Tatjana Soli - The Last Good Paradise

Unfortunately, even Polynesia was not immune — Cooked and Titi’s clan, the people on the other islands, lied to and poisoned and ignored. Where were the laws to protect them? Loren might not have been the most exemplary of men, he had tried to do right and failed, but at least he never knowingly did harm. Never profited from it. He only insisted on being free. The prospect of a hospital room loomed like a jail cell. His last will and testament was to live out his life on his own terms.

He was about to throw the almost empty bottle of absinthe overboard when his cell phone rang.

Unbelievable.

He’d brought it along at Titi’s insistence, not wanting to raise suspicion, and then had forgotten it. The siren song of technology — he could not not look at caller ID: Titi. Absolutely not. His voice would give him away. He shut the phone off. But even so the interruption had its effect. He felt lonely where before he had felt at one with the universe. Maybe he should just head back?

He sat miserably in his deck chair, swaying. He knew what he had to do, yet he was afraid. The distraction had done just that: distracted.

Like a drug addict taking a last hit, he turned the phone back on and texted Titi:

I LOVE YOU LIKE A DAUGHTER. NEVER DOUBT THAT.

After he pressed send, he realized he had in all probability set panic in motion. The text would send off alarms. Ann already suspected something. His time must be measured against possible rescue. As he sat there, the phone rang again.

Doomed, vain, insatiable man that he was, he looked. It was Ann.

A tightness in his throat — he was loved more than he guessed.

Ann, who would have been the kind of woman he might have married in a different life, was easier to disappoint than Titi. He lobbed the phone as far as possible into the ocean.

* * *

“He isn’t answering.” Ann frowned.

They had all been napping when a boat arrived in the lagoon. Sleepy Richard and Ann came out of the fare and shaded their eyes to see what was causing the commotion. Steve, the manager of the resort, piloted in with a woman passenger in sunglasses and a large hat. Unlike Ann weeks ago, this woman still managed to be stylish after the long, windblown ride across the lagoon. She had to be French. Then Ann knew.

Titi came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishrag, displeased. They would have to set up a system for reservations, no constant drop-ins like this. The resort was still a mess, and they were not open to the public beyond the public that now considered itself private. Why hadn’t Loren explained this to Steve? As Titi dialed Loren again, she read the text that had just come in from him, then immediately hit the call button. Instead of ringing, his phone went straight to voice mail.

“Titi!” the woman yelled as she stumbled from the boat so that Steve had to leap out to help her. She glided through the knee-high water, oblivious of her hem, which was getting soaked. In her yellow summer dress, the scene looked like something out of a movie.

Titi stopped as if she had seen a ghost. “Lilou,” she said. “You’ve come home.”

* * *

Loren was profoundly drunk and starting to feel sentimental about all he was leaving behind. He also had to piss. Maybe he’d just head back and put off the inevitable a while longer. What would be the harm? But when he lowered his bathing trunks to urinate over the side of the boat, the purplish bruises, the swollen lumps along the groin, shocked him again in all their goriness, their insistent mockery of his mortality. He had been handsome once. Desired. What would happen when he was no longer fit enough to do himself in? He didn’t want to burden Titi. He refused to be warehoused with the doomed in a hospice. Was it too much to want to be remembered as a man of dignity?

He jumped over the side of the boat and adjusted the valves on his scuba tank regulator. This was his favorite location in the archipelago for diving — a reef shelf that extended from the island and then dropped off more than four thousand feet at an ocean wall. One could glide along the sandy bottom, forty feet from the surface, feeling snug and protected, and then swim to the edge and look down into the great abyss as if falling into the night sky. Looking into the far depths was like trying to see the center of the universe — an unyielding, lonely, liquid deep space.

The first time Loren had gone swimming in the lagoon, he had opened his eyes underwater and been shocked at its otherworldly beauty. In France he had watched diving on television and thought it amounted to nothing more than swimming around in a big aquarium, but when one experienced it firsthand, the effect was indescribably moving. A world independent of what went on above water — great schools of fish passed by oblivious to his human presence. Life teemed, each animal with its unique place, and none of it dependent on man, except of course on his noninterference.

In his early years in Polynesia, Loren, like any eager novitiate, swam every spare moment he had. He bought books identifying each coral, each fish. He got certified in scuba as a way to make a living off tourists. Scuba charters were part of most resorts’ services. Snorkeling was child’s play compared with the thrill of going deeper in the lagoon or the ocean beyond the reefs. Eventually one graduated to the thrill of the drift dives at Tiputa and Aratoru — speeding along on strong ocean currents, going in or out of the lagoon passes. It resembled rush hour in some inexplicable foreign city — a group of a hundred or more gray reef sharks, pods of humpback whales, carpets of eagle rays, clouds of Napoleon fish and grouper. Then there was the ultimate, deep-water diving. During those moments, he found he did not feel so alone, did not ache with loss.

Afterward one returned to the surface changed, less impressed with the goings-on above water. For a while, Loren walked around filled with this secret knowledge as if he had discovered a key to the universe. He could explain it in no other way than that the world seemed more vast and magical underwater.

But then, as happened to so many mystics, the worldly distracted him. He had been strong and happy while caring for the girls, but once they were gone, he couldn’t muster the same faith. He was susceptible to temptation. Even though it was so wonderful down below, what could it matter with the atrocities that happened above the water? If a divine intelligence seemed in evidence underwater, how did it disappear to nullity in the affairs of mankind? The stories of radioactivity on various atolls, the poisoning of lagoons, the drifting fallout made him despair at the impossibility of true escape. His underwater universe was sadly not immune after all.

Now Loren swam along the reef shelf as if revisiting a long-lost neighborhood, nodding in pleasure at its familiar sights. The sunlight penetrated the water so thoroughly that he could almost imagine he was swimming through air. He loved how the ocean cupped his eardrums, silencing the world down to the percussion of his own heart, the beats the sound of the ocean’s own pulsing life. He paused at the edge of the Shark Wall and looked out over the great wilderness of water. Tears stung at the spectacle, but tears were good. They added their salt to the ocean. From salt and back to salt. A miracle that this existed, and he felt blessed to have derived solace from it. He hoped against hope that the madness above the water would stop in time to preserve this for Lilou, Lilou’s children, for Titi’s children and grandchildren, for all the children of the children of the children …

Loren upped the pressure in his tanks and swam off the edge of the reef, diving down, headfirst, in a kind of reverse flight. A form appeared next to him, swam alongside — one of the dolphins that were found only in this area. A comforting presence, like having an angel beside him. In fact, this was the perfect companion for Loren. He looked up in adieu at the faraway surface of the water — the sun a murky smudge whose glory was unimaginable at these depths.