Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  She didn’t finish. Barry was kissing her before she ever had the chance, and before she knew it, she was kissing him back.

  31

  No lurid details are required to guess what followed on the eve of Barry’s thirty-sixth birthday. And it’s safe to say, after more than a year of desperate loneliness and grinding celibacy, no tawdry passages are needed to illuminate just how erotically charged such an encounter must have been. One juicy tidbit, however, does warrant mention: Up until that fateful night, orgasms for both Barry and Sophie had been infrequent, lackluster, and unconditionally solitary affairs, involving some awkward fumbling in the undergrowth and a sullen dose of overimagination (Barry tended to envision encounters with a diverse cast of Victoria’s Secret models; Sophie, a square-jawed Quebecois pop star she had pined for in her late teens named Roch Voisine). But that first night together, the climaxes both Barry and Sophie experienced—technically four seconds apart, but practically mutual—were more cathartic, powerful, and flat-out earth-shattering than either had ever known before. The pleasure they unloaded was transcendent; the emotion they released, indescribable. Sophie flooded the divot in Barry’s collarbone with tears, Barry quaked with an almost epileptic intensity, and then they plummeted together as one into the dark well of sleep, trembling their way toward the same bright dream.…

  * * *

  Then morning came. And with it, the type of hangover only medical-grade ethanol can produce and the sort of awkward regret only highly imprudent sex can bring. Granted, there was that warm moment of half-conscious bliss, when the sun poured its honey through the latticework of palm fronds and four sets of eyelashes first began to flutter. But the memories of the previous night were not far behind it.

  “Merde, putain!” Sophie tore herself away from Barry’s embrace and leapt to her feet, only to catch them in the panties that were still down around one ankle (it was her only pair and she seldom wore them, but she had slipped them on just for the occasion). Her frantic attempt at escape had the exact opposite result, as she lost her balance and fell directly back on top of the nude, half-awake, and severely hungover Barry, who could barely see thanks to the pair of dried-out contact lenses he’d neglected to take out the night before.

  “Ow, what the hell are you doing?”

  Sophie pushed herself off of him and executed a backward crab crawl to the other end of the shelter. “Non, non, non, c’est pas possible. This can’t be happening.”

  “What can’t … God, I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Barry lunged for the door at the same moment Sophie sprang to recover her tattered black panties, which had somehow traveled from her ankle to Barry’s chest. Their heads knocked together with a cartoonishly wooden, bowling alley sound.

  “Jesus Christ!” Barry yelled, rolling in agony, his headache now that much more splitting. And he would have continued to do so for several more minutes had his riled guts not suddenly taken priority. On all fours and naked as a jaybird, he scurried across the palm mat and out of the shelter, heaving and gagging all the way.

  “Real fucking romantic,” Sophie shouted back, her own head in her arms, rocking as if to comfort herself.

  The heaves passed and Barry ducked back inside, wiping his mouth and collapsing beside her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Do I look okay?” Sophie’s eyes smoldered with the same desperate mix of anger and fear he remembered seeing in them just after the crash.

  “I know neither of us planned this, but—”

  “Of course neither of us planned this, Barry! Do you know what could happen?”

  “Well, I mean, I’m not that acquainted with standard dating protocol for island castaways, but technically we’re both single and—”

  “I could get pregnant, connard.”

  By that point, Barry had been called connard enough times to have figured out it translated roughly to “asshole,” with rough connotations of “idiot” as well. But the implications of coupling on a desert island had not fully occurred to him. He did, however, recall from a similar scare some years before with his ex-girlfriend Ashley that the much-coveted negative result on the home pregnancy test was vaguely contingent on the menstrual cycle. And he suddenly felt that pang of terror once again.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

  Sophie swallowed hard and rubbed her face with the heels of her hands. “Both of us did it, not just you. And I think it will be okay. I just had my period last week.”

  Barry exhaled a long, relieved hiss of a sigh. “Look, you don’t have to worry. It won’t happen again.”

  Then, Sophie began to cry. She hid her face, but her shoulders shuddered in small, rhythmic, birdlike shakes.

  “Sophie, I’m sorry, really, but I swear, it won’t—”

  “Tu es vraiment bête, Barry! Putain!”

  “What? What?” Barry was desperately confused.

  “I want it to happen again, you fucking asshole.” And at this point she was sobbing. Relentlessly sobbing. “I haven’t had a reason to live since the plane went down, and last night, for the first time, I felt like I did again. It was wonderful. Putain de merde!”

  Before Sophie could say anything more, Barry had put his arms around her and was stroking her hair. She, in turn, wrapped her arms around him, and they held on tightly to each other until the tears subsided.

  It was 9:43 A.M. local time, July 16, 2002. An asteroid the size of a soccer field had just narrowly missed earth. A burned love letter had caused one of the biggest wildfires in Colorado history. AK-47s were crackling across Afghanistan, the United States’ soccer team had recently defeated Portugal 3 to 2, and Barry Bleecker and Sophie Ducel came to the unsettling realization that as absurd as it sounded, they were actually in love.

  On a goddamn desert island, no less.

  * * *

  Several hours of joyous, exhausting, and nerve-racking conversation ensued as the two castaways struggled to make sense of an emotion that seemed ghastly out of place given their current predicament. Indeed, the idea that love—or at least something that felt an awful lot like it—could exist between them sounded totally preposterous. But there was no denying it. Sophie stuttered and fumbled over explanations of why it had taken her so long to realize it, and Barry stammered and struggled over why it had taken him so long to do something about it. Implications were discussed, agreements were made, and precautions deemed necessary were promised to be taken—after all, if what had happened the night before was to be repeated, extreme care would be required by both of them. The whole beautifully clumsy affair ended with a surprisingly tender hug, a round of apologies and pledges, and, at last, an admission that they both needed a little time alone to consider what had transpired.

  As for Sophie, she spent most of the afternoon seated on the sand with her knees tucked up under her chin. She watched the spires of cumulus climb to the high blue of the heavens and laces of foam crease the deep blue of the sea. Whatever she was mulling or struggling with was finally resolved with a relieved nod and a slow rising to her feet. She walked down to the water’s edge and removed the wedding ring that still hung around her neck from a thin filament of fishing line. She laid the kindest of kisses upon the gold band, said the dignified and loving farewell that the crash had deprived her of, and threw it as far as she could out into the water, to get it as close as she could to her dear Étienne. At last, after more than a year, she could finally breathe.

  As for Barry, he took up in that moment of rapture and confusion the very thing that had gotten him there in the first place. He gathered the two brushes and twin canisters of paint, walked rather pensively through the palm forest, and made his way up the steep bank of rocks. The terns honked at him and a tandem of overprotective parents executed a series of intimidating swoops, but Barry hardly noticed, so consumed was he by the memories of the night he and Sophie had shared and the promise that painting was soon to come.

  At the mouth of the little cave, he took a seat
. Angled sunlight was seeping in from the west, and he required no flashlight to see what he was doing. Carefully, he chose the portion of smooth gray basalt that would serve as his canvas, measuring its proportions with the palms of his hands. He moistened the tips of his brushes between his lips, then took a deep breath and decided it was time to begin. Hands shaking ever so slightly, he let himself go, making a surprising discovery in the process. He found himself consumed with a single, vaporous image: that of the island, the way he had seen it when the storm was battering him out to sea, the way it had looked when he and Sophie went swimming in the starlight. And that was what he painted, in the bone-white shade of clamshells and the pitch-black stain of coal. Around it, full moons, silent stars, and an almost biblically dark sea. It was chiaroscuro in the purest sense of the unpronounceable word, rendered with a level of abstraction that he had not known himself to be capable of. His earlier paintings had always been hampered by a forced realism—perception at its most surface level. On this day, however, his brush was guided solely by a feeling, one that he knew his words could never do justice to. Painting like this was something new, something he’d never done before. And for a few hours, he wasn’t a lowly mortal struggling to survive on a raw patch of sand—he was an artist, positioned like a prophet six stories above it, dabbing his brushes, casting his paints, jousting with angels, and waltzing with the gods.

  * * *

  The sunlight had diminished almost entirely when Barry emerged from his cave and went down the mountain, brushes and paints held tightly in hand. He returned through the palm grove and found Sophie seated, smiling at him in the plum-colored dusk. She said bonsoir, and he said it to her back, and he couldn’t help noticing something different in her bearing. She asked him what he’d done with his afternoon. Painting, he told her, making no effort to disguise his joy or his pride. She smiled again and asked what he had painted. The island, he answered, and he sat down beside her.

  They dined on a fresh bunch of bananas, as there was no driftwood left for a fire, and decided to turn in early—Barry planned on trying out the boat again in the morning, to see if it might serve its purpose and help him catch fish. He crawled through the hut entrance and onto the soft weave of the palm mat and was pleasantly surprised when Sophie slid in seamlessly beside him. She rested her head on his shoulder, and he caressed her hair. Do you think you’ll ever paint me? she asked after a minute of pleasant silence. I will, he told her, once we get off this island. Really, you will? Oui, he replied. But I’m going to need more than two colors to do you justice.

  And a little less lonely, in a night slightly less dark, the two of them both let the patter of raindrops sing them to sleep …

  Until Barry realized that he’d forgotten, yet again, to take out his contacts.

  PART THREE

  32

  There is also an exhibit of Ai Weiwei’s latest sculptures, a Cindy Sherman photography retrospective, a corridor full of Jackson Pollocks, and an entire floor devoted to Marcel Duchamp—all of which are very good, none of which receive from Mona the consideration they deserve. She’d like to give those masterpieces her undivided attention, but the hem of her thoughts is still snagged on the hooked nail of his work. Those haunting black-and-white paintings of the island, frightening in both their scale and their beauty, and that strange floating mobile with all the fishhooks … She finally gives it a rest, though, when her distracted meandering causes her to nearly bump into Marcel’s infamous urinal. A security guard scolds her, and Mona tiptoes quietly away.

  Before leaving, however, she stops at the gift shop. She wonders if there might be some book or companion piece to the exhibition—something to tell her more than the canvases could on their own. She scans the shelves, but there is nothing. Not that it should surprise her. She knows that he never gives interviews and seldom makes anything resembling a public appearance. There was that short profile she read in The New Yorker, but even that seemed more conjecture than actual fact. Just a slightly more eloquent telling of what everyone already pretended to know.

  Oh, well. Resigned to keep pretending, too, Mona exits the Pompidou and only then, with that sudden burst of cool air and light, realizes that she has the beginnings of an unpleasant hangover. She also remembers that she is totally out of Nurofen tablets—and then, on top of that, recalls that the pharmacies in Paris are closed on Sundays. She sighs and walks into a Franprix instead, fishing out just enough euros from her pocket for an ice-cold Orangina—not quite ibuprofen, but it will have to do. The old man behind the counter makes a rather sassy comment in French, to which Mona feels confident enough to reply in kind. The old man smiles, evidently impressed. Not quite the poulette he mistook her for when she came in.

  The day overall is pleasant enough, but walking down the street, Mona notices the rain clouds. Nothing too severe, just a small charcoal cluster poised above the city. But she feels the moisture in the air, and soon she sees the scatter of drops begin to freckle the cement. She doubts it will last long—spring rains seldom do in Paris—but she also has no wish to get soaked in the meantime. And she has no money left to buy a few minutes in a café. So instead, she cuts her walk short and hurries straight into the Rambuteau Métro stop, where, if she’s not mistaken, she can take the eleven to République. She taps her Navigo pass just as a train is pulling in and nearly gets her purse caught in the closing doors. But she jerks it free and takes the first seat, settling back and rubbing her temples. She is on the verge of closing her eyes when she catches sight of the advertisement—a travel poster for vacations to French Polynesia. La vie est toujours plus facile sur une île, says the poster, below a picture of a man and a woman strolling down a beach. Life is always easier on an island.

  Mona stares at the poster with a sad, ironic smile and wonders if he would share that sentiment. Somehow she doubts it. After all, how did he do it? How did they do it? What does it take to not only survive such a thing, but then live the rest of your life with that thing inside you?

  That’s if the stories were true, of course—the answer to which she, like everyone else, could only pretend to know.

  The train commences its electric glide toward home, and Mona at last can close her eyes … at least, until the conductor rattles off Hôtel de Ville and Châtelet, and she realizes she is going in the wrong direction.

  Shit. She gets off at the last stop and stands alone in a sea of people, suddenly feeling exceptionally lost. She sighs and with an underhand toss pitches the empty Orangina bottle into the garbage. She misses. A custodian picks it up before she has the chance, setting it gently into the bin. She thanks him with an apologetic smile—he responds with a weary nod. Still a tourist after all.

  33

  If the first year Barry and Sophie spent together on the island could be called a study in torture, then the second might be deemed an exercise in patience. No, things were not quite as bad as they’d been during those first dark months. There was at least some food to eat, they had at least something resembling an actual home, and if nothing else, at the very least they had each other. But even with the realization of their mutual affection, maintaining health, both physical and mental, proved to be a constant challenge.

  For the latter, they did have their memories. Nights were spent in quiet conversation, reminiscing about their past lives and wondering how their loved ones were getting along back home. The most seemingly insignificant thing could take on a fresh sense of abundance on the blank slate of an unknown island. Sophie once spent two full hours describing the drive from Toulouse to Gavarnie with her parents in the little beige Peugeot, the narrow bridges hung taut as a kite string and the reams of high rock pocketed with snow. Barry used the better part of a night to tell her about the first time his father had taken him rabbit hunting in Illinois, how the whip-poor-wills had circled in a wild frenzy and he had been too frightened to pull the trigger on the .410 shotgun. A whole evening was devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house, including the cool smell
of concrete and the black outline of elm leaves in the bottom of the plunge pool, and the MoMA—just the fifth floor, mind you—demanded from midnight until dawn to fully render its oil-based splendors, with Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy and Munch’s The Storm both saved for another night entire. Side by side in the palm-thatched hut, Barry and Sophie would hold each other, and they would talk about the world as they remembered it, and those two things were what pulled them back from the brink. And on those especially harrowing nights when all else failed (their second Christmas Eve together was a good example), there was always the shortwave, as even something as simple as “Silent Night” on the BBC could quiet the sobs and keep a panic attack at bay. Barry kept his ears peeled for the murmur of ship transmissions undercutting the signals, but after several months, he resigned himself to the fact that they might not come again and gradually ceased thinking about them altogether. It was better for his sanity anyway, not to torture himself with such thoughts.

  As for the physical aspects of their health, Barry and Sophie did what they could. The occasional nibble of vitamin-rich seaweed didn’t leave them in the finest fettle, but coupled with the constant bananas, it did ward off any serious deficiencies. A pair of notched ‘ohe bamboo “toothbrushes” carved by Sophie provided at least a modicum of dental hygiene, and the solar still with just a pinch of sea salt provided Barry with a passable saline solution for his contact lenses. Even the facial wound from the octopus had more or less healed, although the brand of its beak would be there forever. Barry studied the thick white scar in the survival kit signal mirror and joked that he was only a peg leg and a parrot away from being a qualified pirate. Sophie, with a laugh, had to agree.