La Bouche

Chapter One: A Ring of Biomass

The satellite image was ugly, which was the first thing Nate Fournell loved about it.

It hung on the wall of the marine ecology lab in Marseille, printed at low resolution on paper that had gone soft at the corners from six months of handling. Most of the frame was open ocean, rendered in the flat digital blue of a false-color composite. In the lower right quadrant sat a smudge of green no bigger than a thumbprint, and around that smudge, perfectly concentric, a ring of pale turquoise.

"It's a shoal," said Dr. Emile Vasseur, who had been Nate's advisor for four years and had spent most of that time trying to talk him out of things. "Or a bloom. Or a bad pixel."

"It's the same in three separate passes." Nate tapped the corner of the printout where he had written the dates in pencil. "March, June, October. Different satellites. Different sun angles. The ring doesn't move and it doesn't change size."

"Then it's a reef."

"It's a reef with a biomass signature about four times higher than anything in the Mozambique Channel." Nate could hear his own voice climbing and made himself slow down. "Four times. In water that shallow, that far from any nutrient upwelling. It shouldn't be possible. Something is feeding that system and it isn't the open ocean."

Vasseur took off his glasses and cleaned them with the hem of his shirt, which was what he did instead of sighing.

"You have a thesis," he said. "On coral mutualism. It is a good thesis. It is nearly finished. In six months you will defend it and then you will be Dr. Fournell and you will have thirty years to chase pixels."

"It's not a pixel."

"There is no name on that island." Vasseur put his glasses back on. "Do you understand what that means, in this century? Every rock in every ocean has a name. Someone has planted a flag on it or fought a war over it or filed a fishing claim. This one appears on French naval charts from 1908 and 1953 and then it simply stops appearing. The Malagasy hydrographic service does not list it. There is no survey. There is no soil sample. There is nothing."

Nate waited. He had learned that Vasseur's arguments always turned around at the end and revealed themselves as invitations.

"Which is either very boring," the older man said, "or the most interesting thing I have heard in a decade. Naturally you cannot have any money."

"Naturally."

"The committee will not fund a private charter to an unsurveyed island with no permit and no local partner. I would not fund it. If you drowned, I would have to attend a memorial and say kind things about you." He looked at the printout again. In the low afternoon light his face did something complicated. "There was a man. Before your time. Before mine, really. An ecologist named Picot, Georges Picot. Late eighties. He was interested in island biogeography, in isolated systems—the kind of person who could talk for three hours about a beetle. He went south to work in the Indian Ocean and he never published again."

"He quit?"

"He disappeared. Officially he drowned somewhere off Antsiranana. It was 1987, the paperwork was thin, the family was in Lyon and had no money for an inquiry." Vasseur shrugged. "I mention it only because I recall that he was interested in a place he could not get funding for either. I do not want to be dramatic. There is nothing romantic about drowning."

Nate took the printout down off the wall that night and rolled it into a cardboard tube.

---

Denny Pogue said yes in eleven seconds, which was nine seconds longer than Nate expected.

They were on the phone, Denny somewhere loud, and Nate had barely finished the sentence—uncharted, unsurveyed, nobody's ever put a mask in that water—before Denny started laughing, that big flat bray that carried across bars.

"How much?"

"Flights, gear, and a charter out of Nosy Be. Call it six thousand euro for two of us. Denny, I'm not asking—"

"You're absolutely asking. It's the only thing you've ever asked me for and you've been working up to it for a month, I could hear it in the way you said hello." Sound of a door, and then the noise dropped away. "Four of us. Sonia comes or I don't come."

"Of course."

"And Lise."

Nate rubbed his eyes. "Lise hates boats."

"Lise hates you being on boats without her. Which is a different thing and a much bigger problem." A pause. "Twelve thousand. I'll wire it Monday. Nate. Say it's real."

"It's real."

"God," said Denny, with genuine joy, "finally."

The inheritance had come to Denny two years earlier from an uncle he'd met four times, and he had spent it the way a man spends money he doesn't believe in: kite surfing in Essaouira, a motorcycle he crashed, a season of cave diving in Mexico that had ended with a decompression scare he still told as a comedy. He had a hunger that never seemed to be about danger exactly. It was about being somewhere no one had told him he could be.

Lise Chabot took longer than eleven seconds. She took four days.

She read everything. She read the charts, the satellite passes, the two paragraphs Nate could find about the island in a colonial-era survey of the Malagasy coast, translated badly from the original French. She read the hydrographic warnings about the passage north of Nosy Be. She sat on the floor of their apartment with her laptop on a stack of books and made a list of every hospital between the island and Antsiranana, which was a list with one entry.

"There's no evacuation," she said finally.

"There's the charter."

"The charter is a fishing boat that leaves and comes back. That's not evacuation, that's a bus timetable." She looked up at him. Lise had a way of looking at a person that felt like being weighed. She was a structural engineer, which Nate thought explained a great deal about her—she spent her days assuming that things would fail, and calculating how much they could fail before people died. "If someone breaks a leg on day one, they lie on a beach with a broken leg for three days."

"Sonia's a nurse."

"Sonia's an ER nurse with a first aid kit and no blood supply." She shut the laptop. "You're going anyway."

"Yes."

"Then I'm coming." She said it flatly, without generosity, the way you'd read out a measurement. "Not because I want to see your coral. Because if you drown forty miles from anywhere and I'm in Marseille, I'll spend the rest of my life doing this exact arithmetic in my head."

He went to her and she let him, and after a while she said into his shoulder, "Three days. Not four. Three."

---

Nosy Be in November was heat you could lean on.

They came off the plane into it and it settled over them like a wet coat, and Sonia Rivas laughed out loud at the shock of it, holding her arms out from her body. She had come straight off four night shifts and had slept from Paris to Nairobi with her mouth open, and she woke up delighted, which was a thing she did. In eleven years Nate had never seen Sonia Rivas arrive anywhere in a bad mood. Denny had met her in a hospital corridor after the motorcycle, and she had told him within a minute that his helmet had saved his life and his shoes were ridiculous, and he had proposed twice since then, both times unsuccessfully and both times in the water.

They spent two days provisioning. Rice, tinned fish, a butane stove and four canisters of fuel, twenty gallons of drinking water in jerrycans, a machete from a hardware stall, two tents, dive gear, a hand-pumped inflatable raft that Denny bought on the argument that a boat that returns is not a boat that has arrived. Nate hired a VHF handheld and a spare battery. Sonia built the medical kit herself, laying it out on the guesthouse bed and photographing it: sutures, lidocaine, saline, ceftriaxone, morphine ampoules she had acquired through channels Nate did not ask about, tourniquets, gauze in absurd quantity.

"You've packed for a war," Denny said.

"I've packed for stupid men in the water," Sonia said. "Same list."

The charter was the problem.

The harbor at Hell-Ville had thirty boats big enough to make forty nautical miles and back. Nate spoke to eleven captains over two days. The conversations were all the same in shape. He would show the chart, penciled coordinates, and they would look, and they would be perfectly friendly, and then their faces would smooth over and they would say the boat was booked, or the engine was bad, or the season was wrong. One man, a young guy in a Marseille football shirt that made Nate absurdly hopeful, laughed and said something in Malagasy to his crewmate, and the crewmate did not laugh.

"What did he say?" Nate asked.

The young man's smile went careful. "He said you should go to Nosy Iranja. Better reef. Turtles. Very nice."

On the third morning a man was waiting for them at the guesthouse gate.

He was sixty or thereabouts, thick through the chest and shoulders, with gray in his hair kept very short and forearms webbed with the pale scars that thirty years of longlines leave. He wore a shirt buttoned wrong and rubber sandals cut from a tire, and he introduced himself as Patrice Muamba and said he had heard there was a vazaha with money and bad coordinates.

"You'll take us?" Nate said.

"I will take you." Patrice held up a hand before Nate could get any further. "Triple. Not because you are rich. Because it is triple."

"Triple's fine."

"Triple is fine," Patrice repeated, and something moved behind his eyes, something almost like disappointment, as though he had hoped Nate would haggle and reveal himself as a person with sense. "Then hear the rest. I take you out. I put you and your bags on the sand. I go. I do not stay. I do not sleep on that water, I do not anchor, I do not eat lunch there. Seventy-two hours, and I come back, and I take you off. If the sea is bad I come the next tide. That is the whole arrangement."

"That's what we wanted anyway," Denny said.

Patrice looked at Denny for a moment. Then he sat down uninvited on the low wall by the gate, and put his hands on his knees, and said, "Do you know what the fishermen call it?"

"There's no name on the charts," Nate said.

"There is no name on the charts. There is a name." He said something in Malagasy first—a short word, three syllables, that Nate would later try and fail to reproduce—and then, in French: "La bouche. The mouth."

Behind Nate, Lise went still.

"Why?" Nate asked.

"Because things go in," Patrice said, "and nothing comes out." He shrugged, a small motion, unembarrassed. "My grandfather's brother went in. Nineteen fifty-something. Three men in a pirogue, blown north in a storm, and the storm broke and two of them came back and said the third had swum for the beach and stood on it and waved at them, and then he walked into the trees and did not come out. They waited a day. They shouted. They went home. Every man on that coast has a story like it, and every story ends the same way, so you will say: superstition. Fishermen and their stories. Fine. Say it."

"I wasn't going to say it," Nate said. He was, a little.

"You will say it in your head." Patrice smiled without any warmth at all. "Here is what I know that is not a story. Nineteen years ago I was on a boat that took a Frenchman there. Not a young man. A scientist, with cases, like yours. Very polite, very sure. Boxes of paper."

Nate's mouth had gone dry. "Do you remember his name?"

"No. It was nineteen years ago and I was crew and I carried his boxes." Patrice tipped his head toward the harbor. "I remember that we came back for him after three weeks. The captain sounded the horn one hour. Two hours. His camp was on the sand—the tent, the boxes, all of it standing there, very neat. And nobody on the beach. The captain would not put a man ashore to look. I thought he was a coward. I was twenty-nine and I thought many men were cowards." He stood, brushing his palms on his shorts. "Now I am the captain and I would not put a man ashore either. So. Triple, and seventy-two hours, and you carry your own boxes."

He walked off down the road in his tire sandals without waiting for an answer.

There was a silence at the gate.

"Picot," Nate said.

"You don't know that." Lise's voice was tight. "You have no idea if that's the same island or the same man or if any of it happened. He's negotiating. He just tripled his rate with a ghost story, which, honestly, respect."

"Eighty-seven," Nate said. "Vasseur said eighty-seven. He'd have been—" He did the arithmetic and got 1987, nineteen years back from now, and felt the two numbers click together like a bolt going home.

Sonia was watching him. "Nate. Do you want to not go?"

He thought about it. He would think about that question, later, for years—about the fact that he was asked it plainly, in daylight, standing on a road that smelled of frangipani and diesel, with the money not yet spent and the boat not yet loaded, and that he had a whole clean second in which he could have said yes.

"No," he said. "If a researcher went missing there, that's more reason. That's a person nobody looked for."

Denny clapped him on the back so hard he coughed. "Also there's a reef nobody's ever dived."

"Also there's that," Nate admitted.

Lise didn't say anything. She went inside and repacked her bag, and put the machete on top where she could reach it.