Change of Course Page 8

  I reminded myself that I was a lawyer, a lawyer and a writer. I made my living day in and day out using words to persuade people - clients, witnesses, prosecutors, judges, juries, editors, readers, reviewers. Here I’d been handed a case where logic was clearly on my side, not to mention love, and life itself. And I had to persuade only one person - my own brother, the same baby brother I’d once managed to convince he’d been adopted after being raised by cats.

  How could I possibly fail?

  “Did it ever occur to you how utterly selfish you’re being?” I asked Jack that evening. We were doing the dinner dishes, after another meal of freshly caught fish. Once again, I’d eaten less than Jack. It was turning into something of a pattern: As we drew closer to the tiny dot on the chart, my brother’s appetite grew; he seemed to savor every mouthful of food, every sip of drink. I, on the other hand, found myself less and less hungry, and eating - which had long been one of our great shared pleasures on board - began to become something of a chore for me.

  “Sure, I’m being selfish,” Jack agreed. “But what on earth do I have a right to be selfish about, if not my own life?”

  “I’m not talking about a right here, Jack. I’m trying to get you to see that what you do affects other people. It has consequences.”

  “No man is an island?”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “There’s some truth to that.”

  Jack handed me the last of the dishes. I dried it and put it away. We killed the cabin lights, and I followed Jack up the companionway and into the cockpit. It was a good ten degrees cooler on deck, and the breeze felt good. The sky was almost dark, except behind us to the west, where a narrow band of purple still marked the horizon. There were already stars everywhere. I thought about taking a shot of Polaris with the sextant, then decided it could wait. By now, dead reckoning had lost some of its early charm for me.

  “I know how this affects you,” Jack said. “I know it’ll affect my daughters, too, and my ex-wife. I’m sorry for that, I really am. But I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “You can change your mind.” I’ve always believed in the power of understatement.

  Jack shook his head slowly. “I don’t want to do that,” he said. “I’ve decided what’s right for me. I don’t want to become sick. I don’t want to begin the process of turning into an invalid. I’m sure about that, surer than I’ve ever been about anything before. Now you’re telling me that I should forget what I want, and instead do what’ll make other people happy.”

  “I’ll accept that,” I said, “if that’s what it takes.”

  “You’re asking too much of me.”

  “For God’s sake, all I’m asking is for you to go on living, to refrain from killing yourself!”

  “For how long?”

  I took Jack’s question as his first indication of uncertainty. I knew I had to be careful; I couldn’t ask for too much. “I don’t know,” I said. “How about we just see how it goes?”

  “We know how it’s going to go, Joe.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “But we don’t know how soon it’s going to start, how quickly it’s going to progress, how much quality time you might have left. Why not try to squeeze out whatever good stuff you can?”

  To the north, a shooting star made a long arc to the horizon.

  “Here’s the way I look at it,” Jack said. “For almost forty years I’ve been surrounded by people who love me, blessed with good health, and lucky enough to do everything I’ve ever wanted to do. I’m on top of the mountain. I’ve got nowhere else to go but down. I know exactly what’s down there, and I want no part of it. So I’ve got a choice: I can call it quits right now, at the perfect moment, or I can put it off and spend some time suffering before I get around to doing it. But who wins that way? I certainly don’t, and I can’t see how you do, or my girls, either. Not in the long run.”

  “There is no long run,” I said. “Life is too short as it is. I want you with me for as much of it as possible.”

  Jack smiled. “Now who’s being selfish?” he asked.

  “You’re damn right I’m being selfish,” I snapped. “You’re the only brother I’ve got. What’s wrong with my wanting to keep you alive?”

  “Nothing,” Jack said. “Truth is, I’d be awfully upset if you didn’t.”

  The sky was beginning to lighten to the south, where the moon would soon make its appearance. I searched the heavens for another shooting star, knowing that there was precious little time left to spot one. I felt that if I could see just one more before the moon made it impossible, it would be a good sign.

  “I’m not going to be able to deal with your death,” I said, “I’m just not going to be able to handle it.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to, one way or another,” Jack said. “Wouldn’t you rather remember me as healthy, strong, happy? Instead of wasting away in some hospital bed somewhere, with a tube up my nose, an IV in my arm, a catheter in my penis, a bedpan under my butt? Maybe I’ll be writhing in pain. Maybe I’ll have enough morphine in me that I won’t be. If I’m having a good day, we’ll be able to talk for a few minutes. But then I might not know your name - or mine, for that matter. I’ll drool. My gums will bleed. My breath will smell so putrid, you’ll be afraid to come near my mouth. My back will be raw with bedsores. My skin will be gray and covered with ulcers. I’ll need someone else to feed me, to wash me, to shave me, to brush my teeth, to diaper me. Why in the name of heaven do you want me to go through that? And why would you want to remember me like that?”

  I tried to say, “I’d still love you,” but my voice caught in the middle of it.

  Jack must have heard me anyway. “I know you would,” he said gently. “But don’t make me become that for you. Love me enough now not to make me go through that.”

  I couldn’t think of an answer to that, and I was afraid my voice would abandon me, so I let it rest. But it was so difficult for the trial lawyer in me to let the other guy get the last word that I had to keep reminding myself there was nobody else around. It was just my brother and me; there was no jury to win over, no audience to impress.

  The tip of the moon finally made its appearance off our starboard side. We watched as it cleared the horizon and began its climb. The night was so clear that it seemed as though we could see the dark portion of the moon, but maybe that was only our imaginations straining.

  I thought of my wife back ashore, and of my children. I wondered what they were doing this evening, what it was they were watching this very moment, as the same moon that rose in our sky worked its way west, toward theirs. Was it the pages of a homework assignment, or the glossy ads of some magazine? Was it the passing traffic at a nearby mall, or a giant movie screen in an air-conditioned theater, or some rerun of an old TV series? I knew how incredibly lucky I should have been feeling to be able to watch a perfect moon rise over nothing but vast expanses of ocean in every direction; instead, I felt cheated, robbed of any sense of joy that should have been mine. Home seemed half a world away, and I ached with envy of those who’d been smart enough to stay there.

  There came a point when I began to reckon time in terms of how many days were left until we’d reach the tiny dot inked on the final chart, a countdown to whatever final confrontation lay ahead of my brother and me. I played out various scenarios in my mind. There was the one where I deliberately missed our mark, causing us to sail past the dot and thus avoid the moment of truth. There was the one where I turned us around prematurely while Jack slept, then headed us back for the mainland without ever reaching “Walker Island.” There was even one where I overpowered my brother, locked him below, and took him back in chains.

  There were also many versions where I succeeded in winning Jack over with the sheer force of my words, countless variations where I managed to come up with the absolutely irrefutable argument, the perfect plea, to which he had no choice but to give in. These versions became more than fantasies: In time, I took the best of them and presented th
em to Jack. But each absolutely irrefutable argument I served up somehow came out less than fully persuasive, and each perfectly crafted plea I made failed to break Jack’s resolve.

  Day Four dawned with me already at the wheel. I was sleeping at odd hours by this time, rising early, often collapsing by midafternoon, waking up again in time for dinner, but generally finding myself too tired to have much interest in eating. Later, I’d be unable to fall asleep at night. After a while, I’d give up trying, and by four or five in the morning, I’d be up all over again, on deck, waiting for sunrise. Jack seemed to experience no such difficulty: He’d fallen into a regular pattern and seemed to thrive on it, joining me by six or seven, looking well rested and fit, wanting to know what I’d like for breakfast. I realized that the difference was probably nothing more than a reflection of how Jack had come to terms with his decision and how I could not; but in time, my brother’s good spirits became a separate source of anger for me.

  On this day, even before he’d made his appearance, I’d vowed to myself that I wasn’t going to begin attacking Jack the moment I saw him - not because I didn’t want to attack him (I did), but because I knew it simply wouldn’t work. For a while, I succeeded. We sat together quietly, watching the sunrise, taking in the early morning beauty. The days were becoming increasingly warm, but mornings were still a special time - cool, clear, and crisp. We ate something for breakfast - I cannot remember what. When the sun was high enough, I took a reading with the sextant. Then we sat some more. With the wind out of the south, we were moving along nicely on a broad reach, and there was little in the way of hands-on sailing for either of us to do. It was a quiet time aboard Sea Legs, a time unbroken by small talk, a time that would have brought me nothing but absolute delight only a week before. But the longer we sat that day, the more difficult the silence became for me. Here was my brother sitting next to me. In three days, he’d be gone, as they like to say. I forced myself to mouth the word, even silently: dead. In three days, he’d be dead, and we weren’t even talking about it? The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it struck me. But still I fought the impulse to cry out, so determined was I not to put more pressure on Jack.

  I tried to busy myself sailing. I corrected our course, even though we were running just fine; I trimmed sails that really didn’t need trimming; I coiled lines as though we were about to be boarded by an inspection committee. I kept myself occupied doing little chores until there were no little chores left to do. And all the while, I seethed inside like a volcano on the brink of erupting. By noon, I’d reached a point where I didn’t think I couldn’t keep up the charade a moment longer. Yet still I held my tongue.

  It was Jack who finally broke the silence. “You seem like you want to talk,” he said.

  I laughed, a short burst of audible breath that was half bitterness, half relief. “You keep telling me there’s nothing to talk about,” I reminded him.

  “Not exactly,” he corrected me, “I’ve told you I’ve made up my mind. I’ve never said I’m unwilling to talk about it.”

  “That’s just great, Jack. You start off by presenting this thing as a done deal, a fait accompli. But you’re perfectly willing to talk about it. Terrific. Where was I when you first started thinking about it? On the fucking moon? Why couldn’t you have come to me then, when you say you were trying to decide? Why did you have to wait until you’d made up your mind and dug your heels in?”

  Jack took his time answering. “I thought about doing that,” he said after a bit. “But the more I thought, the more I realized it had to be my call. It couldn’t be anyone else’s. Nobody else could possibly have come right out and said yeah, it’d be best if I’d kill myself.”

  “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  Jack smiled. “It tells me that I’m doing something that very few people would do. I pretty much knew that then. I still do.”

  “How about it tells you you’re out of your fucking mind!” I screamed. “What do you think a doctor would tell you?”

  “A doctor, like a psychiatrist?”

  “No,” I said, “a proctologist.”

  “Aha! You think I’m suffering from a case of anocubital confusion?”

  “A serious case, I’d say. “As far as I know, it had been our father who’d coined the term anocubital confusion. It meant you didn’t know your ass from your elbow.

  “Serious anocubital confusion,” Jack intoned. “Acute anocubital confusion.”

  Over the years, a little game had evolved between Jack and me, in which one of us would say something, the other one would top it, and the first would try to top that. Jack had said “anocubital confusion,” I’d made it “serious.” Jack had come back with “acute.” It was my turn, but the only word I could think of to top acute was terminal. So I kept quiet, and the silence that followed was a heavy one. I knew Jack’s mind worked exactly the same way as mine did, and it would have brought him to precisely the same word that had occurred to me.

  “Yes, a psychiatrist,” I said after a while.

  “Hmmmm,” Jack said “Maybe. ‘How do you feel about that?’”

  “Careful, you’re dating yourself. Nowadays, they don’t care how you feel. They just hand you a prescription. Or, if they think you’re really serious about killing yourself, they have you committed.”

  “Committed?” Jack smiled at the thought. “I’ve never been saner in my life.”

  “Irrelevant,” I said. “The word sane is something you find only in crossword puzzles these days. The legal test is whether you’re likely to be a danger to yourself or to others. And the way I see it, I’d say you’ve got a pretty good chance of making the cut.”

  “Tell you the truth, I’m honestly not all that interested in what some doctor might think,” Jack said. “I know what I want to do.”

  “So does every clown who throws himself off the Golden Gate Bridge,” I argued. “Only we know that 90 percent of them are suffering from clinical depression and could easily be treated with medication. How do you know you’re not just depressed?”

  Jack laughed aloud. But it was a gentle laugh, not unkind, not sarcastic. “Of course I’m depressed,” he said. “Death is depressing. Especially when you don’t believe there’s anything after it. But there’s nothing depressing about taking charge of your own life. That feels right.”

  “Goddamn you! I swear you’re getting off on killing yourself. You’re positively tripping on your own death.”

  Jack seemed to consider this for a moment. “Maybe,” he admitted. “Or maybe I’m just feeling okay about being in control of what’s going to happen to me, and how it’s going to happen. And when it’s going to happen.”

  “Maybe you’re a goddamned lunatic!”

  “There’s that possibility, too,” he agreed. “But at least I’m my own lunatic.”

  That was the afternoon that Jack hooked his biggest fish - although, at the time, we thought it might be Moby Dick himself at the end of the line.

  Jack had become quite the fisherman, sitting at the stern for an hour or so each afternoon and trolling either a lure or a piece of raw fish saved from the previous day’s catch. The only tackle we’d brought along was a light rod and a small saltwater spinning reel, so when Jack hooked the fish, the rod bent over almost double and there was an audible whir as his line was stripped from his reel.

  “Holy shit!” Jack yelled.

  “Cut it loose!” I laughed. “It could be a whale, a submarine! It could be the transatlantic cable, for Chrissakes!”

  “Bring her about! Bring her about!” Jack shouted, and, still laughing, I did my best, easing the sails and heading us into the wind before executing a fancy tacking maneuver that put us on a heading toward whatever monster struggled at the end of Jack’s line.

  Jack worked his way up to the bow and fought to regain line, while I did my best to steer us in whatever direction the rod seemed to be pointing. It took us a full half hour. We laughed the entire time, speculating on the true
identity of our denizen from the deep. Our guesses ran to manta rays, giant squid, undersea volcanos, and Volkswagens. We knew this much: Whatever it was, we had no intention of boating it. We had no gaff or net to land it, and we knew its weight, once we lifted it from the water, would surely snap the light line. Besides, we’d decided early on that it had more than earned its freedom from the fight it was putting up. But we sure wanted to see just what it was that was giving us such a battle.

  Eventually, Jack regained enough line so that the creature was brought alongside, almost directly underneath the boat. I turned us into the breeze and let the sails luff, so we drifted to a stop.

  “I can see it!” Jack yelled.

  I moved forward to join him, to get a look at whatever it was.

  “It’s a beauty!” I heard him shout.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Looks like a fucking locomotive!”

  From my angle, all I could see was a telltale dorsal fin cutting through the waves, making a beeline from the west to the spot Jack stood over. Suddenly, there was a violent thrashing in the water, dousing us both, and Jack’s rod straightened out. He yanked up on it, and his prize came with it, catapulted over our heads and onto the boat in a single motion. It was a good-sized fish, or, more accurately, a good-sized half of a fish. Though it still flipped about on deck, it had been bitten clear through by the shark, which had made off with its tail and much of its body.

  “Dolphin,” Jack said, and I saw from its vivid coloring that he was right. Not one of the mammal variety - those cousins of the porpoise who’d taken to escorting Sea Legs on a fairly regular basis - but the fish, commonly served up to diners under more appetizing names like dorado or mahi-mahi.

  The remainder of the fish’s struggle was brief. As the life went out of it, its eyes glazed over, and its brilliant rainbow hues faded before us until all that was left was a pale imitation of the living splendor it had been.