Now I haven’t looked around to check on the boat. When the sun got too bright to keep my eyes shut, I rolled out of my hole and made my way through the cool dark of the bush toward food, a simple motion, the kind I can manage. I didn’t go back to where I saw that dot in the distance.
I couldn’t bear to.
She doesn’t say more about Barclay’s boat, and Barclay’s not around to ask I’m here because if he were, then there would be no boat. But since he’s elsewhere, I’m beginning to gather my hope, scattered and slow-walking away like all those small shells I tried to string.
An outboard cuts the island quiet.
Excuse me, I say, and I run, I trip over car parts, I run all the way to the end of the wharf, where I almost fall off, looking and running.
A boat, a real boat.
It’s not the boat I came on. Even while it’s wallowing outside the breakers I can see that, even after two months of not seeing a big boat, even after only a week’s passage. But why be so particular? If I wanted a boat, this is it.
There’s a staff and a snake on the smokestack. I make that out because it’s the same as the one on the lighter, the boat with the outboard that now guns through the reef with its shocking roar, unearthly or at least not-of-this-island loud.
Someone in a gray suit and hood holds binoculars in the lighter, trains them toward us, a clump of islanders with bags, and me all shaggy and staring. Beside the suit with binoculars sits Barclay, who holds a parcel out of which sticks an antenna.
I turn back to run and get my stuff. I’m not fast enough, who could be that fast, with the boat waiting or going or gone?
My bag I’ve hooked to a twisted branch over my hole. I scoop up shorts and sand and shells and papers with my name on them and fit them in. I don’t know whether that’s all there is, but it’s enough for the bag. I run back to the other side of the island, and I’m about to break from the bush to the wharf all out of breath, slashed raw from my run, when I see four men in gray suits, moonsuits I guess, the kind with hoods and plastic to see out of in front, securing the lighter with big mittened hands. On their moon-suited fronts these men wear big smiley faces behind white plastic tags that turn what other color? and on their moon-suited feet they wear slumber-party slippers, the kind that should be fluffy and pink but are smooth and the color of rats.
The sand is sifting out of my bag onto my bare feet while the moonsuits move in their suits like figures in cartoons—even their clipboards are hard to grip with fists in gloves—when Barclay leaves them for me.
You must not get on this boat, says Barclay quickly. The boat you came on will be here soon. Don’t take this boat. You must stay.
Stay? I back away, I am so surprised.
This is not the boat for you, says Barclay.
He moves as close to me as a dancer. Stay, he repeats with a smile that’s threatening it’s so close. I walk even farther backward, I back into the needles of a bush.
You see, we must find out exactly how bad things are here, he says, shifting his new antenna. You can go to your own doctor and tell us, he says. They won’t tell us. He lifts his chin toward the moonsuits, who are now giving out handfuls of batteries to anyone who holds out a hand.
You made me miss the boat? You told Ngarima to delay me? I hold my bag tight to my front as if he is going to take it to make me stay.
That first time. He looks through a lock of his hair the way he does for women. A week here is not enough. But the boat was supposed to come back, he says, stepping in front of me to keep me as long as he can. The boat is coming back.
Should I tear out his lock of hair, scream, and run in a circle? Well, here’s a boat now, I say. I start for it.
He catches me by the arm so I won’t trip on a bush in front of me—so I won’t run? They just make tests, he says. If you go with them, they will not let you go, they will test you and keep testing you. Our boat will come.
A few islanders line the beach’s shade, ready with their bags, ready with their families.
I pull my arm away. The moonsuited men are coming toward us.
I don’t like it, I say, my voice rising as if I am making a decision, as if I can with all this. I am taking this boat, I have to go home, I’ve got to get off this island.
You like our island? Barclay glares at me. You will not like theirs.
I wave. Over here.
Barclay lifts his arms as I walk away, as I skip over to them.
The girl who sold me the soy sauce, who’s always so hot, is taking a seat next to the young woman who bore the jelly baby, who’s now carrying a sandy package, and a very old man who smells like that smell from the house with all the bottles in front, and a half-dozen others get in, almost filling the rest of the boat. Ngarima’s last, arriving with Temu and a small suitcase.
She has nowhere else, says Barclay, as if I have asked. I try to say, At least she has this, but Ngarima coughs hard as Barclay pries Temu off her, then Temu beats on the boat with his loose arm as she boards. When Barclay hands her the suitcase, the moonsuits push Temu’s fist away, a push that rocks the boat deep.
I’ll take care of her, I say.
Barclay turns his face from me.
I look to the horizon, where the big boat sits, as small as one of my son’s from so long ago. One of the moonsuits radios that boat, another stretches his hand toward the lighter, gestures toward where I could sit, pats that place in fact with a Sit here.
What do I owe you? I shout to Barclay as they start the motor. He’s barely holding Temu back from Ngarima, dollars aren’t on his mind. I give him what I have, but he can’t take it, Temu knocks it from my hand into the water. I bend down to retrieve it, but a moonsuit grips me by the arm, steers me onto the boat to a seat just as it jolts into gear and we’re off.
It is not as if I am saved, not as I had imagined it. Sailors in angel white should have come, not men in moonsuits. An island chorus usually attends all island exits, Barclay, I’m sorry.
You farted, says the electronic toy the lone child sitting on the wharf presses over and over, loud with new batteries. No one’s singing and dancing. A few friends of Ngarima stand by, weeping and waving. Barclay waves, holding his package of antenna and the struggling, crying-out Temu. You’d think Ngarima was going forever, like me. In the slow circle the lighter makes as it turns away, I inspect the wharf around Barclay, where my money washes, where I spent so much time looking out to sea, wishing the boat into it. Now I wish that at least Harry stood somewhere close, up to his ankles in surf, his eyes on me.
But he’s happy.
The moonsuits shoot the reef with a clumsy grinding of gears, and the lighter heaves as if the outboard won’t make it, then they’re hauling us up a wall of boat, a toy boat grown nightmare huge, up a long spaghetti of ladder that trails the side of the big boat and onto the deck. They haul us up with their strong arms, they shove and push and pull at us, they even put down a basket for the little girl, until we’re all on board.
We stand on the deck in shock, wet with spray from the reef passage, the big boat still swaying so much you could be walking, but you’re not, you don’t even want to try, this is a big boat in a swell.
There is only one thing to look at. From where I stand, the island looks flat and small, almost amoeba-shaped at this angle, about to break in half and become two separate islands, mitosis, something to be glanced at under a microscope.
Welcome aboard, they say. Yes, they say when I ask about their boat going back. I like that yes. Then one of them slides a bracelet over my wrist with my name and birth date on it. How do they know that name and date? After the bracelet slides on, it won’t come off, the snap goes tight when I pull on it.
Then they have at us, needle, calipers, and scrapers. I give them what they need, then they need more, they wave their hands, Wait a minute, there’s something else, and I ask, For what? but they won’t say, they wave their vials and point out urinals, they hurry us out or in.
It’s import
ant to do it fast, just off the island is what their answer suggests. Otherwise it might wear off.
I don’t think so.
They want to know how many coconuts I drank or ate, and I laugh. They repeat the question. The forbidden fruit, I smile, and try to figure.
Then they lead us to the showers.
It isn’t that I don’t want a shower. A shower with hot water, the comfort of soap not rendered from whales or tar—or whatever the yellow cakes they sell on the island are made of—this is what I want. I’m shot straight back to all of what my place in the world counts for with that first hot spurt of water, a little more than blood-hot, laving the soap and salt off my skin under fine spray. But in the middle of the shower, the water beating on my skull releases some kind of improved thought run.
It’s not as if they’ve given us stone soap. Too obvious.
I start to shiver under all that hot water, and I don’t stop even after I dry off, even after I use their big fluffy towel on myself and I’m wrapped in it. Maybe I’m sick is what I want to think about the shivers, then I don’t want to think that, not at all.
My clothes are gone. And my bag. All they leave is a gray shift and slippers.
Of course—when it’s all clean, I’ll get it back.
I put on their clothes. One of their smiley faces emblazons the left side of my gown. I wonder if the ones on the moonsuits were as white as this face, but I can’t be sure.
Still shivering, I step out of my cubicle. I can hear the others under their showers. Somewhere farther down the long row, a man with a medical bag walks toward Ngarima’s stall. I know where she is because she’s wailing again. She hasn’t wailed since I caught her with her plastic Jesus, but now she fills the hall with her wild, sad sound.
A sedative makes sense.
I get out of the way of that man, I walk away from him.
I need to walk.
Gray metal rivets, gray stairs, no signs except “Lifeboat This Way.” I skip that way. I turn toward a reindeer-and-dove-covered door on the left. I go through it, wondering at the season I had forgotten in the seasonless sway of an island. Maybe such decoration wipes time and place away, and the island is gone in a whorl of blinking light. I open the door at the top of a set of stairs, thinking this, and the island is still there, still small at such a distance, but there.
A woman comes up behind me. Can I help you, Clare?
Me? I say. I can’t get used to my own name, the one everyone here knows for no reason and can say. Who are you?
Someone with you on my list. She points to a clipboard filled with names.
I see. She has a Dr. in front of her name on her tag, that entitles her to my name, the way she checks my tag.
Where am I? I ask.
The answer she gives inspires hope, to go with the insignia of snake and staff. We’re a large health organization, she says.
With the UN?
Wouldn’t that be nice. No, not us. I see from your records that you spent a little time on this island. What brought you here?
Nobody was going there.
She could say with a professional smile, How adventurous. Instead she says, Nobody is supposed to go there.
I guess not, I say. Why did they let me?
Some mix-up, somebody’s second cousin was asleep, no doubt.
Why don’t they evacuate the island?
It’s not that bad, she says.
Oh, really? I smile, like her. What happened to the boat that was supposed to take me back?
Boats are always late or just a myth around here. You must be glad to see this one. The doctor moves her pens on her pen guard. Over six weeks there, wasn’t it?
The boat rocks under my feet, a slight left, a slight right, and I’m uneasy to match. Over this woman’s shoulder is the island, locked in incomplete reproduction. Can I make a call? I ask.
Sure. But why not get these out of the way? She turns her clipboard full of paper around. Just a couple more releases. Sign here, here, and here. She presents her pen.
I see, I say. I stare at the small print. Ngarima’s wailing increases from somewhere below. I slide my foot in and out of my slipper. Do you have children? I ask her.
Not yet, she says. We’re hoping. She smiles the way they do, the ones who hope.
Have you ever seen any of their babies?
She waggles the clipboard. This is my first trip out. But I’ve seen pictures, of course.
I nod. With her of course, we’re in this together. Well, I say, I guess you have to have one to really appreciate those pictures.
She flattens the paper with her finger where I’m supposed to sign. You’ve had a very slight exposure, ma’am, she says. You should be on your way within a day or two of reaching port.
When is that?
Given the weather, it should be in three days.
I see. Three days, that’s great. Where can I make my phone call?
Over there, in the poop deck.
I sign.
Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? I start away from the cool plastic at my ear. Echo is a girl in a nymph costume, a shreddable tissue of green, who leans forward on a rock with her hands cupped to her lips, and another girl on another rock—a veritable Pacific of rocks, rocks that run right up to my ex’s own cool-plastic-touched ear—leans forward with her hands cupped, and another. Every word echoes, so I must sound startled too, and strange. Does my ex notice?
I’m sorry, I say.
He turns off a radio behind him. You’re what?
I never told you I was sorry.
That’s true, he says. He was my son too.
Tell your wife I said so, I say.
He sighs and starts to say something, but his voice breaks.
What is it?
It’s okay, he says. I forgive you.
I hold the phone and hold it tighter. It wasn’t my fault, I say. It was an accident.
I forgive you, he says again.
I can’t say anything.
So where are you? he asks. I called you about his savings account, but your office said you were gone.
On a boat, I say. A very strange boat, and I’m hoping it will get me to an airport. Please call my office and tell them I’ll be back in a week.
There’s silence on his side, an echo of silence. You still only care about work.
No—no. That never was true. You know that.
What? he says. I can’t hear you.
Listen, I say, the name of the boat is—what? She told me. I lean from the booth, but she’s not around to ask and there’s no sign. It isn’t about work, I say. Really. Tell them that on I’m this boat—
The echo girls have stopped. The echo girls sit back on their haunches and pick their teeth, bored with the actual transmission of information, and in a second I hear nothing at all from the other end, not even the insect swishing of static, of the electric wave tumbling. I say, It isn’t about work at all—but the phone is already dead.
I hit the phone. I hit it again because it doesn’t hurt enough the first time. I manage with number two to put myself in pain. I’m in pain, I’m in pain.
The man who lectures me, who says, That’s private property, ma’am, which I understand to mean I am private property, me, the one who’s in pain and hurt, not the jackass plastic, that I shouldn’t be misused, that man is, say, six years older than my son was, the size my son would have been in six short years, and this baby tells me it’s the only call I can make for three days and by that time we’ll be in port anyway, so relax. We can’t have everyone hanging on the line, he says, and maybe he pats the sucker or maybe he doesn’t, but the gesture is what boys learn with machines they love instead of women. He doesn’t, however, catch the way my face shifts in anger. He says, What about dinner, have you had it?
I do smell its grease, the kind that hamburger makes. After all those boiled roots and puddings, that vast pig, and those tins of fat and fish and salt and wet leather, this smell has its virtues, starting with the smell of ho
me. Home fries, I hear him say as he herds me away from that phone. I hold my hurt hand that is all I have to remember of what I said, I wind down corridor after corridor, the smell stronger than the antiseptic, then the smell is there and the rest folds behind into memory in the presence of clicking plastic silver.
We walk in front of Day-Glo French dressing spread across equally bright greens, instant potatoes wallpaper-paste-fine topped with brown, a color that advertises a circle of meat somewhere below, ground from the tubes and ears of various short-lived creatures, all of which the server plops onto my plate in an almost musical series.
This boy I have come with touches me on the elbow to guide me past the plastic tree strung with red and gold bits of sprayed food—popcorn, macaroni, old bones?—to where the other hot ones eat. That’s where he thinks I want to sit. But I have to know more than what is stamped on the faces of the left-behind islanders, the six who now, removed from the island, removed from their clothes, show their necklaces and scars above their gray wraps, their faces flat with what’s been given them.
I say, Sit with me, it’s been a long time since I talked to someone from home, and I see him squirm and it’s all there: my exposure writ in his body’s flinch, the eyes’ denial that I’m a person standing in front of him, but enough like his mother that a sense of the filial lies in the way of total trashing. If only he had a video game to hide behind.
He’s got his orders, he sits me at another table. But he agrees to sit nearby, he’ll chat with me.
We talk islands and music and their music, as if they can’t talk about their own music. But they don’t want to talk about their music—or anything. The islanders barely eat. Their tests are just beginning, tests they can’t pass, I am thinking, the only tests they can get. Ngarima sits in front of her food, coughing, with a look on her face that I have seen in the snapshots Temu found, a look that says, Who could eat?
Do you get to drink on board? I ask. I’m trying to sound as if I am his age or I once was and did a lot of drinking and maybe drugs too, but of course it fails. I forget my face and how surely it’s hardened from a different past than his, and he gobbles another fearsome bite of his quarter-pounder with fries and says tonight is their party, it’s a week early, they’ve got to get to the next island and the water is rough, so there won’t be much drinking.
A Drink Called Paradise Page 8