When Barry was swallowed by the wave and washed out to sea, that fragile reason was swept away with him. As soon as the surf receded to its standard dimensions and the rains calmed to a drizzle, Sophie climbed out from the little cleft in the side of the rocks and scrambled back down to terra firma, screaming out Barry’s name the entire way. She ran to the ruined site of their beachside camp, where a tattered rope hammock fluttered from a corpse of a tree, and found no trace of him. She scoured the palms and did frantic laps of the island, shouting until her voice went hoarse, Ba-rreeee, Ba-rreeee, Ba-rreeee. But her pleadings went unanswered; there was only the sound of the wind in the shredded palms and a few weak rumblings of delinquent thunder. Sobbing and suddenly too weak to stand, Sophie leaned against the remains of what had once been her home and emitted a sound of pure agony. It was a sound few ever hear and even fewer ever utter. It was the sound of having lost everything—she literally had nothing left.
For two days and nights she held a desperate vigil, squatting in the sand and staring bleakly out at the sea. She neither ate nor drank, in part because she held no appetite, but also as a matter of circumstance—the cyclone had stripped the trees of virtually all their bananas, and the tidal waves had filled the twin cisterns with brackish salt water. Instead, she prayed. She prayed as only a lapsed Catholic can, cutting all sorts of deals, laying out all manners of bargains, if only that stained-glass-colored God she had long since left to the leaded windows of Saint-Étienne Cathedral might grant her this one small favor: Bring Barry back to me, s’il vous plaît, Seigneur, please, bring him back. The sea yielded nothing, however, but curt waves and sour winds.
On the morning of the third Barry-less day, following a dawn as bleak and gray as a bone, Sophie decided she had waited long enough. “Pardonnez-moi, Seigneur,” she muttered as she rose to her feet and approached the stringy remains of Barry’s hammock. The knots were caked with salt and bloated by water, but she was able to untangle a single length of rope about six feet long. While certainly no Boy Scout as Barry had once been, she was able to tie a rough but functional rendition of a noose and, standing on tiptoe, secure the other end to the worn-out notch in the palm that had supported her shelter. All that was left was to say farewell, fall to her knees, and wait for the rope to finish what the spiraling Cessna had begun. As she saw it, she was only quickening that which was now inevitable. Without bananas, without drinking water, without fish of any kind, she knew she wouldn’t last more than a week. Frankly, there was no longer any reason to postpone it. It was time. Shaking, weeping, but resigned to her fate, she tightened the knot and prepared for the plunge.
“Good-bye,” she wheezed out in English, for Barry.
“Au revoir,” she sobbed to the world she’d once known.
23
Sophie’s anguished assumption—that Barry had been swept out into the open ocean and had joined Étienne and Marco in the cold, dark deep—was indeed well-founded but only half-correct. The wave did hit him, and hard at that. He had just ducked out of the windblown shell of Sophie’s palm shelter, the duffel bag in question slung over his shoulder, when he came face-to-face with the monstrous tsunami. The thing by that point was no longer the heaving swell that Sophie had noticed from her rocky perch; after breaching the reef that encircled their island, it had transformed into a thirty-foot torrent of surging white water. Barry had no time to run or climb, only a few short seconds to curse and brace.
The impact was indescribable, beyond imagining, as most forces of nature are. Once, as a teenager, Barry had been involved in a fairly serious head-on collision on a rain-slicked road on the outskirts of Cleveland. And even that crash, with all its Toyota Camry–crushing force, paled in comparison with the experience of being hit head-on by a thousand tons of angry ocean. And after that initial wallop, the situation was slow to improve. For a full hellish minute, he became the proverbial rag doll in the washing machine, spun and yanked about, smashed mercilessly against rocks and trees and everything else the wave brought his way. Was he afraid? Yes, most definitely. Horrified, in fact, as he had not been since the sickening plunge of their damaged Cessna. But it was a peculiar, out-of-body fear, surreal in its intensity. This can’t be happening. Oh, but it was. Barry knew he was at odds with incredible forces; he felt as if he were being ground between the molars of the jaws of the sea.
Then, suddenly, he was released. Like Jonah spit from the belly of the whale, Barry found himself squirted up to the surface. An unimaginable tug still bore him along, but he was no longer underwater. Sure enough, one of his contact lenses had been claimed by the tsunami, but the other remained intact, and with his rehearsed one-eyed squint, he was able to ascertain that he had been taken quite far from the island and that an apocalyptic storm was still raging all around him. Huge swells buckled in every direction, and a violent wind smacked salt spray right into his face. It was quite dark, but storm dark—a bruised shade of almost luminous black and blue, freeze-framed by the bolts of electricity that scissored relentlessly down from the clouds.
Shit. Barry gasped and spit water and turned onto his back, struggling with the dead weight of the duffel bag that was somehow still strapped to his shoulders. He hoisted it onto his belly while fighting to keep his head above water. He considered trying to get out the raft and inflate it but quickly came to terms with the impossibility of that option. Simply staying afloat was monopolizing every ounce of his energy, and the thing took ages to blow up. So up and down he went, simply riding the swells. With each rise, he caught a fleeting, haphazard glimpse of the island’s rocky center from his one good eye, only to have it vanish when he went crashing back down. And after several such glimpses, he reached the disastrous conclusion that he was being carried by the storm farther and farther away from it. The island, that little spit of sand and nub of stone that had seemed to him for so long like a prison, became in that instant the purest home he had ever known. And besides—Sophie was still on it.
Lightning crashed, the oceans roared, and there, at the mercy of waves as big as mountains, beholden to a storm the size of God, Barry closed his eyes and turned his face toward the heavens. And the strangest thing happened: For the first time he could remember, he felt an uncanny sense of peace. He wasn’t afraid anymore. Not really, anyway. Well, okay, maybe a little. But not much. Confronting such an immense dose of destiny brought fresh clarity to the fact that some things were simply beyond his control. Out of his hands. No longer his concern. Honestly, the thought of leaving Sophie alone was more dreadful to him at that moment than the possibility of death. And honestly, how could death be any worse than this?
He did, however, have a bone to pick. The winds swallowed his words, but he spoke them skyward anyway, as only the only child of rural Protestants can:
“Goddamnit, if you’re going to kill me, fine. I get it. No hard feelings. But if not, please quit jerking me around and help me to get back to that island, because there’s a pain-in-the-ass French girl there who I can’t leave alone.”
The first time Barry had made such a request, floundering amid the burning wreckage of a plane, destiny or a deity—take your pick—had delivered to him a Ziploc bag full of contact lenses, an uninhabited island within swimming distance, and, although it took a few days to materialize and nearly a year to realize, a companion whom he truly cared about. The second time he pleaded his case, he was given:
A log.
Or a tree, more accurately. For Barry wasn’t the only thing that the tidal wave had ripped up by the roots and carried far out to sea. One of the island’s few coconut palms had been swept along with him. It didn’t happen right away—he noticed it after some ten minutes of being convinced that the god(s) above had finally forsaken him. But once it finally arrived, it was hard to miss—it smacked him right upside the head, causing him to briefly see stars in the midst of the cyclone. The fact that it was a large, floating palm tree took a moment to register, and his initial reaction was that the half-emerged form was some sort
of primordial aquatic beast (at this point, just about anything seemed possible). But after a few pokes and prods, he ascertained its true identity: a big floating log. He slung the duffel bag over it, wrapped his arms and legs around it, and clung to it tighter than a baby koala. The storm was still raging, but if he could survive it, just wait it out, then he might be able to paddle the thing back to Sophie and back to his home. In fact, to keep his mind occupied, he shut his eyes and sang the words to the John Denver song “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” just as he had done nearly two decades before, while listening to the radio in his grandfather’s pickup truck, the bed loaded with feed sacks and the smell of fresh-cut timothy grass rushing in through the window.
Barry wasn’t able to keep an exact accounting of time. But after what felt like a few hours, the waves regained normal proportions and the rain eased up—giving him the chance at last to put in a new pair of contacts from the duffel bag and restore his full vision. The island was well out of sight by that point, but based on a few quick glimpses he’d managed to sneak at the survival kit compass, he figured he had been moving away from it in a generally northern direction. Which meant once the setting sun appeared dim and milky through the post-typhoon haze, it was simply a question of kicking his log and keeping its glow to his right. His fingers were pruned beyond sensation, and the single water bottle he pried loose from the duffel bag hardly put a dent in his thirst, but Barry was alive. He had something to keep him from drowning, and he knew in which direction his home could be found. A few minutes’ rest, he finally decided, and he would turn the log that way and begin the journey. After all, what other option did he have?
Twilight came quickly and made way for the darkness. A profound darkness that left Barry grateful for the phosphorescent markings on the dial of his compass. Not even starlight could poke its way through the clouds. He was sitting atop his log, squinting at the compass face, and trying to orient himself back toward the south when he noticed it. But the sight of it didn’t register at first. It was just too improbable, entirely too surreal. He sat there, rocking to and fro on the steady roll of the waves, unable to make sense of what he saw in the distance.
No, that was impossible, he told himself. The very thing he had been begging for, pleading for, for almost a year, to suddenly appear like this? It had to be a trick—a ruse of the mind born of wishful thinking, or at the very least some effect from the new pair of contacts. Barry closed his eyes, felt the log buck ever so slightly beneath him on the cusp of a swell, and counted to ten. Then he blinked and opened them once again.
But they were still there. Three simple lights, like wandering magi, flickering on the horizon, seeking their star. Ships, freighters maybe, they could be nothing else. How far away, Barry had no way of knowing. Five miles? Ten miles? Twenty? It was impossible to say, although they certainly were a long ways off.
Stay calm. He had to, he reminded himself, which, when one is lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is far easier said than done. His heart was off to the races, and his hands were shaking to a beat all their own, but he had to keep his thoughts in order. This was no time for rash decisions or thoughtless impulses. A sudden urge to both laugh and cry and possibly scream ascended from his guts, but he fended it off with a deliberate swallow and unzipped the corner of the duffel bag instead. With an almost exquisite level of care, he pried the flare gun loose, inserted a single cartridge into its exaggerated barrel, and pointed it directly over his head. He executed a quick countdown—why, he could not say, but it felt like the right thing to do before a momentous event—and pulled the trigger. There was a hiss of sparks, a tense moment of silence, and then a brilliant pop. For a few precious seconds, the world glimmered red, before returning once again to inimitable darkness. “Please, please, please,” Barry begged aloud, “please, please, please.”
He waited five torturous minutes before firing again. Another brilliant, crimson moment, followed by a second wave of gut-wrenching dark. He was loading up to fire a third when something profound occurred to him. The radio. Was it possible? Was that where the background interference had been coming from? He uncovered the shortwave, being extra careful not to tip the log while the electronics were loose from the waterproof duffel bag. On the verge of hyperventilating, he turned the generator crank and gave the tuning dial a gentle whirl, wondering if his hunch might actually prove correct.
It did. Those same disembodied voices, ghostly as sin, were suddenly rising from the static in a cosmic symphony, only louder now and far more clear. Some were in Russian, others Chinese, and at least one in English. It was the maritime frequency band—it had to be. He’d been listening to transmissions from ships all along, broadcasting on shortwave frequencies when they were too far out at sea for their standard transmissions. He had heard them that first night when he was alone in the hammock, he had listened to them from the top of the mountain just before the storm, and now, in the middle of the ocean, he was picking up their signals from mere miles away. He was actually looking at them, for Pete’s sake, a cavalcade of improbable hope parading across a hopeless sea.
Barry fired all of their remaining flares into the inky heavens, allowing a few minutes between each burst for an agonizing wait and an anxious prayer. They were far off, he knew that, but maybe, just maybe … And in the seconds that followed, he envisioned the ships turning around, the lights growing brighter, his weakened body being hoisted up by a crew of compassionate arms from the all-swallowing sea.
But it was not to be. He had begun to turn the log northward again, in their general direction, preparing to meet them, when he noticed the first of the lights vanish from view. Then the second and, shortly after that, the third. One after the other, the ships were gobbled up by the horizon, leaving him alone and bobbing in the darkness once again, that brief flicker of hope snuffed out like a flame.
“No! No! No!” Barry was startled by the sound of his own shouts. He tore at his hair, gaping helplessly at the void where the ships had just been. An entire year he had waited for this, wailed for this, and then to watch them slip through his fingers like fireflies and twinkle away?
For the briefest and most desperate of moments, Barry considered going out after them. True, they had appeared to be moving away from him, at a speed far faster than he could ever hope to match, but there could be more out there. Perhaps it was a sea lane—after all, he had seen three separate ships glide across his purview. Wasn’t it possible that additional ships might be on their way?
Perhaps. But while the possibility existed of finding a passing boat in a potential shipping lane untold miles to the north, the certainty of Sophie and their island was a day or two’s paddle directly to the south. And he also knew that without the survival gear, she didn’t stand a chance there by herself. If he went chasing after phantom boats, not only might he perish in the attempt—after all, he had no flares left to fire—but he would almost certainly doom her as well. If he went much farther from the island, it would be too far to turn around. He had been given a log, and that would have to be salvation enough. He couldn’t leave her; that just wasn’t an option.
And so, with no fanfare, but with plenty of determination and no small amount of relief—that moment of indecision had been far more excruciating than all the possible outcomes that scrolled through his mind—Barry put away the radio and the flareless gun and, using his glow-in-the-dark compass, began to reposition the log in a southern direction. Back to the island, back toward Sophie. And he did so with a smile, as incredible as it seemed. If the gods were going to have a joke at his expense, Barry decided, then nothing was going to stop him from laughing right along with them. While they were busy chuckling, he just might actually make it home.
He kicked for a while but quickly came around to the inefficiency of that means of propulsion. He did, however, have the raft paddles rolled up in the duffel bag, and it occurred to him that he might as well give one a try. He pulled himself out of the water and straddled the palm log, sin
king the paddle into the waves to push it along. The whole affair was unsteady, occasionally rolling to one side or the other, but it worked. Almost like a canoe, which got Barry thinking, but other more pressing issues demanded his attention.
He kept on paddling straight through the cloud-black night, and a cotton candy–colored sunrise saw him doing the same the next day. The sky had yet to totally clear, and an occasional drizzle peppered the water and misted his skin, but the worst of the storm seemed to have passed. He checked the compass periodically to maintain his position, and he sang old FM hits to help stay awake. He even talked to himself to keep himself company, imaginary conversations he knew he might never have the chance to actually have. He spoke at great length with his parents, caught up with college roommates, and even had a few choice things to say to his ex-girlfriend Ashley. When the sun finally set and that first rash of stars broke out above, he couldn’t help wondering what his old co-workers were doing in New York at that moment, and he laughed out loud when he imagined them stirring their single-malt Scotches and complaining about their six-figure bonuses. The notion that he, now paddling his log alone across the darkened Pacific, had once been among them was almost too absurd for him to believe.
The last traces of the cyclone had vanished by the second morning; the sky and sea regained at least some of their turquoise charms. The sun beat down upon his bare shoulders, but he was tan enough by that point to tarry the burn. In the afternoon, a speck shimmied out of the horizon; two hours later, he could make out once again the cone of rock and the shag of the palms. It was so close … When the log finally ground to a halt on the island’s sand, he felt like weeping. Sweet Jesus, it felt good to stumble onto dry land, no matter how small or isolated its acreage might be. He couldn’t wait to surprise Sophie on the other side of the island, to dump at her beautiful feet the precious duffel bag he had saved. He debated whether or not to tell her about the ships he had seen but decided that was something best saved for another time. He wasn’t sure how she would react to the news, and the last thing she needed was another disappointment. And using up all the flares—that was a whole other can of worms, one he was certainly in no hurry to open.
Castle of Water Page 10
