21

I had been living with Pecheur for nearly two years when his health began to decline. Not long after visiting with his daughter in Rome, he complained of pain in his hands and feet. I didn’t feel it a burden to take him to doctors’ appointments and keep track of his medications. He hadn’t lost his acuity and could have managed the pills by himself, but I wanted to help in whatever way I could. I took him to the hospital for a series of tests, but the inconclusive results were followed by several more stays during which the causes of other discomforts remained equally mysterious. He suffered from dizziness that came and went, and would remain in bed on those days with books piled up around him.

By this time I had learned a great deal about his life and interests. If he needed to spend the day in bed, I would bring him his breakfast on a tray. I would comb through his collection of old records and play his favorites, such as Britten’s opera Billy Budd and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

Despite the difficulties with his health, Pecheur set to work soon after his return from Europe. In the third-floor gallery, I helped him take down the panorama of the coastline that resembled Holland. We stored the physical pieces in a large room off the basement workshop, where I could see the covered shapes of other projects that had been completed and put away before I became his assistant. To me the magic had been in the computer programming that made the seas surge and fall back, and I wondered what animated the models that he made without computers and advanced electronics. In any event, we soon cleared the gallery and began the construction of the island of his dream.

“It’s a stratovolcano,” he told me, “with magma of high viscosity. Its explosive force is immense. The volcano itself is tall and steep, because the lava is brittle and molten rock is forced up and hardens on the slopes. Judging from the angle of incline, this island was formed by multiple eruptions that finally drove the tip of the volcano above the waves.”

“Could it erupt again?” I asked.

“It certainly could.” He pointed to the peak of the volcano. “Here is the magma cap. It’s created by the slow extrusion of magma from the core. These volcanoes occur in chains as tectonic plates collide and slide over one another. The Ring of Fire comprises a thousand volcanoes that rim the Pacific Ocean. The volcano on our island is unusual because it’s solitary.”

Pecheur selected and scaled his materials with a care that bordered on obsession. He had sources that supplied him with pumice from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. From elsewhere he gathered the two common types of lava, one smooth and flat like a roadway surface and the other made of jagged individual rocks. He ordered some lava flecked with olivine, a semiprecious stone. He also located sand made from the wearing away of this lava. The sand, which he used for the island’s beaches, had a greenish tint. I wondered whether his dream had such specificity, or whether he simply used his imagination to create the barren, volcanic outcrop that rose in the gallery. He took pains to build a vent within the volcano where the magma would rise, and he worked the stony slopes to create the strata layered by eruptions over millions of years. He surrounded the island with jagged reefs like a serrated crown.

“It’s coral,” he replied when I asked what he used to make the gleaming pink and black of the reefs. “Coral reefs form around these volcanic islands. The islands rise up because of the magma and ash, but later they settle as the oceanic crust adjusts to the weight. If the islands sink enough, the reefs enclose lagoons.”

At this critical juncture, with the physical setting complete but the programming hardly begun, Pecheur stopped work because of his worsening health. He suffered shortness of breath, vertigo, and weakness. At some moments he felt that he would lose all control over his body. At his instruction, I employed nurses around the clock. Occasionally he would walk with a cane to survey the island, but on most days the nurse on duty would roll him around in a wheelchair to gaze at the work that had halted.

“This is an impossible island,” Pecheur said to me. “We have to program for fierce currents, towering waves, and an enormous undertow.”

It cheered me to hear him speak of continuing the project, but within another few weeks, he stopped speaking of what he planned and hoped to do. He looked shrunken in the wheelchair, fatigued and sallow.

“I can’t keep my mind off this,” he said, gesturing toward the large basin. It held a roundish island about five feet in diameter that rose to a mountain peak with flanks covered by rain forest. Palm trees stood in thick clusters near the skirt of beaches, but there was no ocean, and nothing in the tableau moved.

I stood quietly beside him. I didn’t have to speak because both he and I knew what he said was true. He didn’t rest easily in his sickbed and always wanted to come here.

“I’ve been having a lot of thoughts,” he said.

“Yes?” I wondered if he had someone in mind who might help us finish his work or, less likely, if he had decided to admit that it would remain incomplete.

“I’d like you to go to the island.”

“Without you?”

“Yes.” He smiled wanly. “I’d like you to go and report back to me. Tell me what you find there.”

I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what he hoped to discover there; I would simply be visiting a place of desolation. But I also respected whatever drew him to the island. He had so often let himself be guided in this way.

“Shouldn’t I stay here and help?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Go and tell me what you discover.”

I made plane reservations and chartered a boat with an experienced captain, but Pecheur returned to the hospital. Day after day, as I debated whether to stay with him or go as he wished, he weakened. Soon he lacked the strength to move or speak. In the end, the decision was taken away from me. Pecheur died. I postponed the trip. And even my grief at times was pushed aside by the funeral arrangements and innumerable other practicalities that became my responsibility.

I made certain that he was buried as he wished, beside his wife, on a promontory overlooking the Atlantic. To his wife’s headstone I added the date of her death. His headstone merely has the name he chose, Pecheur, and the dates of his birth and death. Behind the graves stands a grove of pine trees, old and tall and green in every season. The surf breaks on the beach below, and the breezes carry the scent of the pines and the ocean.

Pecheur made me his heir and his trustee. I owned the Floating World, the building that housed it, and many other properties and assets. The model boats remained on their pedestals in the glow of the spotlights. I liked to walk among them and study the intricacy of their details and the fineness of their workmanship. At one point, curious about Pecheur’s name for the shop, I discovered that the floating world was about far more than illicit pleasure. Called ukiyo in Japanese, it grew out of the Buddhist concept of a world filled with pain and came to mean the transient and unreliable nature of our world, how fleetingly it floats in the illusion of time. I decided to turn the building into a museum and open it to the public.

Pecheur had been involved in supporting many causes, and I continued his good work. As the trustee of his foundation, I donated money to feed the hungry, to support dance companies and orchestras, to remove mines from old battlefields, to make small loans to impoverished people who dreamed of being entrepreneurs, to fund scholarships, to fight diseases, to preserve the environment, to aid the elderly, and much more. I tried as best I could to support scientific research that would advance Pecheur’s dream of harmonizing the forces of nature.

Often I returned to the third-floor gallery and studied the model of the island with its volcano. I hired programmers to make waves beat against the reefs and a dark cloud of smoke billow above the peak, but the essential mystery Pecheur sought eluded me. Sitting at the controls, I wanted to take the next step. I kept recalling his request that I visit the island. If he had lived, I would certainly have gone, but even now, after his death, it felt like something unfinished. I didn’t want to go for myself but I wanted to do it for Pecheur. Finally, hoping that the trip might be more pleasant than I imagined, I chartered the boat for a two-week voyage, rebooked my plane tickets, and readied myself to leave.