Veracity (41 page)

I walked down the road for several hours as it meandered more or less along the ridge, watching the sea below through the few gaps in the trees, hoping to judge my progress, waiting to see a coast in the distance that would indicate how close I was to the end of the peninsula. At one point, the track dropped below the ridgeline, and I was glad to get a bit lower, thinking that I might come across a tiny stream of water collecting on a hillside. And though this wasn't the case, I did find something that was just as good.

The road continued to descend until it passed through a kind of basin where water would naturally collect. There was no sign of a stream or pond, but the lush vegetation that grew at the lowest points was a sign that there was a lot of moisture underground. I noticed a different kind of tree that I hadn't seen anywhere else on the ridge, and as I got closer to them, I realized, excitedly, that there were long melons dangling from just below their tops.

I quickly found the shortest tree and climbed it from a sloping side, my feet pressed flat against the bark, inching my way up until I was within reaching distance of the melons, and then, balancing delicately with one hand around the tree and the other on the fruit, I twisted them until they fell to the ground. After seeing one of them split open, and that it was dripping with yellow juice, I tried to toss a few others into bushes where they wouldn't break, hoping to take a couple with me.

I climbed down and shoved my face into one of the broken halves. It was sweet, had an orange, fleshy texture, black seeds, and was saturated with water. The rind was bitter, and only after I'd tasted it did I notice that other animals had left them scattered around on the ground to rot. I ate faster than I should have, finishing a full three melons before stopping, when all I could do was lean against a tree, feeling bloated and sick to my stomach.

After the waves of nausea subsided, I stood and wandered through the grove, poking around for other foods that I could take besides the melons. I didn't find much, but, looking up at these fruit trees, I did notice something that was a bit strange. It seemed that the steeper the tree, the more melons there were, which was something that was never the case on the island. And for some reason, I felt like I had to spend a few minutes trying to figure this out.

The first thing I did was look at the bark of the trees to see if I could find any claw marks, as something like a sloth or a tree shrew might leave behind, but there weren't any. And as the animal that was feeding on these melons was so poorly adapted for climbing that it could only access the fruit from a sloping tree, it couldn't be a monkey, either. No, this was something quite different. Then I noticed that there were woody strands that stuck out from where the fruits had been twisted off of their stems, which meant they were removing them in the same way I had. I picked up the freshest looking rind to look at the teeth marks that were left in it, and saw that they were made from fairly uniform, small teeth, and that both the upper set and lower set met in a perfectly straight line; and, as there weren't any imperfections on either extremity of the marks, I imagined that they didn't have a pronounced set of canines, and so ate mostly fruits and vegetables. I compared the marks to those left in the rinds that I had eaten from, but found that they were nothing like a human's. Yet there was something similar enough (and maybe this was only in the way that we had picked the fruit) that made me resolve to learn as much as I possibly could about them. That day I would create a category in my mind for these creatures - which I would unimaginatively call 'The Creatures' - where I would sort out every piece of information I could gather about them. I'd already learned that they weren't very good climbers, the size of their teeth, the likely dimensions of their head to fit such teeth, their lack of claws, even more or less what they ate. And I would be keeping an eye out for anything else that I could learn about them along the way, tallying it onto my list whenever I did. There was, of course, something dangerous in all of this; but at the time, I was completely oblivious to it.

I continued down the meandering road, carrying a melon in each hand, until the sun drew close to the horizon. At one point, it was perfectly aligned with the road, trailing behind me, making my shadow stretch out into a gangly man with enormously swollen stumps at the end of thin arms, his feet rising high with each step.

I had planned on walking for another half hour or so before looking for a good tree to sleep under, when I came across the first building I would see on the mainland. It was a house on the side of the road, which was set at the end of a short track. It wasn't built like anything we had on the island, its walls being made of some kind of white plaster, which had since yellowed and cracked, vines netting its sides like arteries. Most of the windows were broken, but the door was still on its hinges, hanging ajar, leaves and plants creeping into the dark interior.

I put the fruit on the ground and walked up to the entrance, pressing my face into the open space between the door and its frame. The air was musty and still. I pushed on the wood and felt a soft resistance on the other side, which finally gave when I put more force into it, and I could hear something sliding across the floor, being shoved out of the way as the door swung open. When there was enough room for me to squeeze through, I poked my head inside and could see that a thick cloth, which had since been devoured by mice and was gathered in giant folds behind the door after I'd forced it open, had once covered most of the floor. I stepped inside.

The interior of the building had been ripped to shreds, the furniture turned over, drawers flung out of cupboards, sheets and blankets strewn throughout the rooms. Pictures, which could only have been cut out of books, and, for some reason, were encased with wood and glass, were sprawled all over the ground, the long shards still held by their wooden borders, pointing at the places where the glass was impacted; plain-looking people behind the spider web fractures, lined up shoulder to shoulder on closely cut grass, clasping each other with arms that seemed stiff. There were light-brown water stains that spread out along the walls like lobes of lichen, scat on the floor from the different animals that had scavenged or nested there, along with broken plates, utensils, pots, clay shards, and shredded decorations with bright colours.

I rummaged around for useful things, stepping carefully between the pieces of broken glass with my bare feet. I shook out a thin blanket, which I could wrap in a certain way and use to carry things as we had done on the island. I was also lucky enough to find a dull knife with a sheath, a very thin and transparent plastic bottle with a cap - in hopes that I would soon come across water - which was so aged that it was more opaque than transparent, and a pair of sandals that, like the sheath, seemed to be made from a type of animal hide. I wrapped everything into the blanket and slung it around my chest, walking out the door while there was still enough light to spot the broken glass on the floor.

Seeing as there wasn't much time left in the day, and that my feet and legs were tired with the unaccustomed exercise, I decided to sleep under the relative shelter of the building's entrance. I leaned against the wall, cut up one of the melons and ate it, watching the sky until the first stars appeared, and listening to that cacophony of sounds that takes place as the diurnal creatures of the world settle in for the night, and the nocturnal ones wake and stir into movement. The sounds were different from any I'd ever heard, strange chatters, screams, squeaks, and moans, along with a haunting call of three notes being repeated over and over again in the muffled distance, which almost sounded like a wood flute; though a bit harsher, deeper.

There was one fleeting moment after dark, when the forest had quieted down and I picked up the knife to put it back into its sheath before going to sleep, that I was suddenly struck with a flashing image of Onni, covering his stomach, looking down at his hands. I rejected it as fast as I could, thinking of something else, concentrating on a few new sounds that were rising in the trees, bending all of my attention at them as if they were the most imperative thing in the world. But I wouldn't be able to do this for long. The fact remained that already most of my basic needs had been met, that my situation was becoming less urgent by the hour, and that soon, my mind would find itself wandering outside the confined spaces of immediate necessity. Soon, I would have no choice but to acknowledge what I'd done to Onni.

I wrapped myself in the blanket and slept on wooden boards in front of the door, waking only once during the night, after an animal, probably a large rodent of some kind, overturned a few stones as it scurried across the road in front of the house. I remember hearing it stop to look at me, but I think I might have drifted off to sleep again even before it moved on.

32

I woke to a cloudy day of soft light and flat shadows.

After I packed everything into the blanket and tied it around myself, I walked around the perimeter of the building trying to figure out how it had been supplied with water. I couldn't find anything, and so could only assume that it was an underground system of some kind.

When I left, I followed a black wire that sagged low to the ground and strung from the roof of the house to the road. Once at the road, it turned and continued down the entire stretch of it, as far as the eye could see, never seeming to stop. This was the beginning of the cable, or rather system of cables, that was attached to the top of huge steel poles lining up in an endless procession of rotting shafts, all of them bleeding dry puddles of orange onto the ground. The wires had a plastic sheathing that had decayed and blistered open in places like the flesh of a carcass gnawed away by scavengers, only with a twined mass of metal strings instead of bones. I imagined that this was for the transportation of electricity, and found myself wishing that Harek had told me more about the way past cultures had depended on it. We had talked about it once, but he was dismissive; pointing out that the systems for producing and handling it, apart from being ruined, were also complicated; and, he had added, as there was no way that they could be fixed, they certainly weren't worth wasting our time on. When he had said this, I'd thought about the elaborate scheme around the few electrical lights in the shelter, the coloured wires writhing along the ceilings, through holes, over doors, slinking along the upper corners of rooms, and finally into black sheets of glass that were lying on the roofs, then back out again, continuing on their twisting journey. I could see that he was right; it was complicated. Which, if anything, after seeing how extensive the network of wires on this mainland was, only made me wonder why these people had gone through all the trouble in the first place.

In the middle of the day, after losing sight of the ocean for an hour or so, the road I was walking on ended, intersecting with a wider one. I had to choose between right and left, the stringy poles stretching off into either direction. I chose left, only because it was descending, as water would, hoping that I would come across a stream or river at some point in the near future.

And as a main trail usually has branches that veer off from it, so was there with this road. I began to see a few, and then many smaller tracks that broke away and disappeared, curving out of sight or being overgrown and hidden by the foliage; the strange rusted shafts, hanging with both vines and cables, following them into the trees. Until eventually, the side roads were everywhere, and the number of wires had multiplied until they looked like a loose fishing net that draped over the landscape. Which was when I caught sight of the town.

I had seen a few cities in books, but their scale had always seemed a little abstract to me. Enormous towers poking into the air, concrete streets sprawling beneath them, dots of buildings filling the land to the horizon. It was either that or a picture of a corrupt palace with statues perched in front of it, where the city was in motion around it, eerie streaks of red in the blurry foreground and background. But the town that I came across was neither one of these expanses of infrastructure, nor of palaces and fountains. In fact, the closest thing I had seen to it was in paintings from the art book; the ones with a little cluster of buildings crowning a hill in the distance, fortified walls wrapping around it.

To be honest, from what I could see of this town while I descended into it, it wasn't all that impressive. And though its size was about the same as the ones in some of the paintings, it wasn't even surrounded by a defensive barrier (which, Dana had pointed out, were used to protect the townspeople inside from their neighbouring townspeople, in the likely event that they were as violent and opportunistic as themselves). But regardless of the fact that it wasn't anything close to what I thought it would be, I was glad to have the chance to walk through it. I imagined that if anything could offer insight as to how my ancestors thought, it was the place where they had lived their everyday lives.

I stopped just before entering the grid of streets, spotting a stream at the lowest part of land on the other side of the town. This stream had also been a flooding river in the not so distant past, as the banks were terraced and bare, except for new vegetation that was interspersed throughout silt-coated rocks. Just above the stony terraces that the flood had made were several different kinds of fruit trees, and I could see further upstream that there was a crop-type plant that grew in clumps in the same way that the grain did on the island. I had found plenty of food and water, and would gather whatever I could after I had inspected the town.

However, before even walking into it, I was already getting a feeling as to this culture's odd way of thinking. There were remains of a massive cemented wall lining the banks of the river, which must have channelized the stream toward some designed end. Though, the flooding water had since gouged through and around it, reclaiming what had been its natural path.

Where I entered the town, the wires amassed into a fantastic jumble of poles and lines, stretching along every road and on every side of every building; and as I ducked under the ones that were sagging close to the ground, and looked down one of the streets, I suddenly realized why these people had gone through all the trouble to produce and transport electricity. For some reason, they were afraid of the dark.