The Ferryman

by Justin Cronin

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...