Terese Svoboda - A Drink Called Paradise

By now lights make a plaid of the water, and I hear footsteps click on the ladder above the lighter. I turn the key that’s there and ready, I throttle and pull.

Boat driving is easy if you can see where you are going, if you can at least see the gears. Otherwise you bang the boat in reverse, you almost de-leg the man who is making his way clown to you, but all of a sudden all the light that is now on you lets you see and you go, jerking, off into the night.

You can’t get through the reef in the dark, but it’s not so dark anymore with all this light, all the light they need to launch another boat after yours, anyway I don’t think about what I can’t do, with the lighter moving so well beneath me and turning when I turn. So when the white-headed surf rears up, I find my way, I don’t think of myself and the boat mangled and turned on its sharpness — I just go.

Not that I make it. The boat flips in the surf, and I capsize fast, foam and coral and some very hard wood hit me as the boat goes down. I’m senseless in a light-dark-light moment, the foam and dark sprayed into the spotlights the boat casts out for me. But when I surface, all banged up, I’ve been shot on a wave into the utter dark past the reef.

How can I swim? It’s nothing. I do it with my legs and arms, I flail like that small-headed boy in the lagoon. When I find I can’t breathe I hope to touch that soft monster sponge, but of course I don’t. Did I imagine it anyway? I don’t know what I do but splash and gurgle in a direction that might be forward — there — is that dark part land? Is that tin basin reflecting their light, or is it the moon? A streak of light bounces with drumming far away.

Pain comes so suddenly to my leg that it doubles me up. It must be a nail from a wreck, but next there’s an electric jab into my foot so bad that I can’t straighten it out, I am gone with pain, so far beyond the banging up I’ve just had on the reef that I take on water.

A wave, a lucky wave, tears me out of it, goes the right way, the way I think of as right where I come from, where I must go back to, a kind of amniotic wave, a slap-on-the-bottom wake-up wave that makes you cry out, outraged, and live.

You think we didn’t notice the ship all lit up and the sirens going? Harry hovers over me. A boat with horns like Jehovah blowing?

I move my head as if I might laugh with him, but no, it is impossible to laugh, I can’t laugh, I can’t even move my mouth very well.

Barclay saw you. What does he have to do now but walk the shore all night and wait?

What? What? I say. This is all I can say, and point at my feet, which are bandaged and itchy and hot.

You should be dead, says Harry. Or at least gone, with them, rescued as it were. What happened to you was you hit a taramea , a fish so poisonous we had to use gloves to pull the spines out.

A poison fish? I say, pulling hard at my mouth muscles to get to the p .

Harry sits on a mat beside me. I see it is his mat.

I saved you from them later, says Veelu, who leans into my vision with Milo in a half coconut.

I sip.

Show her how, says Harry. This is the saving after the fish, when they came to the island to get you back — you, their prize experiment. They swarmed the place, I thought the island would sink under their weight — or that they’d find me and take me instead.

Why didn’t they? I try to say.

Veelu lifts her arms, removes a pin from her hair on top, and shakes her head. Veelu’s large hair, so mane-wild and black-silked, falls off and down her back, and her own hair, the little she grows, stands in surprised wisps in small clumps over a head scarred in parallel rows. You like it? I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair , she sings. And send him on his way .

She waves the wig. They give this to my sister in a box, and it is all she has to send me. When the ship people see me without it, when they see the scars the boat has left me with, they don’t bother me. You stay here too long, I say, and they’ll do it to you too. They believe me when I say you are in the surf, finished.

He and Veelu laugh, and it’s strange and painful for me to hear how they do it together, how he then touches her baldness with his thumb, showing that they know they look the same.

I don’t know why they didn’t take me, says Harry. He is quiet with old fear. He restacks the pink shells around the edge of the room. But they didn’t come back, he says. Did you want to be gotten?

I am crying. The tears fill my ears and make me feel underwater again, but they are tears of relief, tears that have waited for a right time to be shed. I am not dead, I work out of my mouth.

I can smile.

I am asleep. I am not asleep. The green outside the window turns blue under my lids — or is it water coming through my head, fixing things? I am listening to the swish of palms and hurting. That’s all you do when you’re ill, listen and hurt, back and forth, a conversation as deep and dark as that. Sometimes a thought buzzes between them, but it can’t connect to anything, can’t feed off the listen or the hurt, and so it drops.

What drops? I am alone here in my sleep. I’m not at the guesthouse, I’m back on my rice bed in the house of silence — Barclay’s empty house. Barclay haunts the shore, watches for what won’t come in or float up, Temu making o’s in the water in front, in back of him.

But now something drops. Somewhere in my listening — it’s a place, my listening, in my recovery — the house is vacant for me because who else will go into it, with its windmilling ghost, its lost boys and lost mother?

I am asleep, so what drops is a dove from a dream of what happened, a dove that came in a box on the Paradise shoot. Gulls were too vulturish to fly across the palms that were supposed to sway in a breeze from the dawn, so we had doves sent in boxes, small gray boxes, coffins, some said. When the sun finally moved out of a cloud that was supposed to be dawn’s but was dusk by the time we shot, we scooped those doves out of their boxes and threw them up toward the sun.

They all dropped to the ground.

Since I am asleep, I can open my eyes.

The room is as dark as sleep. It is night. I had forgotten that, or I didn’t know. When is it not night in my sleep? I could raise my hand to my eyes to see with my hand if my eyes are seeing, but my hand hurts and itches. I am too sleepy to make it rise, too tired of hurt.

The dark breathes. I breathe and it breathes. I stop and it breathes.

I could cry out. Over the pounding ocean? Over the dark, deep night in which no one else is crying? Ghost. It would be ghost, their tupaka . If only Barclay lay nearby, with his night noise, astraddle Ngarima with her bulk like a boat he would take out.

Or if there were just a lamp that could break.

I can see shape now. Large against what there is of a moon, the shape stands by the curtain, and its flowers quiver a little — from his entrance? From a breeze?

It is no dream, I decide. If he has not come to press himself into me, he comes to kill me, he comes to turn the pillow over on my face — or empty the rice into my nose and mouth. Because I am the one Veelu said, a Bravo person. I did it. My deciding can’t stop, I hear the breathing, and I think, think, think.

I sit up. Get out of here, I shout. But what I say comes out small.

He walks into some light. Before I see him, I know. The way he walks is why I didn’t wake before. I know the way he walks. It was just that dropping I didn’t know.

Barclay, I say. You scared me.

He keeps on breathing. He is looking not at me but at the floor.