Warm Waters (Finale)

He could not say for sure, not for all the sun of the Sahara, whether he was conscious or unconscious, dead or alive. He didn’t feel a thing. He did not know whether he floated in the sea or in the ether. He could not pinch his arm to find out whether he was awake. He wasn’t even sure there was still a hand at the end of his arm, or whether he had arms at all. He was weightless and bodiless like a breath of air.

Then he heard a voice. It could have been the voice of the man on board or his own. It could have been a figment of his imagination.

‘If I had told you yesterday that you would die serene and in peace, you wouldn’t have believed me. You would have shouted and cursed and splashed and moaned. And why should you have believed me? Yesterday you were nothing but a spoilt brat who had never asked himself who he was. You’d never stood in front of a mirror and given an honest look at yourself. Now you do. Nobody needs to say now what you are and what your life has been. No heavenly judge, no eulogy from a saddened relative, no three-line obituary will define you or measure you. You define yourself. So tell me, now that the ocean has frozen and neutralised the animal impulse to survive for survival’s sake, what do you see? What’s left of you? Can you find the spark of the fire divine? Can you find a good person, a life that stands on its own? Or is there but a beast, a time more or less pleasurable, more or less honest, but apathic and absurd? If I took you know out of the water, and wrapped you in foil blankets, and inject you with whatever substances can bring your body out from the cold, if I gave you your life back, in short, what would you return to? Would you find the will within yourself to claim your place among the living, or after seeing you like you are, no instincts, no inertia, have you found out there is nothing worth claiming?’

‘But you had no right’ he said to the voice that could be that of the man on board or his own or nobody’s. ‘You had no right.’

‘When you crush an ant with the tip of your finger, do you ask permission? Do you ask forgiveness? I killed you because I could. But tell me now, man in the water, are you an insect after all, or are you a man?

When he was a child, his family had a very little boat, with the hull painted dark blue. It had a little cabin where it got really hot; his dad used to nap there after a sandwich lunch. They would drop the anchor off the shore of a little island less than half an hour away from the harbour, and spend the day there swimming and toasting under the beautifully scorching hot sun. If there was a south wind, they’d stay on the northern part, which was his favourite. It was rocky and full of hiding places, with some shallows where he’d stand, over the mossy-like seaweed that looked like a thick forest seen from the window of a plane. He’d dive six or nine feet deep and the world would explode to red, purple and green. Starfish and little anemone, sea urchins and creatures for which he had no name would waive and dance with the currents. If he was lucky, there would be octopusses. He’d get close enough to alarm them and then they would spread their tentacles and crawl gracefully away, flashing colours at him, white, maroon, purple. Shaols of little silver fish would dance away from him, exploding with a beam of gold when touched by a ray of sun. All those lidless, glass eyes watching him. He’d stay suspended under water for as long as he could hold his breath, and he felt part of it all.

When he emerged to breathe his parents would check how blue his lips were. He had to be sternly commanded before he agreed to get out. He’d climb the removable white ladders that the waves swinged and banged against the hull, sometimes trapping his fingers. His dad would get his snorkel and mask and then the flippers would come off. His feet would feel suddenly disabled and minuscule. He’d be welcome on board with a big, weathered towel that had been under the sun for hours. His mom or his dad would hold him as they wrapped him in it and keep holding him until they were sure he was out of the cold.

The man on board lifted him onto the stern platform with an groan of effort, and stripped him off his diving suit with the aid of his own knife. The blade scratched the skin here and there, even though it was handed with care, and yet no blood poured out. The snorkel, mask and flippers were tossed on deck but the knife was placed in his fist, which was clenched so tight that a couple of fingers had to be broken to allow the handle in. It was another little struggle to cross his arms on his chest. The man on board combed back the other man’s hair and examined his work. It looked like one of these sleeping figures that one sometimes finds on the sarcophagi of kings or rich merchants from olden times. He stroke his head. There was possession and intimacy in that gesture. He pushed him off the platform and into the westwards current. Had he been aware of it, the man in the water might have relished the idea of a Viking funeral.


The man on board didn’t stay to watch the body sink. I hate goodbyes, he would have said. The ocean extended in every direction and he would wander on it for hours, defying the endurance of his fuel tank, almost to the verge of being stranded for ever in the same current that was taking his victim west and then down, down, down, and then nowhere. Man and boat were so small, so insignificant lost in the boundless, indifferent ocean. Blink once and they’re gone.


THE END

Warm Waters, Chapter 8

‘You’ll love the third story. It’s about you.’

The man in the water hated the other man’s smirk. It was poisonous.

‘About ten years ago, this young girl went to college. In a party she was gang-banged by six or seven older students. She could never say exactly how many or who they were, because they drugged her with god knows what before they did what they wanted to her. The rapists were quite passed out themselves. She reported it but the couple of guys who she identified denied it was rape. The judge accepted their defense that it being a frat party she should have known what she was going there for. He didn’t even accept he had been drugged against her will. He didn’t demand the students to name the rest of the boys. In short, he blamed it all on her.

>>The girl went on to marry her boyfriend, a sailorman. For ten years she struggled with depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, and just plain nightmares. Then one night she drowned in her bath, after taking too many sleeping pills. The doctors could never say if it was an accident or suicide.’

The man in the water thought about the bath’s warm waters.

‘What does that have to do with me?’ he said, of course only managing to squeeze out one out of every three words, and that with painful difficulty.

‘You know what.’ Said the man on board. ‘Because you were there when it happened.’

The man in the water gasped.

‘Never.’ He said, struggling to go beyond the ‘n’.

‘How many mornings in college did you wake up and remembered absolutely nothing about the night before? How many nights were you so passed out you forgot even your name?’

Too many, thought to himself the man in the water, his face contorted, his eyes blank, his stomach upturned.

‘Your mates, I hunted them down, one by one. They told me your name. I made them believe they could get away if they named the other guys. Poor bastards. The look on their faces when they realised I had lied.’

The man in the water had no breath to retort with.

‘You lie’ he said, in a whisper, more a prayer than an assertion.

‘How did you first heard from me? How did you learned about my fishing trips?’

A leaflet under his door, every week for three months.

‘Have you heard of any of your old college mates these last couple of years?’

He hadn’t.

‘Never!’ he said. ‘I’d never! I couldn’t!’ he shouted, trying to shut up the shadow of a doubt that had started to grow deep inside him, too odious to be heeded.

‘Oh, but you did.’ Retorted the man on board, unassailable. ‘You did. You know you did.’

‘No!’ he bellowed, his eyes shut, his useless hands wagging on his ears.

So many things didn’t fit. So many things in his head screaming the story didn’t hold water. If only he could think clearly. If only he could go over the whole thing from the start. How did he get here, on that particular boat, on that particular weekend. How did he end up in the water –had he been induced to jump or had it been his decision all along. Hadn’t there been too many random actions the man on board couldn’t have possibly controlled? Wouldn’t he had heard about his mates if they started disappearing? But all these questions and many more had become a swarm of flies and bees inside his head. Thoughts started but didn’t conclude. They were left in the air and covered and clouded by the next, and the other, and the other. He wanted to grab just one of them and weigh it down it properly, but they all escaped him, slippery like eels. He simply couldn’t think straight. The confusion that announced his imminent death had settled in, at last.

‘What was her name?’ he clattered then.

The man on board smiled a huge grin of satisfaction and triumph.

‘Are you saying you choose the third story?’

The man in the water was puzzled. He had forgotten about their macabre game. He had thought he was finally hearing the truth of it all. So yes, you could say that he chose the third option.

‘Her name?’ he insisted, god knows why.

‘Is that a yes? The third story?’ The man on board refuse to let him get away without an answer, his will fixed upon his game.

The man in the water felt the torment of cold, his flesh like marble. His jaw was still clattering, but he realised the trembling in the rest of his body was subsiding. He was dying.

‘I’m so sorry’ he said then, very softly. He was not sure what he was apologising for. He was sorry about many other things, though. The fact is, he could have done something like that. What the fuck, most people can. If that was not a reason to be sorry, he didn’t know what was.

‘You have a big problem, man’ said the man on board, speaking very slowly, as if he wanted to make himself very clear. Words got to the man in the water as if through a veil. ‘If what I’ve told you is true, if this whole thing is a revenge for what you might have done to my wife, and if I’ve bothered so much to find you, and bring you here, and kill you, do you really think I’m going to let you go? Do you think I’ll let you live, just because you guessed right and you said you were sorry? Do you really think you’re saved?’

The man in the water closed his eyes. No, he didn’t. He didn’t. The sun was up. To him it appeared dimmed and white, and the blue of the sky looked pale and transparent like ice. He knew then. He just took full conscience of it, and accepted it. That was it.

‘Was it even the true story?’ the last will of the condemned man.

The man on board smiled.

‘You’ll never know.’

‘Any of them true?’ he rattled, not really expecting an answer.

‘You’ll never know. Does it really matter? Perhaps they all were. Perhaps none of them. It’s all part of the fun.’

The man in the water even smiled ever so slightly, as much as his stone cold face would allow.

‘The fun’ he whispered.