Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  And in an instant, just like that, their buoyant mood went as flat as the remains of the rescue raft. It was a view full of splendor, but devoid of hope. No misty islands were waiting on the ocean’s edge. No distant cliffs caught surf across the waves. Just a tight perimeter of turquoise, and beyond that, a nauseating amount of deep oceanic blue. Nothing but an infinity of open sea in every direction one could turn, interrupted only by a tide of dark thunderheads gathering in the west. Barry’s confidence wilted; whatever general goodwill had been restored in Sophie shrank alongside it. She treated the entire universe to several moments of disparaging silence, clutching her own shoulders in a jacket of despair. Then, still without a word, she slid sideways over the edge and began to make her way back down.

  “Where are you going?” Barry asked.

  “Swimming,” she answered with a cold indifference he found deeply unsettling.

  “Are you sure?” He remembered her terror when he had first pulled her from the raft, away from the sea.

  “Oui.”

  “Want me to come with you?”

  “Non.”

  The words were peremptory and served with a sting. He let her go.

  Ten minutes later she reappeared in miniature below, walking across the beach, stripping off her meager clothing, and shaking out her hair. Barry watched her slip naked into the low waves, then turn on her back in an attitude of total repose and absolute surrender. At the end of his own emotional rope, he lay down on the rocks high above her and did the same. The two of them, though an island apart, stared up at the sky together for quite some time. Sophie waited to see if a shark would drag her under and put an end to her misery. One did not, although a school of diminutive fish did tickle her toes. Barry lay as close to the heavens as possible and waited to find out if lightning can strike twice. It can, but on that evening it did not oblige—the thunderheads dissipated without so much as a rumble, and the sun slipped down beneath a burnished copper sea, and then that day was over, too.

  Crap, thought Barry as it suddenly occurred to him: He had only two extra pairs of contacts left.

  PART TWO

  18

  The American art students catch a cab from the cemetery and have their breakfast at a café on boulevard Voltaire. Their ears are still ringing from their night at the discotheque, and their eyes are red rimmed from the cigarette smoke. They do their best to keep alive the excitement of it all, and for a while they succeed. Oh, my God, like, I can’t believe you gave that guy in the turtleneck your number, one snickers. Whoever said the number I gave him was mine, another replies. Forget the club, interjects the third—I want to talk about what happened at that grave. I mean, like, do you think anyone’s ever going to believe us?

  By the time the dishes are cleared and the coffees finished, however, what lingers of their elation has begun to wear thin. They yawn, they rub their eyes. They ask for l’addition, and the spell is broken. The giddiness of their drunks has finally worn off, and they’re ready to go back to their dorm rooms in the Latin Quarter. All except the girl with the bangs and the blue jeans, whose name is Mona. She decides to hang back, bidding her friends farewell as they step outside into the bright light and church bells. Are you sure you don’t want to come back with us? they ask. It’s totally cool if you want to crash on our couch. She says thank you but that she should probably go back to her own place. Unlike them, she’s on financial aid and has to rent a cheaper chambre de bonne in the tenth, on a derelict street called Château d’Eau.

  She watches them get into another taxi and purr away. Then she turns her head into the sun and closes her eyes, alone at last, smiling bittersweetly. She loves this city, at times more than she can bear, but it also makes her unbearably sad. It doesn’t seem to affect her other American friends in that way at all, though. They claim to “get the French” (which is a lie, nobody gets the French, not even the French) and to feel at home in Paris (also a dubious claim, no one except the homesick is truly at home there). But she has the distinct sense that their impressions are far different from hers. For them, the semester abroad from art school seems to be a pseudobohemian spring break of sorts. A brief rest stop on their path to graduation and then high-paying jobs at graphic design firms—a path she swore she never would take but now feels increasingly resigned to as well. They try to show off their shoddy French in cafés, while Mona, whose French is actually quite good, is timid about using it. They mention ancient streets casually, hinting at an unearned intimacy, while Mona, who knows them all too well, is hesitant to even evoke their names. Having just turned twenty-one, she is very young, and the city is very old, and she is excited and terrified to be part of it, to measure herself against it. So much history, so many lives … she shudders just thinking about it but smiles all the same. Her parents were right—it is definitely not like Pittsburgh.

  Mona should be tired, but she isn’t. Being on her own has left her inexplicably energized. Inspired by the sighting at the cemetery—after all, how often in life does something like that happen?—she decides to go over to the Pompidou and complete the story. A bit of closure, perhaps. She is the only one in the group who has not seen his exhibition, but then again, she is the only one in the group who has not done a great many things.

  She cuts through the quarter on rue Oberkampf, gets off it as quickly as she can—it’s still in shambles from the previous night—and crisscrosses through alleyways, until the bold architecture of the museum rises from all the wrought iron and slate. A cathedral, she thinks, to all things promising and new. It’s early enough that a line has yet to form, so she breezes right in, flashing her student ID for a well-deserved discount. A series of multilingual signs ushers her to the exhibition, which she approaches anxiously, filled with wonder. Her pace slows, her pulse quickens; this is it, what everyone’s been talking about.

  The entrance is guarded by a primitive-looking canoe suspended from the ceiling, with a strange array of objects hanging down from its sides—ticket stubs, family photos, cigarette packets, even a little rubber octopus—each attached to a fishing hook on a line. The sense of meaning they emit is imposing but indecipherable; the hovering mementos seem like fragments of an unsettling dream. Askoy III is carved into the prow, a name as mysterious as the sculpture itself. It feels out of place, a relic from a natural history museum, perhaps, the sole artifact of a vanished people. Why it is here at the entrance, she does not know. There’s a story to be told, but she has a hunch it is one she will never fully understand.

  The paintings inside, however, are beautiful—incredible—their haunting black and white pigments hovering somewhere in the murky border between the abstract and the real. One of her friends had compared them with Pat Steir’s, but no, coloration aside, these are something else entirely. Murals, really, they are immense in both scope and character, taking up entire walls. Up close, they seem to depict blending bands of nocturnal shade; a few steps back, they reveal solitary islands, slumbering in the night. The sprawling canvases are compelling, but not easy to digest. She stares at each one for a long time, struggling to make aesthetic sense of something that, much like a human life or the future before her, she suspects might not make any sense at all. They’re just too big, too beautiful, too hard to take in all at once.

  Except one. The final piece in the exhibition is different. Far from being an expansive, semi-abstract seascape, it is instead a portrait. It’s smaller, more intimate, and it is the only one that’s not black and white. It reminds her in its composition of a Rousseau, but in style more like a Gauguin, rich as it is with a slow burn of Polynesian color. It is of a woman, sleeping beneath a palm at the base of a mountain. She cradles tenderly in one arm a slumbering infant and in the other arm a single bunch of green bananas.

  Mona begins weeping, she’s not sure why, the tears stinging her eyes and making streaks of her makeup. She smears them away and leans forward to read the title of the painting, thinking it is one she would like to remember. Château d’Eau, sta
tes the little French plaque beside the frame, a name that she knows all too well. Below that, in bold italics, the English title reads Castle of Water. A mistranslation by some French intern, she can only assume, or some overworked printer’s obvious mistake.

  19

  For most citizens of the “civilized,” climate-controlled world, there are the usual means of measuring time. Clocks, calendars, cable television seasons—the things that dutifully gauge our progress through life. The sorts of tools one takes for granted until the little LCD screen is cracked, the watchband severed, the Casio casing filled with salt water. How does one measure the days then? For sure there is the rising of the sun, the setting of the moon, the slow churn of the stars—but their repetitiveness tends to make one day indistinguishable from the next. Barry Bleecker and Sophie Ducel learned that the hard way, and they gradually found other ways to keep track of time.

  First, there were the disasters recorded. Not even taking into account the personal tragedy that had visited both of their lives, their first year on the island was full of calamity. When the BBC broke the news of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers over the shortwave radio, Barry was stunned—his office at Lehman Brothers had been just across the street from the World Trade Center. When word came that both of the towers had collapsed into cinders, he crumpled to the sand and stared feebly at the sea. Two weeks later, when Radio France informed Sophie that an explosion at a chemical plant in Toulouse had caused more than two thousand casualties, she was shocked—she had cousins who worked there, people she’d grown up with, and there was no way to know if they had escaped the inferno. A November hurricane raked across Cuba, December saw terrorists hiding bombs in their shoes, January brought a volcanic disaster in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and all across the globe armies seemed to be gathering, marching in time to a cadence of doom.

  And then there were the pounds lost. Barry did the best he could to supplement their meager diet with the odd fish that slipped through Balthazar’s tentacles, or the occasional whelk that washed up from the sea, and Sophie did the best she could to make it all palatable, experimenting with conch fritters and coconut-sprinkled sashimi. But the vast bulk of their diet comprised half-wild bananas. And although the ancient Polynesians had been generous in their planting, rationing was still called for, as the green bunches were always in varied stages of ripeness; only a handful were generally edible at one time. There was no scale on the island, but after the first month, Barry reckoned he had lost some fifteen pounds; after three months, it seemed closer to thirty; and by month six, his weight had stabilized at somewhere around one hundred and fifty pounds—sixty pounds lighter than the soft-middled banker who had vanished at sea. As for Sophie, her weight loss was less dramatic, as she had been on the thin side to begin with, but it was noticeable nonetheless. In the first few weeks, her breasts shrank and her derriere flattened (“J’ai la fesse triste!” she cried), and several months in, she was confident that at least ten kilos had fallen from her figure. The end of that year saw them both wearing tattered loincloths and nothing else. Their respective garments had long since ceased to fit, any coyness had long since vanished, and trimming down their baggy clothes to breechcloths made far more sense. Even Sophie’s wedding ring, the only memento she had left of her beloved Étienne, had taken to slipping off her finger; she in turn had taken to wearing it around her neck on a filament of fishing line.

  And then there were the fights—or, perhaps more accurately, eruptions, because they were nothing short of volcanic in their intensity. Colossal ventings of magma and steam, shouting matches in which the rage seemed directed as much at the pale silence of the universe around them as at the red-faced person screaming three feet away. Oh, at first they had been relatively civil with each other, making pleasant conversation around the fire and discussing their plans for when they returned home. Barry’s constant joint cracking and nervous tics did irk Sophie to no end, and her own borderline OCD when it came to cleanliness certainly put his patience to the test. But for the first few weeks, things were more or less calm. That veneer of civility, however, held out only as long as their hope did. Once the reality of their situation became apparent, the fear and the anger both came roaring out.

  One month in, sometime in early May, there was the infamous Incident de caca, as it came to be known by both parties involved. Barry, who back in New York was accustomed to midnight jaunts to the bathroom, had picked up the habit of relieving himself in the ocean when nature called—finding the latrine without his contact lenses proved inconvenient, if not impossible, and stumbling a few yards into the surf was considerably easier. At least, until a piercing scream startled him awake at some dim, predawn hour. Sophie had gotten up extra early to bathe in the ocean, only to encounter the evidence of his late-night escapades floating maliciously before her. Before Barry could even get a contact lens in, he was being spun out of the hammock and kicked across the sand by the enraged Sophie, who in addition to administering deft blows with her feet showered upon him all manner of French insults. “Non, mais t’es vraiment dégueulasse, putain! Tu chies dans l’eau comme un vieux cochon et tu laisses flotter ta merde! On t’as jamais appris à être civilisé et distingué! Putain! Putain!” The bewildered Barry flew into a rage all his own, telling her in return that she was a psychopathic nut job, that she should be locked up in a goddamn insane asylum with her tits in a straitjacket, and then threw in for good measure that her hairy armpits made him want to throw up. But from that day forward, he found his way to the latrine no matter the hour, and Sophie never brought it up again.

  Six weeks after that, coincidentally not too far from the Fourth of July, a regrettable event known as Le débâcle de fusées de détresse ensued. Darkness had fallen, embers were being stirred, and the shortwave was burbling out a news broadcast in an unknown tongue when something caught Sophie’s eye: a pinprick of light making its way through the constellations. Mistaking the celestial body for an airplane, she leapt to her feet and showed its position with a series of vigorous, pointing jabs. “Un avion! Un avion!” she cried. Barry snickered—somewhat condescendingly—and retorted that she ought to sit back down, it was just a satellite. But Sophie, perhaps blinded by her own desperation, insisted that it was not and beckoned wildly for the flare gun, which was tucked in Barry’s waistband. When he flatly refused, she made a lunge for it, and the two ended up struggling and rolling about the fire, cursing and maligning each other in the cruelest of terms. Sophie called him a gros connard and a couillon d’américain mal élevé, and Barry labeled her an uneducated moron, even going so far as to call into question a culture that cared more about cheese and full-bodied wines than it did teaching its youth the basics of astronomy. Barry stood up and held the flare gun over his head, with Sophie on tiptoe attempting to pry it from his grip, when it accidentally went off, straight into the sky. They both fell to the ground and covered their eyes, expecting some fantastic explosion, and were subsequently disappointed to watch the red trail of sparks give way to a fizzling little pop—a weak and watery firework indeed. The satellite continued its crawl across the heavens while Sophie buried her head in her arms and began sobbing. Barry threw the flare gun at her feet and stormed off, cursing and lobbing nonsensical threats all the way, as furious and brokenhearted as she was yet at the same time at least mildly grateful that she had not shot his dick off in the tussle—not that he was getting much use out of it, anyway.

  August saw the Great Driftwood Debate (really more of a screaming match, it was initiated when Barry insisted on building an unnecessary fire); a shortage of ripe bananas and the predominance of Balthazar produced the epic Famine Fight of November (a pushing contest born of pure hunger, fear, and nothing more); and December’s inordinate heat resulted in the mingled insults and accusations of the Grand Drinking Water Dispute (Sophie committed the unforgivable sin of bathing in one of their two drinking water pools). And when the incessant rains of the wet season arrived just before the new yea
r, the verbal battles only became that much more pitched. For while time had brought changes to both a bearded, bedraggled Barry and a scrawny, sunburned Sophie, one thing that had not changed one iota was their sleeping arrangement. Amid the vinegar showers and bitter winds that marked that dampest portion of the year, he remained faceup in his hammock and she curled beneath her tinfoil survival blanket in the tarp-covered shelter. By that point, Sophie resented Barry too much to invite him beneath its protective roof, and Barry despised her too much to ask. He seethed and cursed through the endless downpours; she swore and smoldered from within the dankness of the shelter. “Fuck her,” Barry would mutter as the rain pelted him through the long, dark night. “Vas te faire foutre,” Sophie would hiss each time the ropes creaked beneath his sleepless weight. There was no escaping it—the rains or their situation—and their frustration was slowly fermenting into unspeakable rage. Deserving or not, they hated each other, nearly as much as they hated the island, and neither could imagine it any other way. Even listening to the radio had become a major source of conflict, as the two of them would argue for hours before agreeing upon a station. In the end, they found it best to leave the thing off when they were together. No music programs, no weather reports, just spiteful silence—which was why they had no idea as to the danger that was headed their way.

  20

  Generally speaking, the South Pacific has never been especially prone to hurricanes—or cyclones, as they’re known in that corner of the globe. But when they do come whirling through the neighborhood, they tend to be inordinately destructive. Tahiti, for example, has no official hurricane season to speak of. But that didn’t deter six separate cyclones from hitting the islands in a single year between 1982 and 1983. The storms walloped French Polynesia in rapid succession, leaving entire towns and villages leveled in their wake. Similar destruction visited the South Pacific in the early 1990s as well, when another lethal spate of cyclones swept through the region. Why these periodic bursts of ferocious hurricane activity? El Niño. The most innocuous sounding of meteorologic phenomenon, an old weatherman’s trick for explaining a wet forecast. But while that slipstream of warm equatorial water gives most of the Western Hemisphere nothing more than a few spring showers, it has a tendency to wreak havoc in the southern portion of Polynesia. And as it just so happened, 2002 turned out to be an El Niño year.