Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

Potato chips would hit the spot about now. What was he doing? It was getting late. If he could just take a nap, it would feel so good. Maybe it would have been wiser to start smoking after he got to his destination.

Cooked threw the book down, intending to go cold turkey — zero entertainment. He needed peace to tap into the ancestral wavelength to know what to say to Laura Vann that would turn around the last two hundred years of exploitation of the islands. On second thought, he put his iPod back in.

He was going out the door when he saw Dex coming up the path. Like a bloodhound, he had scented good reefbud being consumed and wanted to partake.

Cooked pretended not to see him.

“Hey, bro,” Dex yelled, but Cooked flashed him such a fierce, cannibalistic scowl that Dex stopped in his tracks and went silent.

Cooked had in mind a place on the other, deserted side of the island to set up camp for the night — his and Titi’s favorite make-out spot, full of good mojo. What he hadn’t taken into account was that an island that usually had only a dozen inhabitants now had twenty times that many. They, too, had fanned out in all directions. There were reclining forms everywhere like pairs of beached dolphins; the air was filled with soft moans of pleasure. All of it was making Cooked want to give up this whole vision quest thing and go find Titi instead, dragging her off by the hair if she resisted. At least tomorrow he would fail happy.

But as he stood there, taking out a power bar to nibble on, he had a new thought. If he blew the interview, Titi would deny him for a really long stretch. But if by some miracle, he did okay, she would be his for years because he would be the big kahuna times five. If he ballparked it, well, he would be gold for a lifetime. It was worth sacrificing a night. He continued on.

When he reached their favorite cove, shadowed by overhanging palms, it was as he suspected: occupied. Cooked stood there, indecisive, and a dude yelled, “Hey, bro, you gonna make a movie or somethin’?”

Cooked shuffled inland, stoned, hungry, and aroused, not knowing where to find shelter. Fifteen minutes later, he found himself at the sacrificial stone they had visited on that loser field trip. Until Loren had taken them there a few days ago, Cooked had never known what it was. Now that he did, it sort of freaked him out, but he didn’t know where else to go.

As he had guessed, no one was there because, unlike him, everyone else knew the history. Whatever. It was a rock. The old days were … old. The spot was empty and filled with moonlight and made a nice place to sit and look at the sky and allow the gods to drop a huge pile of inspiration down on his head. He climbed up, laid out his supplies, and lit up his first official joint of the night. Even if divine inspiration didn’t happen, it felt good to get away from everyone else’s craziness for a few hours. Halfway through the new spliff, he realized that this was seriously powerful kine bud. He was seriously blazed. He lay back on the cool slab and fell up into the night sky. It was as if the universe was there for him alone. He flew. He expanded, his face covering the whole of the night sky, his breath the wind in the palms. He was spinning. He put one hand down on the stone for leverage, and his fingers probed a small worn-down cup in the stone, and Loren’s words came back to him: “This is where they did human sacrifices.” He lay there frozen, immobile. Horrific visions of oiled bodies writhing in firelight, stabbing their sacrifices, the bloodletting filling the basins. Although he had no actual firsthand knowledge of how they did it, it was sure to be awful, not to mention gory, kind of like a Polynesian Friday the 13th . Cooked sat up, spooked, and ate all his supplies, intending to hurry home to Titi, but then somehow it became sunrise. He had slept through the whole night! Cracker crumbs were stuck to his lips.

He got up stiff, tired, and stuffed. It felt like he’d wrestled the Great Shark itself, and it had showed him its teeth. With a heavy, thoughtful step, he walked back to the resort, feeling the weight of his footsteps in history, ready for breakfast.

* * *

Seven a.m. An hour passed. Laura Vann should have been there. They had radioed in that she was past Hawaii and over the Pacific hours ago. Everything was on hold; it was sweltering; people were getting jumpy. At noon, Wende got the call.

“She’s not coming,” Wende announced.

“Why?” Dex asked.

Wende grimaced. “The vice president is on a visit to Japan. He fell down the stairs getting off Air Force Two and broke his leg. Everyone is rushing over there to cover it. Because Laura had a jump start, she’s ahead of them all. She’s halfway to Tokyo.”

Cooked bowed his head. The ancestors had talked to him last night, and what they had said was be prepared to be shit on. He had expected this, or not this exactly, certainly not the American vice president, whatever his name was, breaking his leg, but something like it. Look at his people’s history. Cursed. Didn’t this Laura Vann’s change of mind also reflect on him, that he was not as interesting or worthy or important as a clumsy no-name VP? He raised his head briefly, his eyes filled, and then, embarrassed, he turned away.

“No,” Dex said. Cooked’s face spoke to him — a good man beaten once again by the system — and he wasn’t going to have it. “No, no, no, no.”

“What?” Wende asked.

Dex was bobbing his head like a possessed man. “We continue. We go on. Screw Laura Vann and her star-fucking. She just missed the biggest story of her career. Just get us the boat!” Dex yelled.

* * *

Wende sent out a request for a powerboat to make the journey across the Tuamotu Archipelago to Moruroa. Immediately offers flooded in. The best one was from a tech mogul who was also a Prospero fan vacationing on Bora-Bora. He offered his eighty-foot yacht and crew.

“Game, set, match.” Wende and Ann slapped palms.

“I want to go,” Ann said. “It’s going to get complicated out there with the police and the media. That’s my training.” What she didn’t want to say was that she was jealous of everyone else finding his or her purpose, doing something that mattered, never mind if it turned out badly. She wanted her shot.

“Where?” Wende was busy scanning the five thousand comments left on the live cam in the hours after Dex’s “Enlightenment” episode.

“I want to go with Cooked and Dex.”

“Oh … No.”

“Why?”

“Because the power of the message is lessened. Your presence skews it into yuppie adventure travel.”

Ann blinked at the jab. “That’s not nice.” This was her moment of self-sacrifice, of going after the greater good, and this muse was blowing her off.

Wende took Ann’s hand and gave it a quick peck. “It’s not who you are, Ann.”

* * *

By midafternoon the Polynesian wedding party guests were whipped into a passion by the presence of a flotilla of boats. The eighty-foot yacht was anchored outside the lagoon, waiting; inside the lagoon, smaller boats circled. Loren had denied landing rights to the paparazzi so they sat in rowboats and dinghies in the scorching sun, wielding telephoto lenses and waiting for something to happen.

The French military’s mission had changed en route from one of rescuing a world-famous celebrity to restricting said celebrity from making a circus and PR disaster of Polynesian tourism. Not knowing the rebels’ plans to go by yacht, a French bureaucrat in Papeete calculated that by outrigger canoe the Moruroa Raid Party could drag along for weeks before getting there, with daily broadcasts worldwide, costing a fortune not only in military presence but also in lost tourist dollars, and long-lasting, radiation-like bad publicity that would continue on for years.