The Book of Strange New Things

‘USIC doesn’t keep you that busy?’

‘I do lots of other things besides the drugs. I analyse all the food, to check we’re not poisoning ourselves. I do research. I pitch in.’

He hadn’t meant to make her justify her wage; he was only curious about that door. Having burgled quite a few pharmacies in his time, he struggled to believe that a storehouse of pharmaceutical goodies wouldn’t be a temptation for even one of the people here. ‘Is it locked?’

‘Of course it’s locked.’

‘The only door in the whole place that’s locked?’

She shot him a suspicious glance. He felt she’d peered straight into his conscience, eavesdropping on his guilty memory of trespassing in Kurtzberg’s quarters. What had possessed him to do that?

‘It’s not that I think anybody would steal anything,’ she said. ‘It’s just . . . procedure. Can we go now?’

They walked to the corridor’s end, where Grainger took a deep breath and opened the door to the outside. The cool, neutral air of the interior was sucked from behind them into the atmosphere beyond, exerting a tug on their bodies as they stepped out of the building. Then the flood of gaseous moisture enveloped them, a shock as always, until you got used to it.

‘I overheard you tell Tuska you love him,’ said Grainger as they approached the vehicle.

‘He was bantering,’ said Peter, ‘and I was . . . uh . . . bantering back.’ The air currents ruffled his hair, ran under his clothing, blurred his vision. Distracted, he almost blundered against Grainger, having followed her to the driver’s side before he remembered that he should be heading for the passenger’s side. ‘But on a deeper level,’ he said, as he backtracked, ‘yes, it’s true. I’m a Christian. I try to love everybody.’

They took their seats in the front of the van and slammed the doors shut, sealing themselves into the air-conditioned cabin. The short time they’d spent in the open air had been enough to dampen their skin all over, so that they both shivered at the same instant, a coincidence which made them smile.

‘Tuska isn’t very lovable,’ Grainger remarked.

‘He means well,’ said Peter.

‘Yeah?’ she said tartly. ‘I guess he’s more fun if you’re a guy.’ She dabbed her face dry with a hunk of her shawl and, peering up into a mirror, brushed her hair. ‘All that sex talk. You should hear him sometimes. Real locker room stuff. So much hot air.’

‘You wouldn’t want it to be more than hot air, would you?’

‘God forbid,’ she scoffed. ‘I can imagine why his wife left him.’

‘Maybe he left her,’ said Peter, wondering why she was drawing him into this peculiar conversation, and why they weren’t moving yet. ‘Or maybe it was a mutual decision.’

‘The end of a marriage is never a mutual decision,’ she said.

He nodded, as if deferring to her greater wisdom on this point. Still she made no move to start the vehicle. ‘Are there any married couples here?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. We’ve got work to do, we’ve all got to get along.’

‘I get along with my wife,’ he said. ‘We’ve always worked together. I wish she was here.’

‘You think she’d enjoy it here?’

He almost said, That wouldn’t matter, she’d be with me, then realised how incredibly arrogant that would sound. ‘I hope so.’

‘My guess is she wouldn’t be a happy bunny,’ said Grainger. ‘This is not the place for a real woman.’

You’re a real woman, he wanted to say, but his professional intuition warned him against it. ‘Well, there are a lot of women working here,’ he said. ‘They seem real enough to me.’

‘Yeah? Maybe you need to look at them a bit closer.’

He looked at her a bit closer. A pimple had flared up on her temple, on the tender skin stretched tight just above her right eyebrow. It looked sore. He wondered if she was pre-menstrual. Bea got flare-ups of acne at certain times of the month, and was liable to start strange conversations full of non sequiturs, criticise work colleagues – and talk about sex.

‘When I first started working here,’ Grainger went on, ‘I didn’t even notice that nobody hooked up with anybody else. I figured it was probably going on behind my back. The way BG talks, and Tuska . . . But then time goes by, years go by, and you know what? – it never happens. Nobody holds hands. Nobody kisses. Nobody skips work for an hour and comes back with their hair all mussed up and their skirt inside their panties.’

‘Do you want them to?’ The decorous reserve of the Oasans had made him less impressed than ever with the reckless ruttings of humans.

She sighed, exasperated. ‘I’d just like to see some signs of life sometimes.’

He stopped short of telling her that she was being too harsh. He only said: ‘People don’t have to be sexually active to be alive.’

She looked at him askance. ‘Hey, you’re not . . . uh . . . I forgot the word . . . when priests take, like, a vow . . . ?’

‘Celibate?’ He smiled. ‘No. No, of course not. You know I’m married.’

‘Yeah, but I didn’t know what the deal was. I mean, there are all kinds of deals between a man and a woman.’

Peter shut his eyes, tried to transport himself back to the bed with the yellow duvet, where his wife lay naked and waiting for him. He couldn’t picture her. Couldn’t even picture the yellow duvet, couldn’t even recall the precise hue. Instead, he saw the yellow of Jesus Lover Five’s robe, a distinct canary-yellow he’d trained himself to be able to distinguish from other yellows worn by other Jesus Lovers, because she was his favourite.

‘Ours is . . . the full thing,’ he assured Grainger.

‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’ Whereupon, with a touch of her hand, the engine kindled into life.




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