The Book of Strange New Things (30 page)

‘The impersonal touch?’

‘It’s what the great religions offer, isn’t it?’ And she lifted her wristwatch again. ‘I’ll come and collect you at 1330.’

She left without another word and shut the door behind her, at exactly the instant that his towel fell off.

‘We are gathered here,’ said Peter to the hushed and solemn assembly, ‘to honour a man who, only one sunrise ago, was a living, breathing person just like us.’

He cast a glance towards the coffin that sat on a rack of metal rollers in front of an incinerator. Instinctively, everyone else in the room looked at it, too. The coffin was made of recycled cardboard, with a lustrous gloss of vegetable glaze to give it that solid-wood effect. The rack was just like the ones attached to x-ray machines at airports.

‘A person who drew air into his lungs,’ Peter continued, ‘lungs that were a bit the worse for wear, perhaps, but still working fine, delivering oxygen to his blood, the same blood that’s pumping in all of us as we stand here today.’ His voice was loud and clear without amplification, but lacked the reverb resonance it was granted in churches and assembly halls. The funeral room, while large, was acoustically cramped, and the furnace inside the incinerator generated a noise like a distant jet plane passing by.

‘Listen to your heart beat,’ said Peter. ‘Feel the ever-so-slight tremor inside your chest as your body miraculously keeps functioning. It’s such a gentle tremor, such a quiet sound, that we don’t appreciate how much it matters. We may not have been always aware of it, we may scarcely have given it a thought from day to day, but we were sharing the world with Art Severin, and he was sharing it with us. Now the sun has come up on a new day, and Art Severin has changed. We are here today to face up to that change.’

The mourners numbered fifty-two. Peter wasn’t sure how big a proportion of the total USIC staff this was. There were only six women, including Grainger; the rest were males, making Peter wonder if Severin had failed to win the respect of his female colleagues, or whether this simply reflected the gender distribution of the base. Everyone was dressed in the clothes they might usually wear at work. Nobody wore black.

BG and Tuska stood in the forefront of the crowd. Tuska, clad in a loose green shirt, military camouflage trousers and his trademark tennis shoes, was nevertheless almost unrecognisable, having shaved off his beard. BG was unmistakable as ever, the biggest body in the room, his facial hair maintained with scalpel-fine precision. A white T-shirt clung to his musculature like paint. A wrinkled white sirwal hung off his hips, its cuffs puddling over incongruous polished shoes. His arms were folded across his chest, his face composed and imperiously tolerant. A few people in the ranks behind him were looking more quizzical, nudged off-balance by the eulogy’s opening salvo.

‘Arthur Laurence Severin died young,’ said Peter, ‘but he lived many lives. He was born in Bend, Oregon, forty-eight years ago, to parents he never knew, and was adopted by Jim and Peggy Severin. They gave him a happy and active childhood, mostly in the open air. Jim repaired and maintained campsites, hunting lodges and military outposts. Art could drive a tractor by the time he was ten, operate a chainsaw, shoot deer, all that dangerous stuff that kids shouldn’t be allowed to do. He was all set to take over the family business. Then his adoptive parents divorced and Art started getting into trouble. His teenage years were spent in and out of juvenile corrective institutions and rehabilitation programmes. By the time he was old enough to go to jail, he already had a long record of crack cocaine abuse and DUI offences.’

The mourners were not so blank-faced now. A thrill of unease was passing through them, a thrill of interest and anxiety. Heads tilted, brows knitted, lower lips folding under top ones. Faster breathing. Children drawn in by a story.

‘Art Severin got time off for good behaviour and was soon back on the streets of Oregon. But not for long. Frustrated at the lack of employment opportunities in the US for young ex-crims, he relocated to Sabah, Malaysia, where he started a tool supply business with some drug dealing on the side. It was in Sabah that he met Kamelia, a local entrepreneur who supplied female companionship to the timber industry. They fell in love, married, and, although Kamelia was already in her forties, produced two daughters, Nora and Pao-Pei, always known as May. When Kamelia’s brothel was shut down by the authorities and Art’s business was squeezed by competition, he found work in the timber trade, and it was only then that he first discovered his lifelong fascination with the mechanics and chemistry of soil erosion.’

With measured assurance, Peter began to walk towards the coffin. The hand in which he had been holding his Bible swung at his side, and everyone could see that his thumb was pressed against a small scrap of hand-scribbled paper inside the Scripture.

‘Art Severin’s next life was in Australia,’ he said, gazing down at the casket’s lustrous surface. ‘Sponsored by a company that recognised his potential, he studied geotechnics and soil mechanics at the University of Sydney. He graduated in record time – this young man who’d dropped out of high school only nine years before – and was soon being headhunted by engineering firms because of his deep understanding of soil behaviour, and also because of his custom-made equipment. He could’ve made a fortune in patents, but he never saw himself as an inventor, merely as a worker who, as he put it, “got mad at crap tools”.’

There was a murmur of recognition in the crowd. Peter laid his free hand on the coffin lid, gently but firmly, as if laying it on Art Severin’s shoulder. ‘Whenever he found that the available apparatus couldn’t deliver the quality of data he demanded, he simply designed and built technology that would. Among his inventions was . . . ’ (and here he consulted the scrap of paper inside his Bible) ‘ . . . a new sampling tool for use in cohesionless sands below ground-water level. Among his academic papers – again, written by this man whose high school teachers considered him a hopeless delinquent – were “Undrained triaxial tests on saturated sands and their significance to a comprehensive theory of shear strength”, “Achieving constant pressure control for the triaxial compression test”, “Stability gain due to pore pressure dissipation in a soft clay foundation”, “Overhauling Terzaghi’s principle of effective stress: some suggested solutions to anomalies at low hydraulic gradients”, and dozens more.’

Peter closed his Bible and hugged it to his abdomen, directly under the crucifix-shaped stain. His dishdasha had been laundered and pressed, but fresh sweat was already spreading in patches all over it. The assembled mourners were perspiring too.

‘Now, I’m not going to pretend I have much of a clue what those titles mean,’ said Peter with a faint grin. ‘Some of you will. Others won’t. The important thing is that Art Severin turned himself into a world-renowned expert on something more useful than taking drugs. Although . . . he didn’t let his old skills lapse entirely. Before he worked for USIC, he used to smoke fifty cigarettes a day.’ A ripple of chuckles passed through the crowd. There had been a solitary, suppressed snort earlier on when he’d referred to the female companionship supplied by Kamelia’s business, but this laughter now was unashamed, relaxed.

‘But we’re getting ahead of the story,’ he cautioned. ‘We’re leaving out some of his lives. Because Art Severin’s
next
life was as a consultant on major dam-building projects in a dozen countries from Zaire to New Zealand. His time in Malaysia had taught him the value of staying out of the limelight, so he rarely took the credit for his achievements, preferring to let politicians and corporate heads bask in the glory. But glorious indeed were the dams he nurtured to completion. He was especially proud of the Aziz Dam in Pakistan, which, if you’ll forgive an unintended pun, was truly ground-breaking: a rock-filled earth dam with an impervious clay core. The entire project required a high degree of attention to detail, since it was in an earthquake fault zone. It still stands today.’ Peter raised his chin, looked out of the nearest window at the alien emptiness beyond. His congregation looked likewise. Whatever was out there symbolised achievement, hard-won achievement within a vast environment that did not change unless dedicated professionals made it happen. A few eyes glinted with moisture.

‘Art Severin’s next life was not a happy one,’ said Peter, on the move again, as though inspired by Severin’s own restlessness. ‘Kamelia left him, for reasons he never understood. Both his daughters were badly affected by the break-up: Nora turned against him, and May was diagnosed schizophrenic. A few months after a gruelling and expensive divorce settlement, Art was investigated by tax authorities and billed for money he didn’t have. Within a year, he was drinking heavily, on welfare, living in a motor home with May, watching her get worse, and getting sicker and sicker himself, with undiagnosed diabetes.

‘But here’s where the story takes an unexpected direction,’ he said, turning abruptly, making eye-contact with as many of his listeners as he could. ‘May went off her medication, committed suicide, and everybody who’d been watching Art Severin’s decline assumed he would completely hit the skids and be found dead one day in his trailer. Instead, he sorted out his health, tracked down his real father, borrowed some money, shipped himself back to Oregon, and found work as a tour guide. He did it for ten years, refusing offers of promotion, refusing opportunities to get back into the geotechnics industry – until finally USIC came along. USIC made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: the chance to test out, on a grand scale, his theories on the use of soils and soft rocks as engineering materials.

‘That grand-scale testing ground,’ declared Peter, ‘is here. It’s what we are standing on today. Art Severin’s skills helped to take this fantastically ambitious experiment as far as it has reached, and, because of Art’s generous sharing of his expertise, his skills will live on in his colleagues, you who knew him. I’ve talked mostly about Art’s past, a past many of you may have been scarcely aware of, because Art seldom spoke of it. He was, as I’m sure some of you would agree, a hard man to get to know. I won’t pretend to have known him myself. He showed kindness to me on my journey here, but by the time we arrived, we’d exchanged some tense words. I was looking forward to catching up with him later, after I’d settled in to my own work here; I was looking forward to smoothing things over between us. But that’s the way it goes with the dead and those they leave behind. Each of you will have your last memory of Art Severin, the last thing you said to him, the final thing he said to you. Maybe it’s the smile you shared over some detail of your work together, a smile that will mean something more to you now: a symbol of a relationship that was in pretty good order, pretty much ready to be severed clean. Or maybe you’ll remember a look he gave you, one of those what-the-hell-did-he-mean-by-that moments, something that makes you wonder whether there was anything you could or should have done, to make his absence now seem more natural. But either way, we’re struggling to make sense of his unreachability, the fact that he’s in a different dimension from us now, he’s no longer breathing the same air, no longer the same sort of creature. We know there was more to him than the body that’s stored in this casket, just as we know that there’s more to us than our kidneys and our intestines and our earwax. But we don’t have accurate terminology for what that extra thing is. Some of us call it the soul, but what
is
that, really? Is there a research paper on it that we can read, that will explain the properties of Art Severin’s soul, and tell us how it differs from the Art Severin we knew, the guy with the discoloured teeth and prickly temperament, the guy who found it difficult to trust women, the guy who had a habit of drumming on his knees to rock music that played in his head?’

Peter had been walking forwards slowly, getting closer to his congregation, until he stood within arm’s-reach of the front row. BG’s forehead was contorted with wrinkles, his eyes shone with tears. The woman next to him was weeping. Tuska’s jaw was set, his lopsided grin trembling slightly. Grainger, somewhere in the back row, was bone-pale, her expression softened by pain.

‘People, you know I’m a Christian. For me, that all-important research paper is the Bible. For me, that vital missing data is Jesus Christ. But I know that some of you are of different faiths. And I know that Art Severin professed to have none. BG asked him what religion he was, and he said “I’m nothing”. I never got a chance to discuss with him what he really meant by that. And now, I’ll never get that chance. But it’s not because Art Severin is lying here, dead. No. It’s because this body here isn’t Art Severin: we all know that, instinctively. Art Severin isn’t here anymore; he’s somewhere else, somewhere where we can’t be. We’re standing here, breathing air into those funny spongy bladders we call lungs, our torsos shaking slightly from the pump action of that muscle we call a heart, our legs getting uncomfortable from balancing on our foot-bones too long. We are souls shut inside a cage of bones; souls squeezed into a parcel of flesh. We get to hang around in there for a certain number of years, and then we go where souls go. I believe that’s into the bosom of God. You may believe it’s somewhere different. But one thing’s for sure: it’s somewhere, and it’s not here.’

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.