Bill Murdoch was on the other winch, his wide shoulders pumping, yelling and laughing at me once again to get her damned head up into the wind.
Up for’ard, a woman scrambled to set the running lights. Because my mother had died when I was so young I remembered very little of her and it was a source of secret pain to me that with each passing year I could picture less and less of her face. Tonight, lit by the navigation lamps, I saw her clearly, every detail.
Voices, speaking in Polish, came from behind me. The woman whose photo I had seen as she held her children tight and walked them towards the gas chamber was on board with me now. She was sitting in the cockpit, grown old and happy, with her adult kids and grandchildren all around her.
Yes, things were dying, and it had certainly been a vision of death that I had seen, but it wasn’t mine – it was another kind of death. I was bidding all the ghosts of my past goodbye. Just like the Buddhist priest had told me on the road to Khun Yuam all those years ago: if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.
And under that vaulting sky, sailing on the wine-dark sea, I realized that I was born to the secret world, I was meant to be an agent. I didn’t choose it, I had never really wanted it, but that was what had been dealt to me. I had started on the journey thinking it was a burden, and that night I saw that it was a gift.
And I knew that not this year, but maybe next, I would return to New York. On a certain day, at an appointed hour, I would go to a building near Canal Street, ring the buzzer and walk up the stairs to Old Japan.
The apartment door would open and, inside, I would see a table set for three, because I knew that the man who lived there would always keep his word.
As Rachel watched, Battleboi would laugh and reach out his huge arms towards me. After a moment we would look at each other and he would ask me why I had come.
I would smile and say nothing, but in my heart I would know the answer, I would know exactly what I had put behind me: it was what was written in the Gospel of St Mark, chapter sixteen, verse six.
That was the part of the epic story about coming back from the dead, being restored to life. ‘He is risen,’ it says.
He is risen.