“I am in the same boat. We’re all in the same boat, even though it may not seem so sometimes.”
“Yeah, and I am, too, even though I know it may not look like it,” said Roland.
They laughed. On occasion, Roland could be amusing.
Lynn said, “We could all go out in the same boat and jump overboard. And then the disagreement would be settled. We would no longer be in the same boat.” She chuckled.
“We would have to let the boat go,” Ray said. “We’d have to jump out while it’s speeding.”
“Why?” Lynn asked.
“So that we couldn’t get back in the boat.”
She nodded.
Ray went on. “So that we would float. And wait. And witness our life regain its perspective, its value. And witness ourselves regain our sanity. There’s a very good chance we’d get rescued and reap the benefits of the risk we took. And I’d say there’s approximately a 25 percent chance that … we would not.” Ray’s eyes were opened wide like vast oceans where floating people always got rescued.
It took a week for Lynn and Alan to decide if they wanted to go ahead with Ray’s idea of risking their lives to improve their lives.
After spending some time on his armless white easy chair with his rat, thinking it over, Alan agreed to the idea of jumping off a boat with the others. He had learned to swim and was proud of it, was no longer afraid of water, and anyway, they’d be wearing life vests. Besides, he’d wanted to kill himself. Just because fate had beaten down on him recently and weakened him didn’t mean he couldn’t fight fate a bit. Once again, he’d take a few days off from work — or forever, depending on the outcome.
Lynn agreed to the idea, because Alan agreed to it. When she looked at her calendar, she objected to the date they had chosen. She was booked for a dinner she had been dreading for weeks but was obligated to go to. It was being hosted by an obsequious collector who had bought work from her many times. She had already tried to get out of the dinner by saying she had another engagement that night, but the collector had changed the date just so she could attend. Lynn told the others about the conflict and asked whether they couldn’t all jump off the boat a few days later.
“Why not a few days earlier?” Ray said. “This way, if you die in the ocean, it’ll be a perfect excuse not to attend the dinner, and if you survive, then the danger you will have experienced will make the dinner more tolerable.”
Lynn considered this for a moment and agreed to move up the date of their semisuicide.
“Does the date suit everyone’s schedule now?” Ray asked.
Alan nodded, and Roland said, “I have no schedule.”
“What do you mean?” Ray asked.
“I’m free all the time.”
“Within reason, no?”
“No, all the time. I got fired.”
The days passed, and the four nuts quietly went about their lives with the calm awareness of a day that was approaching, and of the act that would take place on that day. They did not even think of it as an act so much as a sort of gesture. They rarely spoke of it to each other anymore, and when they did, it was always obliquely.
Before taking the plane, Alan left the same suicide note in his apartment that he had written before. He told his doorman he was going away for a couple of days and asked him to go into his apartment if he hadn’t returned in a week, to give his “gerbil” more food. The suicide note would be next to the cage, so the doorman would understand what had happened.
Alan kissed Pancake, held him against his heart, and said good-bye.
Lynn told Patricia she was going on vacation for a few days. Patricia said, “The Harlem Globetrotters just rejected your application for a tryout. That should sustain you and keep you sane while you’re gone.”
The three nuts and the bum packed their bags and boarded a plane for the Bahamas at 8:00 A.M. They checked into Hotel Atlantis on Paradise Island. They sat on lounge chairs by one of the pools, staring tensely at the fake waterfalls and at all those people who were not going to jump off a boat the next day to make their lives happier, fuller, and more valuable.
They went to dinner at one of the restaurants in the hotel. They ordered a bottle of wine. The waitress asked Alan for some ID.
“I lost my driver’s license a long time ago, and I left my passport in my room. I’ll have a Coke,” Alan said.
“He’s thirty-five, you know,” Roland said to the waitress. “And looks older, in my opinion.”
As Alan sipped his Coke, he said to the others, “We are quite young, you know.”
“Yeah? So?” Roland said.
“So nothing,” Alan said.
During the meal, the four friends passed the salt and pepper while Ray made a few attempts at a conversation, but his heart wasn’t in it, and he soon gave up. He couldn’t get himself to ask them if they were still okay with the plan, since he himself did not feel completely at ease with it.
After dinner, they went back to the pool and sat on the same lounge chairs, side by side, in the dark, alone. It took a long time for one of them finally to speak.
It was Ray. “I thought eleven o’clock might be a good time. That leaves us with many hours of daylight during which we might be more likely to get rescued.”
Alan said, “It’s strange. It’s kind of like committing suicide in reverse, or something.”
“It’s true,” Roland said. “It’s almost like suicide, but instead of being performed out of hatred of life, it’s out of love of life, out of wanting to recapture it. It’s a sacrifice for life.”
The next day, out at sea, all in the same boat, wearing bulky red life vests and little white hats, they stared at the land that was now only slightly visible, extremely far away. They had no excuses. And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been — and weren’t still — searching for excuses. But there were none: The ocean was not rough; the air was not cold, nor the water; there were no jellyfish in sight; there were a few pleasant clouds to protect them from sunstroke.
Roland dropped a penny in the boat.
When the time came, Ray slightly increased the speed of the small motorboat they had rented for the day. The four of them climbed on the side of it, held hands, and jumped off.
Fourteen
They watched their empty boat speeding away, wondering if it would keep going, hoping it would not, but it did — there was no reason it wouldn’t. And then they glanced around to see if they could see any rescue boats, but they couldn’t.
“Well, here we are,” Alan said, once they had settled into the water and found comfortable positions amongst each other.
“This was a mistake,” Lynn said, after five minutes. “If we live through this, you really think we’ll appreciate life more?”
“It’s too late to ask that question,” Ray said.
“I think it would be tragic to die in these beautiful, sunny surroundings,” Lynn said. “Death, if you’re going to die, deserves to have a certain amount of drama and importance, but this death would not be dramatic.”
“It was your idea to do it this way,” Roland said. “If we die, it’ll be a beautiful death, and if we live, it’ll be a beautiful life.”
Alan started laughing. Then he realized he was also crying. The others waited, alarmed, to see how it would develop.
“Are you okay?” Ray asked.
“You know what’s ironic?” Alan slapped the water a little.
“What?” Lynn asked.
“We’re all, still, in the same boat.”
Roland sighed, but the others smiled, to be nice, and said, “That’s funny, Alan.”
Lynn added, “The point was not really to be in different boats, but to be … in a better boat. Right?”