The Raft: A Novel (20 page)

This material, it just so happened, was the accidental harbinger of a new natural world, and his temple on the mountains a retreat like no other. A magic existed there. It was a place of life and energy. A true Shangri-La, and a carefully guarded secret. How Mr. Zhang had come to meet her father, and why she had been chosen to stay with him on the mountain with his three beautiful daughters, she never did find out.

One day, at the end of her year, once she had more than overcome her ailment and attained what can only be understood as a “resistance” to the fears and insecurities that had once beset her, he took her back to her parents. His final warning rang in her ears:
The world has not changed. While people can temporarily alleviate some of their problems, the real problem isn’t in the air. It’s in the mind. And the mind of Man is sick with rot. Though my home is a secret I urge you to keep, I will give you one final gift: you may, at any point in your life, send one person in need of healing to live with me at my home for a year. I promise you this now, as I once promised your father, and someone else before him. But only one person, and for one year only. I’ll be waiting.

He’d said it after my mother had climbed out of the vehicle and into the dusty streets of home. And then the door of the vehicle closed and he sped away, never to enter into her life again. She knocked on the door of her parents’ shanty. They opened it and cried when they saw her. And her life, although forever changed in the deepest way, continued on as it once had—except that she was never sick. No colds, no flu, not even a migraine, she said. That year on the mountain had strengthened her body in some wonderfully strange and incomprehensible way …

And that’s where the story she told me ended. And I’d go to bed and dream about that place, and wonder if I’d ever see it, if it truly was as real as I had hoped.

It was now obvious that the temple was the Silver Whisper’s intended destination. Though I could only be there for a year, it had been her only option. Hopefully, when my year there was up there’d be somewhere for me to go. Perhaps, she said, Mr. Zhang would be willing to let me stay.

I stared back down at my mother’s digital face. On top of everything, what really lingered now was the reminder that my mother had been sick as a child. She had come away believing she’d been cured for life. But even though cured, her life hadn’t been a happy one. She worried about me, about my father, feared that something might happen and she would not be in a position to save me. Perhaps she saw that his dynasty was heading for some sort of cataclysmic collapse. And if that happened, would she be able to save me? She had to have a plan in place that would get me away, because my father would never put me before his precious dynasty. If anything, he’d keep me in captivity there, let me sink with him in the hopes that the heir I was programmed to deliver would provide some miraculous means of salvation.

Maybe my mother thought he would separate us, keep her from telling me what his plans for me were. Whatever the case, she had worked hard to have an escape plan in place, to save me, to make up for what she had allowed him to do to me. Of course, the one thing my mother
never
foresaw was the situation that had arisen, where the sickness came back to take her once more, like a devil who had returned to claim a soul bartered for a few untroubled years of good health.

I was filled with the deepest sympathy for her, reminded that she hadn’t always been my mother. She’d once been a young girl. She had endured a childhood of poverty and sickness, an adulthood of loneliness and marital enslavement. She had done her best … until the day the world had become so unbearable she’d had no choice but to leave it …

Beauty. Grace. Wisdom. She’d had each, but life hadn’t cared, hadn’t shown her any favour. What were the rest of us supposed to live by, if anything at all? Tragedy, I learned that day, floats … And then it lands arbitrarily, like a feather from an indifferent bird high in the sky.

The pod left the flat plains of the desert, zigzagging between the gorges of the mountains, swinging around wide bends, gusting a rippling wake across the surface of a narrow lake, bending reeds and gliding slickly over stone slabs. I flattened my hands against the side and looked up to the tops of the rocky cliff-faces. The sun popped in and out of the cracks and gaps, my constant, protective companion.

It was then that an unexpected heaviness filled my head, the weight of a blanket soaked in water. I collapsed back into my seat. I felt nauseous. Outside, the walls of the valleys still raced rearward. The sun struck out, but now the rays were an expanding, blinding sheet that grew whiter and brighter. The heaviness intensified and became a sharp, piercing pain, followed by a penetrating noise.

My mother’s face began to warp and distort. The pod that had whipped over the land so smoothly was now shuddering and shaking …

I’m sure you’ve already guessed. The growing pain, the shrill sound … all happened the moment our memories were wiped clean and humankind lost a link in the unending chain of advancement and accumulated knowledge.

Day Zero, we now call it.

Of course, I had no idea that at that very moment everyone else in the world was suffering in the same way. As that malfunctioning glass bubble spluttered through the rocky vales, I thought it was an environmental factor, some sort of karmic penance even, for daring to leave the tower. These thoughts lingered for a short, bewildered while and then everything ended in sudden, mind-blotting blackness.

Who knew how long I had been out?

It could have been hours, weeks, or months—there was no way to tell. When I came around, my memory was gone, drained like old water from a tub. Everything I’ve just told you has been dug up and pieced together over many years—detail by detail, word by word. I’m like an archaeologist, delicately picking rock from fossil. At that moment, though, when my eyes opened, there was nothing.

I was lying on a bed in a room. I had no memories of the tower, or the pod, or Sun Zhang’s temple on the mountain. For all I knew, my life had begun right there, sprawled on those brown blankets.

The first thing I noticed was a damp patch on the ceiling. The centre of it was dark, bulging—water waiting for the opportunity to burst through. The air was warm and musty, the room small and unfamiliar. I climbed out of bed and walked unsteadily to the door. I turned down a dark corridor, and found myself in a quaint kitchen with sunflower-patterned curtains on the windows and an old refrigerator droning like a disgruntled house spirit. A man and a woman stood near the sink and gawked morosely back at me. They said nothing as I entered. The elderly man was thin and weathered with a balding crown, and he wore faded overalls and mud-caked blue worker boots. The woman was about the same age, her face hidden in a scrub of thick black hair. Rolls of fat swelled from the shoulder straps of her purple dress like baked bread. They didn’t recognise me … no reaction, no change in expression. Then the man turned and left the kitchen as if he’d forgotten to do something out there. The woman sat down on a chair at a round table, fingering the petals of plastic pink flowers in a jar. She ignored me as I stepped to the door that led outside and swung it open.

I was on a farm. Fat, blotchy pigs snarled and fought to secure their places at a mucky food trough. A boy was leaning over the crude, wooden fence, watching them. As I descended the steps of the porch and planted my feet on the muddy earth, he looked at me over his shoulder. He pushed himself off the fence and approached me, took my hand, and led me back to the fence. I leaned against the post alongside him. The sty smelled like rotten vegetables and excrement. Beyond the sty, the few acres of farm were grey and neglected. Clouds tumbled in high winds, sliding patches of shadow across the land like a desperate, migrating herd.

I never did fully remember the three people I saw in the house that weird day, but as the weeks continued, there were more and more clues. I saw myself in photographs on the walls. If the pictures were to be trusted, I had spent my entire life with those strangers. I saw myself as a young child in the woman’s arms. There was a picture of the boy and me bathing together in a steel tub. I saw each of these pictures, yet recalled nothing of the moments.

Over time,
their
memories slowly came back, but mine didn’t. On several occasions, the man sat me down and tried to convince me that he was my father, the woman was my mother, and the boy, my brother, but I struggled to accept it. Not only did I experience an absence of connection between us, I had also begun to dream of other places and other people.

In my earliest dreams, I saw nothing but a long white elevator. I had flashes of a beautiful woman applying her make-up before the mirror of a large, elaborate dresser. I saw a gigantic room containing nothing but a window that spanned the length of a massive wall, and a small desk. I saw one room drenched in blue light, another containing a floating metallic vehicle.

Night by night, the dreams became clearer and more consuming. By day, I helped my alleged brother on the farm (a boy whose company I had grown to appreciate, although I could never see him as my brother), cooked with my “mother” in the kitchen, and sat at my “father’s” side in the evenings while he watched a fire burn beneath the mantelpiece and drowsed on tumblers of whiskey. But all the while I felt that I was merely pretending to be a part of that rural family.

Sometimes, when everyone was sleeping, I would wake, climb out of my bed, sit by my window and stare off into the outlying mountains. My eyes were always drawn to the same spot—a valley I could just about make out in the obstinate mist that shrouded the land. It was not long before I decided I couldn’t continue in such a way.

One crisp morning, a few months later, I met the boy in the barn beside the house and told him I needed to go. I was carrying nothing but a small bag filled with food, water and a sweater. He asked where I needed to go, and I said I didn’t know. I was being drawn to some place in the mountains; some mysterious location was pulling on me like a magnet, and I knew I could no longer ignore it. He tried to convince me to stay, but when I told him I could not, he decided he’d come with me. He said he would return to the farm, to his mother and father, but he’d go with me as far as he could. I was relieved. I was terrified of what lay ahead and welcomed the thought of his company. I thanked him and we agreed to leave the following day.

We set off in the morning and walked for almost three days. The boy had brought a tent and essential supplies and we camped in bushes when we needed to rest. He tracked and killed small game and we cooked rabbits and pigeons over a fire. The boy said little to me; I knew he was worrying about his parents alone on the farm, but he did not complain, did not once suggest going back. He could see I needed to go on, to reach the place I sensed I needed to find, and he stayed to protect me. Perhaps he too was curious.

On the third day, filthy and exhausted, we saw something in the valley of the mountains—light, reflecting off the surface of an object partially hidden between the rocks. We hurried ahead to examine it further.

It was the pod, half-buried in the dirt, its mirrored exterior layered in rain-streaked dust. Behind it, trees and bushes had been ripped from the damaged soil. It had clearly come crashing down at a great speed …

I must have blacked out when it hit the ground
, I said.
It’s a good thing your parents found me when they did; I’m not sure I would have survived.

We circled the object for a few minutes, and I could see him trying to make sense of its strange shape.

This is mine
, I said.
The Silver Whisper. I was escaping the tower and on my way to the temple …
From the look on his face I could tell he did not understand a word.

As before, I spoke the word
Jai-Li
and, with a hiss, a door rolled out. I held my breath, gave the boy a last blank look, and climbed inside.

In the cockpit, the air was foul. I saw four red chairs, a bag and a gas mask, lying on the floor. Those few items didn’t surprise me; I remembered them all.

No, what surprised me was the figure of a small person slumped over in the front seat, head against a shattered panel of instruments. At first I thought it was a loiterer, a sleeping wanderer who’d taken shelter in the wreck. But how could anyone get in? And what was that awful smell? I struggled to catch my breath. I leaned over and touched the stranger’s shoulder. The body lolled back, exposing her face, and I drew back in horror.

It was a girl. A dead girl. Her face was cut and scratched and the blood had clotted and crusted. Her yellow dress was splattered in dark brown smears. Her arm had been broken and twisted in an unnatural position. It was her, Kayle. Her, and somehow, me.

I recalled that a letter had been written, and carefully reached into her dress pocket and pulled it out. I unfolded it, recognised the handwriting, the roughly drawn map …

I stumbled out of the pod and threw up on the ground outside. Tears ran down my face.
Wait. Wait a minute
, I muttered
No, no, no … it’s not right. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t!

The boy crouched down. What wasn’t right, he wanted to know, what didn’t make sense?

I answered:
It was me. It was supposed to be me.

I couldn’t speak for a few hours. I huddled in a corner reading and re-reading the shabby letter. The words were precisely as I had remembered them: the story of a young couple who had failed to resist a family empire, the programmed pregnancy, the need to escape …

But the girl.

She looked nothing like me, but I knew her face. I knew her face as well as I knew my own. It was one I’d somehow once
had
, but what did that mean? If I wasn’t her, who was I? Who was she?

The boy camouflaged the pod with dirt and bushes. We set up camp, made a fire and ate another small animal, then went to sleep. At first light, I helped him pack up and he laid his hand on my shoulder,
Come on, Jun; let’s go back. Let’s go home.