Barry returned to the beach along the same path, stepping carefully over the prickly undergrowth, whistling all the while. He emerged from the palms to the low burble of the shortwave radio—Sophie must have found another station. He saw her crouched next to it, listening intently, and the signal was strong, probably local. And it was in French.
“Hey, what’s—”
“Shhh!” It was a hiss, really, almost violent in its intensity.
Barry set down the water and the bananas and stood beside her. The broadcast sounded like a news bulletin; he recognized not the words, but the calm, informative inflection of the voice.
Then, abruptly, the broadcast cut to Polynesian music. Guitars and singing. Distant drums. Sophie looked stunned. She covered her face with her hands and released a moan unlike anything Barry had heard before.
“What is it?” Barry repeated. He knelt at her side.
“They’ve called off the search.” She turned to him, her lips quivering, eyes bleeding tears. “We are presumed dead. Ils pensent que nous sommes morts.”
Right then and there, the trapdoor on both their lives clicked and fell out from under them. A brief, sinking sensation, and then the cold thump of reality. No one was looking for them. Not one boat, not one soul.
The restraint on Sophie’s sorrow finally snapped. Unable to bear any more, she fell into Barry’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably. He held her tightly and stared straight ahead, too stunned to cry, too shocked to move. The white feather fell to the sand, trembled there for a moment, and was blown away with the wind. The omelet was burning. And the waves, at that moment the only reliable, constant thing in either of their lives, kept up their rhythm, kept rolling in.
14
What could a part-time techno DJ from London and an aging war veteran from Japan possibly have to do with the story at hand? On first perusal of their biographies, the answer is not much at all. But with a closer look, it becomes more than one might think. For although exceedingly disparate in age group and origin, the techno DJ in question—Nigel Braddock, aka DJ Dirty Dolphin—and the Japanese war veteran of interest—Takehiko Ishigaki, former crewman of the I-25 submarine in the Imperial Japanese Navy—do have one terribly relevant thing in common: They were the only two living human beings, besides Barry and Sophie, of course, who were even aware of the island’s existence.
In regard to young Nigel, he first learned of the island while a student at university, just prior to beginning his career in disc jockeying. As a teenager, one dreary afternoon among many in his parents’ home on Kensington Church Street, he had become engrossed in the movie Mutiny on the Bounty. This was due in part to a latent crush on a young and exceedingly strapping Marlon Brando, but also to the glory of the bygone era it portrayed. It was directly because of that spark that six years later, while struggling to pick a topic for his history dissertation at Cambridge, he chose to write on the exploits of the very Fletcher Christian so gallantly played by the American actor. Only his thesis adviser already had a student tackling that very same subject. Why don’t you look into Captain Samuel Wallis? the adviser suggested, a man who also happened to be the last person to set foot on Barry and Sophie’s desolate atoll. Nigel agreed, and he stumbled across a mention of the island while skimming the captain’s log in the National Archives. The antiquated hand verged on illegible, but he was able to untangle from that skein of inky lines something about killing wild pigs on a nameless beach bereft of men. Intrigued, he decided to include it in his dissertation, to bolster his thesis on the viability of supply chains in England’s eighteenth-century Pacific expansion. But alas, the academic community at Cambridge was destined never to learn of the island’s existence. For in addition to British colonialism in the South Pacific, Nigel Braddock had developed a serious interest in the electronic music that was sweeping London in the late 1990s. How could musty old tomes compete with the seductive beats of Digweed and Oakenfold? Inspired more by his musical heroes than his historical ones, Nigel dropped out of university and began taking low-paying DJ gigs in the smaller clubs of London, neglecting, but never forgetting entirely, his earlier passion. In fact, he took his DJ moniker from the name of Captain Wallis’s ship, the HMS Dolphin. And when the gigs in London petered out, he moved to Manchester, where he did find happiness, if not success.
In the case of Takehiko Ishigaki, he became aware of the island long before Nigel was even born. The son of a fisherman from Wakayama Prefecture, he had enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Navy at the age of eighteen, where he was thrust into almost immediate combat aboard the soon-to-become-legendary I-25 submarine, under the adroit command of Meiji Tagami. In the submarine’s stifling hold, he bore underwater witness to some of the most important battles of World War II, including one of the very few attacks on the American mainland. Most of their time, however, was spent far out at sea, conducting reconnaissance missions on lost little islands that might possibly have harbored Allied landing strips. The submarine remained submerged during the day, but it would surface at night, allowing those on watch duty to get some fresh air. On one such night, while Takehiko stood alone at its prow, enjoying the low chugging of the diesel engine and the parting of starlit waters, he caught sight of a form rising in the distance. His instincts flinched, for he feared it was a ship, but upon closer inspection, he realized it was nothing more than a very small island, alone and whispering in the dead of the night. He entertained a brief urge to leap from the I-25 and swim to its sands, bidding farewell forever to the mingled horror and boredom of that terrible war. But Takehiko’s daydreams—or nightdreams, rather—were that and nothing more. He stayed on board the submarine, did his duty with honor, and was left clinging to flotsam when the vessel was destroyed by the USS Patterson near the New Hebrides islands in 1943, the sole survivor of a ninety-man crew. When he saw the Americans coming to pick him up, he considered committing seppuku with the knife at his belt, but in the end decided, Fuck honor, which sounds much nicer in Japanese, and he let them scoop him out of the waves. He was knocked around a bit belowdecks, but once he began cooperating with his interrogators, he was otherwise treated well—sailors tended to share more camaraderie with their opponents than foot soldiers, for they all knew that their true enemy was not the man at the rudder, but the cold, dark sea. He spent a very strange two years at Camp Deming in New Mexico, where he stood out like a sore thumb among all the blond and lumbering Germans, before eventually being returned to his village in Wakayama. In the years that followed, he did his best to forget about the war, and his many dead comrades, although he lit an incense stick each year to honor their memory, and he still had the occasional dream about an island drifting rootless in the darkness, one he had almost leapt to in the night.
So why mention these two at all? To establish the fact that even if poor Marco “Ding Dong” Mercado had managed to signal back some feeble concept of his general location before the lightning fried his radio, and even if the outdated radar equipment at the airstrip in Tahiti had been able to keep a rough log of the plane’s movements, rescue still would have proven difficult. The island was, with a couple of very inconsequential exceptions, unknown to man. And unless some rescue pilot or search boat captain was lucky enough to catch a glimmer in his rearview mirror of that little speck of land, and on top of that notice the brief spark of an emergency flare, he would have had no reason, or even inkling, to go there. It was not listed on navigation charts; it was too small to warrant mapping. It was, for all intents and purposes, lost to the world. It may have been Marco’s poor judgment that had put Barry and Sophie on its sands, but it was through no fault of his that they remained there. Geography and time had simply conspired against them. They had left the known world behind them and joined the ranks of all those aforementioned castaways in the unknown world beyond.
As such, five fruitless days after Marco’s Cessna took a nosedive into the ocean, the search was called off, sending a small armada of ships and reconnaissance planes back empty-handed to the
French naval base in Tahiti. A reluctant call was placed from the U.S. consular agent in French Polynesia to Barry’s parents in Cleveland, who had been waiting anxiously by the phone since the Tahitian airline had first informed them that their son was missing. Sophie’s parents, in their village outside Toulouse, received a similar phone call from the Départements et Territoires d’Outre-Mer. Although the languages were different, the content was identical—there was always room for hope, but it was very unlikely that their respective child was still with the living. In both countries, phones were dropped, sweaters were sobbed upon, and bouts of delirious grief bilingually ensued.
In the media, the story received little coverage, given the small size of the plane and its limited number of passengers. Both The New York Times and Le Monde made mention of it in passing, however, with single-column articles buried inconsequentially toward the back. INVESTMENT BANKER PRESUMED DEAD IN FRENCH POLYNESIA, read the headline of the former; LUNE DE MIEL MORTELLE POUR DEUX ARCHITECTES PARISIENS, proclaimed the bold print of the latter.
Neither was completely correct. As a bond salesman at Lehman Brothers, Barry was an investment banker in only the loosest sense of the term, and a recently retired one at that. As for Sophie, the honeymoon had proven fatal for only one Parisian architect, certainly not two. And for both survivors, their banishment from the world was consequential indeed.
15
“What are we going to do?”
Sophie spoke first, and for the first time since he’d met her, she sounded less angry than afraid.
Barry rubbed his face in an exasperated fashion, feeling the unfamiliar stubble of an incipient beard. He was tempted to say, I don’t have a goddamn clue, but somehow knew he could not. This may have been the time for despair, but it was not the place for uncertainty.
“We’ll wait. Even if they’ve called off the search, someone could still come by. Boats could pass, or a plane could fly overhead. We have the flare gun, and we can spell out SOS in rocks on the sand.”
“What about food?”
Barry poked at the fire with a bone-white piece of driftwood, pushing the pot with the blackened remains of the eggs away from the coals. “Well, hopefully your next Denver omelet will turn out better than this one.”
“Je suis sérieuse.”
Barry set down the stick of driftwood, considered it for a moment. “There are clams. I saw some fish over by the little cove. There are at least a few coconuts. And bananas. Christ, there’s a ton of bananas.”
Sophie nearly retched at the thought—Étienne had always been partial to the fruit; she’d made him bananes flambées every year for his birthday, and she’d carved them onto his muesli each morning before work. The notion of actually subsisting upon them made her nauseous with grief. But of course she would never say that to the American.
“I don’t want to spend my life eating nothing but fucking bananas” was all that she told him.
“You’ll probably have a pretty short life, then” was all he said in reply.
And he regretted it as soon as it was out of his mouth. But Barry felt entitled to administer a cold dose of reality, given the inordinately painful pinch of it she had dosed him with back in the hammock. After an uncomfortable silence lasting nearly a minute, he wisely changed the subject.
“What made you decide to go to the Marquesas, anyway? They’re a little out of the way, aren’t they?”
Sophie did her best Gallic puff. “Jacques Brel.”
“The singer?”
Sophie nodded, flicking some kind of small beetle off her arm before settling back in the sand. “We originally planned to spend the entire trip in Tahiti, but I read that Jacques Brel had lived on the Marquesas, and that he was buried there. It was a short flight, we were only going to stay a few nights. It was all my idea, so I suppose in a way this is entirely my fault.”
Sophie began to choke up. Barry froze, uncertain what to do. He felt an obligation to extend a hand for comfort or offer some form of condolence but was almost certain that she would slap both away. But after a long, shaky breath, she regained her composure.
“What about you?” she asked, reassuming her mildly annoyed tone.
Barry pushed a jet of ironic air through his nostrils to complement Sophie’s earlier pfff and managed a weak smile. “Paul Gauguin. He’s always been my favorite artist. He’s buried on the Marquesas, too—right next to Jacques Brel, I believe.”
“You flew all the way from New York to some island in the middle of the Pacific just to see the grave of Paul Gauguin?”
He had to admit, when described as such, it did sound improbable, if not flat-out ridiculous. Of course, there was more to it than that, but he didn’t feel like going into it at that moment.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Rather romantic for an American, non? I thought you people just worked all the time, watched TV in your big houses, and ate terrible food.”
“That’s the whole reason I left. And speaking of terrible food, we should probably eat the eggs, even if they’re burnt. It is protein.”
Sophie grimaced in disgust. “Dégueulasse. You can eat them.”
“Suit yourself.” Barry lifted the little pot by the handle and used his fingers to shovel the charred remains of the omelet into his mouth. The flavor was sharp and acrid, but then again, so was his hunger. “Why don’t we turn the radio back on? Some music might be nice.”
“D’accord.”
Sophie gave the little generator handle a few cranks and clicked it on, to the same Tahitian French-language station they’d been listening to before. It was playing “Ne me quitte pas” by Jacques Brel.
“You have to be kidding me,” Sophie snarled, before snapping off the radio. “Putain de merde.”
Barry burst out laughing—laughter tinged with darkness, possibly even madness, but laughter nonetheless. Sophie resisted for a moment and then joined in. Honestly, by that point, her grief expended, her tears depleted, she didn’t know what else to do.
The hours passed, and the sky turned a luminous peach before reddening and darkening to the tar pitch of night. Barry and Sophie sat on the beach and watched the slow surrender of the day, not saying much, both considering what this new development meant. Both thought about their friends and family, who were surely worried about them, if not totally distraught. And there was nothing they could do, not one single means by which they might telegraph their status and ease their concern. I’m alive, I’m here.… Je suis ici, Maman.… With luck and a little adjustment the shortwave could pick up incoming signals, but it was a painfully one-way conversation. The frustration of that fact was beyond description, the silent despair of Ebenezer Scrooge watching events unfold as a ghost, the longing of the wrongfully imprisoned to have the truth be told. The only human being either could talk to was sitting in the sand three feet away.
It was Barry who spoke first.
“We need a plan.”
Sophie turned her head, which had been resting on her tucked-up knees; she was wearing his shirt again, buttoned high against the cool night air. “What do you mean?”
“Well, we don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here. It could be a while. I think we should make a plan for how to live here. We should walk around the island tomorrow, take note of everything, and see what we have to work with.”
“You mean like a system?”
“I guess so. I think a good start would be to figure out what food we have, and how much we can eat.”
“D’accord. I can do that with you.”
“We should climb the little mountain there, too.” He gestured with his head in the direction of the six-story cairn that formed the island’s spine. “We’ll get a better view of what’s around us.”
“Do you think there might be another island near?”
“Maybe. I mean, there are lots of little islands in this part of the Pacific. And if we see one, we can get to it on the raft. It still works, right?”
So
phie sat up and nodded. “I think so.”
“We’ll see.” Barry patted down his pockets for the pack of Russian cigarettes, finding nothing. “Do you have the smokes?”
“They’re in the shelter. Do you want me to get them?”
Barry thought for a moment and shook his head. “Nah. Now’s probably a good time to quit. If there is another island nearby, I’m going to have some serious paddling ahead of me.” He flashed a smile at her, a sly grin flush with confidence. He wasn’t sure where it was coming from, but he had summoned it from somewhere. Unlike his hardy midwestern forebears, he’d had no Great War in which to prove his manhood, no Great Depression to test his mettle. Perhaps this uninhabited island in the South Pacific was his Normandy beach, his own personal and palm-lined Dust Bowl. He had cheated death, he was still alive, and sometimes that fact alone was enough. “Now, let’s go eat some fucking bananas.”
Barry rose from the sand and brushed himself off; he offered his hand to help Sophie up, and to his surprise, she actually took it. She even said merci.
16
The question may not have occurred to Barry and Sophie, who certainly had more pressing issues weighing on their minds, but it does merit asking: How, exactly, did a postimpressionist painter of the late nineteenth century and a Belgian chanteur from the middle of the twentieth come to be buried within feet of each other on one of the most isolated islands in the world? And more important, what was it about Paul Gauguin and Jacques Brel that convinced the two of them to visit their graves in the first place? To answer both questions, a little comparative history is probably in order:
Castle of Water Page 6
