What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  Chapter Twenty-one

  After

  Colonel Kethros squats and enters the cave. He picks up the empty cookie wrappers. He touches the lounge-chair cushions with the back of his hand, feeling for residual heat.

  “Excuse me, Colonel,” says Nicholas, who stands outside, a cell phone in hand. “It’s the minister’s office, sir.”

  Kethros lifts the cushions, sweeps his hand across the sand underneath, searching.

  “Sir…”

  Kethros stands. He backs out of the cave and walks over to his soldier. He takes the cell phone from Nicholas’s hand; he hangs up.

  Nicholas stammers a little. “They say the latest migrant ship has been spotted again,” he says. “They want you to reestablish the command center at the beach….”

  Kethros shakes his head, silencing the soldier. “What did the housekeeper say?” he asks.

  “She says she didn’t see anything, sir.”

  “She was the only one working the night shift yesterday?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The colonel walks past his subordinate. He stands at the water’s edge.

  “Do you know what makes them dangerous?” he asks.

  “I’m sorry, sir?” Nicholas replies.

  “The illegals. Do you know what makes them dangerous?”

  Nicholas begins to say something, then stops. Finally he mumbles, “They come here illegally, sir.”

  The colonel laughs. “Nicholas, you’ll make a good officer one day,” he says.

  He puts his arm around Nicholas’s shoulders and hands him a couple of empty wrappers. “Tell Elias and Alexander to show this to the housekeeper, and ask her again. If she still says she didn’t see anything, tell them to bring her to me.”

  Nicholas stares at the wrappers. “Yes, sir,” he says.

  The colonel pats the soldier on the back, then turns and begins walking up the beach. “When you’re done, the four of you get in the truck and drive north. Tell Andreas I’ll meet you at Mirror Bay—he’ll know where to go.”

  He walks a few steps, then stops. He waits for the sound of the soldier leaving, and when he doesn’t hear it, he turns to find Nicholas still standing there.

  “Is there a problem, soldier?”

  “It’s just…” Nicholas pauses.

  “Say what’s on your mind.”

  “Why are we doing this?”

  Kethros pauses. He looks over the boy’s uniform, decorated at the breast with a patch the military hands out to all the soldiers assigned this kind of duty. It features an illustration of an oversize wave, white-capped and curling, its destination a bucolic little village on the shore.

  “Nicholas,” Kethros says, “you can either ask that question or wear that uniform, but you can’t do both.”

  He leaves the soldiers and walks northward. He traverses the sharp, rocky outcroppings, steadying himself as his false leg struggles to find footing. He knows, although he sees no sign of them, that this is the path the children took. He knows it’s only a matter of time.

  * * *

  —

  When he was a child the shoreline was different, he’s sure of it. He has a vivid memory of a comma-shaped spit that curled out a hundred feet into the water at low tide, the sand almost white, almost colorless. He remembers playing with the other boys, picking a spot about halfway down and building as big a dam of sand and rocks as they could while watching the tide come in, then seeing how long their construction would withstand the inevitable drowning. He remembers these moments and is certain they took place right here, right in this spot where now there’s only a smatter of anemone pools and sharp black rocks.

  Soon the outcroppings give way to a public beach and this too he remembers as something different, a staging ground for evacuation drills in preparation for war or fire or natural disaster. He can’t recall the specific calamity from which he and his classmates were being trained to escape, only the act of marching in line from the school grounds to this beach, and the sound of giggling and shouting and a high-pitched whistle, a teacher yelling, Let’s go, let’s go.

  Now the place is overrun with tourists and locals. The sand is a loose mosaic of beach towels and coolers and shoes with money and keys stuffed in the toes. He has always been able to tell them apart, the tourists and the locals, but now it is by their appearance, the wealth implied in the tourists’ clothing and their accessories and their pristine rented cars, whereas before it was by something in the marrow of them. It induces a kind of nausea in the colonel to see it, to see how nondescript these foreigners and their money and their utter absence of culture have made his island, his people.

  “Is something wrong?”

  The colonel starts. A middle-aged woman he recognizes from town eyes him.

  “I’m sorry?” he says.

  “It’s just…” She points at his uniform. “I thought something might be wrong. More, you know, problems like yesterday.”

  Kethros smiles, regains his composure. “Nothing’s wrong at all,” he says. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  The woman smiles back, laughs in relief. “I was worried there might be more,” she says, leaning in as though to tell a secret. “It feels like it’s every day now.”

  The colonel rubs the woman’s shoulder. “Enjoy the weather,” he says. “We won’t get much more of this before summer rolls in.”

  He walks up to the beachside road and buys a drink from one of the vendors. He sits on the hollow trunk of a dead sleep-gum tree and he passes an hour watching the beachgoers. His phone rings incessantly but he ignores it. A couple of locals who recognize him wave in his direction but he ignores them too. He ignores the sounds of the sunheads, a scramble pattern of black wings above, their high, brittle discontent; he ignores the hustler who walks the beach with a cigarette-girl tray hanging over his chest, selling watered-down sunscreen and sunflower seeds in violation of local ordinance. He simply stares out at the sea, lets it blur and double in his vision until it swallows the land and the sky, until there’s nothing else. This arpeggio spring, April staircasing away. It used to feel smoother, the ending of winter, the island in rebirth.

  A young girl bobs in the surf, about fifty feet from shore. She looks calm but she is drowning. The colonel has seen it before, the way people appear so in control just before they go under. No one else seems to notice, not even the swimmers near her. She rises once, dips below the surface, rises once more and is gone.

  The colonel stands up. He tosses his drink and sprints to the water. He shoves a couple of tourists out of his way, tramples over a spread of finger sandwiches and cookies laid on a checkered tablecloth. People yell, but no one tries to stop him. They can see where he’s headed, they start to extrapolate.

  The colonel runs into the surf. He dives, slicing through an oncoming wave. He has been a swimmer since before he could walk, and although he has done it only a few times since he lost his leg, alone at night in the less-frequented lagoons of the island, that feeling of being at home in the water, of being fluent, never goes away. He moves effortlessly, stroke over stroke, until he reaches the girl’s limp body. He wraps his arm around her chest; he pulls her back.

  At the shore the beachgoers have gathered to watch as the colonel, his uniform drenched, carries the girl out of the water. There are gasps from the crowd when they see her, the smallness of her, and someone says, Call an ambulance, but no one moves. No one can let go of the watching.

  The colonel lays the girl down on the sand. She shows no sign of breathing. Remnants of the colonel’s cadet training come to him; he eases the girl’s head back, lets her jaw relax. He finds the tip of her breastbone, laces his fingers together and presses down with the weight of both arms on one palm. He begins to push, keeping to the rhythm he was taught, somewhere between once and twice a second. There is something exhausting about it,
not only the physical act itself but this being on the other side of a life, being so close to departure.

  After thirty compressions he stops. He pries the girl’s mouth open, breathes twice into her airway, then goes back to compressions. He’s heard the training has changed in recent years, that now you’re supposed to do nothing but chest compressions, or perhaps it is nothing but breathing. It doesn’t matter—he does what he was taught. The girl doesn’t move.

  In his periphery he sees one of the tourists flag down a passing military jeep. The soldiers who get out of the vehicle are his. At first they don’t see him behind the assembled crowd, but when they do, they come running down to the shoreline.

  “Let’s get her in the truck,” Elias says, kneeling by the colonel’s side. He digs his hand into the sand beneath the girl and begins to lift her up, until Kethros shoves him violently away. The soldier falls over; he backs off, becomes one of the watchers.

  The colonel continues compressing the girl’s chest. She doesn’t move. He keeps going, aware now of a wailing from nearby—the girl’s mother, who between sobs is screaming, “Do something, do something,” at no one at all.

  The colonel keeps pressing. There is among the crowd now a sense of time’s unbearable weight, of too much having passed. At the rear of the assemblage a few people start to walk away.

  Then a sputtering fountain of salt water comes out of the girl’s mouth, and on its heels, breath. She wakes in spasms, coughing and reaching for air. Immediately the colonel turns her onto her side. As spittle leaks out of her mouth, he bends down and whispers in her ear: “Easy, easy. Just breathe.”

  The girl’s mother drops to her knees and wraps her arms around her daughter, so tightly that Kethros is forced to pull them apart so as to give the girl some room for air. The girl’s father too takes a knee, though in his restraint he comes off awkward and self-conscious, more embarrassed than relieved. Quickly he stands up and tries to shake the colonel’s hand.

  “I don’t know how we can ever…” he starts, but Kethros cuts him off.

  “Are you from here?” the colonel asks.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Kethros points at the island’s interior. “Are you from here?”

  “Born and raised,” the man says. “Ten generations.”

  In one swift motion the colonel slaps the man across the face, again and again, until his four soldiers intervene. Released from Kethros’s grip, the man appears stunned and humiliated and utterly uncomprehending.

  “Then act from here,” the colonel says as his soldiers pull him away.

  * * *

  —

  They drive back to the temporary encampment at Revel beach, where Colonel Kethros showers in one of the outdoor stalls and changes into a clean uniform. When he returns to the command center his soldiers are waiting.

  “Go home,” he says. “Come back tomorrow at sunrise. We’ll head up north and find the boy then.”

  The soldiers disperse without a word.

  In the makeshift camp the police officers and city morgue workers are clearing out the caution tape and folding up the unused body bags. A printer, out of paper, beeps ceaselessly; the colonel unplugs it. He checks the messages on his phone, and deletes them all. He walks over to the Hotel Xenios restaurant and orders a rib eye and drinks a couple of beers and then goes to the beach where a day earlier the bodies washed up. The hotel has put the lounge chairs back, along with a sign apologizing for the inconvenience. He lies on one of the lounge chairs.

  It is pitch black when he startles awake at the sound of footsteps. He turns to find Nicholas.

  “What time is it?” the colonel asks.

  “Three-thirty,” Nicholas replies.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Nicholas points northward. “Another raft has landed,” he says.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Before

  Amir shivered. What had started as a light snowfall now turned to dousing sleet that seemed to come from all directions; his clothes and his life jacket became soaked once more. He put his arms around his knees and became as small as he could muster. The dark, near-total, lulled his eyes into following the jagged run of the hanging flashlight, and this, coupled with the wild rocking of the boat and the chaotic shouts of its passengers, quickly brought about nausea. He burst into a heaving cough but there was nothing in him to vomit.

  Even in the chaos that overwhelmed the upper deck, he could hear the sounds of the people trapped below. Earlier, when the snow first fell and the sea started turning violent, their shouting had come through the boards muffled and distant. But it was clearer now, so much so that Amir could differentiate between the voices, and in doing so imagined those beneath him not as a single impossible organism but as individual people, bound by their confines but solitary in their fear.

  It occurred to Amir then why he could suddenly hear the lower-deck captives with such clarity—something else had gone quiet. Gone was the ceaseless wheezing, so constant over the past two days that the upper-deck passengers had all but become desensitized to it. Gone was the stink of diesel. The engine had stopped running. Amir looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but everyone he saw in the momentary illumination of the wandering flashlight appeared to be otherwise concerned. Even Teddy, who must have known, was busy wrestling the wheel, desperately trying to keep the compass pointed in the direction of N.

  So violently did the snow turn to storm that at first nobody noticed Kamal had managed to make a call. In desperation, using a phone he’d believed had run out of minutes, he tried the emergency number again.

  The boat heaved and deflated, each passenger bracing against the other and against the boat’s own battered sides. With no glass lantern left to refract its beam, the flashlight, which had previously brought some respite from the darkness, now swung wildly from where it hung, the light landing on each passenger at random, solitary and intense as an interrogator’s lamp.

  “Keep calm,” Mohamed shouted, wrapping his forearm around a run of knotted rope. “Do you want to die out here? Keep calm!”

  But he had lost them now, had lost their superficial obedience. Even the gun that dug its barrel into his thigh every time a wave slapped the hull forfeited its malicious authority. Because now the men and women, who, in undertaking this passage, had shed their belongings and their roots and their safety and their place of purpose and all claim to agency over their own being, had now finally shed their future. There was nothing left for the smugglers’ apprentice to threaten, nothing he could leverage.

  Instead it was Kamal who managed to produce something of a pause in the commotion. “Shut up, shut up,” he said. “I have them on the phone.”

  The passengers in Kamal’s immediate vicinity turned to look at the bare blue glow emanating from the screen. They observed it the way a doll maker might observe a creation come to life.

  “Hello, yes, hello,” Kamal yelled in English over the sound of the waves and the wind. “My name Kamal. We call from boat. You make help, you make help.”

  From where he sat, pressed hard against the railing, Walid swiped for the phone. “Give me that, you idiot,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  Kamal pushed Walid away. He motioned for silence. He listened.

  “Speak to them in Arabic,” Walid said. “They have people who speak Arabic.”

  Kamal ignored him. He pressed the phone against his one ear and cupped his hand over the other, struggling to make out the voice on the line. His face contorted into a confused frown.

  “Boat,” he said feebly. “Boat for West.”

  Maher reached over and motioned for the phone. Kamal looked at him, reluctant.

  “You’ve heard me speak English,” Maher said. Kamal handed him the phone. Like a glowing totem it dragged the eyes of the passengers along with it. All
of them, even Mohamed, watched in silence as Maher spoke.

  “We are stranded somewhere south of the continent,” Maher said. He leaned on that distorted Oxford English accent that bound so much of the previously colonized world, from North Africa to India to all the places over which the sun never set, in each place tinted with turns of the local tongue but still possessed of its most potent quality, a veneer of implied civility, that gentlemanly air. “Our destination was the island of Kos but we don’t know where we are. We have a child and a pregnant woman onboard and we need help.”

  Only a few of the passengers understood what Maher said, but those who didn’t took comfort in the quantity and velocity of the spoken words, as though no Westerner could possibly refuse assistance to anyone who spoke the language so well.

  Maher listened and nodded in response to some incoming query. He looked around the boat, his lips moving silently.

  “About a hundred, maybe more,” he said.

  Again he listened, and again came another query. Maher studied the faces of the people around him.

  “Everywhere,” he said.

  A massive wave lifted the Calypso high. In its wake the violence of the drop rattled the phone loose from Maher’s hand. It skittered along the deck and into the hands of a nearby passenger, who upon righting himself handed it back to Maher quickly and with a kind of fearful gentleness, as though he were holding a newborn or a piece of radioactive ore.

  Maher put the phone back to his ear. He listened a long time. He gave the phone back to Kamal.

  “They’re gone,” he said.

  Kamal grabbed the phone and began trying to redial the number, but after a few rings the device gave a vibrating shrug and the screen went black, the battery depleted.

  For a moment the passengers kept their eye on the phone, even as Kamal tossed it on the deck, as if the collective gaze, powered by enough desperation, could prove resuscitative.

  “It doesn’t matter, they wouldn’t have…” Walid began, then stopped. He stared at his hands, gloved in a stranger’s socks.