Terese Svoboda: A Drink Called Paradise

Let’s take a look, I say.

We make our way inside. Hmmmm, says Harry, as we pace its one room, I guess we’ll have to put up a curtain.

Divorced three years, I can’t see spending my week on a remote island with the only guy off the boat. Besides, what we have here is not love at first sight.

No thanks, I say.

That is how I get to be a local. All tourists want that if they want to be somewhere else. I get a bag of rice for a bed, and a lamp, but what makes my room at Barclay’s so somewhere else shimmers in its one window: a beach so white, white crayon on white paper is about right, a white that stretches — yawns and stretches — its way to the lagoon of choice, the ur-lagoon of every ad for paradise. For a week I float in the amber of a good time, maybe a little lonely with nobody to sigh off into the sunset with, but I collect myself, chase children who squirt me with rubber-hose creatures that grow in the shallows, burn the continental drift into my sandy thighs, cavort with snorkel and mask in the empty lagoon.

Empty except for that tiny head on a board, swirling and stopping, swirling and stopping.

You aren’t hungry? screeches Ngarima. You are sick? She’s spotted my leftover portion, some of my taro hidden upright beside the can.

She feels my forehead.

The way coconut is food for pleasure, taro is punishment. The queen of starch, you can taste in every bite all the shirts it could stiffen.

I’ve eaten plenty, I say. I don’t say, I eat small bites to parse out the taste.

Go, says Ngarima to me as if I’m her son, one of the family, as if I’ll obey. Go inside and get another tin, she says.

No, no, please, I’m fine, I say.

Open the drawer there — just inside — and you’ll find one. I keep them in the drawer.

Her voice tells me she won’t take no.

I cross into the kitchen. She is my host, after all. I am a paying guest, but this is her house. I open the drawer next to the food safe, the one I think is the one she means, but I discover this is not the drawer, that this drawer should not be opened. There’s sugar at the bottom of this drawer, an inch of it spilled on purpose, and the purpose flies up at me when I open it, out flies a flock of gold-brown roaches. I scream, and then Ngarima screams, That’s their drawer.

I am thinking I must leave my room and cross the kitchen again, I must pass its roaring roaches, I must go out, I must go to the bathroom, I must go for a walk, I must see if the rain’s truly stopped and how stopped and whether it will rain again. I am thinking how I’ve made my own island, how one island begets another, like a fish with an organ bag you can see through, all the seeds of future fish in a row, ready to be born and bear and be born again, when I begin to creep past the drawer, which is now closed and not still pulled out to the point where I left it, when I start picking my way past the oozing white of what flew up at me earlier, which I beat down and made ooze, and just then, while I am concentrating on getting around it all and not thinking, a man-sized boy with such a head crashes in from the porch with his arms flailing and a noise coming out of him in big gobs like something left on and stuck.

Boom — pink shredded plastic and streaks of pepper sauce and ketchup, a full jar of mayonnaise, all three of the family’s forks ricochet off the kitchen walls, and its cooking pot, its charcoals and tinder, are smeared into the mess with one more whirl of his long, long arms, with one more great gob of sound.

Back, shouts Ngarima’s son. Back to Auntie, go on back to Auntie. Go on.

The boy is coming for his room, my room, my room that was so empty when I came, and now I know why — those long arms pull down anything in their windmilling radius. But I’m too stunned by the boy’s tiny head, let alone the whipping arms, to stop him from going into my room, to connect what has happened in the other room with those arms that whip toward my clothes, books, passport, money, ID, sun lotion — and his space.

Ngarima’s son raises the boy’s board, the one the boy floats on with his long arms, and he hits him with it, he tries to herd him away from the room by beating him with its hard foam. The boy falters in his furious beeline, he turns in circles beside his brother in the staccato of the beating.

His brother hits him again and again.

I do not scream, seeing the boy being beaten. Speech and the power of speaking leave me. I do not scream, not even as the boy begins to cry, not even when a plate comes down from the back wall with a tremendous crash and splinters into shards that cut my skin in the painless way of razors. Cut too, the boy scuttles away from the broken plate and then his brother hits him again, this time across the back of his tiny head.

That head sinks to pale knees.

The boy pulls him onto his back and carries him out of the house. Temu, the boy explains as he passes me, and dumps him in the shade with his board.

I rush over, I put my hand out.

The boy is already on his feet but turning as if he doesn’t know where.

Wait! Ngarima clumps from the bush to herd him away from me, away from the house, using a switch of coconut frond. He stumbles and reaches for her between switchings. She drops her switch and starts to coo, she cups his tiny head in her knife-scarred hands, rubs his cloud of hair, touches his welts and cuts, all the time cooing except when she snaps out an order, catching sight of his slinking-off brother, who doesn’t bother to point to the dish broken at the door, or at me.

She holds Temu close.

They stand together for a long time.

After a long time, I follow Ngarima’s son into the bush. But follow isn’t exactly what I do, I just take his path. I am so confused and full of fear for the small head, the wind-milling arms, the beating, I just walk. I guess I choose the bush because that’s the way the boy went who beat him back, who saved me, and if I need saving again he is the one to follow. I don’t care about the things in my room anymore — or I forget to care, it is his room anyway. I am the trouble if there is trouble to be pointed at, to be windmilled away.

Ngarima’s son is gone from the path by the time I take it. I walk and walk and see no one, no brother or child or man wandering with a machete. I walk and I am pregnant with that child, the boy is flailing his arms around inside me, I am wondering what’s wrong? Then the head is too easy coming out, I smile at the wriggling arms until I see the rest and can measure what’s wrong against what’s right.

My son is about Ngarima’s son’s age, stalkier though, less woe-eyed but just as fidgety. My son’s fidgets are mine. I have to keep going, I have to keep working. Even when he was a baby I worked at this business of illusion, putting con in the game, the game in the con of telling people they must drink things like Paradise in a bottle. I have an imagination that makes that work. But I’d never imagined a child in paradise being wrong.

I’m afraid of people, yes, even children, who aren’t right, whose heads are too small or too large or wrong. I suppose I’m more afraid of them when I’m on an island. In another country where you drive past or stare and then turn your head and leave money and move on, I’m not so afraid. It is part of the country, why you are not them.

Now I have his room.

I walk on and on, but I know I can’t keep the shore from showing up. I want to avoid it and its lagoon with the tiny head maybe already back in it. Let they who seek out the uneasy bits all islanders bury, seek. I will walk.

I walk until I see a pig in the way, a big pig. I walk to one side of the path and give way to that pig, his bristly back, his huge behind. But his front bears tusks, and he’s annoyed, I’ve annoyed him as he roots with those tusks at a fallen fruit and has to lift his tusked snout just as I am passing on veritable tiptoe past his fruit.