The Island of Last Truth Read Online Free

sting in the thought that no one will be able to feel his disappearance at the moment it strikes. He has been able to mourn the deaths of Katy and Frank. He has accompanied them. He accompanies them still now as he thinks of them, lifeless.
    Dr. Prendel thinks of his widowed father, there in Georgetown, that lost Texas town where many well-heeled retirees live.
    â€œTexas? Why are you going to Texas? Aren’t you happy in New York? You can live with me, if you like.”
    But the man preferred the climate of the South, the calm of a small town.
    â€œIf your mother were still alive, I would stay here. She couldn’t bear small places, she adored cities, and New York more than any other. Remember when we left Balti­more, even her personality changed! But I feel lonely, son; you have your work and a lot of the time you go off to those remote seas for months at a time, and I don’t know what you’re looking for so far from our country. You’re away more than you’re here, and I feel lonely, son, and there are many people my age there, people who have lost their spouse, people looking for meaning in the final years of life, you’ll understand when you grow old.”
    But Mathew Prendel will never grow old. And his father will never be as alone as he is right now, at six in the evening on the day Mathew’s slow death begins.
    It will take his father months to realize that they won’t see each other again. It will destroy his heart and he knows this. He will say: “How many times did I tell him to forget about all those adventures, settle down, how many times did I tell him it would end badly if he continued like that.”
    His father is seventy-one years old. His mother would be sixty-one, if she were still alive. Death didn’t pay attention to the age difference. It took her five years before in less than a month. The liver.
    Mathew was an only child. He’d have liked to have had a sibling. He thinks it’s safe to say they’d be together now, and this thought consoles and distresses him at the same time.
    Many times he has felt sadness imagining his father alone, in the small living-dining room of his house. Sitting on the crimson plastic sofa, the television on at a deafening volume. Dozing and taking gulps of coffee served in one of those cups you get with points from yogurt or paper napkins. His shirt and trousers freshly washed, but with old stains on them. And it is curious, because now he feels an even more profound pity for him. A pity, he supposes, that has to do with knowing how alone he is leaving him while his father still thinks he can count on his company.

3.
    Night has fallen. It is two o’clock in the morning. He is exhausted. He is cold and afraid. He hadn’t been afraid while it was light. Seeing his body through the water helped him to be sure there was nothing worrisome nearby. The sea, when everything is dark, is like an immense animal with black skin moving restlessly as it sleeps and may wake up any moment. He has been swimming for hours, with brief interruptions to do the dead man’s float. Dead man’s float, what an expression for a moment like this. He would swell up and the fishes would eat him. Better that than being cremated or buried. He’d always thought he’d like his ashes to be scattered at sea. The sea, the tomb. Now they wouldn’t be ashes but all of him. Wasn’t that what you wanted? Now you have it. He smiles. He hasn’t lost his sense of humor. Or maybe this is what death is: hoping, smiling, despairing, understanding nothing while on the verge of understanding everything.
    His mother had been buried. Afterwards, for a long time, Prendel had nightmares in which bodies emerged with huge worms slithering through them. His mother, unlike his father, always told him: “It’s good that you go all over the world, that you value things that aren’t bought or sold or measured, that you