A Drink Called Paradise

by Terese Svoboda

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

  Barclay, I say. I slip back down so as not to feel my legs, and the slipping gives me another angle. In this angle, with light, I see Barclay’s face is wet.

  He’s been swimming. In my pain that’s what I think, then I think nothing again. Barclay’s here, so what.

  He’s sobbing.

  Thank you for saving me, I say.

  His words come all at once: Ngarima was who pulled my son out of the snow that fell after, the one who died, not the one who is born later with his head, or the one who has gone away.

  He steps closer to me. Radio, do you want a radio? they said. No problem. Show the others there is no problem. I will do a lot for a radio. He looks at his hands. I let my son play in the snow, to show them you could play in it, not to worry. He breathes in a sob. Oh, my Ngarima.

  I was the one who wanted a radio, I say.

  You are a ghost, he says. If I shut my eyes, you will vanish.

  I am not dead yet, I say.

  Yes, he says, turning away from me. That’s what you say. You who always wants to leave this island, who calls it paradise.

  Paradise, I repeat with a wave of pain. I wish I could have brought Ngarima back with me.

  He stands there. You are here now, he says. He is wiping off his tears.

  I watch his hands move across his clothes. Like before? I say. Like that time when you said it’s the custom?

  It is the custom.

  I close my eyes.

  He moves toward me.

  Most of me is bandage-wrapped. I’m impermeable, a sweating mummy. I am thinking impermeable between the listening and the hurt, but when he lays his head near my arm I put my arms around him, I hold him while he cries.

  Desire is as confusing as death. All the little impermeables between them switch places, get stuck. I kiss the top of his greasy hair where it is sticking up. What he wants is so big and so far from here he loses his want, he pushes it in anger against my bedside until it’s drained.

  I hurt. He hurts. His hurt circles his anger.

  There is a machete stuck in a coconut at the door. That could be what dropped, the sound of it being stuck. But there is always some knife at the door, and what light there is is always catching on it, making it something two people will look at together.

  You are going?

  He’s a shape again. He’s moving toward the door.

  I will tell Harry to move me. You want your house back, that’s it, isn’t it? I say.

  Barclay opens the hands he’s kept clenched. They take hold of the wavering flower cloth at the door and they tear it down, one long rip against nails.

  Then he’s gone.

  Bare feet don’t make steps that dwindle, and nothing thuds or sways or whistles behind him. The new stars the cloth kept dark are all I have to know I am awake.

  I am awake now.

  There’s little blond left, I have a bad limp and a crutch, I have pale brown skin from the sun bouncing off my sheet, with its heat on the wall behind me that I feel on my back sitting up straight on my rice bed, which is now so thin.

  I sit up so straight now that I could receive radio waves myself or at least intercept them, have the radio play in my fillings, hum out that the boat is coming, the real boat. The radio, declares Barclay when he visits, says a boat is coming, he has his antenna that lets him talk. He can yes me now.

  Barclay lingers after he tells me about the boat. I catch and hold his hand. I say, You think I’m not grown up, that I think sex is all that matters to you?

  You will find someone, he says.

  This is a compliment I think I can take. But he doesn’t say more. He walks away quickly to radio again, to talk more about all that I have told him about that other boat. He disappears very fast since my angle for seeing isn’t far. He just disappears.

  At the highest heat of the day, Clam Hold and Breasts for Three come to string white flowers onto fishline at the end of my bed. They laugh over the penis-shaped buds that turn up—but their laughter is not envy the way some would say. And they do not say, What’s with that man now?

  Harry doesn’t pick up rocks anymore. He tells me he doesn’t have to. I’ve done it, he says. To whom is not clear. In this climate, buds burst on cues I can’t sense. That is, all these flowered cloths billow loose, all these women leave their shoes outside his house, and others. But only Veelu runs down his shoes now, smokes his last all-dried-out cigarette.

  The two women wreathe me in white flowers. What’s this? I say.

  Nothing bad, says Clam Hold, if that’s what you mean. It’s just that you smell like water that sits. She pulls another layer over my head.

  I used to steal coconuts, I say as I sniff the buds.

  You used to be crazy, says Breasts for Three. Or a baby. Wanting to drink that hot milk instead of him.

  They really laugh now.

  Have I made them up? Thick-limbed with coarse skin, wide hands, and scarred necks, they have names but don’t use them, they have children but can’t keep them.

  Clam Hold tells me it is the end of Christmas week, but those aren’t quite bells I hear out the window—two machetes banging into each other. All men into their houses is what that clanging means, she says. No one’s coming to gut and roast me.

  Here is the needle, Breasts for Three says. She gives me the long, sharp tool for stringing flowers. You can finish these. She heaps the rest of them into my lap. You Old Coconut, she calls me as they leave, as they rush off.

  An old coconut is coconut through and through, no milk, no slick fruit, sweet but inert and dry. They leave me to go roaming. Today—once a year—despite the Milo missionary and these flowered cloths that conceal so much—the men stay inside the houses and all the women switch.

  But I am the Old Coconut.

  They know my boat is coming, that radio has me already boarding it.

  Say you stay with one man but another one wants you, but not forever. How can you know how long that is? Is that tomorrow, or is that until you die and take time, its long fall, with you? Or is it just for Christmas? Imagine how that man will try to impress you here. This is no ritual rape, this is contest. The men cook, they keep food out at all times. I can hear one sing how much coconut oil he has to rub in.

  It’s so warm today I take off my shirt and doze, still wreathed. These flowers are not meant to go into a cooler and be kept. They must be crushed and worn, their scent released. A bee wakes me, checking the folds on the buds that have opened. He is so anxious, burrowing in. Does he look for another bee and not food? Has he lost love?

  Christmas and children.

  I shake myself awake. I remember my shirt and its heat, but I pull it on anyway, pull up the flowers to settle my shirt under them. I am no South Pacific maiden. I lean out for my crutches, a fresh set made from y’s of wood, all the prickles planed or sawed off, the two stumps almost level, and it’s then that I see the loose flower.

  It’s bruised and brown in its creases and sweet-scented like the others, but all its petals have grown lopsided, every petal hooks to the center, but every petal on it is different, defective, unmatching, then every petal falls soundlessly to the floor between my fingers as I hook them off the middle with effort, pulling them apart so they’re no longer confused, no longer growing wrong and bad.

  He loves me, he loves me not.

  Shush, shush, go the grass skirts on the women.

  I gather myself on the crutches.

  I go to find a house.

 

 

 
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