A Drink Called Paradise Read Online Free PDF

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.
    This ocean that won’t talk.
    I go to where the men bring their chairs, where I have seen Barclay.
    Not many of us sit in the chairs next to the copra shed, midday or not, he says when I ask, Where is everybody? Men leave the island to make money, he says, and the few men there all nod.
    It’s the same where I’m from, I say, men leave for the city.
    Men die without the island, he says.
    It’s a cash economy, I say.