Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

Wende was about to blurt out a confession she was not ready to make and they were not ready to hear — or, rather, that Ann was not ready for them to hear, with the likely outcome that the camaraderie would again be broken. Everyone would want to leave as soon as they could. The table slumped back into inaction. So quiet that they could hear outside.

“Listen,” Ann said.

Silence.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly.”

They tumbled outside into the darkness. The island was holding them up again. The clouds had cleared away. The night sky was newly scrubbed, moon-brilliant, star-punctured.

Around them on the beach were scattered bits of rock and coral. Glistening bodies of sea life lay stranded. Fish and eels fluttered in small pools, and the guys grabbed them and threw them back into the water. The farthest fare , vacant, had disappeared off its finger of sand as if it never was, washed away. A lesson, Loren thought.

“We’re marooned. At least till the hotel sends out another boat,” Richard said.

The idea of actually being marooned sent a tingle down Ann’s spine. Her fantasy was taking a majestic turn toward the real.

“It feels like the beginning of the world,” Dex said. “If only you could record this feeling.”

Loren yawned. “Good night, lovely people. Enough excitement for tonight,” he said, and went off.

Ann felt the urge to lay out something precious before the others, to seal the evening as extraordinary. Besides, her secret had been burning a hole in her pocket for a week now. “You can record it.”

* * *

They scampered through the glittering night like trick-or-treaters, kids playing hooky, whispering and giggling, sneaking kisses and gropes, tripping and falling in the sand. It was like a happy return to childhood. The beach was littered with palm fronds, and in the dark, Wende stumbled over one. Dex fell on top of her, and they rolled away, laughing.

“Knock it off,” Ann said, a taskmaster. “Hurry.” Her heart beat a staccato of excitement.

No reason to hurry. They had basically forever, but she wanted to create proper awe for the unveiling. The hurry also obscured the tiniest feeling of unease at betraying Loren.

The path along the island’s edge was deceptively longer at night. Shouldn’t they have already passed it? Richard was drinking straight out of a bottle of red wine and singing Italian opera, of all things, though he didn’t even speak Italian. Dex and Wende passed a bottle of champagne back and forth. Everyone was enjoying the journey far too much for Ann’s taste.

They didn’t pass anything remotely familiar at the point Ann thought the camera should be. Had the storm washed it away? They went farther. Farther still. Ann walked ahead, squinting into the darkness past the feeble cone of light from her flashlight, unconfident of her landmarks. Behind her, the troops were grumbling. Richard stopped to take a leak behind a palm. Wende complained she was tired.

“There it is!” Ann shouted.

In the middle of a stretch of washed beach was her webcam. As each of them came up to it, there was an unimpressed silence.

Finally Ann said, “Here it is.”

“Hmmph.”

“What is it?”

“A remote webcam.”

“What?”

“It films this stretch of beach twenty-four hours a day.”

“No way.”

“Yes way.”

“Why?”

That was the question that Ann had been pondering all those mornings alone, sitting behind the camera, watching it as it watched the beach. Why do it? Who would watch it? Undoubtedly the same people who would like to be there in person but couldn’t be, for one reason or another. But that didn’t entirely make sense either. While the scene was lovely, so were many others, and a live scene surely trumped a videoed one any day. Were people so jaded that live experience wasn’t adequate any longer?

It had to be something else. Something to do with why Ann trudged all the way there, when any other stretch of beach would have sufficed for solitude — the act of recording implied specialness. How many desires did one have independent of the constant barrage of images that brainwashed one? Was the live image of the beach any different from creating a sacred building? Did anything exist in the sacred building that didn’t exist elsewhere, or vice versa? The very act of putting it in the building, or recording it on a webcam, made one take notice. One carried a photo, a rosary, a lock of hair, a seashell — the religious referred to them as relics — for the same reason one watched this scene on the Internet: it signified an inchoate longing that was getting harder and harder to access in everyday life.

“Loren did this as a performance piece,” she said by way of explanation.

“Cool,” Dex said.

“Loren, that old snake,” Richard said.

“Right?” Ann said.

“That whole dropping out, being unplugged…”

“Uh-huh. But pretend you don’t know,” Ann pleaded, but the cats were far out of the bag. Who was she kidding? She had known that in telling them there would be a loss of control. She had accepted that devil’s bargain even if Loren had not.

“Let’s build a bonfire,” Dex said. “So they see it. Give people a thrill. Planet of the Apes time.”

“Fun.”

“No,” Ann said, horrified, but already they had tuned her out.

Dex and Richard passed a joint as they gathered kindling. Ann, defeated, went to sit with Wende. She hadn’t considered the repercussions of their commandeering her secret, taking it away from her, and co-opting the situation’s possibilities.

“A huge mistake,” Ann said.

“I jumped,” Wende said.

Ann closed her eyes. “Yes, you did.”

“You saw?”

Ann nodded. Events on the island had accelerated to mainland speed, too much to process before the next thing took its place, creating a perpetual state of low-grade anxiety. She didn’t want to admit she’d forgotten all about the jump.

“Are you mad about me marrying Dex?”

Ann rolled over and faced her in the darkness. “Oh, honey, I have no right to judge. You just seemed so sure of what you didn’t want.”

“What I almost did — it was my bon voyage gift to Cooked — but then I couldn’t.”

“Okay.” Ann was feeling her way through the murk of Wende’s explanation, unsure exactly what they were talking about but afraid to frighten away a confession.

“It feels bad. I was trying to be someone I’m not. I got scared. Cooked hates me, but I saved him. His mother cooked for me .”

They lay back in silence. They had formed some type of ad hoc dysfunctional twenty-first-century family unit. Ann gazed up at the stars. The heavens seemed to be spinning so fast she had to close her eyes. Yes, it felt bad. What kind of traitorous person was she, giving up Loren’s secret like a party favor, like a kid trying to be popular? A blaze of fire went up and turned molten behind her eyelids. The guys were screaming and dancing like madmen. Was there sound on the cam? Oh God, yes. She was angry with them, but most of all angry with herself. She was lacking in all the qualities she admired in others.

“I keep making mistakes,” Ann said.

“It’s like the song ‘You just keep trying till you run out of cake.’”

“Who wants to go skinny-dipping?” Dex shouted.

“I do, I do.” Wende jumped up and ran away.

The old Wende was back.

* * *

For ten years the camera had recorded … nothing, which was the whole point, but that night the first seminal images in a decade were of the backsides of two men in the darkness, burnished in the glow of a bonfire. For an hour that was it, a burning fire, because the nighttime view of the beach and waves, even on full-moon nights, was always indecipherable. The next picture — as graven in Robinson Crusoe cam’s history as the first flickering images on film — was the flame-lit figure of a naked blond woman running past the fire, laughing and giggling, being chased by a naked tattooed man with a tangle of black hair covering his face.