Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

The truth was they had nothing to discuss. They were both naturals, but Wende was only just realizing that there was no aphrodisiac like a job well done. After exhausting themselves on each other, they lazed postcoitally.

Dex lay propped up in bed as Wende straddled him, kissing him on the lips, then pulled away.

“Forgive me for what I’m about to do.”

“For what?” Dex asked as she hauled her arm back and slugged him as hard as she could, breaking his nose.

* * *

The count of the wedding party the next afternoon had ballooned up to somewhere north of two hundred and fifty people. The empty strip of beach in front of the resort now resembled a squatter’s slum. Tents had been erected, umbrellas and palapas stuck in the sand, corrugated iron roofs installed, buffet service set up in the dining area, latrines dug in the jungle center to accommodate the unaccustomed, unsustainable size of the island’s new population. Islands were fragile. One took everything one needed to them, left with everything on the way out.

* * *

The first broadcast was of a bruised — partly natural (see Wende), partly made-up (Wende again) — and fatigued Dex trussed up like a turkey, pushed along by a tribe of Polynesian men who looked a cross between scary B movie henchmen and Samoan gangsta rappers. There had been heated arguments during rehearsal: Richard and Ann thought the full warrior dress of grass shirts, anklets, armbands, and masks looked either like a historical documentary (think Rockefeller in New Guinea) or low-budget musical theater (Bakersfield dinner-house-theater version of South Pacific ). The cast bravely elected to take off the masks and wear only headdresses. Although the main problem should have been that this now enabled them to be ID’d, instead what bugged Wende was that their peaceful expressions, their gentle prodding forward of Dex like a prized pig, gave the lie to their supposedly savage, brutal intent.

Dex chimed in that the kidnappers needed a modern, macho look — they should wear Western shorts and T-shirts, and the coup de grâce would be face paint that obscured their features and made them forbidding to look at. Unfortunately, the face paint still left them recognizable, and Cooked made an executive decision that he would not allow his friends to sacrifice themselves. Coconut masks, or the whole thing was off. An unforeseen benefit of the choice was that the eerie blankness of the masks, with their hastily gouged-out holes for eyes, nose, and mouth, made the men’s appearance far more menacing than anything else tried.

Although chafing at the sudden restrictions, Wende agreed, with the caveat that the men get a little rougher with Dex while on camera. She also wanted a longer lead-in with drums to accompany their entrance. The incongruity of there being a soundtrack for a kidnapping would be ignored. “It will create tension and suspense before anything shows up on camera.”

It was slipping into the realm of musical theater again, but Ann held her tongue because at least with all the distractions everyone was too happily occupied to consider leaving.

* * *

The first moments of filming showed the usual rolling waves, but the chosen day wasn’t the optimal blue and sunny as usual, but gray and overcast. Moody. A shower threatened to close them down that afternoon. Out of these lemons, Wende decided to make sour-lemon martinis. Why not a whiff of Polynesian noir, the dark underbelly, the threat, of the islands? She wished, briefly, they could move to the gloomy, cannibal-rumored Marquesas for better street cred.

Drumbeats, faraway, could at first be mistaken for static, or the pulse of fear in one’s own heart. As the sound became distinct, recognition turned to uneasiness. It was too loud, too insistent; this wasn’t your pretty, rhythmic hula dance. It was BAM … BAM BAM … BAM BAM! BAM BAM BAM! It was hard and close and dangerous. A gasp — the realization that this was the sound of war drums, conjuring up every old movie where fleets of canoes, paddled by painted savages, raced through the waters to do harm.

The drum players stayed off camera — one didn’t want to evoke the Copacabana — but four men, dressed in the abovementioned shorts, American-sports-team-emblazoned T-shirts, and eerie coconut masks, carried a heavy log that they proceeded to stake into the ground. Next came eight men corralling a visibly shaken Dex ahead of them.

“Why eight?” Ann asked, thinking it was overkill.

“Scarier,” Wende said.

Through the whole process, Ann was mesmerized by the transformation of this young woman. All that talent and confidence had resided inside the veneer of a Girls Gone Wild participant. Ann had no reason to take any credit, and yet she was proud as a mother. Guess what? To the eye and the heart, if not to the brain, eight burly Polynesian men were better than two or three trussing up Dex, a cross-dressing Joan of Arc, to the log. How had she known that?

Right before the first rope attached man to wood, Dex made his choreographed Escape Attempt. They were supposed to let him go so far that he was off camera; he would be dragged back, kicking and screaming, for a reentrance of maximal dramatic impact.

Titi’s favorite uncle, Aitu, was paralyzed with stage fright and almost missed his self-appointed cue.

He was the one who loved movies and always insisted on going to at least two or three Jackie Chan action pictures when visiting Papeete. He dreamed of being a stunt man and felt he had missed his opportunity during the most recent remake of Mutiny on the Bounty because he had been stung by a jellyfish the day before filming, leaving his face bloated. This could finally be his big break — he was part of the gang bringing Dex in — but he had not been close enough to even lay a hand on him, much less get a close-up. How was he ever going to get noticed enough to play a Polynesian hero, the John Wayne of Tahiti, like that?

As Dex staggered by in a dead run, head down like a football player, Aitu suddenly came to life and grabbed him, unscripted. It was stupid, he reasoned, that a man of his size, strength, and stature, a kidnapper and revolutionary, would just stand there looking good and watch this scrawny haole go by. In fact, it was so illogical it might make the whole sham abduction look phony. Aitu tackled Dex, who, startled, winded, hurt, looked at him with wide-open, terrified eyes. What’s this? Right on, Aitu thought, and punched him in the gut with all the power of his two-hundred-eighty-pound frame, crumpling Dex onto the ground in a little girlie puddle.

Wende bit her lip. This was going way off script, commando filmmaking; there was no “Cut,” no “Let’s take that again.” This was live guerrilla theater — scary, raw, but real. Besides, it didn’t look like Dex would be moving on his own again for a while, so the damage was already done, might as well film it. Only after he had to be held up in order to be tied to the pole, limply collapsing unconscious against the ropes, did she begin to have second thoughts. His nose (broken by her earlier) had started to swell and bleed again. How had they managed to tie him up anyway? Kudos. It looked like the too-tight ropes were causing welts; his limbs were turning bluish. Perhaps a little overzealous in the binding?

Let’s go, people, let’s go , Wende thought but could not say aloud.

The prepared speech, delivered by the cousin of a cousin of Cooked who had gone to USC two years on a football scholarship and spoke passable English, broken enough to be even more threatening, went off without a hitch: “The reason we have kidnapped the famous Dex Cooper is to force the government to stop ignoring us. Other tourists will be in danger if our demands are not met. We demand the French government pay compensation to the veterans, their families, and civilians for health issues caused decades earlier and hidden by the government. We will hold him for twenty-four hours before avenging…” Yada yada yada.