Children of Paradise: A Novel Read online

  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.

  Adam simply stopped reacting and bent his head and kept his eyes glued to the floor, forgetting half a mango and part of a watermelon, loaves of bread with just one chunk missing, bags of flour, rice, and sugar ripped open and sampled, vegetables scattered about. The guards prodded him with their sticks, and he moved from the storeroom, as directed, toward his cage. They shouted at him to keep moving and move faster. They herded him into his cage and added a chain and padlock, and that was the last day he tasted freedom.

  On occasion, he gets scratched by the preacher on his preferred spot between his shoulder blades, just as his mother had scratched him before his capture. Every time he thinks about her he stares at the jungle as if she might walk out into the clearing to end her long search for him.

  The preacher scratches him with a hand that feels a bit like hers but through the bars of a cage, and Adam has to offer his back as a sign that he welcomes a scratch and therefore it is a safe undertaking. He held a child in his arms, and that earned him his second beating. The child’s mother screamed at him. He wishes he had his mother. She would scream at somebody to unlock her son’s cage, and she would scratch his back with more affection and accuracy than the preacher.

  TWO

  The unpainted wooden structures nearest the preacher’s house contain multiple families who are associated with the preacher in some personal capacity or have high standing in the commune. The doctor and nurses and the preacher’s personal assistants and top bodyguards all live with their families in shared houses set apart from the other commune members, whose children sleep together in dormitories. Other buildings serve as the laundry, carpentry, foundry, sawmill, schoolroom, and numerous dormitories, all joined by walkways. Close to dusk, with the low sun filtered by the forest, four guards march to Adam’s cage carrying long poles and a large piece of tarpaulin balanced between them. They spread the tarpaulin on the floor, thread the poles through two ends of the fabric, and hold up the sheet in front of Adam’s cage to block his view of the compound and main house and infirmary. Adam hears a lot of activity coming from behind the screen. He sees, around the sides of the tarpaulin, a number of people approach his cage from all parts of the commune. The activity behind the tarpaulin stops, and the four guards collapse it, pull out the two poles from the ends, and fold the sheet by having two guards walk with their ends to the other two guards. Adam recoils from the scene that greets him. He stops seeing the guards in front of his cage as they untie the ends of the tarpaulin until the sheet shrinks to the size of a suitcase. All four guards drag the folded tarpaulin to one side and come back to the front of the cage, waving again their sticks and rifles, and order the people assembled to take a few steps back. Few people need any further motivation. They comply quickly. They know it is never a good idea to stand too close to an armed guard. Still, the assembly swells, bringing the work of the commune to a standstill. Expressions of astonishment and loud gasps fly around the gathering as new arrivals catch sight of the scene in front of the cage.

  An open coffin sits there on a plinth. Two armed guards stand at attention beside Trina’s lifeless body. A third person, a nurse, fans flies from the child’s face, powdered into a mask. Trina is adorned in an ornately laced full-length white cotton dress. Her mother pushes past the perimeter of guards in front of the cage and throws her body against the bars and bawls and implores Adam to take her life as he took her daughter’s. Some women in the crowd start crying, too. Ryan and Rose lean on each other in disbelief. Joyce cries and pounds her fists on Adam’s cage. She looks over at the community leader’s house and only incidentally at Adam, and she hardly glances at her decorated child in the oblong box. Adam retreats to the back of his cage, suspicious of her performance. He worries that his proximity to her might get him into some sort of trouble. Perhaps a third beating. A group of the preacher’s personal assistants and guards half-heartedly approaches Joyce, and she surrenders readily to their touch as they coax her away from the cage and the exhibit of her daughter.

  Adam stares at Trina. He cannot be sure of his senses. She lies perfectly still. Her face is bone-white. Her lips have darkened with the lids of her eyes. Her hands clasped across her chest: white as well. And yet he expects her to leap onto her feet at any moment and resume her game of running from another child trying to catch her. Adam remembers how his mother grew just as still and how she failed to move no matter how much he implored her to attend to his cries. He thinks the girl might be in the same condition of helplessness. Could his grip have made her still the way his mother was long ago? He held her. Yes. She became still in his arms. Yes. Now she lies in a coffin in front of his cage. He turns away from the coffin and pictures a banana grove and a waterfall and his mother by his side. But his mind comes back to the child in the coffin. He sees himself in that box with his body reduced to the size of a child’s and his mother not there to scream for him. He sees his mother as that child. And he howls and rattles the bars of his cage.

  Everyone in the commune wipes away tears of approval at their distant cousin’s display of remorse; sad as they are, they display gladness to see that Adam understands the meaning of his actions. The commune’s spiritual leader stares into the cage through the bars. Adam entertains an impulse to grab the man and keep hold of him just as he grabbed the child and earned a pile of treats. But he shakes the thought from his head and avoids the preacher’s dark, unblinking eyes. He knows this is the only man in the commune who does not fear him. He understands this lack of fear to mean that their fortunes are intertwined. If Adam knows one thing from his beating after he grabbed the girl, it is that his well-being depends on the preacher’s: As long as the preacher leads this community, Adam will prosper with him; just as only the preacher’s word can halt Adam’s beatings, only the preacher’s actions can alter Adam’s fate.

  The preacher walks to the coffin and waves his arms over the face of the girl. Two more guards approach, taking turns pushing forward a woman in their custody. She stands beside the coffin, and the preacher announces to everyone that a good prefect, the very son of this woman standing before him, exposed her for expressing doubts about the tragedy that has befallen Trina and her mother, Joyce. He gestures to the prefect, who takes a step forward and bows his head, and the people applaud. The preacher turns to the woman and asks if, in her layperson’s opinion, she thinks the child is not really dead. He wants to know from her lips, because the report from her son, a trustworthy prefect, says that she thinks the child is pretending to be dead. The woman shakes her head. The preacher wants her to check for herself and tell the peopl
e gathered around them what she thinks she sees. The woman says she is not a doctor, and if the doctor pronounced the child dead, then it must be so, the child must be dead and gone, since the doctor is the expert. She apologizes for expressing any doubt and explains that her doubts were not said in disbelief but in a refusal to accept the loss of one so young.

  The preacher invites various people in the crowd to come forward and see for themselves whether the child is pretending to be dead. He picks out individuals at random. Two guards are among the chosen. Each files forward and looks closely at Trina lying still as a log in her cot-sized coffin. Some start to cry, while others shake their heads in despair and make the sign of the cross, and one woman takes the preacher’s hand and kisses it. The woman who kisses the ring of the preacher lunges for the woman branded as a disbeliever, but the guards block her path and gently restrain her and steer her back into the crowd. The doubting woman cowers. Except for the two guards pulled from the crowd, who take up positions near the preacher, all the other witnesses are sent back to their places. They look at the woman as if she is the devil incarnate. The preacher raises his thick eyebrows and stares at the woman. His act of looking at her lasts no longer than a second. She falls to her knees and begs the preacher’s forgiveness. She tells the assembled crowd that the child is dead indeed. She says through her loud crying that it is a tragedy, but Trina is most definitely in the arms of the Almighty. The preacher nods in approval. He reminds her to keep her faith at the very moment when the devil of doubt and disbelief rears his ugly head. She says repeatedly:

  —Thank you, Father. Thank you, Father.

  The guards usher the woman back into the crowd. The people standing nearby edge away as if to avoid some form of contaminate. Her son, newly promoted from a prefect to a guard for demonstrating his loyalty to the preacher over loyalty to family, puts his arm around her. She stands there with her son’s arm around her but keeps her arms by her sides and cries. The commune leader returns his attention to Trina in the coffin. Again he waves his hand over her head.