Terese Svoboda - A Drink Called Paradise

So much for the water.

I get out and shake myself dry.

Another pig is dying behind us. Why not a woman? The scream is high-pitched enough, furious and animal enough. A woman in high heels, a hoofed woman. The lagoon goes red, and deep inside it starts glowing, it starts to scream itself.

A boat is coming, isn’t it? I say. In time for leftovers?

Ngarima starts. A boat will come, she says. Yes, she says. Her yes sounds like yes , it is possible a boat will come like the sun will rise, the day end.

Behind us men throw dice against the church wall, the noise of their play followed by soft ha-ha’s that could be laughter or something else I don’t understand. One of them flicks on a cordless razor. It has to be cordless — there are no plugs. Then he brings that buzzing razor over to the dead pig and begins to shave it.

When was the army here last? I ask.

The army doesn’t come here, Ngarima says She is watching the surf the way I do, but the way she watches is better — she can see past it, she can see into it.

But Barclay says it comes. He told me they showed movies.

She squeezes her hose again. Yes, a sort of army still comes. She gives me a look that I equate with their present tense: every word she says revealed to her as she says it.

Over the sound of pig death begin the quick strokes of a drum. They are a heartbeat’s, doubled. Ngarima’s son walks down the beach from where that sound is coming to take the hose from Ngarima.

Go practice the dance, she says to me. Until it’s time.

I look out at the empty ocean. The dancing faces it.

In second grade we had to dance, I say to Ngarima’s son. We put on skirts made of paper cut into wavy lengths that stained, and we had to wriggle. I wriggled hard the way a robot would so no one would laugh. I hated it when they laughed.

Ngarima’s son is already smiling.

I follow him to where four women weave something about birds with their hands over their hips, and their hips say something else in circles, each hip saying it exactly the same way as the next woman’s. Only the size of the hips varies, and as fast as I see this, the size doesn’t matter, one matches the other in what they say with how they move. It’s not that collecting-shells kind of dancing, that bursting forth, but the engine of the island in serious precision. Maybe this is Morris dancing, maybe this is square dancing, but when the men waggle their knees open and shut and dance close and dance closer to the women’s hips, it isn’t folk, I can’t dance it with my parents paying for the outfit.

Ngarima’s son dances, boy enough to make a farce of the dance and its peacock engagement, and the other men are old, the other end of what wags. But they wag, they shimmy and wriggle up to me, scissoring their knees and legs while the drum tats louder and harder and I start to sway.

You have to put your arms up to sway right. The hips need room. But with your arms up, men find places to hold on to, the curve and the bulge where the breasts grow, though they don’t touch me. But then I don’t sway much.

At a nightclub on the island where we shot Paradise, all the tourists were asked to dance. I either kept to the back or else I did it, with my face flushed and watching the back the way a ballerina would, to keep from falling into their precise swaying that pressed toward me again and again without touching. Touching is never the point. Everyone who is not an islander is a Methodist when it comes to this not-touching dance, we have no limbs that correspond to theirs, all we can do is touch and not sway that well.

I try not to breathe, I try not to let any of the island into me. I just dance and forget that I am here by being so here. I say nothing to anyone, even when they shout Vagina Mouth and clap out my path.

I am saying no to their beer that they make out of what? when Harry comes and says, Don’t be stupid. Hearing that so soon a second time makes me think I might be. If a boat comes this time, even they will miss it is what he says when it’s almost dark and doesn’t matter.

I think of my son. This island I’m on is a planet drifting farther and farther away. Not drifting the way planets do on film but screeching along at a pace, that second per second they calculate that wrenches us away from the other stars and wandering planets. My son is standing on a street corner on another faraway planet — just like one of those classroom models — and he’s waiting for the traffic to part so he can run across and somehow join me, but the traffic is part of the orbiting too, it’s the ocean, and the street corner I’m on drifts farther and farther away.

We are all soon slick with scented lagoon water and flower-crowned with stiff white fragrant ginger. We each take a seat in front of half a cold chicken and three pounds of pork and blood pudding and coconut pudding and bananas for garnish on banana leaves and a half coconut shell filled with sauce four weeks soured. Barclay and many others make speeches, long, formulaic speeches that I smile through, smile as if my life depended on it, which perhaps it does, they now being us to me, us with our Vagina Mouth talk, with our sickness and secrets, with all this air I breathe, the food we will eat together — yes, I will, I smell the food, even the dead pig’s dark blood in pudding makes my stomach fierce, I will eat and meet them, stomach to stomach, as if in dance, and when they speak so long and full of flattery, I decide they are going to ask me to do something for them.

But they ask nothing. Or nothing I understand.

I dance and dance, and even Harry dances with me once. He is as stiff as wood, despite all the beer they ladle out for him with their oil cans. But I am Vagina Mouth, who cares what I do? They shout when I swivel, they roar when I bump him with my hip. Harry doesn’t care, Harry drinks enough beer to dance his stiffness wild with all the island women, from crone to toddler. The men egg him on, they shove their fists into the air when the drumming gets going, they thrust themselves forward at the torso, they yell in their language, Get it on, the way men’s language does.

If I should not eat the food or drink the water, the beer must be worse — that is what beer is for. I get loaded, I wander away into the dark. The path I take turns past where coffee tins are planted with whatever’s growing right beside them, and beer bottles surround a chair in the center of that tin garden, so many beer bottles they could be a collection, or an offering. Behind this leans a house with a defeated roof, and the house is dark and doorless, and what wafts out in the heavy, humid darkness is the smell of suppuration, of scabs picked and reopened, and what sound accompanies it is as constant as a series of waves. It’s not the weepy, wet sound I hear from Temu that carries over the water and makes Ngarima rise but guttural and fresh like a hose tightening around someone, some peculiar sound that realizes itself, like constant pain, in the present.

I am not curious. I don’t want to see who or how. The pain is the island’s, the pain is only a matter of time.

It is the next day. The next day I have my hangover, and it is one you want to climb out of and leave the head behind, the head so not your own it is surely borrowed and overdue, thank you very much, but what I see in my head is three perfectly can-shaped cylinders of corned beef and a side of immaculately white rice — Barclay’s party food from yesterday. That’s what sticks in my mind. He did not eat the chicken and pork and banana and boiled blood squeezed onto the banana leaf, he did not drink from a single coconut.

I have never seen him drink from a coconut. From none of the coconuts he opens for me, three a day, not from any of those has he taken even a single sip.