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stefanie_beanTitle: Surfing the Bardo
Chapter Title: Chapter 6: Unmailed Letters (Part 3)
Genre: Angst with a happy ending; Friendship/Romance
Characters: Hugo Reyes, Claire Littleton, Kate Austen, Aaron Littleton, James "Sawyer" Ford
Relationships: Slow burn Hurley/Claire, past Jack/Kate, eventual Sawyer/Kate
Rating: M
Length: 3152 words
Status: WIP
Notes: TW for canon trauma, mental health issues, suicidal thoughts.
Summary: After Kate and Claire return from the Island, Claire starts to rebuild her relationship with Aaron, while she and Hugo explore their growing feelings for each other. Meanwhile, Kate has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. And while things start out rough, they eventually do get better.
Chapter 6: Unmailed Letters (Part 3)
12/05/2007
My love,
A woman doesn't say those words to a man unless she knows that he is hers. A man avoids saying them unless he is convinced that he has lost her. As I lost you last night at the Santa Monica marina.
You said that I was insane, crazy, and a week ago I would have agreed with you. But Kate, I've never felt saner. Sad, yes, and still convinced of my worthlessness (of which I am reminded every time I look at your number in my phone) because John did kill himself, and I will go to my grave convinced that had I listened to him, he wouldn't have.
I can't fix that. I can't fix anything, not even myself. Yet something has happened, something momentous, and all I can do is sit in awe of it, because it makes no sense. Crazy, as you would say.
I haven't had any pills for three days, yet there are no tremors, no sweats, no panic attacks. I sail on a glassy, windless sea of calm and my hands don't even shake. It's not supposed to work this way; I've seen neuro patients in the throes of withdrawal, but I feel better than I have in months. By all rights the symptoms should have hit hard by now, but there isn't a single one.
It's like John's compound fracture, only now the witness I bear is in my own flesh.
So here I sit in an empty room that no longer feels like mine, because I can once more see the carpet that was buried under mountains of debris. When I got back at two o'clock this morning, I found a registered letter waiting for me, the one which formally revokes my hospital privileges. The notice of hearing from the California Medical Board to suspend my license will no doubt soon follow. Those who break into a narcotics cabinet and help themselves don't usually get a come-back.
Now it's four in the morning, the hour of the wolf, and I fight the urge to call you. I tell myself that it's better not to; to make a clean break of it. Let you and Aaron get on with your lives with no worry for what little is left of mine.
My job, my license, this condo, none of these things matter any longer. Since you and I will likely never see each other again, this makes you a free woman now, genuinely free in every meaningful sense.
When all of us were traveling to Membata on the Searcher, I asked Desmond once what it was like to make monastic vows, to be willing to relinquish everything; no wife, no child, no money, no property. He casually laughed and said, “When the time is right, brother, you'll just know. I couldn't make it as a monk because those weren't the vows that were meant for me. They were saved for Penny, and somehow I think Brother Campbell knew it.”
At the time I scoffed. Now, I sit in my bare rooms and scribble on purloined stationary from the El Dorado Motel, because the cleaning service took mostly everything to storage. Desmond's words echo like a refrain as I take off this life like a wet and dirty coat that no longer fits. It falls to the floor and I kick it aside as I have everything else: the condo; the job which I've almost certainly lost; the awe in people's eyes when I casually let drop that I'm a neurosurgeon. Was a neurosurgeon, just as I used to be your fiancé. All of it gone for the sake of a vow that I didn't even know I was making, until that instant when Ben told me to pack a suitcase because I was never coming back.
All I said, Kate, was “Good.” It rang with the same finality as “I do,” and was equally as binding, and at some point everyone discovers who or what they will bind themselves to. For my father it was surgery, and for a time, when made to choose between surgery and drink, he picked medicine. For awhile, anyway.
What I failed to understand at the time was that none of these binding choices can be ratified in a vacuum. There is a reason the Episcopal Church at baptism or marriage asks the congregation, “Will you do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” and the people make their own vow, “We will.”
No one does it alone, Kate, but I was too blind to see that. It's why I could never make it far enough with you to become your husband.
My father couldn't do it alone, Kate, and neither could you. Yet you must have felt so alone, pretending to take Aaron to all-day field trips or mom's day out when you were actually driving to Riverside. You never had Clementine or Cassidy at your house, because you didn't want me to meet them. You let me continue in the delusion that Sawyer was here in Los Angeles, or California at least, and that you were seeing him behind my back. And all this happened because of me, because I made it so that you couldn't trust me.
So you hid, and worried, and evaded, and feared me, because I didn't help you. I made you do it alone.
By my fault, by my fault, by my most grievous fault.
*:*:*:*
I suppose there is no harm at this point in telling you that I have been to see the one person in all of Los Angeles, perhaps in the world, who can return Ben and I to the island.
Perhaps you don't care to hear about the madwoman in the basement with her charts; her spells scrawled in differential calculus; the enormous pendulum that traced its tracks into what felt like my very skin.
Eloise was her name, Eloise Hawking, and if you ever see her, flee, because once her claws embed themselves in your soul you will never be free of the terrible knowledge she weaves of iron threads. No human being should know these things, and yet she does.
The chalk paths of her pendulum intersect at the points where a vow moves from a mere promise to a terrible reality - in short, at the instant where it must be put into practice. Lived up to.
So I make ready to leave on that flight, Kate, and to never return. Perhaps I will die in the new crash that I'm steeling myself to endure. If I survive, I will live out my days on the island, and I can't imagine what that would be like, or understand why I would even have to.
The only thing I understand right now is that I've never understood any of it.
When that bizarre visit was over, Ben sidled up to me and said that he could manage to get you onto that plane, even if you weren't willing. When I didn't say anything, he added, “I won't hurt her.”
I remembered how on Hydra Island you tried to hide your chafed wrists from me, how you lied that they hadn't hurt you, how your tears smeared the Plexiglas wall of my cage. Despite the cryptic warnings of the madwoman in the basement about terrible consequences, I told Ben that I would kill him if he even thought about touching you. You were not to be forced.
With a puzzled glance he responded, “Why not?”
“Because I'm not you,” I replied.
“So much the worse for us all,” he snapped.
It doesn't matter what gets ruined on this mad return flight; let the consequences fall where they may. You were brought on board Oceanic 815 as a prisoner, but you won't depart on Ajira 316 as one.
*:*:*:*
At the hospital, I used to watch dying patients with their families. Some pretended nothing was wrong, and sat there tight-lipped. Other families poured out their hearts to the dying one, as if trying to cram everything and more into the little time that was left. Sometimes I would stand for a moment outside the hospital room door, riveted in place by these tear-stained confessions, apologies, reconciliations.
They had about as much time to make their last confessions as I do now, so here is mine, my love.
My first: after my father's memorial service, I couldn't look at my nephew Aaron without seeing his mother in his wide blue eyes. I know it would cause you suffering were you to actually read this, because in every sense you are his mother. You nursed him through rotovirus and flu; cleaned off red-jello spit-ups that stained the pale carpet in the den so badly it had to be replaced. You taught him patty-cake and eensy-weensy spider and everything else that I couldn't, because I couldn't bear to see my vanished sister in his eyes.
Or yours.
Because I know she haunted you, too. And that is why I left you that August weekend when the air conditioning broke down, when Aaron cried for hours in the hot desert night from an ear infection.
My next confession: what a coward I am. My mother knows that I've been taking trans-Pacific flights; what she doesn't know is that this will be my last. I can't bear to hear her lecture me on how I need help; how “troubled” or “dysfunctional” my behavior is, or whatever euphemism she uses to paper it over. I can't bear to hear the unspoken word “suicidal” in her voice, see it in her expression.
She will never forgive me in any case, not after losing Dad. After me losing Dad, I should say, by pushing him out of his hard-won sobriety.
Did you know I did that, Kate?
I did the same thing to Sarah that I did with you about Sawyer, only this was worse, more monstrous, because I accused her of sleeping with my father. It seems insane now, because of course she was calling him, confiding in him. Her own father had died shortly after our wedding, and she couldn't talk to me about anything. She feared me, in fact, as she made a point to include in the divorce depositions. Not that I ever laid a hand on her, but she feared what I was doing to her spirit when I made her feel small and diminished; that she had no value other than the trophy patient which I had “fixed” and then married.
Later, my mother told me that Dad had always stuck up for me in those conversations with Sarah. Nonetheless, I accused the two of them of something abominable, just as I did you.
I was so wrong to doubt you. Another man (Hurley, say) would have trusted you, instead of accusing you as I did on the night I left you for the second time. He wouldn't have carried around with him “the shadow of the third,” the one I envisioned “always walking beside you” or in your thoughts, dressed in a blue denim shirt instead of “wrapt in a brown mantle.”
But Sawyer couldn't have been “the third” I imagined on the telephone, because he's on the island, or so John said. If Sawyer's still alive, that is. We both know how death finds people there.
No, I don't say that to hurt you, although perhaps I do mean to, if only a little. The two of you came together for a time in the Unreal City, after all. But it's an old argument and tiresome, especially when Ben revealed the truth to me.
Ben's men had Cassidy's house in Albuquerque under constant surveillance. They watched you come and go, photographed the two of you drinking iced tea on the back deck; watched Clementine push Aaron in the baby swing that Cassidy kept long after Clementine outgrew it. They dug through garbage and identified your payments to the child, via Sawyer's cash and Oceanic settlement accounts.
In a dry voice he remarked that not only had you routinely broken parole, you were associating with a known criminal, even if technically Cassidy had turned states'-evidence and hadn't been formally indicted. I sat numb during the entire sordid recitation: Sawyer and Cassidy's partnership in crime, the betrayal, his conviction, the child.
His eyes filled with pity and contempt when he saw that I had never known.
Not numb enough to feel shame, however, or the burning embarrassment that you never trusted me enough to tell me about Cassidy, or her. That was your big secret, your “promise to Sawyer:” a little girl, and all you wanted to do was help her.
I can't write any more, because all I can see is your tear-streaked face as you left the marina. Dawn is breaking, but that's at least one advantage of the Unreal City: there's always someplace to get a drink at any hour of the day or night, and God knows I need one.
Jack
*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
[The last letter was also written on El Dorado Motel stationery.]
Kate,
Do you remember that LA winter morning shortly after we returned from the island? Fog blanketed a flat beach pockmarked with footprints, nothing like the pristine seacoast we knew so well. But we both craved the smells and sounds of the sea, so you choked down your anxiety over leaving Aaron with my mother, your fears of being recognized, your hesitation over what lay ahead for us.
Hidden by a scarf and dark glasses, you gripped my hand tightly. We walked the strand from Newport to Moro Canyon, talking freely as on those early days after the crash, drunk on the possibility of a fresh start. When a gigantic cliff blocked our path, we laughingly called it “Mt. Hurley” before turning around.
Little did we know.
That afternoon, we lay together for the first time in an anonymous Newport Beach hotel, your face more naked than your body as your nails raked my back and your cries of love burned my ears.
That was the first time. Perhaps last night was the last. This morning there was something final in your voice as you said, “See you at the airport.” Damn Ben, for calling right at that last moment. Yes, I know we can talk on the plane. We were in the air about six hours before Oceanic 815 broke up, and one can say a lot in that time.
That first summer back in Los Angeles, you told me that you and Sawyer had been forced to break rocks for an airstrip on Hydra Island. It was right before Dad's memorial service, so we were still together, still seeing each other almost daily.
I am so sorry that I scoffed at you for that; it is perfectly understandable in retrospect that you never mentioned Sawyer to me again until that fateful night last September. Yes, I was jealous; yes, I resented him - even after that day in Newport Beach, that first time which should have erased everything which came before it, yet did not. Just as last night didn't take the morning-after frost from your voice.
Now, though, I desperately want to believe that the near-primitive Others could actually build a runway which could accommodate an international airliner. Because while I still remain convinced that everyone would be better off without me, I saw how so many died horribly after the 815 crash, and I fear that kind of death by fire more than any other. More so even than how the federal marshal lay dying in a putrid, septicemic swamp.
I'm afraid, Kate.
As I write, advancing morning sun burns off the glow of your body under mine, banishing all freedom from worry with its harsh light. I'm afraid, and counting to five won't help, because there aren't enough numbers to carry me through this horrible plodding death march. John's body has to be fetched from a butcher shop - nothing better to remind us that we're all meat dressed up in a few pretensions - and then to the airport, where all that meat stands to get roasted to a well-done crisp.
Please, for the love of God, get us to the island, but not by a crash. Please spare me from a crash, because I don't want to experience that again, no matter how many times I wished for it over the past weeks. Spare us both, because I don't want you to suffer that way, either.
I wish I could care more about those who will fill this flight. My words of last month come back to haunt me like a death sentence: “I want the plane I'm on to crash... I pray that it will crash.” I know that Ben doesn't care either; he's said as much. Hurley might see it differently if he were boarding this ship of the damned, but as far as I know he is still in jail.
It speaks volumes, Kate, that I can't even worry about Hurley any longer. Mentally ill prisoners are often rushed to St. Sebastian's ER when they're attacked in the lock-up; I've seen my share. They're sitting ducks, Kate. I can't bring myself to think about it further.
So while I wanted to drive you to the airport, share some light conversation and prolong the afterglow, it didn't work out that way. Add it to the pile of things I'm sorry for, things done and left undone, as ultimately pointless as that enormous stack of notebooks we found on the island, a stack that has haunted my dreams for years because they perfectly symbolize the hopeless futility that has become my life.
Even though I hope that you won't hold any of this against me, I thoroughly expect that you will. That's all right. I love you more than I can tell, even though I make you unhappy. As you yourself said, “Why hold on to something that makes you feel sad?”
Both of us are casting aside those things that make us feel sad, aren't we? You didn't have to tell me where you left Aaron; it was perfectly obvious. Ben confirmed it on the phone early this morning, when he told me that Carole Littleton had canceled her return flight to Sydney and was remaining in Los Angeles. (How does he discover these things? Never mind; it had the ring of truth.)
Aaron was another one of those sources of sadness, wasn't he? Just as I am.
It's all right, Kate. It's going to be all right. See you at the airport.
Your old pair of shoes,
Jack
(continued)
(A/N: “The shadow of the third,” the one “on the other side of you... wrapt in a brown mantle,” and the Unreal City are all from TS Eliot's poem, “The Waste Land.”)
Chapter Title: Chapter 6: Unmailed Letters (Part 3)
Genre: Angst with a happy ending; Friendship/Romance
Characters: Hugo Reyes, Claire Littleton, Kate Austen, Aaron Littleton, James "Sawyer" Ford
Relationships: Slow burn Hurley/Claire, past Jack/Kate, eventual Sawyer/Kate
Rating: M
Length: 3152 words
Status: WIP
Notes: TW for canon trauma, mental health issues, suicidal thoughts.
Summary: After Kate and Claire return from the Island, Claire starts to rebuild her relationship with Aaron, while she and Hugo explore their growing feelings for each other. Meanwhile, Kate has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. And while things start out rough, they eventually do get better.
Chapter 6: Unmailed Letters (Part 3)
12/05/2007
My love,
A woman doesn't say those words to a man unless she knows that he is hers. A man avoids saying them unless he is convinced that he has lost her. As I lost you last night at the Santa Monica marina.
You said that I was insane, crazy, and a week ago I would have agreed with you. But Kate, I've never felt saner. Sad, yes, and still convinced of my worthlessness (of which I am reminded every time I look at your number in my phone) because John did kill himself, and I will go to my grave convinced that had I listened to him, he wouldn't have.
I can't fix that. I can't fix anything, not even myself. Yet something has happened, something momentous, and all I can do is sit in awe of it, because it makes no sense. Crazy, as you would say.
I haven't had any pills for three days, yet there are no tremors, no sweats, no panic attacks. I sail on a glassy, windless sea of calm and my hands don't even shake. It's not supposed to work this way; I've seen neuro patients in the throes of withdrawal, but I feel better than I have in months. By all rights the symptoms should have hit hard by now, but there isn't a single one.
It's like John's compound fracture, only now the witness I bear is in my own flesh.
So here I sit in an empty room that no longer feels like mine, because I can once more see the carpet that was buried under mountains of debris. When I got back at two o'clock this morning, I found a registered letter waiting for me, the one which formally revokes my hospital privileges. The notice of hearing from the California Medical Board to suspend my license will no doubt soon follow. Those who break into a narcotics cabinet and help themselves don't usually get a come-back.
Now it's four in the morning, the hour of the wolf, and I fight the urge to call you. I tell myself that it's better not to; to make a clean break of it. Let you and Aaron get on with your lives with no worry for what little is left of mine.
My job, my license, this condo, none of these things matter any longer. Since you and I will likely never see each other again, this makes you a free woman now, genuinely free in every meaningful sense.
When all of us were traveling to Membata on the Searcher, I asked Desmond once what it was like to make monastic vows, to be willing to relinquish everything; no wife, no child, no money, no property. He casually laughed and said, “When the time is right, brother, you'll just know. I couldn't make it as a monk because those weren't the vows that were meant for me. They were saved for Penny, and somehow I think Brother Campbell knew it.”
At the time I scoffed. Now, I sit in my bare rooms and scribble on purloined stationary from the El Dorado Motel, because the cleaning service took mostly everything to storage. Desmond's words echo like a refrain as I take off this life like a wet and dirty coat that no longer fits. It falls to the floor and I kick it aside as I have everything else: the condo; the job which I've almost certainly lost; the awe in people's eyes when I casually let drop that I'm a neurosurgeon. Was a neurosurgeon, just as I used to be your fiancé. All of it gone for the sake of a vow that I didn't even know I was making, until that instant when Ben told me to pack a suitcase because I was never coming back.
All I said, Kate, was “Good.” It rang with the same finality as “I do,” and was equally as binding, and at some point everyone discovers who or what they will bind themselves to. For my father it was surgery, and for a time, when made to choose between surgery and drink, he picked medicine. For awhile, anyway.
What I failed to understand at the time was that none of these binding choices can be ratified in a vacuum. There is a reason the Episcopal Church at baptism or marriage asks the congregation, “Will you do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” and the people make their own vow, “We will.”
No one does it alone, Kate, but I was too blind to see that. It's why I could never make it far enough with you to become your husband.
My father couldn't do it alone, Kate, and neither could you. Yet you must have felt so alone, pretending to take Aaron to all-day field trips or mom's day out when you were actually driving to Riverside. You never had Clementine or Cassidy at your house, because you didn't want me to meet them. You let me continue in the delusion that Sawyer was here in Los Angeles, or California at least, and that you were seeing him behind my back. And all this happened because of me, because I made it so that you couldn't trust me.
So you hid, and worried, and evaded, and feared me, because I didn't help you. I made you do it alone.
By my fault, by my fault, by my most grievous fault.
I suppose there is no harm at this point in telling you that I have been to see the one person in all of Los Angeles, perhaps in the world, who can return Ben and I to the island.
Perhaps you don't care to hear about the madwoman in the basement with her charts; her spells scrawled in differential calculus; the enormous pendulum that traced its tracks into what felt like my very skin.
Eloise was her name, Eloise Hawking, and if you ever see her, flee, because once her claws embed themselves in your soul you will never be free of the terrible knowledge she weaves of iron threads. No human being should know these things, and yet she does.
The chalk paths of her pendulum intersect at the points where a vow moves from a mere promise to a terrible reality - in short, at the instant where it must be put into practice. Lived up to.
So I make ready to leave on that flight, Kate, and to never return. Perhaps I will die in the new crash that I'm steeling myself to endure. If I survive, I will live out my days on the island, and I can't imagine what that would be like, or understand why I would even have to.
The only thing I understand right now is that I've never understood any of it.
When that bizarre visit was over, Ben sidled up to me and said that he could manage to get you onto that plane, even if you weren't willing. When I didn't say anything, he added, “I won't hurt her.”
I remembered how on Hydra Island you tried to hide your chafed wrists from me, how you lied that they hadn't hurt you, how your tears smeared the Plexiglas wall of my cage. Despite the cryptic warnings of the madwoman in the basement about terrible consequences, I told Ben that I would kill him if he even thought about touching you. You were not to be forced.
With a puzzled glance he responded, “Why not?”
“Because I'm not you,” I replied.
“So much the worse for us all,” he snapped.
It doesn't matter what gets ruined on this mad return flight; let the consequences fall where they may. You were brought on board Oceanic 815 as a prisoner, but you won't depart on Ajira 316 as one.
At the hospital, I used to watch dying patients with their families. Some pretended nothing was wrong, and sat there tight-lipped. Other families poured out their hearts to the dying one, as if trying to cram everything and more into the little time that was left. Sometimes I would stand for a moment outside the hospital room door, riveted in place by these tear-stained confessions, apologies, reconciliations.
They had about as much time to make their last confessions as I do now, so here is mine, my love.
My first: after my father's memorial service, I couldn't look at my nephew Aaron without seeing his mother in his wide blue eyes. I know it would cause you suffering were you to actually read this, because in every sense you are his mother. You nursed him through rotovirus and flu; cleaned off red-jello spit-ups that stained the pale carpet in the den so badly it had to be replaced. You taught him patty-cake and eensy-weensy spider and everything else that I couldn't, because I couldn't bear to see my vanished sister in his eyes.
Or yours.
Because I know she haunted you, too. And that is why I left you that August weekend when the air conditioning broke down, when Aaron cried for hours in the hot desert night from an ear infection.
My next confession: what a coward I am. My mother knows that I've been taking trans-Pacific flights; what she doesn't know is that this will be my last. I can't bear to hear her lecture me on how I need help; how “troubled” or “dysfunctional” my behavior is, or whatever euphemism she uses to paper it over. I can't bear to hear the unspoken word “suicidal” in her voice, see it in her expression.
She will never forgive me in any case, not after losing Dad. After me losing Dad, I should say, by pushing him out of his hard-won sobriety.
Did you know I did that, Kate?
I did the same thing to Sarah that I did with you about Sawyer, only this was worse, more monstrous, because I accused her of sleeping with my father. It seems insane now, because of course she was calling him, confiding in him. Her own father had died shortly after our wedding, and she couldn't talk to me about anything. She feared me, in fact, as she made a point to include in the divorce depositions. Not that I ever laid a hand on her, but she feared what I was doing to her spirit when I made her feel small and diminished; that she had no value other than the trophy patient which I had “fixed” and then married.
Later, my mother told me that Dad had always stuck up for me in those conversations with Sarah. Nonetheless, I accused the two of them of something abominable, just as I did you.
I was so wrong to doubt you. Another man (Hurley, say) would have trusted you, instead of accusing you as I did on the night I left you for the second time. He wouldn't have carried around with him “the shadow of the third,” the one I envisioned “always walking beside you” or in your thoughts, dressed in a blue denim shirt instead of “wrapt in a brown mantle.”
But Sawyer couldn't have been “the third” I imagined on the telephone, because he's on the island, or so John said. If Sawyer's still alive, that is. We both know how death finds people there.
No, I don't say that to hurt you, although perhaps I do mean to, if only a little. The two of you came together for a time in the Unreal City, after all. But it's an old argument and tiresome, especially when Ben revealed the truth to me.
Ben's men had Cassidy's house in Albuquerque under constant surveillance. They watched you come and go, photographed the two of you drinking iced tea on the back deck; watched Clementine push Aaron in the baby swing that Cassidy kept long after Clementine outgrew it. They dug through garbage and identified your payments to the child, via Sawyer's cash and Oceanic settlement accounts.
In a dry voice he remarked that not only had you routinely broken parole, you were associating with a known criminal, even if technically Cassidy had turned states'-evidence and hadn't been formally indicted. I sat numb during the entire sordid recitation: Sawyer and Cassidy's partnership in crime, the betrayal, his conviction, the child.
His eyes filled with pity and contempt when he saw that I had never known.
Not numb enough to feel shame, however, or the burning embarrassment that you never trusted me enough to tell me about Cassidy, or her. That was your big secret, your “promise to Sawyer:” a little girl, and all you wanted to do was help her.
I can't write any more, because all I can see is your tear-streaked face as you left the marina. Dawn is breaking, but that's at least one advantage of the Unreal City: there's always someplace to get a drink at any hour of the day or night, and God knows I need one.
Jack
[The last letter was also written on El Dorado Motel stationery.]
Kate,
Do you remember that LA winter morning shortly after we returned from the island? Fog blanketed a flat beach pockmarked with footprints, nothing like the pristine seacoast we knew so well. But we both craved the smells and sounds of the sea, so you choked down your anxiety over leaving Aaron with my mother, your fears of being recognized, your hesitation over what lay ahead for us.
Hidden by a scarf and dark glasses, you gripped my hand tightly. We walked the strand from Newport to Moro Canyon, talking freely as on those early days after the crash, drunk on the possibility of a fresh start. When a gigantic cliff blocked our path, we laughingly called it “Mt. Hurley” before turning around.
Little did we know.
That afternoon, we lay together for the first time in an anonymous Newport Beach hotel, your face more naked than your body as your nails raked my back and your cries of love burned my ears.
That was the first time. Perhaps last night was the last. This morning there was something final in your voice as you said, “See you at the airport.” Damn Ben, for calling right at that last moment. Yes, I know we can talk on the plane. We were in the air about six hours before Oceanic 815 broke up, and one can say a lot in that time.
That first summer back in Los Angeles, you told me that you and Sawyer had been forced to break rocks for an airstrip on Hydra Island. It was right before Dad's memorial service, so we were still together, still seeing each other almost daily.
I am so sorry that I scoffed at you for that; it is perfectly understandable in retrospect that you never mentioned Sawyer to me again until that fateful night last September. Yes, I was jealous; yes, I resented him - even after that day in Newport Beach, that first time which should have erased everything which came before it, yet did not. Just as last night didn't take the morning-after frost from your voice.
Now, though, I desperately want to believe that the near-primitive Others could actually build a runway which could accommodate an international airliner. Because while I still remain convinced that everyone would be better off without me, I saw how so many died horribly after the 815 crash, and I fear that kind of death by fire more than any other. More so even than how the federal marshal lay dying in a putrid, septicemic swamp.
I'm afraid, Kate.
As I write, advancing morning sun burns off the glow of your body under mine, banishing all freedom from worry with its harsh light. I'm afraid, and counting to five won't help, because there aren't enough numbers to carry me through this horrible plodding death march. John's body has to be fetched from a butcher shop - nothing better to remind us that we're all meat dressed up in a few pretensions - and then to the airport, where all that meat stands to get roasted to a well-done crisp.
Please, for the love of God, get us to the island, but not by a crash. Please spare me from a crash, because I don't want to experience that again, no matter how many times I wished for it over the past weeks. Spare us both, because I don't want you to suffer that way, either.
I wish I could care more about those who will fill this flight. My words of last month come back to haunt me like a death sentence: “I want the plane I'm on to crash... I pray that it will crash.” I know that Ben doesn't care either; he's said as much. Hurley might see it differently if he were boarding this ship of the damned, but as far as I know he is still in jail.
It speaks volumes, Kate, that I can't even worry about Hurley any longer. Mentally ill prisoners are often rushed to St. Sebastian's ER when they're attacked in the lock-up; I've seen my share. They're sitting ducks, Kate. I can't bring myself to think about it further.
So while I wanted to drive you to the airport, share some light conversation and prolong the afterglow, it didn't work out that way. Add it to the pile of things I'm sorry for, things done and left undone, as ultimately pointless as that enormous stack of notebooks we found on the island, a stack that has haunted my dreams for years because they perfectly symbolize the hopeless futility that has become my life.
Even though I hope that you won't hold any of this against me, I thoroughly expect that you will. That's all right. I love you more than I can tell, even though I make you unhappy. As you yourself said, “Why hold on to something that makes you feel sad?”
Both of us are casting aside those things that make us feel sad, aren't we? You didn't have to tell me where you left Aaron; it was perfectly obvious. Ben confirmed it on the phone early this morning, when he told me that Carole Littleton had canceled her return flight to Sydney and was remaining in Los Angeles. (How does he discover these things? Never mind; it had the ring of truth.)
Aaron was another one of those sources of sadness, wasn't he? Just as I am.
It's all right, Kate. It's going to be all right. See you at the airport.
Your old pair of shoes,
Jack
(continued)
(A/N: “The shadow of the third,” the one “on the other side of you... wrapt in a brown mantle,” and the Unreal City are all from TS Eliot's poem, “The Waste Land.”)