A Drink Called Paradise (12 page)

He folds the map small.

One more thing, I say. Can I bum a few cigarettes from you?

He chuckles with an addict's pity and hands over what's left of his pack.

Part 4

He bolts the door behind me. I walk away slowly. He's called for security—You like security, right?—to help me find my way back. I'm to stay right there.

I start to walk away quickly. I start to climb fast, then faster when I hear someone on the stairs. It, It, is what I hear in my head, I am It. I run all the way to the rail.

It is time to choose.

A good thing it is night. By day I would think it all out, lay each piece face up and add them. At night I can't separate fear from fear. Besides, I am frightened by heights, I fear putting my head down and seeing whatever's so far down, and I can't see much but stars in this night. I still have what I drank as a comfort when I duck my head way down so when I jump it is not from a height but through all these stars.

I fall the way my son fell.

But into water.

I go so far down it feels as if I'm being pulled under by some deep-sea creature to make sure I never breathe air again. I fight my way up, and all that fight surprises me, maybe I wanted to just stay under, but I don't, I'm star-side again and swimming. I don't think about the sharks I disturb, the ones cruising the ship for its rain of leftovers, I gasp at the top, not thinking.

Someone rimmed by the light of the stars has heard me hit the water—she has, it could be her.

I gasp again, trying to be quiet. I'm now full of fear and now off the boat, and now what? I'm on the dark side, at least, where the moon isn't. I'm not going to swim back to the island, I can't get back on the boat. I swim over and touch the boat as if it's base.

On the island, the islanders are practicing their dancing. I hear the clipped orders, the drums building, the tune about holiday stars that Ngarima sang on the beach with her Jesus. Does anyone hear me? Above, people collect and lean over. No, nobody, is what they say about my splash. But someone else—the woman, no doubt—says, Yes, with such assurance that they go to find lights. That's what they shout out to get.

What rocks in my darkness? I paddle-crawl through the dark to find the lighter, the outboard end. I pull myself onto it, but I am used to someone pulling me in, and it takes me three tries plus my leg thrown over to get on.

By now lights make a plaid of the water, and I hear footsteps click on the ladder above the lighter. I turn the key that's there and ready, I throttle and pull.

Boat driving is easy if you can see where you are going, if you can at least see the gears. Otherwise you bang the boat in reverse, you almost de-leg the man who is making his way clown to you, but all of a sudden all the light that is now on you lets you see and you go, jerking, off into the night.

You can't get through the reef in the dark, but it's not so dark anymore with all this light, all the light they need to launch another boat after yours, anyway I don't think about what I can't do, with the lighter moving so well beneath me and turning when I turn. So when the white-headed surf rears up, I find my way, I don't think of myself and the boat mangled and turned on its sharpness—I just go.

Not that I make it. The boat flips in the surf, and I capsize fast, foam and coral and some very hard wood hit me as the boat goes down. I'm senseless in a light-dark-light moment, the foam and dark sprayed into the spotlights the boat casts out for me. But when I surface, all banged up, I've been shot on a wave into the utter dark past the reef.

How can I swim? It's nothing. I do it with my legs and arms, I flail like that small-headed boy in the lagoon. When I find I can't breathe I hope to touch that soft monster sponge, but of course I don't. Did I imagine it anyway? I don't know what I do but splash and gurgle in a direction that might be forward—there—is that dark part land? Is that tin basin reflecting their light, or is it the moon? A streak of light bounces with drumming far away.

Pain comes so suddenly to my leg that it doubles me up. It must be a nail from a wreck, but next there's an electric jab into my foot so bad that I can't straighten it out, I am gone with pain, so far beyond the banging up I've just had on the reef that I take on water.

A wave, a lucky wave, tears me out of it, goes the right way, the way I think of as right where I come from, where I must go back to, a kind of amniotic wave, a slap-on-the-bottom wake-up wave that makes you cry out, outraged, and live.

You think we didn't notice the ship all lit up and the sirens going? Harry hovers over me. A boat with horns like Jehovah blowing?

I move my head as if I might laugh with him, but no, it is impossible to laugh, I can't laugh, I can't even move my mouth very well.

Barclay saw you. What does he have to do now but walk the shore all night and wait?

What? What? I say. This is all I can say, and point at my feet, which are bandaged and itchy and hot.

You should be dead, says Harry. Or at least gone, with them, rescued as it were. What happened to you was you hit a
taramea
, a fish so poisonous we had to use gloves to pull the spines out.

A poison fish? I say, pulling hard at my mouth muscles to get to the
p
.

Harry sits on a mat beside me. I see it is his mat.

I saved you from them later, says Veelu, who leans into my vision with Milo in a half coconut.

I sip.

Show her how, says Harry. This is the saving after the fish, when they came to the island to get you back—you, their prize experiment. They swarmed the place, I thought the island would sink under their weight—or that they'd find me and take me instead.

Why didn't they? I try to say.

Veelu lifts her arms, removes a pin from her hair on top, and shakes her head. Veelu's large hair, so mane-wild and black-silked, falls off and down her back, and her own hair, the little she grows, stands in surprised wisps in small clumps over a head scarred in parallel rows. You like it?
I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair
, she sings.
And send him on his way
.

She waves the wig. They give this to my sister in a box, and it is all she has to send me. When the ship people see me without it, when they see the scars the boat has left me with, they don't bother me. You stay here too long, I say, and they'll do it to you too. They believe me when I say you are in the surf, finished.

He and Veelu laugh, and it's strange and painful for me to hear how they do it together, how he then touches her baldness with his thumb, showing that they know they look the same.

I don't know why they didn't take me, says Harry. He is quiet with old fear. He restacks the pink shells around the edge of the room. But they didn't come back, he says. Did you want to be gotten?

I am crying. The tears fill my ears and make me feel underwater again, but they are tears of relief, tears that have waited for a right time to be shed. I am not dead, I work out of my mouth.

I can smile.

I am asleep. I am not asleep. The green outside the window turns blue under my lids—or is it water coming through my head, fixing things? I am listening to the swish of palms and hurting. That's all you do when you're ill, listen and hurt, back and forth, a conversation as deep and dark as that. Sometimes a thought buzzes between them, but it can't connect to anything, can't feed off the listen or the hurt, and so it drops.

What drops? I am alone here in my sleep. I'm not at the guesthouse, I'm back on my rice bed in the house of silence—Barclay's empty house. Barclay haunts the shore, watches for what won't come in or float up, Temu making
o's
in the water in front, in back of him.

But now something drops. Somewhere in my listening—it's a place, my listening, in my recovery—the house is vacant for me because who else will go into it, with its windmilling ghost, its lost boys and lost mother?

I am asleep, so what drops is a dove from a dream of what happened, a dove that came in a box on the Paradise shoot. Gulls were too
vulturish
to fly across the palms that were supposed to sway in a breeze from the dawn, so we had doves sent in boxes, small gray boxes, coffins, some said. When the sun finally moved out of a cloud that was supposed to be dawn's but was dusk by the time we shot, we scooped those doves out of their boxes and threw them up toward the sun.

They all dropped to the ground.

Since I am asleep, I can open my eyes.

The room is as dark as sleep. It is night. I had forgotten that, or I didn't know. When is it not night in my sleep? I could raise my hand to my eyes to see with my hand if my eyes are seeing, but my hand hurts and itches. I am too sleepy to make it rise, too tired of hurt.

The dark breathes. I breathe and it breathes. I stop and it breathes.

I could cry out. Over the pounding ocean? Over the dark, deep night in which no one else is crying? Ghost. It would be ghost, their
tupaka
. If only Barclay lay nearby, with his night noise, astraddle Ngarima with her bulk like a boat he would take out.

Or if there were just a lamp that could break.

I can see shape now. Large against what there is of a moon, the shape stands by the curtain, and its flowers quiver a little—from his entrance? From a breeze?

It is no dream, I decide. If he has not come to press himself into me, he comes to kill me, he comes to turn the pillow over on my face—or empty the rice into my nose and mouth. Because I am the one Veelu said, a Bravo person. I did it. My deciding can't stop, I hear the breathing, and I think, think, think.

I sit up. Get out of here, I shout. But what I say comes out small.

He walks into some light. Before I see him, I know. The way he walks is why I didn't wake before. I know the way he walks. It was just that dropping I didn't know.

Barclay, I say. You scared me.

He keeps on breathing. He is looking not at me but at the floor.

Barclay, I say. I slip back down so as not to feel my legs, and the slipping gives me another angle. In this angle, with light, I see Barclay's face is wet.

He's been swimming. In my pain that's what I think, then I think nothing again. Barclay's here, so what.

He's sobbing.

Thank you for saving me, I say.

His words come all at once: Ngarima was who pulled my son out of the snow that fell after, the one who died, not the one who is born later with his head, or the one who has gone away.

He steps closer to me. Radio, do you want a radio? they said. No problem. Show the others there is no problem. I will do a lot for a radio. He looks at his hands. I let my son play in the snow, to show them you could play in it, not to worry. He breathes in a sob. Oh, my Ngarima.

I was the one who wanted a radio, I say.

You are a ghost, he says. If I shut my eyes, you will vanish.

I am not dead yet, I say.

Yes, he says, turning away from me. That's what you say. You who always wants to leave this island, who calls it paradise.

Paradise, I repeat with a wave of pain. I wish I could have brought Ngarima back with me.

He stands there. You are here now, he says. He is wiping off his tears.

I watch his hands move across his clothes. Like before? I say. Like that time when you said it's the custom?

It is the custom.

I close my eyes.

He moves toward me.

Most of me is bandage-wrapped. I'm impermeable, a sweating mummy. I am thinking
impermeable
between the listening and the hurt, but when he lays his head near my arm I put my arms around him, I hold him while he cries.

Desire is as confusing as death. All the little impermeables between them switch places, get stuck. I kiss the top of his greasy hair where it is sticking up. What he wants is so big and so far from here he loses his want, he pushes it in anger against my bedside until it's drained.

I hurt. He hurts. His hurt circles his anger.

There is a machete stuck in a coconut at the door. That could be what dropped, the sound of it being stuck. But there is always some knife at the door, and what light there is is always catching on it, making it something two people will look at together.

You are going?

He's a shape again. He's moving toward the door.

I will tell Harry to move me. You want your house back, that's it, isn't it? I say.

Barclay opens the hands he's kept clenched. They take hold of the wavering flower cloth at the door and they tear it down, one long rip against nails.

Then he's gone.

Bare feet don't make steps that dwindle, and nothing thuds or sways or whistles behind him. The new stars the cloth kept dark are all I have to know I am awake.

I am awake now.

There's little blond left, I have a bad limp and a crutch, I have pale brown skin from the sun bouncing off my sheet, with its heat on the wall behind me that I feel on my back sitting up straight on my rice bed, which is now so thin.

I sit up so straight now that I could receive radio waves myself or at least intercept them, have the radio play in my fillings, hum out that the boat is coming, the real boat. The radio, declares Barclay when he visits, says a boat is coming, he has his antenna that lets him talk. He can
yes
me now.

Barclay lingers after he tells me about the boat. I catch and hold his hand. I say, You think I'm not grown up, that I think sex is all that matters to you?

You will find someone, he says.

This is a compliment I think I can take. But he doesn't say more. He walks away quickly to radio again, to talk more about all that I have told him about that other boat. He disappears very fast since my angle for seeing isn't far. He just disappears.

At the highest heat of the day, Clam Hold and Breasts for Three come to string white flowers onto fishline at the end of my bed. They laugh over the penis-shaped buds that turn up—but their laughter is not envy the way some would say. And they do not say, What's with that man now?