A Drink Called Paradise (2 page)

The dripping helmet rocks on the porch floor between us. Cheerleading, concussions, crisp fall burnt leaves, and school bunting power through my brain, as far away in time as in place. I touch its dome, I mime a why? through the pounding rain.

The missionary points at the wisps of hair plastered to his skull like the strands on a husked coconut and bends that skull toward me so I can see a brown scar slashed where a crack might be. He then points to the closest palm and its load, which waves and shakes, suddenly slingshot.

No porch-leaving for me.

From inside, the boy brings out Milo, a substitute of a substitute for coffee but the real thing here, and for me the heat above the cup, which exceeds the heat of the rain, is fiercely and unexpectedly refreshing. I drink it.

We all stare at the rain.

My eyes burn from the hour I must have left them open, not knowing I wasn't awake. The gray, unflinching curtain continues like the inside of eyelid but solid and noisy in downpour. Even the inside of the missionary's helmet is wet, and now a slight shift in the rain's direction sprays us all an inch closer together.

Will the boat come? I ask. Do you have a radio?

The missionary gives me his
yes
, his
no
.

We sit together for a long time, not speaking. I sense they don't speak because I am present, although they could speak in their island way, but they don't. But I don't retreat. The porch holds what little light there is, and besides, inside sits Ngarima's son, training more roach horses, letting them fly.

It is more a kind of hesitation that the man and Ngarima have by not speaking or not leaving. It is not me, my presence. And it's not a liaison I'm preventing. He and his cracked head, his missionary way of thanking the boy when he comes to collect the cups—all this doesn't add up to sex. I have been sitting on the porch too long with warm rain coming through the boards. This is not something I'm always thinking. But maybe Ngarima is looking at him when I'm not looking—or maybe it's just him, and their not talking, that makes me think they do think of sex.

Should I go inside? I ask, as if this is what they're thinking.

No is one answer, Ngarima's.

In America, asks the preacher, where the Latter Day sits, they have deserts to drive on?

You just go straight along, I nod with relief, until you're gone.

The three of us look where you could be gone, through all that water. This is no lush volcanic island, I say, despite all this rain.

An atoll, says the missionary. The story, he says, is that a young man fished the land out of the water.

Or did the sky and water use their sex? asks Ngarima.

Aha, I think, she is thinking it. But then she sighs, making the sex less, like
having relations. No
, she says, they do that later, to make a man.

The missionary strokes his scarred head. Really what makes land is all the coral animals squeezing in with each other. That makes it strong. That's the way island people are. But coral does crack, says the missionary. I have seen cracks, he says.

I'm not afraid of cracks, I say. LA could crack and fall right off, and it's not even coral.

When I mention some part of where I'm from that they don't already know about, they look off. It is as if I am telling about a dream I have, that dull, that particular. I go on thinking about all my work in LA cracking off in a quake, sliding right down into the ocean, right off into the water. Maybe it has, maybe they have already finished with Paradise, people have bought it and have quit buying it.

One drink and you think you're Eve
, that's what I wrote.
If you can drink this drink, you can live in paradise
is mine too. A little snappier, but that is what it was, more or less. The war over it was: Is Paradise lemon-lime? Does it fizz? But when the bottle finally comes, who wants to drink it? Not even on the set did we drink it. We settled for water. But everybody wants the word
paradise
, it's all dollar signs.

Not pearly gates.

I sip my Milo. Without milk or sugar, it is bitter vegetable, something you would beg a child to drink, telling him how it would make him grow. I steel myself to swallow.

I can't think about children.

Ngarima's son comes out with a pleated plastic rain hat. How does he know she needs her rain hat? No words that I hear pass between them. She hands him her finished Milo cup, the preacher helps her upright, and the porch shudders.

She stands.

The small bit of pleated plastic does cover her woolly island hair well enough, but the rest of her, with the bulk of some army vehicle, something large yet still moving, sweeps into the deluge with its shoulders bare, the water sluicing and splashing around her, parting the water for the preacher behind, who has to go on into the rain for some reason, and with her.

Ngarima's boy invents a dog. At least you don't have to walk it, I say as he trains the roach to roll over.

Insects are the future, he tells me. My father says so. He knows.

What else does he know? When the boat's coming back?

The boy nods as if I don't listen. He says, He doesn't want me to go on the boat.

Parents don't want children to go anywhere.

The boy rights his cockroach, puts it back inside a shell, and plugs the shell with a rock. This will help it learn.

Where I live, I say, boys go swimming. Why don't you swim? I ask. All the time I've been on this island I've never seen you swim. The only one who swims is there.

I point to a head in the lagoon, just above the water from this angle. You can finally see the lagoon because the rain has stopped, and what you can see is what you see daily, a head, tiny like a baby's, over a big board, with long arms like a man's that go around it. When I go in, the head and arms are always gone, the board against a tree. What about that swimming? I say.

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 and 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.