The Last Good Paradise: A Novel

by Tatjana Soli

  “I’m sorry,” Wende said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “I don’t think he’s doing it for you,” Ann said.

  Titi made her stately way down the path from the kitchen to the water. Cooked ran to her and fell on his knees, burying his face in her billowy dress. Had the love potion worked after all, albeit slowly, painfully, like all true love?

  Wende turned away, her face pale. “Okay,” she yelled. “I’ll do it.”

  Ann was confused. Events were unspooling like a bad drug trip.

  With difficulty Loren pulled the boat around in the choppy waves. The wind from the coming storm was pulling at every surface so that one had to hunch one’s shoulders against it. Dex appeared with a duffel and his guitar case.

  “Do you have to go?” Ann asked, more a whine than a question. The night before had been special, the whole group finally bonded, and now just as quickly it was falling apart. “We could all hang out a while longer. Our little paradise. What about the free nights?”

  “Are you speaking as my attorney?” Dex said.

  Ann shook her head. “As your friend.”

  “I don’t want to lose her,” he whispered.

  They hugged and exchanged good-byes. Wende and Dex held hands sitting in the boat while Loren and Cooked argued; finally Cooked yanked on the hotel’s official yellow shirt and got behind the wheel. The shirt soaked up his blood like a cocktail napkin, a Rorschach of heartbreak.

  “I didn’t think she even liked Dex,” Richard said.

  Thankfully, Richard appeared to be staying for now.

  “Life’s strange that way,” Ann said.

  Richard watched as they boarded and the boat pulled away.

  Ann felt sorry for him. It was so easy to forget one’s husband could be a hurting human being also.

  Cooked was mournfully staring at Titi as if he were going away on a many-years-long sea voyage, with the possibility he might never return.

  Titi and Richard turned away as the wind kicked up sand, but Ann kept watching the boat as it made its way into the deeper part of the lagoon. She alone saw Wende rise, holding the small valise, then lift her free arm for balance as she gracefully stepped over the side like a modern-day Ophelia.

  “Man overboard! Woman!” Ann screamed as the others turned around and Loren ran out of the kitchen.

  There was a loud cracking sound as the boat hit an underwater coral reef.

  Loren grabbed his head. “I’ll kill him!”

  Both Cooked and Dex jumped overboard to rescue Wende. In the panic all three almost drowned. For a weird moment in the choppy waves, Cooked appeared to be yelling at Wende, and she submerged again. A miracle that they made it back to the boat, and that the boat returned to the shore before it was logged with water and sank. Their own twenty-first-century shipwreck. The luggage, including the valise, lost.

  * * *

  By the afternoon, rain pelted down so hard that they had no choice but to stay sequestered inside their fares. Even a quick trip to the kitchen punished one with a drenching. At dusk a howling began, like a never-ending freight car roaring overhead. Loren beat on each of their doors and ordered them to evacuate to his fare, which was the highest point on the island.

  “How much higher?” Richard asked.

  “One meter. Three feet. Maybe enough to save you.”

  Outside, the island’s transformation was spellbinding. Water that had been fifty feet away, now surrounded them, and they sloshed barefoot through it. Debris floated in the sand-heavy liquid, knocking into their shinbones. This was way beyond any thunderstorm. When Richard and Ann got to Loren’s, everyone else was already inside. Titi sat in the corner, chanting to herself. Cooked thumbed through a sports magazine. Dex had his arms around Wende, who was shivering and teary-eyed.

  “We should have left,” she said. “It’s my fault.”

  Cooked looked up sharply at her, but she ignored him.

  “The other resort would have been no different,” Dex said.

  “The other resort is steel-fortified,” Loren said. “It can easily withstand a hurricane. Plenty of food, medicine, boats there.”

  “What’s the safety plan here?” Richard asked.

  “If the storm surge floods the island much more, the buildings will go. You don’t want to get hit by debris. Put your life jackets on and head for the boat.”

  The stack of neglected yellow life vests sat piled in the corner. Ann did not mention the obvious—that there had been no boat since that morning.

  A storm went on so long into the night that intermittent sleep finally overcame their fear. The sole light came from a battery-operated lantern, which threw attenuated, spooky shadows on the ceiling. Alternating from prayers that sounded more like plea bargains to self-recriminations (why hadn’t they gone to Alsace?), Ann fell asleep on the floor and woke to the startling sensation of sitting in water. She whimpered.

  “I hate storms,” she said.

  “I know,” Richard whispered, and wrapped his arms around her, forming a Richard blanket.

  It was true—Richard was the one person in the world who knew she preferred earth tones, that she liked anchovies on her Caesar salad, that she absolutely detested and loathed thunderstorms. How had she forgotten all this?

  “I’m sorry,” Ann said. “For everything.”

  “I’m not sorry for a minute of it,” Richard said, and kissed her hair.

  Minutes later, the water pooled up to the undersides of the rush-bottomed chairs. They would literally drown in the Pacific, their leaky life raft of an island sinking beneath them.

  And then the waters retreated. Within ten minutes, the floor was no longer underwater. The force of the hurricane passed to the west.

  “I’ve never been so hungry in my life,” Wende said.

  “Food,” Richard agreed.

  * * *

  Although it was still raining hard, the howling had subsided the slightest degree in intensity. Celebratory after two close calls, feeling very much alive, they shoved the wet table and chairs into the kitchen. Richard cooked a large pot of linguine frutti di mare and served family-style.

  At Richard’s insistence, Titi and Cooked joined the table for the first time to eat with them. Something had been settled between the two. They only had eyes for each other and the food, which they ate with gusto. At the beach, after the near-drowning, they’d had a passionate, seawater-sputtering reunion when Cooked staggered back to solid land.

  “Today I saw my life passing by,” Dex said. “It’s good to be back.”

  “You were only one hundred meters out.”

  “I was already checked out here.” Dex tapped his ear, which in his case might indeed have been the seat of all desire. “I’m taking it as a sign.”

  “It’s only a sign,” Loren said, “that Cooked is an imbecile.”

  Through this exchange, a subdued Wende sat silent. Ann had been the only witness to her act.

  “What does it mean?” she muttered, but so softly they could pretend not to hear her.

  “The boat sinking was a gift,” Titi said.

  “Of course. No guilt, no remorse at all,” Loren said bitterly. “It would be different if the boat was yours.”

  Cooked dropped Titi’s hand. “Yes, it would be different. But it isn’t.”

  The table fell into a funky silence.

  Richard broke the impasse by serving a huge platter of cheeses and fruit. “‘A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.’”

  “Whoa, I like that,” Dex said. “Did you just make that up?”

  “That’s the master—Brillat-Savarin.”

  “Cool. I think I’ll use it.”

  Wende looked on the verge of crying. “I almost died out there. No one cares!”

  Dex put his arm around her. “Clumsy honey bunny, you fell overboard. We had you covered.”

  Wende was about to blurt out a confession she was not ready to make and they were not ready to hear—or,
rather, that Ann was not ready for them to hear, with the likely outcome that the camaraderie would again be broken. Everyone would want to leave as soon as they could. The table slumped back into inaction. So quiet that they could hear outside.

  “Listen,” Ann said.

  Silence.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  They tumbled outside into the darkness. The island was holding them up again. The clouds had cleared away. The night sky was newly scrubbed, moon-brilliant, star-punctured.

  Around them on the beach were scattered bits of rock and coral. Glistening bodies of sea life lay stranded. Fish and eels fluttered in small pools, and the guys grabbed them and threw them back into the water. The farthest fare, vacant, had disappeared off its finger of sand as if it never was, washed away. A lesson, Loren thought.

  “We’re marooned. At least till the hotel sends out another boat,” Richard said.

  The idea of actually being marooned sent a tingle down Ann’s spine. Her fantasy was taking a majestic turn toward the real.

  “It feels like the beginning of the world,” Dex said. “If only you could record this feeling.”

  Loren yawned. “Good night, lovely people. Enough excitement for tonight,” he said, and went off.

  Ann felt the urge to lay out something precious before the others, to seal the evening as extraordinary. Besides, her secret had been burning a hole in her pocket for a week now. “You can record it.”

  * * *

  They scampered through the glittering night like trick-or-treaters, kids playing hooky, whispering and giggling, sneaking kisses and gropes, tripping and falling in the sand. It was like a happy return to childhood. The beach was littered with palm fronds, and in the dark, Wende stumbled over one. Dex fell on top of her, and they rolled away, laughing.

  “Knock it off,” Ann said, a taskmaster. “Hurry.” Her heart beat a staccato of excitement.

  No reason to hurry. They had basically forever, but she wanted to create proper awe for the unveiling. The hurry also obscured the tiniest feeling of unease at betraying Loren.

  The path along the island’s edge was deceptively longer at night. Shouldn’t they have already passed it? Richard was drinking straight out of a bottle of red wine and singing Italian opera, of all things, though he didn’t even speak Italian. Dex and Wende passed a bottle of champagne back and forth. Everyone was enjoying the journey far too much for Ann’s taste.

  They didn’t pass anything remotely familiar at the point Ann thought the camera should be. Had the storm washed it away? They went farther. Farther still. Ann walked ahead, squinting into the darkness past the feeble cone of light from her flashlight, unconfident of her landmarks. Behind her, the troops were grumbling. Richard stopped to take a leak behind a palm. Wende complained she was tired.

  “There it is!” Ann shouted.

  In the middle of a stretch of washed beach was her webcam. As each of them came up to it, there was an unimpressed silence.

  Finally Ann said, “Here it is.”

  “Hmmph.”

  “What is it?”

  “A remote webcam.”

  “What?”

  “It films this stretch of beach twenty-four hours a day.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.”

  “Why?”

  That was the question that Ann had been pondering all those mornings alone, sitting behind the camera, watching it as it watched the beach. Why do it? Who would watch it? Undoubtedly the same people who would like to be there in person but couldn’t be, for one reason or another. But that didn’t entirely make sense either. While the scene was lovely, so were many others, and a live scene surely trumped a videoed one any day. Were people so jaded that live experience wasn’t adequate any longer?

  It had to be something else. Something to do with why Ann trudged all the way there, when any other stretch of beach would have sufficed for solitude—the act of recording implied specialness. How many desires did one have independent of the constant barrage of images that brainwashed one? Was the live image of the beach any different from creating a sacred building? Did anything exist in the sacred building that didn’t exist elsewhere, or vice versa? The very act of putting it in the building, or recording it on a webcam, made one take notice. One carried a photo, a rosary, a lock of hair, a seashell—the religious referred to them as relics—for the same reason one watched this scene on the Internet: it signified an inchoate longing that was getting harder and harder to access in everyday life.

  “Loren did this as a performance piece,” she said by way of explanation.

  “Cool,” Dex said.

  “Loren, that old snake,” Richard said.

  “Right?” Ann said.

  “That whole dropping out, being unplugged…”

  “Uh-huh. But pretend you don’t know,” Ann pleaded, but the cats were far out of the bag. Who was she kidding? She had known that in telling them there would be a loss of control. She had accepted that devil’s bargain even if Loren had not.

  “Let’s build a bonfire,” Dex said. “So they see it. Give people a thrill. Planet of the Apes time.”

  “Fun.”

  “No,” Ann said, horrified, but already they had tuned her out.

  Dex and Richard passed a joint as they gathered kindling. Ann, defeated, went to sit with Wende. She hadn’t considered the repercussions of their commandeering her secret, taking it away from her, and co-opting the situation’s possibilities.

  “A huge mistake,” Ann said.

  “I jumped,” Wende said.

  Ann closed her eyes. “Yes, you did.”

  “You saw?”

  Ann nodded. Events on the island had accelerated to mainland speed, too much to process before the next thing took its place, creating a perpetual state of low-grade anxiety. She didn’t want to admit she’d forgotten all about the jump.

  “Are you mad about me marrying Dex?”

  Ann rolled over and faced her in the darkness. “Oh, honey, I have no right to judge. You just seemed so sure of what you didn’t want.”

  “What I almost did—it was my bon voyage gift to Cooked—but then I couldn’t.”

  “Okay.” Ann was feeling her way through the murk of Wende’s explanation, unsure exactly what they were talking about but afraid to frighten away a confession.

  “It feels bad. I was trying to be someone I’m not. I got scared. Cooked hates me, but I saved him. His mother cooked for me.”

  They lay back in silence. They had formed some type of ad hoc dysfunctional twenty-first-century family unit. Ann gazed up at the stars. The heavens seemed to be spinning so fast she had to close her eyes. Yes, it felt bad. What kind of traitorous person was she, giving up Loren’s secret like a party favor, like a kid trying to be popular? A blaze of fire went up and turned molten behind her eyelids. The guys were screaming and dancing like madmen. Was there sound on the cam? Oh God, yes. She was angry with them, but most of all angry with herself. She was lacking in all the qualities she admired in others.

  “I keep making mistakes,” Ann said.

  “It’s like the song ‘You just keep trying till you run out of cake.’”

  “Who wants to go skinny-dipping?” Dex shouted.

  “I do, I do.” Wende jumped up and ran away.

  The old Wende was back.

  * * *

  For ten years the camera had recorded … nothing, which was the whole point, but that night the first seminal images in a decade were of the backsides of two men in the darkness, burnished in the glow of a bonfire. For an hour that was it, a burning fire, because the nighttime view of the beach and waves, even on full-moon nights, was always indecipherable. The next picture—as graven in Robinson Crusoe cam’s history as the first flickering images on film—was the flame-lit figure of a naked blond woman running past the fire, laughing and giggling, being chased by a naked tattooed man with a tangle of black hair covering his face.

  Dex and We
nde were like children with a new toy. They sat in the sand, drinking and coming up with variety-show scenarios to stage in front of the camera.

  “Leave it alone,” Ann begged. “You’ve had your fun.”

  “No way,” Dex said. “We’re just started. Weren’t you begging us to stay a few more days?”

  * * *

  When they returned to their water-soaked fares late that night, the oil lamp in the dining area was still lit, and Loren was sitting up, waiting for them like a cross father. As they walked by, Richard wished him good night, but he held up his hand to stop them.

  “You betrayed my trust,” he said to Ann.

  Ann had regressed to her teenage years, living out all the things she had not done at the time. Having broken the rules, she just wanted the punishment to be swift. “They would have found it eventually. No one will notice.”

  “Viewership has exploded. It’s gone to virus on the computer.”

  “Viral.”

  “Cool,” Dex said.

  “It’s ruined.”

  “More people are watching than ever,” Ann said.

  “That was never the point. It’s turned into a cheap sideshow.”

  Dex lit up a cigarette. “You could parlay it into advertising for this place.”

  “It was supposed to be pure.”

  “Look around. Your place is getting rough around the edges,” Dex said.

  “People will forget,” Ann said.

  Loren shook his head. “I’m pulling the plug. I want you all to leave the island.”

  “No,” Richard answered. Ann was near tears, and even if he didn’t understand, he wanted to help her get whatever it was she was after. “I’m cooking. Dex is paying. Ann is looking after you. We’re not ready to leave just yet.”

  “Besides, there’s no boat,” Wende added. “We’re marooned.”

  Loren got up and without another word walked away.

  He made a big production of wanting to be alone, but once he was back in his fare, ironically he longed to be in the company of people. He sat hoping that someone would come and disturb him so that he could act annoyed and too busy for whatever concerns they had. Sometimes the need for solitude was real, and other times it was a mere costume. Like all true recluses, he was simply waiting to be found by the right person.