The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 8

In which the Author continues with the theme of Absence, which will be a pervasive theme throughout this narrative, there really being a lot to say, but here the focus will be on water and electricity, the absence thereof.

Before I moved to Kiribati, I had never spent much time considering the topic of infrastructure. If someone had asked me where does drinking water come from, I would have said from the tap, of course. The provenance of electricity was equally mysterious. It seemed to somehow involve lightning, a kite, a key, and men in frocks who conveniently stored the power inside walls. This all changed when I noticed with some alarm that water was no longer streaming from the tap. I had hesitated to look inside the water tanks, fearing the knowledge that awaited, but one day the dry rasping of our water pump forced the reckoning. Inside the tanks, a thick layer of mud, the remnants of leaves, nettles, and insects, covered the bottom. On the sides, I saw the outlines of several geckos silhouetted in relief, their decomposition having slowly occurred in our water supply. Not knowing what to do, but feeling the need to be useful, I clambered inside one of the tanks with a shovel and bucket and began cleaning. This ranks very high on my list of exceedingly dumb things I have done in my life. It was nearly midday and the sun had transformed the tank into an oven, which cooked and basted me until I finally gasped and, with the last of my strength, I hoisted myself out of the roasting tank and began to wretch. I stammered into the shower thinking cold water would do me good. I turned it on and nothing happened, of course, except the bleak sound of air moving through the water pump and the sudden awareness that the tropics had so far not been very kind to either my body or my mind.

I caught sight of myself in the mirror. I was filthy. Not only was I pasted in a thick layer of primeval slime, no doubt the kind of tropical muck of abiding interest to those with degrees in the life sciences, but I could also see bonded to my skin the dark remains of several geckos. What on earth were so many geckos doing in our water tanks? Ah, eating, of course. And what were they eating? Bugs. And what happens when geckos eat bugs? They poop. But what would have killed all those geckos? I was stymied there. Tottering on the cusp of heat exhaustion, I could only think, again, And we moved here why?

There was nothing to do but go for a swim. The tide was going out, but there still remained enough water over the reef to bathe, a shallow layer that the sun had heated to a near scalding temperature. I walked out about forty yards where the water was nearly waist-deep though not much cooler and dove in, enjoying the salt water and the feeling of sweat and grime departing me. And then I turned back to shore. Two large women were walking toward the water. Please no. They carried sticks. Oh, please, please, no. They moved toward the ledge of coral rock, which I had begun to call the Ledge of Coral Rock Behind the House Where Large People with Bottoms I Have No Wish to See Go to Defecate. Maybe they’re just going to talk about that cute guy they saw in the coconut tree. They squatted. Nooooo. Up went the lavalavas. Ugh.

When finally I returned to the house I immediately doused myself with half a bottle of antiseptic, and, to complete the catastrophe, drank our last liter of boiled water. Then I tried to think constructively about the water problem. In the short term, I would have to find water, any water at all that did not contain too much salt or too many parasites, for our hour-by-hour needs. In the medium term, I would have to find a sufficient quantity of water to fill, at least partially, one of the water tanks. And for the long term, I would have to learn the local rain dance. I contemplated sacrifices. Would the gods accept a dog? I would sacrifice a lot of island dogs for water.

I headed out with two large plastic canisters. On our little road were a few oceanside houses that were similar to ours, and across from these houses were smaller, decrepit permanent houses that appeared fatigued and burdened with the task of sheltering what seemed to be forty people per house. Surrounding each house like satellites were customary shelters of wood and thatch, raised on platforms and partly enclosed by mats. These, unlike the permanent houses and their crumbling walls, were always kept tidy and in tip-top condition. Each contained bodies in repose, mostly asleep, but a few awake, watching me, whispering to their neighbors, giggling and smiling. Two young girls, wearing lavalavas and plaited, locally made sleeveless shirts sat on a stoop in front of a house, one picking at the long cascading black hair of the other, seeking out the lice, and smiling radiantly at my passing. Everywhere there were dogs, mangy and spotted, their bones jutting against mottled, hairless skin, sleeping in freshly dug shallow pits, seeking the cooler earth below the surface that seemed to cackle and hiss in the sun.

I hesitated to ask anyone at all for water, knowing that most people relied on well water and that well water was brackish and the happy abode of numerous parasites and probably the reason why everyone was always shitting on the reef. Also, I knew that due to the drought even the wells were often nearly dry.

There is, I should note, a water system of sorts on Tarawa. Twice daily, for about twenty minutes, water is pumped from Bonriki and piped toward Betio. The water pipe was a gift from the good citizens of Australia. It was also so punctured that rare was the drop that actually reached Betio. It is technically illegal to puncture the pipe, but since there are way too many people on Tarawa and few homes actually connected to the water system, there really was no choice for people but to puncture the pipe in order to satisfy their basic water needs. This was usually done in a very orderly fashion. I had even seen policemen politely standing in line with their buckets awaiting their turn. A few I-Matang, confronted with their own empty water tanks, had taken it upon themselves to attach portable water pumps to the water system, ensuring that during the twenty minutes or so when water trickles down the main pipe, nearly every drop would get pumped into their tank. Like most houses, ours was not connected to the water system, so this was not a possibility for us, which was probably a good thing, because while I recognize that expropriating the island’s water supply to satisfy your own needs is just wrong wrong wrong, I might have been sorely tempted.

Instead, I decided to inquire at the neighbor’s house, which like ours had rainwater tanks. Most of the oceanside houses were allocated to the Ministry of Health. Our immediate neighbors were two female Chinese doctors, a psychiatrist and a gynecologist. I once attempted some friendly, neighborly banter—looks like it will be sunny today—but I was rebuffed. I mentioned this to Sylvia, who made her own foray. When she returned, she looked puzzled.

“They don’t speak English,” she said.

“Do you think they speak I-Kiribati?”

“No.”

We contemplated this for a moment. The psychiatrist represented the entirety of Kiribati’s mental health services. She was well known for favoring powerful tranquilizers, unlike her predecessor, who was partial to straitjackets. Her roommate was the only gynecologist in the country. “Well,” said Sylvia, “it’s good to know that if a schizophrenic Mandarin-speaking woman with a bad yeast infection ever shows up on Tarawa, there will be help for her.”

That’s the thing about Sylvia. She’s always thinking positively.

I knocked on their front door. I practiced my pantomime. No answer. Next to them was the surgeon, also from China. I knocked on his door. No answer. Of course, I thought. They have jobs. Just as I turned to go, however, the door opened and a sleepy, rumpled surgeon, wearing only briefs, emerged, blinking into the brightness of day. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but we just live two doors down, and… well, we’ve run out of water and—”

Before I could finish, he had relieved me of my canisters. He went to the laundry basin beside the house and filled them with water. “Any time you need water, just take. No problem.” The kindness of strangers is a great thing. Regrettably for the surgeon, his kindness did not go unnoticed and soon the entire neighborhood was helping themselves to his water, which may be why a few days later his water basin/laundry area was encased behind a chicken wire fence that extended from ground to ceiling. I took this as my cue to seek other water sources.

Fortunately, Sylvia had discovered that it was possible to actually buy water. The Public Utility Board sold it for $3 per cubic meter. I went to their office and bought five cubic meters of water, all that our two tanks could hold. This felt good. We now owned enough water to last us a year, no small feat on a dry atoll. The problem was transporting the water from the water tower at the airport to our water tanks. Any suggestions? I asked the clerk at the PUB. He picked up his telephone and after a few minutes he told me that, regrettably, I could not use the fire truck. It was still broken, alas.

A fire truck. This was well beyond my expectations. It was like calling a veterinarian to inquire about a cat’s fleas and suddenly finding an ambulance complete with police escort to transport the kitty to the hospital. I was curious, however. “Um… what’s wrong with the fire truck?” I inquired.

“It can’t carry water.”

This was an interesting problem for a fire truck on an island without anything like hydrants. Tarawa’s lone fire truck was of a certain age and long past its prime. It resided at the airport, where, to satisfy regulatory need, it was trotted out to the edge of the runway to attend to each landing and takeoff. That it could do nothing in case of fire was entirely beside the point. Air Marshall and Air Nauru, the two airlines that occasionally flew to Tarawa, insisted on having a fire truck present to attend to their crashes. And so Kiribati obliges them.

The clerk made another call. I was impressed with how helpful people were. Nothing seemed to work on Tarawa, except the telephone system, which as Kate pointedly noted, was managed by I-Matangs, and yet everyone seemed very willing to attend to whatever troubled another, which posed a curious dilemma: If people were so helpful why was Tarawa such a mess?

The clerk asked me where I lived. There are no addresses on Tarawa. There is the one road, called the main road, and it slithers halfway up the atoll, uninterrupted by stoplights or even stop signs. I described where I lived and the clerk asked me whether it was the green house or the pink house. I said the green and he mentioned as much to whomever he was speaking with on the telephone. He hung up and told me that a truck with a water tank would pick me up and haul the water I now so happily owned. It would cost $70.

The truck was a flatbed with a blue tank, the kind often seen in rural areas, used to store fertilizers and pesticides and other things one doesn’t want to mix with drinking water. The tank could hold one cubic meter of water and so we would have to make five trips. The driver grunted. “Maybe two trips today. Three another time.”

I didn’t care. Every morning I approached a neighbor as a supplicant, empty canisters and buckets in hand, and I knew that each drop I took from them brought them that much closer to our own situation. The dishes we used remained barely cleaned. Bathing was done with a sponge. Washing our hair seemed out of the question. The toilet was flushed with buckets of seawater. We still boiled our drinking water, but just for a minute so none was wasted through evaporation. And I was a mess. All the little insignificant cuts I had received turned septic. Sylvia too found herself with a festering mosquito bite that soon began to discharge fluid in ever deepening shades of green. It was impossible to battle the microscopic critters of Tarawa without water. We needed water.

I hopped into the cabin of the truck. We were in search of Abato, the gatekeeper of the water tower. He lived in the village of Bonriki and we found him asleep on his kie-kie (sleeping hut). Jobs and sleep seemed to blend easily on Tarawa. He took us to the water tower, unlocked the gate, ran a hose from the tower to the truck, and suddenly water shot through into the tank. My water. Don’t spill it, I felt like hissing as the driver struggled to direct the flow into the tank. There was no lid on the tank and as we drove back to the house I dreaded each pothole, each curve, anything that would cause the precious water to slosh and dribble out the top.

“You have a water pump?” the driver asked me.

“Eh?”

“A water pump. We have to pump the water.”

“You don’t have a pump?” I asked, brilliantly.

“No pump.”

We did have a pump, but it was bolted solidly into place and fitted for the pipes that brought the water from the tanks into the house. We contemplated it.

“Do you think… ?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so,” said the driver.

We stood there, our eyes darting back and forth between the truck and the water tanks. So close. It took the rest of the afternoon to locate a water pump that we could borrow or rent, and when finally we found one at Tarawa’s lone hardware store, it was nearly dark. And then, just as we started the portable pump and water began to flow into our tank, a shadow passed above, the sky darkened, and I felt a drop of water, then another, and soon there was a deluge of rain, a tropical downpour of the kind that the island had not seen for more than a year. I became primal man—man need water, man get water—and I scurried around the house, checking the gutters that would stream this clean, fresh rainwater into our tanks, and I became horrified when I saw that the gutter was corroded and that this precious water was flowing uselessly through a gap onto the ground. I ran into the house, grabbed a chair and a notebook, and for the eight minutes that it rained, I stood underneath the gutter, pressing the notebook up to fill the gap, conceding that when one reduces life to its essential needs, it is water that precedes all else.

When the shower passed, the driver was smiling. “Maybe tomorrow it will rain again.”

But it didn’t rain the next day, nor the day after that, nor did it rain in the following weeks. It didn’t rain for months. Tarawa remained parched. The truck became perpetually unavailable and we never saw the other four cubic meters of water. We tracked our water as others track their money. And then, of course, the electricity failed.

At first, it wasn’t so bad. For a few hours every couple of days, the ceiling fans would cease their whirling, the water pump would stand idle, and my computer remained off, which was just as well, in case inspiration hit me and I completed my novel in a month or two, and what would I do then? Best to pace myself.

But soon the electricity was off for days at a time and we became dependent for our light on kerosene lanterns, which are extremely useful and easy to use, except when you turn the lever-thing the wrong way and your filament disappears into the kerosene basin and, of course, it’s dark so you can’t see what you’re doing, and inevitably your girlfriend is standing there beside you saying, “What, again?” and you remind her that from the beginning you were very up front about your competence as a handyman.

More troubling than lighting issues, and more irritating than slogging buckets of water from the tank to the house, was trying to sleep without a fan, which we typically had to set to hurricane force for it to become cool enough to sleep. A cinder-block house might be useful to have on the Siberian steppes, but not so on an equatorial atoll devoid of power. The heat was enraging. Rivulets of sweat streaked the body. When I turned, Sylvia would declare: “You’re too close. Don’t touch me.” Throughout the night, no longer softened by the white noise of a whirling ceiling fan, the waves, the booming earth-quaking sound of breaking waves, would cause heart palpitations. Meanwhile, in the absence of our nightly gales, mosquitoes humored themselves with a few flybys, causing us to slap ourselves senseless, until they quietly did their feeding and, as the night progressed, an even tempo would be reached—buzz-slap-scratch buzz-slap-scratch.

And then the ants came marching in. Apparently, they found their living quarters in the exterior mortar of the house a little cramped and so they dug through and suddenly we were sharing the bedroom with a billion ants. On that awful dawn, I awoke with a howl to the bites of hundreds of ants clambering all over me, though curiously they left Sylvia alone, which may say something about how ripe I was then. But just as Sylvia began to feel confident that my magnetism within the bug world would save her from the visitations of night creatures, she awoke to find a beetle in her ear. Naturally enough, she wanted to share this news with me, which she did, with considerable aplomb. “There’s a bug in my ear,” she declared, and indeed there was. It was a coconut beetle, burrowing toward her brain, and this Sylvia wanted removed pronto. It took some work. I tried floating it out with water, but the little bugger was persistent, and so tweezers were needed and I’m pretty sure I got most of it out. Sylvia didn’t think it funny when I speculated about eggs.

It wasn’t all glum, however. I forged a strong friendship with Buebue, who was the chief electrician on Tarawa. In the United States, when one calls, well, just about any corporate-type organization for any reason at all, one is inevitably left seething after three attempts to navigate the automated customer-service line (“to serve you better”) and eighteen hours on hold (“your call is important to us”) only to finally be connected with the rude, abrasive morons that the American corporate world feels inclined to use as their link to their customers. And the experience of calling a U.S. government agency, of course, is what leads people to join the Montana militia. On Tarawa, however, a simple call to the power station to determine whether there might be any electricity forthcoming was directed straight to the man who knew all, Buebue, even on his days off, when I would be told to call him at home. He was like an oracle. If Buebue said there was to be light, then there was light. If Buebue said that all would be dark, darkness prevailed. And he didn’t spin the situation either. He just told it like it was, which left me bewildered at first, when he explained that there would be no electricity this evening because they forgot to bring the diesel, or because the technicians were too drunk to be trusted around a generator, or because he had absolutely no clue why the generator wasn’t working but that he was pretty confident it wasn’t going to work for a while yet, or—and this really hurt—the power station in Betio caught fire, reducing Tarawa’s power generation capabilities by half and spare parts weren’t expected until 2012, but I soon found this brutal candor refreshing.

He was such a nice guy too, always inquiring about Sylvia’s welfare and thanking me kindly for wondering about his kids, that I felt guilty as Judas the one night that I took advantage of his obliging nature. We were experiencing rolling blackouts at the time, with each corner of the island taking its turn in darkness, when we heard the exciting news that Australian friends of ours, volunteers, had received in the mail a package containing a videotape of the funeral of Princess Diana, whose death had greatly saddened Tarawa. I cannot quite overstate the importance of this vestige of our own world—what with Elton John and all that—particularly as we were then feeling acutely isolated from happenings of global import, and we immediately set upon procuring a television and VCR and organizing a gathering, complete with scones and jam and a highly prized bottle of sherry, which may strike some as morbid, but for us the videotape was like a revered talisman connecting us to our people and was cause for celebration. Of course, the power went out just as I was about to press the play button, which was highly disappointing and led me to call Buebue. I explained that the I-Matang community was present in our house and that they had clustered here to mourn Princess Diana, and could we please, please have some electricity, particularly since we were expecting the Australian high commissioner, which wasn’t true at all, since the Australian high commissioner was an uptight nitwit who carried on as if he were assigned to London, not Tarawa, which for diplomats is, frankly, an assignment portending the end of one’s career. However, I dropped his name because Australian foreign aid pretty much comprises the entirety of the government budget of Kiribati and, therefore, I thought it likely that the Public Utility Board could be browbeaten by mentioning the Australian high commissioner and his need for electricity-driven entertainment. This turned out to be true and we watched and mourned and speculated about Dodi while the rest of Tarawa remained dark. I have felt guilty ever since.