A Drink Called Paradise (11 page)

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 home. 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.

I fork through my meat and turn it over. What else? I suppose you've seen a lot of water, I say, you've probably surfed in a lot of incredible places.

He says, Yes. He brightens. Lots. And most of them look like this one, he says. He names an archipelago or two of even more far-flung islands, says the sharks are bad on some of them, but then, they glow in the dark, why worry?

He stops because his food is almost gone, because I'm staring at him, because he should. He laughs. Glow in the dark, he repeats, shaking his head at his own joke.

What if I don't test out?

Well, they'll give you a few more tests, and maybe some treatment. It's not that you want to be in any hurry not to take the tests. But don't worry, you were hardly exposed at all. Not like them. He points the chewed end of his red meat to where they sit as if they are already dead, not eating.

Where do you put the trash? I ask.

He points to a hole next to the serving area. I push in all of the brightly colored foods so they tumble into the dark that trash makes, and Ngarima comes up to me.

Don't sleep, she says. Ghosts will get you when you sleep. She looks as if she has locked her eyes again, the way you do on the island to sleep in the day.

Stars in absolute excess, I gulp stars in my breathlessness, swinging through the last door off the stairs that finally lead up and out, and she is sitting on the cold metal deck, her legs drawn up, her eyes on the smoke that curls but does not drift into the stillness of the star-packed air. She is a civilian now, or at least the lab coat's gone, her clipboard's stowed—nothing she holds protects her. She jerks her cup back toward her toes, away from me.

Not that I threaten her, not that I come toe to toe. I am bathing in stars. We sit in absolute dark here, an aurora borealis in reverse, black paint sucking the stars closer than even the stars on the island, which will surely someday set fire to the tops of the palms, fronds waving once too often against their white light.

'Tis the season. She offers me a shot, which I take. And I take a second one, and one more before she says it's not her bottle.

As many islands as there are stars, I say, toasting her. You like working for this corporation?

She levers herself up from the deck, weaving a little, smoothing her way forward with her feet. They give you a house at the facility, it's okay, she says. It's a very modern place.

It must be hard. I stand too.

A lot of medicine is hard. I try not to think about it.

I'm good at that.

We talk, and the dark starts to spin with words, which I try to hold on to. I ask what I need to ask, Are you the one in charge?

No.

Okay. So who is in charge? I ask.

She leans on the railing, leans as if this is why they're installed, not to keep people in but to let them lean. Below, she signals with a hand off that railing. He hardly ever comes up, not even at night. He could be in Bellevue instead of the ocean, he could be in Persia, he's a thousand-and-one-nights kind of guy. He's the one.

She's maybe more drunk than I am.

It was an accident, you know, she says.

I know what an accident is, I say.

The captain will like my story about the island, I say. In my story, children hide under it as if it were just a spoon to be overturned. But instead of being served up in a mouthful, they come up through the sand as jelly.

I stop, I go on. The important part of the story is why they are hiding.

They should hide, she says at last.

No—not children, they shouldn't, I say. What have they done?

Her smoke triples in the wait.

It's nice you don't lock us up, I say.

She dumps ash onto the deck. You're guests, you're volunteers.

Can I change my mind?

She stubs out her smoke. I say before she can answer—because yes or no isn't relevant, because it isn't my mind I want to change—See which way the palms grow on that island? Have you ever actually looked at this island?

She glances over. The island's backlit by stars. Left, she says, they grow left.

Trade winds, I say. They never blow any other way. Now, if it were all an accident, this Bravo thing, which is what the husband of the woman you have here who is screaming so much calls what happened, if it were all a big accident, if it were just a big mistake that they made, letting the cloud spew itself up, up, up and be borne by the wind, wouldn't you have to know which way it would go? Wouldn't you have looked at the palms at least? See that speck a hundred miles away, you said, that's nothing, there's just people in the way. Or maybe, Let the wind blow a little that way and then we can see what's what with a few people. Even the gravestones blew that way.

Okay, okay, she says. I didn't do it.

Did I? I ask. Before she can suck in another star off the deck or drink from her cup again, I try another voice: “Studies show that in paradise, sex is paramount, that the natives reproduce like rats”—do you hear a voice like that rising in wonder, envy, lust, do you hear it tinged with the amoral curiosity of science, some boy-scientist speaking who tears the wings off six generations of flies to see if it affects their reproductive abilities, their, you know, sex?

Our parents elected those people, I say, and we keep them in place.

She has already walked away.

The stars are still there. Hot little islands.

I stroll past a card game. The little girl from the island squats beside it. I sit down and take her on my lap, though she resists, she tries to squirm away from me in fear because I have never held her or any of them, never comforted their boo-boos or said
sorry
. At least she knows who I am, I am not the drinking woman. But of course I have no Band-Aid for her, no Band-Aid with some animal on it that children like printed on the side that's not sticky, I don't even have words she'd like to hear,
home
or
get well
, so there we struggle.

I let her go. I leave the stars for the stairs, for the very bottom of the stairs, where the doors are hot with engines behind them. Some are open, so I don't have to knock, I don't have to call out over the machines, O Captain! My Captain!

Of course, he could be sleeping. It is night, and on a boat any time is all the time, they have watches and they take turns and surely even captains sleep.

Nothing promises anything inside room after room: the machines and their couplings fill them almost to the ceiling the way plants do, a thick blooming, but one room does divide and through that burrowing division must lie its reason.

He smokes and wears a tiny hat. It's the kind you wear for building expressways or putting I-beams into buildings, but it's the wrong size, the size real estate salesmen wear when they're saying it's in move-in condition, the one that sits on the head and teeters. Despite the hat, he's in charge, he's no missionary-in-a-helmet. He doesn't bother to look up when I enter his high-tech lamp light, not even when I cast a shadow in his smoke.

He could be blind.

He is not blind enough to wear the glasses they wear because he turns to me when I say, Captain, and he blinks pale eyes, I see them see me.

Doctor, he says.

Excuse me, doctor, I say. Of course he's a doctor. That makes me fear him more, but I cast off that fear for later, when I have more time, when I don't have someone looking at me or three shots of liquor inside. I want to go back, I say.

He spreads a chart over his knees, and it caves in the middle where the blue is, where it's lined with circles inside circles inside circles. He stares at the map—to sort out the creases from the bull's-eye?

You're sicker than you think you are. But don't worry, honey, he says without looking at me. Haven't lost a patient yet. He snaps the chart taut and picks up another.

None of them? I ask.

You can think what you want, honey. He smiles at me, a dazzling smile, one with teeth, then he opens his new map, snaps that map shut. We have all the data.