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.