I began to imitate Richard Parker in sleeping an incredible number of hours. It wasn't proper sleep, but a state of semi-consciousness in which daydreams and reality were nearly indistinguishable. I made much use of my dream rag.
These are the last pages of my diary:
Today saw a shark bigger than any I've seen till now. A primeval monster twenty feet long. Striped. A tiger shark—very dangerous. Circled us. Feared it would attack. Have survived one tiger; thought I would die at the hands of another. Did not attack. Floated away. Cloudy weather, but nothing.
No rain. Only morning greyness. Dolphins. Tried to gaff one. Found I could not stand.
R.P. weak and ill-tempered. Am so weak, if he attacks I won't be able to defend myself.
Simply do not have the energy to blow whistle.
Calm and burning hot day. Sun beating without mercy. Feel my brains are boiling inside my head. Feel horrid.
Prostrate body and soul. Will die soon. R.P. breathing but not moving. Will die too. Will not kill me.
Salvation. An hour of heavy, delicious, beautifal rain. Filled mouth, filled bags and cans, filled body till it could not take another drop. Let myself be soaked to rinse off salt.
Crawled over to see R.P. Not reacting. Body curled, tail flat. Coat clumpy with wetness.
Smaller when wet. Bony. Touched him for first time ever. To see if dead. Not. Body still warm. Amazing to touch him. Even in this condition, firm, muscular, alive. Touched him and fur shuddered as if I were a gnat. At length, head half in water stirred. Better to drink than to drown. Better sign still: tail jumped. Threw piece of turtle meat in front of nose.
Nothing. At last half rose—to drink. Drank and drank. Ate. Did not rise fully. Spent a good hour licking himself all over. Slept.
It's no use. Today I die.
I will die today.
I die.
This was my last entry. I went on from there, endured, but without noting it. Do you see these invisible spirals on the imargins of the page? I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out.
CHAPTER 90
I said, "Richard Parker, is something wrong? Have you gone blind?" as I waved my hand in his face.
For a day or two he had been rubbing his eyes and meowing disconsolately, but I thought nothing of it. Aches and pains were the only part of our diet that was abundant. I caught a dorado. We hadn't eaten anything in three days. A turtle had come up to the lifeboat the day before, but I had been too weak to pull it aboard. I cut the fish in two halves. Richard Parker was looking my way. I threw him his share. I expected him to catch it in his mouth smartly. It crashed into his blank face. He bent down. After sniffing left and right, he found the fish and began eating it. We were slow eaters now.
I peered into his eyes. They looked no different from any other day. Perhaps there was a little more discharge in the inner corners, but it was nothing dramatic, certainly not as dramatic as his overall appearance. The ordeal had reduced us to skin and bones.
I realized that I had my answer in the very act of looking. I was stairing into his eyes as if I were an eye doctor, while he was looking back vacantly. Only a blind wild cat would fail to react to such a stare.
I felt pity for Richard Parker. Our end was approaching.
The next day I started feeling a stinging in my eyes. I rubbed and rubbed, but the itch wouldn't go away. The very opposite: it got worse, and unlike Richard Parker, my eyes started to ooze pus. Then darkness came, blink as I might. At first it was right in front of me, a black spot at the centre of everything. It spread into a blotch that reached to the edges of my vision. All I saw of the sun the next morning was a crack of light at the top of my left eye, like a small window too high up. By noon, everything was pitch-black.
I clung to life. I was weakly frantic. The heat was infernal. I had so little strength I could no longer stand. My lips were hard and cracked. My mouth was dry and pasty, coated with a glutinous saliva as foul to taste as it was to smell. My skin was burnt. My shrivelled muscles ached. My limbs, especially my feet, were swollen and a constant source of pain. I was hungry and once again there was no food. As for water, Richard Parker was taking so much that I was down to five spoonfuls a day. But this physical suffering was nothing compared to the moral torture I was about to endure. I would rate the day I went blind as the day my extreme suffering began. I could not tell you when exactly in the journey it happened. Time, as I said before, became irrelevant. It must have
been sometime between the hundredth and the two-hundredth day. I was certain I would not last another one.
By the next morning I had lost all fear of death, and I resolved to die.
I came to the sad conclusion that I could no longer take care of Richard Parker. I had failed as a zookeeper. I was more affected by his imminent demise than I was by my own.