Underwater New York

And Never Can a Man Be More Disastrously In Death Than When Death Itself Shall Be Deathless by Jonathan Callahan

—The only men I admire are suicides, I repeated, as the Turk looked away, or not away but rather past me, the Turk was frequently looking past me, his thoughts seeming to drift like the wisps rising from his meerschaum pipe’s slow burn—only to wheel back when I least expected and fix me with a gaze of redoubled intensity. In the morning on rising I immediately drank the cup of black coffee and smoked both of the cigarettes allotted me by the Turk, then lay back in my berth and stared through the porthole at the sun’s perplexing diffractions for several hours before the Turk requested I join him above.

The Turk was not satisfied with this answer. As a rule the Turk was not satisfied. This constituted the principal distinction between us: the Turk was in no way satisfied, nor would he be satisfied, even under the most satisfying circumstances, even if after untold adventure and hardship, for example, he were to secure the object of a lifelong obsession, he would certainly find himself still more dissatisfied, his new dissatisfaction proportionate to the degree by which the consummation of a private ambition nourished over decades of unflagging if fruitless one-minded dedication toward this end ought to have left him absolutely sated—and yet even then, when the truth would have necessarily been most clear, he would have immediately convinced himself that he was satisfied, even while simultaneously and also immediately initiating plans for the pursuit of some other objective toward which he might bend his considerable energies and, assuming eventual success, since in the end the Turk always succeeds, fail to concede to himself then that he was still unsatisfied; whereas I both knew that I was not satisfied and knew that I never could be satisfied and in this knowledge I took my sole, perverse satisfaction.

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Tags: 1600 bars of silver, Arthur Kill, Jonathan Callahan