Castle of Water: A Novel(17)

In regard to young Nigel, he first learned of the island while a student at university, just prior to beginning his career in disc jockeying. As a teenager, one dreary afternoon among many in his parents’ home on Kensington Church Street, he had become engrossed in the movie Mutiny on the Bounty. This was due in part to a latent crush on a young and exceedingly strapping Marlon Brando, but also to the glory of the bygone era it portrayed. It was directly because of that spark that six years later, while struggling to pick a topic for his history dissertation at Cambridge, he chose to write on the exploits of the very Fletcher Christian so gallantly played by the American actor. Only his thesis adviser already had a student tackling that very same subject. Why don’t you look into Captain Samuel Wallis? the adviser suggested, a man who also happened to be the last person to set foot on Barry and Sophie’s desolate atoll. Nigel agreed, and he stumbled across a mention of the island while skimming the captain’s log in the National Archives. The antiquated hand verged on illegible, but he was able to untangle from that skein of inky lines something about killing wild pigs on a nameless beach bereft of men. Intrigued, he decided to include it in his dissertation, to bolster his thesis on the viability of supply chains in England’s eighteenth-century Pacific expansion. But alas, the academic community at Cambridge was destined never to learn of the island’s existence. For in addition to British colonialism in the South Pacific, Nigel Braddock had developed a serious interest in the electronic music that was sweeping London in the late 1990s. How could musty old tomes compete with the seductive beats of Digweed and Oakenfold? Inspired more by his musical heroes than his historical ones, Nigel dropped out of university and began taking low-paying DJ gigs in the smaller clubs of London, neglecting, but never forgetting entirely, his earlier passion. In fact, he took his DJ moniker from the name of Captain Wallis’s ship, the HMS Dolphin. And when the gigs in London petered out, he moved to Manchester, where he did find happiness, if not success.

In the case of Takehiko Ishigaki, he became aware of the island long before Nigel was even born. The son of a fisherman from Wakayama Prefecture, he had enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Navy at the age of eighteen, where he was thrust into almost immediate combat aboard the soon-to-become-legendary I-25 submarine, under the adroit command of Meiji Tagami. In the submarine’s stifling hold, he bore underwater witness to some of the most important battles of World War II, including one of the very few attacks on the American mainland. Most of their time, however, was spent far out at sea, conducting reconnaissance missions on lost little islands that might possibly have harbored Allied landing strips. The submarine remained submerged during the day, but it would surface at night, allowing those on watch duty to get some fresh air. On one such night, while Takehiko stood alone at its prow, enjoying the low chugging of the diesel engine and the parting of starlit waters, he caught sight of a form rising in the distance. His instincts flinched, for he feared it was a ship, but upon closer inspection, he realized it was nothing more than a very small island, alone and whispering in the dead of the night. He entertained a brief urge to leap from the I-25 and swim to its sands, bidding farewell forever to the mingled horror and boredom of that terrible war. But Takehiko’s daydreams—or nightdreams, rather—were that and nothing more. He stayed on board the submarine, did his duty with honor, and was left clinging to flotsam when the vessel was destroyed by the USS Patterson near the New Hebrides islands in 1943, the sole survivor of a ninety-man crew. When he saw the Americans coming to pick him up, he considered committing seppuku with the knife at his belt, but in the end decided, Fuck honor, which sounds much nicer in Japanese, and he let them scoop him out of the waves. He was knocked around a bit belowdecks, but once he began cooperating with his interrogators, he was otherwise treated well—sailors tended to share more camaraderie with their opponents than foot soldiers, for they all knew that their true enemy was not the man at the rudder, but the cold, dark sea. He spent a very strange two years at Camp Deming in New Mexico, where he stood out like a sore thumb among all the blond and lumbering Germans, before eventually being returned to his village in Wakayama. In the years that followed, he did his best to forget about the war, and his many dead comrades, although he lit an incense stick each year to honor their memory, and he still had the occasional dream about an island drifting rootless in the darkness, one he had almost leapt to in the night.

So why mention these two at all? To establish the fact that even if poor Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado had managed to signal back some feeble concept of his general location before the lightning fried his radio, and even if the outdated radar equipment at the airstrip in Tahiti had been able to keep a rough log of the plane’s movements, rescue still would have proven difficult. The island was, with a couple of very inconsequential exceptions, unknown to man. And unless some rescue pilot or search boat captain was lucky enough to catch a glimmer in his rearview mirror of that little speck of land, and on top of that notice the brief spark of an emergency flare, he would have had no reason, or even inkling, to go there. It was not listed on navigation charts; it was too small to warrant mapping. It was, for all intents and purposes, lost to the world. It may have been Marco’s poor judgment that had put Barry and Sophie on its sands, but it was through no fault of his that they remained there. Geography and time had simply conspired against them. They had left the known world behind them and joined the ranks of all those aforementioned castaways in the unknown world beyond.