The Last Good Paradise (38 page)

He sat miserably in his deck chair, swaying. He knew what he had to do, yet he was afraid. The distraction had done just that: distracted.

Like a drug addict taking a last hit, he turned the phone back on and texted Titi:

I LOVE YOU LIKE A DAUGHTER. NEVER DOUBT THAT.

After he pressed send, he realized he had in all probability set panic in motion. The text would send off alarms. Ann already suspected something. His time must be measured against possible rescue. As he sat there, the phone rang again.

Doomed, vain, insatiable man that he was, he looked. It was Ann.

A tightness in his throat—he was loved more than he guessed.

Ann, who would have been the kind of woman he might have married in a different life, was easier to disappoint than Titi. He lobbed the phone as far as possible into the ocean.

*   *   *

“He isn’t answering.” Ann frowned.

They had all been napping when a boat arrived in the lagoon. Sleepy Richard and Ann came out of the
fare
and shaded their eyes to see what was causing the commotion. Steve, the manager of the resort, piloted in with a woman passenger in sunglasses and a large hat. Unlike Ann weeks ago, this woman still managed to be stylish after the long, windblown ride across the lagoon. She had to be French. Then Ann knew.

Titi came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishrag, displeased. They would have to set up a system for reservations, no constant drop-ins like this. The resort was still a mess, and they were not open to the public beyond the public that now considered itself private. Why hadn’t Loren explained this to Steve? As Titi dialed Loren again, she read the text that had just come in from him, then immediately hit the call button. Instead of ringing, his phone went straight to voice mail.

“Titi!” the woman yelled as she stumbled from the boat so that Steve had to leap out to help her. She glided through the knee-high water, oblivious of her hem, which was getting soaked. In her yellow summer dress, the scene looked like something out of a movie.

Titi stopped as if she had seen a ghost. “Lilou,” she said. “You’ve come home.”

*   *   *

Loren was profoundly drunk and starting to feel sentimental about all he was leaving behind. He also had to piss. Maybe he’d just head back and put off the inevitable a while longer. What would be the harm? But when he lowered his bathing trunks to urinate over the side of the boat, the purplish bruises, the swollen lumps along the groin, shocked him again in all their goriness, their insistent mockery of his mortality. He had been handsome once. Desired. What would happen when he was no longer fit enough to do himself in? He didn’t want to burden Titi. He refused to be warehoused with the doomed in a hospice. Was it too much to want to be remembered as a man of dignity?

He jumped over the side of the boat and adjusted the valves on his scuba tank regulator. This was his favorite location in the archipelago for diving—a reef shelf that extended from the island and then dropped off more than four thousand feet at an ocean wall. One could glide along the sandy bottom, forty feet from the surface, feeling snug and protected, and then swim to the edge and look down into the great abyss as if falling into the night sky. Looking into the far depths was like trying to see the center of the universe—an unyielding, lonely, liquid deep space.

The first time Loren had gone swimming in the lagoon, he had opened his eyes underwater and been shocked at its otherworldly beauty. In France he had watched diving on television and thought it amounted to nothing more than swimming around in a big aquarium, but when one experienced it firsthand, the effect was indescribably moving. A world independent of what went on above water—great schools of fish passed by oblivious to his human presence. Life teemed, each animal with its unique place, and none of it dependent on man, except of course on his noninterference.

In his early years in Polynesia, Loren, like any eager novitiate, swam every spare moment he had. He bought books identifying each coral, each fish. He got certified in scuba as a way to make a living off tourists. Scuba charters were part of most resorts’ services. Snorkeling was child’s play compared with the thrill of going deeper in the lagoon or the ocean beyond the reefs. Eventually one graduated to the thrill of the drift dives at Tiputa and Aratoru—speeding along on strong ocean currents, going in or out of the lagoon passes. It resembled rush hour in some inexplicable foreign city—a group of a hundred or more gray reef sharks, pods of humpback whales, carpets of eagle rays, clouds of Napoleon fish and grouper. Then there was the ultimate, deep-water diving. During those moments, he found he did not feel so alone, did not ache with loss.

Afterward one returned to the surface changed, less impressed with the goings-on above water. For a while, Loren walked around filled with this secret knowledge as if he had discovered a key to the universe. He could explain it in no other way than that the world seemed more vast and magical underwater.

But then, as happened to so many mystics, the worldly distracted him. He had been strong and happy while caring for the girls, but once they were gone, he couldn’t muster the same faith. He was susceptible to temptation. Even though it was so wonderful down below, what could it matter with the atrocities that happened above the water? If a divine intelligence seemed in evidence underwater, how did it disappear to nullity in the affairs of mankind? The stories of radioactivity on various atolls, the poisoning of lagoons, the drifting fallout made him despair at the impossibility of true escape. His underwater universe was sadly not immune after all.

Now Loren swam along the reef shelf as if revisiting a long-lost neighborhood, nodding in pleasure at its familiar sights. The sunlight penetrated the water so thoroughly that he could almost imagine he was swimming through air. He loved how the ocean cupped his eardrums, silencing the world down to the percussion of his own heart, the beats the sound of the ocean’s own pulsing life. He paused at the edge of the Shark Wall and looked out over the great wilderness of water. Tears stung at the spectacle, but tears were good. They added their salt to the ocean. From salt and back to salt. A miracle that this existed, and he felt blessed to have derived solace from it. He hoped against hope that the madness above the water would stop in time to preserve this for Lilou, Lilou’s children, for Titi’s children and grandchildren, for all the children of the children of the children …

Loren upped the pressure in his tanks and swam off the edge of the reef, diving down, headfirst, in a kind of reverse flight. A form appeared next to him, swam alongside—one of the dolphins that were found only in this area. A comforting presence, like having an angel beside him. In fact, this was the perfect companion for Loren. He looked up in adieu at the faraway surface of the water—the sun a murky smudge whose glory was unimaginable at these depths.

It was known as
“l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs
,” or “rapture of the deep.” People forgot that Loren had advanced Trimix certification for depth dives. He knew the effects of narcosis at different levels. Playing along the bottom of the reef shelf at forty feet, his anxiety left him. He looked at the parrot fish munching on coral, the sound crunching in his ears like turning gravel. Manta rays hummed through the water like bees. The absinthe whispered in his ear that Titi and Cooked would manage for themselves quite well. At one hundred feet down, already there was the relaxation comparable to a glass of wine, except Loren had pretty much finished off the bottle of absinthe, and so the effect was accelerated and intensified. Gravity took over, and he no longer had to exert himself to continue down. A miracle he hadn’t already passed out. He wished he could have a last taste of the green fairy now; drink was his closest companion these last years. As he accelerated down the wall, approaching one hundred and fifty feet, a silliness overtook him. He had to suck in oxygen to keep from laughing at the dolphin that even now swam at his side, not more than five feet separating them. Around two hundred feet down, Loren’s air bubbles started to make a funny tinkling sound like high-pitched glass bells. A pelagic music of the spheres. Past two hundred and fifty feet, it began to grow darker, cooler. Life here existed in a perpetual twilight; the sea life had larger gills, moved less to conserve energy. He was surprised that the dolphin had stayed with him to this depth. He imagined his own skin turning gray and rubbery as his companion’s. She was an attractive one. Somehow Loren intuited she was female. He imagined morphing into her mate. Side by side they would swim through the islands, having baby dolphins and playing up to tourists. Not a bad life. Possibly a beautiful life. His own movements became slower now, even though his mind raced. Every problem he thought of seemed capable of immediate solution under the laser of his expanded attention. It seemed entirely within the realm of possibility that if he surfaced he could negotiate immediate world peace. He considered taking off his mouthpiece, just for a moment, and asking the dolphin’s thoughts on Lilou … He did not … Past three hundred feet, the pressure of the water began to exert itself, as if forcing him to occupy a smaller place than his body could naturally accommodate. His ribs hurt as if the stays of a corset were being tightened around him. It felt as if the blood in his veins had become effervescent. Only once before had he attempted that depth … The she dolphin drifted away … breaking his heart. He cried, but no tears came out. Probably twenty feet separated them. The dolphin was circling and pointing upward with her wandlike snout. Pointing toward light and life; fish, squid, and shrimp for all. How could he say it any other way? She was sexy. Large aquatic eyes like liquid mercury. Was it creepy to be attracted to a fish? Loren wasn’t imagining it—the she dolphin was clearly disappointed in him. He knew female censure when he saw it. Perhaps she had thought they were playing a game, going on an adventure, and now she felt duped. She was going Catholic on him.

The capriciousness of revelation.

Past three hundred and fifty feet, the waters grew brighter and sunny again. Loren felt that this proved something he had always guessed, but then, in the next moment, he forgot what it was. The cold steel bodies of sharks passed, singly, like undertakers. A ribbon of yellow uncurled itself toward him like a beckoning hand. It was warm and translucent and inviting. He swam toward it as it teasingly moved away. Another tendril beckoned in pink. Then green. A deconstructed rainbow was winding itself around him like a cocoon of light. The she dolphin poked him from behind, sending Loren spinning in slow-motion through the water—arms and legs out like a tumbling blue starfish—when a thirty-foot shark turned ponderously in his direction.
May I help you?
Loren, the reticent aquanaut. The she dolphin grew agitated now. She kept nudging Loren and going away and up. Finally Loren grew irritated and slapped her side as she passed yet again. She nodded her pretty, rubbery head in hurt comprehension, and then, with a powerful flex of her muscled body like a final arch of passion, she sped upward with a good-bye flutter of her comely tail. Loren was bereft. His final chance of happiness had just swum away. The tendrils of light no longer enticed him. Their beauty was frightening, cold. It pained the artist in him that evil should hide in such splendorous guise. At his nonattention the tendrils grew faint and then went dark entirely. A truly sinister shark decided to take up new residence at Loren’s side. His skin a black that sucked all remaining light. So be it. Loren shuddered out of his flippers. He almost passed out with the exertion of taking off the straps of his oxygen tank. He drank in a last sweet, deep sip of air as delicious as the fairy in its rarity and then spit out the mouthpiece. He held the tank aloft for a moment and then let it go. It was sucked downward as if by a magnet. Unable to bear the cruel face of his new companion, Loren removed his mask. Everything blossomed into a blinding white light as he took that first inhalation of sea, that first bid at a new, fishy incarnation.

*   *   *

“So where’s Loren?” Steve asked after he’d tied up the boat.

“At your hotel. Didn’t you talk to him?” Titi said.

“He came this morning and took a boat for a charter. He didn’t bring it back.”

Titi walked away without a word.

Lilou looked back and forth between the two.

“Thank you for coming,” Ann said, stepping up to her. “I’m the one who contacted you.”

*   *   *

The men decided to break up and hit separate dive destinations to save time. Cooked and Richard would cover a private spot that was Loren’s favorite.

“We’ll be in touch by radio.”

Dex and Javi went with Steve in the hotel boat, hitting the places one took tourists in case Loren’s alibi was true and he was simply in distress. Or drunk. Or some unholy combination of the two.

Once they were gone, Titi melted down on the sand. Lilou had gone to rest, kept in ignorance of what was happening.

“What is it?” Ann asked. “What do you know?”

Titi shook her head. “I feel it in my bones. An emptiness where he should be.”

As fanciful as this explanation was, Ann knew it was the right one. She had sensed something was wrong when he left. There was the mystery of his appearance on camera, but how could she have prevented his departure? If she had succeeded this one afternoon, what about all the others that would follow? As much as it pained her, she knew it was Loren’s right. She sat down next to Titi and took the girl in her arms.

*   *   *

The hotel boat was anchored where Cooked had guessed it would be. Of course there was no evidence on the boat of Loren’s fate, nothing as prosaic as a note left behind, but the final intention was beyond doubt. Cooked had liked Loren but never could bring himself to really trust foreigners. He thought in the end they would always go home. This time he was proved wrong. It moved him that Loren had made
te fenua
his final resting place. To die in the ocean made him one of them at last. The Frenchman’s death frightened him. He was not ready to take on the mantle of leader, even of this small place, but he accepted that one never was prepared. It was like being born—you were pushed out into the world.