Castle of Water: A Novel(25)

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 débacle 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 year, 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.