Fruit

Mr. Kayle. Mr. Kayyyyyyle … it’s your old friend Jack Turning here. Wake. Up.

The first thing I became aware of when I came around was the pinch of a crab’s claw on my nose. It had a firm grip and was trying to clamber up my face with its many pointed legs. I plucked it off and opened my eyes. The light of the sun cut through my retinas. The tall silhouettes of trees swayed against the sun and from somewhere nearby came the sound of the ocean washing softly ashore.

I was on a beach.

The raft had washed up on an embankment, quite a distance from the shore. The front end of it was buried in white sand. I quickly realised this was somewhere new. Somewhere new and somewhere deserted. There were no signs of life.

I wiped the sand off my face and my skin burned at the lightest touch. Carefully, I undid the strap across my neck then gingerly lifted my head from the raft and proceeded to undo the rest of my straps. My body ached as I stretched to my side to undo my left arm and then forward to undo my feet. Eventually, painfully, I managed to free myself entirely.

I got to my feet and studied my surroundings again. At the edge of the beach began a wilderness of trees and bushes, running the length of coastline as far as I could see. They were like no plant life I had ever seen. The trunks were thick towers, stretching far into the sky, aligned alongside each other like perfectly positioned pylons. Beyond the wall of oversized trees was what looked like a dense jungle running up a large green hill in the distance. This was not mainland. This was an island.

But the tide …

I turned to examine the sea.

There was something uncannily unnatural about the way the waves washed up the shore. The water didn’t foam at all but ran clearly, with a slightly greater speed than waves usually do—more in the way water laps cleanly and forcefully against the edges of a lake on a windy day. Nothing about it seemed right.

I stepped off the raft and lurched onto the sand. The sand didn’t feel right, either. It didn’t even look right. I bent to pick up a handful and opened my palm.

It was like no sand I’d even seen—soft flakes instead of grains and almost metallic in the way they shimmered in the sun. They could have been finely crushed shells but that seemed unlikely; each gleaming flake seemed identical to the next one, almost synthetic. I dusted my hand on my pants and rubbed off the last bits between my fingers.

“Hellooo!” I shouted into the jungle, but there was no response. The trees caught the wind and they swayed and shrilled in their fixed spots. I looked back over the ocean and noticed something else, far off in the distance.

There was another small island out there, ten maybe twenty kilometres away. I wondered what it was, whether it had been there all along. But never mind that island; I still hadn’t explored the one I was on. I turned to look into the jungle again. I knew I should go into it, explore, get a better idea of where I was and what was on offer. For a while, though, I’d stay on the beach and get my strength back. Find some food, drink some water. The last thing I needed was to be in a weakened state, being chased down by a wild cat or bitten by a venomous spider.

But my instincts were telling me something else. It wasn’t the treachery of nature, the natural hazards of an untamed world that had me unsettled and scared. This place had been tamed. Arranged. Manufactured to look and feel like an island. And all the while I stood there, staring into the thick jungle, I felt I was being watched.

I found a bowl-shaped rock filled with rainwater and drank it dry. The water filled my shrunken stomach and I didn’t feel like eating, even though I knew I should look for food, something solid. I put off foraging and instead pulled the raft up against a tree and slept there that night. The night was warm and accommodating, but I slept fitfully. I had nightmares of being bound and on the ocean. When I finally awoke, I was briefly unsure about where I was, but the shiny sand and the uncharacteristically tall and smooth-trunked trees soon reminded me.

My energy was drained. I lay in the rising sun for hours, trying to regain my strength. Eventually, I managed to get up and make my way to the shoreline. When I looked up, I noticed something peculiar about the other island—it seemed closer than it had been the day before. It was a small island—more of a ship-sized islet than an island—but now I could make out the volcanic shape of it, the faint hue of green undergrowth and the rise of the central peak. I walked down to the water’s edge and peered out at the floating island. It could have been a trick of light or trick of the mind (I hadn’t exactly been in the clearest and most perceptive state the moment I’d awoken), but I could have sworn it was closer than it had been. By three or four kilometres, at a guess.

Even stranger, when I looked down into the water, it seemed my own shore did not stretch out gradually beneath the tide, the way it would on any normal beach. There was a sudden drop, as if I was standing on a cliff. Less than a foot from the edge of the dry sand I could look directly down into the dark abyss of the ocean. It was like peering over the side of a boat. A large fish fluttered a metre down into the ocean, and then, to my surprise, disappeared under the shore.

I didn’t have the strength to dwell on these observations: I was suddenly ravenous. I found a large branch near the fringe of the jungle, took off my shirt and created a kind of net, which I then attached to the branch. I leaned over the edge of the island, dipped the branch and shirt under the water, and spent at least an hour scooping water until eventually I was able to catch a fish.

I hoisted the thrashing fish to the shore and killed it. I had no way of making a fire, but decided to skin and gut it, tear off the head and tail, and eat it raw. Each salty sliver slipped uneasily down my throat. When I was done, I stretched out on the beach under the harshening sun. The sky was perfectly blue. At a great height, birds crossed overhead. I didn’t know where I was, but no longer cared. I was simply relieved to be off the sea.

I spent some time thinking about what had happened, how my raft had come free at all (Had the rope broken? Had it been cut?), but even these thoughts seemed irrelevant to my situation. Whatever the reason, I was here now. Stranded on the strange new beach of a strange new island. It was time to focus on surviving—and on finding my way to my son, because the truth was, whether the rope had been deliberately cut or had snapped on its own, I was free from the commune.

Starving. Exhausted. Free.

I closed my eyes, settled my mind, and sailed once more to sleep.

The next day I woke up feeling better. It was time to go into the jungle. I tied the raft to a young tree further up the beach and headed inland, beyond the wall of impeccable trees—smooth and identical, standing like ancient warriors on eternal watch.

The jungle was thick and wet. The canopy overhead had knitted together so that only a few shafts of light managed to cut through. They ran into the undergrowth at angles like rungless ladders. Each beam revealed wispy floating strands, like human hair, dancing in the warm, dank air.

One of the first things I noticed was the lack of any wildlife—no birds, no creatures scuttling through the trees. If not for the occasional spider web strung like necklaces of wobbly water droplets, I would have thought the jungle devoid of animal life. I stepped carefully through the undergrowth, keeping my wits about me. This was not a normal place. Not a normal jungle.

I walked for what must have been ten minutes before an astonishing new part of the jungle revealed itself.

Fruit.

The trees were now garlanded in clusters of bright and luscious fruit. This new vegetation didn’t make sense either. The variety of fruit was contradictory to what I remembered about where and how fruit was grown. In the orchard beyond the paddock in the house I had left behind me, apples grew next to apples, and oranges nowhere near those at all. Bananas were tropical fruits, that fact floated in as I looked at the trees. So maybe they belonged here, in this clammy, humid forest. But here an orange tree grew beside an apple tree beside a banana tree, all hanging thick with the largest and most colourful fruits, big enough to feed two or three people. And that wasn’t all. I saw pineapples the size of watermelons, watermelons scattered like boulders. There were unusual fruits too. Mulberries and pomegranates. Jujubes and kumquats. Quinces and lychees and kiwi fruit.

But still, there were no animals.

No flies or butterflies or monkeys or lizards. Just the fruit, perfectly and conveniently arranged, ready for a traveller’s banquet.

As appealing as each fruit was to me—who had hardly had a thing to eat in days now—I was sceptical. They were simply too perfect. They had been put there to be eaten, but that instilled no faith in the motives of the caterer. There were many ways to ensnare an animal, and a sumptuous bowl of food left out in the open was one of them. I resisted the urge to pick one and carried on walking.

As I walked, however, the sweet fragrances of the fruits began to fill my nose. The smell of them was deliciously potent, far more tantalising than anything I had ever encountered. I found myself struggling to compose myself. Struggling to resist.

Nothing this wonderful can possibly be bad for you, I told myself as I trudged through the bushes beneath the hanging garden of fruit. Why are you denying yourself these fruits? Because they’re too inviting, too delicious and fragrant? For God’s sake, stop being so paranoid! You’re starving!

My stomach gurgled loudly and that sound decided me. I’d walked almost a kilometre through the fruit trees and I could contain myself no longer.

I reached up to a conveniently low treetop to pluck a football-sized pear. The surface of its smooth and perfect skin shone in the light. I wiped the dew on it and plunged it into my mouth, taking as big a bite as I could.

My sense of taste had never done me so proud. The juices ran into my mouth and down my throat like the liquid essence of life itself. The sweetness ripened in my mouth, developing complexity as it lingered, filling each small space and gap, nursing and refreshing. Almost instantly, my eyes widened and my body came alive. I was sure nothing had tasted, or ever would taste, as good in my life.

I took another bite and walked on, reinvigorated. And now I felt something else, a pleasant tingling and warmth expanding within me.

I looked up.

The jungle, I realised in that moment, was a paradise. A place of pure and painstaking beauty, bathed in a golden aura. Each leaf glistened before me. Each shaft of light through the leaves was a passage to a divine tier above the known world, one that had always been there, sheltering me. The trunks of the trees glowed. The fatigue in my muscles and joints began to lift. My skin prickled. My head cleared. Every fear I’d had about these unknown surroundings was flushed away by the juices of the fruit.

The fruit. Was this all because of the fruit?

I didn’t know and didn’t care. I was overwhelmed by the sense that I was complete in every way. Nothing more was needed. How could I have not realised this? How much time had I wasted trying to figure out the world when the world had already figured itself out?

I am alive! I am free! Time is an illusion!

The past and the future vanished and I floated across the land in the euphoric glory of now, seamlessly at one with myself and the cosmos. I no longer cared about where I was going, what I was expecting to find. I was where I was and that was all that mattered. Destination was a cruel misconception posed as a plan and purpose. Fear is a fabrication! Loneliness is a lie! How can any of us be lonely when we’re surrounded by so much life?

It was not long before my stomach was full.

I stopped eating and kept walking.

It was about then—a while after having taken my last bite—that the sense of enlightenment began to slip away.

It began with the jungle.

It was changing …

The glistening leaves grew dull and grey, decaying on the ends of their stalks. The bright colours of the world faded, leached by some terrible, chemical agent. Shadows flickered in their corners, stretching and reaching with twisted black hands.

Paradise? This wasn’t paradise. What had I been thinking? This was a dungeon. A dungeon constructed of dying things. Fear and anxiety leaped back. The world began to take on strange and menacing undertones …

But this is the real world, Kayle. Everything choking, struggling and gasping for a chance to live out a painful and exhausting life—one that inevitably comes to nothing. Cruelty! Deterioration! Death! This is how things truly are.

How lost I really was. How alone. What if I didn’t find anything here? Or anyone? What if my son was being abused or tortured or enslaved? What could I possibly do about that? I could barely keep myself alive, let alone save him. Besides which, I had no idea where I was.

I stared down at the remnants of the pear in my hand. It wasn’t juicy and succulent. It was bloated and tumorous, the red and green streaks patterning the skin like the hard veins of a dead thing. The juices on my hands felt like the gummy secretions of some abominable creature’s saliva.

My head began to spin. I could no longer tell which direction I had come from, or where I had planned on going. Light and darkness were mixing and forming bizarre new shapes. My heartbeat accelerated and my face spat sweat. Absolute fear filled me like hot acid.

The last thing I saw was a young man’s face staring down at me. And then I lost the strength in my legs and disappeared into unconsciousness.