Choice and Chance
Ted Ryner noticed the pain in his head before he registered that he was awake. He rolled over to his side and a flood of nauseating pain filled his body. Groaning, he fell back, a little too hard, to the surface beneath him. He lay in the darkness, afraid to open his eyes and make the pain worse, slowly realizing that wherever he was, it was cold, flat, hard, and had plenty of salty, wet air. As the pain subsided, he registered the soft ebb of water against what might be a dock. He rolled over again, with more success this time, and managed to sit up and open his eyes.
It looked like he was sitting in a stereotypical sewer as the wall opposite him was closer than he had expected and guided the flow of a dark river of water. He was sitting on a stone ledge in a brick alcove which had a set of stairs leading into the water. At the bottom of the stairs was a gondola manned by an incredibly pale gondolier with dark circles around his eyes wearing a quizzical expression. When he caught Ted’s gaze, he smiled.
“Welcome to Styx! Or rather, the area upon which you will be traveling is called Styx-I mean, the river. We call the area around it…” the gondolier stoped suddenly and cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, I’ve got a lot of people to escort, so I’ll answer your questions on the way. Provided, of course, you have money to pay for your voyage. You do, don’t you?”
Ted rubbed his temples and shakily stood up. Even in the haze of his headache, he remained upright as he fumbled through his pockets.
“Sorry, I don’t,” he mumbled.
“Oh, er, that’s a problem,” the gondolier said. “If you can’t pay for your passage, you’re going to have to swim. And no soul that swims in the water ever survives.”
“What?”
“I said, no soul that swims in the water ever survives. They get pulled under by the other ones and get absorbed. It’s a sad fate, but improves the shoreline much better than when they had souls wandering around here. Or, at least, that’s what I was told. I don’t know having just started this job and…” he stopped again and sighed. “Well, if you don’t have payment, I have to go.”
“Wait!” Ted called after him, although the man had not gone very far away, “at least tell me where I am and what I’m doing here.”
“I told you, you’re at Styx. And, um, I’ve never been very good at leading into the subject, so I’ll just jump right in: you’re dead.”
Ted laughed. “No, really. What’s going on? What day is it? Did the boys put you up to this for my birthday?”
The gondolier didn’t laugh. “I’m sorry to say you must have died because only the dead come here.”
The smile melted off of Ted’s face. “You’re kidding…” his voice was quiet and diminished to a whisper as he stepped back towards the wall and slid down, his eyes focusing on a spot of space in front of him. Once again, the only sound was the water sloshing up against the stone ledge and even though the gondolier didn’t say anything, he bit his lip and kept turning down river as if expecting something to come barging from upstream.
“Look, I’m sorry. But I really have to go. I hate to leave you like this, but…good luck.”
“Wait,” Ted called back a little softer. “Is there any other way I could pay for passage?”
“Well, I don’t…nobody told me…I can’t imagine…” the gondolier looked nervously downstream and then glanced up at the ceiling above the ledge.
“What if we gamble for it?” Ted said quickly.
“G-gamble?” The gondolier looked at Ted like a wounded deer cornered by hunters. Ted felt a little sympathy for the boy in the boat; he looked no older than Ted’s twelve-year-old son and as if he hadn’t slept for years. Of course, Ted thought, mentally kicking himself for his naïve reaction, he probably died long ago.
“Sure!” Ted said more enthusiastically than he felt. “If you win I’ll swim to shore and if I win, you’ll take me there in your boat.”
“No, no, I can’t…I can’t…”
“What have you got to lose?” Ted said shrugging, although he knew the gondolier had more at stake than he did. He swallowed his worry for fear of breaking the illusion that he was in control of the situation.
“A lot, actually. But…no, I haven’t played in a while and you shouldn’t get the advantage. But…” the gondolier bit his lip and looked downstream, “Fine, you’ve got yourself a deal only if I pick the game.”
“Deal,” Ted said extending his hand.
“But we can’t play here,” the gondolier said, ignoring Ted’s gesture. “Get in the boat and I’ll take you to a place we can.”
Ted stepped onto the boat and sat down instinctively to avoid the craft from tipping over, but it barely reacted to Ted’s step or the added weight. All at once, the boatman pushed the craft forward quickly down the river. It soon got dark in the tunnel, which brought to Ted’s attention that he hadn’t noticed a light source earlier, but he could definitely see the alcove and river as if there had been a dim flood light. Only the sound of sloshing water gave any indication that they were making progress until the boat turned sharply to the left and Ted could see an island ahead as if it was under a spotlight. Under different circumstances, he might have rolled his eyes at the overly dramatic setting, but the pain had returned to his head when panic hit his stomach like a bullet.
When they had gotten closer, he could see that the island was a floating deck held to the riverbed by four chains. In the middle of the deck was a table and two chairs opposing each other. The gondolier stopped the boat and helped Ted onto the deck, which did give under his weight letting a little water lap at Ted’s shoes. He quickly walked to the center and sat down in a chair, then realizing that a chess board and scattered deck of cards were already waiting for them. The gondolier took his seat across from Ted and, after pushing the chess pieces aside, he gathered the cards, expertly shuffling them for what seemed like several minutes.
“German Whist,” he said. “That’s what we’re going to play. Have you ever played before?”
“No,” Ted said, trying to take an inconspicuous deep breath to calm himself down as panic mounted.
“It’s pretty easy,” his opponent said and cheerfully went through the rules while Ted asked a few questions to try and wrap his head around the game. “I want to make this fair to you since you don’t know how to play, so should we say best out of three? No, best out of five, ok?”
“Best out of five sounds fair.”
The gondolier finished dealing the cards and placed the remainder of the deck on the table. The first hand started fairly slowly as Ted tried to figure out the best strategy; his opponent was patient while he fumbled and fussed with his cards. The first hand went by in silence with the gondolier winning. Ted wasn’t surprised, but he wasn’t comfortable with the fact, either. He shuffled the cards in heavy silence and tried to talk himself out of an increased feeling of doom.
“What’s your name?” he asked his opponent as he dealt the thirteen cards for the game.
“I can’t remember,” he said as if he was talking about a forecast of consistently sunny weather. “That’s the problem of being led down the Lethe. You forget things.”
Ted surveyed his cards. “How many rivers are there?”
“Five.”
“And where do they go?”
“The Underworld doesn’t really have a name, which is kind of weird, now that I think about it. And, well, only people who can afford it go, but it’s not a bad existence. You get assigned to a job and you do it. Once they find you a perfect job, you stay there. I haven’t gotten there, yet, though. We’re still trying to figure it out.”
Ted nodded and they continued play in silence before the gondolier asked, rather quietly:
“Do you remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Your name, how you died. Anything from when you were alive? Some people do, but I don’t talk to them much because they’re either crazy from shock or too snooty to bother talking to those of us who don’t.”
“Um, well, I remember my name is Ted Ryner and I worked as a security guard and I played black market poker on Saturdays. You couldn’t have picked Poker, huh?”
The gondolier smiled. “I’m not very good at it.”
That’s a shame, Ted thought as he studied his cards. He was doing better than he thought he might.
“What is black market poker?”
“We would bet on illegal stuff that people would represent with vouchers. Don’t worry, I always got cash since I didn’t want anything too incriminating on me if the cops stopped the game. I had a wife and kids to worry about.”
The game seemed to be taking a turn for the worse for Ted. Panic hit him again, but he managed to push it out of the way.
“You had a wife?”
“Listen, you’re better at this game than I am. Do you mind if we don’t talk so I can concentrate?”
“Sorry,” the boatman said so quietly Ted almost didn’t catch it. At the end of the game (Ted ended up winning), the boatman shuffled the cards and repeated his question.
“Yeah. Michelle was her name. We met in high school and weren’t really close, but she was the only person I knew in college, so we became friends. It took me a long time to realize she was the girl I wanted to marry.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Kid, she was beautiful.”
“What was she like?”
“She became a physicist in a small lab almost right out of school and she stayed working there. She was incredibly bright and a hard worker. And she loved to sing. She played piano or guitar to accompany herself when she thought I wasn’t home or the kids needed calming down. She used to sing to herself, too, when she thought she was alone. I don’t know if she loved singing more than physics, but she certainly did it a lot when she was lost in thought. She loved gardening too, which was fine by me. As long as she had a garden and plenty of yard, she was quite content.” Ted stopped talking, still stuck on his wife and the last time he saw her. The kids were out in the garden, it was sunny, and she was bent over some pink flower he had never heard of. And then, there was a knock on the door and…
He snapped back to the game. “Are you ever going to finish shuffling?” he asked, not meaning to sound hostile but coming across that way all the same.
To be continued…