The Raft: A Novel by Fred Strydom Page B

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
    F inally, 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