The Raft: A Novel (46 page)

I tried to sit up but was still shackled at the neck, wrists and ankles. Daniel put his hands on my chest to calm me.

“What’s going on?” I muttered. “Where’s Gideon?”

“They’ve pulled him out already,” Daniel said. “Everyone’s out of the water; you’re the last one.”

I shook my head, my neck tight under the leather neck-strap. My eyes rolled, taking in what they could, looking for a crack in the shell of a convincing delusion.

“It’s been three days,” Daniel said. “Three days. The longest sentence yet.”

There was no crack. The world shaped itself into a terrifying reality. The indentations in Daniel’s acne-scarred skin. The powdery tufts of cloud above and the birds that flew freely through them. The caress of the breeze on my face. Icy seawater lashed my back, the sun lashed me from above.

Cold water. Hot sun. Cold water. Hot sun.

In a dream, can we tell the difference between the burn of cold and the burn of heat? I wasn’t sure. A lucid dream can trick us, but never with the complexity of wakeful thought. Could it really be that it had all been a drug-induced fallacy, that I hadn’t gone anywhere?

No! You were there!
my mind insisted.
You were on your way to Chang’e 11, to confront Quon and rescue your son. Wake up, Kayle
…

But I didn’t wake. I was still there. I probed my new reality, as tender as the reddened skin on the edge of an inflamed swelling. I felt sick. I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t. I stared at the broad blue sky and breathed in a deep ocean breath. I let the air out, and with it, myself.

I thought about that quest—so full of coincidences—and the more I thought, the more ludicrous it began to seem. How could I have believed I had been set upon a quest of such importance? The simplest explanation was, in the end, the most likely; all of it was nothing more than an elaborate fabrication of the ego, the invention of a man desperate for purpose, for meaning and resolution. I’d even made myself the hero of the story.

I felt like a broken idiot.

I would never see my son.

I would never leave that beach.

The raft had done its job; it had crippled my will, demonstrated the uselessness of mutiny, emphasised our individual insignificance. Not long after waking (
dreaming, Kayle, you’re only dreaming
!
), I felt the raft being pulled through the water. The water rushed over my forearms, soothing my blistered skin. My exile was over, my sentence had been served and I was being pulled to shore.

I was not permitted to see Gideon, Theunis or Angerona. I was taken straight to the white house on the hill and put back in the chair. The plugs were attached to my head and the grey machine read my thoughts, as it apparently always had.

The Body sat behind their long table and asked me about my time out on the raft. They asked if I had seen the error of my ways and if I regretted having helped Jai-Li escape the beach.

I could barely respond to their questions. The light of the overhead lamp seared my eyes. Even then, sweating in that big chair, I thought I would wake up to discover it had all been a ruse, a chilling new trick of the mind. I didn’t want to tell them anything, but they waited, silent, until I was left with no choice but to speak. They were curious about my experience. No two raft experiences were the same, they said, but there was always
some
kind of experience.

In the end, I submitted and told them what I remembered so clearly: the island of fruit, Anubis, the family of machines and Gideon. I told them many things, but I did not say a word about Shen and Quon; they were my last two cards: my king and my joker.

Once I had told them the story, they said they were impressed by my fabrication, that I had always been gifted with imagination. And then, almost as an afterthought, they mentioned that they’d found Jai-Li; she hadn’t made it very far from the cove before her boat had tipped, sending both her and her child to their watery deaths. My first reaction was shock, and deep sorrow, but then I remembered the story they’d concocted to cover up Moneta’s fatal escape. They were seasoned liars, and I decided not to believe them. They asked how I felt about that news and I said nothing—they could
read
my answer if they wanted it.

Next they said I would no longer have contact with the other offenders. They added they were pleased with my co-operation and hoped I’d make the most of my reintegration into the commune. They expected great things of me, they said, which meant great things of doing nothing at all.

I was taken back to my tent where all my things were waiting for me. I climbed into bed.
Maybe when you awake, you’ll be back there, Kayle, back in the desert.
But when I awoke the next day, I was still in the tent.

I was put to various tasks. I helped the fishermen with the lave nets and the young men and women with the cleaning. I’d stare at the ocean frequently, wondering if I’d ever be able to get back. It pained me to think how close I had been to finding my son. Or, at least, how close it had felt. Memories of my journey flew about my mind like the orange-tipped embers that blew from the nightly bonfires. I ran through the details over and over again, but the more I tried to remember them, the dimmer the flames of my certainty grew, the greyer the ash of my doubt.

I saw Gideon a few times, wandering through the commune. I tried to call him, but he wouldn’t look my way. Was he deliberately ignoring me or simply obeying the orders of The Body? I couldn’t tell. I’d go back to my chore, wondering if he resented me asking him to help with Jai-Li’s escape. Whatever the reason, I had lost my one friend. That was difficult to accept. I thought I had been lonely before my time on the raft, but this was true loneliness: it isn’t simply the difficulty of being by yourself; it’s being near the people you care about most, and having them deny you.

I did end up on the raft once more, a few months after my first sentence. This time, I hadn’t saved anyone’s life or helped anyone off the beach. I was convicted because I had tried to run, to escape through the woods against the mountain, only to find my plan thwarted by an immense wall that I knew nothing about. There was no way over it and no way around it; we were truly imprisoned on the beach. Somehow the story of my attempt to leave got out and I was put back on a raft. I remember thinking that perhaps that would be the clincher; I’d lie back on the raft and pick up where I had left off with Gideon, in the desert, but over the course of my second sentence, I experienced nothing but a watery day and cold wet night before being pulled back to shore.

The time following my second return from the raft was long and painfully mundane, one long day recycled for all eternity. The nights were even longer than the days, sleepless and formless, offering nothing but a black wall against which I tried to paste the faded scraps of my memories. Over time, there was hardly anything to think about. Slowly, irrevocably, I was losing every last drop of my hope. And then, one day, I forgot to hope at all. That was the day I put to rest the whole idea of returning to the world and hope became a faint and faded glimmer, seldom seen, seldom felt.

Months turned into years, and the years rolled on.

Every now and again I sat and thought about that first time on the raft. I would never completely let it go, even though I felt that it somehow wanted to let go of me. I was on the beach for good, that was obvious now, and I told myself to accept it. Nothing hinted otherwise. The Renascence proved to be some kind of farce (the omega point of The Renascence had either not occurred, or was vastly less ceremonious than we had imagined), and everything simply, and gradually, wasted away. We had been on the beach for so long the water level of the ocean had risen and eventually there was barely a beach at all. We were forced to move our tents to the woods.

The dictatorship too had simply come to an end. Trawlers stopped bringing new communers, and nobody was called up to the white house on the hill (which was no longer a white house at all but a flaking, cream-yellow shack). One day, on a whim, I went up to inspect it. There was no longer any fear of being punished—The Body had already done their worst—and I knew there would be nobody inside. I was right. Bushes and trees had grown up to the entrance and the house was filled with little but dust and ruined furniture. The grey machine that once read our minds sat in its corner like a creature turned to stone by an angry god. There were no floating heads behind the table, no more
bearing witness
, no more questions and plugs and sentences for trivial misdemeanours.

Our commune had been forgotten by the world. We had no communication with outsiders, so had no idea whether The Renascence was being continued elsewhere. Nobody bothered dancing around bonfires (there was too little of the shore left to even make a fire), and we simply huddled through the seasons, keeping ourselves alive on fish and fruit.

Angerona was now a grown woman, but still hadn’t uttered a word in her life. I had become an old and weary man. My knees were bad. I had arthritis in both wrists. I was the crumbling mess none of us ever dream of one day becoming.

I was often revisited by that old memory of a journey I thought I’d taken, but the memory had been hollowed of its worth by the chisel of time. It might as well have been someone else’s memory, and someone else’s quest—I had preserved every detail in my mind, but felt nothing for it. My son was either an old man himself, or dead; perhaps that, after everything, would be the one true way in which we’d finally be reunited. If I had thought such a thing was possible, I might have at some earlier time taken my life, just to see. But now I was too old to bother with suicide—a young man’s escape. Time would do it for me, ungraciously and grudgingly, and I was prepared to wait.

We thought the rising ocean would be the means of our eventual end (we’d all be pushed up against the wall in the woods waiting for the ocean to claim us), but one ordinary day a communer began to cough in his tent. He came out, his mouth running with blood. Not long after that, someone else began coughing and appeared with the same scarlet patch of blood on her face. We did not know what the illness was, but over the course of a few months, it spread from communer to communer, claiming life upon life. Some people said it was the water we were drinking. Others said we had contracted a virus from mosquitoes. It didn’t matter what caused it, though. There was nothing we could do about it, and people were dying. We dug holes in the dirt and buried the bodies to prevent the disease from spreading, but we may as well have dug pits for ourselves and gone to bed in them.

By the time winter arrived, I knew that most of us would not survive it. There would be less than a handful of us by the time the leaves returned to the trees. This turned out to be true. People died in quick succession. The woods were riddled with graves, and day by day our numbers shrank. One night, Angerona began coughing and spitting blood, and less than a day after the symptoms had first appeared, I was digging a hole for her too.

Within two months of that final winter only Gideon and I remained. We moved up to the house on the hill and made a fire with the furniture. Outside, the wind and the rain thrashed and thumped the earth. Gideon made the occasional practical suggestion, but apart from that said almost nothing to me. I didn’t mind. All I wanted was to keep warm—warm and fed. That was what hope was reduced to. It was difficult to fish and find food. Some days we didn’t eat at all and would go to sleep early, hoping the new day would bring with it some small, trifling fortune.

Then Gideon started coughing.

The first dry cough came in the middle of the night, Death’s knuckles rapping on our door. I knew as soon as I heard it. Soon I would be alone. I loathed the thought.

I covered him with more blankets and started a fire in the centre of the room. He was sweating profusely, shivering beneath his blankets. I told him to hold on,
just hold on.
But I had seen enough of the disease to know what was coming.

I kneeled beside him on my old knees and wiped his hot forehead with a damp cloth. The first spurt of blood came from his mouth and I stumbled back. I edged closer, trying to pretend I hadn’t seen it, continuing to pat his head and wipe his mouth.

He grabbed my thin wrist with his big hands and turned to his side.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kayle.”

He hadn’t called me Mr. Kayle in years.

I told him to save his energy and pulled the blankets up to his shoulders.

“We had an adventure once,” I said. “You and I. Not in this world, but somewhere. It was an incredible adventure, and I couldn’t have done it without you. I remember that.”

I could hear the blood gurgling in his throat. I sat at his side through the night, until the gurgling came to an end and he closed his eyes and died.

I pulled the blanket over his face and walked to the window. Outside, the rain was falling on the place we had once called a commune. Lightning cracked over the ocean.
This is it
, I thought.
This is the culmination of my long and pointless life.

I walked to my blankets and lay down. The last stick of furniture in the house was burning. Soon everything would go cold and dark. I rolled myself in my blankets and tried to sleep. But it wasn’t easy, not with my own dry and determined cough.

By morning the storm had ended and the weather cleared. I wrapped Gideon’s body in the rest of the blankets and slid him to the door of the white house. My cough had worsened and I was sweating uncontrollably, but if there was one thing I’d get done before collapsing somewhere, it would be to give Gideon a proper burial. My last duty in this life. I rested his body on two long logs, clutched the ends and dragged him up through the soggy soil of the woods. I struggled, my frail body weakening with every step. The sun glimmered on the leaves of the trees. Water trickled from the canopies above. All around were the broken remnants of the commune—tattered tarps and tent frames. The area was deathly still but for the ceaseless slapping and gurgle of the waves through the vegetation.