Terese Svoboda: A Drink Called Paradise

Paradise.

Not that I don’t love ad life. Writing something from nothing is important in these days of few blue skies, no water clean enough to spit in, and no place to drive that Malibu four-wheel sheet-metal bomber that ad life said would take you. That I said would.

It’s the romance of the thing I know how to write: the bent palm, the burn of a cigarette in the dark, pearls against a tawny neck, water reflections, most of what started here and was whispered, sailor to merchant to whore to chamberlain to some philosopher walking around a big lake in a cold country who made romance what it is so I can remake it, wrap dollars around it so people can burn their lives away answering yes.

Ngarima takes her machete out from her armpit and sections the big, thick taro in her lap into three huge chunks, all white through, all gray-brown rough outside, then she pares it, hacks at it until its gray-brown outsides curl at her knees.

This is what island life is really like: knives and rain. How else will you have growth? It is a mistake to think sex, that romance, and not to see how this kind of growth is part of it. Plants knife the rain at the end of the porch, waggle in the violent wind, shake with a drop in temperature or when a ghost moves the plant’s long, slender leaves — everything here is so stiff and ready to cut or come, it’s sex and death together. On this island you can see right where those two end: in a circle, curved, according to all the theories, curved and meeting at the edges with ocean.

I’m on this island until the end of time. Not so terrible, you say. Relax, you say. A few extra weeks on an island, what’s the big deal? Those days of speed-dialing and demanding, with no time for food, for love, the present never present I am so nervous with fade to static now under this sun, under this lack of sun. No doubt there is a Zen lesson here, a long lesson, but one that lacks the amusing riddle.

Maybe you think I exaggerate. Maybe you think the end of time is quite impersonal, Cretaceous or Pleistocene only with some future suffix, but I know the world and its end are inextricably linked to my personal decay, so that when I finish with the world in whatever hole I’ve stolen from somebody else, via some ad or other, time will simply perish because I am time. Bury me now and carbon dating will tell.

The rain keeps falling. Ngarima and I stare into the gray, we listen to how the tin roof bangs back with the hard parts of the rain so we can’t possibly talk. We sleep instead, sleep without going to all the trouble of closing our eyes.

The water that falls, parts. A helmet parts it. The top of the helmet says Green Bay Packers as it parts the water in a line straight toward us. The helmet’s approach makes Ngarima squeal and clutch her machete, her open-eyed sleep severed and over. Does she squeal from shock, the helmet running from dream to her porch, or has he come for sex, his small wet self an offering, and there I am in the way, with my flat-out Europeanness a flag of missionarydom despite my grown-out blond hair, my too-short shorts and halter?

But he is the missionary. Ngarima issues an order to her boy, who abandons the roach toy he has brought to the porch’s edge, a roach coach and harness or a roach airplane, a pink cast-off thread from my shorts tying the three roaches together so they can still fly, and the boy rouses himself, but before he leaves he addresses the helmeted man Preacher. I know that address from my week of touristing the tumbledown this and that in bright colors at odd angles that dot the croissant that keeps the palms upright. Crescent, not croissant. The carnal inverts even the words here. So the man runs a church, but which one is not plain because there’s only a paper cross in one window. In the break in the rain — brought on by the helmet’s cleaving? — I ask after the preacher’s church.

Latter Day sounds right for here, nearly postmodern, with Christ rising again in no time or at least in our time, whenever we can agree on what time while time is stopped like this. He runs a mission not a church because he finds his own food, his own cinder blocks and paper cross, while Latter Day just sends the paper. They do do that.

The dripping helmet rocks on the porch floor between us. Cheerleading, concussions, crisp fall burnt leaves, and school bunting power through my brain, as far away in time as in place. I touch its dome, I mime a why? through the pounding rain.

The missionary points at the wisps of hair plastered to his skull like the strands on a husked coconut and bends that skull toward me so I can see a brown scar slashed where a crack might be. He then points to the closest palm and its load, which waves and shakes, suddenly slingshot.

No porch-leaving for me.

From inside, the boy brings out Milo, a substitute of a substitute for coffee but the real thing here, and for me the heat above the cup, which exceeds the heat of the rain, is fiercely and unexpectedly refreshing. I drink it.

We all stare at the rain.

My eyes burn from the hour I must have left them open, not knowing I wasn’t awake. The gray, unflinching curtain continues like the inside of eyelid but solid and noisy in downpour. Even the inside of the missionary’s helmet is wet, and now a slight shift in the rain’s direction sprays us all an inch closer together.

Will the boat come? I ask. Do you have a radio?

The missionary gives me his yes , his no .

We sit together for a long time, not speaking. I sense they don’t speak because I am present, although they could speak in their island way, but they don’t. But I don’t retreat. The porch holds what little light there is, and besides, inside sits Ngarima’s son, training more roach horses, letting them fly.

It is more a kind of hesitation that the man and Ngarima have by not speaking or not leaving. It is not me, my presence. And it’s not a liaison I’m preventing. He and his cracked head, his missionary way of thanking the boy when he comes to collect the cups — all this doesn’t add up to sex. I have been sitting on the porch too long with warm rain coming through the boards. This is not something I’m always thinking. But maybe Ngarima is looking at him when I’m not looking — or maybe it’s just him, and their not talking, that makes me think they do think of sex.

Should I go inside? I ask, as if this is what they’re thinking.

No is one answer, Ngarima’s.

In America, asks the preacher, where the Latter Day sits, they have deserts to drive on?

You just go straight along, I nod with relief, until you’re gone.

The three of us look where you could be gone, through all that water. This is no lush volcanic island, I say, despite all this rain.

An atoll, says the missionary. The story, he says, is that a young man fished the land out of the water.

Or did the sky and water use their sex? asks Ngarima.

Aha, I think, she is thinking it. But then she sighs, making the sex less, like having relations. No , she says, they do that later, to make a man.

The missionary strokes his scarred head. Really what makes land is all the coral animals squeezing in with each other. That makes it strong. That’s the way island people are. But coral does crack, says the missionary. I have seen cracks, he says.

I’m not afraid of cracks, I say. LA could crack and fall right off, and it’s not even coral.

When I mention some part of where I’m from that they don’t already know about, they look off. It is as if I am telling about a dream I have, that dull, that particular. I go on thinking about all my work in LA cracking off in a quake, sliding right down into the ocean, right off into the water. Maybe it has, maybe they have already finished with Paradise, people have bought it and have quit buying it.