The Last Good Paradise (33 page)

The leader of the original
Kon-Tiki
voyage, Thor Heyerdahl, had set out to prove that the prevailing ocean currents allowed migration from South America rather than Asia as had been commonly assumed. When he landed on Raroia in the Tuamotus, he was hailed an international hero. But Titi’s people had endured generations of hardship by staying in place—where was the celebration for that?

None of that had mattered to Titi at eighteen, flattered by the attention, the newspaper photographs of herself with the boys. She had been picked because her grandmother had been on the beach for the official celebrations to greet the men from the original voyage in 1947.

One of the grandsons developed a crush on Titi, and she had stayed with him for several weeks. When it came time for them to leave, he had asked her to come home with him to Narvik, Norway. He described what his home looked like: forests, herds of reindeer, and thick-walled houses that burned fires inside for warmth. Although she had seen snow in movies, the reality of living in it was beyond her. The closest she could come was imagining living inside a freezer. It sounded more fantastical than the idea of living on the moon. He described the whiteness as being as vast as the blue of her ocean. He told her of standing on water that was frozen solid, like a giant ice cube, and how he danced on its surface with blades on his feet. “You mean like the ice-skating rink in Papeete?” she asked.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was collecting her, a South Sea specimen, to take home. Not for a moment did she consider going. Her adult life was preordained to be spent with Cooked, on the land that gave her people their strength and identity. This had been taught to her from the beginning by her mother, Faufau, and her grandmother. During her young life, she had observed what being out of place did to Loren. Tuamotuans did not have a word for loneliness. She did not want to experience its meaning in another language.

But the land was ailing.

Faufau told the story of how she woke up early one morning and walked along the lagoon on an errand. A brilliant light flashed overhead. Not in one corner of the sky like a house on fire or the sun rising, but like a great apocalyptic flame. Faufau fell to the ground facedown, shutting her eyes tightly, sure that it was the white god coming to end the world like the missionaries always threatened. A great rumbling started, like the worst thunder, the stomach of the earth growling. The sand in front of her eyes rolled up and down like a wave, like a ripple being shaken out of cloth, then sank away. The ocean rushed to replace the land, reversing the Bible story of creation. Faufau rose, crying, and ran back home.

Faufau’s father was on a nearby island, hired to do construction for the French. During a break, it was so hot he decided to go swimming. Underwater, the blue-green world that usually soothed him suddenly buckled, and a strange, awful pressure gripped his body viselike. His eardrums hurt, as if sticks were being poked through them. His head pounded as if every thought in the world was trying to crowd its way inside. He surfaced for a gulp of air, but the shiny, peeled sky burned his eyes. He saw only blackness where there was blinding white. Instinct drove him back underwater. The swallowed air seared his lungs like hot coals as he plunged back down.

A sight he regretted seeing that would haunt him the rest of his life: A large shark suspended in the water, turned inside out. Eyes popped, internal organs exploded out through its mouth and anus. The many companionable fish that he had swam among his whole life now turned monstrous.

Later the government told them that the tests were for the stability of the world, to end all wars. Destruction to prevent destruction. But these were not their wars. What about the war that now raged in the lagoon? A war that would continue on for generation after generation to the end of time?

One of Faufau’s uncles worked at the test site because it paid double what other jobs did. They were told the tests were harmless. The French workmen scurried into thick cement bunkers while the Tahitians were left on open platforms, offered only the protection of face masks, which were too small to fit them. Instead, the workers played ball with them as they waited.

An enormous cloud had covered the sky, and as in a fairy tale it had begun to snow. Faufau and the other children had read of snow in their French textbooks at school and thought the teacher had brought it as a present for them. After hours of playing in the accumulating drifts, one by one the children fell sick. Faufau’s eyes itched. She had a great thirst that couldn’t be quenched. The drinking water in the rainwater drum was magically changing colors like a rainbow. She wobbled and thought she would throw up. Then it got worse.

Adults could not care for the children because everyone was sick. Burns bloomed on bodies. Hair and fingernails fell off like an unnatural molting.

Faufau could not know the damage had also gone inside. As a woman, she endured eight miscarriages before Titi was born.

Cooked was doing this for their future children, Titi thought.

*   *   *

“Javi?” Richard couldn’t believe his eyes.

The morning had been too much for him. He had lost his little bit of heaven in the kitchen. Ann had never seemed the martyr type, yet she was on her way to radiate herself for a cause they had known nothing about a few weeks ago. Like most people, when Richard looked at tragedy, he donated a few bucks and moved on with his life. He didn’t understand the kind of person who sacrificed herself to causes. It seemed vaguely scandalous to be unwittingly married to such a person. Like a bad dream, Ann was gone, and inexplicably Javi was in her place.

Javi jogged the last few soggy feet of surf and embraced Richard. He had never felt so lost as when he didn’t have his big, dopey sidekick to bully along. Then he looked around.

“Not a bad place you guys holed up in.”

Wende stepped forward. “Who is this guy who almost ruined the shot?”

Richard shrugged. “Meet Javi. He’s our business partner.”

Javi grinned. “Nice to meet you, woman of my dreams.”

“You’re
el gusano
.” Disgusted, she walked away.

The paparazzi flotilla had turned and followed the outrigger through the pass to the waiting yacht, so the interruption thankfully had not been photographed.

“What are you doing here?” Richard asked.

“You won’t answer my calls.”

“We don’t have reception here.”

Javi pulled out his phone and looked at the full bars.

“Until the last day or so. And Ann’s gone.” Like this info would make him turn around and go back to where he came from.

“Yeah? Fishing trip? How long?”

“She left for a radioactive island with Dex Cooper.”

“You let her go? My Ann?”

“
My
Ann. I had no choice.”

“Not if you treat her like this. I love her.”

Richard rubbed his forehead. “What, exactly, are you saying?”

“You didn’t treat her right from the get-go. She should have left you years ago. She would have made me a better man. At least I would have kept her busy.”

*   *   *

Titi walked by Richard and the new strange man rolling on the sand, trying to punch each other out. When Cooked and she took over the resort, she was going to make sure there were rules against this kind of behavior. It was undignified.

In fact, the crowds of relatives and wedding guests were starting to wear on her; she had grown used to the orderly isolation of the resort. Her taste for privacy, like expensive fine chocolate, had been acquired. Cooked and she had been working alone for years, with only short breaks back to their own chaotic village. The farthest she had ever been in her life was Papeete, which was as big city as it got until one hit either Sydney or Honolulu. She was a small-island girl.

The wedding party had grown restless. Young men camped out along the beach, bored by the lack of action, were getting into fistfights. Since there was no telling how long Cooked would be away, she prepared to announce that they should return home. Wedding postponed. Her priority was to get things back to normal for Loren.

Titi’s father left soon after her birth, and Loren had filled in as a kind of semi-father, crazy uncle. All this activity was too much for him in his current state. She worried that it would send him into a tailspin of depression again.

His drinking binges had been legendary. She had to bail him out of all kinds of terrible situations. Over the last year, he had hidden the signs of his illness as well as he could but had no choice but to confide in someone. No one could exist utterly alone, although Loren came close. She was steady as a caretaker because she had gone through her grandmother’s and aunts’ illnesses. Together they went to his doctor’s visits. There came a time when her grandmother, too, had refused treatments as Loren was now doing. Titi respected his decision. The doctors took the dignity of life away, took away the soul, and everyone knew you eventually died of the poisoning no matter what. He might as well be where he wanted. Everyone said what a shame it was that Loren had never married some woman who would be there for him. He was way past indulging in men. It was unthinkable on the islands to die alone, and so his care would come down on Titi’s shoulders, which she accepted.

In his hut, Loren lay in the darkness. She knew better than to try to open the windows, but left the door open to air out the fetid smell.

He smiled when he saw her, the skin drawn tight across his cheeks. Fever.

“How is it?” she asked.

“It hurts.”

She nodded and patted his arm.

“So what do you think, little Titi? Are you impressed? The whole world watching us.”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters because the resort will be full.”

It touched her that such details could interest him.

“The wedding will happen as soon as Cooked returns,” she said.

“I can wait.”

“You will sit in the place of my father?”

Loren nodded. He turned away, gruffly telling her to shut the door on her way out, but he couldn’t fool her. She saw the tears.

Twenty years before, their people had been thriving. People believed that the prosperity brought by the new hotels would trickle down to them, and they would all grow rich. It was still enough of a novelty to see a Frenchman that the children came out to stare, but the true novelty was the appearance of two young French girls standing behind him. They stared back at the pack of children while the man went inside Titi’s grandmother’s house to look for a place to stay.

While the Frenchman worked as a manager of a nearby farm in the day, Titi’s grandmother was paid to be babysitter, but the way things worked was that Bette and Lilou joined a big extended family of a dozen children and twice as many adults. The girls thrived, and since Loren spent every spare minute with them, he ended up part of Titi’s extended family also.

Although she had only been a child, Titi remembered a different man back then. After work, he’d come and play with the children, teaching magic tricks (to that day almost every man in the family could pull a coin out of your ear as easily as walking down the beach). He used to spin his daughters in his arms, faster and faster till their legs flew straight out and they squealed in delight; then he slowed and laid them on the earth like drunken butterflies. They giggled, tried to stand and staggered, fell back down. Titi had longed to be spun but was too shy to ask.

One time, Lilou cut her leg. They rushed her to an aunt who was a nurse. Holding her, watching the aunt stain the skin with iodine, then begin stitching, Loren cried along with his daughter. What a good father, the women said. What a good husband he’d make. He should marry, have more children, become settled. They sent attractive young women his way, but he showed no interest.

The day the girls were taken away by the French policemen was the saddest day in the village. After Loren came out of prison, not only he but the whole village mourned. They erected new stones for the girls on the
marae
. Ceremoniously, Loren gave the girls’ belongings to Titi because, even if they did come back, by then they would have outgrown such things. In her young heart, Titi felt that she was being called on to replace them. The villagers decided the only cure for Loren was marriage and a new family. Once again women were brought out, not callously, but with the idea of new beginnings. Instead Loren chose old endings. Chose drink and trouble. As they found out only later, chose men over the company of women.

On the days he was still himself, he played the role of uncle to Titi. In reverse of those French fairy tales that Loren read to her, the pretty princesses vanished, and the dark, heavyset girl got to take their place. Later, when Cooked moved to the village and became inseparable from her, Loren tried to be a big brother to him also. He paid for special things they wanted but couldn’t afford. He played cheerleader at their school events, and always was the prime organizer of birthday parties. He made them the wager that if they got good enough grades to get into college, he would pay for it.

As she got older, sometimes she felt they were taking advantage, as if Loren were offering himself only because of the loss of his girls, but they couldn’t afford to refuse. Faufau, Grandmother, and the aunts did look after him; as badly as he took care of himself, he would have died many times over otherwise. Cooked and Titi were both in college in Papeete when news came of his sickness. Although he said it was otherwise, Titi knew it was the same wasting disease that the others had. He ate the same fruit and fish, breathed the same air, and swam in the same ocean. He’d sat at her grandmother’s bedside as she wasted away, listened to Faufau’s story of playing with the poisoned snow that now they understood was ash. The illness made him even more reckless; he went on drinking binges lasting weeks. It was a fluke when he won the island in a poker game. Loren asked them to drop out of school to run the hotel as if it were the most natural request in the world.

Cooked was unhappy about it, saying they would become servants of the tourists. But after all Loren had done for them, how could they complain? Without his help, they couldn’t continue their studies. Once they settled down to running the resort, he became a stranger, a boss, talking to them only about business—were the rooms done, the food ordered, the plumbing fixed? He treated them as servants. Now things were changing once again.