The Island of Last Truth (3 page)

By night the water temperature will drop and he will experience slight hypothermia, not enough to kill him. He will die of thirst. A topical thought overpowers him: “Water, water everywhere!” But he knows very well he cannot give in to the temptation: if he drank seawater he would dehydrate much more rapidly. So what? he thinks. Strange, the instinct to cling to life even when you know you have no chance of survival. Under normal conditions it would take between three and five days to die of dehydration. Given the circumstances, it will all be much quicker. Sometimes he had wanted to die. Now he realizes, no. Never. He didn't know then what it meant to face your own death.

He keeps swimming. He is not a great swimmer. He doesn't breathe well, he tires. He does the dead man's float again. Face up. Then he relaxes into the fetal position. Luckily, from time to time a cloud blocks the sun. He looks at the time. Four o'clock. The time has passed quickly. His hands and feet are wrinkled. His skin itches. He feels a cramp in his legs. He would like to have a nap. He would like to have something to eat. Most of all he would like to have something to drink. Impossible. He is in the corridor of death. He touches the knife in his pocket. The wait is unbearable. He could use it and end it all. Life is not a decision. Death, yes. He grabs the knife, opens it. Vein at the wrist? Jugular? He takes a deep breath.

He can't do it. Kill himself. Let death come and take him. Make it hard for her. He has no intention of making her a gift of his life. What has he been thinking? Mathew Prendel is a survivor. This isn't the first time death has been near. On more than one occasion, when he has distanced himself from the crowds of people that gather on land, when he has gone off to find himself, to feel the freedom of not being in the place assigned to him and is accountable only to himself, the price has been almost losing his life. Time and again he has proven that the only victory the sea concedes is survival. Until now. This will be his final crossing. Now he is alone forever. There is a bitter sting in the thought that no one will be able to feel his disappearance at the moment it strikes. He has been able to mourn the deaths of Katy and Frank. He has accompanied them. He accompanies them still now as he thinks of them, lifeless.

Dr. Prendel thinks of his widowed father, there in Georgetown, that lost Texas town where many well-heeled retirees live.

“Texas? Why are you going to Texas? Aren't you happy in New York? You can live with me, if you like.”

But the man preferred the climate of the South, the calm of a small town.

“If your mother were still alive, I would stay here. She couldn't bear small places, she adored cities, and New York more than any other. Remember when we left Balti­more, even her personality changed! But I feel lonely, son; you have your work and a lot of the time you go off to those remote seas for months at a time, and I don't know what you're looking for so far from our country. You're away more than you're here, and I feel lonely, son, and there are many people my age there, people who have lost their spouse, people looking for meaning in the final years of life, you'll understand when you grow old.”

But Mathew Prendel will never grow old. And his father will never be as alone as he is right now, at six in the evening on the day Mathew's slow death begins.

It will take his father months to realize that they won't see each other again. It will destroy his heart and he knows this. He will say: “How many times did I tell him to forget about all those adventures, settle down, how many times did I tell him it would end badly if he continued like that.”

His father is seventy-one years old. His mother would be sixty-one, if she were still alive. Death didn't pay attention to the age difference. It took her five years before in less than a month. The liver.

Mathew was an only child. He'd have liked to have had a sibling. He thinks it's safe to say they'd be together now, and this thought consoles and distresses him at the same time.

Many times he has felt sadness imagining his father alone, in the small living-dining room of his house. Sitting on the crimson plastic sofa, the television on at a deafening volume. Dozing and taking gulps of coffee served in one of those cups you get with points from yogurt or paper napkins. His shirt and trousers freshly washed, but with old stains on them. And it is curious, because now he feels an even more profound pity for him. A pity, he supposes, that has to do with knowing how alone he is leaving him while his father still thinks he can count on his company.

Night has fallen. It is two o'clock in the morning. He is exhausted. He is cold and afraid. He hadn't been afraid while it was light. Seeing his body through the water helped him to be sure there was nothing worrisome nearby. The sea, when everything is dark, is like an immense animal with black skin moving restlessly as it sleeps and may wake up any moment. He has been swimming for hours, with brief interruptions to do the dead man's float. Dead man's float, what an expression for a moment like this. He would swell up and the fishes would eat him. Better that than being cremated or buried. He'd always thought he'd like his ashes to be scattered at sea. The sea, the tomb. Now they wouldn't be ashes but all of him. Wasn't that what you wanted? Now you have it. He smiles. He hasn't lost his sense of humor. Or maybe this is what death is: hoping, smiling, despairing, understanding nothing while on the verge of understanding everything.

His mother had been buried. Afterwards, for a long time, Prendel had nightmares in which bodies emerged with huge worms slithering through them. His mother, unlike his father, always told him: “It's good that you go all over the world, that you value things that aren't bought or sold or measured, that you don't always have your feet on the ground, that you start over again.” Who knows if he'll find her again. Who knows if there is a place where the dead reunite to go over their lives, comment on them, project them like a film. Forward, rewind, pause, slow motion, freeze image.

The cold has relieved the sensation of thirst. But his head hurts. He knows that's normal. The first symptoms of dehydration. Increased heartbeat and respiration. Spasms, nausea. And afterwards he'll have hallucinations. He'll see an island, a boat, he'll hear voices. Mirages. He'll see salvation.

He keeps going. Very slowly. It's difficult for him to move his arms. He can hardly feel his hands or feet. He orientates himself by the stars. He keeps swimming towards the continent. In the depths of his heart he believes that maybe he'll get to a shipping lane for merchant ships or oil tankers; maybe some boat will change direction for an unforeseen reason, a breakdown perhaps. In any case, he is still mocking his survival instinct.

Sailing means knowing where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. Therefore it is perhaps more difficult to sail than to live. Right now, Prendel can calculate where he is. He can calculate the speed at which he has been swimming, his approximate direction, and the amount of time he has spent in the water. He is sailing without a vessel. This is what will kill him. Although he is lost, he hasn't lost himself. He is a good sailor. Frank and Katy knew that, and so they had set sail with him. They had trusted too much in his skill. Or perhaps they didn't figure that sooner or later the sea kills you; the only difference is that if you are a good sailor, you know where you are at the moment of dying.

Mathew rebukes himself for having thought that things happen to other people. Everyone wants to choose. Loneli­ness won't happen to me, failure won't happen to me, not ruin or sickness or pirates. Pain, hunger, the ending of a love story won't happen to me. But it has to happen to someone.

The ending of a love story happened to him. Worse than that. He remembers Mary Stradform with a mixture of nostalgia and rage. Professor of pediatric surgery during his final year of medical school. They fell in love after a few classes. Contrary to habit, he asked her out for coffee. She said yes. They had coffee. The following day they woke up together in Mary's flat. He remembers the white cotton sheets and on top, her underwear, midnight blue. The salty taste of her skin, so similar to the taste of the waves. Loving her gave meaning to his life. He introduced her to his parents. He went to live with her. First and last love.

When they'd been together a little over two years, that operation happened. A little girl seven years old, a transplant, a disaster. Mary Stradform, prestigious surgeon, drowning in anxiety. She lost her touch. I didn't have the hands for the operating theater any more, she'd say. It was my fault, she'd say. The little girl would have survived. I didn't do it right, she'd repeat. I killed her. She'd killed her. And Mary Stradform committed suicide. She disappeared forever. She left him alone. But not as alone as he finds himself now, facing his own death, rather alone in a different solitude, the one felt only after the death of others.

Afterwards, to avenge Mary, to find peace, to get even with himself, and even with her, Dr. Prendel started to operate on seven-year-old girls. He specialized in pediatric surgery. To save himself and save her. Not long afterwards, however, his firm resolve began to waver and he sought refuge as a professor at Columbia University. He'd built up a good rèsumè and they accepted it without objections. He never picked up a scalpel again. He didn't want this godlike power, to give and take life. He wanted to be responsible only for his own. Many lamented his resignation. Prendel was a great professional. An honest person. Also an unsociable man with the soul of an adventurer. Few had understood his flight.

But Dr. Prendel hadn't fled. You don't flee from something when you go searching for something else, and he'd seen that life could be something else. That there were other possibilities. Sailing was a way of finding himself, of knowing what he wanted. Knowing what he didn't want. And now, despite the cold, his wrinkled, cramped hands and feet, physical and mental exhaustion, imminent death, Mathew Prendel knows that there are many things he doesn't want in his life from before. He is sure that rather than return to it, he prefers to move forward, directly to the destiny reserved for him at the bottom of the sea, with Katy, Frank, and darkness.

The darkness begins to fade. The dawn's first light illuminates the horizon. Prendel makes out the round profile of the world once more. Life becomes reality. The night has been an unfortunate parenthesis. The day is not a parenthesis, but it too is unfortunate. It was not a nightmare. The lightbulbs the moon had been lighting in the water all night disappear. Now everything is gray. It will only be an instant. The sun will not take too long to rise. It will be the second day out of a maximum of three. He gulps a little water. Bad move. But his thirst is becoming unbearable. He has no point of reference to know where he is. He can no longer calculate how he is advancing. He doesn't want to wait for death. He is impatient to meet it. Why are no sharks attacking him? If he cuts himself, maybe his blood will attract some. But he is afraid of being devoured by a beast. He fears the bite, the pain, the horror. During the night he suffered a shock: something brushed against him while he was almost dozing, doing the dead man's float and he came to violently. He has lost his sunglasses. By night, he didn't think it important, but now he thinks he should have paid more attention, should have tried to find them, get them back. He also thinks he shouldn't be hard on himself, shouldn't reproach himself, what he is doing is already enough. But that's always been his style, blaming himself, suffering, asking too much of himself. Perhaps because of this, sailing alone had been good for him, to gain an understanding of the fine but key difference between blame and responsibility. One is not to blame for breaking a halyard at the least opportune time but is responsible for not having replaced it in time. One is not to blame for failing to take down the sails at the right time but is responsible for not having followed the old adage: “the first moment you think you should take down the sails is the time to do it; afterwards it's already too late.” On land, on the other hand, other people's stares return an image filtered through a judgment that much of the time implies guilt. Wanting to share it with Frank and Katy, rather than feeling responsible, he felt guilty once again.

He shouts. He hadn't thought of doing so until now. He shouts, “Help.” Maybe the wind will carry his cry to a boat. Desperate, he shouts. He should have done so by night. Why hadn't he thought of it?

He hadn't thought of it because it's absurd. There is no boat to be seen. And faced with miles of sea and more sea, his voice seems ridiculous.

He shouts, shouts, shouts. Help. Help.

He knows it's pointless. But how many times do we do pointless things?

He sees an island. He was prepared for it to happen. But seeing it, he can't help but feel a happiness as previously unknown as this piece of land ahead of him.

He doesn't know how much time has passed. He isn't sure. He had let go completely. He was no longer hoping for anything. Now, however, he has strength again. As if he has just abandoned the
Queen.
He has to give his body precise instructions, which it doesn't obey at first. He has to tell his body not to swim, something his brain doesn't understand, no; he has to tell it to move his arms and legs as if they were blades.

As he moves forward, he wonders how it is possible his eyes haven't been burned. His lips are cut and contact with the salty water stings. How far is it? A mile? Maybe less. Definitely less. How is it possible? He's sure that there was no island or islet on the nautical map. Or he didn't remember it . . . but that's impossible . . . there was nothing but water.

And then experience, knowledge, and reality make an appearance and Dr. Prendel, dying, realizes that the time for hallucinations has come, little time is left to him before he loses his senses and he can stop struggling. And this thought tires, and at the same time, relaxes him.