Castle of Water: A Novel(3)

The arrival of night brought Barry little solace. The screams of tree frogs and the pitched chatter of insects, yes, but no solace. Crouched and shivering in a crude bower of palm fronds, surrounded by darkness, he reached instinctively to his pocket for a cigarette, only to dump out their mashed remains. In doing so, however, he remembered the plastic Bic that was tucked in the cellophane. And that, unlike his Parliament Lights, was still serviceable—he flicked at the flint and summoned a flame. And an idea came to him: a signal fire. Surely rescue planes would be out combing the waves. They would likely even pass over the island in their search for survivors. Barry struggled to his feet, again tripping over his tattered cuffs, and began gathering the driest palm fronds he could. After several trips to the beachhead, he had a rather impressive pile and, after a few dabs of his lighter, a convincing flame. He stood beside it, watching and waiting, certain the spotlights of some chopper or seaplane would come blazing from the murk. When they didn’t, and the fire burned down to embers, he scurried for more fronds to resuscitate it—an exercise that proved less than fruitful. Halfway into his second armful, it began to rain. Not a demure tropical sprinkle, but an honest-to-goodness downpour. Barry hurried back to his palm bower and huddled beneath its meager shelter. At some point, exhausted, he curled up to sleep, but on the cusp of obtaining it, he realized he had forgotten to take out his contacts. Crap. With exquisite tenderness, he removed each from its respective eye and deposited it carefully into its respective holder. He placed the plastic case in his pocket, beside the suddenly priceless Bic, and finally, blanketed by chill rains, lulled by the high whine of midges, he fell headfirst into a cavernous slumber.





3

Barry awoke to a parched throat, sore muscles, a mild sunburn, and the sickening realization of the predicament he was in. But first things first. Water, and then food. He had swallowed a considerable amount of ocean the previous day, and his last meal had been a granola bar consumed at the airport in Tahiti. Slowly, achingly, he crawled from beneath his little teepee of palm fronds and rose to his feet. He cracked his neck and squinted into the sunlight; it was overcast, but still bright. The waves rolled in, steadily, incessantly. The air tasted faintly of brine.

After a quick and unsettling bathroom break (the darkness of his urine was a disturbing reminder of his dehydration), he put in his contact lenses and turned for the first time away from the sea, toward the little island’s bosky heart. And bosky it was. Columns of trunks propped up an ever-shifting ceiling of frond leaves, through which fugitive slats of sunlight escaped. He stepped gingerly over the prickly undergrowth, as he had lost both his loafers the day before. The terrain became increasingly rocky the farther in he ventured, until he came to the base of a mountain or, perhaps more accurately, very steep hill. Boulders, bedded with some form of ferny moss, rose to a peak some five or six stories overhead. And nested snugly in their crevices were birds: gulls or terns or cormorants. Barry didn’t know, but they were living creatures sharing in his fate. And even more important, he found water. Two separate rock pools, both about the size of Jacuzzis, were coolly waiting, filled to the brim with the previous night’s rain. Barry inspected the pools first before consuming their contents. They both looked clean enough—one had a few odd squigglies jetting about its edge, some larvae, perhaps, but nothing that screamed befoulment. Barry chose the slightly more pristine of the two and brought several handfuls of the water to his lips. Its flavor was fresh and deliciously minerally, not unlike a white wine he had once tasted while touring Napa Valley with his girlfriend—fine, ex-girlfriend—Ashley. Well, perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but after all he’d been through, a gulp of clean, cold water was nothing to sneeze at.

Once his thirst was slaked, all that remained was for his appetite to be sated, and that came courtesy of the island’s banana trees. Somehow he had missed the bunches of green, starchy fruit, dangling just above head level. But upon noticing their presence, he also became aware of their prevalence. Good, thought Barry, chewing on his sixth banana and fully prepared to eat six more. Water and bananas. I shall want for neither hydration nor potassium. And he laughed at his little joke, which, anyone with experience in survival situations can tell you, is a promising sign. Attitude is everything, and those that turn negative can be just as ruinous as diseased streams and toxic berries.

With his most basic of needs addressed for the immediate present, Barry returned to his post on the shore, ripping off the lower half of his slacks as he did so. They were shreds anyway, and cutoffs seemed more appropriate to the conundrums of a castaway. His sleeves he rolled up past his elbows, then muttered, “What the hell,” and took his shirt off entirely, wrapping it around his head in a sort of improvised French Foreign Legion hat. He breached the tree line and scanned the horizon, having transformed in a few short minutes from a high-yield-bond salesman at Lehman Brothers into a passable Robinson Crusoe. “Shit,” he muttered to himself. “Goddamn.” And goddamn was right—no rescue boats sat poised on the horizon, and no choppers hovered above the unfurling waves. He kicked sand at the remnants of his signal fire and considered his options. If only his cigarettes weren’t mush—he was dying for a smoke. After some deliberation, he vetoed a signal fire for being too labor-intensive and decided instead to write a message in the sand. After some scouring (he was surprised at how little loose wood there was, but then again palm trees didn’t exactly have branches), he settled on a rock with a jagged edge. Using it, he carved out SOS as large as he could. He then repeated this in several other locations, doing another lap of the island. He considered again starting a fire, but the palms he found were too damp, and he ultimately gave up on the idea altogether. A school of ominous storm clouds was quietly gathering, squirting its dark squid ink deep into the horizon; finding shelter took precedence over everything else.