The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 19

In which the Author begins to hear rumors of Lurid Happenings in Washington, and suddenly he Regrets his Situation, his Location, and Wishes only to have access to a tabloid newspaper, a television, an Internet connection, but he is Denied.

The reading situation had become desperate. I’d read through every book we’d brought. I had read all of Mike’s books. I had trudged through the scraps left by previous FSP directors. I read a biography of the last days of the Romanov family. I read Dune. Then I read it again. I like my entertainment not too serious, not too stupid, sort of like this book.

But there are only so many times one can read a book. I am quite certain that I am the only man in the Pacific to have read All the Pretty Horses three times, which might be why in my own prose I found myself writing sentences that were approximately four pages long, describing the sad yet inevitable descent of a leaf. More troubling than the dearth of books, however, was the utter absence of newspapers and magazines. In Washington, I had been a certifiable news junkie. Sundays just didn’t feel complete until I had burrowed through forty pounds of newspaper. I even read Parade. Each weekday, I began my morning with the Washington Post, the New York Times, and, because I respected their coverage of events in Slovenia, the Financial Times. From the debate on health care to the governor’s race in West Virginia to recent events in Mali, I was informed.

Alas, on Tarawa I lived in a state of ignorance not known to westerners since the advent of papyrus. I often found myself approach-ing other I-Matangs. “I’ll trade you my December 1978 Scientific American—it’s about this new thing called computers—for your March 1986 Newsweek. I’d like to relive Iran-Contra for a spell.” At noon, I religiously tuned in to the English-language news summary on Radio Kiribati. I had grown very fond of its opening jingle—the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—but the news broadcast itself made for a compelling argument on the importance of a free and independent media. Inevitably, the government-controlled broadcast would begin with something like: The recent power outages have proven to be a boon for shops selling kerosene lanterns. And then it would cut to Radio Australia. In Wagga Wagga today…

The bimonthly newspaper was no help either. It contained a World Focus page, where the government printed what it thought were the most important global news issues of the day. “Precious Rock Keeps Diana’s Name Alive” was a typical headline. The I-Kiribati might not have been aware that the Cold War had ended, or even that there was such a thing as cold, but thanks to the government of Kiribati they were well informed about all things Diana. I no longer cared much about Princess Diana. She’s dead. Let it go. But the government would not let it go, and so every two weeks we would learn yet another profoundly inconsequential detail about the life and times of Princess Diana.

I eventually confined my hunt for news to the shortwave radio my father had thoughtfully given to us as a parting gift when we left for Kiribati. Unfortunately, it says much about the extreme isolation of Kiribati that I couldn’t call up much beyond Radio Bhutan. Occasionally, I caught five minutes or so of the BBC before it faded into the ether, and I must have caught it on London’s night shift, since the programs I found were of the “Gardens of Wales” and “Folk Songs of Bolivia” variety. I had nearly resigned myself to living in an entirely news-free world, when I heard a snippet that suddenly made me ravenous for news and commentary and rumor, causing me to pathetically spend the small hours of the morning scanning the shortwave radio dial, wishing again that my world was occupied by CNN and Time and Sunday newspapers and, in particular, tabloids. I was desperate for any info regarding a woman named Monica.

I have long had a weakness for spectacle, and I’m willing to go to great lengths to consume its delights. It filled me with despair that I was missing out on the fun of a sex scandal enveloping the White House, particularly this sex scandal. The deliciousness of it. Its luridness. Its breathtaking stupidity. Now and then, in the small hours before dawn, I caught Voice of America. Inevitably, it was transmitting America’s Top Forty Countdown, confirming that America’s propaganda arm believes insipid banality to be the best way to capture hearts and minds abroad. If they must go lowbrow, I thought the Clinton sex scandal offered some opportunities. But sadly, VOA declined, preferring instead to inform the world that America can best be understood through the Backstreet Boys and Mariah Carey.

Eventually, I discovered that if I turned to a particular frequency at exactly 6 P.M., I could catch approximately five and a half minutes of BBC’s Newshour before it faded into static. A newsreader presented a summary of the day’s happenings—revolution in Indonesia, a crashing global economy, trouble in Argentina. Do get on with it, I thought. This was followed by analysis. But even the BBC felt that the Clinton sex scandal was of sufficient global import to merit a lead story, and so for the one and a half minutes that remained until I lost reception, I listened to—and I don’t want to make too much of this, after all I am an adult, sophisticated, not at all puerile, really—a BBC correspondent by the name of, ahem, Judy Swallow, explain the day’s events. All of America today is talking about a cigar and a stained blue dress… and then there was static. What cigar? What’s so important about a cigar? What’s so significant about a blue dress? Stained with what?

It was maddening.

In an effort to obtain more information, I decided one day to subscribe to The New Yorker. I knew, of course, that it would be months until I saw a magazine, but I figured that if someone was putting each issue in the mail, a few would eventually reach Tarawa. I was willing to wait. True, by the time the magazines reached me, they would have been terribly dated. But it still would have been fresh for me. I knew nothing. There weren’t more than a few dozen homes on Tarawa with telephones, and we, lucky us, lived in one of them. And so I called the international subscriptions department of The New Yorker.

“Hi. I’d like to subscribe to The New Yorker, please.”

“Name?” said a faint voice through the static.

I gave her my name.

“Phone number?”

“28657,” I said.

Pause.

“I need more numbers, sir,” said the voice on the line.

“Um, I don’t have more numbers. I’m calling from a small country, a very small country.”

“The computer won’t let me continue until I fill in all the spaces.”

“How many more numbers do you need?”

“Five.”

“Then make it 28657-00000.”

“Address?”

“P.O. Box 652, Tarawa, Kiribati.”

“I need a street name, sir?”

“There are no street names. There’s only one street here.”

Pause.

“The computer won’t let me continue until I put in a street name.”

“Okay. Put in Main Road.”

“All right, sir. You said Tara-something. Is that a city?”

“It’s an island.”

“I need a city.”

“There are no cities on this island.”

“The computer won’t let me—”

“Put in Bikenibeu.”

“Bikeni-who?”

“B-I-K-E-N-I-B-E-U.”

“Okay. State?”

“Ma’am, there are no states here. There are no cities. There are no streets. There are only islands.”

“I need a state, sir. The computer won’t let me—”

“Put in T-A-R-A-W-A.”

“Country?”

“Kiribati.”

“Kiri-what, sir?”

“K-I-R-I-B-A-T-I.”

“Sir, it’s not showing up in the database.”

“It’s an independent country. It’s been a country for almost twenty years. Surely The New Yorker’s database of independent countries has been updated in the past twenty years.”

“It’s not showing up in the database, sir. Is there another name I could try?”

“Try Gilbert Islands.”

“I’m showing Ocean Island, Gilbert and Ellice Islands.”

“Ocean Island hasn’t been called Ocean Island in seventy years. It’s called Banaba.”

“Bana-what?”

“And the Gilbert and Ellice Islands are two separate countries now. The Gilbert Islands are part of Kiribati, and the Ellice Islands are now called Tuvalu.”

“Tuva-who?”

“Never mind. Let’s go with the colonial name.”

“All right, sir. Let me repeat the information. The address is: P.O. Box 652, The Main Road, Bikenibeu, Tarawa, Ocean Island, Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Telephone number 28657-00000. Is that correct?”

“Yes. I mean no. How much exactly is it going to cost me for you to send The New Yorker to the wrong island in the wrong country?”

“Let’s see. You’re not in Europe?”

“Nope.”

“And you’re not in Asia?”

“No.”

“And you’re not in Latin America.”

“No.”

“Okay. Then you’re in Other.”

She offered a chin-dropping figure. Already, the phone call alone was costing me the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Kiribati. I might have gone ahead with the subscription if I had been an English colonial officer stationed on Banaba in 1910, but I wasn’t, and I thought it imprudent to spend big bucks on a magazine that wasn’t at all confident that Kiribati existed.

Denied a magazine subscription, I turned to the other I-Matangs on the island. Most of them were Australian. “What have you heard?” I’d ask. “What’s with the blue dress?”

The Australians would inevitably begin “Americans are so puritanical…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I’d say. “Whatever. Now, what do you know?”

They knew nothing.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” Sylvia offered. “I’m meeting with an English consultant tomorrow.” While not quite as obsessive as I was, Sylvia was notably curious about recent affairs in Washington. This was her president after all.

“Well, I asked her about the cigar,” Sylvia said the following day.

“And?” I asked, positively drooling for the lowdown.

“She wouldn’t say. But she was really blushing.”

“Blushing? You mean this is blush-worthy news? What on earth did Bill Clinton do with a cigar? This is killing me.”

I imagined what it must be like in America. The Clinton Sex Scandal 24/7 on television. Newspapers with screaming headlines. Rumors on the Internet. Magazine pieces on what it all meant for America. Salivating Republicans. How I wished I was there. Instead, I found myself at reef’s edge, under the white light of a million stars, watching the night fishermen scour the reef for octopus, as I worked the knobs of my shortwave radio, longing to hear nothing more than a Jay Leno monologue.