I chose to overlook the possibility that Jack’s fight had been for my life, I preferred to believe it had been for his own. And if I was right, didn’t that mean that Jack wanted to live in spite of everything he was telling me? Wasn’t it painfully obvious that he was crying out for me to tell him how deeply he was loved, how desperately he was needed? Wasn’t it plain to see that, at the moment of truth, he’d chosen life after all? I seized on that notion the way a man overboard grabs at a log when he’ll have only one chance at it; I clung to it as though I were clinging to hope itself.
My brother had saved my life. Now it was my turn to save his. With a renewed sense of resolve, I climbed from my bunk and made my way up the companionway. No missionary ever went forth to preach conversion with greater love in his heart or more righteousness in his soul.
I found the target of my ministries at the wheel, studying the reflection of his face in a small pocket mirror. He was wearing an old pair of cutoffs, a red baseball cap, and aviator sunglasses - nothing more. I was struck again by how tan and fit he looked. At thirty-nine, there wasn’t a visible ounce of fat on Jack. His hair had thinned a bit and had begun turning gray here and there; otherwise, he could have passed for ten years younger.
Catching sight of me, Jack palmed the mirror and pocketed it, apparently embarrassed at being caught in his little act of vanity.
“That was a quick nap,” he observed.
“I missed you.”
Jack smiled. “Should I say, ‘That’s nice,’” he asked, “or should I get ready for a speech?”
“Get ready for anything you like,” I said. “If you think I’m going to be a good sport about all this, you’re out of your mind.”
To Jack’s credit, he had the decency to say nothing.
“You saved my life,” I told him “You were magnificent during the storm; you were awesome. Here I was, ready to quit. Damn it, I would have quit if it hadn’t been for you.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “If I’d been the one who was having trouble, somehow you’d have found the strength to be there for me.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But don’t you see? Now you are the one having trouble. Let me be the one to be here for you on this. Let me take you back home and care for you. Let me help you through this, okay?
“Jack looked straight at me without speaking. And as I studied his face, his features seemed to relax before my eyes. He let his forehead unfurrow just a bit; the lines around his eyes softened visibly; even his mouth and jaw unclenched. All of the toughness seemed to melt away, replaced by a gentleness that had been absent during our recent exchanges, a gentleness that had always been such an important part of the Jack I knew.
“Do you really want to help me?” he asked softly. Gone was the glibness from his tone, gone the casualness that I’d been finding so infuriating ever since Jack had revealed his plan to me.
I let his words sink in, afraid I might spoil things by jumping too quickly to answer him. To this day, I can remember the long moment of silence, filled only by the sensation of my pulse beating in my temples, as I dared to hope that I’d finally broken through some invisible barrier and reached him.
“Of course I want to help you,” I said at last, matching the softness of Jack’s voice with my own.
“Then please let me do what I’ve got to do.”
Spoken every bit as softly, every bit as gently as his earlier words. But making it absolutely clear that his resolve was as strong as ever. So much for hope, I told myself.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I don’t understand how you can possibly want to go through with this. Here you are, on top of the world, at the absolute peak of your strength, physically and mentally. You don’t even have symptoms. Yet you’re ready to throw in the towel.”
“That’s just the point,” Jack said. “I was only able to do what I did during the storm because I’m still well. Six months from now, a year from now, I’d have been too sick, too weak. I don’t ever want to be in that position.”
“But why the rush?” I demanded. “Why now?”
“I think that’s the wrong question,” Jack said. “Why is it such a sin to want to quit when I’m ahead, to want to go out while I’m on top?”
“You make it sound like you’re at a casino,” I said, “like life is nothing more than some kind of dice game.”
“It is, in a way. And the trouble with most players is, they’re never satisfied with winning. They’ve always got to try one more roll of the dice. They can’t quit until they’ve begun to give some of their winnings back to the house. Then, as they walk away, all they can think of is how they should’ve quit while they were ahead.”
“But you’ve got time,” I insisted. “You’ve got real quality time left. Why not wait and see, for God’s sake?”
Jack reached out and put a hand on my upper arm. “I don’t want to get to that point,” he said. “You’re absolutely right when you say I’m on top of the world. And that’s precisely where I want to end up. I refuse to give anything back to the house. I’m going to be the one who walks away from the table a winner.”
“Why can’t you at least wait until the symptoms begin?” I argued. “What is it you’re so afraid of?”
Jack was silent for a moment. Good, I thought, he doesn’t have all the answers, after all. But his silence was a brief one.
“The symptoms have already begun,” he said. “That mirror you caught me looking at before? It isn’t about vanity: It’s not supposed to tell me I’m the fairest in the land. It’s supposed to tell me how much my gums are bleeding today. Jesus, Joe, do you know what it’s like, waking up each morning and finding new spots on your skin, or feeling lumps where there shouldn’t be any? Wondering whether the headaches you get or the tremor in your hand mean you’ve got a tumor the size of a golf ball growing inside your brain?”
“My gums bleed, too,” I said. “My dentist tells me it’s because I don’t take care of them. And everybody gets spots - it’s probably just too much sun.”
“And the headaches? The tremors?”
“Those may be nothing,” I said. “We get back home, I’ll go to the doctor with you. We’ll have all of these things checked out. They may turn out to be nothing.”
“This time.”
“Yeah, this time,” I agreed. “Hey, Jack, nobody ever promised us forever, you know. Lots of people go through stuff like this, and much worse. Help me out here, will you? I just don’t understand what it is you’re so afraid of.”
Jack seemed to consider that for a moment. “I guess what I’m most afraid of is that I’ll learn to cope,” he said. “It’ll go something like this. First, I’ll come down with a cough. I’ll tell myself, Hey, it’s not so bad, I can deal with that. Next, I’ll find out it’s pneumonia. Okay, I’ll take antibiotics; I’ll get over it. After that, it’ll be headaches. So I’ll learn to live with the pain, or I’ll take enough pills to get through the days in a fog. I’ll say, No problem, I can do this. Before you know it, I’ll be signing up for chemotherapy, radiation, bone-marrow transplants, surgery. They’ll be poisoning me, burning me, slicing little pieces off me, and there I’ll be, thanking them, counting my blessings, grateful to be alive still.”
We’d lived through our father’s death ten years earlier, and it seemed clear that this was a pointed reference to it. Dad had bought an extra couple of years from his doctors at the end, but they were tough years, full of pain and setbacks, and I’d never known if he’d been glad he’d put himself through it or not. Apparently, Jack had come to his own conclusion about it.
“No one’s asking you to go through bone-marrow transplants, Jack.”
“Not today they’re not. But we let these things sneak up on us; we develop a tolerance. They convince you to take the chemotherapy, see how it works. So your hair falls out, big deal. They tell you there are more important things than vanity; if you like, you can always get a wig. Dad got to the point where he let them cut off his balls, for Chrissakes. He jo
ked about it afterward. ‘Didn’t have much use for the damn things at my age, anyway,’ he said. Remember that?”
I remembered that.
“Don’t you see?” Jack asked me. “Once I let them start with me, I commit to the process; I willingly accept one indignity after another. And for what? For a few months of remission here or there? For a couple of years of pain and procedures? For living some shadow version of my former self, dependent upon doctors and nurses and drugs and - “
“Family.”
“Why? Just so I can prolong the inevitable?”
“We’re all going to die, Jack. It’s not some kind of race, you know.”
“But it doesn’t have to be some kind of endurance contest, either, where we stay in it long after we should’ve had the good sense to drop out. Think of all the athletes who weren’t smart enough to know when to quit. Think of Joe Louis, getting knocked to the canvas by guys who weren’t good enough to lace up his gloves when he was in his prime. Think of Willie Mays struggling to hit two seventy-three his last season, or Bob Cousy too slow to bring the ball upcourt anymore.
I looked at my brother and, for the first time, I thought I knew his terror. There’d been no sign of it during the storm, when I’d most expected to see it, when I myself was so paralyzed that the life all but went out of me. No, it wasn’t death that frightened Jack, I suddenly understood, it wasn’t the loss of life that he ultimately feared. It was the loss of control, the loss of self.
My insight into Jack’s thinking allowed me to let up a bit on him. I don’t know now if I was being charitable toward him in my new awareness, or if I was simply taking time to regroup and refine my strategy. Whichever it was, it gave the two of us some breathing room. And it also permitted us to get back just a bit to the business of sailing.
The southern breeze now warmed us and dried us out. We straightened our damaged rail and mended our torn jib. We hung our wet clothing and gear on makeshift lines. I got out my sextant and took shots of the sun, went to my conversion tables and reestablished our position. From it, I was able to reconstruct our course during the storm. We’d been pointed east the whole time, and though we’d been heading into the wind, I’d had the distinct sensation that we’d been moving forward, up one wave and down the next, as the sea rushed by us from bow to stern. Now my calculations told me that we’d actually been pushed back almost twenty miles in two days.
I decided to postpone the inevitable issue of our destination; there’d be time to confront it. I charted a course as before, to thirty-one north latitude, sixty-five west longitude, to where Walker Island would have been, had there been a Walker Island.
That afternoon, while I took the wheel, Jack rigged up a fishing line and trolled a lure from the stern. In the space of an hour, he’d landed a baby kingfish, a yellow snapper, and two flying fish. We tossed the king and snapper back, keeping the flying fish and sautéing them for dinner that night. When fresh, there’s no better eating fish in the world: The meat is tender, flaky, and sweet, and needs nothing but a little lemon or lime squeezed onto it. But as good as it tasted, I found myself less than hungry, and I pushed most of my portion onto Jack’s plate.
Afterward, we sat in the cockpit and watched a quarter-moon rise in a cloudless sky. The breeze had dropped off, and we were doing maybe five knots over two-foot waves. Compared to the storm, it seemed like lake sailing.
“Do you have any idea how much I love you?” I asked Jack.
“Yes,” he said softly. “And I also have a pretty good idea of how hard this has got to be for you.”
“How about your daughters? They love you, too, you know?”
“I know.” He nodded. “But they’ll cope. They’ll be okay. They’ve got their mother, and they’ve got each other. My life insurance will get them through college with something to spare. That’ll help.”
Here I was talking about love while Jack was thinking of insurance and tuition payments. But I took the bait, so ready I was to confront him on any level he might choose. “Did you ever stop to think that there might be an exclusion for suicide?” I suggested. “That the company might not pay off so quickly?”
“What suicide?” Jack asked. “There was a storm, remember? We didn’t make that up. There’ll be weather reports to confirm it. I was washed overboard.”
“Oh, I get it. First it was a benevolent fib to keep your girls from knowing the truth. Now I’m supposed to be an accomplice to insurance fraud.”
“There’s no fraud,” Jack assured me. “I checked the policy. After a waiting period, it covers suicide. So it doesn’t matter what you tell them.”
“That’s crazy. Anyone could go out and buy a million dollars’ worth of coverage, wait till it kicks in, and say good-bye.”
“I suppose you’re right. That waiting period’s the catch, though: It’s two years. Seems with most people, the urge to die wears off at some point during that time. But even if it doesn’t, the companies have got it all figured out and reduced to numbers. They’ve got these actuarial tables that show them that if they sell insurance to 10,000 non-smoking, thirty-five year-old white males, precisely fourteen of them are going to kill themselves at some point during the life of their policies. It’s all calculated and built into the rates; they don’t care. If it turns out they’re wrong, and suicide suddenly goes out of style, say, then the state regulators step in, make them reduce their premiums. So it’s no difference to them.”
“And what if suicides go up? Suppose everybody were to decide to cop out and take the easy way out?”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” Jack said.
“Oh no? It happens with teenagers all the time. Some high school kid can’t deal with his pimples, takes a dive off a bridge. A week later, his girlfriend decides she can’t go on living without him. The papers get a hold of it, write it up like a Romeo and Juliet thing. Before you know it, you’re reading about copycats all over the county. They call it the ‘tipping point,’ where you reach a critical mass and all of a sudden you’ve got a full-blown epidemic on your hands.”
“Sorry,” Jack said with a wry smile, “but I refuse to be held responsible for an epidemic of suicides.”
As much as I wanted to keep up my attack on Jack, I knew I had to back off at some point and give him breathing room. The last thing I wanted to do was to turn things into a contest of wills, where the focus of our dialogue would shift from who was right and who was wrong to who could dig his heels in deeper and be more stubborn. So as we sat that evening and watched the moon climb higher and higher in the sky, I forced myself to let go for a while. I let the night envelop us with her darkness and her soothing symphony of sounds. I let myself be transported back to those glorious sun-drenched days and magical moonlit nights, when we’d sailed in pure, perfect joy, with nothing but the horizon ahead of us - days and nights that were in truth barely behind us, but which now seemed ages ago, millennia ago. I saw them all in my mind’s eye, a movie being rewound in excruciatingly slow motion; back to before my brother had looked me in the eye and revealed his terrible plan to me; back further, to before there’d been a storm and a bolt of lightning that should have killed us both right then and there; all the way back to a time when everything was warm and dry and safe and I still believed there was a place called Walker Island.
One of the results of Jack’s revelation to me about his plan to kill himself was that I no longer felt I could trust him. Whereas before I’d gone along with his little game of withholding the final charts from me, I now took it upon myself to dig them out and inspect them one afternoon while Jack was busy at the wheel. On doing so, I made a macabre - but not entirely unexpected - discovery: I saw that Jack had actually gone to the trouble of locating thirty-one north latitude, sixty-five west longitude and there, at the precise spot where the lines intersected, he’d inked in a dot and, next to it, had written “Walker Island.”
I looked up from the chart and caught Jack watching me, just before he had a chance to avert hi
s eyes. We both knew I’d seen his notation, there seemed no point in pretending otherwise.
“Why that dot,” I asked him, “if there’s nothing there?”
Jack shrugged. “It’s as good a spot as any,” he said. “I had to pick someplace.”
“Suppose I miss it? I am the navigator, after all.”
Jack seemed to think about it for a moment. “I guess I could settle for some other place,” He said. “If I have to.”
The thought panicked me. Was he telling me that he might go overboard anywhere, at any time that suited him? Was he now going to deprive me of the small comfort I’d been able to take from knowing that we were still several hundred miles away from our destination and that I therefore still had time to talk him out of going through with his plan? A rush of fear came over me, and my mind raced to find some way to keep those miles and that time as a buffer between us and the dot on the chart. And as I look back now at the bargain I managed to strike in my desperation, I regard it as nothing less than Faustian, my own version of a deal with the Devil.
“I’ll keep us headed to ‘Walker Island’” is what I told my brother, “if you’ll promise me you won’t do anything before we get there.”
So help me, I spoke those very words, right down to the horrible, cowardly euphemism “do anything.” And Jack - Jack said nothing. Instead, he looked me in the eye, and then he nodded once, and we had our bargain. And all I’d had to promise was that I’d deliver my only brother to the place of his death.
But if I now know that I sold my soul that afternoon, at the time, all I felt was relief. I’d fashioned a good deal, after all: I’d bought time, precious time I could use to work on Jack. Back at the charts, I made some hasty calculations and concluded that if conditions held as they were, we still had roughly six days of sailing ahead of us.
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