I had to wait for them to pack up the submersible, and it just about drove me nuts. It must have taken an hour. I wanted to scream.
While I paced around, I wrote a long email to Vanessa. I told her all about being under the Mediterranean Sea, the beauty down there, the romance of seeking St. Ex’s crash site and the building excitement of this assignment. Then I texted Shirley, but by then the submersible was almost on the truck. Going well, was all I had time to say.
We made our way to the Halliday’s home out on a nearby point, at the end of a dirt road far away from everyone else but with a nearly 360-degree view of the water. Just the two of them lived there. There wasn’t any sign of a female resident, believe me. It was a ramshackle wooden place that looked as if Mr. Halliday had whacked it together with a hammer and nails. It was probably worth about one-tenth of his submersible. The living quarters were tiny and cluttered with dirty clothing and dirty dishes and filled with a horrible smell I couldn’t identify. I counted five dogs and nine cats, and they seemed to have the run of the place. Attached to the house at the back was a lab of some sort, about three or four times the size of the living area. I could see microscopes and sea plants and fish skeletons on lab tables; a lovely odor was emanating from there too. I kept my distance.
“Johnny!” cried Halliday. “Show Monsieur Murphy le rock.” But Johnny was slouching along with his earbuds in, listening to a thrash metal band that was growling out French lyrics like the lead singer was Satan’s PR guy. It was so loud that I could almost make out every word. (Les Américains and diable came out clear as a bell.) Halliday had to rip the buds from his ears and repeat himself. Johnny didn’t look pleased.
The boy reluctantly led me to his little room, not much bigger than a walk-in closet and even more cluttered than the living area. I wasn’t even sure where his bed was at first, because it was under mounds of clothes and toys and video games and other electronic equipment. Other than the posters on the walls (of a bunch of hard-core bands I’d never heard of), the only items that weren’t mixed into this rubble was a laptop that formed the peak of the mountain on his bed and a large flat-screen TV on a shelf. It was blaring when we came in.
He began rummaging around in the piles. And as he worked, he actually said something, the very first words he’d uttered since I’d met him, spitting it out under his breath in a sort of snarl. “Américain,” he hissed. Then he muttered, “Capitaliste!” It was a pretty strange thing for a kid his age to say.
Finally, he found what he was looking for. I could tell because he suddenly stopped moving and stood up. His back was to me. I stiffened. Then my hands started to tingle.
When he turned, he was holding a rock a little larger than a man’s fist. It was mostly covered in barnacles and algae, but part of one side, probably the side on which it had rested in the cockpit, was an unusual pink and purple color; it actually glowed.
I reached for it.
But he pulled it back.
“Money,” he said. He pronounced the word with barely the trace of an accent. He rubbed the thumb of his left hand against his index finger and smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant grin.
I took out a few Euros and handed them to him. He snorted but snatched them. I reached out again, but again he pulled the rock back.
“Just to look,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me, butt-head,” I snapped, then instantly prayed that he didn’t understand.
He gave me a funny look but did not hand over the rock. “Money,” he said again.
I gave him a few more Euros and ripped the rock from his hands.
“Hey!” he cried.
I pulled it away, thrilled to have it in my grasp, wondering if this indeed was the rock my grandfather had carved and given to the one-and-only Antoine de Saint-Exupéry!
There wasn’t a single word carved onto the glowing part, not that I could see. And the rest was just a mass of hardened green growth. At first, I felt like throwing it through the kid’s window. But then I had an idea. I marched out of the room—butt-crack boy in pursuit, cursing me in French—and headed for the lab. Mr. Halliday put himself between his kid and me, and that allowed me to slip into the lab, find a screwdriver, sit down and get to work.
My hosts were soon looking on, the father standing slightly in front of the son to keep him from interfering.
I started on the side of the rock that needed the least amount of work, the side that was partially clear. The rest of this bottom part was only covered in algae—no barnacles. I scrubbed it clean with a cloth. What appeared was more of the glowing surface of the rock, shining purple and pink. But there were no words carved into it either. With a sigh, I turned the whole rock over. Maybe this thing was just what Halliday thought it was: a big unusual stone that had smashed through the window of the cockpit when the plane crashed to the ocean floor. Maybe it had zero connection to St. Ex and Grandpa.
I began grinding the thick wall of barnacles off this side. I worked until I had chipped a hole in that wall. Then I actually gasped. I saw something carved into the rock at the bottom of the hole I had created. I began working frantically. Soon a little word emerged…friend.
I held the rock up to my face, my hands shaking so much that I dropped it with a thud, almost cracking the lab table.
Halliday picked it up and stared down into the opening I had scraped in the barnacles. “Mon dieu! ” he cried. Scurrying away, he found an electric tool of some sort—it was hard to tell exactly what it was—and began buzzing the rest of the barnacles off the rock. Once he’d sheared them almost to the surface, the two of us picked up screwdrivers again and carefully chipped off the last bits. Le Punk stood beside us, still peeved.
Another tiny word emerged and then another. Soon there were fifteen.
I have made him my friend and now he is unique in all the world.
I stood there with that rock in my hands, my mouth wide open, just staring at it. Halliday was moved too. He put his hand on my shoulder. Though he likely knew it was a sentence from The Little Prince, he had no idea what it meant to me. All the same, he was stunned. It was as if this item had appeared by magic, out of the ocean and into the plane of the soul of France. He looked at me as if I were a messenger from God.
I turned to the boy, emptied my pockets of Euros, which he took with glee, and walked out the door, still almost in a trance.
“Monsieur!” cried Halliday at the door. “Where are you going?”
“I have a letter to read,” I said.
That made little sense to him, of course, but he nodded. A messenger from God can do and say what he wants.