The Last Good Paradise (30 page)

Ann edged toward the door.

Wende sighed. “I’ve decided to go home and apply to film school.”

“That’s okay,” Dex said.

“No, it isn’t. Because I need to be selfish these next few years. You’re a distraction. Your life is too big.”

She got up and went to him, sitting on the bed and pressing herself against his chest. Tears rolled down his face, maybe for Wende, maybe from the pain of his broken ribs—it was hard to tell.

*   *   *

As the wedding party settled in for a long night of drinking and eating, Wende and Ann found the “actors” from that day and paid them in dollars, crisp hundreds from Ann’s bag. They had been on the island long enough that the bills took on a kind of Monopoly-money unreality. The pay was both thanks and bribe to show up again early next morning.

When they went to see Loren, he was sitting at his desk, staring at a blackened monitor.

“How’s it going?” Wende said.

“My island is a disaster. My life’s work is ruined. What do you think, little Windy?
Diable
.”

For a moment, Wende tried to see things from his point of view, but what was the point since it got in the way of the project? “We’re going on camera again at sunup. Then you’re back to normal broadcasting. Waves and such.”

“Nothing will ever be normal again. Do you know how many viewers we had this afternoon?”

Both women shook their heads, plotting how to leave as quickly as possible.

“Twelve million!” Loren screamed.

“Twelve?” Ann seemed doubtful.

“Million!” Loren said.

“Oh my God.” Wende sat stunned. “Think about it. Our production costs so far have been about two thousand dollars. By the way, Loren, we’re going to pay you for the use of your camera. Two days filming, two thousand dollars, twelve million viewers. Maybe I should skip film school and go straight into production.”

“Did you watch it?” Ann asked him.

Loren nodded. “The best part was Dex being punched by that brute.”

Wende shot up out of her chair. “I’ve got planning to do for the morning. Ann, when you’re done, find me.”

When the two were alone, they sat in silence.

Finally Ann asked, “Would you like an absinthe?”

He nodded, and she went to pour, carrying two glasses back.

“So what do you really think?” Ann asked. In her opinion, this was strictly home-movie stuff, amateur hour. No one would be at all interested, except maybe cult followers of Prospero and Dex. But whatever. Let them have their fun.

“It’s a circus. It is your
Gilligan Island
. Who in their right mind would take any of it seriously?”

*   *   *

News of the abduction of the lead singer for Prospero by a lost Polynesian cannibal tribe made the front page across most major newspapers the next morning—a huge, above-the-fold picture of Dex, freeze-framed off the video, looking broken and forlorn. It had made the dubious leap from the entertainment to the news section. They had buried the lede of the story; only at the end was the disclaimer that the incident had yet to be verified. But a celebrity picture was a celebrity picture. Newspapers sold more briskly. Sales of Prospero downloads skyrocketed, as did bootlegged copies of CDs in third-world countries. It was a slow news week before the Memorial Day weekend, and the networks decided to pick up the story. Reporters camped out in front of Robby’s mansion in Malibu; videos were played on YouTube; MTV aired old interviews of the band. Bogus comparisons were made to Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and his probable demise by headhunters, even though the circumstances of Dex Cooper’s kidnapping at a luxury resort in Polynesia weren’t exactly a good comparison.

It was sobering that the abduction had been taken for real.

“Should we do a service announcement stating that this is a simulated abduction?” Ann asked. “That it’s a PR dramatization to bring attention to a real problem?”

“We never made claims. Ride it out,” Wende said.

The writer John Stubb Byron was now being interviewed on Fox News for his insights into the troubled rock star Dex Cooper. He provided salacious details of excessive drinking and drug use that were unfortunately all true. The rest could be read in his upcoming biography of the singer, being rushed to press.

“He was my hero,” Dex said.

When the White House press secretary fielded a question about the abduction of American citizens on French soil, whether it constituted an act of aggression or terrorism, he had no idea what the reporter was talking about. He covered by saying they were currently looking into the situation. Then they had to hurry and actually look into it before anyone discovered that they had not. When the French heard the press conference, they inferred that they were being insulted for not taking care of business. They jumped on the story that they assumed from the beginning was false, but now, true or false, if Americans believed it, it had negative tourist value. The first order of business was to pinpoint where the transmissions were coming from and put an end to them. If this was a hoax, people would go to jail.

Wende was geek enough to know that it would take some digital camouflage to keep the transmission location hidden for any length of time, so she contacted a guy friend, a hacker from Cutthroat, who agreed to scramble and resend the signal from Idaho to slow things down in exchange for front-row tickets to the next Prospero concert in Idaho. Done.

It shocked them that the hoax was being taken as authentic. Unfathomable four thousand miles away on a sweltering desert island to appreciate the effect as the story gained traction and grew bigger by the minute.

Ann’s worries that the kidnapping video would quickly be seen as fake, a piece of agitprop theater, morphed into the more troubling fear that it would be seen as real. What exactly were the legal implications of perpetrating a global prank? She was beginning to suspect that, even if the media didn’t believe in the video’s legitimacy, that wouldn’t stop them from acting on the story—it dovetailed nicely with the prevalence of reality shows and the meshing of news and entertainment for ratings: infotainment.

Experts in Polynesian anthropology were called in to identify from the video footage both the island and the specific cannibal tribe supposedly holding Dex Cooper hostage. News sources were totally bummed to find out that cannibalism in Polynesia had effectively ended in the islands by the start of the twentieth century. The experts were able to surmise that the white sandy beach was not characteristic of the volcanic rocky cliffs of the Marquesas, but was more likely in the south, possibly in the Society or Gambier island chains, or in the even more remote east of the Tuamotu Archipelago.

The costumes confused the experts even more, until one particularly iconoclastic female anthropologist from a university in the Pacific Northwest recognized the costumes from a Papeete dance troupe she had seen a few years back in Seattle with an ex-boyfriend. She supplied corroborating evidence in the form of promotional flyers and a captioned picture in the Capitol Hill weekly entertainment newspaper.

The French government, mired in a deflationary economy, with an increasingly hostile electorate, totally believed in the video’s power to ruin consumer spending, and contacted their branch colonial counterparts to rev up the French military (
We are losing tourist euros every minute as we speak!
), intending to launch a military rescue mission once the exact location was pinpointed. If it was real, or thought to be real, they would be heroes. If it was faked, they would haul the perpetrators to jail.

The resourceful American paparazzi beat them all. Someone had a friend of a friend of the resort manager Steve, who received nice monthly payments for reporting on celebrity sightings on the island (higher for women, the most for topless), and who had nothing to lose now that Loren had screwed him over on his commission for selling the
motu
to the conglomerate that owned the main resort.

A group of paparazzi, all of whom thought the video was strictly a publicity stunt by a has-been rock band, didn’t care because Dex’s picture made the story lucrative to the tabloids, not to mention a free vacation for them. They pooled resources to charter a jet to deliver them to Tahiti by early morning, followed by network newscasters in their own corporate jets, who blindly aped the paparazzi for the entertainment angle to combat falling ratings, followed by newspaper reporters on Air Tahiti, riding in economy (many using their own frequent-flier miles), who were the only ones who actually understood or cared about the politics of the video, but their stories had been bumped for years because nuclear poisoning wasn’t “sexy” enough. Dex’s presence had just made it a whole lot more so.

From Papeete, each was on his own to discover the where and the how of finding the right atoll. Within hours, every charter tourist helicopter and boat was gone. The French military, reeling from budget cuts and layoffs, were even further behind than the newspaper reporters. Worried about looking bad and thus instigating another round of cuts and layoffs, once they caught wind of the reporters descending, they decided to send covert operatives—that is, pretty French waitresses from the hotels where the press were staying—to either find out or accompany them, carrying satellite GPS on their persons.

By noon, helicopters, amphibious airplanes, frigates, and motorboats were converging on the small, hitherto exclusive and unknown atoll.

*   *   *

Wende shivered in the predawn night, despite the blood-warm air, although in the bigger sense she was no longer physically on the island. Definitely not recognizably as the person formerly known as Wende, who had occupied the resort during the last two months. She ate as much as she felt like and didn’t bother with exercise. Waking, she took a quick shower and clothed herself in her new roomy, comfort clothes, without looking in the mirror. As she gave up the elaborate toilette that went into being a “hottie,” she realized the obvious: she could abandon her beauty now or not, but either way, it would abandon her eventually. It was a loyalty program with a built-in, guaranteed obsolescence. Time would erode her most valuable asset, so she better be prepared.

None of these thoughts greatly bothered her because she felt like pure spirit, and this pure spirit’s only purpose was to bear witness to the
vision
that existed in her head, to get it down as quickly as possible before it expired or disappeared under the taxing logistics of dealing with one hundred and fifty Polynesian extras; plus the cranky principal actors, including one gloomy rock star ex-boyfriend; plus a suicidal owner, Loren, threatening to pull the electrical plug; plus the technical difficulties of the transmission to the stoned hacker friend in Cutthroat, who asked repeatedly, in texts—
’SUP? nOOb
—plus whatever the reaction was
out there
, back in the world.

The eight “Cannibal Kidnappers,” as the
Observer
had dubbed them, showed up for their continuity check, visibly subdued even behind their coconut masks. On balance, Wende thought it had worked out nicely to let them get shit-faced the previous night. Now they had a stolidness about them that was not typical of these rambunctious, puppy-fun men, but they did look a little slow, a little dazed. Hungover rather than menacing.

“Before the camera goes on, how about a few laps up and down the beach? I need a little pep. Some energy, people!”

“Why do they need to jog?” Cooked asked, petulant at his abrupt dismissal both as boy toy and lead actor in the video.

“Trust me on this.”

Dex sat in her director’s chair (dug up from the yacht of a movie producer who had been a former guest).

“How you doing?” she said gently.

“You didn’t care if I bled to death.”

“A doctor will be here any minute. Not my fault that they couldn’t find a boat last night, huh?”

“If anyone cared, one of the ones docked here could have made the trip.”

Wende nodded, frowned. “The sun comes up. You give your speech, Cooked gives his, bam, we’re done.”

“We’re done, too, that’s what you’re saying.”

She moved in close to him. “Today, Dex, you are doing something great. You are helping people who don’t have a voice. You are putting your fame to a higher purpose. You are touching on the wings of greatness. I, for one, have never been as turned on by you as I am this very minute. Think what it’s going to do to your fans. Think Lennon, Clapton, Bono.”

Dex blinked. “And us?”

“Let’s not have things messy right now.”

“You used me.”

Dex had never cared so deeply now that she didn’t.

*   *   *

The red disk of the sun rose out of the primal broth of ocean as the Crusoe live cam returned to shaky, computer-generated faux life, capturing the light on the water and the pole in front of it in a symbolically powerful crucifixion tableau. Unbeknownst to the experts, the live cam had been moved and pointed in a different direction in order to capture that very sunrise (Loren had purposely avoided such a location for its commercial vulgarity, much preferring the more subtle Japanese aesthetic of a slow lightening of sky, water, and sand to represent the passage of time), confusing the calculations of the experts and bringing the island a few more hours of splendid isolation.

The faint throbbing of drums grew louder and louder as they approached. The eight “Cannibal Henchmen” (
Daily Star
), as they were now known in the world press, came on, but this time they weren’t restraining a bound Dex. They were forming an escort. Although Wende had considered dragging the whole thing out, Ann had convinced her to end the charade as quickly as possible. Dex walked solemnly between his former jailors. They had removed some of his bruise makeup and applied cover-up to the real bruises so that the damage wasn’t a reminder of yesterday’s brutality. Wende didn’t want the audience thinking that this turnabout was coerced Stockholm syndrome stuff.

Dex stepped in front of the “cannibals,” who formed a fierce backdrop behind him.