A Drink Called Paradise

by Terese Svoboda

  And the moral of the story?

  He looks around. Is someone listening? He says, Don’t think you can help.

  I can’t help. I wasn’t even thinking of helping. I’m angry I missed the boat. I just want to get out of here.

  I keep watch on my hands. He is very attractive now, without his women, with all this scotch and his story.

  He stretches way up and takes down the hanging, plaited pandanus.

  We’re not really here for them anyway, I say. We’re here just to eat and sleep, I guess, but not for them. We’re in the way for them.

  He drinks the rest of what’s in the coconut.

  You know, it’s not the secret of life that people always want, he says. That’s easy, that’s a man and a woman, we can even do that with test tubes. It’s the secret of death. What happens after life isn’t too interesting. So what if you could live death, wouldn’t that get you a little closer?

  You are guessing now, I say. What am I not seeing? I once heard a hairdresser ask, and I felt fear. It’s not funny.

  You know what else about this island? he says when he stops laughing. The most famous story about this island?

  Listen, the ticket agent didn’t even spell this place right, let alone tell me about it. I came because the main island was a bore, because the crew for a drink called Paradise got tired of me playing the piano backward at night, because all I could get in the seashells was car roar and not waves.

  You want another story?

  I like you, I say.

  You wouldn’t look at me someplace else.

  This is an island, after all, I say. Tell me the story, I say. You have to keep inventing or else the island closes in, goes cold with too much truth.

  He looks out his window. The first white woman to set foot on this island was the mistress of a Captain Goodenough, who wasn’t quite good enough, and so he left her—in payment of a debt. Or in a hurry? Who knows? Or had he just had enough of her and wanted to exchange her for an island woman? Or did she give him syphilis and he knew it?

  She liked the place, she wanted to stay.

  Whatever. Anyway, she got herself in trouble immediately. Whoever couldn’t have her fought with the rest until they realized nobody was having her. They decided to solve the problem most democratically—by eating her. A little of her for everyone.

  Sex and food, men are always getting them confused. So, what about it? Are you trying to warn me? I’m the dainty little dish set before the king?

  I’m not a bit drowsy now.

  Don’t think you can help, he says, and he pushes me toward the door.

  Hey, I don’t know any more about you, I say.

  You’ll think of something. He frowns, patting his chest where a cigarette might be.

  Aha—an addict? I say. I know you better already.

  Oh, no, not me. He grimaces.

  Veelu waits outside. She can’t look in, there are no windows except toward the water. She can only listen. I walk past her with the swagger of someone who knows more than she, of someone who has heard his stories and understands what he means.

  Later, I’m sorry.

  This week I will stay in the water up to my neck until the boat comes, and in the meantime the island will wash off and I will have nothing to fear. Besides, I will drink and eat nothing, especially not drink. I will be safe.

  I am sane. I am sane. This is the sane thing to do.

  I slump into the water, just letting my nose and mouth stick out, but I’m so white, white-faced and white-headed, that I can’t be a rock or a seal or a post. I wish for Harry and his whiteness beside me, a hundred Harrys dimpling the lagoon so I can’t be picked out by color, so I can’t be picked out. Oh, if I have to be here, let me be fitted with the parentheses of a tourist, the ones that let you not be where you are and not be at home at the same time, the ones that are safe.

  Ngarima says a stupid girl can’t stay in the water all the time like a dog with bugs. You’ll get sick and we’ll be blamed, she says. She asks how I am.

  Fine, I say. Just in for a morning dip, I say.

  Ngarima has been slapping what I think is rope against a rock. She watches me.

  Who’s more interesting than me? Here, when I open my mouth, everyone else shuts theirs. Here, when I say I’m going nuts, nobody says anything until two hours later, when someone asks, Is this where the nuts are?

  I am not facing Ngarima. I am answering her with my face to the sea, as if I should not take my eyes off it, as if a boat will pass by if I do. If only I could climb to the top of the tallest coconut and keep watch and stay in the water at the same time. What was screaming this morning? I ask, half submerged.

  A pig. Pigs don’t like to die.

  I clear my head from the water. Just a pig. Good, I say.

  It was the pig you gave your bottle of soy to, that fat one.

  That one? Oh, yes, right. I did buy a bottle of soy sauce. I shut my mouth. That pig was happy with that soy sauce. What about its bottle? I arch my neck over the water to see if it’s still afloat. Things do float against the morning brightness—is that a bottle? Or Temu?

  I can’t tell.

  We are having a celebration, she goes on. For you, she says. And for the other one, Harry. We haven’t had visitors for such a long time that we are making a party to show our respect. But for such a party, we have to wait for the sauce to sour, for one of the pigs to get big.

  Ngarima, I say. I am stopped from saying what a fine thing this is to do, but unnecessary, how many pigs do you have? let alone how ungrateful I am to be here where pigs scream first thing in the morning and deformed babies roll out of mats and giant sponges lurk, and what’s wrong with Temu anyway? when I see what’s coiled on her shoulder. Intestines, garden-hose long. They are all clean, I see that, flat and clean, there’s a bottle of Joy in her hand, I see its bubbles not far away, a little extra foam, and a little something brown swirling around me in the water.

  So much for the water.

  I get out and shake myself dry.

  Another pig is dying behind us. Why not a woman? The scream is high-pitched enough, furious and animal enough. A woman in high heels, a hoofed woman. The lagoon goes red, and deep inside it starts glowing, it starts to scream itself.

  A boat is coming, isn’t it? I say. In time for leftovers?

  Ngarima starts. A boat will come, she says. Yes, she says. Her yes sounds like yes, it is possible a boat will come like the sun will rise, the day end.

  Behind us men throw dice against the church wall, the noise of their play followed by soft ha-ha’s that could be laughter or something else I don’t understand. One of them flicks on a cordless razor. It has to be cordless—there are no plugs. Then he brings that buzzing razor over to the dead pig and begins to shave it.

  When was the army here last? I ask.

  The army doesn’t come here, Ngarima says She is watching the surf the way I do, but the way she watches is better—she can see past it, she can see into it.

  But Barclay says it comes. He told me they showed movies.

  She squeezes her hose again. Yes, a sort of army still comes. She gives me a look that I equate with their present tense: every word she says revealed to her as she says it.

  Over the sound of pig death begin the quick strokes of a drum. They are a heartbeat’s, doubled. Ngarima’s son walks down the beach from where that sound is coming to take the hose from Ngarima.

  Go practice the dance, she says to me. Until it’s time.

  I look out at the empty ocean. The dancing faces it.

  In second grade we had to dance, I say to Ngarima’s son. We put on skirts made of paper cut into wavy lengths that stained, and we had to wriggle. I wriggled hard the way a robot would so no one would laugh. I hated it when they laughed.

  Ngarima’s son is already smiling.

  I follow him to where four women weave something about birds with their hands over their hips, and their hips say something else in circles, each hip saying it e
xactly the same way as the next woman’s. Only the size of the hips varies, and as fast as I see this, the size doesn’t matter, one matches the other in what they say with how they move. It’s not that collecting-shells kind of dancing, that bursting forth, but the engine of the island in serious precision. Maybe this is Morris dancing, maybe this is square dancing, but when the men waggle their knees open and shut and dance close and dance closer to the women’s hips, it isn’t folk, I can’t dance it with my parents paying for the outfit.

  Ngarima’s son dances, boy enough to make a farce of the dance and its peacock engagement, and the other men are old, the other end of what wags. But they wag, they shimmy and wriggle up to me, scissoring their knees and legs while the drum tats louder and harder and I start to sway.

  You have to put your arms up to sway right. The hips need room. But with your arms up, men find places to hold on to, the curve and the bulge where the breasts grow, though they don’t touch me. But then I don’t sway much.

  At a nightclub on the island where we shot Paradise, all the tourists were asked to dance. I either kept to the back or else I did it, with my face flushed and watching the back the way a ballerina would, to keep from falling into their precise swaying that pressed toward me again and again without touching. Touching is never the point. Everyone who is not an islander is a Methodist when it comes to this not-touching dance, we have no limbs that correspond to theirs, all we can do is touch and not sway that well.

  I try not to breathe, I try not to let any of the island into me. I just dance and forget that I am here by being so here. I say nothing to anyone, even when they shout Vagina Mouth and clap out my path.

  I am saying no to their beer that they make out of what? when Harry comes and says, Don’t be stupid. Hearing that so soon a second time makes me think I might be. If a boat comes this time, even they will miss it is what he says when it’s almost dark and doesn’t matter.

  I think of my son. This island I’m on is a planet drifting farther and farther away. Not drifting the way planets do on film but screeching along at a pace, that second per second they calculate that wrenches us away from the other stars and wandering planets. My son is standing on a street corner on another faraway planet—just like one of those classroom models—and he’s waiting for the traffic to part so he can run across and somehow join me, but the traffic is part of the orbiting too, it’s the ocean, and the street corner I’m on drifts farther and farther away.

  We are all soon slick with scented lagoon water and flower-crowned with stiff white fragrant ginger. We each take a seat in front of half a cold chicken and three pounds of pork and blood pudding and coconut pudding and bananas for garnish on banana leaves and a half coconut shell filled with sauce four weeks soured. Barclay and many others make speeches, long, formulaic speeches that I smile through, smile as if my life depended on it, which perhaps it does, they now being us to me, us with our Vagina Mouth talk, with our sickness and secrets, with all this air I breathe, the food we will eat together—yes, I will, I smell the food, even the dead pig’s dark blood in pudding makes my stomach fierce, I will eat and meet them, stomach to stomach, as if in dance, and when they speak so long and full of flattery, I decide they are going to ask me to do something for them.

  But they ask nothing. Or nothing I understand.

  I dance and dance, and even Harry dances with me once. He is as stiff as wood, despite all the beer they ladle out for him with their oil cans. But I am Vagina Mouth, who cares what I do? They shout when I swivel, they roar when I bump him with my hip. Harry doesn’t care, Harry drinks enough beer to dance his stiffness wild with all the island women, from crone to toddler. The men egg him on, they shove their fists into the air when the drumming gets going, they thrust themselves forward at the torso, they yell in their language, Get it on, the way men’s language does.

  If I should not eat the food or drink the water, the beer must be worse—that is what beer is for. I get loaded, I wander away into the dark. The path I take turns past where coffee tins are planted with whatever’s growing right beside them, and beer bottles surround a chair in the center of that tin garden, so many beer bottles they could be a collection, or an offering. Behind this leans a house with a defeated roof, and the house is dark and doorless, and what wafts out in the heavy, humid darkness is the smell of suppuration, of scabs picked and reopened, and what sound accompanies it is as constant as a series of waves. It’s not the weepy, wet sound I hear from Temu that carries over the water and makes Ngarima rise but guttural and fresh like a hose tightening around someone, some peculiar sound that realizes itself, like constant pain, in the present.

  I am not curious. I don’t want to see who or how. The pain is the island’s, the pain is only a matter of time.

  It is the next day. The next day I have my hangover, and it is one you want to climb out of and leave the head behind, the head so not your own it is surely borrowed and overdue, thank you very much, but what I see in my head is three perfectly can-shaped cylinders of corned beef and a side of immaculately white rice—Barclay’s party food from yesterday. That’s what sticks in my mind. He did not eat the chicken and pork and banana and boiled blood squeezed onto the banana leaf, he did not drink from a single coconut.

  I have never seen him drink from a coconut. From none of the coconuts he opens for me, three a day, not from any of those has he taken even a single sip.

  I sit on the porch wearing a taro-leaf poultice and between throbs I think. Barclay sits on the porch too, for once here, and without a poultice. But he is slow today, very slow, and as soon as he sits he falls asleep and soon begins to snore his thunder snores. Someone else will have to tell me, someone else will say why they don’t object or make fun of him and his corned beef and rice and no coconuts. I hold my poultice to my forehead and use the fingertips of my free hand to ease myself up to standing without disturbing too much of the pounding. I make for the two steps off the porch to ask Ngarima, who is rooting in the bush.

  But there, just over the edge, under the flowering plant that a stick I dropped turned into, lies a small overturned box. It kills me to bend over to pick it up, my poultice slips, blood rushes into my heavy temples, but the glimpse I have is of photos inside. Beside it lies the ripped spine of an album that looks like just a curl of bark if you are sitting on the porch.

  A boy I’ve never seen on the bow of a ship with Barclay. That’s the first picture.

  The others show less, the boy at the bottom of a set of steps, the same boy in a bed looking bad, pink flesh under brown, Barclay beside a gravestone with what looks like Minnesota behind it, grass and trees whose leaves fall and a power line and a station wagon.

  My hands begin to shake.

  Bravo, says Barclay behind me.

  Bravo? I repeat. He doesn’t say it like congratulations.

  He takes the photos from me. Temu, he shouts.

  The army’s Bravo, it was their big test here, he says. He is speaking without looking at the photos, he speaks with his eyes shut, he speaks from an old pain in his head. Or really the test was over there, he says. He points one hand into the wind without looking at it. But then the trades blew and brought the test here, and after a while my son is taken away with me on this boat to your country, and I go home later alone.

  You know too much, I say, holding my hands so they don’t shake so. That’s why you don’t eat.

  He takes the broken album back from me.

  Temu! he calls out. Temu!

  Temu doesn’t come dripping up out of the lagoon.

  Barclay sits and smooths the photos, puts them back into the box with the others. He is still smoothing when Temu shows up, not dripping. One of Temu’s hands clutches more photos so tightly that surely they can’t be flattened back into the box. The other hand flexes as if he’s ready for more.

  Instead of beating him, Barclay pulls him close. Temu starts to moan, to roll his eyes, tries to hit his small head against the wall behind them.

 
I am them, and I am we.

  Bravo is just what he says it is, says Harry.

  It sounds Italian, I say. An Italian perfume.

  Ha, says Harry. It sounds self-congratulatory, something real American.

  I look out his window. The sun bloodies itself going down.

  You knew all about this before you came?

  Harry sits on his floor, touching one of the many pink, slick shells that line one wall. A few roaches crawl out of one of them, but that’s where the roaches live—everywhere.

  I’m starting over, he says. That’s all. No one will follow me here.

  I nod. It’s quiet for a while.

  You have a son, he says. You talk about him.

  I walk around the room. School, you know. Sports. I never know what he is thinking unless he wants something. I’m the one with custody.

  Custody, I say again. What a weird term.

  Possession’s nine-tenths of the law, he says. You think you possess him.

  You never possess anybody, that much I know, I say.

  Sure, he says. That’s what you think. He works his finger into the crenellated folds of one of the shells. The island’s a possession, what kind of owning is that?

  He starts talking about half lives, how the cells repair so fast they overrepair, how they actually have a life and a half. He stops talking.

  You’re afraid, aren’t you?

  You’re the one who’s afraid, he says. You’re the one coming to me.

  I’m no volunteer. I squat by the shells. You had a life once, you were married too, I’ll bet.

  So what? he says.

  You’re a criminal, aren’t you? I ask.

  I could be a saint, he says. I could be Bogart. Vagina Mouth, he says.

  At least I have a name, at least they’re not cooking me in the umu.

  The way we cooked them? he says.

  I have to get off this island, I say.

  I stand and look out again.