Castle of Water: A Novel(8)
At some point in the night, rain clouds rolled in, immense, lolling things that blotted out the heavens. The shower was brief, nothing like the previous evening’s, but it was enough to kill what remained of the campfire in a sharp chorus of hisses. The rain passed, but Barry didn’t bother to relight it. Dawn was coming; a blush was beginning to drown out the stars. Even Venus was on the verge of cutting her blinkers. When the first splash of sunlight spilled over the palms behind him and threw a scatter of bright scales across the water, Barry decided to call it a night. He took out his contacts, checked on the girl, who was still snoring softly, and crawled into his little shelter, where he fell promptly asleep and had an uncannily lucid dream in which he was in Rome helping Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel—by starlight, incidentally, which in the half logic of the dreamworld made absolute sense.
7
A kick to the shin woke Barry up. Not a hard one, but a kick with definite insistence. He shot up in a disoriented haze, still woozy from sleep and essentially blind without his contact lenses. At the entrance of his shelter, he detected the nondescript blur of a human form.
“First of all,” a decidedly foreign female voice announced, “my name is not Sonya. It’s Sophie. I remembered your name, and you can at least get mine right.”
Barry scrambled to get in his contacts, taking a few tentative blinks to adjust to the light.
“Second of all, your French is terrible. And third of all, I need your help with the raft. I think we should move it over here.”
Sophie (yes, that was her name!) was standing resolutely before him, torso cocked slightly so as to see into his frond tent. She was wearing his dress shirt, sleeves rolled up and knotted at the waist, and her short-cropped brown hair was cleaned and slicked back. Her eyes were rheumy and red, he suspected from crying, but also clear and focused—no sign of her stupor remained.
Barry crawled out of the shelter and rose to his feet, brushing the sand from his legs and arms as he did so. “How are you feeling? Is everything okay?”
Sophie expelled an exasperated, Gallic puff of air. Pfff. “That’s a stupid question, isn’t it?”
“Did anyone else…” Barry trailed off, not sure how to ask the question. “Did you see anybody else after the crash?”
Sophie shook her head and bit her lip. “Non,” she said in French, wincing visibly. “Il n’y avait personne.”
“God, I’m sorry.”
“Well, I’m sorry for you, too. We’re both in the same position at the moment, in case you haven’t noticed.”
It was clear she didn’t want to discuss whatever had happened to her husband.
Barry made an attempt at clearing his throat. “Are you thirsty? Hungry? There’s water and bananas deeper in the island.”
“I know. I found them. Unlike you, I didn’t spend the whole day sleeping.”
No, you only spent the whole previous day practically comatose, Barry thought to himself, but he didn’t dare say it. “Well, have you seen any boats or planes? Someone must be looking for us.”
She shook her head again. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Shit.” Barry shoved his hands in his sand-gritty pockets. How many days had it been? Two and a half? Three? Surely the pilot radioed back some sign of distress. Naturally alarms must have been raised when the plane failed to arrive. Unquestionably there were rescue craft out trolling the seas, checking coordinates on maps, and monitoring little electric pings on some form of GPS device. After all, it was the twenty-first goddamn century.
“Come on, let’s go get the raft.” Sophie tightened the shirt knot and smoothed her hair back behind her ears. “There are some supplies in it, too.”
“Supplies?”
“Like a little survival kit. It’s attached to the inside.”
Barry perked up. A survival kit? After having to make do with disposable Bics and unripe bananas, a shot at some viable gear offered considerable promise. Who knew what treasures such a kit might contain? Clean changes of unisex clothing? Gallons of freshwater? Freeze-dried gourmet dinners? Astronaut ice cream? Wasting no time, Barry and Sophie hurried to the other side of the island to fetch it—he, in great excitement, humming “Frère Jacques,” and she, in great annoyance, kindly asking him to never sing that stupid song again, putain de merde.
8
There is, of course, one pressing question that deserves to be answered: Why wasn’t anyone searching for survivors? The answer is that they were. Barry was correct—alarms had been sounded when their plane failed to arrive, and rescue craft were indeed out trolling the seas. Unfortunately, they were looking in the wrong place. This was the direct consequence of an unfortunate addiction on the part of their pilot and of the fact that their smallish Cessna had been downed by a colossal bolt of lightning—one that deep-fried every radio circuit on board.
As for the pilot—a fifty-year-old Filipino divorcé of Spanish Principalía ancestry by the name of Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado—both his skills and his privileged social status were sharply negated on more than one occasion by his great thirst for a Manila rum known as Tanduay. In fact, it was a bottle of Tanduay White that had cost him his captain’s title five years before at Philippine Airlines, a bottle of Tanduay Dark that had severed his ties with a down-market Malaysian airline two years after that, and an entire case of Tanduay A?ejo, consumed over the course of a single weekend, that had convinced his wife to leave him forever, just one year prior to his fatal crash. Which was how he came to service a scruffy, no-name airport in Tahiti, shuttling tourists twice a week to the Marquesas. The eight-hundred-mile flight was a breeze, and given the intervals between each leg, he generally had the freedom to enjoy as much Tanduay as he liked, so long as he could slog through his hangover, throw on a pair of mirrored sunglasses to hide his bloodshot eyes, and make his way woozily down to the hangar.