I have been carrying the dead across the Bosphorus for longer than the strait has had a name.
This is not a boast. It is a complaint. The hours are unreasonable, the dead are ungrateful, and the strait — which I have known since it was a river, since it was a valley, since it was dry land you could walk across without getting your feet wet — has opinions about my service that I find presumptuous from a body of water that cannot steer itself.
I am the ferryman. Not the mythological one — no coin, no dog, no river of the dead. I have a boat. It is small and white. The living see a fishing vessel. The dead see what it is.
My hands have not changed in twelve thousand years but they ache as if they have. Phantom aging — the body remembering a deterioration it has not been permitted to undergo. My knees are perfect and they hurt.
The dead board without tickets. They sit without speaking. They smell of the last thing they touched while alive. Soap. Motor oil. A perfume discontinued in 1987 that I have smelled eleven times in twelve thousand years — violet and smoke and the particular sweetness of a thing kept too long.
Last Tuesday: a man who smelled of parking permits and cold coffee.
He sat in the front. He did not look at the water.
"I filled out every form," he said.
"The forms don't apply here."
"I lived carefully."
"That is not the same as living."
His eyes were the color of the Bosphorus at 4 a.m. — everything that has ever crossed it, compressed into a single shade.
"Did I live well?"
They all ask. I never answer. I know everything about my passengers — their kindnesses, their cruelties, their parking permits and their abandoned daughters. But the question is not for me. It is for the water.
And the water answers, every time, with the same sound: a ferry arriving at a shore.
Which is: you are here.
He disembarked. The light on the far shore was different — better, the way light is always better when you have stopped trying to earn it.
I turned the boat. A woman was waiting. Younger than most. She carried a book she had not finished. She opened it to the page she'd been reading when she stopped everything, and continued. The dead do not often read. I slowed the crossing to give her time. She did not finish. She was not meant to. Some crossings are made with an open book and the understanding that the last chapter belongs to the water.
The Bosphorus held. The night, which is always longer than the living think and always shorter than the dead expect, continued.