The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Author:Michel Faber [Faber, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adult, Religion, Adventure
ISBN: 9781471277474
Google: Q6K1ngEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 20697435
Publisher: Hogarth
Published: 2014-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

16

Toppling off an axis, falling through space

On the fifth day, a day of rain and almost unbearable beauty, it slipped Peter’s mind that Grainger was coming for him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to come, and it wasn’t that she’d ceased to be real to him. Every now and then, during the three hundred and sixty-odd hours leading up to their scheduled rendezvous, she had been in his thoughts. He wondered, for example, if she would let him help her with her next drug delivery; he recalled the scars on her forearms and speculated about what anguish might have led her younger self to inflict them; and sometimes, at nights before drifting off, he replayed a fleeting vision of her pale, troubled face. However, his life here among the Oasans was very full, and there were so many things he must try to hold in his head. Observe the opportunity, as Ecclesiastes urged him. Be not ignorant of anything great or small.

Oh, he didn’t forget to pray for Charlie Grainger and Coretta, and he thought of Grainger each time he did so. But when he woke up on the morning of the fifth day, the long night was finished, the sun had risen, and the rains were drawing near – and that was that. His appointment with USIC’s moody pharmacist was erased from his brain.

Keeping track of schedules had never been his strong suit anyhow. The longer he spent among the Oasans, the less point he could see in clinging to ways of telling time that were, frankly, irrelevant. A day for him had ceased to feel like twenty-four hours and it certainly didn’t consist of 1,440 minutes. A day was a span of daylight, divided from the next by a spell of darkness. While the sun shone, he would stay awake for twenty, maybe twenty-five hours at a stretch. He didn’t know exactly how long, because his father’s watch had stopped working, ruined by damp. Sad, but there was no point grieving.

Anyway, life wasn’t about measurement, it was about getting the most out of each God-given minute. There was so much to do, so much to digest, so many people to commune with . . . When darkness fell, Peter would slip into comatose sleep, his consciousness sinking fast and irretrievable like a car dumped in a lake. After an age spent down on the bottom, he would float up into shallower fathoms where he would doze and dream, get up to pee, then doze and dream some more. It was as though he’d discovered the secret of Joshua – Joshua the cat, that is. The secret of snoozing for hours and days on end without boredom, storing up energy for a future occasion.

And then when he’d slept as much as he possibly could, he would lie awake, staring up at the sky, familiarising himself with the eighty-seven stars, giving them each a name: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, Shuah, Sheba and so on. All those genealogies in Genesis and Exodus had come in useful after all.

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