The sound of birds wakes me up. They must be quite close.
I open my eyes and see the sky above me. It's greyish, a colorless blue. It must be early in the morning.
A few seagulls are up there, one of them just landed at the mast of our boat.
I stir a little. Audrey is here. She's sleeping at my side, her head rests on my right shoulder and her arm wrapped around my chest. I don't want to wake her up. She seems immune to the noise of the birds.
I better not move.
How the hell did I get here? No idea.
We're lying at the wooden deck of the boat. There's the helm. I must have fallen asleep out here. She obviously brought a pillow from below the deck and a blanket. The wind is chilly but it's not cold under the blanket.
My back aches from sleeping on the hard floor. Nothing special. Within the past half year I've spent more nights on a hard floor than in a bed anyway. Stop thinking.
I try to look around, but the rim of the boat is too high. We're obviously not moving. Hell, I have no idea how we got here or where we are. Last thing that I remember is going through the night. Don't think back to last night. It was no good night. Like always, when my thoughts go racing.
The main switch is off. The GPS is off. That there are birds means that we're not too far away from the coast, maximum twenty miles maybe. A look at my wristwatch confirms that it's still early, 05:30 a.m. The first rays of the sun are yet to come but the morning twilight is already there.
I need to know where we are, damn it. I shouldn't turn on the GPS. The main electric switch was off – I guess it has been off for a few hours – a long time and that's good. I'll need to remove the AIS transponder before powering up again, because I don't want it to send any signal before I'm sure where we are.
I move a little to look over the rim. Too much. I woke her up though I wanted to let her sleep.
Good morning. If we weren't sleeping on the hard floor, if we weren't here because we had nowhere else to go, if I didn't know that I'll need to let her leave in two weeks time… then this would be a perfect morning. Opening your eyes and there's the one you love. Seeing her smile, hearing her say good morning.
Damn it, stop thinking. This is a perfect morning. She's here. We're not injured and nobody is threatening our lives right now. It's not gonna get better than it already is.
Where are we? I might as just ask her. She obviously brought us here.
South of Karpathos. The buoy field that you showed me yesterday on the GPS.
So she brought us here. I don't even remember when you came up here. I wanted to do the first night shift until midnight but I hoped to reach that point before midnight. How long did it take us to get there?
Half past eleven.
What? That can't be.
You fell asleep, she says, softly smiling.
This isn't funny. What?!
You fell asleep during your shift.
You're not honestly telling me that we were going through the night with nobody at the helm, somewhere, some direction because I was asleep?
It's a shock to hear that. We could have hit a shoal… no, unlikely, we're too far away from the land. We could have hit another boat. Again, unlikely, we're away from the major maritime routes and there's barely any traffic at night time. We could have… gone somewhere, some direction. Towards the mainland. Hit the coast.
When was the last time you really slept, Jack?
I need to think back. Yesterday night. No, that was just one or two hours. The night before, in Turkey. That was not a very long night either, and I spent it on the floor, after driving for about twelve hours. Before that, we were in that truck when they smuggled us across the Turkish border. The night before that we were in Armenia. I had to take one of the shifts in that outpost after the enemy troops attacked. The night before, on the boat on the Caspian Sea, she woke me up in the middle of the night. The night before that, we were on the road, coming from Almaty. It takes a while to find a night when I really had a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. Must have been back in Almaty, the few days in which Audrey slept next to me, in my room, waking me up before the usual nightmares came in.
That's more than a week ago. Before those days, I was constantly waken up by my nightmares. I don't want to think back further. It gets worse, not better.
In the days after we left Almaty, I've lived off amphetamines. That was a bunch of pills that I brought along for emergencies. Like the night when I brought her across the Chinese border, or the travel through Kazakhstan. I threw the rest of them away before we got on the boat. It's too dangerous to have illegal substances when we'll be crossing so many borders. Turkey. Greece. Croatia, maybe. Italy.
I have a hangover, for sure. You just can't go a week without sleeping.
Do you even remember?, she asks.
Remember what?
The last time you had a good night's sleep.
I shrug. Five or six years ago, maybe? Maybe longer? It's a sarcastic answer but actually not even wrong. I can't remember a night when I slept well. I'd like to say 'Washington D.C., one of the nights you played piano and we got drunk together'.
Audrey didn't comment my sarcasm. She lies her head down on my shoulder again and just tells me to close my eyes.
It's so easy, when you're here, Audrey. You're gonna wake me up when memories come haunting me. When you're here, I don't go to sleep missing you and worrying if you're at a good place.
This could have turned out really badly. I'm sorry.
Don't be. Everything's okay.
How can she be so calm? So unexcited? So totally not shocked while I am? It's not. I let you down, Audrey. Both of us. It was dangerous.
No, it wasn't. She sits up and looks down on me. I'm not sure what that look in her eyes means.
I spent – I don't even know how many – weeks with you now, Jack. I know how tired you are, and I've seen how… how everything comes back haunting you when you're alone and it's nighttime. I… she takes a deep breath, checked on you from time to time.
Checked on me. Wow.
Jack?
What the hell shall I answer? Did you watch me, secretly, yesterday night, Audrey, when I chose to be up here alone to cry my eyes out? Was that really necessary?
She comes a little closer and cups my cheeks with her hands.
I love you, Audrey, but sometimes I need a few hours for myself.
Bullshit. If you hadn't had an eye on me, who knows what would have happened.
Do you want to talk about it? she asks me.
I shake my head, no. It doesn't help to talk about the things that bother me. Whenever I think about them, it's like living through all that again. What I need is to forget them. Not repeat it over and over again.
You saw me yesterday night, Audrey. It's so boring to steer a boat through the darkness. There's nothing else you can do than sit here and think about your life. The darkness will forever remind me of China, Russia, Sengala and all the other awful place I've been at. But it's not everything. All the wrong that I've brought into this world is just the same burden. I started doing pushups but after about forty of them I was exhausted. Checked the boat again. Did some crunches. Must have fallen asleep at some point after that.
She looks worried.
After a few moments, she lies down on my chest, saying nothing.
I grab the blanket and cover us both with it again. She deserves an answer. She did so much for me.
Did you think it leaves me cold? I ask her.
What do you mean?
Everything. Yesterday. They guys I killed. I take a deep breath. They're not the first innocent people I've killed. Sometimes I had my orders. Sometimes it was just my decision. Sometimes I made the decision to hurt people when I wasn't even totally sure about it. But in the end, I have to live with it.
Her body weighs almost nothing. I hold her closer. Savour the moment. I wished for nothing else, all these years. To have just one moment like this. And then you end up lying here, with the unmistakable feeling that you didn't deserve it. She should be at home, safe, with a loving family. Not here with me and all my problems, the danger all around us.
I don't know what to say, Audrey tells me.
I place a kiss at her head. It's okay. There's nothing you could say to make it better. This is my problem. The simple fact that she's here with me is comfort enough. I've had the same thoughts when I was all alone, in a run-down apartment, living from one day to the next, without a real occupation or anything else that gave my life a meaning. I don't know why I didn't just kill myself. Maybe because I am afraid of dying.
Twelve years ago…. you said you hated me. You called me a monster.
She suddenly sits up and stares at me with disbelief. What?
You said you hated me.
Jack, that was…
…let me finish, I interrupt her. We never really got the chance to talk about it. You were right with everything you said, back then.
I was angry at you. I forgave you long ago.
You had every right to be angry and to hate me. I made the decision that killed him.
Jack, you…
… let me finish, Audrey. Please. I make these decisions, again and again and again. Even if they turn out to have been necessary in the end, I still need to live with what I've done. Killing ten people to save one hundred still means to take ten lives. Or killing ten people in self-defense to save the both of us.
She wants to say something. I'm not done yet. I lay a finger on her lips, softly, to keep her from saying anything.
Years later, a dear friend… she told me almost exactly the same. I had just questioned a subject. I can see her, like it was yesterday, back in Washington D.C.
Let's be honest for once. I had tortured that guy. She slapped my face again and again, she yelled at me and asked me if I am even capable of feeling anything at all.
Renee. I still remember how you freaked out on me. That day, I did no good to you. You saw what I did to get the job done, but the end doesn't justify the means. You need to live with what you've done. You should have never seen me do these things and you should have never gotten the taste of what it means to do literally anything for that job.
What did you answer?
I don't know how much Audrey knows about Renee.
Audrey's voice rips me out of my thoughts. What?
What did you tell her as an answer?
I told her… this is so hard to say, I told her that eventually she'd learn to live with it. It was bad advice.
Bullshit. Nobody who has ever felt pain or had a single feeling can learn to live with this.
Not even I can't live with it.
Silence.
Up there are the seagulls.
My thoughts are so empty right now that I even hear them again. The sky has already turned from a dark grey into a brighter blue. The first rays of sunlight will come out soon.
We better get going, I tell Audrey and help her up. She knows when it's best to say nothing at all. There's the pillow she brought. I didn't deserve you, Audrey. I've never met anyone in my whole life who loved me even after knowing everything about the horrible things that I've done. You were repulsed by the things I've done and yet you forgave me and had an eye over me last night, grabbed that pillow and your blanket and spent the night with me on the hard wooden deck after you brought the boat here.
You should have been repulsed when I told you about my infection. Yet you didn't pull back for one second.
I feel the urge to grab her and keep her from going downstairs.
For a few minutes we just stand at the deck and watch the sunrise. If I had the choice, Audrey, I'd never let you go. Never.
I bury my face in her hair. Thank you for being there for me, Audrey.
One of her hands finds mine. She just smiles and presses my hand as an answer.
I've fought for you and got you out of that hellhole in which you were, I took care of you in these days – but right now, you're taking care of me. It feels so endlessly good to know that there are arms that'll catch me when I fall. Your arms.
.
.
.
Written to: Mozart – Requiem/Lacrimosa
Dvorak – Symphony VIII / Adagio