The Gentlemen's Hour

138

Boone starts to go to sleep.

When he stops thrashing, the world gets very still and peaceful, like Mother Ocean has him in her lap, singing him a lullaby, a pulsing hum like the sounds of whales or dolphins. He feels warm, almost cocooned, and he remembers that he has often said that he would like to die in the ocean instead of in a bed with tubes sticking out of him. Many times said in those conversations on the Dawn Patrol that when his time came, he would just swim out until he was exhausted and couldn’t swim anymore and let the ocean take care of the rest. And maybe this is a little sooner than he hoped for, but it’s like getting into a wave, better too early than too late.

Remembers now his mother telling him that she surfed when she was pregnant with him, took him out with her in the gentler waves, dove underwater so he could feel the pulse and pull, he in the water of his mother, she in the water of hers. They say this is where we came from anyway, crawled from brackish waters onto land, and maybe all of living is a quest to go back, not from dust to dust but from salt to salt. The tide comes and goes out and one day it takes us with it, people say they are going up into the sky that’s where heaven is up there with the father but maybe you don’t go up but down not into hell but into the deep belly of your mother, the deep, impossibly deep blue and that would be okay that would be good a world away from air because you are so tired of holding your breath hoping for air a world beyond struggle and hope, a world of perfect silence you’ve had good times and good friends it’s been a good ride on this wave let it go . . .

Except he hears K2 say:

Not yet.