Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  6

  Morning number two of Barry’s maroonship proved no more eventful than the one that preceded it—at least at its onset. Emerging damp and stiff from his palm shelter, he encountered the same flat, featureless sky, the same blank, unyielding sea. True, the sun was beginning to peep out from behind an ashy haze of clouds, throwing at least a tinge of gold upon the palms and turquoise upon the water. Beyond that, however, nothing had changed. A long, hot shower and a crisp change of clothes would have been most welcome, but a starchy bunch of bananas and a gulp of fresh rainwater were the only amenities the island offered. He had at least gotten some sleep, though—that was nice—and something to eat was better than nothing. Feeling reasonably energized and relatively well rested, Barry was in the process of inspecting the damage that the previous night’s rain had done to his SOS signs when he noticed the raft, not to mention the half-dressed female form hanging out of it.

  “Hey!” he shouted midstride, loping over the sand toward her. “Hey, are you okay?”

  The female form in question flinched and did half a turn on the sand, and he saw that it was indeed the French honeymooner, although considerably worse for wear. Her eyes rolled dazedly in her head, visible through a bedraggled mat of sand-caked hair. Her Breton-striped Saint James T-shirt was gone—only a black bra remained to cover her torso—and a single soggy blue espadrille dangled from her big toe.

  Barry crouched beside her (what was her name again—Silvia? Sonya?) and helped her fully out of the raft to lie flat on the sand. He pushed the hair from her eyes and gave them a closer inspection. They seemed unable to register his existence.

  “Sonya, are you okay? Where’s your husband? Did he make it?”

  Barry recognized the cruelty inherent in the last question and immediately regretted asking it. Not that it mattered. Sonya, as he believed she was called, appeared to be in some sort of catatonic shock. She was shivering, in fact, and he removed his shirt-turban, sat her up, and draped it around her shoulders. What to do next?

  Once upon a time, Barry had been a Boy Scout. And at summer camp one year in the north woods of Wisconsin had been the recipient of an earnest and well-intentioned lecture on basic first aid—very little of which Barry remembered, engrossed as he was at the time with a clandestine Playboy one of the other campers had snuck into the meeting. Airway, breathing, and circulation couldn’t hold a candle to the magazine’s glossy, trifold delights. Among those fond adolescent memories, however, he did have one recollection from the actual lesson: the necessity of warmth. Something about the body going into shock and requiring extra heat. Not that it was especially cool outside—it couldn’t have been less than seventy degrees on the island. But something had to be done.

  Leaving the raft where it was, Barry scooped the unresponsive Sonya(?) into his arms and did an awkward, stumbling job of carrying her back to his makeshift encampment. She was by that point shivering convulsively, and her delicate limbs seemed to be seizing up. He deposited her inside his little shelter, then set one of his frond stacks ablaze. Three rushed forays into the bush yielded a thick harvest of additional leaves, which he piled onto the growing fire. Coughing through the smoke, he lifted Sonya once again and set her down beside it.

  Whew. He exhaled sharply, exhausted from the exertion, and sat in the sand. Curled beneath his shirt, his new co-castaway formed a shivering ball. He made a few attempts at conversation, none of which yielded even a hint of a response. It occurred to him that perhaps she did not speak much English, so he tried some very poor overtures in mostly forgotten middle school French, at one point even resorting to a horribly garbled rendition of “Frère Jacques.” That didn’t work either. Not sure what else to do, he stroked her hair—sometimes the simplest gestures are the ones that mean the most—and gradually, over the course of a breezy, surf-swept afternoon and a flamboyant, sorbet-shaded sunset, she stopped shaking.

  Barry stayed up the whole night, tending to the smoldering fire, keeping his eyes out for any sign of rescue—of which there was none. No jet contrails glazed in the moonlight, not a single megaphone blast from a distant pontoon. The French girl, meanwhile, stared blankly into the embers for hours, unmoving and unresponsive. Eventually—Barry wasn’t sure exactly when, but he noticed it not long after the moon set and the winds died down—she fell asleep, announcing her slumber with a faint, almost mouselike snore. Barry took a strange, paternal pleasure in this; it seemed to him a good sign, an indication that the horror was perhaps fading and that natural human rhythms were again taking hold. He stirred at the embers and looked at the stars. Blazing, searing stars, the likes of which he had never seen before in his life. He recalled the night skies above his grandparents’ farm in Illinois; the way the Milky Way made a shimmering ribbon above the frozen prairie had been more than enough to stir a boy’s wonder and put an ache in his soul. But the star-fire that burned down upon him on the island, an ocean away from the incandescent smear of civilization, was something else entirely. Back in one of his college art history classes, he had once read an account from Renaissance Europe, when the nights were wondrously dark, of starlight bright enough to cast shadows, even read by. He wondered if this glimpse of the universe, afforded to him in the direst of human circumstances, was as close to those pristine, preelectric nights as he would ever get. Probably, he thought to himself, and for a moment he felt the heady sensation of traveling through time, despite being firmly planted in a rather inconvenient place.

  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 Añejo, 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.

  Naturally, such a boozy existence gave rise to a fair amount of unadvisable liberties. Airport regulations demanded that Marco leave a detailed manifest before each trip, but he seldom complied. Control tower etiquette mandated that he keep in regular contact throughout the course of the flight, but he almost never did. Indeed, Marco wasn’t even above dozing off behind the stick when his hangovers called for it. The compass beeped if he went off course, and the altimeter buzzed when he got too low—what could possibly go wrong?

  Well, as it turned out, much to the detriment of those on board that fateful morning, quite a bit could go wrong. Marco’s hangover from the night before was otherworldly. It had been his and his ex-wife’s anniversary, and he had spent it alone at a dingy bar in Papeete, downing shot after shot of clear, unaged Tanduay, doing precisely that which had convinced her to leave him in the first place. And when his clock radio prodded him awake at eight o’clock the next morning, he was still reekingly, staggeringly drunk. But it wasn’t the first time he had walked the half mile to the airstrip loaded, nor did he think—although he was sorely mistaken—that it would be his last. Shielded behind his mirrored aviators, he trudged into the hangar, waving at the mechanics as he yanked his keys off the upturned gutter nail from which they were hung. Marco glanced quickly at a clipboarded manifest, reading off the names of his passengers: two French and one American. Perfecto. He choked back five ibuprofen tablets from his locker, downed them with a swig of Tanduay from a half-pint he kept there for just such an occasion, and climbed into the cockpit of his trusty Cessna 208. The mechanic gave him a thumbs-up, and Marco, donning his earphones and adjusting his mouthpiece, gave him a healthy dose of thumb in return. Time to pick up the passengers, who, if able to distinguish between the Tanduay and the gas fumes that filled the airplane, said nothing.

  The first half of the four-hour flight had gone seamlessly as planned. The American stared out the window in amazed bewilderment, the French couple was all smiles and hand squeezes, and the skies were clear and …

  Well, not that clear. Snoring awake from one of his infamous micronaps, Marco took note of something ahead: A bank of clouds, dark and foreboding, loomed before them. It wasn’t unusual at that time of year to encounter a stormy patch, and Marco’s usual strategy was simply to fly around it. It could add twenty or thirty minutes to the trip, but it was better than turning back and wasting the entire day, as traffic control generally suggested. Which was precisely why he seldom informed them of his little detours.

  By the time Marco executed his slow, droning roll, raindrops were already flecking the windshield, squirming their way across the glass. He considered turning on his radio and asking for some information on the storm’s size, but with his head a-throb and guts a-churn, he was in no mood to have some pissy traffic controller demand he turn the craft around. No, Marco would continue on his way, skirting the storm’s dark margins, waiting patiently for the skies to clear.

  Only they didn’t. Because the small patch of storm clouds Marco was intent upon circumventing was nothing of the sort—a fact he did not know, because he had been too hungover to bother checking the morning’s weather report. Its black curtain hung for miles, hiving from within with flares of orange-and-purple lightning. And more pressing than that, after spending two hours trying to flank it, his weak-winged little craft was running dangerously low on fuel. Gulping back down his Adam’s apple and wiping with a shaky arm the sweat from his brow, Marco realized that he had no choice. He did not have enough gas either to fly around it or to turn back. His only chance was to fly straight through it.

  At which point Marco should have radioed back to Tahiti with his position and begged feverishly for help or at the very least advice—a precautionary measure he refused to take. After having lost two decent pilot gigs and a wife to the good folks at Tanduay, he was in no hurry to lose anything else. No, he could make it, he told himself in Chavacano, the Castilian-inflected dialect of his native Zamboanga back in the Philippines. A few bumpy minutes would pass, and then they would burst triumphantly on through to clear, sunny skies. It simply had to be so.

  And the truly amazing part—Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado’s plan went almost exactly as planned. He shouted back to his three passengers that there would be some turbulence ahead and that they ought to fasten their seat belts. He bit his lip and righted the stick. He muttered a quick prayer to the benevolent Pilar, patron saint of Zamboanga, whose beatific face graced a paper card he had taped to the dashboard, and he plunged the little craft headfirst into the storm.

  Oh, it was bumpy all right. A series of nauseating dips and teeth-grating climbs, shaking that nearly wrenched th
e shoulders. Some of the overhead luggage spilled out of the compartments; a bag of contact lens supplies skittered down the aisle. The French girl hid her head in her husband’s shoulder, and the American in the strange office clothes turned a legitimate shade of maritime green. “Por favor, Pilar,” Marco muttered aloud in his desperate Chavacano. “Grant me this one favor, and I will give up drinking for good—I’ll be a better person, I’ll even try to get my wife back. I’ll never touch the bottle again.” And it appeared that the forgiving Pilar actually listened; up ahead, a break appeared in the clouds. The fierce bumps shrank to gentle nudges. A great wash of apricot sunlight illuminated the path that had been laid out before them. “Ay, gracias, Pilar. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” In fact, so grateful was Marco, he decided right then and there to honor her kindness with a fresh bottle of Tanduay as soon as he got—

  And then the lightning struck. Like a megawatt hand swatting an escaping fly, that great arc of electricity reached out from the storm clouds just as Marco, Étienne, Sophie, and Barry were on the verge of leaving them behind forever. They had almost cleared their pitch-black hurdle and made the lemon-drop safety of the open sky beyond—almost, but not quite. The bolt deafened all aboard for a bright white moment and left a taste like tinfoil ringing in their mouths. When the electric fog cleared, Marco, Étienne, Sophie, and Barry all came to the horrifying realization that not only was the plane’s single engine aflame and its radio circuitry kaput, but they were also pitched and falling at a death-dealing angle. And to make matters worse, the bolt’s electric fangs had taken a smoldering bite of the plane’s left wing. No gentle glides, no stone-skip landings. Instead, the most horrific, spiraling, downward trajectory a human being can imagine, with nothing but a carbon-hard sea rising to meet them and a fading drone to serve as their dirge.