Euphoria

18

On the fourth night of the celebration of Xambun’s return, Fen came home naked and slathered with an oil that smelled like rancid cheese, claiming he had danced with Jesus, his great-great-grandmother, and Billy Cadwallader.

Nell was at her typewriter, writing a letter to Helen. ‘Who’s Billy Cadwallader?’ she asked.

‘You see? That’s how I know it’s real. Couldn’t have made up a name like that. He was just a boy.’ He was looking out the door as if these dance partners just might have followed him home. His hair was full of painted clay beads and ash from the fires was caught in the oil on his skin. He planted his feet wide apart to stay upright, but he still swayed. He was pure muscle and bone, like a native. He would never refuse a hallucinogen; he would drink, eat, snort, or smoke whatever was offered to him. ‘You know, I think’—he jerked around, beads rattling, smiling at her as if he were just then noticing she was in the room—’I think my mum might, she might.’

‘Know who the little boy was?’

She didn’t like the look in his eye.

‘Yes.’ He came up close to her and the smell was unbreathable. He seemed to be struggling for the right word, or any word. ‘Sex,’ he said finally. ‘I like sex, Nell. Real sex.’

Fortunately his penis wasn’t listening.

‘Nothing to do with—’ He strained for the word and could not find it. Children, she supposed he meant.

He turned away as if she were the one with the putrid smell. Then he whipped back around, noticing her all over again.

‘Working, Nell Stone? Typing typing typing, so much to type, so much to say. It must be exhausting being Nell Stone all the time.’ He seemed to have struck a vein of words. ‘The sound of that fucking machine is the sound of your fucking brain.’ He slammed his fist onto the keys. The letters flew up and twisted together. Before she could assess the damage he shoved the typewriter off the desk. It fell on its side. The silver arm snapped off.

He spun and left the house, his movements not his own as he went down the ladder jerkily, as if someone were pulling him with strings. Once in their first month together in the field an Anapa elder had come to her and told her it was not safe for her to be alone with just her husband, and he offered to be her brother. At the time she and Fen had laughed about this. But she had needed a brother, it turned out. She had needed one with the Mumbanyo. She might still have her baby if she’d had a brother there.

She turned off the lamp and tried to sleep. Her heart was beating too fast. She took long breaths but it wouldn’t slow. She was scared he’d come back.

She got up and pulled on her filthy clothes. Wanji had not done the laundry since three days before Xambun arrived. There were fewer people on the beach than she had thought, only about fifty, some twenty people dancing and another thirty sprawled out around them. All the dancers were men, beads in their hair like Fen’s and special, ceremonial, elaborately curved penis gourds strapped on. The dance was all about these gourds, about making them leap and turn and thrust at the women, who lay about in groups half watching, bemused but sated, like men who’d been in a strip club too long. And there was Fen, in full costume, gyrating, clacking his gourd against his partner’s, his movements lacking the fluidity of the others. All the flute players had gone to bed, and the one man with a drum was listing to one side and slapping it only occasionally. A few women chanted or kept time with stones or sticks. Most lay with their heads close together talking, barely watching. Xambun was not there anywhere in the crowd.

The mood Fen had brought up to the house was magnified here. The celebration had turned. The men were tense, doped, some barely upright, others flinging themselves around as if trying to escape their own bodies. There seemed a muted desperation, not the building fury of a Mumbanyo ceremony when she feared they were seconds away from stabbing each other, not homicidal like that but suicidal, as if the women’s lack of interest and Xambun’s disappearance and the lack of rain were all their fault.

She sat beside a woman named Halana who passed her some kava and taro. She opened her notebook. It was the fifth night. She’d seen it all by now. There was nothing more to add. She heard Boas scolding her: Everything is material, even your own boredom; you never see anything twice — never think you’ve seen it before because you have not. I am working, she told herself, one of her tricks to re-see, see better, see beyond. Halana stared at her. She imitated Nell holding the pencil, chewing on its end, then pretended to eat the whole thing, which sent her friends into gales of laughter.

The dance went on and on, with no sense of form, of beginning or end. At one point Fen gave her a smile. His anger had passed. She felt herself falling asleep with her eyes open. And then she noticed, off to the left beyond the dancing and close to the water, a flicker of light. She looked hard. It was a tiny orange glow just above the rock that jutted out from the shore. A cigarette? She got up and moved toward it casually, as if she were heading up the path to her house, then she turned into the bushes toward the rock. Through the leaves she could see she was right: it was a cigarette, and hunched over it was the barely discernible shape of a man.

Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it. Not even a monkey walks alone was the Tam’s most repeated one. The man on the rock was Xambun, not squatting the way another Tam would be, but sitting, knees drawn up slightly and his torso curled over them, eyes fixed on a point across the water. His body had grown fleshy and pear-shaped from the rice and bully beef they fed mine workers. Shoes were louder than bare feet — he would know it was her — but he did not turn. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth. He was still wearing the mine’s green trousers, but no adornments, no beads or bones or shells.

An informant like this in the field, a man who has been raised in the culture but removed for a time so that he is able to see his own people from a different angle with the ability to contrast their behaviors to another set of behaviors, is invaluable. And one who has been exposed to a Western culture — she couldn’t think of anyone who had ever accessed that kind of informant in as remote a place.

She wanted to move toward him. She might never get this opportunity again. And yet she felt his need for this solitude. She felt she knew his story already: the child hero, the false promises of the blackbirders, the slavelike treatment at the mine, the perilous escape back here, and the exhaustion of trying to hide it all from his family, to whom he was returning in glory. But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She wanted his real one. What would he say about it all? She could imagine writing a whole book on him alone.

She hadn’t moved but he turned suddenly, looked directly at her, and told her to go away.

It wasn’t until she was halfway up her steps that she realized he’d said it not in Tam or in pidgin but in English.