“No way.” That was Barry’s response when she explained what she intended to do.
“But you know where the seaweed is. It can’t be more than four or five meters underwater. It’s no different than when I used to dive for the clams and lobsters.”
“Yes, it’s very different,” he attempted to explain as unagitatedly as possible, “because you’re almost five months pregnant. And that seaweed grows outside the reef. I’ve seen what it’s like out there, it’s just not a good idea.”
“I’m not asking your permission, Barry, I’m telling you I’m going to get it. I’ve had almost nothing green in two and a half years, and now, with a baby inside me, I need it. The baby needs it. So are you going to help me or not?”
Sophie eyed him with the same fierce determination he remembered from their first weeks on the island: that way of telling him, with a burning stare and iron jaw, that she was her own person and could make her own choices. It had taken him the bulk of his tenure there to realize it, but he loved her for it. It was, after all, what had kept her alive and there alongside him.
He sighed and relented, because he knew from experience that to do otherwise was utterly pointless.
“Fine. I’ll take you out in the boat tomorrow.”
“We can’t go today?”
“Damnit, Sophie!”
“What? You haven’t gone out yet today, why can’t I go with you?”
By this point fully and visibly agitated, Barry chucked a shell toward the water and swore under his breath. “All right, let’s go. You can help me push the canoe into the water.”
Sophie jumped to Barry’s side and kissed the rough prickliness of his cheek; he in turn gathered the net and tucked the utility knife into the waist string of his breechcloth.
“Merci, Barry.”
“De rien, Sophie.” And he was already smiling despite his sincere attempts not to.
* * *
The beach was still damp from an earlier rain, and the Askoy III slid effortlessly into the water. Barry helped Sophie in first, holding her hand as she climbed aboard, then waited until he was waist-deep before pulling himself up over the gunwale. Once situated with their paddles on their respective ends, they began stroking their way across the shallows. The rippled patterns in the seafloor echoed the tides below, while a strong breeze threw scales along the water’s surface. Barry sniffed at the incoming wind; he detected no storms, but the sky was disconcertingly cloudy. It was cooler than usual, too, and he was glad he wasn’t the one going for a swim.
At near one hundred yards, the reef showed through, its crinkled mass visible just below the surface. Barry and Sophie both pulled up their paddles and allowed their canoe to coast gently above it, passing into the deeper realm just beyond.
Then Barry slid his paddle breadthwise into their wake, dragging the craft to a gradual halt. Below them, twelve, fifteen feet, perhaps, a ghostly orchard of seaweed swayed in the current. And just a few paddle strokes beyond that … darkness. Ironclad darkness, total and profound. Where the seafloor ended marked the edge of the abyss.
Sophie slipped over the side of the Askoy III and into the water, steadying herself against the bamboo outrigger so she could peer down at the forest of seaweed. Her stomach contracted at the sight of all that green, waiting for her just a short dive away. A deep breath, a flurry of kicks, and she was gone, vanishing in a spurt of ripples and bubbles.
Barry’s eyes found her as soon as the water regained its clarity, disarmingly small and distant below. He could see her arms yanking seaweed stalks from their bed, an occasional air bubble fluttering up toward him. After a minute that felt much longer, she pushed up from the bottom in a dark puff of sand. She returned to the surface as casually as she had left it and slung a lank shock of seaweed into the boat. A relieved Barry leaned over across the gunwale to help.
“Everything go all right down there?”
“Bien sûr. Some of it is a little difficult to pull up, but I’m getting it.”
“Are you going down again?”
“One or two more dives should be enough.”
“Enough for how long?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to see if the baby likes it.”
She smiled up at him, her chestnut hair plastered down her bright face, and he smiled uneasily back. Another deep breath and she vanished once again into nothing but ripples. Barry took his eyes off the water momentarily to check their position—he didn’t want to drift too far from the island.
That was when it happened. He felt it before he saw it. Like a cloud that casts a cold shadow when it glides past the sun, only this shadow maker slipped in from below. Barry shuddered first, glimpsed instinctively over the side of the Askoy III second, and then panicked—a railroad spike of fear hammered straight into his heart. It was huge and grotesquely silent; the convexity of the water only magnified its menace. A shark. A damn big shark. A creature of ungodly strength and unconscionable size. And it was blackening the water in the direction of Sophie.
As to whether it was going in for the kill or merely an inquisitive nibble, Barry would never know. Nor did it particularly matter. Before its intentions could be considered, or the wisdom of diving in after a fourteen-foot tiger shark taken into account, he was already plunging headfirst with his box cutter drawn, the interests of mother and child trumping all others. An explosion of cold water and he was beside it—the danger it emitted an almost palpable force. A force, as it were, that shifted in focus, veering suddenly upward and back toward him. There was no time to plan, no time to think; Barry was moving instinctually, his muscles motored by something even older than fear. It was flight or fight, and with his family on the line, the hand holding the blade seemed to have chosen the latter. He sliced twice and missed in a blind rush of bubbles, but with the third swipe, he felt the blade snick. Something dense as a boulder and rough as sandpaper raked across his side, followed by a haymaker of a tail swipe that caught him dead in the face. The stars and nausea lasted only a moment, then he was reaching downward for Sophie’s arm, so soft and giving compared with the almost geologic mass of that primordial fish.
They broke the surface coughing and spewing. Barry pushed Sophie up over the coconut-wood keel before he’d caught his first breath and tumbled in right behind her.
“Oh, putain!” gasped Sophie.
“Holy shit!” choked out Barry.
Their chests heaved and their hearts hammered; fear like some chemical still shot through their blood.
“T’as vu ça?”
“Of course I saw it! Do you think I was practicing my swan dive for fun? It was as big as a goddamn bus!”
An especially grisly form of déjà vu gripped Sophie, glimpses of dark blood and burning seas, and she in turn gripped Barry with a strength he did not know she had.
“I’m sorry, Barry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s the sea. Sharks live in it.”
“Thank you, though,” she panted. “For scaring him away. I saw him from under the water and I was too frightened to move.”
“Pfff,” puffed Barry, who after two and a half years had appropriated more than a few of her habits. “I didn’t do much except get smacked in the face with its tail.”
Barry wiggled his nose tenderly, examining his fingertips for traces of blood.
“Is it broken?”
“No, I don’t think so. But you are going to have to paddle us back toward shore.”
“You’re hurt?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“I just lost my last pair of contact lenses. I can’t see a thing.”
41
“Can’t see a thing” may have been a slight exaggeration. But only slight. Barry could make out the powder blue of the sky and the azure blue of the sea and the verdant smudge of the island sandwiched in between. But beyond that, anything more th
an an arm’s reach away was little more than pigment and haze. For several months, he had been trying to postpone the inevitable by putting in that last pair of contacts only in the afternoons for fishing and painting—the two activities in which unclouded vision was more or less essential. And through careful conservation, coupled with judicious cleaning, he had hoped to extend the life of those lenses by at least a year or two. Maybe more. Only that whole plan of action had been contingent on not having to dive into the ocean after menacing sharks. Not that he regretted it—near blindness was nothing compared with the thought, too painful to even contemplate, of something happening to Sophie or their child. He would have plunged headfirst into a whole feeding frenzy of hammerheads to prevent such a thing. So no, there was no regret. Only a grim, spirit-sucking awareness that his position on the island, only recently stable, was once again tenuous at best. With his severely compromised vision, he could not spot the schools of fish before casting his net. He could not search the tide pools for clams or scour the rocks for tern eggs. Hell, he could barely grope his way through the trees and find low-hanging bananas. Maybe not even that.
Barry did his best to camouflage that fear with a few lighthearted quips about white canes and guide dogs, but Sophie could easily detect it. The first night of no-sightedness, she cranked up the little shortwave and fiddled with the dial until a station playing some semblance of American music came through the static. She lit the special coconut-oil lamp that he had made for her from a clamshell and began work on a batch of his favorite banana fritters, to accompany their bowls of fresh seaweed salad. They ate together in the lamplight around their new kitchen table, some Motown hit rising and falling on the whims of the stratosphere. To Barry, the room was nothing more than a half-lit smudge, and Sophie’s face just four feet across from him, an indecipherable blur. He chewed and stared blankly ahead, with eyes unable to find their focus.
“It’s going to be all right, Barry.”
“I know.”
“No, you’re just saying that. But I’m telling you, it will be.”
Barry nodded, exhaled, and kept on chewing.
“Are you worried about food?”
He nodded again. “I guess. Among other things. You’re five months pregnant, I’m basically blind, I don’t know how in the hell we’re going—”
“Shhhh.” Sophie rose from her palm-stump stool, stood beside him, and cradled his head. “Ne t’inquiète pas, mon amour. We’re both alive, we’re both healthy, and we will figure it all out together. You can take me out on the boat and teach me to fish with the net. I’ll be your eyes, and you’ll be my arms. And everything else I can take care of. It’s not hard to pick bananas or knock down coconuts.”
“But I can’t even see your face.”
“I’m right here, my love. And there’s nothing to see.” Sophie blew out the oil lamp, flooded their little house with rich darkness, and pressed her face against his. “And besides, you have to admit. A blind painter—it is all rather bohemian, non?”
At that, Barry couldn’t help laughing. He felt Sophie’s forehead pressed to his own, and her life-swollen belly warm against his, and he knew if nothing else, they had each other, and on more than one occasion, that alone had been more than enough.
“Do you feel it?”
“Hm?”
“The baby has the—what do you call it in English?”
He moved his hands from the lithe curve of her back to the taut curve of her stomach and felt for the first time the stirrings of their child. His face erupted in a fatherly glow. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s got the hiccups.”
And that was when Sophie gasped and pulled away. “Mais oui, c’est ça! The name!”
“What? Hiccup?”
“Persinette!”
“What’s Persinette?”
“It’s from the fairy tale, you know, with the tower and the girl with the long hair and the prince.”
“You mean ‘Rapunzel’?”
“No, in English she’s called Rapunzel, in French her name is Persinette. This is just like the story. The pregnant wife craves the persil, then later the prince falls from the tower and goes blind.”
“Okay. And?”
“That’s what we’ll call our daughter. Persinette.”
“What if it’s a boy?”
“Pfff, I don’t know. Percival, maybe.”
“Percival Bartholomew Bleecker-Ducel? That’s worse than Pierre-Marie. People will think he’s a goddamn Habsburg or something.”
“Well, too bad.”
“Persinette.” Barry repeated the name, tested it out, let it linger in the air. “I could live with that. It has a nice ring to it.”
“Good. Because that’s what we’re calling her. C’est trop mignon.”
Barry laughed, and in doing so consented. He knew from experience that to do otherwise was utterly pointless.
42
In the weeks that followed, there were spellbinding sunsets, incredible twilights, and jaw-dropping dawns—none of which were seen by the half-blind Barry. Color, certainly, he saw some of that, but form and depth were suddenly strangers. Had he books, he might have been better off. Being severely nearsighted, he could still make out what was held close to his nose. But there were no books to be read on their island, and anything more than a foot or two away was beyond the reach of his feeble eyes. He cursed himself for not packing a spare set of glasses in with his contacts and damned the doctor who’d advised him against Lasik. But it didn’t matter. None of it. His ruined eyesight was a bitter pill he had no choice but to chew and swallow.
With Sophie’s help, he was able to grope his way up the rocks to the tiny cave where he painted, and that served as a relief from some of his frustration. But he could see virtually nothing of what he actually did. Sophie reminded him that Beethoven had done some of his best composing while deaf, which provoked a grim chuckle but little relief. Still, she sat with him while he dabbed at the rock wall in his clamshell whites and charcoal blacks and offered advice when the haze was too thick. When he was finished, she would take his hand and lead him carefully back down the boulders, shooing away angry mother terns as she pointed out the footholds time had carved in the stone.
As for sustenance, Sophie’s prediction proved astute. At first, she served as Barry’s eyes on the Askoy III, her pupils peeled for the shimmer of fish scales below. Using the same chum technique Barry had mastered in the deeper water beyond the reef, they were able to bring the schools up to the surface; she would point out the ripples with a gesture close to his face, and Barry would cast the net, giving it a moment to settle before yanking back the hand line and closing it like a bag. Together, they would haul the catch over the side and empty it all, flapping and thumping, into the canoe’s smooth wood bottom. After just two trips out, Sophie was able to cast the net herself. By the fourth, she had learned which fish were ideal, which were bony but still edible, and which ones were best avoided altogether. And within a week, she could already manipulate the sail and catch the wind when necessary, although her tacking technique left something to be desired. Not that it especially mattered; when all else failed, they could always use paddles.
Still, Barry insisted on going out with her. Within a short time, Sophie was more than capable of fishing and captaining the Askoy III on her own, but he wanted to be at her side. This was in part simply a result of protective, paternal urges as old as time. But it was also, though he would most likely not have admitted it, because of helplessness. Or rather, how much he hated the feeling of it. The both of them had long contributed in their own ways toward guaranteeing their mutual survival on the island, none less crucial or more dispensable than the others. But on some level, Barry had always enjoyed his role as “the provider,” as Neanderthal-ish as it might sound. With the loss of his last pair of contacts, he felt more like a childish burden, some helpless babe to be lugged about in a papoose, and he hated it. Of course, Sophie never saw it that way. He had helped her when she was at
her most vulnerable, and in her eyes, she was simply doing the same in return. Barry’s masculine pride, however, was not quite so mature in its understanding, and occasionally he let that insecurity get the best of him. Sophie was initially patient with Barry’s bouts of moping and grumbling, but when he began to hover over her shoulder and criticize in snide tones the coconut-wood cradle she was sanding for their child, she finally had enough. Putain, Barry, she shot back. Find something to do! I know it’s hard, but feeling sorry for yourself and taking it out on me isn’t helping anyone.
His initial reaction was to answer with something harsh and spiteful, but halfway through, he realized she was right. He apologized begrudgingly, kicked again at the sand, and snagged the one thing he could still manipulate and enjoy without compromise before stomping out their cabana door: the shortwave radio.
Barry gave the little generator a few belligerent cranks and twirled the knob until a station came into focus. Great. Voice of Free China. And Barry snorted and closed his eyes and leaned in forced relaxation against the knobby burls of a palm trunk, feeling in reality anything but.
The setting sun was pleasantly warm, and the breezes coming in off the waves were pleasantly cool, and a broadcaster was giving a rundown of world events in a lilting Mandarin, or maybe Cantonese, when the notion came to Barry. An idea. Back in the States, China had been considered the Far East, which it unquestionably was. Here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, however, it would have to be almost directly due west—precisely where the sun was setting. Barry began to think and stroke the scruff of his beard accordingly. He recalled during the cyclone how he had used the radio antenna to gauge roughly in which direction Tahiti was to be found. The signal had been slightly stronger when it was pointed in that general direction. Could the same be true for more distant signals? Barry worked the radio’s spoke of an antenna in a slow circle, provoking a symphony of crackles and whistles. But sure enough, the announcer’s voice became slightly crisper when the antenna was pointed in the direction of the sun. To the west, as it were. Where China ought to be.
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