The Island of Last Truth Read Free Page A

being a doctor used to weigh heavily on him. So he had thought. And instead, he’d proven that his survival instinct functioned like the mechanism of a Swiss watch: silently, with precision. It wouldn’t be useful to him anymore.
    After a while, he sees them throw the bodies of Katy and Frank overboard. Mathew cannot forgive himself. He is going to die with the sorrow of having sacrificed his friends; the only ones he’d had in New York in all the years since his family left Baltimore and moved to the Big Apple for him to go to university. He remembers how he convinced them to join him: it was April and Prendel had just begun a sabbatical year. He’d gone looking for Katy and Frank at their nautical bookshop. They’d opened it six years before. Frank and Katy had been friends, and sometime lovers, since university. They’d both studied marine biology. It was lunchtime and he invited them to the place of their choice, although he already knew the answer if it were Frank who chose; he always suggested PJ Clarke’s on the off chance he’d run into an old girlfriend of his, a tour guide he was still in love with.
    â€œI have to tell you a dream which I’ve been going over in my mind for years and that now, finally, I can make come true,” he told them en route from 57th to 55th Street. And little by little, while they each devoured one of those famous burgers, he seduced them. They would depart in May, to take advantage of favorable winds. They had already sailed on the
Queen
once and knew she was safe and comfortable. He would take care of the expenses. And the preparations. He’d requested a sabbatical year thanks to some stock market investments which had paid more than generous dividends. The lives they were leading would await them quietly. The two sales people they’d hired could mind the bookstore. They were talking about five months, six at the most.
    â€œWe have to do things in life that later on we’ll want to remember. Look back and feel it’s been worth it. Going over our history and feeling that it’s not like anyone else’s, it belongs to us, we invented it. We’re young. We have to do it now. Now. I can’t stand any more of this predictable life. Whatever we do, we’ll end up dying. Worth doing what we want, isn’t it?”
    Prendel knew very well that everyone carries within himself a person who wants to break the routine, who wants to show that he is unique, who says there is only one life and it has to be seized. He also knew, as practicing medicine had allowed him to corroborate it on more than one occasion, that when a patient receives a terminal diagnosis, the first feelings to overwhelm him are sadness and regret for not having done anything special with the life he’d been given. And that was what counted.
    Everyone carries within himself a person who believes he is better than their living self. Prendel addressed his friends’ inner beings. And it was a good move, because they didn’t know how to say no.
    Now, on the contrary, he thinks it wasn’t a good move but an unfair manipulation. Now that he is floating in an improvised cemetery he feels guilty. They should have fled as soon as Katy saw the boat. Or afterwards. They should have tried. He should have trusted Katy’s intuition, or more simply, respected her fear. But fear, when it isn’t contagious, is as untransferable as desire or disgust. Now the man has the sensation of having surrendered without resistance. He cannot manage to forgive himself, he isn’t capable of telling himself he acted as he did because he thought it was the best way to stay alive. He feels stupid. He is angry at himself.
    Many times he has feared dying in the sea, but he never imagined it would be this way. He’d feared storms and calms. Even feared the coast, when he’d seen it too close on stormy days. Feared darkness. How true it is that life surprises us