A Drink Called Paradise Read online

  Water gets in your throat and you cough, he says. He coughs to show me. There’s too much water. You see him? He doesn’t need to breathe so much—look at the size of his head.

  We look.

  Where I live, I begin again, boys play ball or go to school or watch TV.

  Here, all the balls go into the lagoon, then trade winds take them away, he says. And the school here is closed now until we get a new teacher.

  He turns his shell over. You can be the teacher, you can tell us about TV.

  This is how you turn it on, I say, and I twist my wrist, touch a channel. Unless you have a remote, then you just press.

  Ngarima’s son just presses.

  I think you’ve got it, I say.

  He presses and presses.

  A pig squeals, caught on a kitchen can outside. Why doesn’t anybody fish around here? I ask, after he frees it. Even if you don’t eat the fish, it would pass the time.

  He rattles the shell. No boats, he says.

  But why aren’t there any boats? These islands are famous for boats.

  Nobody can buy them here.

  Sure, I say. But can’t you just go and make them like before?

  He laughs. Who knows how? he says. He puts his hands up and out. Do you? he asks, as if I know.

  Back on the porch Ngarima screeches, Come get food for us.

  Ngarima’s son fetches a can of mackerel from which he skinnies out all of the fish without losing its can shape. I am offered a chunk to go with a piece of taro that I still have from an earlier offering. No, no more, I say. I might as well say yes. He disturbs his cylinder with his finger, the chunk is mine no matter what, and the curls of coconut jelly he scrapes from the lid of the nut I drink from come with it.

  I eat one for the other, the jelly surely a drug, so cool and smooth I want to climb back into the coconut with it. Ngarima’s son eats what’s left in the bottom of the can, then beats on its bottom in quick rhythms. Over at the next house, a two-year-old sways with her hips, she sways and falls down on some slick of her porch, then gets up, goes on with his beat.

  How many live on this island all the time? I ask. Even if it isn’t so big, I say.

  Not so many as before, says Ngarima, but she doesn’t say before what.

  There’s a book in my room, I say, that says a hundred and eighty-three. But is this the number made up for the book or the number that once was and is not now?

  It’s hard to count, she says. A hundred and eighty-three is not a bad number.

  Ngarima’s son begins counting. At the number fifteen, the two of them begin to talk about clouds of people, groups that re-form and flatten and pour into houses, regardless of cousins or whose father. The number swells and pulses, and I think of my son, my only population.

  Ngarima’s son has a name, but I can’t repeat it the way they like to hear it, so in my head it is son, like Abrahamson or Jackson. No one can say my name. When they say it, it is Rare. Rare this and that, which makes me smile. I’m beginning to think I am, white where it doesn’t count on an island of brown, all alone, the way all tourists, no matter how many are on an island, like to think they are. That’s the way I write it: one couple, a single set of prints. I don’t show the six people raking the sand behind them what allows their aloneness.

  But I am not alone. Harry with his Rolex clothes, whatever wardrobe goes with the watch, waded off the lighter with me. I felt sad then for his name-brand shoes taking in so much salt. He could’ve pulled them off, but he was too eyes-wide, salt-be-damned. Not that I know much about him. Seasickness does that to you, and the close company of pigs. I am not fond of pigs. Prop pigs, yes. Or pigs with careers, with handlers and sixty-second contracts.

  Hi, I say to him anyway when we hit the beach. He says his hi, but it includes a couple dozen island girls who wreathe him like a race horse.

  Who thinks about people living in paradise and so far from everywhere—I mean, why would they be here? It’s paradise for sure, but no one lives in paradise every day. Unless they’re staff. And for staff it is never paradise, it’s bookings and changing rolls in bathrooms. How can people expect to live in paradise for nothing, by just being born here?

  The first thing I get on this island is a coconut, which this islander hands me, this islander who turns out to be Barclay, and I look it over like it’s something he’s selling.

  But Barclay smiles, pure plaster saint. Over here, he waves us toward a car behind him. We two play Columbus showing up with Eric the Red, each of us making his singular discovery, each left-righting so separately toward that car. Harry throws his bag through its broken window, then tries to open the door but the handle comes off in his hand. Barclay takes it from him and tosses it over his shoulder with a laugh, to where other parts lie, maybe another whole car in pieces, and we all start walking the path beside the car, which is what will really take us.

  Was I wanting a high-rise haven with matching hot towels and wraps? No, I can handle “individually appointed,” even adventure, but the place we come to has been kayoed to its knees long ago and did not get up, this place has a door cut to accommodate what? A Quonset hut, all of a world war in its half-moon frame. To cheer it up, someone has set out a dozen already opened coconuts along the base, but the cheer looks more like a lot of raw, chopped-up open mouths.

  Let’s take a look, I say.

  We make our way inside. Hmmmm, says Harry, as we pace its one room, I guess we’ll have to put up a curtain.

  Divorced three years, I can’t see spending my week on a remote island with the only guy off the boat. Besides, what we have here is not love at first sight.

  No thanks, I say.

  That is how I get to be a local. All tourists want that if they want to be somewhere else. I get a bag of rice for a bed, and a lamp, but what makes my room at Barclay’s so somewhere else shimmers in its one window: a beach so white, white crayon on white paper is about right, a white that stretches—yawns and stretches—its way to the lagoon of choice, the ur-lagoon of every ad for paradise. For a week I float in the amber of a good time, maybe a little lonely with nobody to sigh off into the sunset with, but I collect myself, chase children who squirt me with rubber-hose creatures that grow in the shallows, burn the continental drift into my sandy thighs, cavort with snorkel and mask in the empty lagoon.

  Empty except for that tiny head on a board, swirling and stopping, swirling and stopping.

  You aren’t hungry? screeches Ngarima. You are sick? She’s spotted my leftover portion, some of my taro hidden upright beside the can.

  She feels my forehead.

  The way coconut is food for pleasure, taro is punishment. The queen of starch, you can taste in every bite all the shirts it could stiffen.

  I’ve eaten plenty, I say. I don’t say, I eat small bites to parse out the taste.

  Go, says Ngarima to me as if I’m her son, one of the family, as if I’ll obey. Go inside and get another tin, she says.

  No, no, please, I’m fine, I say.

  Open the drawer there—just inside—and you’ll find one. I keep them in the drawer.

  Her voice tells me she won’t take no.

  I cross into the kitchen. She is my host, after all. I am a paying guest, but this is her house. I open the drawer next to the food safe, the one I think is the one she means, but I discover this is not the drawer, that this drawer should not be opened. There’s sugar at the bottom of this drawer, an inch of it spilled on purpose, and the purpose flies up at me when I open it, out flies a flock of gold-brown roaches. I scream, and then Ngarima screams, That’s their drawer.

  I am thinking I must leave my room and cross the kitchen again, I must pass its roaring roaches, I must go out, I must go to the bathroom, I must go for a walk, I must see if the rain’s truly stopped and how stopped and whether it will rain again. I am thinking how I’ve made my own island, how one island begets another, like a fish with an organ bag you can see through, all the seeds of future fish in a row, ready to be born a
nd bear and be born again, when I begin to creep past the drawer, which is now closed and not still pulled out to the point where I left it, when I start picking my way past the oozing white of what flew up at me earlier, which I beat down and made ooze, and just then, while I am concentrating on getting around it all and not thinking, a man-sized boy with such a head crashes in from the porch with his arms flailing and a noise coming out of him in big gobs like something left on and stuck.

  Boom—pink shredded plastic and streaks of pepper sauce and ketchup, a full jar of mayonnaise, all three of the family’s forks ricochet off the kitchen walls, and its cooking pot, its charcoals and tinder, are smeared into the mess with one more whirl of his long, long arms, with one more great gob of sound.

  Back, shouts Ngarima’s son. Back to Auntie, go on back to Auntie. Go on.

  The boy is coming for his room, my room, my room that was so empty when I came, and now I know why—those long arms pull down anything in their windmilling radius. But I’m too stunned by the boy’s tiny head, let alone the whipping arms, to stop him from going into my room, to connect what has happened in the other room with those arms that whip toward my clothes, books, passport, money, ID, sun lotion—and his space.

  Ngarima’s son raises the boy’s board, the one the boy floats on with his long arms, and he hits him with it, he tries to herd him away from the room by beating him with its hard foam. The boy falters in his furious beeline, he turns in circles beside his brother in the staccato of the beating.

  His brother hits him again and again.

  I do not scream, seeing the boy being beaten. Speech and the power of speaking leave me. I do not scream, not even as the boy begins to cry, not even when a plate comes down from the back wall with a tremendous crash and splinters into shards that cut my skin in the painless way of razors. Cut too, the boy scuttles away from the broken plate and then his brother hits him again, this time across the back of his tiny head.

  That head sinks to pale knees.

  The boy pulls him onto his back and carries him out of the house. Temu, the boy explains as he passes me, and dumps him in the shade with his board.

  I rush over, I put my hand out.

  The boy is already on his feet but turning as if he doesn’t know where.

  Wait! Ngarima clumps from the bush to herd him away from me, away from the house, using a switch of coconut frond. He stumbles and reaches for her between switchings. She drops her switch and starts to coo, she cups his tiny head in her knife-scarred hands, rubs his cloud of hair, touches his welts and cuts, all the time cooing except when she snaps out an order, catching sight of his slinking-off brother, who doesn’t bother to point to the dish broken at the door, or at me.

  She holds Temu close.

  They stand together for a long time.

  After a long time, I follow Ngarima’s son into the bush. But follow isn’t exactly what I do, I just take his path. I am so confused and full of fear for the small head, the wind-milling arms, the beating, I just walk. I guess I choose the bush because that’s the way the boy went who beat him back, who saved me, and if I need saving again he is the one to follow. I don’t care about the things in my room anymore—or I forget to care, it is his room anyway. I am the trouble if there is trouble to be pointed at, to be windmilled away.

  Ngarima’s son is gone from the path by the time I take it. I walk and walk and see no one, no brother or child or man wandering with a machete. I walk and I am pregnant with that child, the boy is flailing his arms around inside me, I am wondering what’s wrong? Then the head is too easy coming out, I smile at the wriggling arms until I see the rest and can measure what’s wrong against what’s right.

  My son is about Ngarima’s son’s age, stalkier though, less woe-eyed but just as fidgety. My son’s fidgets are mine. I have to keep going, I have to keep working. Even when he was a baby I worked at this business of illusion, putting con in the game, the game in the con of telling people they must drink things like Paradise in a bottle. I have an imagination that makes that work. But I’d never imagined a child in paradise being wrong.

  I’m afraid of people, yes, even children, who aren’t right, whose heads are too small or too large or wrong. I suppose I’m more afraid of them when I’m on an island. In another country where you drive past or stare and then turn your head and leave money and move on, I’m not so afraid. It is part of the country, why you are not them.

  Now I have his room.

  I walk on and on, but I know I can’t keep the shore from showing up. I want to avoid it and its lagoon with the tiny head maybe already back in it. Let they who seek out the uneasy bits all islanders bury, seek. I will walk.

  I walk until I see a pig in the way, a big pig. I walk to one side of the path and give way to that pig, his bristly back, his huge behind. But his front bears tusks, and he’s annoyed, I’ve annoyed him as he roots with those tusks at a fallen fruit and has to lift his tusked snout just as I am passing on veritable tiptoe past his fruit.

  He makes his noise.

  I pick up a fruit and hit him in the face with it. He blinks, sniffs it, then crushes it between his jaws, the juice coming through real animal’s teeth.

  Then he makes his noise again.

  I run.

  Off the path, everything scratches. I rip my shorts, my legs bleed, my hands tear as I lurch away from the boar into the bush, into the real bush. They may as well tack up boards covered with nails as grow all this stiff stuff so ready for sex that scratches, cuts, jabs, lances what is already dish-shard-sliced.

  The bush thickens further with its knife-sharp plants, and I stop. I have to. Besides, the pig’s not in pursuit, nor is the windmilling boy. I’ve gone too far. I have to be lost, though lost on this small island can’t be too bad. Maybe lost is good, is just somewhere else. I force myself to smile. I turn as if that’s what I want to do.

  Where the bush thickens most there’s the leftover of a path that veers around it, and I take it more to avoid the plants than for a direction, and at the end of that path is a palm with a wire running up its smooth side, like one plant throttling another. Then I see the house below it.

  It is made with fiberboard nailed crookedly to planks and tarpaper and air, but the rusted bolts and barbed wire all around its bottom give it a look of growth, of a succulent’s succulent with greening thick walls, of something made fast and abandoned slow.

  I look for an opening, a reason for all the bolts and barbed wire, why it’s here and not on the beach. Surely the wire’s an antenna, surely something inside bounces sound around, if not picture. Inside must be a radio, if not a phone.

  I’m free, finding a phone makes me free. The boat is already coming if I can tell it to.

  I keep circling.

  My ex will send a boat. Although he is the man who forgot me, he is someone who shrinks refrigerators and blows up people for a living, one special effect or another, none of them very special to me after he forgot to pick me up post-delivery, and other better-forgotten events, he could send a boat. But I don’t think he thinks of me now.

  I hope he doesn’t, I hope he’s forgotten.

  There has to be some place to get in.

  It is my son whom I’d call. Miss you, I’d say to him if I could, but it would come out, Brush your teeth. Then I’d make the loud sound of a smack that’s supposed to embarrass him, the one that leaves a red butterfly on a cheek.

  I stop to think about that butterfly, that call, and then I find the lock.

  It’s covered with vines and all rusty, a lock I can’t knock off with one blow of a machete the way any islander could. I have no machete. I’m probably the only person on the island who doesn’t carry a machete.

  The shack can’t be empty.

  Maybe the rust fills in instantly where a sweaty palm turns, or the plants surge over the suddenly bared spot in a single afternoon.

  And over what other bared spots on single afternoons? One square mile of island, and how many secrets can such an is
land harbor?

  My shoulders against the door don’t so much as flake off rust. I give the door a good kick.

  Barclay will open it.

  Barclay, I say, let me radio.

  Who would look for him in the cemetery? Ghosts, says Ngarima, you don’t want to go there. But there he is, drinking, his back up against one of the stones that all lean one way, like recliners, that angle, and hard to see if you are walking by at a clip, which I am, short-cutting and wending and feeling my way back. But I do see.

  He gives me his film-star profile, his wet lips settling around a bottle.

  Barclay, I say, I’ve found the shack.

  Barclay drinks. The label’s imported. What’s not imported here?

  I squat to his level. At his level, each plot is fenced to the size of a bed and mounded as if there are covers pulled over. In some places the covers are cracked and open. I thought everyone here was afraid of this place, I say. Talk to me, Barclay.

  Everyone is afraid, he says. Aren’t you? His voice is down deep where darkness sits in a man, where rumble meets those chemicals that make a man or make him weep.

  They’re not my dead, I say.

  No? It doesn’t matter, he says. The spirits have blown away anyway. He purses his lips to show me blow. All of the spirits.

  Quit being so mysterious, I say. It’s bad enough you wouldn’t take me to the radio.

  Radio? says Barclay, sitting up a little. You know, boats used to miss this island even when they started having radar, he says. He drinks again. This is where they always put the inches-to-miles on maps because there is so much blue here they can’t resist it, it makes the map look good. He says, Watch the sunset tonight and you will see green fire. Or you used to. He takes another drink. I used to meet women here, he says. No one would bother us.

  Barclay, I say, let me radio.

  Clare, he says. He says Clare perfectly. The radio doesn’t work.