Lethe

by A. Sparrow

  Chapter 29: Suicide

  Stuck on a ledge, we tilt. The outrigger’s float rises out of the water, dripping. We spin about an axis formed by an apex of stone biting into wood like a fang.

  Shades gather to gawk; silent, but I sense their excitement.

  “Get out on that float!” says Sabonis, wedging an oar against the barely submerged ledge. “If we flip, we'll never right her.”

  I grip a brace so hard, my knuckles pale. I look between the float, the wildly turbulent surf and Sabonis.

  “Get the fuck out there!” he says.

  I scramble off my butt, ease myself over the side and straddle one of the thick struts supporting the float. It teeters like a see-saw. Encouraged, I inch up and out towards the float and my weight forces it down further.

  Another swell surges into us and upsets the balance, but in a good way. The float slaps back down against the reef.

  The collision knocks me off the strut. I grab on to the slick wood, wrap my arms around it. The boat swirls through the churn. My legs dangle and smack against rocks.

  Thick, strong fingers seize my arm and pull me back into the hull. The outrigger spirals away from the islet into the channel. It sits heavy in the water. Every other wave breaks over the side.

  One oar is missing. I snatch the plastic bucket before it too can float away. Sabonis helps me bail with cupped hands.

  The current disgorges us from the channel, sweeping us free of the islets. The Shades all crowd together on the near-side ledges; watch us leave. I suspect they rooted for us to lose our struggle and join them. If the islets were ferryboats, and Shades had the weight of flesh, these would have capsized.

  We drift, spinning with the whims of the wind, no sign of Delgado ahead of us.

  “There’s the other oar!” says Sabonis. It looks like any other driftwood, riding the peaks and valleys of the swell. Sabonis sidles us closer with the remaining oar. We swing near. I have one chance to seize it. I lean far over the side and paw it out of the water like a bear landing a salmon. It clatters into the hull.

  “Attaboy!” says Sabonis. For once, he doesn’t mistake me for a girl. I don’t know whether to feel vindicated or insulted. I straighten my dress.

  Sabonis sets an oar in each oar lock and sits down to row. He gets us pointed towards shore and closing in on a double bay, the first scooped out of the basalt by a collapsed caldera, the second hemmed by a broad arc of ashen beach backed by a scrubby plain that cuts completely across the island. I realize that this is the backside of the “Rift” we traversed a few days earlier.

  I settle back into my spot, find a good rhythm for bailing and admire the view of these two vastly contrasting mountains. I always liked looking at mountains, though seeing Mt. Abdiel reminds me of my truancy, making me nervous. Not that I can even see much of it. Flanks and buttresses peek over lesser ridges, but the summit remains obscured by clouds.

  The other mountain, the volcano, generates its own mists, wrapping itself in ropy contrails spilling from fumaroles. Its slope rises in one continuous arc from the broken teeth of the caldera to a steep walled cinder cone. I feel like a tiny child staring up the torso of a threatening stranger.

  Sabonis struggles to haul the waterlogged boat along. With my bailing, I manage to maintain the status quo. Draining the hull dry is a hopeless cause. At least the wind and waves are less severe on this leeward side.

  “I’m taking us ashore,” says Sabonis.

  “We have a choice?” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Sabonis. “Sink.”

  I notice an odd collection of rock piles on the pumice plain between the bay and the long, narrow lake that stretches across the Rift. As we creep closer I spot door openings and roofs.

  “That a village?”

  Sabonis nods. “Sixwing. Don’t worry. Ain’t nothing like Gihon. Least they got whores here.”

  “Whores? You mean prostitutes?”

  “Not the nicest,” says Sabonis. “You gotta go to Zion for that. Sixwing’s kind of their farm system.”

  “Zion, huh?”

  “Next settlement up the coast. Probably where Delgado went. I’d follow him there instead if I thought we could make it. But … not without repairs.”

  “Is it … a Jewish settlement?”

  “Nah!” says Sabonis. “It’s kind of like a gated community. It’s where all the big shots—well, big shot Squatters—go.”

  I absently pick at a rough spot on the top of my foot. My fingers come back wet and smeared with red. I look.

  “Holy shit!”

  There’s a gaping contusion on the top of my foot that I hadn’t even felt. Only when the injury registers in my mind does the pain dare to bloom and it wavers with the intensity of my attention.

  “You’d better take care of that,” says Sabonis. “Little gashes tend to grow if you don’t watch ‘em.”

  “Man,” I say. “I never thought I’d say I missed feeling pain.”

  “I sure as hell don’t,” says Sabonis. “Not real pain, cancer pain, the kind that turns morphine into kiddy aspirin.”

  “You died of cancer?”

  “With … not of … malignant melanoma,” says Sabonis. “Pretty name for a nasty disease, don’t you think? Rolls off the tongue.”

  “Glad I went quick,” I say. “I mean … I’m not glad I died, just … glad that I don’t remember hurting. I sure don’t envy you … dying of cancer.”

  Gina’s uncle died of rectal cancer. There was nothing pretty about the whole affair.

  “With,” says Sabonis. He had an odd look in his eyes: a mixture of mischief and shame, as if he had foiled himself as much as the reaper.

  “You mean, you—?”

  “I helped it along, you might say,” says Sabonis, blanching and averting his gaze. “Ain't proud of it. I fought as long as I could. Got to the point ... wasn't worth fighting anymore. Morphine stopped working. Fucking cancer clamped down and started dragging me down its hole.”

  “How … did you do it?” I say.

  “Don’t you think this conversation is getting a little too morbid?” says Sabonis.

  “We’re … dead,” I say. “What else are we supposed to talk about?”

  Sabonis pauses between strokes, but keeps on rowing.

  “Towards the end, my cousin Sarah sat with me … hours every day. And she had a family at home. But Joanne … my wife … my … separated … she refused to come see me. I asked Sarah to give her a call, get her to come over, so I could fucking say goodbye. She would tell Sarah yeah, she would, but she never did.”

  “You didn’t really give her a chance, though … I mean, not if you killed yourself.”

  “No chance?” Sabonis exploded through his oar stroke. “Bullshit! I was in hospice for weeks and she never showed. Longest weeks of my life. A waking nightmare 24/7.”

  He pauses at the oars again and slumps. He looks like he’s going to cry, but collects himself. His face stays dry.

  “When the pain kicked in big time, they doped me up extra heavy. Still hurt, but … one day I opened my eyes, looked up and saw … Joanne sitting there.”

  “But … I thought you said—”

  “Let me finish!” Sabonis glares me down and resumes. “I was so goddamn happy to see her. I asked where she'd been. She said she’d been there all along. Held my hand while they changed my IV. I told her … next remission, I’d take her up to Vermont … leaf peeping … Smuggler’s Notch … like she was always nagging me to go … stay in one of those bed and breakfasts … talk things out. But … I was fuzzy-headed a lot … but I would have these moments when things got clear. And I had one of those and realized … there wasn’t gonna be no more remissions. So I told Joanne that. Only problem was …”

  His eyes went blank. He stops rowing. This time the trickles come, running down the leathery folds along his nose into his beard.

  “She wasn’t Joanne. The whole time, it was Sarah sitting there, playing along with my delusions. Joan
ne never came. I sank into that rack like a sack of lead. I had enough of that shit. I had days and days of pills that I had pretended to take but tucked away in the back of a drawer. Don’t even know what they were. I took ‘em all and they took me down fast. Burned my gut, but not for long. This droning started up that drowned everything else out … just blew everything away.” His eyes are red. He stares at the remnants of the caldera rim. “And that was it.”

  Sabonis digs in with the oars, takes a deep, long stroke and stops; lets us drift.

  “So what then?” I say. “You wash up on a beach?”

  “Nope,” says Sabonis.

  “Then how'd you get here?”

  Sabonis dips his head and his eyes roll up, revealing the whites beneath.

  “The hard way,” he says.