The Island of Last Truth by Flavia Company, Laura McGloughlin Read Free Book Online Page B

hadn’t gone back to practicing medicine either. He didn’t even want to advise me and when I felt sick, he would say: “Best if you consult a doctor.” Faced with my astonishment he would assure me that one day he would explain the reason; later on, always later on.
    And that “later on” came suddenly, as do so many important things in life that one expects within a certain time and then they turn up when it’s not convenient, when one isn’t prepared.
    Prendel wasn’t well. He was nauseated, he’d lost his appetite, he had heat spots. Rather than complaining, he seemed happy. Fifty-two years seemed enough life, he would say. I’ve already seen what I had to see, he insisted.
    Finally his body demanded a solution. And we went to the specialists. He wanted them to be new people, people he wouldn’t know from the past. He said he didn’t want pity. Or even empathy. What he wanted was a clear diagnosis, nothing more.
    When he knew he was sick he decided he had to find a propitious occasion to make me a depository of what he called, with black humour, his legacy. A legacy with which he has been able to live, he said, but one with which he couldn’t die.
    I needed Prendel to explain his story to me to understand that a shipwreck is a way of disappearing forever, that there is no possible way back. As he had told me more than once, Katy and Frank weren’t as dead as him, because they weren’t conscious of it, but he was.
    He told me during the week we spent in the Boston Harbor Hotel. He said, “I can’t hand over my legacy to you in any old place,” and he said it with that characteristic expression of his, the expression that came over his mouth every time he was up to one of his old tricks. I suppose he chose that hotel because from the bedroom we could see the boats sailing on the Charles River. Boats docked at the very entrance to the hotel. Prendel always said that since he’d learned to sail, his world hadn’t ended at the seashore or the riverbank. And because of that, from time to time, he would say he also wanted to learn to pilot planes: he didn’t want the air to be a limit. “I don’t have the credentials to ascend,” he would joke.
    We hired a boat. Simple and manageable. A twenty-four footer. “A boat for chatting,” said Mathew with his customary skill at assigning everything a practical use. In a twenty-four footer you can only be close. And every day of that week, sailing in the
Trevor,
my beloved doctor told me everything I didn’t know, all that he’d never told me, everything that I then promised him—and in doing so I remembered my grandfather who always, with every promise, made the same face of disgust as when he tasted something he didn’t like and said, “Don’t eat that, you’ll feel sick,”—I would write on his death.

2.
    After we saw each other again,” I remember Dr. Prendel telling me as we were sailing along and he was checking that the sails were well-set, “Nelson Souza, as though he was somehow aware that I wanted to attack him some time, disappeared. During that second long absence I devised plans, systems, considered possibilities, but after a time, I began to get disoriented. I don’t know if I’m explaining this very well, Phoebe, I don’t know if I am being faithful to what I really felt back then. Being disoriented means not knowing anything about anything. For the first time, I wished I’d died. What was I doing there? What did surviving Frank and Katy mean?”
    The days went by as they go by when there is no hope, like the wind blowing over the land, with no intention. I stopped recording the passing of time on the rock. If one doesn’t know what is happening, one is not alive, not aware of being alive. Maybe it was two, maybe four weeks of not recording. I don’t know. Maybe more. The days, one the same as the