Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

From The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook

While the Flood rages, you must count the days, said Adam One. You must observe the risings of the Sun and the changings of the Moon, because to everything there is a season. On your Meditations, do not travel so far on your inner journeys that you enter the Timeless before it is time. In your Fallow states, do not descend to a level that is too deep for any resurgence, or the Night will come in which all hours are the same to you, and then there will be no Hope.

Toby’s been keeping track of the days on some old AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park notepaper. Each pink page is topped with two long-lashed eyes, one of them winking, and with a lipstick kiss. She likes these eyes and smiling mouths: they’re companions of a sort. At the top of each fresh page she prints the Gardener Feast Day or Saint’s Day. She can still recite the entire list off by heart: Saint E.F. Schumacher, Saint Jane Jacobs, Saint Sigurdsdottir of Gullfoss, Saint Wayne Grady of Vultures; Saint James Lovelock, The Blessed Gautama Buddha, Saint Bridget Stutchbury of Shade Coffee, Saint Linnaeus of Botanical Nomenclature, The Feast of Crocodylidae, Saint Stephen Jay Gould of the Jurassic Shales, Saint Gilberto Silva of Bats. And the rest.

Under each Saint’s Day name she writes her gardening notes: what was planted, what was harvested, what phase of the moon, what insect guests.

Mole Day, she writes now. Year Twenty-five. Do the laundry. Gibbous Moon. Mole Day was part of Saint Euell’s Week. It wasn’t such a good anniversary.

On the bright side, there should be some polyberries by now, ripe ones. The strength of the polyberry gene splice is that it produces at all seasons. Perhaps in the late afternoon she’ll go down and pick them.

Two days back – on Saint Orlando Garrido of Lizards – she made an entry that wasn’t about gardening. Hallucination? she’d written. She ponders this entry now. It did seem like a hallucination at the time.

It was after the daily thunderstorm. She was up on the roof, checking the rain barrel connections: the flow from the single tap she’s kept open downstairs was blocked. She found the problem – drowned mouse clogging the intake – and was turning to go back down the stairs when she heard an odd sound. It was like singing, but not any singing she’d ever heard before.

She scanned with the binoculars. At first there was nothing, but then at the far end of the field a strange procession appeared. It seemed to consist entirely of naked people, though one man walking at the front had clothes on, and some sort of red hat, and – could it be? – sunglasses. Behind him there were men and women and children, every known skin colour; as she focused, she could see that several of the naked people had blue abdomens.

That was why she’s decided it must have been a hallucination: the blueness. And the crystalline, otherworldly singing. She’d seen the figures for only a moment. They were there, then they’d vanished, like smoke. They must have gone in among the trees, to follow the walkway there.

Her heart had leapt with joy – she couldn’t help it. She’d felt like running down the stairs, running outside, running after them. But it was far too much to hope for, other people – so many other people. Other people who looked so healthy. They couldn’t possibly be real. If she allowed herself to be lured outside by such a siren mirage – lured into the pig-ridden forest – she wouldn’t be the first person in history to have been destroyed by the overly optimistic projections of her own mind.

Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?

She takes her pencil and scratches out the question mark. Hallucination, it says now. Pure. Simple. No doubt about it.

She sets down her pencil, gathers her mop handle and her binoculars and the rifle, and trudges up the stairs to the rooftop to survey her domain. All is quiet this morning. No movement out there in the field – no large animals, no naked blue-tinged singers.

How long ago was that Mole Day, the last one Pilar was alive? Year Twelve, it must have been.

Right before it had come the disaster of Burt’s arrest. After he’d been taken away by the CorpSeMen and Veena and Bernice had left the vacant lot, Adam One had called all the Gardeners together for an emergency meeting up on the Edencliff Rooftop. He’d told them the news, and when they’d grasped it, the Gardeners had gone into shock. The revelation was so painful, and so shameful! How had Burt managed to run a gro-op in the Buenavista without anyone suspecting?

Through trust, of course, thinks Toby. The Gardeners mistrusted everyone in the Exfernal World, but they trusted their own. Now they’d joined the long list of the religious faithful who’d woken one morning to find that the vicar had made off with the church building fund, leaving a trail of molested choirboys behind him. At least Burt hadn’t done any choirboy molesting, or not as far as was known. There’d been gossip among the children – crude remarks of the kind children made – but they hadn’t been about boys. Just girls, and just groping.

The only one of the Gardeners who hadn’t been surprised and horrified by the gro-op was Philo the Fog, but he was never surprised or horrified by anything. “I’d like to try that shit, see if it’s any good,” was all he had to say.

Adam One had asked for volunteers to take in the families that had been so suddenly displaced – they couldn’t go back to the Buenavista, he’d said, because it would be overrun with CorpSeMen, so they should consider their material possessions as lost to them. “If the building was on fire, you wouldn’t run back into it to save a few baubles and trinkets,” he said. “It is God’s way of testing your attachment to the realm of useless illusion.” The Gardeners weren’t supposed to be bothered by that part: they’d gleaned their material possessions in junkyards and dumpsters so they could always glean others, went the theory. Nevertheless there was some weeping over a lost crystal glass, and a puzzling fuss about a broken waffle iron with sentimental value.

Adam One then asked all present not to talk about Burt and the Buenavista, and especially the CorpSeCorps. “Our enemies may be listening,” he’d said. He’d been saying that more and more frequently: Toby sometimes wondered whether he was paranoid.

“Nuala, Toby,” he’d said as the others were leaving. “A moment. Can you go by there and check?” he said to Zeb. “Though I don’t suppose there’s anything to be done.”

“Nope,” said Zeb cheerfully. “Not a fuckworth. But I’ll take a look.”

“Wear your pleebland clothes,” said Adam One.

Zeb nodded. “The solarbiker outfit.” He strolled away towards the fire-escape stairs.

“Nuala, my dear,” said Adam One. “Can you cast any light? On what Veena said, about you and Burt?”

Nuala began sniffling. “I have no idea,” she said. “It’s such a lie! It’s so disrespectful! It’s so hurtful! How could she think such a thing, about me and… and Adam Thirteen?”

Not too hard, thought Toby, considering the way you rub up against pant legs. Nuala flirted with anything male. But Veena had been in a Fallow state while the flirting had been going on, so what had aroused her suspicion?

“None of us believes it, my dear,” said Adam One. “Veena must have listened to some rumour-monger – perhaps an agent provocateur sent by our enemies to sow dissention among us. I will ask the Buenavista gatekeepers if Veena had any unusual visitors in recent days. Now, dear Nuala, you should dry your tears and go to the Sewing Room. Our displaced congregation members will need many cloth items, such as quilts, and I know you’re happy to be of use.”