Chapter 3: Enter Charon's Passenger

Back at my apartment, I mulled over Camille’s words, looking for answers in the amber swirl of sherry that filled snifter in my hand. I had taken to my cups more frequently of late and up till now they had given me some succor. But today each sip gave me only a creeping feeling of dread, like a man on an endless desert, about the drink the final mouthful of water from his canteen.

I had gone through nearly half the decanter before I found myself standing in front of my bedroom looking glass, gazing at my pallid visage in utter self-disgust. The face that stared back at me was no longer the face of the young, gallant, finely-bred and well-heeled English dandy who had stepped off the boat at Fulton’s Landing so many years ago, but that of a gaunt and waxen fool with his best years behind him and one foot in his grave, the eyes glassy and caving in, a corpse in its early stages of decomposition.

My attention then fell to the suit I wore. Once the shining masterwork of a renowned London tailor, time and inattention had rendered it a seamy costume fit more for some dissipated fop lying face-down in the gutter of Five Points.

This image and similar ones lingered in my mind. Camille had awoken a realization in me – that the ease of existence I had taken for granted my entire life as a birthright, was in fact not a guaranteed proposition at all – that, quite the contrary – the natural evolution of a person’s standing in the world, when left unchecked, was not unlike the laws obeyed by freely running water: it will always seek its lowest level, move from the tops of mountaintops and so below into the shaded canyons, and so through the cracks and dark crevasses beneath the ground, and silently, ever so silently and forever forgotten, make its way out to the cold, dark sea.