Veracity (43 page)

When I had finished eating I felt my way to the open doorway, and, sitting down on the ground and resting my back against its frame, I looked out into the dripping night. This was ideal, I thought to myself, this place, the tranquility, the respite from travelling, the fact that I wouldn't have other people to muddle my thoughts, it would all be exactly what I would need to sort things out in my mind, and to make a plan for what I was going to do next. Yes, I reaffirmed, there certainly wouldn't be people to muddle my thoughts. In fact, there wouldn't be people in my life ever again. Ever.

For some reason, this seemed to strike me for the very first time. True, I could have made the connection long before, but I guess I'd been so worried about making it to land and then surviving that I hadn't really bothered to think of anything beyond that. Yet, whether I'd considered it or not, I had already begun a solitary existence that would continue on for the rest of my life - which was a sobering thought.

As a way to try and comfort myself, I thought back to a conversation that Kara and I once had about aloneness. She had begun it by saying to me, stolidly, that we are born alone, live our lives alone, and then die alone. She went on to explain how we have no choice but to see the world through the constraints of our own perception - through our individual experience, awareness, knowledge, and the personal limitations of our senses, of which the exact combination of, no one else who has ever lived throughout the span of our history could possibly share. We are alone in the world that we experience, prisoners to the way we see it.

Which, she had said, is why there are things inside us that we never share: because part of us recognizes that, even if they were spoken, we would be the only ones who could understand them. The quiet memories of our childhood, the kindnesses that we never had the courage to carry out, the wild dreams and aspirations, the sordid sexual fantasies, the doubt, the hate, the jealousy, the nightmares. We hold these things in places no one else can see, and not necessarily because they are secrets, but because they're facets of our being that, outside the air of our prisons, are unfathomable, indecipherable, meaningless to anyone else. The silences we choose are the echoes of our solitude.

At the time, I had argued that, if this were all true, then why weren't we impelled to
live
on our own. Why did it feel like we needed people, were drawn to them, wanted to be around them? But at that point in the conversation we heard someone coming, and she had to jump to her feet and leave. However, before she turned away, she had enough time to retort to my line of questioning by cocking her head to the side and raising her eyebrows with a bit of pity. After she left, I sat there in the shade feeling stupid, knowing why she had looked at me that way. It was simple: we are naturally drawn to people for two reasons; one, because having others around us is the easiest way to evade the intimidating fact that she was pointing out, that we are, in reality, completely and absolutely alone; and two, because we are simply wired that way. We are group animals, and have evolved to be so over hundreds of thousands of years. And the reason she had given me such a look was because it was obvious that the act of
depending
on the people that we flock toward, and
understanding
them, are worlds apart; and also happen to be completely unrelated.

So then, if she were right, I was just as alone as Mikkel was with the entire crew around him, or Dana surrounded by everyone eating in the dining hall. I tried to feel reassured by this, but didn't really.

The hiss of rain intensified outside. I held my hand out into the dark and caught a few drops.

How was I supposed to appease the cells in my brain that were linked in a way that made me a herd animal, a social being, something that would
need
to have interaction of some kind? I was sure I wasn't the first person in the world to be physically isolated, so what did other people do when this happened? Who knew? Maybe they found some kind of outlet, something to talk to; an animal, a plant, some invented friendship, some voice that seemed to answer back, or maybe just appeared to listen. And if so, was that what it would come to: my scurrying around on all fours trying to catch mice or lizards so I could while away my days jabbering at their terrified faces, waiting for them to give me a meaningful blink in response? Was that what I would become, a withered man walking through the trees, babbling to a stick in his hand about the importance of maintaining a healthy state of mind through the use of imaginary social interaction?

The sudden call of an animal pierced through the noise of the rain, and I sat up, listening for it to be repeated, knowing that it would have to be quite close. I didn't hear it again, and, eventually, I stood up to go to bed, taking a few minutes to try and close the door, the wood having warped so far out of shape that it didn't match the dimensions of the frame anymore. I lifted and pushed until it fit as well as it was going to, and then felt my way to the bed, which was a kind of box that was raised slightly higher than the floor. It turned out to be infinitely more uncomfortable than sleeping on the soil under a tree, which is where I had been sleeping every night until that point, and I shifted around under the blanket, resolving to gather small branches and leaves to make it more comfortable the next day.

I fell asleep wondering how creative I'd have to get to fill the void of being alone in this land. And as I did this, drops of water fell from the ceiling, drumming the pool in the bucket with rhythmic precision - like Onni tapping on a rail.

34

It wasn't raining the next day, and I spent most of the misty morning exploring the area around the hut. The river, which seemed to be the only weakness I might be able to use to travel further into the plateau, had thin trails of fog stringing above it, as the air was still sodden with humidity from the night before. Though, I would soon find out that the river didn't represent much of a weakness at all. Very near the hut, only a few minutes walk up along it, the banks began to narrow, and soon led into the entrance of a small gorge. The gorge's walls were smooth and steep, with incredible scooping shapes carved into them, and marbled veins of lighter rock that streaked through the bulges and curves. Once inside the gorge, I tried continuing upstream, but it quickly became impassable; places where you either had to get into the rushing water and fight against the current, or try traversing along the slick rock walls, which, when they weren't vertical, were filmed with a slick algae or moss. Either way would probably have ended in drowning while breaking most of your bones in the process, your body plunging downstream from one rocky pool to the next. It seemed that if I wanted to go further into the plateau, it would have to be through the high bushes.

On my way back to the hut, I took a better look at some reinforcements that had been made to the bank, just before the entrance of the canyon, which I think had served to slow the erosion of the loose slope. They were essentially cages of wire that were holding back boulders; though the metal had almost entirely decayed, and the rocks would soon be breaking loose and rolling down the long bank.

I returned to the hut and walked through the terrace of land that had once been covered in crop plants, but had since been taken over by native grasses for the most part, leaving only a few straggling vegetables behind. It occurred to me that I could save the seeds from these, and try to cultivate the terrace again. It would make life a little more secure for me, in terms of having most of my food in one place. It would also involve quite a bit of work; but if I sharpened some of the tools that I'd thrown out of the hut, I knew that it was more than feasible. I walked to the edge of the terrace, thinking over some of the details of this re-planting idea.

Having arrived just as it began to rain, I hadn't really taken in the view. But as I was standing there, looking down at the land that gently sloped away until it met with a few hills at the horizon, the river creasing the terrain and penciling in a line of white, I noticed that it was an impressive one. Which is when it hit me.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I felt calm for the first time in what seemed like months, or that, finally, I was letting the very last bit of my guard down; whatever it was, it was then that Onni's image entered my mind - and this time, it refused to leave. With it, something sunk into the pit of my stomach and seemed to physically pull me down, until I found myself sitting on top of a boulder, my shoulders heavy, blankly staring ahead, thinking about what had happened the night I escaped.

At first, I have to admit that I was almost frustrated with Onni. Why in the hell couldn't he have said something, whispered something, found some way of making his presence known before standing in complete silence behind an armed and desperate man who was on the tentative verge of escape? I could think of a few brighter things to do. But, of course, he
had
come up behind me, and he had done this naturally, walking in the same way he'd always walked. Just like I had naturally spun around and slashed his stomach open.

Slashed his stomach open. I slouched even lower, put a cold hand on my forehead, understanding, for the very first time, the full implications of the wound I'd inflicted. Because the truth was that even if the crew had the sum total of all the surgical knowledge of the island in their heads, still, such a cut would need a sterile environment and complicated medicines to heal. The ship had neither. Which meant, simply enough, that Onni would die. Maybe later than sooner, but he would definitely die. I had killed someone. No, more than that. I had killed the one person on the boat who was trying to save my life. And even
more
than that, I had killed the one person who, out of all the people I knew, seemed to embody our innate ugliness the very least. What did that mean exactly? Where did that put me? And was there a single thing I could do about it?

These, unfortunately, were questions that only became more complicated the deeper I probed. First of all, the only reason Onni was trying to save me was that he believed the others had judged incorrectly, that this notion that I was conspiring to help remove our species from the world was absurd. Instead, he thought that the entire situation was being misjudged, and that, whatever lies might have been told around me, I still had a sense of kindness and morality that was being deliberately ignored. Which, in a way, meant that it wasn't really
me
, but rather the traits that he had believed were inside me, that he was trying to save. Only, as it turned out, he was wrong. I didn't have those traits; I
was
a conspirator; I
was
involved in something very close to the plot that the crew believed they had uncovered; I
had
been raised and educated for the sole purpose of carrying out the final stages of The Goal, and I had always planned on doing exactly that. And as much as he couldn't imagine my being capable of it, I
did
believe that it was the right thing to do. (And, really, that belief hadn't exactly been challenged along the way. Everything I'd learned about my 'fellow man' on the ship, about our fear and lust for power, about our cruelty and mercilessness, in addition to the things that I'd gathered about our ancestors while travelling through the mainland, had done nothing but confirm how valid The Goal was to me.)

As this jumble of barbed thoughts continued to fold in on itself, there seemed to be only one thing I was sure of, and it kept rising to the surface over and over again: I felt some kind of strange obligation to Onni. In exchange for his life, I felt like I at least owed him
something
, some attempt at atonement, some meagre act of redress. Yet, what was in my power to do that could possibly rectify anything?

But I realized there
was
something, as strange as the idea might have been. The one way I could offer a degree of compensation to him would be to set out to become more like the person he
thought
he was saving. If I could find a way to contort my being around the lies that he'd believed I was, and do this until they became closer to the truth, then this would take away from the futility of his dying, would add meaning to his intentions. However, the lie that Onni had believed was that I had nothing to do with The Goal, which meant that the only way to bring his belief closer to the truth would be to abandon it in every way inside my head. I slumped even lower.

For days afterwards, I walked around the terrace with a gnawing sensation in my chest. I spent a lot of time picturing Dana, burying his head in his hands at the prospect of my throwing away everything they'd been working toward, breathing a slow, heavy sigh, swallowing hard. I could picture Harek, furious, slamming a fist onto one of the wooden tables, his eyes wide, sharpening with something like violence; or Chalmon, sliding his fingers over his face, rolling his shoulders a bit, curling his fingers around his thumb and clenching down until he heard it crack.

But as much as these images weighed me down, my rationalization seemed increasingly capable of lightening the load. I reasoned that, all things considered, I wasn't even supposed to be alive, that the crew had intended on killing me, or at best, were going to drop me off on an island where I'd have been as little use to The Goal as I was abandoning it on the mainland. So if I should've been dead, what would be the harm in living like I was? I knew the Elders well enough to know that they would have planned for a contingency like this. There would be other expeditions of the third phase searching for fertile survivors, and we'd probably all been given overlapping routes in the case that some of us shipwrecked or were killed by other unforeseeable events. I could rest assured that there'd be other people to pick up where I left off. Meaning that, if I decided to shirk my responsibilities, there wouldn't really be much of an effect, much consequence. In fact, considering how often I'd blundered, The Goal was probably even better off without my fumbling hands juggling its leaden weight in the air. Wasn't it better for everyone if I just lay it down on the ground and quietly walk away? Of course it was.