Castle of Water: A Novel(5)
And then it came. The buckle gave and the box sprang loose. With the very last of the plane descending in slow, disastrous, Hindenburg-like motion around her, she pursued the opposite vector, kicking and thrashing her body toward the life-giving sky and away from the cheated black hole that waited below.
She broke through the surface in a flesh-toned geyser and drank in the light. Smoke and steam abounded, but anything was better than the alternative. The orange box popped open rather easily, spilling out a nylon duffel bag, itself containing a package both rubberized and densely packed. An imperative black arrow pointed to a cord attached to a handle, not unlike the starter on a lawn mower, and Sophie subjected it to a vigorous tug. Something snapped, a python hiss of gas was released, and the orange vinyl bundle came buoyantly to life, transforming into a compact and functional life raft. Sophie clambered over its side while it was only half-inflated—a few curious sharks had begun nuzzling her knees—and sprawled across its bottom, gasping for oxygen. The little vessel continued to take shape around her, growing sturdier by the second, until the gaseous hiss eventually stopped, leaving Sophie to bob alone in silence and smoke.
The sky above her was a jarring cobalt; the wind tasted of petrol and doom. Sophie shivered from shock, and she wept profusely. She wailed and wondered, both to herself and out loud, how a honeymoon to French Polynesia had degenerated into this. For the time being, she cared little about rescue. She was indifferent to the possibility of escape. She thought only of étienne, with whom she had made love that very morning, following a breakfast of fresh papaya and pain perdu, directly beneath her, being chewed up by sharks and swallowed by darkness. And after some hours of delirious weeping, she, just like Barry in his bower, fell asleep.
Sophie drifted all night in her little raft. She was still drifting when she awoke in the morning, to a parched throat, sore muscles, a mild sunburn, and the sickening realization of the predicament she was in. She drifted right through the afternoon, beneath a sky that yielded no trace of rescue but plenty of rain, and right on into a second night, until the drifting stopped with an abrupt and gritty halt. Nudged back to reality, Sophie raised her head. Baffled, she looked around her, at low, hoary dunes and palms that quivered and silvered in the moonlight. She climbed over the side of the raft, vomited bile, moaned once more toward the god(s) she, too, assumed had forsaken her, and collapsed forward onto the sand.
And so it came to pass that two utterly disparate lives happened to overlap: a young architect from Paris’s tenth arrondissement, prematurely widowed at age twenty-eight, and a relatively young banker from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, prematurely retired at age thirty-four, bound together on an uninhabited island some 2,359 miles from Hawaii, 4,622 miles from Chile, and 533 miles from the nearest living soul.
Crap, as Barry liked to say.
Putain de merde, as Sophie was known to exclaim.
5
Alone and shivering on their respective beaches, Barry and Sophie both considered themselves extremely unlucky—which, in a purely statistical sense, they were. But from a historical perspective, they were hardly alone. Becoming an island castaway in this mapped and modern twenty-first century may sound exceptional, but it was not without precedent. And while it would have likely proved little comfort, there’s no shortage of individuals who could attest to that fact.
Take, for example, an Irish American most have heard of named John F. Kennedy. As a twenty-six-year-old skipper in World War II, he found himself floating in the middle of the Pacific after a Japanese destroyer rather inconsiderately sank his patrol boat. The future president and a few members of his loyal crew braved sharks and saltwater crocodiles to swim to nearby Plum Pudding Island, living off coconuts and rainwater while waiting for rescue.
And then there is Ada Blackjack, the twenty-three-year-old Inuit woman who served as both cook and seamstress on a Canadian expedition to Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, in 1921. When the rest of her party either died of scurvy or perished trying to escape in the sea, she hunkered down and survived for a solid two years on that desolate rock, hunting small game and melting ice to drink.
If it’s literary renown you’re after, you’ll find no better example than Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor marooned on the Pacific island of Más a Tierra in the early eighteenth century. He subsisted there for nearly five years on the goats and rats that plagued his uninhabited isle, whiling away the hours reading his Bible and smoking tobacco. Following his rescue, he would publish a record of his adventures—a biography that many believe inspired the novel Robinson Crusoe, written just a few years later. Indeed, in 1966, Más a Tierra was officially renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in honor of that noble act of plagiarism.
For longevity, you can’t beat Juana Maria, the lone woman of San Nicolas Island, who was for eighteen years a castaway lost to the world; for drama, Marguerite de la Rocque, who gave birth to a bastard child during her two years on the Isle of Demons. And for pure heroism, there’s always Ernest Shackleton, who rescued his men from Elephant Island after a grueling and treacherous eighteen-month ordeal. There’s even some evidence that Amelia Earhart spent her penultimate days as a castaway on a lonesome Pacific atoll, although the verdict is still out on that one. Philip Ashton, Fern?o Lopes, Charles Barnard, Poon Lim, Gonzalo de Vigo, Chunosuke Matsuyama—they’re all right there for the skeptical and the curious alike, men and women who found themselves abandoned by civilization and left to their own devices on desolate hunks of sea-gird stone. The history books abound with such desperate plights, going back to the sailors of classical antiquity, all the way up to the Japanese tsunami victims and lost Mexican fishermen of, yes, our mapped and modern twenty-first century.