The Ferryman

by Justin Cronin

It’s all a game of sorts, whereby Elise expresses her concern about me and, having aired this thought, is free to move on. It’s been my experience that a lot of human interaction comes down to just these sorts of exchanges, less an actual conversation than a form of parallel confession—the two parties performing their interior monologues, not really listening to each other but merely taking turns. I do not mean this cynically or as a statement of personal superiority; I’m as guilty as the next guy.

A minute or two passes as, side by side, we watch the shushing waves. I’m out of my depth here; I know few if any young people; I have no idea how to advise her beyond the customary platitudes. Look on the bright side. Tomorrow is another day. Not wrong, but banalities just the same, which I sense she’d see through in a heartbeat.

The mind works wondrously; it is capable of astonishing feats. It is the only machine in nature capable of thinking one thing while knowing its opposite. The bright, busy surface of life—that is the key. How easily it distracts us, like a magician who waves a wand with one hand while, with the other, he plucks a rabbit from his vest. Here is the golden morning, we say; here is the beautiful sea. Here is my beautiful home, my adoring wife, my morning cup of coffee, and my refreshing daybreak swim. We look no deeper into things because we do not desire this; neither are we meant to. That is the design of the world, to trick us into believing it is one thing, when it’s entirely another. I ask again: Did I know? Of course I did. Of course I fucking knew.

Too proud to accept, he waves my offer away. Thus, I am forced to watch with mounting anxiety while, with forced absorption, he goes about serving the tea. This unsteadiness an untrained person might notice. But there is something else—an intangible quality that my professional expertise has taught me to detect. One sees it in the eyes: a kind of metaphysical agitation, as if the retiree is attempting to tune out a sound that only they can hear, or to ignore a phalanx of hovering spirits. The bad thoughts have begun. There is, for every Prosperan, a number. It might be a hundred and twenty, or a hundred and thirty, or even, in rare instances, one fifty. It represents the number of years that a mind can carry before it breaks under the load. The genetic tinkering that blesses us with decades of healthful activity; the overall freedom from material want; the stimulating work we are encouraged to pursue; the rich communal matrix that binds us to the commonwealth; the romantic and sexual arrangements that stimulate and nourish us across the lengths of our iterations: none of these advancements to the human state can change one basic fact. Time itself has weight. It bears upon the mind—every joy, every regret, every minute of every day adding to the total—until the system by which we sort and file the data (I like chocolate; it’s Wednesday; my ward is named Proctor; my wife, Cynthia, tied an anchor to her ankle and threw herself into the sea) collapses in a cascade of confusion...

Many people pose this question, or some version of it. Am I doing this right? Am I like other people? Is this normal? We are herd animals, make no mistake.

Which only goes to show that people are more complicated than they let on, and that even tragedy (sometimes only tragedy) can open the door to who we really are.

And suddenly it hits me, like a blow to the chest. My father is going; my father is nearly gone. And once he’s gone—when I stand on the pier and watch the ferry churn away—I will be the last of us. All the memories of the things that happened will be mine and mine alone.

How strange it all was. A beautiful night, clear and full of stars, yet my father was nowhere in it.

For you I bridged the depths of space and time to find humanity a home, and yet I could not save you.

It might just as well have been forever and, eventually, would be.

There is power in a name. It is through names that we bring all things into this world, and when they leave, it is names we carry with us, so they are never truly gone.