Lethe

  Chapter 27: Dead in the Water

  I pick a splinter off the broken oar and fish the note out of the bottle. The rolled paper is soaked in rum. I’m no alcoholic, but I glory in its vapors. I lick the drippings. I suppose I would have done the same if Delgado had sent a chocolate bar.

  “I said read the damned thing … not eat it,” says Sabonis.

  I peel the message apart to reveal flamboyant loops of penciled script.

  “Dear Marco. Nothing personal. Is just business. I hope you understand. Love, Hector.”

  “Business?” says Sabonis. “I’ll give him business.”

  He undoes more lashings to enlarge the sail and swings the boom to catch all of the wind. Something rips and rips again.

  “Piece of shit boat! Sail’s come apart at the seams.”

  Delgado and the catamaran pass between islets. I watch them get smaller and smaller.

  “That … cat of yours is quick,” I say.

  “No shit,” says Sabonis, unlashing the sail from the boom. “Take the oars. I got mending to do.”

  I move forward, splashing through a thin film of water. The swelling is finally starting to seal the cracks as Sabonis predicted. I sit down between the oarlocks.

  “Just keep us off the rocks,” he says.

  I’m clumsy with the oars, but it doesn’t matter. Between the waves and current, there’s not much an oar can do to alter our position in the water. We are being swept into the channel between two islets.

  “Row, goddamnit!” says Sabonis. “Don’t just sit there. Keep us in the middle of the flow.”

  I skip oars off the tops of waves to keep him happy. As we drift closer to the islets, I notice black smears swarming their ledges. Seals? Penguins?

  As the islets grow, so do the objects. They are much larger than I thought.

  “What the heck are all those black things?” I have to shout over the crashing of surf.

  “Shades,” says Sabonis without looking up. He’s threading a long curved needle made of bone.

  “All those are Shades?” I say. “Holy cow! What are they all doing there?”

  “Beach blanket bingo. What the fuck you think they’re doing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It's a haven,” says Sabonis. “Collectors don’t bother them there. Don't know why. All they’d need is a boat. Be as easy as bagging dodos.”

  The ledges are dark and bleak and bathed in a perpetual spray. The Shades stand rigid, like ranks of mourners at a politician’s funeral. When one of them moves concentric ripples propagate across the crowd.

  “Doesn’t look like they’re having much fun,” I say.

  “Whattaya want? They’re Shades,” says Sabonis, his hands dipping and flicking deftly down the length of a tear. “They had their time. Now they’re just hanging on.” He sniggers. “There’s some real old-timers there. Some so old, even their languages are dead.”

  The catamaran is just a speck now, soft in the mist.

  “No way we can catch up with him now,” I say, dipping each oar in the water to maintain the illusion of rowing and keep Sabonis off my back.

  “Oh … we’ll catch him alright,” says Sabonis. “He can’t run forever. He’s gotta come ashore and conduct his business.”

  “What … business?”

  “He does things for people back in the living world.”

  “Like what?”

  “Message delivery, bringing stuff back … hit jobs.”

  “Hit jobs?”

  “That’s the rumor.”

  “How does he get paid?”

  “Don’t know,” says Sabonis. “Favors, I guess.”

  Hearing Sabonis speak so casually about Delgado’s crossings sparks a thrill. Despite all overwhelming evidence surrounding me—that copy of Newsweek, the plethora of the same flotsam and jetsam that washed up on every earthly continent—I had trouble making the idea that these crossings were real, stick in my head.

  But the lingering taste of Delgado’s rum worked some kind of magic on my senses. It re-ignited my desire to do everything in my power to get back to the living world.

  The outrigger swings close to a ledge cheek to jowl with blank, black faces. The hull vibrates as we scrape over a boulder. We wedge tight, dead in the water. I try to row away but we’re stuck and the outrigger only rotates in place until a swell lifts us free.

  “What the fuck were we doing so close?” says Sabonis, looking up from his mending.

  “Wasn’t me … it was the current.”

  Sabonis drops the sail. “Give me the damned oars!”

  We careen against more submerged stones. The cracks in the bottom of the outrigger flex and spurt. Another crunch and we’re stuck again atop a ledge. A wave strikes us broadside and tips us. The outrigger float rises over my head. I look to Sabonis for reassurance but see only panic in his face.