Captain Charon

Tomás shuffled along the aisles, one eye on his ticket, the other on the places where the seat numbers should be. So far, halfway through the plane he had traveled, he had found both empty: the places where the numbers should be, and the seats themselves, where the passengers should be sitting. He would take a step, look at his ticket, mutter the number to himself—“42F”—look up, across the aisle, not find what he was looking for, and move on, perpetually repeating the process.

“May I ask why you’re wet, mate?” a voice suddenly asked. It belonged to a tall, slender man wearing a fine, tailored suit. He sat in one of the two unnumbered seats to Tomás’s left, the one by the window, and spoke listlessly as he leafed through a magazine about boats without any enthusiasm.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s no room for excuses here, mate, this train has already left the station, and this plane is about to take off. You should sit down.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do… 42F: can you tell me where I can find it?”

The man looked up and frowned. He tore his eyes from the magazine and fixed them on the back of the seat in front of him.

“42F?”

“That’s what I said…”

“Right…” The man made a rough noise in his throat, a kind of laugh. “Wrong flight, huh?”

It was Tomás’s turn to frown.

“I think someone would've noticed if I had gotten on the wrong plane,” he said impatiently.

“I suppose so. Well... Sit down then.”

“Sure, as soon as I find out where I should sit.”

“It doesn’t matter, sit wherever you want. There’s enough room for everyone. You can sit right here next to me if you want.”

Tomás looked around at the sea of ​​empty seats around him. He couldn’t say why, but he felt that next to that mysterious man was exactly where he wanted and should sit. That’s what he did.

The man closed the magazine and put it aside. He stared out the plane window and said, without looking at Tomás:

“Now that you have somewhere to sit and a seatbelt to fasten, do you mind telling me why you’re wet?”

“And does it really matter?”

“Well, I guess it does, since other, much more important questions still need to be answered and they won’t even be asked until you answer this first one.”

Tomás stared at the floor and the tips of his shoes.

“I... I was in the bathtub.”

“Ah! I see. And you didn’t think about taking your clothes off before getting in?”

“I did think about it, but then I couldn’t find any reason to actually take them off. It didn’t make any difference. Without clothes or with clothes, it was the same. And since I was already wearing clothes... why bother?”

“It makes sense.”

Tomás sighed.

“I doubt it does...”

“Well, maybe not making sense is the hidden meaning behind all this, right?”

“Maybe it’s yours too, apparently...”

“Well, I’m not here to give you the answers, son. But maybe if I ask the right questions, you’ll find them yourself.” It was the stranger’s turn to sigh. “Unfortunately, I’m doomed to ask only the questions that you—or some fragment of all those who come together to form what you know as I, or at least think you know—would ask.”

“I don’t see the slightest chance of that happening. No offense.”

“Well, let’s not know before we try, shall we? Let’s start with the basics, if I may. Let’s start with the famous why? Why are you here, Tomás da Silva Reona?”

It was Tomás's turn to let out a snore that must have been a short laugh. He then sighed.

“Funny, if you'd asked me that five minutes ago, while I was still in the tub, I would've known how to answer in great detail.”

“Do you really think so? Or was the lack of light what really put you in that bathtub?”

Tomás gritted his teeth and raised his head. He stared at the back of the man's head as he looked out the window, and narrowed his eyes.

“Hey! Are you going to stand there judging me now?! You don't know half of what I've been through, what I've had to endure! You'd have to be inside my head to know!”

“Well,” the stranger raised one of his arms, his hand open, palm facing upwards, as if to indicate the surroundings, everything that existed around them. “In a way...”

He left the sentence unfinished, withdrew his arm and relaxed his shoulders. Tomás continued to stare at him in silence. Only then did he realize how gaunt the man was, how thin and pale was his skin, with a somewhat sickly, cadaverous, almost translucent pallor. His hair was equally white and lifeless. Tomás blinked, swallowed hard and went back to staring at the floor and the tips of his soaked shoes.

The silence that followed was broken by the man in the suit:

“What if I were to guess, what do you think?”

Tomás shrugged.

“Go ahead. Just… go for it. For some reason, I don’t care. Not in that ‘I’m too tired to care’ way, I just really don’t care anymore. Although there’s energy in me to care if caring about something seemed indispensable. It doesn’t seem like it.”

“No, I don’t think so. Well...” The stranger cleared his throat. “Francesca, right? It was because of her?”

Tomás shook his head.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure? If she was the best thing that ever happened to you, she must have also been the worst when she left you, right? She met you insecure, full of doubts about the future, about yourself, and in a matter of months she threw you up there, put you on the highest pedestal, and you really believed that you were all that. She made you believe, made you believe that you had the right to rise so high, that you were capable of flying. And then, while you’re up there, she looks around here below and realizes that it would be much better to throw So-and-So into the clouds instead of you, and simply abandons you. You look down and don’t see her, and realize that you were only flying because she had been there blowing and blowing and inflating your ego, but now she’s gone, and you plummet. And suddenly the doubts return, the fears, the insecurities. You start to doubt what you lived, the promises, the compliments, everything she told you, everything she made you believe you were and everything she made you believe you meant to her. And you don't just feel as low and insignificant as before, you feel much worse, you don't plummet to the previous level, no, your fall opens a crater in the ground and you sink even lower, where no one else could ever reach you. So you give up. No, wait, you don't give up yet; first you humiliate yourself: you not only fail to get rescue, but you sink even lower. It is after that that you give up.”

Tomás frowned.

“That could be it, I don’t know… It doesn’t seem like a big deal to me now, maybe before, when I was in the tub, it was different. I don’t know… Maybe I made my mistakes too. Her dream was to be a mother, she told me that right from the beginning and I didn’t listen to her, not to mention what happened during our vacation in July last year—”

“Okay, okay, give me one more chance. Hmm...” The man in the suit thought for a while, while stroking his clean-shaven, bony chin. “I know. It’s Normando’s fault, isn’t it? Yes, it can only be his. The son of a bitch promoted Henrique and not you. Oh! How hard you worked for that position, Tomás, you did it for years, ever since you joined the company, as soon as you graduated from college. And then this great son of a practitioner of the oldest profession in the world comes along and steals what is rightfully yours in less than six months! Why? Why, man?! Because he’s more talented and professional, because he has more degrees and courses than you? No! He simply knows how to kiss balls better than anyone. Besides, he’s much younger, which means that, by keeping you in your previous position, your retirement would be cheaper for the company, right?”

Tomás shook his head.

“The kid worked hard, actually. Maybe he deserved it, I don’t know… He was young, but he worked hard, he’d had a hard life up until then, and he already had a wife and child to support.”

“Maybe, but you didn’t see it that way five minutes ago, did you?”

Tomás shrugged.

“I don’t think so.” He lifted his face and stared at the back of the man’s head, who was still looking out the plane window. “You know what, I don’t want to hear any more questions! What’s your goal here, to upset me, to bring me down, to depress me, to make me regret this?”

The man in the suit finally turned around and fixed his milky, blind eyes on Tomás's. Tomás fell silent, swallowed hard.

“Is that how you feel, Tomás? Upset, depressed, regretful?”

Tomás blinked, looked away, shook his head.

“No,” he murmured with great difficulty.

“Of course not. There is no room for any of those feelings here, or for any other. I bet it would make you happy if there were room for joy here, or that the fact that there wasn’t would make you sad, if there was room for any form of sadness here. But those things don’t matter to you, do they? If you wanted joy or sadness, you wouldn’t be here, you’d still be on the other side, right? If I remember correctly, you wanted to be alone, you just wanted the world to forget you, for everyone to leave you alone, you just wanted to feel nothing anymore. Well, in that case, congratulations! You got what you wanted.”

Tomás raised his head and looked at the man.

“Who... Who are you?”

“Me? Who am I? That’s an intriguing question, difficult to answer. Well, let’s say I am you, but not completely; I am also myself, something completely separate.”

Tomás frowned. The man in the suit continued:

“Think of me in the same way that you believe it is possible for a god to be both father and son of his own mother; father and creator, son and creature of himself.”

“Are you... God?”

“No! Aren’t you paying attention? Maybe my example didn’t help. What you call God is a concept that is too complex for your limited intellects. I am just the little voice inside your head, a little voice that is you and at the same time is not. We can say that I am what you call consciousness, and at the same time the consciousness of everything else that ever had or still has consciousness. I am the tiny detail, the spark, that makes you different from other animals. I existed before you and I will continue to exist after you, and that is why we are here, because I need to prepare you to detach yourself from all this insignificance that you know as matter, I need to free you so that I can then be free to finally return to the Source, to the Beginning and the End, to Everything and Nothing.”

“Are you saying that the lights are about to go out and when they do, all of this ceases to exist, I cease to exist, you cease to exist, just like that, in the snap of a finger?”

“More or less like that. A blink of an eye for me, an eternity for you, don’t worry. You, what makes you you, disappear, blending in with everything else that was once someone and is no longer. And as for me, I also disappear, but at the same time I don’t.”

“So, where am I going?”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? I want to know where. Heaven? Hell?”

“Funny, when you got into the bathtub just now you didn’t seem the least bit interested in the answer to that question. As the Catholic your poor mother believed you to be, you must have known that suicide was a one-way, non-stop ticket to hell, right? But you didn’t really believe in hell. Or in heaven. You didn’t believe and you didn’t want to believe. If I remember correctly, you just wanted to be forgotten, to be left alone, to feel nothing anymore, to be nowhere. Well, here we are, my dear Tomás: Nowhere.”

“Are you saying that I am condemned to languish in this place for the blink of an eye, which to me will seem like an eternity, feeling nothing, longing for nothing, knowing that I am not going anywhere and with nothing to do in the meantime?”

“What difference does it make? Do you feel bored, by any chance?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Then that settles it.”

“And will it be like this forever, for the next eternity?”

“Yes. But that shouldn’t worry you, you won’t feel bored or sad in the meantime. Wasn’t that your wish?”

“I won’t feel happy or content either, will I?”

“No, but that doesn’t matter. Tomás, what you call ‘happiness’, like so many other worldly concepts—wealth, poverty, etc.—is nothing more than a line. Some draw it more to the right, others more to the left. In that part of the world, wealth is a seven-figure salary, mansions, luxury cars in the garage. On the other side, it’s a house, whatever it may be, to call your own, electricity, running water, treated sewage, three meals a day, clothes that don’t have holes, blankets that keep the cold away. For some, happiness is a new cell phone, a pair of shoes or a collection of expensive clothes with the name of a famous person sewn on them or on their labels. While for others, it’s a hug, a phone call, a reunion, a pat on the back, a starry night outdoors, forgiveness for a mistake, the opportunity to watch the sunrise or sunset, the victory of your favorite soccer team, the chance to breathe again without the help of machines. All that is on the other side, my friend. There is no line here. From the moment there is a line, there will be two sides, perhaps a gray area that separates them, but there will be opposites either way. He who does not know what sadness is does not know what happiness is; he who has never experienced unhappiness, who is not even willing to take that risk, is not ready for joy.”

Tomás sighed. He felt that if there was ever a moment for sadness and regret, it could only be this one, but he still couldn't feel anything.

“I had no choice,” he said, he felt that he needed to say something, to justify himself somehow.

“Are you sure? I bet you would think differently after you and Jéssica were together?”

“Jéssica? Who's Jéssica?”

“Oh! Right... You never got to meet her. The girl you would give a ride to on a rainy September night. The girl you would fall in love with, the girl who would make you forget about Francesca. The girl who would change your mind about children, the girl you would start a family with. In the end, you would even realize that not getting that promotion was a good thing, otherwise you wouldn’t be coming home so early the night you met, and you wouldn’t have time to watch your oldest son’s soccer games, or your youngest daughter’s ballet performances. But there’s no point in talking about it, it doesn’t matter now...”

“How can I know that you’re telling the truth, that these things would really happen?”

“You can’t. You can’t now, just as you couldn’t then. You chose not to know, you chose never to find out.”

“And you’re going to sit here and torture me because of it?”

“Do you feel tortured? Do you feel anything at all?”

Tomás stared at the tips of his shoes once more.

“No,” he said.

“Very well.” The man stood up, left the magazine on the seat of the chair, and covered his head with a pilot’s cap. “I’m sure there are still many ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ unanswered, but I believe that the truths we have reached so far are the most that a hairless ape like you and the rest of humanity can handle. I think we are finally ready for takeoff.” The man stopped in the aisle next to Tomás and extended his hand. “Captain Charon, at your service. On behalf of the entire crew, I wish you an excellent flight from Anywhere to the destination of your choice—Nowhere—my dear Tomás.”