She knows more of death than he. For while he’s been on the end of deliverance, all those last cries, sighs, moans, sobs– it’s a wonder and a shame how men transform themselves at the doorstep of death– all those endings he witnessed, he sometimes hastened… it was all so very different from the work she did as a healer. She witnessed all the kinds of deaths he did not: sickness, infection, disease of the mind. She also witnessed healing, which is something Eik knows far too little about.
Eik thought this would drive cynicism into her, as it has into him. He was wrong, of course, although not exactly surprised. It was foolhardy for anyone to assume what Moira Tonnerre might think or feel about anything. It was also foolhardy to not listen very carefully to her. Perhaps this was one reason they got along so well, for Eik had that very rare quality of listening very intently without having to try or think about it.
So he listens to her now, wholeheartedly, without forming his own response until she is done speaking. It is not a difficult thing to do, when listening to someone so eloquent and passionate. “We choose our futures…” he echoes with a nod. It is a sentiment he’s always been uncertain about– but it was also a self-evident trap, a strange loop, for wasn’t not choosing a choice too?
And did Acton really choose to die that night in the garden? Maybe at the end, yes (Eik not only hopes so, he needs it to be true) but what about before that? Eik wanted to believe in choice, in changing once’s future, but it seemed impossible sometimes to break the continuity of one’s life into discrete actions (choices). When you went through the experiment, you quickly realized that each choice could be further broken down into more choices that made up the whole, and further choices after that, and so on and so forth until you find: at the very foundation of every choice was something you did not have a choice about. Something bigger than you, like the persistent march of our heart or your ancestral longing for the sea.
But–
Eik and Moira both saw all of death’s dirty details. And they both probably cared too much for their own good. There must be such thing as choice. And it had to matter. They had to believe this, otherwise there would be no point whatsoever to living. “Sometimes I think we don’t know what exactly it is we’re choosing” until the knife slips into us and we bleed out beneath the stars “until it’s upon us.”
There was some dark humor in this, some vast beauty that reminded him of the night sky.
“What could you owe the dead, Eik?”
Oh, he doesn’t know. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Her words are wise and ring with truth. “I know you’re right,” he says, but… how can he explain it… his mind goes one way and his heart goes the other. It was beyond logic, behind knowing. Sorrow was as much apart of him as his name. It was not vital to living. It was nothing more than a pattern, but it was repeated so often and for so long that it became woven into the fabric of his being. “It feels like a betrayal to not…” How to say it? “carry them with me. Always.”
Eik shakes his head as though to chastise all the loose thoughts rattling around in there. He had not meant to drag the two of them into talk of death and philosophy. It was always where he seemed to be going (down down down) but he surely didn’t need to take a friend there with him. But he appreciated the company, and the patience, and he feels closer to understanding the great unspeakable truth, the secret of life’s inner mechanisms.
“We don’t let them die in vain, we live. And next…”
“We learn why we are here - in life, in our hearts, on this island… Sometimes, the journey is the most exciting part of the adventure.”
An adventure. He forgot sometimes that that’s what life itself was– the longest, most exhausting of adventures– and when the wind blows from behind them he pictures it catching in great white sails that billow proudly toward the future. He inclines his head toward the island and meets Moira’s strong gaze. “Together, then.” He feels her emotions swell and lap against his own, twin tides that eddy against their legs.
And then they continue to walk into the future.
@
Time makes fools of us all
