Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

“We never made claims. Ride it out,” Wende said.

The writer John Stubb Byron was now being interviewed on Fox News for his insights into the troubled rock star Dex Cooper. He provided salacious details of excessive drinking and drug use that were unfortunately all true. The rest could be read in his upcoming biography of the singer, being rushed to press.

“He was my hero,” Dex said.

When the White House press secretary fielded a question about the abduction of American citizens on French soil, whether it constituted an act of aggression or terrorism, he had no idea what the reporter was talking about. He covered by saying they were currently looking into the situation. Then they had to hurry and actually look into it before anyone discovered that they had not. When the French heard the press conference, they inferred that they were being insulted for not taking care of business. They jumped on the story that they assumed from the beginning was false, but now, true or false, if Americans believed it, it had negative tourist value. The first order of business was to pinpoint where the transmissions were coming from and put an end to them. If this was a hoax, people would go to jail.

Wende was geek enough to know that it would take some digital camouflage to keep the transmission location hidden for any length of time, so she contacted a guy friend, a hacker from Cutthroat, who agreed to scramble and resend the signal from Idaho to slow things down in exchange for front-row tickets to the next Prospero concert in Idaho. Done.

It shocked them that the hoax was being taken as authentic. Unfathomable four thousand miles away on a sweltering desert island to appreciate the effect as the story gained traction and grew bigger by the minute.

Ann’s worries that the kidnapping video would quickly be seen as fake, a piece of agitprop theater, morphed into the more troubling fear that it would be seen as real. What exactly were the legal implications of perpetrating a global prank? She was beginning to suspect that, even if the media didn’t believe in the video’s legitimacy, that wouldn’t stop them from acting on the story — it dovetailed nicely with the prevalence of reality shows and the meshing of news and entertainment for ratings: infotainment.

Experts in Polynesian anthropology were called in to identify from the video footage both the island and the specific cannibal tribe supposedly holding Dex Cooper hostage. News sources were totally bummed to find out that cannibalism in Polynesia had effectively ended in the islands by the start of the twentieth century. The experts were able to surmise that the white sandy beach was not characteristic of the volcanic rocky cliffs of the Marquesas, but was more likely in the south, possibly in the Society or Gambier island chains, or in the even more remote east of the Tuamotu Archipelago.

The costumes confused the experts even more, until one particularly iconoclastic female anthropologist from a university in the Pacific Northwest recognized the costumes from a Papeete dance troupe she had seen a few years back in Seattle with an ex-boyfriend. She supplied corroborating evidence in the form of promotional flyers and a captioned picture in the Capitol Hill weekly entertainment newspaper.

The French government, mired in a deflationary economy, with an increasingly hostile electorate, totally believed in the video’s power to ruin consumer spending, and contacted their branch colonial counterparts to rev up the French military ( We are losing tourist euros every minute as we speak! ), intending to launch a military rescue mission once the exact location was pinpointed. If it was real, or thought to be real, they would be heroes. If it was faked, they would haul the perpetrators to jail.

The resourceful American paparazzi beat them all. Someone had a friend of a friend of the resort manager Steve, who received nice monthly payments for reporting on celebrity sightings on the island (higher for women, the most for topless), and who had nothing to lose now that Loren had screwed him over on his commission for selling the motu to the conglomerate that owned the main resort.

A group of paparazzi, all of whom thought the video was strictly a publicity stunt by a has-been rock band, didn’t care because Dex’s picture made the story lucrative to the tabloids, not to mention a free vacation for them. They pooled resources to charter a jet to deliver them to Tahiti by early morning, followed by network newscasters in their own corporate jets, who blindly aped the paparazzi for the entertainment angle to combat falling ratings, followed by newspaper reporters on Air Tahiti, riding in economy (many using their own frequent-flier miles), who were the only ones who actually understood or cared about the politics of the video, but their stories had been bumped for years because nuclear poisoning wasn’t “sexy” enough. Dex’s presence had just made it a whole lot more so.

From Papeete, each was on his own to discover the where and the how of finding the right atoll. Within hours, every charter tourist helicopter and boat was gone. The French military, reeling from budget cuts and layoffs, were even further behind than the newspaper reporters. Worried about looking bad and thus instigating another round of cuts and layoffs, once they caught wind of the reporters descending, they decided to send covert operatives — that is, pretty French waitresses from the hotels where the press were staying — to either find out or accompany them, carrying satellite GPS on their persons.

By noon, helicopters, amphibious airplanes, frigates, and motorboats were converging on the small, hitherto exclusive and unknown atoll.

* * *

Wende shivered in the predawn night, despite the blood-warm air, although in the bigger sense she was no longer physically on the island. Definitely not recognizably as the person formerly known as Wende, who had occupied the resort during the last two months. She ate as much as she felt like and didn’t bother with exercise. Waking, she took a quick shower and clothed herself in her new roomy, comfort clothes, without looking in the mirror. As she gave up the elaborate toilette that went into being a “hottie,” she realized the obvious: she could abandon her beauty now or not, but either way, it would abandon her eventually. It was a loyalty program with a built-in, guaranteed obsolescence. Time would erode her most valuable asset, so she better be prepared.

None of these thoughts greatly bothered her because she felt like pure spirit, and this pure spirit’s only purpose was to bear witness to the vision that existed in her head, to get it down as quickly as possible before it expired or disappeared under the taxing logistics of dealing with one hundred and fifty Polynesian extras; plus the cranky principal actors, including one gloomy rock star ex-boyfriend; plus a suicidal owner, Loren, threatening to pull the electrical plug; plus the technical difficulties of the transmission to the stoned hacker friend in Cutthroat, who asked repeatedly, in texts— ’SUP? nOOb —plus whatever the reaction was out there , back in the world.

The eight “Cannibal Kidnappers,” as the Observer had dubbed them, showed up for their continuity check, visibly subdued even behind their coconut masks. On balance, Wende thought it had worked out nicely to let them get shit-faced the previous night. Now they had a stolidness about them that was not typical of these rambunctious, puppy-fun men, but they did look a little slow, a little dazed. Hungover rather than menacing.

“Before the camera goes on, how about a few laps up and down the beach? I need a little pep. Some energy, people!”

“Why do they need to jog?” Cooked asked, petulant at his abrupt dismissal both as boy toy and lead actor in the video.