The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 21

In which the Author shares some thoughts on what it means to Dissipate, to Wither Away, Dissolute-like, and how one becomes perversely Emboldened by the inevitability of decay, the sure knowledge that today, possibly tomorrow, the Body will be unwell, which leads to Recklessness, Stupidity even, in the conduct of Everyday Life.

I am not sure when it happened, but at some point during my time on Tarawa I stopped wearing a seat belt. I saw nothing unusual in having the pickup truck filled with gas from a pump that was smoking, delivered by an attendant who himself was smoking. The sight of three-year-olds piled precariously on speeding mopeds no longer filled me with wonder. Body boarding in bone-crushing surf was an activity to be savored. Digging flies out of ever-deepening cuts became a thoughtless little habit. Four-day-old tuna? How ’bout sashimi? Six cans of Victoria Bitter? Why not? And hey, smoke ’em if you got ’em.

I’d become immune to disease, not physically, but psychologically. Nothing fazed me. “Do you remember that consultant from New Zealand?” Sylvia asked. “The one who was here to train the police force? Well, his office just sent a fax. Apparently, he’s in the hospital with cholera and leptospirosis. They thought we should know.”

“What’s leptospirosis?”

“Something to do with rat urine.”

“Well, he shouldn’t have had the rat urine… Hey, I found some fresh sea worms for dinner.”

I took it all in stride. Cholera, leptospirosis, hepatitis, leprosy, tuberculosis, dysentery, hookworms, roundworms, tapeworms, mysterious viral diseases, septic infections, there were so many diseases to contend with on Tarawa that it was best to ignore them altogether. Beyond boiling drinking water, there wasn’t much that could be done. What happens happens, I thought. It could always be worse. That’s what I told Sylvia when she was felled by dengue fever.

“I feel like I’m dying,” she said. “Every bone in my body hurts.”

“You’re not dying,” I contended. “Unless its hemorrhagic dengue fever.”

“There’s no cure for that.”

“No there isn’t. But at least it’s not Ebola. Just relax. You’ll probably feel better in about two weeks.”

And she did.

On Onotoa, in the far southern Gilbert Islands, it seemed perfectly normal to have a meal of salt fish in a maneaba where fifty-odd shark fins were drying in the rafters. Afterward, I went swimming. When I did come across a shark in the shallows above the reef, I just smacked the palm of my hand hard on the surface of the water, and off it swam. Sharks had become an irritant, nothing more.

Flying Air Kiribati also ceased to fill me with dread, even after the CASA wrapped itself around a coconut tree while attempting an emergency landing on Abaiang. I’d traveled to Abaiang on a homemade wooden boat, just for fun, and as I stared at the CASA with its sheared wing, I thought, Ah well, at least we still have the Chinese plane.

At a funeral, I had a generous helping of chicken curry. In front of me lay the corpse. It was the custom in Kiribati to lay out the body of the deceased for three days before burial. Kiribati is on the equator. I had seconds.

Somehow, two years had passed since we first set foot on Tarawa, and in those two years I had become, in my own peculiar way, an islander. Certainly I was an I-Matang. But the world from which I’d arrived had become nothing more than an ever-receding memory. Sylvia too had adjusted to Tarawa. When I cut her hair, she no longer cringed in fear. She too had lost her vanity. When she took the electric razor we borrowed to shave my head, she was no longer troubled when her haircuts made me look like a skate-punk with unresolved anger issues. I, of course, couldn’t care less. No hair, no lice, I thought.

One day, she arrived home and declared: “I ran over another dog today.”

“What’s the tally now?” I asked.

“Four dogs and three chickens.”

“Didn’t you run over a pig?”

“No,” she said. “That was you.”

Shortly after she’d arrived on Tarawa, Sylvia swerved to miss wandering dogs. It was instinctual. But Tarawa is a small island, where every speck of land is occupied or used, and to stray from the road’s narrow lane was to risk the lives of humans, and no dog was worth that. And so now, like me, if she couldn’t brake safely, she simply ran over the dog. Perhaps she felt bad about the first dog, but by the fourth dog, she took it as she did any other bump on the road.

When her staff at work declared that one of the rooms in the office was haunted by malevolent spirits, Sylvia did what any manager wise to the ways of Kiribati would do. She organized an exorcism. Unsure whether the spirits were Catholic or Protestant, Sylvia had both a priest and a minister cast out the offending spirits. The staff were satisfied.

We found that we no longer had much in common with the newer volunteers and consultants to arrive on Tarawa. Every six months or so, another dozen I-Matangs arrived on Tarawa, replacing those whose contracts had ended, or more commonly, those I-Matangs who had been broken by Tarawa. The newcomers seemed dainty to us, naïve and ill-prepared for island life. Whenever I saw a newcomer, I had only one question: “Did you bring any magazines?”

“I’ve got a People,” one said.

“Can I have it?”

The world on those pages, however, seemed utterly foreign to me. Instead, I found myself asking Bwenawa, “So, tell me a little more about this Nareau the Cunning character.”

Whenever possible, we traveled to North Tarawa or to one of the outer islands. The threat of being marooned no longer troubled us. In fact, we welcomed it, because if one can ignore the heat, and the scorpions, and the awful food, the outer islands of Kiribati are about as close to paradise as one can reasonably ask to experience in this life. I have mentioned the color in Kiribati, and I will mention it again. There is no place on Earth where color has been rendered with such intense depth, from the first light of dawn illuminating a green coconut frond to the last ray of sunset, when the sky is reddened to biblical proportions. And the blue… have you seen just how blue blue can get in the equatorial Pacific? In comparison, Picasso’s blue period seems decidedly ash-gray.

I admired the outer islanders. Though they had cloth, kerosene lanterns, and metal fish hooks, they survived on the atolls largely as their ancestors had, without any outside help at all. I was struck by how resistant to change these islands were. Inevitably, the handful of Western-style cinder-block buildings that were built on the islands for one grand purpose or another, stood derelict and forsaken, abandoned in favor of the customary wood and thatch homes and meeting places that were so perfectly suited to the equatorial climate. Traditional singing and dancing existed not for the benefit of package tourists, but as ways to amuse and engage the people themselves once dusk put a definitive end to the day’s work. The lagoons were clean, untampered with by clogging causeways and indestructible trash, and on the turquoise surface, men fished in skillfully crafted sailing canoes. It is no wonder that 85 percent of the thirty thousand people living on South Tarawa claim one of the outer islands as their “home island.” There remains a way of life on those islands that exists in very few places now. It is a way of life I greatly respect.

Even on the outer island though, the continental world intrudes in strange and inexplicable ways. Whoever unleashed Vanilla Ice on Butaritari ought to be severely punished. And no punishment would be too cruel for the miscreant who brought in “La Macarena.” But it is these glimmers of a world beyond the village that causes outer islanders to voice the lamentations of provincials everywhere—we’re bored—and many, too many, have chosen to depart their islands for the flickering lights of South Tarawa, where inevitably there is a relative or two whom they can bubuti. Every month, more people arrived on South Tarawa and more children were born. But the island did not get any bigger. The water did not become more abundant. And with too many people living on too little land, South Tarawa was becoming a filthy, noxious hellhole.

But it was our filthy, noxious hellhole. South Tarawa had become our home. We knew how to live here, on an island that had fallen off the map. Like the I-Kiribati, we had become fatalists. We no longer believed we could control our world. Each day was marvelously odd. One day I might be snorkeling with an enormous eagle ray, and the next I might be clutched over with stomach pain as the parasites that had made my intestines their home threw a party. A day might be wonderful or terrible, but it was never, ever boring. When I woke up in the morning, my first thought was always, What now? I am quite likely the world’s laziest adrenaline-junkie, and so living on Tarawa worked well for me. I didn’t have to do anything. Shit just happened on Tarawa.

And so when Sylvia’s contract ended, we weren’t sure what to do. Sylvia could have held on to the job until the end of time. She reported to no one except her donors. She had some good projects. The FSP staff were quite likely the most motivated people in Kiribati. She liked the job. As for me, well, the book wasn’t really working out. I learned that contrary to what they say, books do not write themselves. I thoroughly explored that avenue. Every day I said, All right, book, go write yourself. But the book wouldn’t budge. Instead, it asked me for a story. But I didn’t have a story, which, of course, is a problem when writing a novel.

This setback didn’t trouble me. Tarawa has a way of shattering professional ambitions. Of course, my professional ambitions could have been shattered by a hummingbird’s feather. Nevertheless, when your world is reduced to a sliver of land smack-dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, your aspirations tend to change. Once, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Now, I aspired to open a coconut with the same panache as the I-Kiribati.

We could continue to live here, I thought. I could teach. I could suckle at the teat of the foreign aid industry. There was plenty to do. More important, there was still much to experience in Kiribati. I had plans to do some long-distance windsurfing. I was fairly certain I could reach Abaiang. Maiana would have been more difficult, but I’d already found someone to accompany me in a boat. I wanted to learn how to build an I-Kiribati sailing canoe. I wanted to explore more of the outer islands. Abemama’s distinction for quality oral sex, for instance, needed further investigating. Perhaps now and then, to escape island fever, we could travel, Air Nauru permitting, to a larger land, such as Samoa.

“If we stay any longer,” Sylvia cautioned, “we’ll never be able to go back.”

That was quite likely true. Any longer in Kiribati and the culture shock that was sure to inflict us upon our return would almost certainly prove to be fatal. When we first arrived on Tarawa, we laughed at the stories of the I-Kiribati who had traveled abroad, usually no farther than Fiji. One spent a week in a hotel room after she couldn’t figure out how the elevator worked. Another sustained severe injuries when he tried to navigate an escalator. One man who had traveled to Hawaii returned complaining bitterly of the cold. Now, as I contemplated going back to the distant shores of the United States I found myself a little more simpatico to the plight of islanders cast off in the great big world beyond the reef. Frankly, I was more than a little intimidated myself by the thought of having to weather the peculiarities of the continental world. On Tarawa, I understood life. Food came from the ocean; water from the sky. Coconuts were good for you; stand underneath a coconut tree for too long, however, and you would get conked. Tides determined the day’s activities. Taboo areas were to be avoided. There is always time. It had all become very manageable. I understood this world… well, most of it in any case. To leave the islands was to set forth for the unknown. We would be adrift in the continental world.

Of course that world had air-conditioning and restaurants and bookstores. There were doctors. There was ample electricity. Lots of water, too. And toilets. Lots of toilets. And there were family and friends. No one had come to visit us in Kiribati. Those who had the time lacked the money. And those who had the money lacked the time. There’s the conundrum of American life in a nutshell. During our absence, we missed innumerable weddings, a couple of funerals, and the births of our first nephews and nieces. I thought of the handful of long-term I-Matangs in Kiribati and realized that all of them had, either by choice or default, become severed from their old lives. The isolation in Kiribati is unforgiving.

It was the sudden appearance on Tarawa of one such long-term I-Matang that finally compelled us to make our decision. Half-Dead Fred had arrived. For twenty years he had eked out an existence on Tabiteuea North. I had heard of Half-Dead Fred, of course, just as I had heard of Banana Joe and a few of the other I-Matangs who resided on the outer islands much as the beachcombers who preceded them had. The government of Kiribati, however, had decided to expel the foreigners who had overstayed their visas. Half-Dead Fred had overstayed his by nineteen years. He had arrived those many years ago from the Marshall Islands, where he had been working for a defense contractor. One day, as an Australian might say, he went walkabout and ended up on what is quite likely the most traditional of islands in Kiribati, where he found himself marrying a procession of young brides, who provided him with land where he could cut copra. Life moved along in its usual helter-skelter fashion and suddenly two decades had passed. And after twenty years on the Island of Knives he was told that it was high time for him to return to the United States, which he had not seen since disco was king.

Half-Dead Fred was staying with Mike. Everybody stayed with Mike. If you ever happen to find yourself in the equatorial Pacific needing a place to stay, just head on over to Mike’s house. Bring him something to read, ideally a surfing magazine, and you can stay until you grow old. This seemed to be what Half-Dead Fred would have preferred. The government wanted to expel him to the Marshall Islands, but the Marshall Islands correctly pointed out that Half-Dead Fred was not Marshallese and that according to international law deportees could only be deported to their country of origin. The government of Kiribati, however, was not too keen to shell out the money for a plane ticket to the United States. And there matters remained until, miraculously, Half-Dead Fred’s father was found living in Florida, and he agreed to spring for the airfare.

Air Nauru, as usual, was not flying. It had been impounded in Australia—again—for declining to pay its bills. In the meantime, Half-Dead Fred lingered on at Mike’s house, which is where I found him one afternoon, enraptured by Mike’s computer. Mike, like everyone in Kiribati, was resourceful. One year he might get his hands on a hard drive. Three years later, he’d find a monitor. A year or two later, he’d get word that some westerner was soon to arrive on Tarawa and he’d fire off a telegram listing all the goods he desired that were unavailable on Tarawa, which is to say pretty much everything invented since the wheel. This is how Mike ended up with a video game called Doom, or was it Gloom, or possibly Boom. Anyway, as I walked in I saw Half-Dead Fred hunched in a chair spellbound by the imagery on the computer.

Half-Dead Fred had earned his moniker. He was so wasted in appearance that in comparison a cadaver would seem plump and rosy-cheeked. Tall and gangly with a long salt-and-pepper beard, Half-Dead Fred looked much as I imagined Robinson Crusoe would look had Robinson Crusoe been marooned for a few years longer. He wore a pair of shorts that anywhere else would have long been discarded or put to use as rags. He was shirtless and barefoot. Then again, I too was shirtless and barefoot. So was Mike.

“How long has he been like that?” I whispered to Mike.

“Since the power came back on.”

“That was five hours ago.”

Mike nodded.

“Does he talk?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Mike said. “When the power’s off he doesn’t stop talking. Of course, what he says doesn’t make any sense. But he does talk.”

We stood watching him. It was strangely riveting. Half-Dead Fred hadn’t even acknowledged the presence of others in the room, so entranced was he with discovering the tools that would allow him to rescue the princess locked in a dungeon by a nefarious wizard in cyberworld. I could think of few things more discombobulating. Twenty years on an island in the world’s most remote island group, where every day was occupied by fulfilling one’s basic subsistence needs and where one had to constantly watch one’s back, because this was the Island of Knives after all, and then to suddenly find oneself deeply ensconced within the alternate reality of a video game.

“Is he mad?” I asked Mike.

“As in crazy? No, I don’t think so. But sane would be a little too strong.”

For some reason I found the sight of Half-Dead Fred staring determinedly at a computer screen more than a trifle disturbing. I wasn’t sure why. I couldn’t quite grasp the source of my discomfort, until I realized that what I was looking at was… me.

This would be me, I realized, if I remained in Kiribati any longer, a dissolute man untethered from his own land, a foreigner who has adapted to the queer realities of island life, but a foreigner always, disconnected from the world beyond the reef, and possibly even from his own mind. Half-Dead Fred was my future.

“Let’s go home,” I said to Sylvia later that evening.

“It’s time, isn’t it,” she said.

“Yes. It’s time to go home.”

TWO MONTHS LATER we found ourselves at Bonriki International Airport, our necks sagging under the weight of a dozen shell necklaces, our heads crowned with garlands, our luggage weighed down with a half-dozen mats. We had spent much of the previous week in the island’s maneabas attending one farewell party after the other. They take goodbyes seriously in Kiribati, quite likely because they tend to be permanent. When people leave the islands, they don’t come back. At the airport, it seemed as if half of Tarawa was on hand to see us off. Of course, every time an airplane arrives on Tarawa half of the island shows up simply for the novelty of it. Nevertheless, we were touched by the number of people on hand. The FSP staff were there, of course, and so too were their families. The tears flowed freely. I bought everyone a round of coconuts.

“We have come to think of you as family,” Bwenawa said, “but now it is time for you to return to your families in the I-Matang world. We will remember you. You are good I-Matangs. And you must remember us here on the islands under the sun.”

We most certainly will, we said.

We walked across the tarmac toward the airplane, and as we climbed the stairs we turned to see all those people gathered behind the fence, no longer exotic strangers, but friends. We waved a last good-bye and entered the aircraft, Nauru’s Boeing 737, where we were immediately walloped by a bracing gust of culture shock.

Air-conditioning.

Settling into our seats—plush, comfortable seats that reclined at the push of a button—was a journey in itself. The plane took off with a satisfying roar and as it turned southward toward Fiji we had our faces pressed to the windows, straining for that last view of Tarawa before it receded forever a nanosecond later.

“Well, we did it,” Sylvia said. “We’ve lived at the end of the world.”

“Yeah,” I said, gazing at the blue magnitude of the Pacific. “Do you think they’ll have cheeseburgers in Fiji?”