But Mr. Haldersen, wishing they should not tarry on the ride, briskly pressed on.

“Ah, well! It will make do. I will make an exception for a sad, old man, as you are, Mr. Farber. Get in, of course, please!” 

Mr. Haldersen quickly whisked the old, hobbling man into his boat and cast off the rope from the quay post. 

Mr. Farber looked beyond the grey horizon as he and Mr. Haldersen drifted towards the other side, slowly but surely.

“Can you tell me what lies on the other side?” Mr. Farber mused, his expression softening as thoughts consumed him.

“No, I cannot,” returned the puzzling ferryman. “Have you figured out who I am, Mr. Farber - or shall I call you, Joel, now? I suppose we’re familiar enough now, hmm?” 

“Sure. And I guess I shall call you Kai, in return. It’s only fair.” The old man’s eyes narrowed in slight suspicion.

“And who do I think you are? I think you’re Death - like the Grim Reaper or something. And you are a reflection of my deepest insecurities, I believe. And I’ll probably have to face a lot of my problems on the other side, correct? All of my regrets and sorrows. I’ve read it all, Haldersen - what do you think I was doing all those years in that damned senior home? I wasn’t going to waste time on those horrid soaps. I did a lot of reading, especially on death and regret. Non-fiction and fiction. I guess fiction has its use after all, with the analogies and such.”

Mr. Haldersen halts in his strokes with his river-pole and smiles knowing, not quite softening but neither hardening. Rather like a blade being whetted on the stone, sharpened for its purpose. 

“A rarity, now!” he exclaimed, though his voice was not loud. “It’s only fair you may call me, Kai. And now it’s only fair, because you, any one who guess who I am, gets their fare returned to them- here’s your fare, Joel- you’re one of the few who’s guessed who I am. You’re quite well-read, Joel! I thank you for sparing me yet another pedantic explanation of my identity to my passenger.” 

The old man shrugged. “Sure, I’ll take this back then. I still am offended about how you said I was a sad, pathetic man.” He gave Mr. Haldersen a hard smile. “That’s not very fair at all. Am I any sadder or any more pathetic than the vast majority of people? Only very few get to rise above being sad and pathetic. I guess I was not one of those lucky few.”

“So tell me - what about my life is so ‘pathetic’?” He said as he brought the pearl closer to his face, examining its yellowing skin. 

(Art illustrated by FortunusGames @ Tapas.io/FortunusGames)

“I lived a quite fulfilled life, you know. No one is fully happy. I minimized all the things that usually cause a lot of harm to people, and as a result, I had a pretty good run. Just because I didn’t get famous like my friend Sam doesn’t mean my life wasn’t worth anything. Perhaps you would know better than most people, Haldersen - I feel that your mortal life was as bleak and minimalistic as mine.” Something dark glinted in Mr. Farber’s eyes for a brief second - was it mischief?

Tilting his head in question, as though silently saying, “really?”, Mr. Haldersen, now known as Kai, blinked three times slowly, allowing his passenger voice his own defense of dignity and justifying the summation of his mortal life. 

“For that insult, I am deeply sorry-” though his tone, rivaling his passenger’s own capacity for mischief, indicated he was anything but. 

“You are a wise man, Joel. You’ve lived with such singular satisfaction, have you not?”

Kai craned his head slightly over the reclined Joel, gazing at the pearl the old man held  in his wizened hand. 

“I’ve said before, you can tell so much about a soul’s measure of their life through their fare for their Charon… and I wonder what this pearl tells us? Do I not see a woman’s face on the sheen of the pearl’s surface?” He leaned closer for a sharper look.

(Art illustrated by FortunusGames @Tapas.io/FortunusGames)

“Yes. And a scarlet-haired one, too. Red hair, like my wife. You see, even Death needs a wife, too. What a sweet-looking gentle soul this face has. Ah, was it someone you knew, Joel?” questioned Kai, though he knew this answer from the beginning. 

Joel trembled and blinked, shocked at what he saw reflected on the pearl’s surface.

“W-what? What woman? I don’t see anything. That’s just a reflection of my face. Just poorly reflected because this piece of sand doesn’t do anything properly.” Pausing, he continued stiffly, “Great. Good for you. I’m glad you have a wife. I think she’s probably a lovely woman. Suits you, I think.”

Kai’s face falls flat, irked by the dripping sarcasm spilling from Joel’s acidic tone.

“Joel?” His voice grew dark, almost like thunder rumble in the distance, gather its full measure of strength.

“I DO NOT APPRECIATE MY WIFE SLIGHTED- BE CAREFUL HOW YOU SPEAK OF HER…” his voice remained quiet, but there was a hardness, and his timber lost its polish- his accent reverted to a thicker one, almost rough in its intonations of an old Norseman.

He then juxtaposed into his civil smile, a whiplash reaction which shocked his passenger. “You might want to look closer again- seems your eyes, clouded with age, haven’t shown you what is reflected! Or perhaps they are clouded with your own denial- you’re talented in denial, are you not, Joel?” 

The old man - now Joel - shrugged. “Perhaps you could say that. Yes, I am quite talented at that. But perhaps there is no truth at all, except for what we tell ourselves is true. So is not my form of truth just as valid as what you perceive?”

Joel looked again at the pearl, trying to see himself more clearly. However, he began to see glimpses of another face, not that of a wrinkled old crone, which he had been expecting after what Kai had just said, but a young woman in her twenties looking straight into his cataract-ridden eyes.

Shocked, the old man nearly dropped the pearl. “Oh gosh, what was that?” he muttered under his breath. “I must be slowly losing my mind. Perhaps I’ve already lost my mind a bit, haven’t I? A lot of old people are obsessed with the past, and perhaps I’m not that different from those unfortunate souls.” 

Despite Joel’s faux-jovial, light-hearted tone, however, Kai could feel that Joel was now struggling against a deep desire to tell Kai the truth about himself and his past.

“Perhaps misfortune is subjective, do you not think? After all, who decides what is the measure of happiness? The erasure of the self is the greatest loss, so many thinkers argue... But do you know what I believe is the greatest loss, Joel? The losses we sow unto others and their lives. And it happens when we are unawares. I wonder who the missus is? Her eyes contain such an abundance of sorrow. What or who put that there, I wonder? Might you know, Joel?” 

Joel looked down. For a few seconds, it appeared as if he had admitted defeat and that he was going to admit, yes, I had caused her all of that sorrow. 

But he shook his head. “It was her choice in the end, Kai. She chose to accept my choice, and it was her choice to continue carrying that pain. She could’ve chosen to be with Sam and leave me behind. Or even Frankie. Or someone else. Who knows? We were so young. We had so many years ahead of us. Why did she choose to fixate on me?” The last few syllables dropped slowly from his mouth, as if he was holding something back - regret, perhaps.

“It is, of course, everyone’s choice to carry sorrow or not. But I doubt that, sometimes. How are we expected to cast what is part of us aside? That’s where the moralistic argument unravels, like thread unwound from its tightly-wound spool. For certain, she might have wedded another… but the argument reverts unto you- why didn’t you marry her? You cannot lie and tell me you did not love her…” Kai set forth his observation, perhaps a resounding judgement, upon the old man. 

Joel paused, his mouth suddenly frozen. “I...I did. You’re right.” Pausing, he looked to the side, at the pearl, and then back at Kai. 

“I convinced myself that I didn’t need such a complicated thing in my life. I thought I was doing both of us a favour by denying both of us this supposed ‘happiness.’ I believed, no, I forced myself to believe that taking too many risks wasn’t worth it. I wanted to live a simple life where I didn’t have to take many risks, where I could just live in full control of my faculties. I didn’t want to fall in love, have my consciousness seized by another, and have my independence snatched away from me…” his words faded as they left his mouth, becoming increasingly slurred. 

Suddenly, the man’s thin and emaciated form was contorted by heaving sobs. Decades of self-denial, isolation, and a perverse desire to be right had its costs, after all.

“It was pathetic, I suppose - you’re right. Now that I have the chance to vocalize all of this and why I chose to do this, you’re right - it doesn’t make sense. I just wanted to be right SO BADLY. She was right. Sam was right, too. I’m a sick man and have always been. So obsessed with my thought-experiments, going against society, and proving a certain point that I lose track of the things that are truly important, I suppose. But I maintain the belief that one gets to choose what is important...but you’re going to say I wasn’t true to myself, right? That I managed to deceive myself for nearly 70 years...just because I could.” Shaking as he said this, Joel wiped the tears pouring down his face with the sleeve of his ugly sweater.

Like the creeping notes of Grieg’s “In The Hall of the Mountain King”, a storm edges its gathering force- clouds cast the entire landscape in pitch-black darkness, while the waters, once mirror-like, grow choppy, seething a furious foam from the whistling gale now cutting through the open water. 

The boat tosses, like a powerless object caught in a relentless, menacing vortex of wind and thunder. 

Kai remains mercilessly silent, offering no words of comfort or assurance to his passenger. He has, all but in presence, abandoned his charge to the maelstrom of his own consequences- the summation of his life. 

Death stands still in the boat, despite the violent thrashing and bobbing. At times, it seems the boat may capsize. Joel nearly is tossed out, and he clings onto the drenched folds of Kai’s cloak, knuckles clutched white against its aged splotches as the water and rain soak both men. 

Yet Kai remains fixed like stone-unmoved by the man’s wails and unmovable through his own body. 

He finally speaks, his voice dead-still against the howl and crash of the winds and waves. 

“Joel Farber- this is what awaits you for your eternity. You wanted nothing else than to be isolated with your own thoughts. And your desires are granted. So this is the total sum of your life. Live with it in your death, for this will not end. And, not being Life, I cannot help you, for that is unfair. Life, as they say, is unfair- but I am neither. This is fair, do you not agree?” He looked down upon the horrified soul, the old man’s eyes bulging with the greatest terror a soul can experience. 

There was no solace, no kindness. Simply a sentence of fate. Nothing more. 

Kai remained silent, turning his eyes aside from Joel in the coldest rejection.

“Are you sure you want to see her again? See how she is now?” Kai asked in the deadest of voices. 

Joel nods, eyes red from crying. “Yes. Please. It’s only the right thing to do. After so many years of purposely distancing myself from her.”

The storm halts - the waters, churned into a vertical funnel, encircling the men and the boat, stands still, firm tension surface like molten glass is torn in foam-like strands. The thunder ceases. A great, deadening silence deafens around the men. 

“But is it fair to her, though?” Kai asks. Setting his pole aside inside the boat, he takes a simple golden band off his ring finger- it looks like a wedding ring. 

“Do you see this?” 

Joel nodded. “Yes? What about it?”

Kai held the ring with a meticulous care. 

“When we first met, my wife gave me this ring. We never imagined, at the time, that we would ever wed. She was lost, along with whom would become our sons. I offered to take her back to my home. But first, we had to cross over a bridge that stood above a river. I needed payment, or else I would not be allowed to carry her across. I asked if she had anything of worth. She cried she didn’t. I noted the ring on her finger. I asked her for it. She denounced the band as worthless, for her own marriage proved of no worth. She offered me her hair or her teeth- she said these things held more worth than the golden band. But the band was payment enough- I took it and told her I would render the ring worth something, someday.

I held unto this band, day after day, through the time we grew together, if you will, in love. And then we wed, I wore it, having finally worked hard enough to make it worth something. Can you do that for Malka? Make something worthless- the time you wasted from her- into something worthy for her?” Kai asked, finishing his explanation. 

For a few moments, Joel was completely still, unable to fully understand or answer Kai’s explanation and request. After a while, however, Joel regained his composure, cleared his throat, and replied, “Yes. I believe I can do that for her. I have to make amends. I just hope she will forgive me. Or is this yet another illusion? Are we all separated in death? Is it even possible to meet others besides you…? Will the Malka I meet on the other side just be a reminder of my own failings and flaws rather than her true self?”

Kai answered- “That is up to you, Joel. It is up to your will what happens to you- and Malka’s own happiness lies in your decision, too. Decide wisely.” 

Joel nodded, clutching the pearl closer to him now, protecting it with his hand, which was now, to his surprise, young and fresh again. Gone were the wrinkles, the splotches, the varicose veins - it was as if he was a young man again. The top of his head suddenly felt warmer too, and his stomach lurched as he felt a lock of hair brush against his forehead. Looking at the pearl again, he saw himself staring back at him, but he wasn’t the fossilized resident of the senior home he had gotten used to being over the past fifteen years. No, he was young again - with a head full of dark hair, a wrinkle-free face, and an eager, almost innocent air to him.

He was so stupefied by this sudden transformation that he failed to notice that he and Kai had already arrived on the other side. 

The boat brushed against the damp silt of the shore with a smooth rustle. 

Kai stuck his pole into the sand and halted the boat.