The Raft: A Novel (36 page)

But still.

The way that one with the bad teeth and electrically charged hairstyle mocked the clerk while the rest of the squad cackled—hadn’t he made the same dumb gag the night before? The way that skinny girl with the smeared eye make-up leaned over the counter to wrench the clerk forward and kiss him on the lips—how many nights in a row would she tease the poor boy with the same cruel gesture?

Shen was thinking all of these things when, prompted by some sort of collective thought, they all turned to look at him. Shen’s heart skipped a beat as their animated expressions fell away, and they swivelled their heads to eye him as he passed. Even the clerk was now staring, as if he had suddenly been accepted into their fraternity by their shared captivation. In Shen’s mind, there was no explaining it; he was on the other side of the street. He couldn’t imagine why he’d caught their attention, or how they’d all known he’d been watching them in the first place.

Shen ducked his head and hurried along the street. He hailed a passing taxi and told the driver to take him to The Glimmer Room.
Those staring teenagers
, he told himself,
figments of my imagination. You’re getting paranoid in your old age, Shen.
They’d probably either mistaken him for someone else or hadn’t been looking at him at all. Had there been someone walking behind him perhaps? Someone they would have known? He didn’t know and he didn’t have time to think much more about them. All he wanted was get to The Glimmer Room, figure out the business with Quon, and get back to his warm bed.

He watched the streets through the window of the taxi. Dark, drenched and hopeless, he didn’t feel as if he was moving through them as much as they were moving past
him—
as if the hawkers, prostitutes, the drunks and the homeless were standing on the open platforms of a gigantic train going in the other direction, all of them casually unaware they were being led to a place of execution: a death camp, a slaughterhouse, to plunge off the edge of an unfinished bridge.

Shen sighed, sat back in his seat, and looked ahead. A pair of plastic black cue balls dangled from the rear-view mirror. The back of the driver’s big head was set square on his shoulders as if it had little need of a neck.

“Miserable night, huh?” Shen said.

The driver said nothing, and the car kept cruising down the street.
And let’s all just make it a little more miserable, shall we?
Shen thought. He abandoned any attempt at chitchat and sat back in his seat. The vehicle turned a corner and finally came to a stop outside The Glimmer Room. On the dashboard, the fee flashed on an LED display and Shen placed his thumb on the square glass plate beside it. His print was fed into the machine and the amount was deducted from his account. Then the door opened and he got out.

“Thanks for the—” he tried to say, but the door shut instantly and the car pulled back onto the street, vanishing silently into the night.

Shen looked up at the flashing sign for The Glimmer Room. He nodded at the bouncer perched on his stool like an overfed parrot and went through the doorway.

The ramshackle bar was quiet. The barman was behind the counter with a clipboard, lining up half-bottles of hard liquor and taking stock. In the corner, two men played an unhurried game of pool, dense clouds of cigarette smoke hanging over their heads as if they’d been playing for days already.

Quon was sitting at the end of the bar, nursing a short drink. Shen walked up to him, took off his coat and pulled out a stool.

“Quon,” he said.

Quon turned, snapping out of a daze. Shen was shocked. Quon looked like a terrible effigy of the conservative, mathematical, military man he had once been: his hair was shaggy and dishevelled, his eyes sunken, his skin creased. This was not the unemotional, disciplined scientist Shen had come to respect aboard Chang’e 11 … Quon smiled drunkenly and put his hand on Shen’s shoulder.

“Shen. My friend,” he slurred.

“What’s going on Quon?” Shen asked, wasting little time. “What’s this all about?”

“How are you, my friend?”

“I’m okay. How are you?”

Quon shrugged and tapped his empty glass on the counter. The barman turned to top it up, but Shen put his hand over the rim of the glass, pulling it away.

“How about we keep things simple for the time being,” Shen said, and then told the barman to bring them a couple of Cokes. “So we’re both on the right level. What do you think?”

“On the right level. Sure,” Quon said, waving his hand. “I’m glad you made it out. Glad you could come.”

“Of course.”

Quon must be getting a divorce. That’s what it was. Quon and his wife were splitting and Shen was the only person he could call. That was his best guess. “How’s the wife?” he asked.

“The wife?” Quon replied. “Wouldn’t know. Haven’t seen her.”

Divorce. Shen was almost certain.

“Is she not at home?”

“Oh, yes, she’s at home. She’s
all
the way back there, at home. But how can I know with this place, hm? Tell me.”

“Well, maybe you should go home, Quon. Go home to Fang. You’ll feel better in the mor—”

“Go home? Go home! And how do you expect me to do that?”

“C’mon, I’ll get you a taxi.”

“Yes!” Quon laughed. “A taxi! Let’s get a taxi, all the way back home. What do you think the fare will be for a few billion kilometres? How much you got on you?”

Shen frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let me ask you something, Shen. Let me ask you this.” Quon leaned forward. His breath stank of alcohol and an empty stomach. “How’s
your
wife?”

“She’s fine.”

“Is she? Is she ab-so-lute-ly
fine
, Shen? Just the way you left her nine years ago?”

“Okay, that’s enough, Quon. Come on. We’ll talk about this in the morning, when you’re—”

“All right! If you won’t tell me about your wife, let me tell you about mine.”

“Fine. What about her?” Shen said, relaxing into his seat.

The Cokes arrived and Shen passed one of them to Quon and told him to drink it all quickly.

“Two weeks ago,” Quon began, “I woke up at six in the morning. Fang was up and in the kitchen, making something to eat. And you know what? She looked beautiful to me. Just beautiful. You know when a woman just glows? She was glowing. She made me my breakfast and it was the most delicious breakfast ever. Exactly what I like. When I was done, I grabbed my case and walked to the door. She came to see me off. She stood at the door in her pink and yellow pyjamas and she had this smile on her face. Empty. Like she was being controlled by a little man in her head who was making her smile against her will. She had a bit of ketchup on her thumb. She was licking it off as she waved goodbye. I got in the car, pulled out of the driveway, and she was still standing there. Waving and sucking her thumb.

“I was away for four or five hours—went to the gym, did some errands—and then I came back, right? Except, you know what, guess who was still there in the doorway when I pulled the car in? Fang. Standing in the doorway in her pink and yellow pyjamas, sucking her thumb, smiling like a mannequin.”

“Okay …”

“She’d been standing there the entire time I was gone, Shen. Standing in the doorway for five hours!”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know? Christ!” Quon slammed his glass on the counter. “I don’t
know.
But I do. I do know. Her hair was exactly the same as when I left. She was still in those goddamn pyjamas. She was still sucking her thumb, and not a single thing had changed in the house. The dishes were still all out. The egg shells were still on the counter. The bed was unmade. Nothing had been done. And I know my wife, Shen.
You
know my wife. That would never pass. No. Whoever or whatever was at the house, that was
not
my wife.”

Shen swigged his Coke. Maybe he should have ordered something harder, he thought. Quon was staring him down, waiting for a reaction.

“I don’t know, Quon,” Shen said, finally.

“Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I know you do. Now. Do you want to tell me about
your
wife?”

Shen rubbed his hand around the glass, gathering the condensation on his fingers. “She’s younger,” he said finally. “She’s younger than I remember.”

“Younger. Ha! Yes. Not the woman you left behind, is she? Okay. How about this—what do you remember about us being up there?”

“Up where?”

“In Chang’e 11, Captain. What’s the last thing you remember about our mission?”

“The last thing? What do you mean?”

“Anything,” Quon said. “Do you really remember anything? Anything specific? Re-entry? Do you actually remember the day we landed?”

“Of course I do. It was only a couple of months ago.”

“Was it really? So you remember it. Great. Give me one memory of it. One story. Detail. Anything.”

Shen smiled. Quon was having him on. The entire conversation was some kind of weird wind-up. Of course he could remember it.

“Okay, well—” he began, playing along. “The day we landed. Let’s see. We … uh …” He paused. He trawled through his memories, but where there should have been facts and feelings about the event, there was nothing, a void. He could not even access the next available memory. A black hole had materialised in his head and it was sucking in the weak light of what he should have known.

“Forget the arrival,” Quon said. “What about this place? Home. Hell, let’s talk about this very bar. Do me a favour. Close your eyes.”

“Quon …”

“Close your eyes.”

Shen did as he was told.

“When you stepped into this bar, ten minutes ago, what did you notice first?” Quon asked.

“Um. The bar counter.”

“What else?”

“Two men playing pool.”

“Right. Go on.”

“And—I don’t know, Quon—you. Sitting on the stool.”

“Who was behind the bar?”

“A barman.”

“Barman. Okay. What was
he
doing?”

“Taking stock.”

“Hm. Open your eyes.”

Shen blinked hard. At first he could not tell what he was expected to see. As he looked around, however, he noticed certain details had changed. The barman was not a barman, but a young and beautiful woman. She was fidgeting at the till. The two men playing pool weren’t behind him as he was sure they had been a moment earlier; they were wearing expensive suits and halfway through a card game at a small table. There wasn’t even a pool table.

“What’s going on?” Shen asked. “How did—”

“What I saw when I came in here,” Quon said, “is probably what you’re seeing right now. Once you told me what you saw, I projected my environment onto you, as if your mind was a screen. Don’t ask me how.”

“This doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s as if there’s something, someone maybe, trying to rectify the discrepancies between us. To balance our perceptions and create a synchronicity between our conscious minds. It’s failing. But it’s trying. Trying to make us believe the same lie.”

“What lie?”

“Captain Shen. You know what I think?” Quon asked. He ran his finger over the counter. “I think this isn’t home at all. It looks like home. It
feels
like home. But we’re not on earth. We haven’t returned from our mission. We’re still out there, and whatever, or wherever, this place is, it’s trying to make us
think
we’ve returned.”

“That’s ridiculous. No. We landed. Two months ago.”

Quon turned back to the bar. “No. No. These environments have been downloaded from our memories. Everything we see here we’ve seen before. Perhaps we’re being shown a world that we
want
to see. Our beautiful, ageless wives, for example. But there are glitches. This place is full of them. Look,” he held up his glass. It was a tumbler with a few last drips of whiskey sloshing at the bottom. “You ordered two Cokes. I wanted another whiskey. So mine’s a whiskey. Has been all along.”

Shen took a moment to process what he was being told. He watched as the stunning young lady behind the counter diced a lemon. She looked up at him, thinking he needed to be served, but he waved his hand gently, and she turned back to her task. “There must be an explanation for all of this,” he said.

“I’ve just given you one.”

“Have you spoken to the others?”

“The others? The crew. They’re not here.”

“Where are they?”

Quon shrugged and tapped his glass on the counter, signalling the barmaid to fill it up. He smacked his lips.

“Living in their own projections, I suppose. Stuck in their own lies. Who knows?”

The barmaid filled the glass and Quon beckoned her closer with his finger. She leaned over the counter and Quon whispered something in her ear. Once he had spoken, she headed back to her lemon. Shen thought it was odd,
What secret could Quon have with a barmaid?
but did not consider it for long. He was studying the bar for clues. The missing pool table. The card players.

His mind played over the events of the past two months—if it had been two months at all. Was it a dream? Was he dreaming right then? Had he really just walked back from his apartment or had he simply been in the same
nowhere
Quon had postulated, fabricating a past for himself as he went along?

He thought about his wife’s face. Her unnaturally young face. He thought about the extra rooms in the corridor. He thought about those wasted kids in the diner, eyeing him as he went by. He even thought about the taxi driver whose face he had not seen. Did the man even
have
a face, or was he only a back that could not be turned? There had been two black cue balls hanging from the driver’s rear-view mirror, but even though Shen knew he’d seen them, the mental image of what he’d really seen was different. In his mind, the totems hanging from the mirror were two playing cards, twisting on a string: a king of hearts and a joker.

Christ.

Where were they? Were they still in Chang’e 11? Was this a kind of simulation, and if so, who was controlling it? Who was controlling
them
? Shen rubbed his temples with his fingers and told himself to breathe.
Quon’s drunk. This is a joke. A prank. We’re home. On earth. We returned.