Terese Svoboda: A Drink Called Paradise

One drink and you think you’re Eve , that’s what I wrote. If you can drink this drink, you can live in paradise is mine too. A little snappier, but that is what it was, more or less. The war over it was: Is Paradise lemon-lime? Does it fizz? But when the bottle finally comes, who wants to drink it? Not even on the set did we drink it. We settled for water. But everybody wants the word paradise , it’s all dollar signs.

Not pearly gates.

I sip my Milo. Without milk or sugar, it is bitter vegetable, something you would beg a child to drink, telling him how it would make him grow. I steel myself to swallow.

I can’t think about children.

Ngarima’s son comes out with a pleated plastic rain hat. How does he know she needs her rain hat? No words that I hear pass between them. She hands him her finished Milo cup, the preacher helps her upright, and the porch shudders.

She stands.

The small bit of pleated plastic does cover her woolly island hair well enough, but the rest of her, with the bulk of some army vehicle, something large yet still moving, sweeps into the deluge with its shoulders bare, the water sluicing and splashing around her, parting the water for the preacher behind, who has to go on into the rain for some reason, and with her.

Ngarima’s boy invents a dog. At least you don’t have to walk it, I say as he trains the roach to roll over.

Insects are the future, he tells me. My father says so. He knows.

What else does he know? When the boat’s coming back?

The boy nods as if I don’t listen. He says, He doesn’t want me to go on the boat.

Parents don’t want children to go anywhere.

The boy rights his cockroach, puts it back inside a shell, and plugs the shell with a rock. This will help it learn.

Where I live, I say, boys go swimming. Why don’t you swim? I ask. All the time I’ve been on this island I’ve never seen you swim. The only one who swims is there.

I point to a head in the lagoon, just above the water from this angle. You can finally see the lagoon because the rain has stopped, and what you can see is what you see daily, a head, tiny like a baby’s, over a big board, with long arms like a man’s that go around it. When I go in, the head and arms are always gone, the board against a tree. What about that swimming? I say.

Water gets in your throat and you cough, he says. He coughs to show me. There’s too much water. You see him? He doesn’t need to breathe so much — look at the size of his head.

We look.

Where I live, I begin again, boys play ball or go to school or watch TV.

Here, all the balls go into the lagoon, then trade winds take them away, he says. And the school here is closed now until we get a new teacher.

He turns his shell over. You can be the teacher, you can tell us about TV.

This is how you turn it on, I say, and I twist my wrist, touch a channel. Unless you have a remote, then you just press.

Ngarima’s son just presses.

I think you’ve got it, I say.

He presses and presses.

A pig squeals, caught on a kitchen can outside. Why doesn’t anybody fish around here? I ask, after he frees it. Even if you don’t eat the fish, it would pass the time.

He rattles the shell. No boats, he says.

But why aren’t there any boats? These islands are famous for boats.

Nobody can buy them here.

Sure, I say. But can’t you just go and make them like before?

He laughs. Who knows how? he says. He puts his hands up and out. Do you? he asks, as if I know.

Back on the porch Ngarima screeches, Come get food for us.

Ngarima’s son fetches a can of mackerel from which he skinnies out all of the fish without losing its can shape. I am offered a chunk to go with a piece of taro that I still have from an earlier offering. No, no more, I say. I might as well say yes. He disturbs his cylinder with his finger, the chunk is mine no matter what, and the curls of coconut jelly he scrapes from the lid of the nut I drink from come with it.

I eat one for the other, the jelly surely a drug, so cool and smooth I want to climb back into the coconut with it. Ngarima’s son eats what’s left in the bottom of the can, then beats on its bottom in quick rhythms. Over at the next house, a two-year-old sways with her hips, she sways and falls down on some slick of her porch, then gets up, goes on with his beat.

How many live on this island all the time? I ask. Even if it isn’t so big, I say.

Not so many as before, says Ngarima, but she doesn’t say before what.

There’s a book in my room, I say, that says a hundred and eighty-three. But is this the number made up for the book or the number that once was and is not now?

It’s hard to count, she says. A hundred and eighty-three is not a bad number.

Ngarima’s son begins counting. At the number fifteen, the two of them begin to talk about clouds of people, groups that re-form and flatten and pour into houses, regardless of cousins or whose father. The number swells and pulses, and I think of my son, my only population.

Ngarima’s son has a name, but I can’t repeat it the way they like to hear it, so in my head it is son , like Abrahamson or Jackson. No one can say my name. When they say it, it is Rare. Rare this and that, which makes me smile. I’m beginning to think I am, white where it doesn’t count on an island of brown, all alone, the way all tourists, no matter how many are on an island, like to think they are. That’s the way I write it: one couple, a single set of prints. I don’t show the six people raking the sand behind them what allows their aloneness.

But I am not alone. Harry with his Rolex clothes, whatever wardrobe goes with the watch, waded off the lighter with me. I felt sad then for his name-brand shoes taking in so much salt. He could’ve pulled them off, but he was too eyes-wide, salt-be-damned. Not that I know much about him. Seasickness does that to you, and the close company of pigs. I am not fond of pigs. Prop pigs, yes. Or pigs with careers, with handlers and sixty-second contracts.

Hi, I say to him anyway when we hit the beach. He says his hi , but it includes a couple dozen island girls who wreathe him like a race horse.

Who thinks about people living in paradise and so far from everywhere — I mean, why would they be here? It’s paradise for sure, but no one lives in paradise every day. Unless they’re staff. And for staff it is never paradise, it’s bookings and changing rolls in bathrooms. How can people expect to live in paradise for nothing, by just being born here?

The first thing I get on this island is a coconut, which this islander hands me, this islander who turns out to be Barclay, and I look it over like it’s something he’s selling.

But Barclay smiles, pure plaster saint. Over here, he waves us toward a car behind him. We two play Columbus showing up with Eric the Red, each of us making his singular discovery, each left-righting so separately toward that car. Harry throws his bag through its broken window, then tries to open the door but the handle comes off in his hand. Barclay takes it from him and tosses it over his shoulder with a laugh, to where other parts lie, maybe another whole car in pieces, and we all start walking the path beside the car, which is what will really take us.

Was I wanting a high-rise haven with matching hot towels and wraps? No, I can handle “individually appointed,” even adventure, but the place we come to has been kayoed to its knees long ago and did not get up, this place has a door cut to accommodate what? A Quonset hut, all of a world war in its half-moon frame. To cheer it up, someone has set out a dozen already opened coconuts along the base, but the cheer looks more like a lot of raw, chopped-up open mouths.