The Island of Last Truth Read Online Free Page A

don’t always have your feet on the ground, that you start over again.” Who knows if he’ll find her again. Who knows if there is a place where the dead reunite to go over their lives, comment on them, project them like a film. Forward, rewind, pause, slow motion, freeze image.
    The cold has relieved the sensation of thirst. But his head hurts. He knows that’s normal. The first symptoms of dehydration. Increased heartbeat and respiration. Spasms, nausea. And afterwards he’ll have hallucinations. He’ll see an island, a boat, he’ll hear voices. Mirages. He’ll see salvation.
    He keeps going. Very slowly. It’s difficult for him to move his arms. He can hardly feel his hands or feet. He orientates himself by the stars. He keeps swimming towards the continent. In the depths of his heart he believes that maybe he’ll get to a shipping lane for merchant ships or oil tankers; maybe some boat will change direction for an unforeseen reason, a breakdown perhaps. In any case, he is still mocking his survival instinct.
    Sailing means knowing where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. Therefore it is perhaps more difficult to sail than to live. Right now, Prendel can calculate where he is. He can calculate the speed at which he has been swimming, his approximate direction, and the amount of time he has spent in the water. He is sailing without a vessel. This is what will kill him. Although he is lost, he hasn’t lost himself. He is a good sailor. Frank and Katy knew that, and so they had set sail with him. They had trusted too much in his skill. Or perhaps they didn’t figure that sooner or later the sea kills you; the only difference is that if you are a good sailor, you know where you are at the moment of dying.
    Mathew rebukes himself for having thought that things happen to other people. Everyone wants to choose. Loneli­ness won’t happen to me, failure won’t happen to me, not ruin or sickness or pirates. Pain, hunger, the ending of a love story won’t happen to me. But it has to happen to someone.
    The ending of a love story happened to him. Worse than that. He remembers Mary Stradform with a mixture of nostalgia and rage. Professor of pediatric surgery during his final year of medical school. They fell in love after a few classes. Contrary to habit, he asked her out for coffee. She said yes. They had coffee. The following day they woke up together in Mary’s flat. He remembers the white cotton sheets and on top, her underwear, midnight blue. The salty taste of her skin, so similar to the taste of the waves. Loving her gave meaning to his life. He introduced her to his parents. He went to live with her. First and last love.
    When they’d been together a little over two years, that operation happened. A little girl seven years old, a transplant, a disaster. Mary Stradform, prestigious surgeon, drowning in anxiety. She lost her touch. I didn’t have the hands for the operating theater any more, she’d say. It was my fault, she’d say. The little girl would have survived. I didn’t do it right, she’d repeat. I killed her. She’d killed her. And Mary Stradform committed suicide. She disappeared forever. She left him alone. But not as alone as he finds himself now, facing his own death, rather alone in a different solitude, the one felt only after the death of others.
    Afterwards, to avenge Mary, to find peace, to get even with himself, and even with her, Dr. Prendel started to operate on seven-year-old girls. He specialized in pediatric surgery. To save himself and save her. Not long afterwards, however, his firm resolve began to waver and he sought refuge as a professor at Columbia University. He’d built up a good rèsumè and they accepted it without objections. He never picked up a scalpel again. He didn’t want this godlike power, to give and take life. He wanted to be responsible only for his own.