Children of Paradise: A Novel (2 page)

—Miss Joyce! Miss Joyce!

Ryan and Rose run to help their friend, who threw them one-liners for their response not long ago. They join in the call for Trina’s mother:

—Miss Joyce! Miss Joyce!

Until this moment anyone seeing the proliferation of children, all in the open, might mistake the place for a colony without any grown-ups. Not one of them can be seen, busy as they are doing all the things the children cannot manage on their own. Cooks at fires balance the flavor of giant pots. Nurses attend to the sick in the infirmary. Carpenters operate the sawmill or climb ladders to perilous rooftops or feed garbage into the single-minded incinerator. Guards patrol the vast boundary of the compound and check fences and secure gates with rifles slung over shoulders to free their hands for a hammer and nails, or large sticks that they set alongside them as they repair a fence post or tighten barbed wire around the commune perimeter, or they simply stroll and scan everywhere and everyone within range, their arms draped over the ends of sticks balanced behind their necks. The men and women and some older children on farm duty stop their swilling and cleaning of the outlying pig and cow pens. All abandon their duties and run toward the screams. The preacher’s advisers stop their paperwork and radio communications with the faraway capital and make their way to the exit of the main house at the front of the square, unsure what the reason can be for this commotion among the children. Even the commune leader who looked out the window moments earlier at a scene of enviable joy, even he registers something different and decides on the basis of what he hears that his intervention is merited and heads directly for the front door.

—Miss Joyce! Miss Joyce!

Joyce never heard her name called this way, more like a summons, a repeating alarm. She knows right away that her daughter is in trouble. She jumps up from her ledger of supplies for the commune and covers her mouth to trap a scream. Her chair falls to the floor, and receipts scatter from her makeshift desk. She scrambles to the exit of the main house. She prays quickly and quietly for Trina’s safety, more a thought than an utterance, since her lips move but there is no sound.

God, please. Keep my child safe.

This is how Adam earns his second beating. He holds on to Trina and refuses to release his grip. The perimeter guards are the first to approach the cage. They push the circle of children out of the way. They carry long sticks and rifles. They shout at Adam and lash his arms, careful to avoid hitting the child. They swing their sticks and jut the butts of their rifles. A carpenter among the guards swings a hammer. Joyce runs up to the cage and screams at the guards to stop. She fears a badly aimed blow as much as the predicament of her child in the grip of a gorilla. The guards slow a little but do not stop. Adam switches arms around Trina, from his right arm to his left to avoid the pain brought by the men. Trina spots her mother.

—Mom, help me.

Trina stops looking at the men gathered to rescue her. The sight of her mother close and yet far helps to calm her a fraction. She hears children crying, picks out her two close friends, Ryan and Rose, calling her, but they sound farther away than their bodies look. The bodies and voices of the crowd near the cage begin to blur into one mass of sound and movement as Adam tightens his arms around Trina. She cannot keep her mother in focus. She struggles to breathe. Adam’s grip moderates Trina’s screams. She becomes quieter. Her screams shorten to less frequent bursts of air from her constricted frame. Trina’s eyes drift down to the large hairy arms alternating around her body. Adam’s arms feel heavy on her chest and stomach. Under pressure, Trina’s mind switches from the reality of her predicament with Adam to the weightlessness of a dream built from memories of trunks of fallen trees. The kind of tree trunk so big across that she cannot jump over it cleanly but must step up onto its bulk before she leaps down the other side. Mass she views as truly immovable because the large span of one such fallen tree remained for ages lying across a path, and chain saws had to cut it into pieces to clear that path, and several men together could not pick up one such trunk. She feels trapped under a fallen tree. The trunk presses on her chest. She waits for the hands of adults to free her, but they appear to need more time than she can spare.

Trina twists her head to her extreme left to catch a glimpse of Adam’s face, perhaps to put an expression to the strong arms or with her own look of a desperate plea to convince the mind behind the face to free her. The men continue to strike Adam’s arm, and he switches Trina from his left arm to his right. His grip tightens around Trina’s torso more as a natural reflex to the blows than out of any intention to harm the child. Her cries stop. She slumps in Adam’s embrace. The guards lessen then and cease swinging their sticks. Joyce begs someone to free her child. The preacher in charge of all things at the commune pushes his way to the front of the crowd, which parts for him, and in a soothing voice, he offers Adam one very ripe plantain, the yellow skin streaked with black. Adam grabs the fruit with his left hand. The preacher offers a second fruit, and Adam grabs that one as well. He holds Trina in one arm and two plantains in the other hand, both arms stick out between the bars of his cage.

The cage door opens, and Adam sees a tempting variety of treats, bananas, oranges, breadfruit, a head of lettuce, and mangoes, just beyond his reach. Adam tries to work the child’s slumped body along the bars while maintaining his grip on her so that he can reach the fruit basket. But he loses patience with the trickiness of moving Trina along while supporting her slack body and feeding his arms in and out of the bars as he progresses nearer and nearer the hoard of treats. In his haste to move closer to the basket and keep hold of the child in one arm and the two plantains in his other hand, he tightens his grip and squashes the fruits. Adam keeps his eyes on the preacher, who beckons him to come nearer and nearer. Adam, Adam, Adam, the preacher says in a soothing voice. Adam hardly notices his arms slacken around the silent child. He drops her without looking at how her body falls in a heap, one leg under her, the other stuck out to the side and twisted the wrong way, malleable as wire or clay.

The preacher orders the guards and his assistants to take Trina to the infirmary and wait for his orders. The men and women, Joyce first among them, rush to retrieve Trina. Two of the guards drop their sticks, push Joyce to one side, and scoop Trina off the ground somewhat clumsily because they are partly attentive to her and partly mindful of Adam’s exact location in relation to them. They lower Trina to the ground a safe distance from the cage. Joyce drops to her knees and pulls Trina to her chest and sobs. A nurse and the commune doctor separate Joyce from Trina and begin to examine the girl for a breath and a pulse. Two women restrain Joyce and urge her to let the nurse and doctor help. No one is allowed to approach the circle of nurses, the doctor, the personal assistants to the preacher, and the guards surrounding Trina. A heated discussion ensues in hushed tones.

Adam leaps on the treats and scoffs them. The preacher stands less than three feet away. Adam turns once or twice from the food and growls at his benefactor to stay away. The preacher seems not to care about the gorilla’s threats. Adam gathers his treats and moves sideways to the back of his cage, away from his brazen master, then crouches beside the collection of treats and does not notice the preacher exit the cage. Adam looks at the cage door just as the commune leader loops a chain around the door and the bars of the cage and threads the catch of a padlock through holes in the last two links of the chain. It hardly crosses Adam’s mind that he should ignore the treats, charge at the exit, and escape from the cage. Instead he thinks it wise to watch the children more closely the next time they play in case another child approaches his cage. He plans to grip that child as well and take the beating that comes with it just to earn himself more treats.

The preacher orders his guards to clear the area and his men to brandish sticks and lash at the legs of the children who fail to move away quickly enough. Next he orders that Trina be taken to the infirmary, and he allots two other guards to escort Joyce to the main house. Joyce acquiesces quietly. She knows better than to protest against an order from the commune’s leader, even if it means being separated from her injured daughter. The preacher holds up his arms, and the array of guards in the middle of clearing the compound, as well as the many children and adult onlookers backing away, come to a standstill and hush.

—The child is no longer with us. Get back to your work of serving God.

He turns and marches to the infirmary, his walk an odd mix of soldier and sailor, of rigidity and inebriated spasticity. Joyce screams, No. The men and women around her grab her as she lunges toward her daughter. They lift and drag Joyce away from the clearing and steer her to the main house. One of the women, a personal assistant to the preacher, thrusts her face close to Joyce’s and speaks in a rapid volley that is almost a whisper. Joyce nods as she keeps her eyes locked to the woman’s stern gaze. Whatever Joyce hears from the preacher’s assistant, whatever the nature of the threat or inducement, it is enough to make Joyce assume a cooperative demeanor. She nods. She stops her struggle. Her shoulders drop. She takes the arm of the nearest person to her and barely lifts her legs as she is led back to the house. Her lips move and issue a small sound. It would take someone standing very close to her, as close as it takes to stare into a pocket mirror, to hear Joyce’s lips forming her daughter’s name. Trina, said over and again, Trina.

—Guards! Guards!

A prefect shouts for help to come right away and deal with his rebellious mother. Two guards approach the teenager and his mother. She tries to tell her son to be quiet, that she meant nothing by what she said to him. But the prefect, in keeping with his training to listen and report anything suspicious that he hears, no matter the source, tells the guards that his mother said the child could not possibly be dead, that she had to be in a faint or a state of shock. The guards congratulate the prefect on his loyalty to Father and the commune, over and above any loyalty to blood, and second only in loyalty to the Most High. They grab the woman and march her away. The teenager looks satisfied but not completely so. He looks around for someone else, anyone else, nearby to tell him he did the right thing in reporting his mother to the guards. He did as he was trained to do, as all the children are trained to do: Report anyone who expresses any opinion that goes against the teachings and orders of their leader. Another prefect comes over to the teenager and pats him on the back. The teenager watches his mother for a moment as the guards march her to the infirmary, where the commune leader and his inner circle of advisers and assistants have Trina. The other prefect hits the teenager gently on the arm, gently but with sufficient purpose to jolt him back to the business at hand, and the two plunge themselves into the fray of clearing the compound of idling children.

Guards raise their sticks and swing them at children and shout at others to move away from the area. Ryan and Rose and the other children who share a dormitory with Trina begin to cry aloud and ignore the sticks. Poorly aimed blows, meant for the legs, connect with backs and arms. Rose ducks too low in an effort to dodge a blow, and the bamboo stick hits her on her head and splits the thin flesh. The quick flow of blood heightens her screams and attracts more lashes to quiet her. Ryan rushes forward and grabs Rose, steering her away from the square, and both draw a few more lashes from the guards, who continue in their quest to carry out the preacher’s orders. Parents do their best to pull their distraught children away from the raised sticks. The adults around Joyce wipe their eyes and avoid her empty stare. They fight an impulse to stand and look in the direction of the infirmary. The whole thing has happened so fast that many of the children appear puzzled, and some of them repeatedly ask the older children nearby and the adults they can trust if it can really be so that the girl, Trina, just died in the arms of the gorilla. The same reply emerges from each responsible older child and adult as if learned by rote: If Father says the child is dead, then it has to be so.

And from being a clearing in the jungle where moments ago children ran in wild abandon, the compound converts into an empty mausoleum, no children in the open. Whimpers emanate from the oblong dormitories where the children dived for cover. An older girl soothes Rose while Ryan dabs the cut on her head. Several boys and girls covered in welts from the sticks sit with friends who comfort them and urge them at the same time to be quiet as they struggle to recover their composure. Their cries are discernible only by standing directly outside the dormitory’s log building and listening for signs of distress. Guards practice this act of listening and leaning with an ear against a door only to bang against the door for absolute silence. The guards repeat the trick at other dormitories, and that proves sufficient, for soon the settlement returns to calm and industry, an air overlaid by the metronomic thrum of the power generator and an occasional splash of parrots mapping their flight paths with screeches or the ferocious tapping of woodpeckers pausing to squawk with delight at their progress drilling holes in the trunks of trees.

Adam peers through his bars around the empty compound and up at the sky, where the bales of cloud have all too soon begun to whittle away and become translucent and invisible in the dropping furnace of the sun. Branches on the zinc roof of Adam’s cage deflect the heat and create an illusion of a natural habitat; tarpaulin curtains guard two sides of the cage against the sun’s flame. A pile of bedding furnishes one area, mostly straw, small branches, old clothes, and, for entertainment, a large tree limb on the floor and an old tire suspended from a rope at the center of the cage. Adam avoids the trough of pig swill but tolerates his water bowl. On occasion he enjoys treats of fruit and confectionary.

It was not always like this. At one time the cage was never locked, and he could roam around the compound getting into mischief. Monkey business, the preacher called it. He wrestled with the commune guards, who seemed content to roll around with him on the floor until he clobbered them unintentionally, intending to fend off a blow or beat someone to the punch. This resulted in fewer romps on the floor of huts or in the grass, though there was always someone willing to challenge him and risk getting knocked around. Denied a watermelon, the gorilla became angry and took it anyway, cuffing the commune guard who stood between him and his food. The dismissive wave of his hand translated in human terms into a perfect sucker punch. A couple more guards approached, and he fought them off with a few well-aimed sweeps of his arms. Others arrived to chase him out of the storeroom when he was grabbing at one treat after another, some of which he ate in just one bite. He attracted more guards, and their numbers turned into a crowd. The cheers and smiles turned to jeers and curses.