Terese Svoboda: A Drink Called Paradise

I don’t say, Sorry. I don’t. I’m having trouble breathing. It must be anger, after that punch. I used the karate of my hand, all that I have, this row of fingers, this bluntness untrained except from the movies, I used it where it hurt, and he tangled his legs together in surprise as he flailed backward and broke the lamp.

I heard him before he broke it, says Ngarima. He was useless, a boy.

They will always try, says Barclay, then he sleeps, drawing the air out of every corner, the loud, sudden snoring like yet another person in the house.

Could Barclay himself be the culprit? I resist crawling between the two of them. I consider fleeing to the shed a few yards away. But there’s all that dark between the shed and the house — I could be caught by someone else sneaking up or away. Or is Ngarima’s son who sleeps there of an age that slips into houses? Twelve? What do I know? Could it be Harry? I step back behind my curtain.

No guidebook says not to sleep because men make a sport of tupping the tourists. Now only the broken glass protects me. Thank you, Temu, for sparing the one lamp that could break. It certainly wasn’t you, you who can’t even aim pee without wildness.

I keep my eyes open to the broken glass. No one else, clumsy or not, will tiptoe over it tonight without me hearing his cut cries. Tomorrow I will find the man who did tiptoe by his bloodied feet, the one who fled the room over the lamp pieces, the one who is probably still running over the sharp coral that faces the beach.

Unless he has calluses like all the rest.

Not the sex I expected. I review the few men I’ve seen here: all smooth-chested adolescents except Barclay and the old men who gamble next to the flagpole at the wharf. Do more men hide in the crevices of this island, lazy ones who don’t come down to move copra, who howl with the roosters before dawn and sneak onto women’s beds of rice? Men happy about the boat’s delay?

I can always use my made-up karate again, and besides, for tonight, the glass will have to do. I keep my eyes wide against the darkness until I have to blink, and blinking, they have to close.

The glass is gone when I wake up. So are the two mountains who sleep but do not guard me just beyond my bed.

Barclay and Ngarima stand under the papaw tree outside, and their voices carry. They are talking about the sex of the tree, whether it will bear anymore, whether by cutting it short it will have better sex. The chicken under the tree pecking at coconut shreds swivels its head between them and their talk, surveying the ground really, moving its lizardy way forward, neck, then ruff, then the machete Barclay carries shakes at the point he is making about tree sex, but he is really aiming, and that is that for the chicken. Suddenly headless, it takes flight, as much as its bush wings allow, it dances and dies, dances and dies, pumping its blood into the sand while the two of them go on arguing.

I don’t interrupt.

I break my strong-tourist vow, the one to never complain or whine to another tourist, which would reveal expectation, and all I really want is to be without that, knowing from the ad business how much of that is made up for you anyway, and I break my vow and leave for the guesthouse. Who is surprised about the path I choose? As I choose it, Ngarima waves at me, chicken feathers rising in a white corona around her hand, and Barclay tips his head the way he does when I say, What about a boat wreck?

When Harry comes to his door, he is wearing just a wrap of the flowered sheet around his middle, and what shows above it is where the Harry is most appropriate. Since all I have seen him in is what can only be described as planter’s wear, I take the wrap as a state of undress and step back in shock. I didn’t knock, I say. You’re busy, I see, I say.

Knock, he says. But come in. Veelu is about to go.

The woman inside is twisting two coconuts together by their husk-hair. Two heads is what they look like to me, bound in her Valkyrie grasp. I’m all ugly angles next to her, where fat is altogether fine, thin is grim.

She tilts her machete in greeting. Then she lifts her two coconuts and cracks them together so they break open in a single blow.

I smile, and she leaves to skin and dress the coconuts, whatever you do after such a display.

Harry, I say, turning back to him slowly. I give him a sorted-out version of my nocturnal visitor. I end with: I just wanted to know how you were getting along. I try not to say that with female inflection at the end, a question.

I must say the sex is fine, if that’s what you’re after. He stretches his arms over his head so I see more of his navel. I have at least four women fighting over me.

Oh, good, I say. In turns or at the same time?

As if on cue, another woman shows up, bearing food and wearing Harry’s once beautiful shoes as slippers, feet shoved in, untied, with the backs broken.

I’m a happy guy, he says. So you don’t like the customs. He walks over to a shirt and trousers splayed across two spiky plants, testing the clothes for dryness, pinching the fabric between his fingers.

I wait. The other woman waits. I hate the tableau feeling I’m getting. A breeze flicks at the ends of the flowered sheet that wraps the woman, shoulders exposed. Sex, sex, sex, laps the lagoon behind her.

He plucks the shirt off the plant and folds it, arm to arm. Well, the boat will take you away soon enough, won’t it?

You too, I shrug. Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t take the last one?

He laughs, his flowered loins straining against the fabric. No, not me. No more boats for me.

I want to swim off Harry and his smug happiness, I want to swim off my own envy — and what? Temu, Barclay — I don’t know, maybe it’s not wanting to know more, I’m the archetypal tourist. I could swim all the way back to the main island not wanting to know more, I could swim straight through the hot, smooth water past the small black head floating on its board all the way home. Where I do swim is as far as the reef, where the roar of the world starts, and it is there, with the water’s violence real and constant, there that I know that I can’t swim back, I can’t even imagine it.

The ocean, so limitless, such a fence.

Protect yourself, it says. I float on my back. Cumuli pile over me, shadowing the ocean with boat shapes, boats that are always arriving.

I sidestroke my return, trying to slice the water thinner and thinner, my small slashes and wounds from the bush ragged bait for anything that swims under me. Fish muscle through the water in sheaves of color. Why would anyone eat canned fish here? Misplaced mercy, the brilliant stripes fading in the frying pan? That’s me, the well-fed one who would change her mind at the first whiff of a fading fillet.

The great silence the fish slice through soothes. I follow a storm of clown fish to an intersection of red and black, where I drift and they rush around, all life and color, into whatever trouble they look for and enjoy. I think fish until I am, I dart and swirl and enjoy.

Until I touch sponge. It’s a surprise. I retract my feet because what I touch should have been coral, then I push away only to find more sponge, that sponge sponges up an area a hundred feet wide. Dark green, it could look like coral, it could look like just darkness, but as I bounce along, toes sinking, its blind mouthlessness releases a faint gray. It’s sponge. I’m probably crushing the foreheads of a million tiny sponges in orgy. I swim away, and in the gray of my going bubbles and sponge corpses rise in suspension behind me, pulse and undulate.

I start swimming to shore, but I’m tired and the shore is so far away and now I’m curious. That was one giant sponge. I dive again to take another look at what I think I’ve seen, but I look in the wrong direction and all I see are sand squirts, more sand and fish. Or has the giant sponge moved? Or did I make up the soft, porous surface, all that yielding? I dive and gasp again and see nothing, then I swim to shore with all of what strength I have left. Flopping down on the sand, I look out at an ocean that has just shown me what? This ocean that roars and plays so silently.