Castle of Water - Dane Huckelbridge

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He’d spent almost every night of that winter with the little radio whirring beside his pillow, adjusting the dials with a Swiss watchmaker’s precision, navigating a vast ocean of static until the sweet whale song of some faraway station came rising from the deep. There was Radio Havana, Voice of Free China, Deutsche Welle, the BBC. Sure, it was no great shakes in hindsight, but to a ten-year-old Cleveland boy in a flyover state, such sounds were nothing short of magic, hints at what awaited beyond the bleak soot of the horizon. He would listen in secret, with the volume almost but not quite extinguished and the speaker pressed tightly to his ear.

      And now he had at last ended up in exactly the sort of exotic, faraway locale that he had longed for as a boy, only to do exactly the same thing. But with considerably less luck. Perhaps because of solar winds or distant storms, viable stations were hard to come by. Like timid leviathans they refused to surface, remaining hidden below the rolling whitecaps of static. There was, however, something out there. Every so often, snatches of a disembodied voice, ghostly as sin, would come warbling through the crackling waves. Like a crossed telephone line, a conversation in the background thin as a whisper and too faint to hear. And each time it happened, Barry would press his ear even closer to the speaker, straining to make some sense of voices that he wasn’t entirely sure were voices at all. But he could not. There was no sense to make. The signals were too weak, too far away. Just comet trails, there and then gone again, drowned out and lost at sea. So he gave up trying to find them and settled instead for the comfort of static. Eventually, he dozed off and the charge on the radio wore down, the whistles settling out to a hum, the silver whiteness of that static fading into the blackness of silence. Then there was only the waves and the trees.

      As for Sophie, she fell asleep shortly after Barry, after having spent most of the night gagging on her grief. She’d been able to keep it simmering quietly on the back burner for most of the day, but it came boiling back when she was all alone in the darkness. It was unbearably visceral, as if an essential organ, one that could not be replaced or transplanted, had been ripped with indifference right from her gut. Her Étienne was gone—no, much worse than gone. “Gone” was resting peacefully beneath French platane trees in a velvet-lined box. The place he had been dragged to was the pure stuff of nightmares, the raw substance of dread. And at the one moment he had truly needed her, his face awash in fear and regret, she’d been unable to help him, powerless to do anything. She wondered if she’d made the right choice out there in the ocean—if perhaps she should have joined him, surrendered instead and gone down by his side.

      So great was her sadness, she even considered going to talk to the American, to beg him for comfort, to let him tell her that everything would be all right. But she could not. No, a French girl could not do such things, never disclose there might be a cant to the perfect posture, a shaky wheel in the noble carriage. It was impossible. So instead she let her sobs rock her to sleep, terrified of the nightmares to come but giving in at last to whatever horrors midnight might bring.

      But the strangest thing. When she finally dozed off, there were no dark things waiting for her there—no sucking whirlpools or circling sharks. Just her grandfather Jean-Pierre Ducel, the mountain guide from the Pyrenees with whom she had spent her summers all those years before. He had died from a heart attack back when she was in university, but in her dream there he was, dressed in his wool knee breeches and red Gavarnie socks, sitting beside her, shaving off slices of saucisson sec with his Laguiole knife. He smiled through the bushiness of his mustache, told her to eat up, it was time to go. Allons-y, ma chérie, he said. Il faut avoir la niaque. She finished the dried sausage slices and they stood up together, brushing the pine needles from the seats of their pants. Then they started marching upward, ever upward, clearing the spindled boles of pines, cresting the top of an ancient ridge, entering upon a field of pure white snow, mountains rising all around them, ancient things that feared no sea. . . .

      “No planes or ships during the night?”

      Barry massaged the sleep out of his eyes, easing his feet over the hammock with a groan and a wince—his sunburn had worsened considerably overnight. “The French navy pulled up briefly, we had coffee and croissants, and they said they’d send for help.”

      “You’re an imbécile,” murmured Sophie, less than amused with his attempt at a joke.

      “How did you sleep?”

      “Fine,” she lied. “And you?”

      “Pretty well,” he lied back. “Christ, I would kill for a toothbrush.”

      “Maybe you can buy one on your way to get some water.” She tossed him one of the plastic water bags—it bounced off his chest and fell to the sand.

      “Maybe you can get it yourself.”

      “Do you want breakfast or not?”

      “Breakfast? What . . .” And then he sniffed. Eggs. Somehow, she was cooking eggs. He squinted down over her shoulder and noticed the little omelet she was prodding atop a small driftwood fire, using one of their stainless-steel drinking cups as a pan.

      “Whoa! Where did you get that?”

      “I found two eggs in a bird’s nest by the rocks.”

      Barry felt a slight inkling of appreciation, perhaps even admiration, but was at a loss for how best to express it. “I’ll go get some water” was all he said, putting in his contacts from the case and gathering up the water bag.

      “Bon. And try to get some more eggs, too, while you’re at it.”

      “I don’t know about the eggs, but I can definitely bring back some more bananas.”

      He plodded off across the sand toward the island’s interior, shaking his head. It was the infuriating insouciance with which she said it—she might as well have been asking him to grab a baguette on his way home from work. God, these ridiculous French.

      Barry did have to admit, though, the interior of the island was growing on him. It was a nice respite from all that sea and sand, and although certainly different in terms of its foliage, it was not entirely unlike a midwestern forest. The undergrowth was tough on the soles of his feet, and the insects there were more of a nuisance, but it was peaceful, a silence tended to by the comforting rustle of trees rather than the disconcerting roll of the surf. In fact, it was almost pleasant. He wrested a bunch of green bananas from a shaggy tree and slung it over his sunburned shoulder, gaining in doing so the courage—audacity, even—to whistle, with the insouciance of someone grabbing a six-pack of beer at a bodega after work. God, these ridiculous Americans, he snickered to himself.

      And the water was spectacular. Barry hadn’t realized how parched he was. At the two freshwater pools in the mountain’s rocky base, he quenched his thirst with wild abandon, drinking it down in tremendous gulps. Once adequately hydrated, he dunked the water bag under, let it fill, and sealed the top. He gazed up past the rock ledges, at the pillar of seabirds that circled above, their cries that morning unduly harsh—maybe they were upset about the missing eggs. He didn’t see any nests with eggs nearby, but he did notice a single white feather on one of the rocks, and something about it appealed to him. He picked it up and decided to take it back for Sophie. Who knows? Maybe she’d like it.

      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.

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