Castle of Water: A Novel(49)

As a fisherman, however, Barry excelled. Tiller in hand, net at the ready, he felt inexplicably at home. The crisp snap of the sails catching the wind was an exalted sound; the weighty thump of a full net on the hull was practically music to his ears. The Askoy III felt from the get-go like an extension of himself, and he plied the waters around their island with the same joy and grace he had known previously only when seated before his easel. Naturally, the net technique took a little practice, but not much. And within only a few days of trial and error, he was able to re-create a scene as old as time: a lean, wolfish man, sun cured and squinting, standing astride the prow of his boat and casting his net to harvest the sea.

By his doing so, what had been an elusive delicacy became instead a nourishing staple. And hunger, the agony that had consumed their existence, quickly became a thing of the past. Suddenly, there was charbroiled parrot fish with banana kebabs. Raw paddletail with bananas in coconut milk. Mahi-mahi baked in banana leaves. Tern-egg omelets stuffed with black jack and bananas. Goatfish sashimi sprinkled with banana paste and sea salt. Barry caught them, Sophie cleaned them, and they cooked them together. Bananas may have still composed the bulk of their diet, but rare was the day when there wasn’t a healthy portion of poisson du jour to go along with them. Sophie even used a few slender slats of ‘ohe bamboo to carve them some chopsticks, and were an outsider to ever actually set foot on their island at just the right moment, they would have found the two of them chatting and digging into a bowl of fresh-caught sushi as casually as if in a sake bar on St. Marks Place.

The effects of all that nutrition became immediately apparent. The exhaustion they had known since their arrival was replaced by a renewed sense of vigor. Their emaciated bodies regained proportions and muscle tone that bordered on normality. Their swollen gums and sour stomachs ceased to be the bane of their days. Barry’s sunken cheeks lost their hollows, Sophie’s whittled hips regained their womanly shape—they started to feel human again, less like the walking dead and more like the sentient, wholehearted beings they once had been.

And it didn’t stop there. Far from it, their restored health ushered in a whole series of improvements. With the search for food no longer a constant distraction, both Barry and Sophie began to employ the miniature set of stainless-steel scissors from the first-aid kit for grooming. His beard was trimmed to a length of passable civility, and her hair ceased to drop past her behind (although despite Barry’s good-natured chiding about Frenchwomen, Sophie steadfastly refused to do anything about her armpits). With less hair and more exposed body area, bathing became a regular occurrence, with the two of them soaping up in coconut lather each time it rained. And with skin that was suddenly borderline clean, their filthy loincloths—pieced together from the very last vestiges of boxers and cutoffs—were no longer acceptable and soon replaced by two crisp, laundered codpieces fashioned by Sophie from rope and a single Charles Tyrwhitt dress shirtsleeve. Over the course of just a few months, two exceptionally decrepit individuals who very readily could have been mistaken for Lower East Side junkies on the verge of death were replaced by a couple who very easily could have passed for tanned Parisian bobos on some peculiar form of nudist holiday.

Not that it was all rose-colored glasses, however. Life on the island may have lost its darkest tints, but it had hardly become la vie en rose. Still, no distant ships steamed across the horizon; no contrails made chalk lines across the blue slate of the sky. And as mentioned, when it came to those nearby maritime transmissions, there was nothing but an endless stream of radio silence. Barry and Sophie did their best to hide it, but they shared a common fear that the rescue they had been waiting for might never come. The facts were bare and unavoidable—no trace of humankind had done so much as skirt their purview on the island, let alone drop by to whisk them away. And even if that coveted ocean freighter or 747 was to glint from afar in all that turquoise and sunlight, what would it take to get their attention? After all, Barry had fired every last one of their flares into the air when he saw the ships, and look how much good that had done. Their only realistic hope of salvation, it seemed, was that someone—some moneyed adventurer, some eccentric ornithologist, some curious cartographer—might land on their beach and discover them there. That, or the shipping lane, or whatever it was, might suddenly fill with boats again and jump back to life. The months, however, had taken on the sickening proportions of years, and the deliverance their souls screamed for simply did not appear.

Naturally, the fresh presence of the Askoy III did encourage talk around the campfire about the possibility of escape. Not simply waiting around for ships, as Sophie had suggested in the cave, but actually going out there and finding an inhabited island. It was a boat, after all, and although small, it could hold two people and harness the wind. But any hope or promise its mobility offered was quickly tempered with a hard dose of reality. Sailors and a few astronauts aside, the true proportions of the ocean are incomprehensible to most people; its breadth and depth are abstract at best. As denizens of the island, however, both Barry and Sophie had received a harsh lesson in its proper dimensions; they understood its elemental vastness. And in different ways and at different times, they had both opted against the idea of suicide. Without any knowledge of where they were or where they might be going, venturing blindly into its blue yonder in search of new lands seemed precisely that: suicidal. At least on their island there was food to eat, water to drink, earth beneath their feet, and a place to bear witness to their fate. In short, there was something. Out there in the ocean there was … nothing. And “nothing,” in their condition, had become synonymous with death—the same black cloud that had swallowed their Cessna, the same shapeless horror that had consumed étienne. They may have argued at length about every single other thing over the course of their relationship, but on this point they were in reluctant agreement. For better or worse, that island was their home. If salvation was to come, it would be most likely to find them there.