She looked up at him at last, warm tears in her eyes.
“Fear,” she said.
“Fear?”
“We’re all doomed,” she said. “No matter how hard we try, one by one we’re going to die. Our desperate acts are just dancing on a hot griddle before the end.”
For a long moment he held her gaze, searching for words of reassurance, searching for the incantation that would smash the barrier. He could find none.
“Still,” he finally managed. “Dancing is better than nothing.”
“Until you get tired,” she responded.
Although Frank felt better on the morning after the jet attack, some strangely detached part of himself knew he was going to die. It wasn’t any rational conclusion based on medical or anatomical knowledge; it was some previously uncontacted part of himself informing him from some unknown world of reality, which, paradoxically, he didn’t believe in. A mystic certainty had come to him, Frank, the most unmystical of men.
When the heavy sedation Neil had given him began to wear off and his mind began to clear, Frank was surprised at how he felt. His anger against Neil and his jealousy were totally gone. His earlier decision to abandon Jim, Jeanne, and his friends seemed totally senseless. He knew it had come out of his resentment and sadness at losing Jeanne, but to his new way of looking at things losing Jeanne seemed as trivial an event as losing an anchor. The thought of her, even now, made his heart ache, but the ache was somehow amusing, trivial, like hiccups.
Even his own death had a somewhat comic quality: wrestling with one big clown, being shot by a small one. Surviving megatons of destruction to succumb to a tiny piece of lead.
Jim’s death, if Jim were going to die, was not comic. It was sad. It was the only thing that made him truly sad. It was the only thing that made him resent the war, resent the holocaust. Jim should live. Lisa should live. Children should live. It was he and Neil and Olly and Philip and their generation that had let things happen: they could die knowing they deserved it, but not their children. We are the one generation in human history to snuff out untold millions, no, billions, of lives of all creatures for untold centuries. We were the assholes that let it happen.
For even as he accepted his own fate with equanimity, he felt a quiet fury at the way he had led his life. He saw that his joyful playing with money, so dissociated from any human reality, was his personal contribution to the holocaust. He had been a part owner of General Electric and General Dynamics, both when he owned some of their stock and when he didn’t. He never built a bomb or pushed a button, but he helped pay the men who did.
It made his life pathetic. All his successes and failures now seemed so trivial compared to the Big Failure; all his aspirations so selfish compared to those he might have had, but didn’t. But could men have done anything to stop the flow of events to the ultimate madness? Although he had always thought they couldn’t, though his reason even now argued they couldn’t, that new voice from that strange detached world announced unreservedly that men could have stopped the flow of events as inefficiently, sporadically, and bumblingly as they had set that flow of events in motion. The creative capacity for building rockets that occasionally blew up on their pads was equally capable of tearing them all apart and burying them, and could have done it with the same margin of error.
Although it took a lot out of him to talk and though Neil reminded him that every ounce of energy was needed, Frank was thankful that first Jeanne and then Neil let him say a few things he wanted to say.
Jeanne was pale, puffy-eyed, and disheveled when he saw her, thirty hours after she’d begun taking care of Lisa and Jim. It seemed to Frank she was almost like a madwoman. When she came down into the main cabin and washed her hands and arms and then sat beside him for a moment, he smiled up at her.
“You look like you’re the one who got shot,” he said.
She looked startled and didn’t smile.
“I’m sorry Lisa’s sick, Jeannie,” he went on, aware that his strange levity was out of place with her now.
“How are you, Frank?” she rejoined, finally centering her attention on him.
“Pretty good,” he answered. “Even dying.”
“You’re not dying, Frank,” she said urgently.
“It doesn’t matter, dying’s not what it’s cracked up to be,” Frank went on, vaguely thinking that he might be feverish. “And I’m sorry I butted in between you and Neil.”
“That’s not important now.”
“I know it’s not,” Frank said, “but I still wanted to tell you.”
“I’m sorry I can’t love you the way you deserve.”
“Hell, Jeanne,” Frank said, smiling. “I’d want to be loved a lot more than that.”
Again she looked at him questioningly as if she were uncertain he was in his right mind. Then she smiled.
“Thank you,” she said, “for being the way you are.”
He felt a wave of weariness pass through him and then responded. “It’s simple to become wise,” he said. “Just get shot.”
The next day he and Neil talked.
“We’re only a day’s sail from the equator,” Neil announced.
Frank, whose weariness was increasing and who now slept most of the time, opened his eyes to look at Neil. “You plan to bury me there?”
“I hope to save you.”
Frank closed his eyes, nodded almost imperceptibly, then opened them again. “Too late, buddy.”
“Maybe,” said Neil. “But we’ll try.”
Frank struggled up into consciousness again. “I’m sorry I won’t be rounding Cape Horn with you.”
“Not very likely.”
“The sailing was always great,” he said softly. “It was… the human stuff that messed us up…”
As Neil looked down, Frank thought he saw tears in his eyes.
“You, me, and the rest of the world,” said Neil.
“Yeah,” said Frank.
For another half-minute neither man spoke and a series of confused images raced through Frank’s mind until Neil rose to leave.
“Last word,” Frank mumbled, and Neil stopped. Frank opened his eyes and felt a strange giddy joy flowing through him. He smiled feverishly up at Neil. “Advice…” he announced to Neil. “I think… the market is… at a low…” He felt like laughing. “Good time to buy.”
Neil, like Jeanne, looked down at him uncertainly, then nodded, smiling slightly in return.
“Nowhere to go but up,” Neil commented.
“Right…” said Frank, closing his eyes.
At dawn two days later Frank died.
Neil was surprised and unsettled by the grief he felt. He had known Frank was dying and thought he had hardened himself, but when Olly called him down and he saw Frank’s limp body and open mouth, an emptiness and gloom descended upon him that left him immobilized. He realized how much unspoken companionship he and Frank had enjoyed, even during the estranged period of the last month. The two communicated in a shorthand about the way Vagabond sailed that Neil couldn’t share with anyone else. To realize that he had lost this friend, first to jealousy and now to death, grieved him.
Instead of giving Olly orders about what to do, he wandered back out of the cabin and walked aft to stare out at the sea. A distant part of him felt the burden of having to tell Jeanne. But he felt passive, weary. He felt a sad, self-pitying sense that everything was useless, that Death, like a cat playing with crippled mice, could take him and his loved ones at any time he wanted. A tickling on his cheeks and saltiness in a corner of his mouth made him realize that he was crying.
Jeanne came up to him. Seeing her eyes beaming with happiness, he realized that no one had told her about Frank’s death. She didn’t even notice his tears.