A Drink Called Paradise Read Free Page A

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.
    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