The Raft: A Novel Read online

  They said nothing for a while, scratching notes in their dockets.

  “Was that all?” one of them asked.

  “Moneta’s getting old. It’s difficult to understand some of the things she says.” Again, they scrawled in their dockets. “I’ll be more careful next time, though, not to indulge an old woman’s careless conversation.”

  “Well, unfortunately, the problem is even greater than that. Moneta has gone missing …”

  They paused, waiting for a physical response. They didn’t get what they expected; my sudden surprise registered on the machine, and thus, so did my alibi.

  “She hasn’t been seen since yesterday and it seems you were the second-last person to speak with her. We’ve questioned the assistant, but he says he doesn’t know. We’ve sent scouts. We’ve looked everywhere. We are not pleased by how things have transpired. The conversations and such. You can understand our concern, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about Moneta. She had offered no thoughts about leaving. And then I remembered what she had said, the curious finality of her words. A story I need to tell. To both someone else and myself, one last time.

  “We need you to be very careful over the next few days,” said the man with the metal gadget on his head. “We’ll be keeping a closer eye on some of your actions. Until this is all cleared up, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  I wondered whether The Body had made it all up, said that she’d disappeared in order to test me in some way, but I too was capable of providing my analyses of others; they were puzzled and troubled, all right. They weren’t faking it. They said nothing and had me sit for a couple of minutes while they looked for any fluctuations in my report. They waited for some secret to slip through the cracks of my subconscious and into their mechanical mind reader.

  “That’s all for now,” said the old man at the end of the table. “We may need to call you back, soon. Do not go far.”

  I walked back from the house and picked through my memory of Moneta’s story, but could recall no hints of a plan to escape. It was difficult enough to believe a woman of her age could get very far. Behind the beach was nothing but steep mountains and barren, endless roads. We were fenced in, they’d told us. The Body had its eyes (enough eyes to know I had spoken to her in the first place) and even the most careful of us would be captured before covering any meaningful distance.

  I looked back to make sure I wasn’t being followed. All I could see was the roof of the white farmhouse as it sank into the shrubby knoll. I slid on the muddy footpath and stepped onto the skewed stairs leading to the encampment of tents on the beach.

  I still had the letter.

  Checking over both shoulders, I slipped inside my tent. I zipped up behind me, lifted a pile of books from my shelf and grabbed the letter. I sat on my bed and tore open the short side of the envelope. Carefully, I reached inside and slid out folded sheets of white paper. I unfolded the pages and read Moneta’s words.

  To whomever you are

  Firstly, thank you. I am writing this before having even spoken to you and yet am deeply grateful to you for having offered your time, patience, respect and discretion. You would not be in possession of this letter if I had suspected otherwise of you. I would not even have bothered telling you my story, let alone given you this letter. So again, my deepest thanks.

  Secondly, if you are reading this, I am no longer on the beach. Unfortunately, my whereabouts will not be disclosed to you in this letter. I apologise for any disappointment. I am not keeping it a secret out of disrespect for you, but out of respect for myself. In this strange world, we are born alone and we die alone. And while we use this as an excuse to force ourselves upon each other, I believe there is some natural, overlooked importance in embracing some elements of our seclusion instead of trying to disown them. There are some things we need to keep to ourselves, things no one else can or should know, so that we are able to maintain a more meaningful sense of self. We need our secrets. Our individuality. I’m too old and have been around for too long to worry about the oneness of everything, despite what they’ve been telling me—how we are all heaps of the same stardust, having followed the same tired line of evolution. One divided example of the same configuration of amino acids and protein molecules—forget it! Couldn’t be bothered. What a terrible waste of sentience, honestly, to get caught up in all that!

  I have already told you my one clear memory. You have heard about the parents, the move from the house in Kroonstad to Tsitsikamma, the lodging for the backpackers, the man in the woods, and how he was so violently removed from the earth. I remember this memory almost perfectly. I remember the smell of the cabin and the woods. The light, the sounds. And the feelings: joy and curiosity and fear. Of all the times, of everything that has occurred in my long years here, it is this time I recall the most. The problem, however, lies in precisely this fact. You see, even though I remember this memory, there is something I must confess: it is not my memory.

  Now, this may confuse you, and I cannot assure you that I will be able to offer any clarity on the subject, but I will tell you what I know for now. Perhaps, in your time, you will find the answers to some of the questions this raises, but know that I have been unable to find the answers for myself, and frankly, have no interest in doing so.

  Everything about that memory occurred just as I said, but the truth is, it did not happen to me. I have never lived in Kroonstad. I never moved to Tsitsikamma. And I did not meet the man in the woods. I cannot tell you to whom these things actually happened, but it wasn’t me.

  Simply put, someone else’s memory somehow found its way into my head.

  As time passed, this alien memory grew in my mind, became stronger and clearer, and somehow sucked the nutrients out of my other memories (my own memories) like some thick weed. There are still other memories in my head, memories of events I know actually happened to me, but they are weak and frail things, barely attached.

  Now, you may think this the senile confabulation of an old woman. If you can look no further than this assumption, I am afraid there’s little I can do about that, but know this: there is something happening on this beach. Believe me. Something is happening to us—to all of us—and I think the fact I have someone else’s memory, so sharp and ingrained that it may as well be my own, is somehow linked to this something.

  This memory is also the reason I have decided to leave the beach. You can’t imagine what it feels like to realise that the one thing you remember about your life did not actually happen. It could be assumed that sharing someone’s memory could be understood as an enriching, communal experience, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is with loneliness that I am leaving this beach. Loneliness and regret. If the one thing I remember about my life is not actually mine to remember, I see no reason to prolong my stay.

  I didn’t tell you about this earlier, in your company, because I needed to say it out loud one more time as if it was my memory, to hear it from my lips, to know how I felt. If you are reading this, it means I have made up my mind. It means I have quit this lie. As I have already warned you, however, what I am telling you is somehow connected to what is happening on the beach, as well as in the rest of this unusual world. Beware of what they say. Examine it carefully to see, if you can, what it is they mean. Keep your eyes and ears open. Absorb each moment. One day, the world will no longer be recognisable to you. Without a memory or two you can trust, you will be forced to leave it a stranger.

  Finally

  Moneta

  Flipping the final page, I saw nothing else. I read her letter again and then fanned out the pages on the bed. I leaned back on my pillow and looked up at the ceiling. A moth was tacked in the corner—it had been there for two days. I stared at it until its furry body and flat grey wings became sharper—almost hyper-real—the perfect emblem of a tattered and unmoved world.

  It seemed ludicrous to accept that Moneta had somehow received someone else’s memory, like
a radio transmitter picking up some unknown signal.

  It couldn’t be possible, I told myself.

  It didn’t make sense.

  I sat up on my bed and rubbed my face, wondering what to do next. My eyes swept the tent, seeking familiar things, things I recognised and could rely on to simply be what they were. My broken umbrella. My box of pictures. My blunt knife. But whereas once they might have served to balance me, they now sat like cold dead stones at the bottom of the ocean. Magic charms that had lost their magic. They held no power, didn’t mean anything, and I no longer knew why I’d once thought to keep them.

  Stepping outside, I looked about; the area was quiet and empty. I thought about telling someone about the letter, but who, and why? Besides, that seemed the wrong thing to do. And who would believe it? I wasn’t even sure I did, though the letter had suffered no lack of coherency.

  As I walked, the commune remained eerily still. Everyone was at the whale and many strange contraptions, rigs and workstations stood unattended. There was always an array of tasks to be managed in the commune. Anyone with a proclivity for handiwork had been assigned to the building of the tent frames and furniture. Evening meals were prepared by four men who recalled they had once been Swedish and had worked as chefs. A team washed our dirty clothes in vats of filtered seawater provided by the overseers of a rickety, clanging desalination system. A group of fishermen made and hauled the lave nets and three women sat on stools outside the infirmary, waiting to tend to the occasional broken bone or fever. Nothing was ever adorned or embellished. A stick of primed wood never saw a lick of paint and nor was a meal ever garnished. The commune was a place of bareness. A practical bone yard. And now, without a soul in sight, the place was even gloomier than usual. It seemed for a moment that all activity had not been postponed but permanently abandoned, as if everyone, all at once, had come to the realisation they’d been living on a stage of cardboard props, none of which really worked at all.

  I continued walking towards the botanical garden.

  I didn’t think I’d see Moneta, but there was no other place to look. I thought again about her story—each inspired detail. I thought about her running between those trees, and long-legged Burt chasing her the way some horrible thing chases you in a nightmare. Tearing through those bushes until the bushes began to tear through him. Now, perhaps old Moneta had chosen to run again, run from this commune the way her memory told her she had, that day in the woods.

  But was there anywhere left to run?

  A warm wind passed through the trees, ruffling the leaves and startling brightly coloured birds. They took to the sky like shreds of a rainbow. Below, an arcade of palm trees shuffled in the stiff breeze. My path ran alongside the beach and then snaked between the trees. Soon, the glistening glass dome came into view. I passed through the wild grasses and could see Moneta’s plants through the shimmering glass walls.

  Junyap was hobbling awkwardly out of the front door, carrying a blue bucket, tipping his body to the side to counter the weight of it. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and flapped the top of his shirt to pull cooler air in. He caught sight of me. I waited for a reaction, but he did little but stare. I redirected my gaze to the dome.

  Everything seemed to be as it had been when I’d left it: the perfect green ferns, the vegetables, the bushels of herbs, the radiant petals of the flowers. And there were the bags of fertiliser, the pots I’d moved and the large wooden crate I had dragged.

  The crate. The six-foot-long crate was now packed with soil and blanketed in tufts of large-leafed plants.

  (The trees, it seems, will take the body of a dead thing as quickly as they want it, or want to get rid of it)

  I swung to Junyap to confirm my conclusion. He placed the bucket on the ground beside him. Holding my gaze, he raised his right hand and put a finger to his pursed lips …

  Sssshhh.

  A chill ran through me, but I nodded. I understood, immediately and completely. There was nothing left to be said: I already knew more than had been intended. Any questions would only betray Moneta’s final wish.

  Unhurriedly, and without looking over my shoulder, I strolled away—away from Junyap, away from the greenhouse—and back through the long green undergrowth towards the path.

  The weather was changing again. As I made my way back to the commune, the wind whistled listlessly overhead. But it was also carrying something. Something that made me sick to the bottom of my stomach. The wind, an unscrupulous messenger spirit flitting over the ocean and beach, carried the stench of oil smoke and burning flesh.

  Extracts

  (Excerpt from the The Age of Self Primary)

  The day every person on earth lost his and her memory was not a day at all. It couldn’t be slotted in a schedule or added to a calendar. In people’s minds, there was no actual event—no earthquake, tsunami, or act of terror—and thus whatever had happened could be followed by no period of shock or mourning. There could be no catharsis. Everyone was simply reset to zero.

  This moment of collective amnesia could not be understood within any context because it was the context itself that had been taken away. There was nothing anyone could do to repair themselves because they didn’t know what was broken. Before the resetting, they had created for themselves lives of routine and were motivated to participate in the world because they knew where they had come from. They knew what they were capable of doing and clung on to the mistakes they’d made like the maps of dangerous roads they knew not to take. They were driven by their aspirations as well as the fears they’d built up over the course of their lives like solitary fortresses on the peaks of mountains. But with no recollection of their aspirations, no remembrance of their fears, they were not propelled at all.

  And so everything stopped. Industry. Commerce. Politics. Religion. Technology. They could no longer remember what their gods had needed of them. They no longer knew how to use the machines they’d once made, let alone how to improve upon them. Money was of no use because the values of various notes, coins and currencies could not be designated. So they became loiterers. Ghostly wanderers, doomed to haunt a world that no longer belonged to them.

  When a few memories did begin to filter back to them, gradually and in no particular order, there was, at first, a mood of hope. Some families drifted back together. Homes and towns were faintly remembered. People hoped that over time enough memories would return to remind them of what their purpose had been before the resetting. Their memories would show them the significance of the lives they were supposed to now resume. But even as memory upon memory slunk back in their minds—a familiar face, a friend, a place from their childhood, a talent and a job they had once done—the purpose of their existence did not follow.

  Instead, as they hunched down, picking up each new memory like the charred and scattered remains of a burned-down house, they were filled with a new sense of despair. The despair of realising the things in their world did not add up to any whole, and that there was no meaning in any of it. All the things they’d been desperate to recall were little more than the trivial knick-knacks of a species that had not lost—in that one global moment—any meaning, but that had never had any real meaning to begin with …

  A functional version of earth

  Finally, I am on the raft.

  I’ve seen so many others out here before and been curious about the experience. Now I am here: tied down at the neck, wrists and ankles. Spread open like the Vitruvian Man. Eyes fixed on the sky. Mouth dry. Skin beginning to burn. Stomach digesting what’s left of my final breakfast, as well as the hallucinogenic flower I was forced to ingest a short time earlier.

  Soon, that flower will begin to take effect.

  When it does, my thoughts will start to slip. My reason will lose its shape and my ideas will fold like a sheet of paper, forming finally into an elaborate origami figure I will not understand. I probably won’t even realise it’s happening (that’s the point, I suppose)—I’ll just slide into it.

>   I feel the cold seawater rise through the gaps in the logs. It wets my back, and retreats. The water dries in the sun, caking my skin in salt and aggravating my sunburn. Beneath my leather constraints, my neck, wrists and ankles are beginning to chafe. The moisture between the pelt and my broken skin forms warm and sticky incubators for infection. With my head fastened, I can’t see how bad the blistering has become. I can only feel it.

  There is only one thing I’m capable of seeing.

  The sky.

  I’ve been staring at it for hours now. I have no choice. The blue is a blank wall. It fills my vision, a maddening thing that goes on forever with no depth. No corners. No shape or texture. It could be a centimetre in front of my face or a million kilometres away. It is so absolute and empty that after a while it doesn’t look blue at all—just another strange form of nothing. Am I really seeing it at all, or am I losing my sight …

  No. Focus. Hold on.

  I can’t let such notions take control of me. I need to ground myself with facts, with what I know.

  I’ve seen plenty of others cast out on the rafts, attached to the pier by about a hundred metres of rope, so that’s one thing I know: I’m not far out at sea. I may as well be, though. I can hear nothing from the shore, see no land, no matter how far I roll my eyes. I know the three others are floating beside me, each on their own rafts for committing the same offence, but I can’t see or hear them either.

  Calling out won’t matter. We are too far away to distinguish anything more than muffled shouts—but really, what is there to say? Shouting will only dry our throats.

  That’s the last thing we want.

  We have no idea when we’ll be pulled back in, our recalibration complete, but sooner or later the thirst will come, regardless of the anti-diuretic compound we’ve been given to conserve our fluids. We’ll feel the dryness in our mouths and throats long before our bodies reach the critical stages of dehydration.