The beginning

I opened my eyes. Spears of sunlight and blue skies. Ocean. Wind.

I was on the raft.

And my son …

My son.

I didn’t have a son.

I didn’t have a son.

The water washed over my burned arms and legs—icy ocean water—but the true chill came from inside. The chill of the truth. My raft bobbed over the unsettled waters and I could do nothing but move with it, fixed at the limbs and exposed to the universe. I closed my lids against the glare of the mighty sun, the overhanging face of a god I could never look at directly, never negotiate my passage with.

I had been in Chang’e 11 alongside Gideon and Andy. I had watched as a father I’d never known reunited with a son I’d never had, and then there were the memories—new memories of old experiences like crumpled letters finally surfacing from beneath the dust and clutter of a dark attic. These memories had entered my mind as swiftly as they had once been taken, though they were now paired alongside the memories of who I thought I had been.

But Andy.

My Andy.

He was gone again. Gone forever.

The cold chill of truth could not change that I loved him, though he had never been mine to love. My hope that we’d be reunited had also been my hope of having some worth in this world, but it was a reunion that hadn’t been mine to expect. As much as I still remembered him as my own, I had never been his father and he had never been my son.

The water ran over my face, splashing over my nose and down my throat. I didn’t have the energy to tug on any of my straps. I moved with the water, as far as the rope would allow, but then there was a sudden bump; somebody was pulling my raft in, guiding me back to shore. It could all be another dream, I told myself. It didn’t matter how real it seemed. I had been burned by the sun and cooled by the sea before.

I strained my neck to the side to identify the person pulling on my raft but I could only see a thin, pale arm.

I played through all the memories of my time in the Blue Caribou. A little girl standing in the road at night. A speeding car. A gutless plan to steal an island from an old man.

I was not a good man. I thought that Day Zero had erased the memories of a man with a life worth living, but that had not been the case. No. I was murderer. A coward. A waste.

I looked to my side again. The man beside the raft came into view. It was Daniel.

“Daniel,” I murmured. “What’s happening?”

“It’s over,” Daniel said. “All over.”

“What’s over? How long have I been out here?”

“Dunno. Maybe three days?” He was walking alongside my raft. “No one really knows.”

I groaned and winced in the light. If I had received those new memories, I went on to think, it must have meant that Quon had finally picked up the knife Gideon had left on the floor, incapable of tolerating the truth of his own. The memories must have returned after he died, but if that had all happened, as I still believed it had, how was it possible for me to now be on the raft?

“Where’s Gideon?” I asked, forgetting for a moment it was not his true name.

“He’s being pulled out as we speak.” Daniel turned to look at me. “You’ve been through quite an ordeal. Take it easy, Kayle. Everything will be explained in a bit.”

“It’s Jack.”

“What?”

“The name,” I said. “It’s Jack.”

I was unstrapped from the raft and slowly got to my feet. My arms and legs were numb. Stinging red rings of broken skin circled my wrists and ankles. I barely had the energy to stand, but I pulled myself up and twisted my neck to the side, clicking it into place. There were people on the beach, most of whom I recognised, but there was something different about them. There was a commotion. People whom I had never heard utter a word were now talking freely to each other.

I stood and stared at them, amazed. I had never seen them behave in such a way. I rubbed my wrists and wiped my burning eyes with the back of my arm, but my salt-encrusted arm made them sting even more. I stepped clumsily on the sand and felt the grains slide between my toes. I closed my hands into swollen fists, pumping the blood up my arms. I scanned the beach for Gideon (who was really Kayle), but couldn’t see him anywhere. Daniel was crouched beside me, rolling up the leash the raft had been attached to.

“Daniel.”

“Mm,” he said, preoccupied.

“What’s going on?”

I looked from face to face. The communers conversed animatedly with each other. Some were laughing, some were crying, but most stood clumped in small huddles, talking. Simply talking, nothing more.

“Like I said,” Daniel said. “It’s over.”

“What’s over?”

“Everyone remembers,” Daniel said. “Everyone remembers. One moment we were going about our business and the next … it all came flooding back.”

I studied Daniel’s expression to determine whether or not he was joking, in on some elegant hoax, but he seemed to believe what he was saying.

“Where’s Angerona?” I asked anxiously. “And Theunis?”

“Angerona’s around here somewhere, but Theunis …” Daniel paused, and then added mournfully, “His raft broke loose in a storm, we think. We lost him at sea. We don’t know when it happened but it was some time in the night, we imagine. There was nothing we could do, man.”

I ambled away from Daniel and up the sandy shore. I trudged through the soft sand and made my way to the top of the beach, through the lively crowds, and onto the path that led to the white house on the hill. I caught a familiar smell, the faintest whiff of beachside greenery. The trees that lined the edge of the sand wavered in the wind. Clumps of white cloud floated across the sky like man-made islands on a perfectly still ocean.

I looked through the muddy windows of the white house. There was nobody inside. The back door stood open, unattended. I thought about all the times I’d been made to bear witness in there, to recite the lines of the script, plugged to a useless machine.

I walked back down to the beach, passed through the crowds of known faces and went to the water’s edge to study the outlying horizon. The silvery ocean moved as it always had, rolling eternally, without memory.

The foamy water swirled around my feet. I stared as countless bubbles grew and burst on my skin. I looked again for my tall friend, the one who’d covered the world with me. I couldn’t see him anywhere in the crowd. I wasn’t even sure I could still call him my friend. His daughter had lost her life at my hands.

I wasn’t a friend. I had ruined his life.

And then, from the depths came a painful reminder. Andy. My misplaced son. I had loved Andy, and still did, but there was nothing I could do about it. The universe had deliberately torn him from my clutches. Someone had raced around a dark corner in a speeding car and struck him in front of my eyes.

The sense of surprise at my return to the beach was subsiding.

Now there was only pain.

Deep, irreparable pain.

As I stood looking out at nothing, I suddenly knew: we do not own our memories; our memories own us. It didn’t matter what I remembered or how I felt. Memories are their own strange creatures, flitting between the tall trees of our experiences, inviting us to enter the dark and uncharted woods of our lives, promising nothing.

I sat on the beach by myself and watched the sun set over the edge of the world, layering the sky in yellows, purples and reds. I thought about the strange journey. If our memories had returned, then so had the memories of everyone else. Jai-Li had left the beach with her child to find the Silver Whisper, but now her purpose must have changed. I imagined her walking back into her parents’ farmhouse beside the muddy pig troughs—the parents she had forgotten and denied—not as Jai-Li, but as their daughter Jun. The dream of another girl had given her the courage to set forth, but the truth of who she was had brought her home, where she now belonged. Home. Where we all hoped to belong.

Three days, Daniel had said. I’d been on the raft for three days. If that had been so, who had spent days, months, travelling across the world? Who had washed up on that island of fruit, sailed through the sea of rooftops and flown across the landscapes in the Silver Whisper?

There was a moment on Klaus’s island when I’d looked at myself in a mirror for the first time in years. I had hardly recognised myself. Had that been my face at all, or had my identity and my memories somehow leapfrogged from stranger to stranger until the very end? Theunis had broken free in the storm and was lost at sea. Had I actually seen and done everything through him, the man who’d believed in helping Jai-Li off the beach? Where was he now? In Chang’e 11? Dead? Still adrift on the ocean?

(The only thing left to be in this world is a martyr. One day we’ll look back and be forced to ask ourselves what good we’ve ever been to anyone)

The man I once knew as Gideon finally walked up to me on the beach. I glanced up at him as he sat down in the sand, pulling up his knees and locking his hands around them. He stared across the ocean at the red setting sun.

“Do you know about the alp?” he asked, as he had once asked what felt like a hundred years earlier.

“It sits on your chest and steals the breath in your sleep,” I replied, as he had once explained. “The woman with her hand nailed to the floor.”

“The cat with its tail nailed to floor.”

“Ah, right,” I said, running the sand through my fingers. I looked at the lowering sun and for a while we said nothing to each other, sitting in quiet companionship the way we had in those first dateless days, weeks, months and years.

Finally, the big man named Kayle spoke:

“After my son was taken from my house in the night, I think it all slipped away from me.” His voice was deep and measured, but his eyes did not veer from the cooling sun. “My memories—of my family, and of who I was …”

He shook his head and started again. “I don’t think it even had anything to do with Quon. After my daughter was killed, my wife ran away, and my son was taken … there was a great emptiness. I never did remember my own name. ‘Gideon’ was a name left in a note. Of course, that’s what I remember now, now that we’ve got it all back …” He paused a long while and then added, “It doesn’t feel the way we hoped it would, does it? Having our true memories.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“Perhaps we expected more. Perhaps there were things we forgot long before Day Zero,” he said. “But at least I now know what I have to do.”

“And what’s that?”

“Get off this beach. Get my son. Find my wife.”

“Do you know where they are?”

Kayle nodded, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and gave it to me. It was a drawing of a house on a hill beside four crosses. Or were they tombstones?

Angerona had drawn the same image for me in the sand with a wooden stick, an incomprehensibly long time ago.

“I’ve seen this before,” I said.

“Angerona. She had my wife’s memories. Sarah’s memories. So, in a way, Sarah was right here, on the beach with me all along. Angerona also knows where Sarah is,” he said, holding up the page. “She’s known all along, and she’s decided to come with me. She wants to join my family; I don’t think she has family of her own.”

“I see.” My heart ached to hear him speak about his family. I recalled nothing of Sarah, his wife, but, of course, those memories had been reserved for him alone. A story of a beautiful woman who’d lived in a house of students, who had once kissed him on the cheek, commencing their future love.

But Andy—I missed Andy.

Kayle took the paper back from me and slipped it away. “I don’t know what happened after we found Andy in that room in Chang’e,” he said.

I was startled that he recalled it too.

“I was holding him …” Kayle continued, “There were memories, endless memories, and then I was here. I can’t explain it. Can you?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Strange days.”

“Well, maybe it’s happened already,” I said.

“What?”

“The Renascence. Maybe this is the start of collective consciousness, as was always intended. Maybe we’re sharing a dream right now. Maybe that was a dream. Or maybe we got more help than we realised.”

I thought back to the scripts we’d been made to learn and recount to The Body in the white house. Perhaps there were some seeds of truth in those words after all.

(Evolution demands more. In the end, we will not need to be the fittest, for competition itself will cease to exist for us. Subsequently, we will neither disown nor denounce the remaining organisms with which we share the planet. We will simply exist in a state of being of which they will have no concept and to which they will have no access, on an alternate stream of time—within the one true reality)

“Indeed,” Kayle said.

He watched as the sun sank over the brink of the ocean. Then he stood and dusted the sand off his pants.

“I couldn’t have found him without you, you know,” he said, tucking his dreadlocks behind his ears. “I was lost, and didn’t even know it. You helped me.”

“Kayle,” I said. I needed to tell him who I was and what I had done. I couldn’t bear to hear him praising me, not after all the pain I had caused him and his family. “I—”

Kayle held up his hand, a sign for me to stop, not say any more.

“I know, Jack,” he said. “I know what happened. And I forgive you. I forgive you and I thank you.”

Without another word, Kayle scuffed out the print his body had left in the sand, and it was as if he had never sat beside me. He strolled away and I watched as he headed along the beach towards the communers. Bonfires were burning bright, a celebration of recently acquired selfdom. I caught the final sliver of sunlight, the last breath in a dying thing.

I forgive you and I thank you.

His words lingered on the cool and misty scent of the ocean. I released a long breath, a breath I’d been holding for a lifetime. As it left my body, a sensation I hadn’t felt in longer than I could remember, even with a lifetime of memories at my disposal, flushed through me. Whether I deserved it or not, I could not say, but I felt it.

(Remember, Kayle. Victory isn’t getting what we want. It’s getting what’s owed to us. And what’s owed is balance. Balance between right and wrong, the guilty and the innocent, the saved and the damned. We might not ever have the Utopia we’ve dreamed about—I’m not even sure it’s what we really want—but balance: it’s the first step towards retrieving Man’s stolen destiny. Towards peace)

The sky dimmed overhead and the stars began to make an appearance. I stood on that beach and thought: perhaps that was what we’d always needed to evolve. We would never move on, together, as one, unless we settled our debts with each other. Kayle had lost a child and his pain was now mine. He had forgotten to reclaim his family and I had remembered enough to lead him to his son. Perhaps, after everything, that other earth had finally succeeded in helping us. Perhaps, after Quon’s death, that one unifying thought entrusted to nine astronauts had finally been shared with the world—and one day, if we made sure to remember, we would all find a way to connect.

In the months that followed, communers slowly made their way off the beach to find their ways in the world. Trawlers arrived every few weeks to take them home. The beach grew quieter. The tents and shacks stood empty. Work stations were dismantled. Gideon said nothing more to me after that last time we spoke, and he and Angerona climbed aboard the last trawler and sailed into their future—one I would never know anything about.

I watched from the beach as they stood on the deck and left the shore. I had decided I wouldn’t be going anywhere. Not until a man came down from the woods to tell me I was living a lifetime in a night, that I was in Chang’e 11, that I’d fallen from that tall tree to my death, was bobbing on the raft, or this wasn’t the same world (or universe) at all. No matter how long I lived on that beach, I would always leave room for any one of those possibilities. I might be trapped, but I would never be fooled. Not ever again.

Gideon and Angerona looked back at me from the deck as the trawler chugged away. He raised his arm and waved and I waved back.

Then they were gone, forever.

After they’d left, I walked across the desolate stretch up to the white house on the hill. I threw out what I wouldn’t need, moved in my bed and the few trinkets from my tent: a blunt knife, a broken umbrella and a box of clipped pictures. I walked to Moneta’s dome of plants and herbs. I swept it out, tore out the weeds and watered the dry, neglected soil.

I made a fire on the beach and sat beside it, remembering the nights the communers had once danced around it in hope of summoning the gods of reason and meaning. I watched the tide swell and wondered if one day the water would rise to claim me, as once, in a strange and faded dream, I had believed would happen. The sun set before me, stroking the sky with dark and beautiful shades of red.

I put the past to rest like a tired child, bared myself to the universe, and prayed for the grace of another day.

Just one more day to call my own.

Day One.