Children of Paradise: A Novel (36 page)

In the morning it is almost sorrow to resume their former selves, but it is sweet to feel renewed, in a new body, and therefore in a new set of circumstances even if they face the same things. They eat cornmeal porridge and drink green tea and thank their hosts and offer a few dollars. The first mate asks the captain’s permission to give away his cap and the captain says yes and the first mate drops it on the head of a child who immediately attracts many small hands that try to pull it off and the child runs away pursued. The two men promise Sid that they will return soon. They dip in the river and brush their teeth with the chewed end of a twig from a special bush with oil in it that polishes the teeth and leaves the mouth feeling fresh. The captain asks his first mate if he is ready. The first mate says never more so.

—Let’s do this.

The first mate nods slowly and spins the wheel. In the morning light, as the boat leans into the current, it looks like a perfectly formed flock of parakeets swooping low over the water. The
Many Rivers
cuts across the river current, set on a course for the commune.

Trina brings Ryan a bowl of cornmeal porridge. He crawls out of his hiding place under the bunk bed but refuses to eat. She tells him the trouble she went through to walk from the kitchen with a bowl of porridge that every hungry child wants to take from her and every prefect and guard she meets questions her about. Still Ryan shakes his head and looks at the bowl as if it might be poison. She tells him she might get into big trouble for telling everyone that the preacher asked for the bowl of porridge so that he can sample the quality of the breakfast being fed to his flock, but Ryan remains unmoved. Trina dips the spoon in the porridge and eats a little and tries to feed the rest to him. He pulls his head away and keeps his lips sealed. She brings the spoon to his mouth and presses it to his bottom lip and he takes the spoon’s contents and swallows. She feeds him again and again until the bowl empties.

—Next time you feed yourself, you big baby.

T
he president of the land of many waters dictates a letter that he wants flown and delivered forthwith to the commune leader with the date—two weeks hence, is how he puts it—of the U.S. delegation’s arrival and its composition. Next to the list of names, he writes “press” or “VIP” or “concerned relative” and the kind of access each wants at the commune. His letter advises the reverend to take this one on the chin and he will be rid of foreign interference, since half the things said about the commune concern outside access and this visit would settle that question and quiet the negative publicity. The president argues that this could be a positive public relations exercise if the commune handles the visit with professionalism. Much can be accomplished in the few days before the delegation arrives. He recommends that the commune spruce up the place, mow grass, a lick of paint here and there, put out flags, bunting, that sort of thing. Plenty of schoolchildren in neatly pressed uniforms always do the trick with the media.

Finally, he offers the assistance of the highest office of the land to the commune leader to facilitate the urban aspects of the visit.

We have a zoo with the largest collection of anteaters on the continent. Our botanical gardens abound with Rafflesia, the largest single flower on earth, some opening only once every twenty years, with a twenty years’ smell to match; to witness one of these rare specimens opening is to remember that time and day for the rest of your days. The largest wooden building in the southern hemisphere that is a miracle of engineering is here, and cloth, we are a land of weavers, and the best indigenous Indian wood carvings at bargain prices, the best curried goat, the most prized blood pudding, the most precious gold and diamonds at a steal given the exchange rates, the most mouthwatering cow foot, pig foot, and offal stew, and the world’s longest single-drop waterfall in the free world, not to forget calypso, everyone needs to dance every once in a while, and we have cricket
.

The preacher’s assistants divide themselves between checking the radio to see if the connection to the president’s office is still open and making sure the reverend is okay. The preacher looks around for something else to throw, and seeing nothing within reach, he stamps his feet, jumps up and down on the spot, and rushes at the radio again, but his assistants and the guards restrain him. They release him and he warns them all never to lay a finger on him when he has a mind to do something. He turns to the nearest guard and punches him hard in the stomach. The guard doubles over and vomits into his hands and darts out of the room, still leaning forward and leaving a trail of bile and a sour smell in his wake.

The people roam around the commune, guided by chores. All appear to wait for something, an order to switch tasks, another summons to meet, or a message on the broadcast system. They do what they think the preacher wants them to do, but he asks something different of them. They move as if the preacher were standing in their midst, directing them this way and that. They move against each other at the slightest provocation or report of dissent or any accusation of impudence or a lack of effort. Adam watches them as if he stands in their place and they in his and he acts for them.

Adam spots the woman in an apron covered in flour, coming toward his cage, and he sways from side to side and grips the bars. He holds his open hand through the bars and Joyce places an aromatic chunk of warmth in his palm. Bread, she says, and she spells it for him, b-r-e-a-d. He looks at her, retracts his arm with the spoils, and scoots to the back of his cage. He sits on his bed and nibbles the bread to make it last. Soon enough, though, the bread disappears. He sniffs his hand for the bread smell. Soon that goes, too. He considers asking her for some more, with a sound for bread and an open palm pushed through the bars of his cage and perhaps a gesture of that hand to his mouth. If not Joyce, someone else will come along soon with a banana. The preacher or Trina. Or both.

The guards believe their gunfire repelled a mercenary attack on the commune. They say the assailants manipulated the jungle according to their training, but the superior firepower of the guards saved the day. These hostile forces will regroup and launch another, more direct attack on the commune, so preparations need to be made to repulse them. And if this line of defense fails, there is always the ultimate escape route from capture and imprisonment and separation of parents from children and dissolution of the commune. The preacher asks the guards if they accept his assessment of the situation and his remedy for it. They all agree that they want to evade their persecutors and be by their leader’s side in paradise. They will mount an armed defense of the commune as a first response to any hostility, and this should create a diversion and help to facilitate the orderly departure of everyone in the commune from this world to the next. The leader says theirs is a win-win situation. Faith is the only requisite ingredient in a recipe to win the kingdom of heaven.

Over the community loudspeaker, the preacher announces the imminent arrival of a delegation from the U.S.:

—Soon Satan will set foot in our holy refuge.

It galls him to say the name of the land that banished them all. He asks the faithful if they want prying eyes and hostile minds to walk all over the commune that their labor built from nothing, the order that they carved out of the chaos of the jungle, for these intruders to judge them as if they were common criminals. No one wants that, and they all pause in the middle of their chores to shout and gesticulate at the nearest loudspeaker.

At the evening sermon he talks late into the night and orders the commune to rise at dawn to purge their sins and pray. People faint in the congregation. Many need medication to sleep, to stay awake, to eat, to stop eating, to stop biting their nails and pulling their hair, to stop their hair from falling out, to cure inexplicable rashes, for shingles, for mono, for nervous exhaustion, for not knowing which way to turn and not being able to tell their up from their down, their left from their right. They need to sleep but the preacher will not let them. He broadcasts night and day and at irregular intervals. His people’s nerves are frayed, their minds rendered incapable of making the simplest decisions. They ask someone in charge what to wear, what to do, and when to do it. They stand in one place for ages, unsure what to do next or what to think. They walk around and bump into furniture, each other, drop plates of food and glasses with milk and clean clothes that need to be rinsed all over again, and which they’ll wear back to front and inside out.

He marches them around the commune and points out where vipers and tarantulas and scorpions might nest and bite a child, and idle pools where mosquitoes might hatch and spread malaria, and worms that eat between the toes and flesh-eating mites that crawl into the crotch. He reminds them their children belong to God and their lives will be better in God’s hands and not his and not this commune, and no place on this godforsaken earth is good enough for his flock, only the kingdom of heaven, only everlasting life. For their vigilance in this life against the temptations of the flesh, they will garner freedom of the spirit in the next. This life in this commune tests their bodies every day, but the real test is their faith in a spiritual life that lasts forever.

He tries to get them to comprehend forever. Old men and women in the commune stand during the sermons and face the young people nearest, and they swear to those youth that time is an illusion, one day you are young, the next, old, and that their earthly lives will run away from them like quicksilver, will pass through their fingers like the river’s water. That yesterday they are young, less than yesterday, a moment ago, that they blink and open their eyes and, lo, they are old. That they find the days shorter and shorter. That this time they are in, this present, is just a trick, chump change, funny money that is robbed from them in an instant of daylight. The old testify to the young that the afterlife has no truck with conventional hours, days, weeks, months, and years. They believe it is true because there must be a reason for this trial by time of the flesh at the expense of the spirit.

The old take their seats, and the preacher thanks them and takes over:

—Forever exists outside of time.

He asks them to examine the second hand of a clock, and he gets two guards to hold up a large clock borrowed from the schoolhouse. He says that time in God’s mind is so slow that in terms of creation and all of human history, only one second elapses on this clock. Imagine that, he says, one second to get from the beginning of time to where we are at this moment. That is time in God’s hands. There is no way to measure seventy or eighty or ninety years on this scale, those human years are too infinitesimal to count for anything in God’s time.

—Now you have an idea about eternity. That is what waits for each of you because you chose to be here with me today. Eternity is your reward.

Joyce, Trina, and Rose add their praise the Lord to the chorus and a part of them finds the preacher’s reasoning irresistible. Rose applies it to Ryan’s disappearance and return and concealment, all in one blink, and to her own mother, whom she trained herself not to think about to avoid feeling dejected from the day her mother had to leave the commune and was forced to leave her behind as insurance. They leave these meetings in a daze and find that they, too, weep in the moment for no reason and feel numb and walk in a sleep of some kind. Joyce tells Trina again and again to think of the boat and the captain and the river and not to listen too closely to the preacher, since his voice stays in the head and steers independent thinking in unpredictable directions.

The only thing the two listen for is the amen responses required from them, and they mimic these without thinking. Trina thanks her lucky stars that most nights the preacher seems too busy with others to call on her for support during his sermons or demonstrations. But tonight he pulls a scorpion from a box and asks the nearest child, who happens to be Rose, to open her hand and to be very still while he places the insect on her hand. Rose pees her pants as the preacher lowers the insect toward her hand and the preacher castigates Rose for her fear that is deeper than her faith and dismisses her. The preacher calls on another child, who stands, wide-eyed, and faints or pretends to faint even before taking a step toward the stage.

The preacher asks for Trina:

—She’ll show you kids what faith is.

But a young prefect jumps to his feet and says he will do it, he has faith, he believes in Father. And the preacher smiles, hails the young man forward to the stage, and lowers the scorpion onto his hand, which shakes abysmally until the scorpion begins to slide off his arm and he screams and flicks it away and the scorpion lands somewhere between the fourth and fifth rows, which causes a stampede from the area, and the guards restore order with their sticks.

The scorpion cannot be found and the two rows remain clear, no one wants to go near the area until the guards agree to sit in the chairs themselves to reassure the congregation. The rows fill up again and people keep looking around their feet and twitching their legs just in case. Pat produces another box and the preacher pulls a tarantula from it and turns his hand over as the spider crawls along his hand. He invites two other assistants, Nora and Dee, to do the same, but they recoil and he takes their hands and keeps hold as he repeats the same motion of turning the hand over to keep the spider on it. He calls Trina again. Another young prefect jumps to her feet and begs to prove her faith. The preacher agrees and she bounds onto the stage and perhaps it is her proximity to the tarantula that causes the change in her from sprightly volunteer to someone rigid who wishes she could change her mind. She holds out her hand and shakes so much that the preacher has to steady it. He tells her to keep still so he can place the spider on her, and recommends that she think of a calm place, since a tarantula easily senses fear and lack of faith and will bite her.