Children of Paradise: A Novel (42 page)

Trina cries all the way back to the compound. She apologizes over and over to her mother for dragging her into more trouble. Joyce tells her to stop apologizing for doing what is right. As they walk into the clearing by Adam’s cage, Adam jumps up and down and shakes the bars. He seems simultaneously mad and glad to see them. A few people ask why Trina is soaked through. Joyce says a minor mishap at the pig farm. Joyce asks Ryan and Rose to stick close to Trina and to her, since the next few hours will be vital for all of them. Ryan and Rose ask what they should say when asked about the trip to the river.

—Tell them you skipped stones on the river. Come with me, young lady, you need to change out of those wet clothes.

Joyce heads for the laundry house and tailor shop with a drenched Trina trailing after her.

—She fell in a pig trough. I had to hose her down.

Joyce slows and pulls up beside Trina and drapes an arm over her daughter’s shoulder and pulls her close. Trina puts her arm around her mother’s waist. As they walk, Joyce leans toward her daughter’s ear and divulges a few things of such importance that they widen Trina’s eyes and trigger the seventeen muscles that it takes to smile and return the sprightliness to her steps.

They wave simultaneously at Adam. He makes synchronized pendulums of his arms. Joyce waits on Trina as she washes away the smell of the river, fusses with a towel, and wriggles into dry clothes. Joyce zeroes in on Trina’s head with a mother’s mix of comb strokes, gentle tugs, and prods with her articulate fingers, her eyes steeped in thought as she divides her daughter’s hair.

—My darling daughter, you must outlive me.

—No, Mum, let’s grow old together.

Joyce sticks the comb in a tuft on Trina’s skull, and with free hands, her fingers interlace and scissor as she plaits a neat row along Trina’s scalp from the front, where her child’s hairline meets her forehead, to the back, at the nape of her neck.

—Where’re we from again, Mom?

—Redwood.

—Where’s that?

—In San Mateo County.

—California.

—West Coast.

—U.S.A.

—North America.

—Western hemisphere.

—Earth.

—The galaxy.

—The universe.

Joyce stands and steps aside from the chair and away from her daughter, who looks up at her. She sets the comb on the chair and stoops down and grabs her daughter tightly. Trina pauses for a moment, then throws her arms around her mother and soaks up the kisses planted on her neck and the whisper of love and love and you, you, you, which she says back to her mother in an echo of love and you and I and you too.

T
he preacher calls the president:

—Can’t you do something, anything, to stop them from coming?

—What should I do with the eyes of the world watching?

—Fuck the eyes of the world. Throw all of them off the twelfth floor. Just don’t fob them off on me.

—You know these people cannot be harmed. The best course is to show them what they want and be rid of them. You have a self-sufficient community—show them that; show them your schools, your choir—

The preacher cuts off the president:

—Don’t tell me how to do my job when you can’t do yours.

The president’s earpiece hums, killed at the other end.

The president asks for all calls from the preacher to be blocked.

—Who does he think he’s talking to? Two-bit con man lording it over a bunch of losers.

The president knocks his portrait of the preacher off his desk, and the framed glass smashes on the floor.

At the same time, the preacher looks for something to throw against a wall or someone to grab and hit, but Dee, Nora, and Pat slide out of reach and the guards make themselves scarce.

The preacher takes off his dark glasses and flings them.

—You pay for what you never get in this country.

He storms outside. The guards at the door jump to attention. He leaps off the front porch and squints skyward and throws up his arms and shouts at the glare of the sun:

—Let them come! Let them come and see what I can do!

He feels around him, hardly able to see in the open. He scoots back into the house.

—Pat! Dee! Nora! Bring me my dark glasses. Dammit.

The pilot of the twin-engine Cessna informs the passengers that the journey to the compound involves a small detour, by popular request, past the country’s famous falls. The passengers applaud. The plane taxies and climbs off the runway in sixty thunderous seconds. The pilot reports excellent weather but warns that his forecast is subject to dramatic change in this mountainous, forested terrain. In no time the buildings thin out, with the capillaries of dirt roads running in crisscross fashion among voluminous trees. Trees fill the windows, and a river twists out to an expanse of sea.

The plane crosses the river at a wide juncture in its course, and at some point the water seems as wide as a sea, with its own islands and small powerboats dragging their tails up- and downstream. A passenger who tried too much of the country’s signal red rum the night before reaches into the back of the seat in front of him just in time to catch the contents of his bilious stomach in the waxy bag that he quickly unfolded. People around him squirm and cover their noses to quell the contagion of stomach juices. They pretend not to notice anything, and he holds up a piteous hand as he continues to retch into the bag.

For the next hundred miles, a host of greenery looms. As far as sight, the ground looks stuffed with broccoli. The bulbous, crumpled, inflated, vibrant, slumbering, towering, seemingly endless jungle makes the plane feel like a toy that, if dropped into the wild arrangement of greenery below, would be swallowed and never found. A clearing opens up: brown and red naked earth like a scar, with bulldozers pressing into the giant trees, felling them one by one and wounding the forest. Columns of smoke dawdle above large brick ovens dedicated to burning trees to make charcoal. Other clearings reveal huts and half-naked figures staring up with a hand in salute to shade the eyes. And just as the passengers begin to talk about their business at the commune, some of them wonder what they will find. They pass through cloud and the windows streak with rain and the plane banks and emerges from cloud and beside them the wall of water drops and turns to mist far below. A rainbow arches over the plane and the passengers crane their necks to catch the colors as they fly through the rainbow and for a moment the banked aircraft, the endless waterfall, the plunging rainbow above and below scramble their bearings and invert polarities so they have no idea if the falls they see go down or up and the rainbow loops like a skipping rope for the plane to jump over.

The compound strings a banner that welcomes the delegation to the commune. The residents hang yellow and green commune flags, alternated with flags of their adopted country and flags of their home country. These strings of three flags drape over entrances and between buildings and signal the commune’s alliance to three places. Each flag represents a distinct geography, but taken together, as an amalgamation, they amount to no place found on earth. The residents break into opposing groups. Most people say they should obey the preacher and not listen to the delegation, whose visit spells trouble for everyone, but some think this may be their only opportunity to break with the commune, whose leader seems to be in meltdown. They debate in fierce whispers: He cried when they hit the children, he made children beat their parents, he cut his wrists to prove a point, he thinks he is impervious to bullets, he lies down with a gorilla in its cage. Perhaps the jungle experiment is a failure. Maybe their faith needs some other communal outlet. What loving God asks parents to poison their children as a means to salvation? Can a delegation made up of the press, politicians, and blood relatives really be such a dangerous entity and pose a threat to the commune? How? These questions rage among commune members as they work side by side, so the talk in the compound is at a higher pitch, and the preacher and his managers put it down to excitement about the delegation’s imminent arrival.

Various scouts and prefects report the growing dissent to the preacher, who says he has a special surprise in store for those in the commune who want to be deserters. He reminds everyone over the loudspeakers what happens to deserters in the military during a time of war—and this is a time of war for the commune, as they are about to face the most serious assault ever mounted against them.

—This is our last stand, right here. Anyone comes here, our rules apply. People ask me all the time why we don’t turn the other cheek to our attackers, like good Christians. Why? So they can slap that side as well? And if they run out of sides to slap and want to keep hitting us, what else is there for us to offer up to them? I say we are not just passive Christians. We do not just turn the other cheek. The Good Book says, “If mine enemy smite me I shall smite him back with interest.” We are crusaders. We are soldiers of Christ the Savior. We do not turn the other cheek. This is where we make our last stand. Repeat after me. We are soldiers of Christ.

—We are soldiers of Christ.

—We do not turn the other cheek.

—We do not turn the other cheek.

—If mine enemy smite me I shall smite him back with interest.

—If mine enemy smite me I shall smite him back with interest.

He calls together his senior guards and announces that any of his followers in the commune who elect to leave with the visiting delegation must not be allowed to do so under any circumstances. He says the result of any defections would be an endless stream of official visits and renewed scrutiny and the beginning of the end for the commune. He reminds them how far they have all come since their days scratching out a living in a country that throws away its people by the boatload: in wars, in prisons, in high homicide rates, in abject poverty, in ghettos, in godless materialist pursuit. The commune was born out of this necessity, to save the souls of the few left in the country who believed in the kingdom of heaven. They ran from terrible destructive forces to find peace in this jungle as they prepared for salvation, and now the day looms large as the devil’s emissaries near the compound.

He turns on the commune’s loudspeakers and announces that the Day of Judgment is near. People stop last-minute preparations for the delegation and begin to pray. He says the delegation’s arrival will drive a wedge between parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife, and as their protector, he must launch a final counterattack to save them from suffering and assure their passage to eternity.

—You know what we have to do, brothers and sisters, you know how we can escape the devil coming in disguise to tempt you and rob you of your place in heaven. You know what we must do. You must answer the call when you hear it. You trust me in this, and we shall meet again in heaven. Don’t be afraid. Something scares you, and you come running to me with your tails between your legs. You know what I have to put up with, alone, every night? You want to know what I have to face on account of all of you? Death. Death walks up to me and says it is my turn to go on a little trip with him, to a place he set aside just for me. I look at his animal shape and hoof feet, horns on his head, and I nod without a word of protest or any hesitation. I want to say to him, I’ve been expecting you, what took you so long? But he knows my thinking even before I know it, and knowing me the way he does, he just walks up to me and claims me as his prize. We do not waste air with words after he identifies me. I nod. You want Father? The devil nods. And I say, Father dead, family done. And we stroll off together.

—Our walk to end all walks builds into a trot until next thing we are flying. Instead of a journey skyward, we tunnel to the center of the earth. I feel none of this, numb from head to toe. The tips of my fingers feel numb. I want to take the devil’s hand. Not that he offers it. But I do not. That, too, would be a waste of energy. I want to attack him in the name of Christ, but I think better of it, unsure what he would do to me in my flesh-and-blood state. I do not feel pain. My numb body registers nothing, but I remember pain, and the memory is enough to serve as a warning to be careful. I know from stories about the devil that death has a lot of bad things in store for me and that I deserve them all.

—To tell you the truth, I expect God to come and claim me, not the devil. I expect life, eternal life, not hell and damnation. I disguise my mild surprise at seeing the devil as intrigue, too tired to muster the suitable level of outrage. God, I did all this for You, and this is how You repay me? I think this. My evil escort glances at me as if to encourage me to think something complimentary about him fast, or I will face the consequences. This time flying headlong downward, with the earth parting for us, takes time and no time at all. I think the way we move appears to be outside of time, looking at a fish tank populated with varieties of time. I tap the glass to see a piece of time dart from me, a colorful piece with long fins and large eyes and rainbows for scales. I tap the glass again and a sign looms up that says: Do Not Tap Glass. No please, no explanation, but I cannot disobey. Once I read it, I must comply with it.

—I could have written it myself. I say it enough times. I say enough to fill a library. I do not write a word. I want my books to boil in the blood of my people, to fill the seashells of their ears with their constant roar. All my life I need one book and one book only, the Good Book. And from it, I spin my talking books. Not one man or woman tells me to my face that I am bad for them or their children. Not one. My enemies attack me from a safe distance. Across the sea. In courtrooms. What kind of fight do you call that? Spineless. Bloodless.

—God comes to me in my sleep. He takes the form of a branch scratching against the windowpane. The branch writes on the glass, and I read the writing, and though written from the outside, the words flow nevertheless from left to right and join up. The branch says, “Do not eat of the fruits of man. Eat from the orchard of the Lord. Do not drink from the well, drink from the spring that feeds the well.” I wake and read it, not once but a few times, before it fades. I take the teaching to mean that I should listen to my voice and not the clamoring voices of others. It gives me permission to open the Good Book and speak directly from it as I see fit.