White Rabbit Chapter 9

9.

           

He introduced himself as Hugo but didn’t give a last name. Names are inconsequential in his line of work. It would be like your garbage man telling you his astrological sign. Delores didn’t respond. She stood forlorn in the quivering boat looking out into the fog strewn distance. She found nothing unusual about his introduction or his munificent smile but had she known the way this sort of thing normally transpires, she would have realized the peculiarity in it. Under normal circumstances, the grimy ball gag that lay on the floor of the boat between her boots in a puddle of black virulent water cocktailed in vomit and mud would have been placed in her mouth and clamped tightly behind her head as soon as the body chains were securely fastened. That was protocol, per the Torgans. But Hugo Finch cared about as much for protocol as he did for Torga or the Torgans, or for the black wool sweater which he was required to wear as part of his boatman uniform (without an undershirt even). He wasn’t employed by the Torgans making minimum wage with benefits and sick time, nor did he yield any perverse pleasure from his work; it was simply his lot in this life after he was judged. He was not condemned to Torga, or blessed enough to be sent to Ethereal, he was a Kataren boatman and there would be no reconsideration of his position if he did well. There was only the possibility of being condemned like those he boated if he did poorly.

Hugo looked at Delores as she sat glumly in the middle of the boat looking out into the black sea as though she could somehow see through the dense fog that shrouded the emptiness of her fate—that would eventually clear to the abysmal sight of Torga, whatever that be. He felt sorry for her, deeply sorry, and the thought that he was a part of her distress and her ensuing ruin depressed him. There was something more about her; he wasn’t sure what but he was different from the moment he saw her. Maybe it was something in her eyes that glimmered with promise; the way her bottom lip puffed, flush with color; or her thin frail face inset with two jeweled doe-brown eyes that promised something more than a glance. It was as unmistakable as it was mysterious and it indubitably possessed him. Or maybe, to appease the pragmatic, it was only that he had to have something to believe in, for everyone has to believe in someone or something sometime.

The Torgan Sea was like a vast puddle of motor oil beneath an old Cadillac to an ant. The exhaust was the pillowing clouds surrounding it and smothering heaven, the undercarriage, a rusty assembly of thankless parts meant to quiet the heavy engine noise, which no one considers. But Delores considered it for it was her reality, the miserable scenery and the sound of the giant oar splashing into the water and the bracket that braced the oar squealing like an ensnared rabbit with each back-and-forth. Her stomach ached at the sound of the water’s displacement, at the feel of being rocked into a nightmare. She remembered her grandmother who used to rock her into good dreams as though with some magical clout. “What do you want to dream of tonight?” She would ask Delores gingerly whispering so her mother wouldn’t hear. “Unicorns, talking teddies and fairy goblins.” Delores would say fantastically through missing teeth. And sure enough, in her dreams she dreamt of whatever she had wished.

Delores was in a trance when Hugo spoke to her. He didn’t know what to say so he opened his mouth like a cage door and let what was inside do what it may at the prospect of its liberty. Liberty—the same word that brought Delores into her present predicament. Had she to hear that word she might scream with despair. But even in her misery she had no regrets for there was so much uncertainty as to what would happen next that it made even the fatality of it all appealing. She was lost in thoughts again as those words flew from Hugo’s mouth sluggishly to her ears. Is this death? What it is to die? Some kind of suspension of reality and a journey to another world bound not to logic or to reason but to the whimsy of a creator. Was she in love with Him? Was He watching her? Was He the moon?

            His words were terribly insufficient in representing the sudden overwhelming feeling that befell him and fluttered on the ground like a worthless canary with clipped wings.  “I like your dress.” he said plainly, stupidly, he felt. Boatmen were not supposed to talk to the condemned but he wasn’t any more satisfied with being a boatman as she was with being a condemned Torgan slave. She didn’t reply and he closed his eyes regretting not saying something more after all these years. He was handsome and young, thirty four when he came, and perpetually, thirty four since. It had been a long, long, time, but no time at all.

The story of Hugo Finch is as interesting as the story of Delores Marlowe—maybe more so. He lived a long life and the last days he spent on earth he waited with endless rides on the subway in New York City for someone to show up through the constantly opening doors, the exchange of people, some beautiful woman to offer his seat to, maybe a ballerina with sore feet, or a cellist with fingerless gloves—a love that he once knew who finally came back to him, who returned in another body as promised by all the books he read of reincarnation. But she never came. He lost his love a long time before, hundreds of years before, and was walking dead without her, condemned to live by a familiar sickness that has long been fantasized and perverted by novelists and screenwriters. He never got the reprieve of death and finally after a few hundred years of the dreariness of a loveless life in the overworld, he entered the rabbit hole when he tried to commit suicide by jumping from the fifty fourth floor of his apartment building. Relative to the other boatmen he was new. He wore that dingy black wool sweater and gray slacks tucked into black rubber boots. He continued to row, but slower, hoping to prolong the trip to perhaps say something more meaningful before they arrived, after all, he had waited for a very long time. He would be content with one pretty exchange, he lied to himself.  This was what he rode the subway a hundred and seventy thousand times for when he had no place to go, no reason to go from Brooklyn to Jersey and back—before he gave up and stopped believing she would come back, cursing Walt Whitman and all others who led him to believe in such frivolous fiction. Fiction is a motherfucker.

            She didn’t reply to his compliment. He tried again remembering the old line he used to cast out there like a hopeless fisherman when he was in the overworld and before he met his wife—in an overworld where women were wily as bluegills and people are as intelligent and faithless. “Do you have the time?”

            “Excuse me?” She said.

            “The time.” He repeated oddly, still rowing.

            “It is 6:30.” She said facilely. “It is always 6:30.” she paused. “How long does it take to get there?” she asked not bothering to look back or to stop staring at the gray dullness of their course as though it would clear at any moment.

            “Well,” he paused, “if it is always 6:30, then I’d say no time at all.” Hugo Finch had never been a comedian. He was a lost soul, a wayward train-hopper with no destination but that where someone else’s commitment would take him.

            “Oh.” she sighed indifferently. She paused for a long while and took a few deep breaths. “Boatman, do you know what Torga is like?”

            “Ma’am, I’ve only seen it from the shore.” He admitted nervously. “But from there I could smell it and could hear enough to know that it isn’t a pretty place.”

            “This world is strange.” She complained inertly keeping a low-depressed tone. “It is a fantasy world, I understand, created by a He and all the bad are simply the subconscious thoughts, the fears of its creator.”

            “That is how we understand it.” he agreed.

            “Well, then why doesn’t he take a Prozac?”

            “Not everything can be solved in a pill.” Hugo replied.

            “Is everything predetermined as I have heard?” She asked dolefully.

            Hugo quickly countered. “I cannot believe that.”

            “I can.” she said hopelessly. She was as miserable as the black water, resigned to her fate, whatever that entailed. On dozens of other boats there must have been the same feeling in the pits of nauseas stomachs, fissures in souls like cracked ice where children walked, at any moment to be lost, drowned, absent of everything. Her mind began to slowly dissolve the underworld of being a fantastic different place to being a horrible nightmare and slowly she became the bloody white rabbit in the snapped metal snare. But on those other boats there were ball-gagged women and gregarious boatmen sticking to the code.

            “You must remind yourself,” Hugo said, “of your credo.”

            “My—” She turned and looked at him finally, bizarrely.

            “Live free or die.” he interjected confidently.

            “How did you know—”

             “I am a Katarin boatman.” he replied falsely proud. She looked at him expecting more but he didn’t elaborate. He kept rowing and the bracket of the oar kept squealing.

            “It’s hard to live free when you are bound by chains.” she sighed.

            “Chains?” He replied quickly. “Pffff! What are chains but modest impediments if in your mind you are free.”

            “Easy for you to say, boatman.” she complained.

            “Hugo.” He insisted.

            “It hardly matters.” She dismissed as an owl landed on the side of the boat followed by another.

            “Chains are meant to be broken.” Hugo tried again to which she was mute. But instead of looking absently to nothing she was studying the curious gathering of black owls as though they were something hopeful to study. They reminded her of the fairies from the wood she never caught in her butterfly net and she thought of the fact that she had never seen an owl before and only knew that they existed by having been told they existed, or by pictures. Hugo knew they were sinister and were spying on him. He was speaking radically and the water was becoming restless with his agitation, his insolence, churning the boat angrily. Another owl landed on the opposite side of Delores and another on the bowsprit, the naked mermaid with her hands bound skyward and a look of desolation upon her absent face. It was the same woman on every boat. Delores would never know that it was her—as close a resemblance as the mind could carve. But Hugo knew, and he knew the black owls were Torgan owls and were not here to roost or for any other purpose than that they felt a disturbance amongst the boat.

            “Owls?” Delores was at first comforted, slightly smiling confused. But she soon knew that they were not here for her amusement but to ensure the boat stayed on course. She looked back to Hugo whose face offered her no comfort as he began to turn the boat and attempt to steady it in the tempestuous black water that began to crash, and against the winds that howled loudly like a hurricane. “What’s happening?” Delores cried.

            “Liberty!” Hugo shouted. He seemed to anger the water even more with that one defiant word and all was black and the water threatened to capsize the boat. The owls began to crossly caw like mad crows. “When I say jump, Delores, you must jump!” Jump: such a powerful word to both of them. To Hugo, who had from the fifty fourth floor of his apartment; and to Delores, in the Paris love story. She looked back confused, white-knuckling both sides of the boat.

            “What?” She cried in disbelief. She looked down into the coffee-black water that bubbled and whipped and clawed at the boat like sinister hands ripping flesh from live skin.  “Into the water?! I can’t swim in chains!” The waves crashed upon the boat and Hugo and Delores were immediately soaked.

            “You have to trust me!” Trust is a strong word. Hundreds of years Hugo had trusted that she would come back but she never did and so he jumped from that window expecting yet another failed suicide attempt. But now that she had come this was their fate? He was expected to row her to slavery? Certainly, he wasn’t. Whatever God there was, was giving him this opportunity to save her. Opportunities are so frequently wasted. People come and go and are lost in fear that paralyzes our ability to speak or to say something meaningful like hello. Hello, I love you. Hello, I have been waiting for you for a long time. Welcome. Welcome back. Or it is fear that causes the person listening to walk away, to ignore such an effrontery against logic and reason. Fear is a stupid waste and less is lost in death. There wasn’t time for anything else. “Now!” he shouted.

            There are moments in time when you will always remember whether you did or you didn’t; if you let go, or if you held on; if you said no instead of yes, or yes instead of no; and either you are better or worse for one or the other. Maybe it was something in his eyes she trusted; or his reciting of New Hampshire’s motto out of the blue; or for a lack of a better alternative. Regardless of the reason, Delores jumped just as Hugo swung the large wooden boat oar over where her head would have been, smacking the face of a snapping sea dragon which burst up from the restless black water. Fortunately, she chose the starboard side and the insidious dragon came from the left.