The Sensory Deception (52 page)

Her position makes it impossible to see in front of the raft.

Right now, Farley can’t see it either.

But Chopper can. The raft is headed straight for the granite slab. Water approaching the granite wall combines with the water reflected from that wall to form a stationary hill of water. Two things can happen when the raft reaches it. The hill of water can push the raft away from the wall and guide it downstream to the rapids, where it will be caught in the fallen trees. Or, if the raft floats to the top of the stationary wave, it will slide down the other side, collide with the granite, and break apart. Should it collide, Gloria and the child will drown.

Chopper must assure that the raft makes it to the trees. He sets the burning torch down in a dry spot. There will be time to ignite the fallen trees when Gloria is appropriately caught in them.

Chopper does not see Farley behind the raft.

Farley realizes that he won’t catch the raft before it hits the granite dam. Instead, he prepares for an in-water rescue. He’s done it before with drowning tourists caught in riptides. He twirls around, feet forward, kicking to reduce the speed of his impact. On his back, zeroing in on the wall about fifteen feet upstream from the raft, he sees Chopper.

He calls out but can’t be heard over the water and fire.

Chopper leans over the wall above the point where the raft will impact. He’s holding a sturdy branch and it looks like he’s preparing to cushion the blow. It’s dangerous, though. The wall is too steep and the water too violent for Chopper to successfully pull Gloria to safety, and there’s no way he can save them both.

But the raft never hits the wall. As it climbs the stationary wave, it begins to rotate and then careens parallel to the wall, accelerating toward the rapids and fallen trees.

A second later, Farley hits the rock wall. He bends his legs, keeping his feet against the rock. The current is most powerful a foot from the wall, but it’s not too bad at the point of contact. He glides along, feeling for a foothold. The rock is slick with algae. He slides farther, spying a rock ahead. Again, he maneuvers his legs ahead of him. This time he coils his legs before they impact the rock and, when they hit, he kicks up out of the water and onto the wall. He gets hold of the top.

Again, Tahir’s words resonate in his head. “We only get one chance.” Instead of yielding to the desire to jerk himself straight out, he confirms the stability of his grip and only then pulls himself up.

Gloria braces herself for impact. She’s not sure whether she should try to stop against the wall or cushion the blow and continue downstream. If she can just slow enough for Farley to catch up, she’ll be fine.

Farley! Everything is all better
.

She braces Iara for impact.

The raft floats high in the water. She looks up. Chopper stands above them. She cowers between the logs, expecting a bullet. Instead, the raft starts spinning again. It catches a current and accelerates parallel to the rock, rushing toward what appears from her perspective to be a waterfall.

As the raft sweeps away, Chopper sprints along the wall. He stops and lifts the torch. It’s down to cinders. He raises it and the hot wind feeds the fuel with fresh, dry oxygen. The flame builds and seconds tick away. Timing is everything and Chopper is in the zone.

He jogs along the rock just ahead of the raft.

Gloria, kneeling, pulls the child up onto her hip. The raft accelerates, veering off of one rock into the current between two others. Gloria reaches up with her free arm. The trees are draped over the water; she can’t miss, and even if she does, there are a dozen trees farther along.

Chopper waits, poised. The instant he lowers this giant match, the entire mess of trees and vines will explode in flames, just as the island upstream did a minute before. He’ll wait until Gloria and the child are firmly enmeshed in the trees, until their raft has broken to pieces down the rapids, until they begin working their way toward presumed safety. This will provide the ideal allegory, the quintessential virtual experience for
Homo sapiens
to realize the consequences of their actions.

From his position perched on the granite wall, halfway between the land to the north and the rapids to the south, some fifty feet from Chopper, Farley screams for his friend’s attention. As Chopper lifts a flaming branch and runs to the trees hanging over the rapids, Farley calls him again, screams for him.
How can he not hear?
Farley can’t recall ever having to call Chopper twice. Rarely has he had to call him even once. Farley’s always had Chopper’s attention. It’s built-in, like being right-handed, like knowing there will be air when you take a breath.

Nothing makes sense. Or does it?

How can Chopper bring harm to Gloria? Stranger than that, how can Chopper stand there with that torch when he can take three steps and rescue her and the child?

He must choose.

Farley reaches his right arm over his shoulder, takes the stock of the rifle, and pulls it from the pack. As he brings it over his shoulder, resting the chamber in his left hand, water pours from the barrel. He slides the bolt in place, hears a round slide into the chamber, and raises the weapon to his shoulder. He aligns the sights with Chopper’s torso.

Along that barrel, beyond Chopper, he can see Gloria with the child attached to her waist climbing out of the river.
This should be it. She should be safe
.

Chopper holds the torch in front of him and lowers himself to the blown-over trees. Farley can see the tangle of vines that Chopper will light. Farley can see what will happen. Either Gloria will burn right there before him, or she’ll fall into the river and be shredded to pieces in the rapids.

And what will happen to Chopper? His closest friend? Since the day they met, Chopper has been at Farley’s side. In
the instant, Farley feels a great pang of guilt. Farley has taken Chopper for granted the entire time they’ve known each other. He always assumed Chopper would help him, assumed that Chopper understood how Farley felt about him, assumed that Chopper’s eccentricities were the quirks of genius. The guilt brings an image of his friend in pain. Chopper was always in pain, he always needed help but would never admit it. If Farley had been a better friend, worthy of the friendship that Chopper offered, he’d have gotten him the help he needed. Instead, Farley took Chopper for granted.

Farley tightens his finger on the trigger. Until yesterday he had never fired a weapon. Of course, it was easy. It only took three shots to get a feel for the kick and the imperfections in the angle of the barrel and to learn how to compensate for them. From that point he was able to hit pretty much anything he aimed at, as he’d always expected. It was a simple equation of manual dexterity and eyesight—two of Farley’s strongest qualities. Combined with agility, you get a natural athlete, a surfer, a sailor: Farley.

The gun is soaking wet. Farley is acutely aware that if water has leaked into the bullet casing, nothing will happen when the firing pin comes down. That nothing might happen, that pointing the weapon at his friend and pulling the trigger is in no way certain to cause a projectile to emerge, gives Farley the minuscule doubt that he needs. Without that doubt, he will later wonder, could he have pulled the trigger?

In that instant, he surrenders his will to that of the laws of nature.
Let nature dictate the result of pulling the trigger.

The casing hasn’t leaked. The rifle bucks, precisely as it did yesterday. The concussion of the little explosion is lost in the sound of fire and water.

Chopper squats over the fallen trees, lowering the torch. The bullet hits him in his right shoulder. The same shoulder
that he injured when Moby-Dick threw him against the ship. He twists around, maintaining his grasp on the torch. He looks up, surprised.

When he sees Farley, his eyes open wide and he cocks his head to the side. In the sixteen years that Farley and Chopper have been friends, Farley has never seen this look. Farley has never seen Chopper surprised.

For an instant, Farley believes it is over. Now that he has Chopper’s attention, everything will settle down. Together, Farley and Chopper can continue their mission. It is an absurd thought, of course, one that will later flash through Farley’s mind and leave trails of shame and humiliation, but Farley believes it for an entire second.

Then Chopper shifts the torch to his left hand and turns away.

Farley reorients the rifle and pulls the trigger again. He misses. He lowers his aim and fires again. This one catches Chopper in the lower back. The torch drops to the side, resting precariously on the granite. Chopper falls over the barrier into the rapids.

Gloria doesn’t hear the shots ring out. They’re drowned by the sound of water splashing through the rocks and the crackling of dead branches as she pulls her way out of the rapids. She sees Chopper fall, though.

The hard part for her to thread together is not that she and Iara are finally safe from Chopper. No, what’s jumbling through her mind like a stick being battered through the rapids and finally down a waterfall is that Farley’s no longer dead. He’s running toward her along the big granite wall.