John Tavares
Greg possessed a simple, hungry indulgence for danger. His life was a catalogue of verticality and depth: rock climbing, roof-topping, marathon swimming, and the silent descent of free diving. Though he had been raised amidst the rugged, rolling Canadian Shield of Northwestern Ontario—a terrain of ancient rock that offered summits to hike rather than true mountains to scale—he sought the sharpest edges wherever he could find them. Of all his pursuits, free diving stirred the deepest consternation. Even Greg grew disturbed by the depths he reached and the unnatural stretches of time he spent suspended in the dark water. It was only when the physical toll became undeniable—when his gait began to stumble, his speech slurred into a thick lethargy, and a persistent brain fog clouded his thoughts—that he finally chose to stop. The fear of anoxia, of a brain starved of oxygen and permanently scarred, was the only thing capable of tempering his compulsions.
Yet, a new set of anxieties had begun to take root. He felt a protective, nervous energy toward the novel he carried in his backpack: a thick leather-bound accounting journal, purchased in a dusty London stationers, now heavy with three hundred pages of his own compressed handwriting.
He told himself he didn’t have a care in the world, yet that very vacuum of responsibility had begun to bother him. He believed he had successfully outrun the madness of his family and the ghost of his girlfriend, finally discovering a scenic pocket of the world where serenity seemed possible.
Ignoring the local warnings of a deluge that could swallow the cave systems whole, he had wandered miles along the shoreline. As the forecasted rain finally broke over the village, he sought shelter within the rock. His hosts at the bed and breakfast had been explicit about the meteorological dangers, but Greg hadn’t truly been listening. Or perhaps, subconsciously, he was listening to a different call entirely.
The caves were a labyrinth of smooth, photogenic stone that fascinated him with their complexity. Finding a narrow passage, he settled onto a large, flat rock surrounded by the rising water, finding rest in the very place he had been told to fear. He decided, at the very least, to indulge in the wine gifted to him by a fellow traveler on the train. Spreading his blanket over the large, smooth surface of the rock, he sat amidst the slow encroaching of the flood. He ate simply: a slice of homemade bread baked from ancient grains, a few chunks of sharp cheese, and rhythmic sips of the red wine.
From his pack, he pulled the leather-bound Bible a Bavarian priest had pressed into his hands during a long, soul-baring conversation on a train through Germany. The priest had listened to Greg’s stories and offered a quiet observation: it sounded as if he were on a spiritual quest, whether he chose to name it so or not.
As the natural light in the cave began to fail, dissolving into a bruised twilight, Greg set the physical Bible aside and reached for his Kindle. He found the King James Version in his library and returned to Genesis. Once again, he was struck by the sheer, rhythmic poetry of the prose—a literary weight that matched the ancient stone around him.
The water continued to rise, creeping up the sides of his stone island. Yet, Greg remained suspended in that hypnotic, backlit trance induced by the e-reader. The blue glow of the screen masked the deepening shadows of the cave, and the silence of his reading insulated him from the subtle, liquid sounds of the environment changing around him.
By the time he finally looked up, the reality of his predicament was absolute. The rising tide had choked the passageways; there was no longer enough clearance to walk, crawl, or even squeeze through. He stared at the dark channels, knowing he couldn’t risk swimming through an unfamiliar subterranean network. He suspected there were already long stretches of the cave completely submerged, and despite his history as a free diver, his recent fears of anoxia held him
back. He didn’t trust his lungs—or his mind—to hold out long enough to find the surface.
There was also the matter of his backpack. Along with the ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin mushrooms he’d acquired from Saskia, a Dutch DJ in Amsterdam, he carried the only existing copy of his life’s work. The drugs were loosely packaged, unlikely to survive a soaking, but it was the manuscript that truly anchored him to the rock.
The novel had become the unexpected, thematic marrow of his travels—an obsession that had consumed him entirely. He had no photocopies, no digital backups, no safety net. To swim was to drown the words, to turn three hundred pages of handwritten soul into a pulpy, illegible mass.
He decided to stay put. He watched the water with a mounting, quiet anxiety, praying the tide would peak before it reached his head, trapped between the rising earth and his own uncopied history.
He frequently lectured himself on the necessity of duplication—reminding himself to photograph the manuscript’s pages with his digital SLR and store the images on an external hard drive or a thumb drive. But he had never quite reached that threshold of pragmatism. Now, as the floodwaters in the coastal cave continued their steady ascent, he realized he had become a captive of the very natural forces he once sought to master. There was no higher ground to claim, and the risk of drowning in the lightless, submerged channels made escape a fool’s errand. In the dim light, Greg reached into his pack and retrieved a plastic container. He selected a tablet that looked and was labeled like Xanax—part of the chemical care package gifted to him by the Dutch DJ who had expressed a fleeting desire to date him, to perhaps even visit him in Canada. She had tucked extra tablets into small, resealable bags, advising him to use them if the other substances—the mushrooms or the MDMA—put him into a “lurch or a tizzy.” She had warned of a “greenout,” a psychic spiraling he was now experiencing for entirely different reasons.
He swallowed the sedative, reasoning that a chemical crutch was his only defense against the looming panic. It was a strange, unexpected development; the girl’s hedonistic gifts were now serving a clinical purpose in a scenario he had never anticipated.
Searching the walls for watermarks or some sign of the cave’s high-water history, Greg found nothing but smooth, indifferent stone. He turned to the bottle of Port a fellow traveler had given him, savoring the final, syrupy sips as the sedative began to work its quiet magic. In the burgeoning stillness of the drugs, a moment of sharp moral clarity pierced through. He felt a sudden, heavy impulse to write goodbye letters—to reach out to the wreckage of his family and the ghost of his ex-girlfriend. But the list was short and haunted. His parents had already
perished, leaving behind a legacy of bitter litigation.
He remained deeply estranged from his sisters. They had accused him of using his background in finance to embezzle funds from their mother’s estate—a stinging irony, given that his university education in economics and his years as a financial advisor had allowed him to generate handsome returns for his parents. They had never acknowledged how he had turned their pensions into compounding wealth; they saw only a thief where there was a steward. Opening his accounting journal to the blank back pages, Greg began to write to his twin sisters, his pen moving with a frantic honesty. Then, he turned a page to write to his youngest sister—the family’s athlete, a competitive rower of international standing. In hindsight, the letter was a heavy vessel of disappointment. He couldn’t help but remember the last time they spoke, when she had turned her physical strength against him, slapping him repeatedly with the rhythmic force of someone lifting weights, each strike landing harder than the last.
During that final altercation, his sister had struck him with such velocity that his jaw slammed shut, the force shattering his front teeth. Even as the copper taste of blood filled his mouth and the argument raged on, he never raised a hand against her. He had never raised a hand against her in his life.
The injury had occurred mere hours before they were scheduled to meet the funeral director to arrange their mother’s service. The family matriarch was no longer there to mediate, to arbitrate their bitter disputes, or to exert the formidable authority that had once forced her offspring to maintain a veneer of peace. In the aftermath, his sister seemed baffled by his silence, but Greg had simply gone mute. He chose a self-imposed exile of speech to avoid the fruitless, violent cycles that had already decimated what remained of their dysfunctional bond. This sentiment served as the coda to the letter he now wrote to her—a requiem and a goodbye scrawled in the back of his journal.
As the floodwaters rose, a dry, dusty thirst settled in his throat. He dug into his pack and found an insulated bottle of Portuguese wine. He had bought it as a replacement for a vintage gifted to him by a fellow hostel resident, shocked that something so exquisite could be so remarkably inexpensive. He sipped it now, the rich notes of the wine at odds with the damp, mineral air of the cave.
There was one final piece of unfinished business. He turned to a fresh page to compose an au revoir to his ex-girlfriend—the woman who had first introduced him to the pull of global travel. If this note survived his presumed drowning, he wanted her to know the truth.
He apologized for failing to be the provider she required, and for the fact that he was, at his core, a loner who preferred the company of his own shadows. He asked for her forgiveness for the way he had ended things—ghosting her after she had pleaded for one last meeting at the Eaton Centre food court in Toronto. He tried to offer her a strange kind of solace, reminding her that she was now unencumbered, free from the onerous ties that had bound them. He hoped she would find the fulfillment he couldn’t provide and finally start the family she craved.
He looked down; the black water was moving with a new, predatory speed.
Greg carefully closed the thick accounting journal. He tucked the goodbye letters and the manuscript into a resealable bag, then double-wrapped it in another layer of plastic. He worked with meticulous care, determined to ensure his words remained waterproof even if the cave—which he had explored on a dangerous, foolish whim—decided to claim the man who wrote them.
His taste for danger had been his undoing, or so he had confessed in his letter to Julia. He apologized for walking away from his career as an investment advisor at the bank, a role she viewed as the foundation for the life she demanded. Julia had been insistent on an engagement, a wedding, and the construction of a traditional, mid-century domesticity that felt to Greg like a gilded cage. He hadn’t left because he wanted to be a “hipster,” or a “hippie,” as she had mockingly claimed; he had left because he refused to be a slave to her expectations. Her last
words to him: “You’re not the man I thought I knew. You’ve become a hipster.”
Now, sitting in the rising dark of the cave and fueled by the uncharacteristic volume of wine he’d consumed, he finally admitted the truth to himself: he did want to be a vagabond. He craved the fringes of the counterculture.
As the tide of water continued to claim the cavern, a strange, chemical serenity settled over him. He finished the last of the bread and cheese, washing it down with the final dregs of the wine. It felt like a secular Last Supper. He returned to the beginning of Genesis on his Kindle, mesmerized by the ancient, rhythmic beauty of the prose. He wondered, with a touch of grim ego, who else had the luxury of such a pursuit in the final hours of their life? Eventually, the flashlight he’d salvaged from his pack flickered and died. Bathed only in the cool, blue glow of the e-reader, Greg felt a profound peace—a cocktail of the wine, the Xanax, and the weight of a full stomach. He lay back on the flat rock, just inches above the lapping water, and drifted into a heavy, vivid sleep.
When he awoke twelve hours later, he was bathed in sudden, blinding sunlight. He felt the thick throb of a hangover, but it was eclipsed by a surge of spontaneous relief: the tide had receded completely. Judging by the damp watermarks on the stone, the flood had stopped just short of the rim of his rock.
It took hours of backtracking through the limestone maze, but he eventually emerged onto the lakeshore. He walked the familiar trails back to the village, his boots heavy but his spirit jubilant. After reaching his bed and breakfast, he headed straight to a local café, indulging in coffee and fresh bread, lingering over newspapers until nearly midnight. The world felt new, vibrant, and earned.
Returning to his lodgings, he decided to perform a final ritual of closure. He would burn the goodbye letters. He was alive; there was no need for a requiem.
Standing over the kitchen sink in a state of exhaustion, he struck a match. He held the journal over the basin, intending to burn only the back pages. But in his fatigued, clouded state, he hadn’t torn the letters free. The flame caught the heavy paper and climbed greedily. As the fire spread to the ledger pages containing the only draft of his novel—his new life’s work—he panicked and twisted the faucet.
Nothing happened. The landlord had shut off the main valve to conserve water during the drought.
Then the smoke detector went off—a shrill, spectacular shriek that shattered the midnight quiet.
Panic surged through him, sharper than any fear he had felt in the cave. Greg lunged for the bathroom, grabbing a towel and a bucket he’d left beneath the shower drip. As a second alarm began its rhythmic wail, the house stirred; the muffled groans and hurried footsteps of the other guests vibrated through the floorboards.
He threw the water and beat at the sink with the sodden towel, but it was a desperate, losing battle. The heavy ledger paper had caught with a hungry intensity. By the time the last spark died, the pages of his novel—the three hundred handwritten sheets of his soul—were a black, curled mass of illegible ash.
At the ungodly hour of two in the morning, Greg stood in the kitchen, smelling of smoke and defeat, forced to offer hollow reassurances to the frightened guests. He stood there, a man who had survived the rising tide, now drowning in the mundane embarrassment of a kitchen fire. The next morning offered no reprieve. His landlord appeared in the hallway, a man of immaculate English and surreal attire: a pair of boxer shorts patterned with bright yellow pineapples. His patience had reached its limit. “I have had quite enough of your antics, Greg,” he said, his voice flat and final. He was told to pack his bags immediately; the peace of the other paying guests and the long-term tenants was a sanctuary Greg had forfeited.
He left the village as a ghost of the man who had entered it, his backpack lighter by the weight of three hundred pages.
Weeks later, by the time Greg reached the gray, brutalist sprawl of Belgrade, the final cord of his old life was severed—and a new one was tied. A notification chimed on his phone: an email and a string of texts from the Dutch DJ in Amsterdam. Saskia’s message was brief, shorn of the hedonistic glow of the nightclub where they had met. She was pregnant.
Greg stared at the screen, the Balkan wind biting at his face. He had spent his life chasing the edge of the abyss, convinced he was a solitary creature, a man of temporary connections and drifting smoke. He had never imagined himself capable of leaving anything permanent behind—neither a book, nor a legacy, nor a life.
Greg stood on the cracked pavement of a Belgrade street, the phone a cold, glowing weight in his palm. Around him, the city moved with an indifferent, rhythmic bustle—people heading to work, children being ushered to school, lives being built on foundations of duty he had spent a decade trying to outrun.
He thought of the charred ash in the sink back at the bed and breakfast. He had burned his goodbye letters because he was alive, yet he had accidentally incinerated his soul in the process. He had felt light then, a man without a history or a project. But as he reread the DJ’s message, that lightness curdled into a terrifying gravity.
He had once joked to the Bavarian priest that he was on a spiritual quest, a seeker of heights and depths. He realized now that he had been looking for the abyss in all the wrong places—underwater, on rooftops, in the glow of a Kindle. The true abyss wasn’t a cave or a mountain; it was the sudden, undeniable presence of another person who needed him to stay on the ground.
He didn’t reply yet. He simply put the phone in his pocket, adjusted the straps of his lightened pack, and began to walk. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t looking for a cliff to climb or a hole to dive into. He was just looking for the way home.