Warm Waters, Chapter 2

2.
Noon. Water still felt warm.

‘Why are you doing this?’ said the man in the water, not really talking to the man on board. He felt a surge of rage. ‘What have I ever done to you? I don’t even know you!’ he spashed.

‘Ah, a reason’ said the man on board, smiling in a way that made the man in the water feel very small. ‘There has to be a reason. It can’t just be random. You can’t be dying by chance!’ Sarcasm oozing. He proceeded almost philosophically. ‘A reason can be as good as a rope to cling on to.’ he said. ‘But listen, listen to me.’ The man on board leaned outwards, confidencially. ‘Consider this for a moment. What if there really is no reason? There may not even be a plan. You jumped on the boat, you decided to go swimming, and when I see you swimming back, it just pops up in my head: “what if he never gets back on?” You haven’t thought of that, have you? No, of course not. Because that would be so unfair. If you’re going to die of cold in the middle of the ocean, there better be a good fucking reason for it!’

The man in the water had stopped paddling and waving his hands around to control the floating. There was a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows. He hadn’t even thought of all of this, not really.

‘So, just for the sake of argument,’ continued the man on board, ‘let’s say there is a reason. Let’s say I picked you. Let’s even say I’ve spent the whole morning putting in your brain the idea of jumping off my boat in the middle of nowhere. Let’s say there is a plan. Maybe if you think really hard, you’ll find out what it is. And wouldn’t that be helpful. That you could, shall we say, reach me;’ such an ugly sarcasm in the word “reach”, ‘that you could understand what I’m doing, or why am I doing it to you. Wouldn’t that give you some leverage, perhaps even a chance?’ The man on board stared intently to the man in the water for a minute in silence. Then he turned his back to him, leaned forward, grabed a can of beer from the coolbox under the bench near him.

The other man was looking at his hands, distorted and turned white, almost fluorescent, by the thin layer of water above them. They looked like raisins. They’d soon start to turn blue.

‘It would make more sense, wouldn’t it’ continued the man on board, staring into space. ‘It would be a relief. That you deserved this somehow.’ The man on board sipped his beer. ‘There are days when I feel that we all deserve to die a cruel death for something, you know. But if we all deserve this, then in a way none of us do.’ The man on board reclined on the cockpit bench and disappeared.