Most of the time Dad lay motionless on deck, looking like a scary stuffed toy you give to a child on Halloween.

I stroked his forehead gently, but he summoned up just enough energy to shrug me off.

“I’m dying,” he said bitterly.

“Another couple of days and I’ll be dying too,” I said, to cheer him up.

“I’m sorry about that. I told you not to come,” he said, knowing full well he hadn’t.

Dad was trying to act remorseful for having selfishly aligned my fate to his. But I knew better. I knew something he would never admit- that he had never fully shaken off his old, sick delusion that I was the premature reincarnation of his still living self- and now he thought that if I died, he might live on.

“Jasper, I’m dying,” he said again.

“Jesus Christ, Dad! Look around! Everyone here is dying! We’re all going to die!”

That burned him up. He was furious that his death was not being regarded as a tragic isolated spectacle. To die among the dying, as a number, was really a thorn in his side. Mostly, though, it was the constant praying to God that was getting under his skin. “I wish these idiots would shut up,” he said.

“These are good people, Dad. We should be proud to drown among them.”

Nonsense. I was talking pure nonsense. But Dad was determined to leave the earth in a belligerent state, and there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. Even with his life packed and its passport stamped, he rejected the religious world for the umpteenth time.

We were the only ones not praying, and the Runaways’ positivism really put Dad and me to shame. They still had the feeling that lovely things were stirring in the air. They were giddy in their ecstatic flight, blissful because their gods were not the inner kind, who can’t really help you out in a tangible, nonephemeral crisis like a sinking boat; their gods were old-fashioned, the kind who direct the whole of nature to the desires of the individual. What a lucky break! Their gods actually listened to people, and sometimes intervened. Their gods dealt out personal favors! It’s Who you know! That’s why their private experience had none of the cold terror of ours: we envisaged no big thumb and forefinger descending from the heavens to pluck us out of harm’s way.

I tended to Dad in a sort of trance. In the dark he laid out countless ideas about life and how to live it. They were slightly more confused and puerile than his usual diatribes, though, and I realized that when you’re falling, the only thing you have to hold on to is yourself. When he talked, I pretended to listen. If he wanted to sleep, I slept too. When Dad moaned, I gave him painkillers. There wasn’t anything else to do. He was suffering, his far-off eyes farther off than ever before. I knew he was thinking of Caroline. “Martin Dean- what a fool he was!” he said. It gave him some comfort to talk about himself in the third-person past tense.

Ned sometimes gave me a break. He took my place and gave Dad water and took over pretending to listen to his ceaseless droning. On those occasions I crawled over the half-conscious bodies of my companions to get to the deck for a breath of air. Above me the sky opened up like a cracked skull. The stars were glistening like beads of sweat. I was awake, but my senses were dreaming. My own sweat tasted of mango, then chocolate, then avocado. This was a disaster! Dad was dying too slowly and in too much pain. Why didn’t he just kill himself? Why do staunch atheists put up with so much futile agony? What was he waiting for?

Suddenly I remembered. The poison!

I ran down and climbed over the human mattress and whispered feverishly in his ear. “Do you want the poison?”

Dad sat up and looked at me with glowing eyes. Death can be controlled, the eyes sang. Our vital powers were somewhat recharged, contemplating the poison.

“Tomorrow morning at dawn,” he said. “We’ll do it together.”

“Dad- I’m not taking the poison.”

“No, of course not. I didn’t mean that you would take it. I just meant that I’d take it and you’d watch.”

Poor Dad. He always hated loneliness, and now he was faced with the deepest, most concentrated form of loneliness in existence.

But at dawn it was raining, and he didn’t want to commit suicide in the rain.

When the rain cleared, it was too hot to end it all.

At night he wanted to let out his final breath in the warm glare of the sun.

In short, he was never ready. He vacillated interminably. He always found a new excuse not to do it: too rainy, too cloudy, too sunny, too choppy, too early, too late.

Two or three days of agony passed in that way.

It finally happened just after sunset around two or three weeks at sea. A wave of foam crashed below deck. We were half drowned. The shrieking didn’t help anything. When the ocean settled, Dad sat up in the dark. He suddenly had trouble breathing. I gave him some more water.

“Jasper, I think this is it.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. I was always suspicious of the way in movies people knew when their time was coming, but it’s true. Death knocks. He actually knocks.”

“Can I do anything?”

“Take me up top, wait until I’m dead, and push me off the boat.”

“I thought you didn’t want a watery grave.”

“I don’t. But these bastards have been eyeing me like I’m just one big lamb chop.”

“Cancer hasn’t exactly made you appetizing.”

“Don’t argue with me. Once I’m dead, I don’t want to spend another minute on this boat.”

“Understood.”

The Runaways didn’t take their eyes off us. They spoke to each other in quiet, conspiratorial tones as Ned helped me get Dad out of there.

Up on deck his breathing grew easier. The Pacific air seemed to do him some good. The vast movement of the ocean pacified him. Well, at least I’d like to think so. These were his final moments, and I’d like to think that at the end he ceased to find his cosmic insignificance insulting, that finally he felt something whimsical in meaning nothing, that it was even somewhat amusing to be an accident in the appalling wasteland of space-time. This was my hope- that, staring out at the ocean’s majestical performance in surging blue and facing the mad sea wind, he might have cottoned on to the idea that the universal stage show was a bigger drama than he could ever have dreamed to land a key role in. But no, he didn’t put his existence into perspective at all- he was humorless about it right to the end. He went to his death a martyr to his own secret cause, unwilling to denounce himself.

I record his last minutes in the sad spirit of a biographer too close to his subject.

The night was silent, save for the creaking of the boat and the gentle lapping of the water. The moon hung brightly above the horizon. We were heading straight for it. The captain was steering us into the moon. I imagined a hatch door opening. I imagined us drifting inside. I imagined the door slamming shut behind us and the sound of crazy laughter. I imagined these things to distract me from the reality of my father’s death.

“Look, Martin, look at the moon,” Ned said. “Look at how it has been painted on the sky. God is truly an artist.”

That gave Dad a burst of energy. “I hope not, for all our sakes,” he said. “Honestly, Ned, have you ever actually met an artist? These are not nice people. They’re selfish, narcissistic, and vicious types who spend their good days in a suicidal depression. Tell him, Jasper.”

I sighed, knowing this speech by heart. “Artists are the kind of people who cheat on their mistresses, abandon their legitimate children, and make those who are underprivileged enough to know them suffer terribly for their efforts to show them kindness,” I said.

Dad raised his head to add, “And you proudly label God an artist and expect him to take care of you? Good luck!”