Castle of Water

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Once his thirst was slaked, all that remained was for his appetite to be sated, and that came courtesy of the island’s banana trees. Somehow he had missed the bunches of green, starchy fruit, dangling just above head level. But upon noticing their presence, he also became aware of their prevalence. Good, thought Barry, chewing on his sixth banana and fully prepared to eat six more. Water and bananas. I shall want for neither hydration nor potassium. And he laughed at his little joke, which, anyone with experience in survival situations can tell you, is a promising sign. Attitude is everything, and those that turn negative can be just as ruinous as diseased streams and toxic berries.

With his most basic of needs addressed for the immediate present, Barry returned to his post on the shore, ripping off the lower half of his slacks as he did so. They were shreds anyway, and cutoffs seemed more appropriate to the conundrums of a castaway. His sleeves he rolled up past his elbows, then muttered, “What the hell,” and took his shirt off entirely, wrapping it around his head in a sort of improvised French Foreign Legion hat. He breached the tree line and scanned the horizon, having transformed in a few short minutes from a high-yield-bond salesman at Lehman Brothers into a passable Robinson Crusoe. “Shit,” he muttered to himself. “Goddamn.” And goddamn was right—no rescue boats sat poised on the horizon, and no choppers hovered above the unfurling waves. He kicked sand at the remnants of his signal fire and considered his options. If only his cigarettes weren’t mush—he was dying for a smoke. After some deliberation, he vetoed a signal fire for being too labor-intensive and decided instead to write a message in the sand. After some scouring (he was surprised at how little loose wood there was, but then again palm trees didn’t exactly have branches), he settled on a rock with a jagged edge. Using it, he carved out SOS as large as he could. He then repeated this in several other locations, doing another lap of the island. He considered again starting a fire, but the palms he found were too damp, and he ultimately gave up on the idea altogether. A school of ominous storm clouds was quietly gathering, squirting its dark squid ink deep into the horizon; finding shelter took precedence over everything else.

Barry thought for a few minutes, studying the tree line and hoping for an idea. After considerable grumbling, head-scratching, and additional sand kicking, he came to one palm that hung especially low, jutting out over the beach at a shallow angle. Yes, it was just close enough to the ground to do the trick and was sheltered quite well by the surrounding trees. Newly inspired, Barry set to work, harvesting the larger fronds he could find and leaning them in thick layers against both sides of its trunk. Within an hour, he had something resembling a tent. When the rains came later that evening—and boy, did they come—he was even able to stay relatively dry. It was a definite improvement over the leaf pile of his first night, which offered some relief to Barry, although not much. He was still stuck alone on an island not much bigger than Madison Square Park. Still uncertain if anyone was searching for him. Still at the mercy of a negligent sea and a vastly indifferent sky. And then of course there was the pilot and the other two passengers. Christ. Barry hadn’t even thought about them in that flaming mess of twisted steel and surging water. Had he seen them, he would have certainly tried to help, but he had not. Chances were, they hadn’t survived the crash. No, the Filipino pilot with the Hawaiian shirt was probably at the bottom of the sea, the young French honeymooners were likely food for fishes—a thought that alarmed and saddened Barry, but comforted him in a strange way, too. It alarmed him because they had all seemed like nice people, in no way deserving of their fate. But it also served as a reminder of the fact that there were far worse places he could be at that moment. Like the ocean floor, for example. He stifled a shudder and listened to the rain, damp, weary, very afraid, but also very much alive, and in that fact alone he found vast reassurance. “Crap,” he said out loud, once again on the edge of sleep. He’d forgotten yet again to take out his contacts.

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Had Barry not plucked out his contacts, had he taken a midnight stroll instead around the island’s sandy perimeter before hitting the hay—or palm fronds, as it were—he would have come to discover just how mistaken he was about the other passengers. Or at the very least, one of them, anyway. For on the shore directly opposite his, a Day-Glo orange raft was slowly deflating. And curled fetally inside its rubbery womb was Sophie Ducel, exactly one-half of the French honeymoon duo that Barry had assumed to be joined for eternity underwater. Her eventual destination proved identical to Barry’s, but the manner of her arrival was markedly different.

Unlike Barry, she had stayed at the site of the crash as long as she could, hidden inside a floating portion of the cockpit, trying with determination to keep her dying husband afloat. The pilot was nowhere to be seen (Barry had been right on that count; his seat was dislodged by the force of the impact, dragging him down to the ocean’s bottom), but a brightly colored emergency package of some sort could clearly be seen strapped to the floor where his seat had been. Keeping the bleeding form of her Étienne from sinking required Sophie’s full strength and attention, however, giving her no opportunity to unbuckle the box. She sensed its importance, its absolute necessity to her survival, but to let Étienne go for even one moment would mean losing him. She whispered encouragement in his ear, begged him to hold on just a little longer, but her appeals were in vain. His groans became less frequent and then ceased altogether. “Non, non, mon chéri, ne me quitte pas,” Sophie pleaded, to no avail. Étienne’s blood had all left him; his heart had nothing left to pump. His eyes, once so luminous and full of life, had been in an instant irrevocably dimmed. A distraught Sophie opted to hold on to his lifeless body rather than procure the orange box, but after several minutes of hopeless bobbing, an oceanic whitetip shark—not a huge one, but at ten feet imposing nonetheless—rendered her selfless act moot. Attracted no doubt by the thrashing and the blood, the pale phantom form slipped in from below and stole her Étienne away. She felt the intimation of a tug—testing, flinching, almost infantile—followed by a massive jerk that tore him out of her arms. There was a splash and a crimson surge of bubbles and he was gone. The now hysterical Sophie was at this point truly alone, the water around her was undeniably aflame, the cockpit fragment in which she sheltered was sinking nightmarishly into the sea, and a dinner bell had officially been sounded, noticed by every shark for miles around.

Two paths, white and shimmering as a summer day in her native Toulouse, appeared before her. Amid Sophie’s immense terror, depthless loss, and visceral sadness, a clear choice took shape. Suddenly her life was a fork in the road, a binary system both horrific and beautiful in its simplicity. One path was as follows: She could close her eyes, cease her struggle, and let her body go limp. Slowly, placid as a dream, she would sink into the dark water, enjoying a final moment of numb serenity before the ghost left her and the sharks did their work. A quick and relatively painless surrender, followed by a reunion with her husband in the beckoning deep.

Or she could swim like hell and get that putain de merde orange box.

Sophie Ducel chose the latter. With the walls of the narrow cockpit closing down upon her, she lunged for the box, which was underwater but still visible from the surface. She worked one buckle loose but felt her treasure sinking, moving steadily downward. She took a quick swallow of air and went down with it, her fingers struggling valiantly with the last canvas strap, her aching cheeks blistered with air. They were going down, everything, she knew that, and if she didn’t get it soon . . .

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.

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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, Fernão 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.

A twenty-first century that for Barry and Sophie was only just beginning. Their joint Cessna 208 went down on the first day of April 2001, a rather severe poisson d’avril, to say the least. That they ended up on the same plane was merely coincidence, if one believes in such things. As passengers aboard a small semicharter flight from the relatively remote island of Tahiti, bound for an even more remote island in the Marquesas, it was pure chance that brought them together. They were both looking to visit a place at the ends of the earth that they had heard good things about, and nothing more.

For Sophie, it was to be the most romantic leg of an already exceedingly romantic vacation. She and Étienne had delayed their honeymoon because of time and financial constraints—starting an architecture firm in Paris had proved taxing on both, and the AutoCAD licenses alone had put them several grand in the hole. But the date was set for a late March departure, some three months after their wedding, and when it arrived, they were understandably elated. The first week was spent on the main island of Tahiti, at a beachside resort rife with coconut palms and equally coconutty drinks. Mornings were devoted to making love in bed beneath the gauzy veil of their mosquito netting, and afternoons to walking along the beach, discussing architecture and making plans for the future. Étienne wanted to live in Paris indefinitely, but Sophie at least entertained the notion of returning to the south one day, maybe even to the Hautes-Pyrénées, where she had spent her summers as a girl. Either way, they had several happy years to figure it out. In the meantime, they had a promising little firm in the tenth arrondissement, several new contracts for respected cultural institutions, and another full week of tropical leisure ahead of them, to be spent on an even more idyllic island in the Marquesas that Sophie had read about in a brochure.

“Regarde,” she had whispered to a half-asleep Étienne while in bed together in their flat in Paris. “Jacques Brel lived there during the last years of his life. C’est un paradis.”

“Oui, ma chérie,” he had drowsily assented. “Allons-y.”

Barry’s voyage was also a celebration of sorts, albeit one of separation rather than joining. A separation from many things, as a matter of fact. For while Sophie had been doggedly pursuing her passion in Paris, Barry had been halfheartedly bobbing along as a middling bond salesman in New York. Actually, halfhearted may be generous. Barry hated it, loathed it, despised it with a passion. Yet somehow he had become resigned to that existence, a far cry from his childhood in Cleveland and an even farther shout from his grandparents’ farm in southern Illinois. But it just seemed the sort of thing one did after Princeton, even with a degree in art history, and he had been initiated unenthusiastically into the world of Excel spreadsheets and client meetings and unpleasant bar nights, while quietly dreaming of far different things.

Things like Gauguin paintings, for example. And when the tensile cord of his being finally snapped and his conscience could take no more, Barry remembered that selfsame Polynesian island whose name Sophie had uttered in bed (“Hiva Oa, Hiva Oa” . . . just saying it made his spine tingle). In a burst of resolve, he had decided to go, and with good reason: The singer Jacques Brel wasn’t the only francophone who had spent the last years of his life there—the little speck in the Marquesas had served as the painter Paul Gauguin’s final resting place as well. When Barry quit his job at Lehman Brothers, his boss had called him an idiot. When he told his girlfriend, she had informed him that his odds of making it as an artist were one in a million, as she packed her things and walked out the door. But when he whispered his new path to himself, the gods said, Well done.

Naturally, there was some trepidation. Quitting a fairly lucrative career in his midthirties to become a painter wasn’t the most fiscally prudent decision he had ever made, and giving away most of his savings to the United Way (honestly the only charity he could think of) was probably an even worse one. But if he lived frugally, he knew what remained in his bank account would sustain him for a few lean years, and the art supply store across the street from his new apartment downtown sold canvases on the cheap. Nervous but pleased with himself, and giddy with possibility, Barry felt a celebration was in order, something to commemorate a bold new adventure and provide ample inspiration for the creative period ahead.

The island of Hiva Oa was not easy to get to. But from Tahiti’s smaller airport in Papeete, there was a single-engine prop plane that made the eight-hundred-mile flight to the Marquesas twice a week. Sketchbook, oil paints, and pastels in hand, Barry had stood waiting at the airstrip, half a world away from home, beside a young French couple who had booked the same flight as he. The husband introduced himself as Étienne and seemed serious but personable. As for his new wife, she was very pretty but strikingly aloof. Sophie, she had said her name was, and beyond that, she did not divulge much more. They were dressed quite appropriately in their Deauville finest: cutoff shorts, espadrilles, and matching Saint James T-shirts. Barry, on the other hand, was still wearing the same clothes he had donned for his last day at the office and felt distinctly out of place in the South Pacific. Oh, well. He would have plenty of time to invest in cargo shorts and tan-giving tees when he arrived in the Marquesas. And he was looking forward to it.

The sun spilled down and the palms did their thing, and after a half hour of waiting, a rattletrap Cessna droned up, its rust-flecked wings shimmering in the heat that rose off the tarmac. From its cockpit, a groggy-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses beckoned them aboard.

“That’s our plane?” Sophie asked worriedly, and in French.

“Oui, c’est ça,” answered Étienne. “But don’t worry, it will get us there.”

Over the course of his life, Étienne had been correct on many counts, from his suspicion that the attractive brunette in his architecture class in Montpellier might like to join him for coffee to his conviction that it was better to set out and start a small firm of his own. But in this instance, regarding the reliability of the single-engine Cessna 208 and the integrity of its custodian, Étienne could not have been more wrong.