement, it was about getting the most out of each God-given minute. There was so much to do, so much to digest, so many people to commune with… When darkness fell, Peter would slip into comatose sleep, his consciousness sinking fast and irretrievable like a car dumped in a lake. After an age spent down on the bottom, he would float up into shallower fathoms where he would doze and dream, get up to pee, then doze and dream some more. It was as though he’d discovered the secret of Joshua — Joshua the cat, that is. The secret of snoozing for hours and days on end without boredom, storing up energy for a future occasion.

And then when he’d slept as much as he possibly could, he would lie awake, staring up at the sky, familiarising himself with the eighty-seven stars, giving them each a name: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, Shuah, Sheba and so on. All those genealogies in Genesis and Exodus had come in useful after all. They had begat a new constellation.

Mostly, by the light of slow-burning resin candles, he would sit up in bed, working on his paraphrases of Scripture. The King James Bible spread open on his lap, a notepad cradled on his forearm, a pillow for his head whenever he needed to mull over the alternatives. Unto every province according to the writing thereof, and unto every people after their language — Mordecai’s publishing manifesto, sometime during the Israelites’ Babylonian exile. If the Oasans couldn’t have the Gospel in their own words, they deserved the next-best thing: a version they could speak and sing.

More than once, he’d walked out from his church into the darkness, knelt in the area of scrubland where he buried his faeces, and asked God to tell him honestly if he was falling prey to the sin of Pride. These translations he was spending so much energy on — were they really needed? The Oasans had never asked to be delivered from consonants. They seemed resigned to their humiliation. Kurtzberg had taught them to sing ‘Amazing Grace’, and how sweet the sound had been — yet how excruciating, too. And wasn’t that the point? There was grace in their strenuous approximation. More grace, for sure, than you’d find in some complacent congregation in a British village, singing facile hymns while their minds were half-preoccupied with football or soap operas. The Oasans wanted their Book of Strange New Things; maybe he shouldn’t dilute its strangeness.

He prayed for guidance. God did not caution him. In the stillness of the balmy Oasan night, with the stars shining greenish in the azure heavens, the overwhelming message he felt in the atmosphere around him was: All shall be well. Goodwill and compassion can never be wrong. Continue as you began . Nothing could tarnish the memory of the day when the Oasans sang ‘Amazing Grace’ for him — it was Kurtzberg’s gift to them, which they’d passed on to their next pastor. But he, Peter, would give them different gifts. He would give them Scripture that flowed forth from them as easily as breath itself.

Close to a hundred and twenty Jesus Lovers were in the fold now, and Peter was determined to know them all as individuals, which took a lot more effort than simply keeping a mental record of robe colours and Jesus Lover numbers. He was making headway (so to speak) with telling the difference between the faces. The trick was to quit waiting for the features to resolve themselves into a nose, lips, ears, eyes and so on. That wasn’t going to happen. Instead, you had to decode a face as you’d decode a tree or a rock formation: abstract, unique, but (after you’d lived with it for a while) familiar.

Even so, to recognise was not the same as to know . You could train yourself to identify a certain pattern of bulge and colour, and realise: this is Jesus Lover Thirteen. But who, really, was Jesus Lover Thirteen? Peter had to admit he was finding it difficult to know the Oasans in any deeper sense. He loved them. For the time being, that would have to do.

Sometimes, he wondered if it would have to do for ever. It was hard to remember individuals if they didn’t behave like humans, with their circus displays of ego, their compulsive efforts to brand themselves on your mind. Oasans didn’t work that way. No one engaged in behaviours that screamed Look at me! or Why won’t the world let me be myself? No one, as far as he could tell, was anxiously pondering the question Who am I? They just got on with life. At first, he’d found that impossible to believe, and assumed this equanimity must be a front, and any day now he would discover that the Oasans were as screwed up as anyone else. But no. They were as they appeared to be.

In one way, it was really kind of… restful , to be spared the melodramas that made things so complicated when you dealt with other humans. But it meant that his tried-and-true method of gaining intimacy with new acquaintances was totally useless here. He and Bea had pulled it off so many times, in all the places where they’d ministered, from opulent hotel lobbies to needle exchanges, always the same message to open people up: Don’t worry, I can see that you’re not like everybody else. Don’t worry, I can see that you’re special .