Moneta asks two favours

T he heat of the day had already begun to fill the tent. I sat on the edge of my bed, curling my feet and cracking my toes. My body felt tighter and heavier than it had the night before, probably from the lack of sleep.

I finally forced myself to stand and the bed creaked, the mattress popping back into shape. I looked around my confined space. Each small object and ornament sat in its rightful place: a shelf of tattered books and a stack of unfinished drawings beside a broken mug of pencils. There was a small chest of drawers containing a few items of clothing. A red umbrella with missing spokes leaned like an ageing charmer. Beside it, a shoebox of clippings from National Geographic magazines recovered from the cabin of a boat wreck. There was also a glass jar filled with coins, a set of broken headphones, and a rusty old army knife that wouldn’t close anymore …

(The Renascence is not a law, Kayle. It’s a choice. A collective choice, isn’t it? A choice we make together. Material hoarding was resigned to the Age of Self, whether or not the people of different periods were able to see it for themselves. The secular people of the technological period prided themselves in having little in common with the henotheistic people of Ancient Egypt—with their ideas of an afterlife and their pantheon of gods—and yet both seemed intent to die in mounds of their possessions. Don’t you see the hypocrisy in that kind of behaviour? Rest assured though, Kayle: in The Renascence, when we die, we’ll leave nothing behind)

I ducked my head and stepped outside. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the bright light as I sauntered through the narrow spaces between the tents, passing familiar faces as they went about their morning chores. A large woman dunked her clothing in an old bucket. She churned the dirt out of a soapy shirt, her bronze arms pumping like the rhythmic shafts of an engine. There was the smell of jasmine, sawdust and spices in the air, and steam rose from tinny pots warbling over gas burners.

As I left the commune of tents and stepped out onto the beach, the sea breeze nibbled at my legs and arms like inquisitive, invisible creatures. I shaded my eyes with my hand; the sun was high enough for it to be midday. The sand beneath me was already hot between my toes and, at the far end, the faint shimmer of a heat mirage weaved like a chorus of ghosts.

I walked along the water’s edge with my pants rolled to my knees. I crouched and cupped the water in my hands to dab the back of my neck. Seagulls hovered and cried above me, chasing each other between the rays of the sun. At the end of the beach a group of people stood huddled like the Moai statues left by the inhabitants of an expired empire, gazing forever out over the ocean. It would have been an odd sight had I not already known the object of their fascination: they were watching the rafts.

I could just about make out the floating rafts bobbing over the small waves.

I counted three of them.

Each raft had been attached to the pier by a length of rope. The offenders had been tied down at the wrists and ankles, forced to stare only at the sky while they thought about their offences. Pumped full of hallucinogens and bared to the heavens, forced to wait until the universe dripped itself in, filling each with a sense of purpose, realigning them with The Renascence.

Although I knew nothing of the men on the rafts that day, a rumour had spread of their having vandalised the white house two mornings earlier. They’d scrawled defamatory comments on the walls in mud, but I hadn’t seen the words for myself. By the time I’d awoken, the evidence had been removed. Their sentence was delivered with no deliberation. No prolonged trial. No testimonies. A direct and unchallenged judgement by the one dictatorial panel of voices that oversaw us: Guilty—Separation by the Raft.

Offenders could drift for as long as three days before being pulled back to shore. No food. No water. Pounded by the wind and the waves. Frozen in the cold or burned in the sun. Sometimes the icy rain fell so hard it must have felt like hot iron shot on their exposed faces. And while the rest of us could scarcely imagine such a battering, we sensed it was the stillness of a quiet night that affected them most. We’d heard about it. Watched them raptly. Wondered.

“Kayle.”

Surprised, I turned.

It was Moneta, standing a few feet behind me. She was an elderly woman with ash-grey hair tucked behind a green plastic peak. Her overalls were grass-stained, the tips of her fingers browned by soil.

“I wonder if you wouldn’t give me a hand,” she said.

Moneta needed me to move bags of fertiliser and fill pots, and I followed her to the botanical garden, a glass dome set back from the beach. The dome housed countless varieties of flowers, herbs, vegetables and small trees. I’d often seen children assist with the pruning, picking, planting and cleaning, but only Moneta knew how to make her autotrophic friends truly bloom into silent wonders.

As I entered the dome, I was hit by a flurry of scents: the perfumes of the brightly coloured flowers, the wetness of loamy soil. The air was thick with humidity, which probably kept Moneta’s skin as supple as a much younger woman’s. That, and her lifestyle: one of calm and commitment.

She explained where the bags of compost and the enormous clay pots needed to be moved to, and I hauled and dragged her heavy pots and filled a large empty wooden crate with soil and fertiliser. Once I was finished, I stepped outside to wash my hands in a bucket of water. I lifted my face to the sun. It slipped behind a single cloud—throwing grey on everything—and I continued to stare until it returned to blind me. I dried my hands on my pants and walked back inside.

“Oolong tea?” Moneta asked as I entered. She was sitting at a small wrought-iron table. She had prepared a pot of tea and two china cups, each overturned on a daintily patterned saucer.

“Yes, please,” I said.

“Well, have a seat then.”

She poured each of us a cup of tea. I lifted the cup to take my first sip, my thick finger squeezing through the narrow handle. We sat quietly for a while, and the silence didn’t seem to bother her. There was little deemed appropriate to talk about anyway.

“They gave me a hard time in the beginning,” she said. “You know, with my garden.”

I nodded. I was sure they had.

“It took me a while to explain that my garden would not be a possession of any sort. I have no interest in owning these plants as things, you see.”

“I see.”

She looked to the side as she spoke, and I felt as if I could have been anyone, really—any willing ear. Finally, she turned to me.

“Thank you for helping,” she said.

“It’s my pleasure,” I replied.

She smiled and sipped her tea. She surveyed her garden—the ferns, flowers, vines and vegetables—like a parent keeping an eye on her children in the park.

“Let me tell you a story,” she said. “Would you indulge an old woman and her story?”

I shifted uncomfortably. Moneta and I had hardly said a word to each other before that moment. We’d greeted each other on occasion and I had assisted her once or twice before, but we were far from what one might consider close. “What kind of story?”

“A story I need to tell. To someone else and to myself, one last time.”

I looked through the glass wall and saw the others on the beach. They seemed far enough away and I was almost certain the two of us were alone.

“Okay,” I said.

“I hope you will entertain my story. It may be a bit long. I imagine it will be. But I must tell it the way I want or I will not want to tell it at all.”

“All right.”

She lifted her cup and watched me carefully as she sipped. Then she smiled.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m not sure you know how much this will mean to me, but it does, it will, and I thank you. I’ll make us another pot.”