The Book of Strange New Things

Then Jesus Lover One led him through the streets (could unpaved paths be called streets, if they were wide enough?), further into the settlement. There was no one else about, no sign of life, although Peter knew that the throng of people he’d met earlier in the day must be in there somewhere. The buildings all looked the same. Oblong, oblong, oblong; amber, amber, amber. If this settlement and the USIC base constituted the only architecture on Oasis, then this was a world where aesthetic niceties weren’t wanted and utilitarianism ruled. It shouldn’t bother him, but it did. All along, he’d assumed that the church he would build here should be simple and unpretentious, to give the message that its outward form didn’t matter, only the souls inside; but now he was inclined to make it a thing of beauty.

With every step, he grew more desperate to piss, and wondered if Lover One was going to unnecessary lengths to find him a private place to do it. Oasans themselves had no such concern for privacy, at least not when it came to toilet matters. Peter had seen them expelling their wastes freely in the streets, unheedful of the loss. They’d be walking along, solemnly focused on where they were going, and then, out of the bottom of their robes, a trail of turdlets would patter onto the earth: grey-green pellets that didn’t smell and, if accidentally stepped on by other people, disintegrated into a powdery pulp, like meringue. Nor did the faeces linger long on the ground. Either the wind blew it away, or it got swallowed up by the earth. Peter had not seen any Oasan expelling liquid waste. Perhaps they didn’t need to.

Peter most certainly needed to. He was just about to tell Lover One that they must stop right now, anywhere, when the Oasan came to a halt in front of a circular structure, the architectural equivalent of a biscuit tin, but the size of a warehouse. Its low roof was festooned with chimneys . . . no, funnels – large, ceramic-looking funnels, like kiln-fired vases – all pointing up at the sky. Lover One motioned Peter to enter through the beaded doorway. Peter obeyed. Inside, he was faced with a jumbled array of vats and canisters and kegs, each different and hand-made, each fed from tubes that snaked up to the ceiling. The containers were arranged around the sides of the room, leaving the centre free. An artificial pond, the size of a backyard swimming pool in the wealthier parts of Los Angeles, glimmered with pale emerald water.

‘Wa???er,’ said Lover One.

‘Very . . . clever,’ Peter complimented him, having rejected the word ‘resourceful’ as too difficult. The sight of the full pond and the dozens of tubes fogged with moisture made him only more convinced that he was about to wet himself.

‘Enough?’ enquired Lover One, as they turned to leave.

‘Uh . . . ’ hesitated Peter, nonplussed.

‘Enough wa???er? We pa?? now?’

At last, Peter understood the misunderstanding. ‘Pass water’ – of course! Such collisions between the literal and the colloquial – he’d read about them so often in accounts of other missionary expeditions, and had promised himself he would avoid ambiguity at all times. But Lover One’s acquiescence to his request had been so low-key, so smooth, that there was no hint of a communication glitch.

‘Excuse me,’ said Peter, and strode ahead of Lover One, to the middle of the street, where he hitched up his dishdasha and allowed the urine to squirt free. After what seemed like several minutes of pissing he was ready to turn and face Jesus Lover One again. And as soon as he did, Jesus Lover One released a solitary ball of faeces onto the ground. A gesture of respect for an unfathomable ritual, like kissing a European the correct number of times on the correct sides of the face.

‘Now, again, you ??leep?’ The Oasan pointed back the way they’d come: back towards the sweat-drenched coconut-stinky tub in the house of snorers.

Peter smiled non-committally. ‘First, take me to where our church will be. I want to see it again.’

And so the two of them had walked out of the settlement, across the scrubland, to the chosen site. Nothing had been built yet. The site was marked with four gouges in the soil, to demarcate the four corners of the future structure. And, inside those demarcations, Peter had scratched the basic design of the interior, explaining to the seventy-seven souls gathered around him what the lines represented. Now that he saw his drawing again, on the deserted patch of earth, after a gap of many hours and through eyes bleary with exhaustion, he saw it as the Oasans might have seen it: crude, mysterious gouges in the dirt. He felt unequal to the task ahead of him: grossly so. Bea would no doubt counsel him that this meant he was confusing objective reality with the amount of sleep he’d had, and of course she’d be right.

The site contained a few other traces of the Jesus Lovers’ assembly. The small posset of vomit that one of the infant Oasans had disgorged during Peter’s opening speech. A pair of boots, specially made as a gift for Peter, but several inches too small for him (a mistake which appeared to cause neither embarrassment nor amusement: just mute acceptance). A semi-transparent amber water jug, almost empty. A metallic blister foil (medicine courtesy of USIC) from which the last tablet had been expressed. Two scattered cushions, on which a couple of the younger children had snoozed when the grown-ups’ discussion strayed too far into invisible realms.

Peter hesitated for a few seconds, then fetched the cushions and arranged them one near the other. Then he lowered himself to the ground, pillowing his head and his hip. His weariness immediately began to drain out of his flesh, as if seeping into the soil. He wished he was alone.

‘You were un??a???i??fied in our bed,’ Jesus Lover One remarked.

The sibilant cluster in the third word rendered it unintelligible to Peter. ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite hear what you just . . .?’

‘You were . . . unglad,’ said Lover One, clenching his gloves with the effort of finding a pronounceable word. ‘In our bed. ??leep came never.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ conceded Peter, with a grin. ‘Sleep came never.’ Honesty was the best policy, he felt. There would be misunderstandings enough without creating more with diplomacy.

‘Here, ??leep will come for you,’ Lover One observed, indicating, with a wave of his gloved hand, the open space around them.

‘Yes, here sleep will come for me.’

‘Good,’ concluded the Oasan. ‘Then all will be well.’

Would all be well? There seemed reason to hope that it would. Peter had a good feeling about his ministry here. Already, inexplicably felicitous things had happened – small things, true, not strictly miraculous, but enough to indicate that God was taking a special interest in the way things were panning out. For example, when he’d told the story of Noah and the Flood (at the Oasans’ request) and, at the precise instant that the heavens opened in the Scripture, it started raining for real. And then there was that amazing occasion, after they’d all stopped work for the night and the braziers had been extinguished and they’d been sitting there in the dark, when he’d recited the opening verses of Genesis (again at their request) and, at the exact instant that God said ‘Let there be light’, one of the braziers had sputtered back into life, bathing them all in a golden glow. Coincidences, no doubt. Peter was not a superstitious person. Much closer to genuine miracles, in his opinion, were the sincere declarations of faith and fellowship from these people so incredibly different from himself.

Then again, there had been a few disappointments. Or not exactly disappointments, just failures to communicate. And he couldn’t even figure out why these encounters had fallen flat; he didn’t understand what it was he hadn’t understood.

For example, the photographs. If he’d learned one thing over the years, it was that the best – and quickest – way of forging intimacy with strangers was to show them photos of your wife, your home, yourself when younger and decked out in the fashions and haircuts of a bygone decade, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your pets, your children. (Well, he didn’t have children, but that in itself was a talking point. ‘Children?’ people would always say, as if they hoped he was saving the best photos for last.)

Perhaps what had gone wrong with his show-and-tell with the Oasans was that the group was too large. Seventy-odd people examining his photos and handing them on, almost all of those people contemplating an image that was unrelated to the commentary he was giving at that point. Although, to be honest, the responses of the Jesus Lovers who’d been sitting right nearby, who had the opportunity to make the connection between the image and his explanation of it, were just as hard to fathom.

‘This is my wife,’ he’d said, extracting the topmost of the photographs from the plastic wallet and handing it to Jesus Lover One. ‘Beatrice.’

‘Bea???ri??,’ repeated Jesus Lover One, his shoulders contorting with effort.

‘Bea for short,’ said Peter.

‘Bea???ri??,’ said Jesus Lover One. He held the photograph gently in his gloved fingers, at a strict horizontal angle, as if the miniature Beatrice posing in her mulberry-coloured jeans and imitation cashmere sweater was in danger of sliding off the paper. Peter wondered if these people could even see in the conventional sense, since there was nothing on their faces he could identify as an eye. They weren’t blind, that was obvious, but . . . maybe they couldn’t decode two-dimensional images?

‘Your wife,’ said Jesus Lover One. ‘Hair very long.’

‘It was, then,’ said Peter. ‘It’s shorter now.’ He wondered if long hair was attractive or repulsive to those who had none at all.

‘Your wife love Je??u???’

‘She certainly does.’

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