The Sex Lives of Cannibals (4 page)

We were not happy. Pretty close to despair, actually. Tarawa was supposed to be similar, but poorer. It occurred to us that this might not be such a good idea after all, that moving to an atoll at the end of the world is really nothing more than an act of romantic delusion, and it was tempting to succumb to negativity, but we resisted, and instead yielded to a simmering anger, anger at the United States for obliterating a nation, just for practice, and anger at the Marshallese for behaving like debased junkies, willing to do anything for another infusion of the almighty dollar. This included removing the population of one island so that a Korean resort and casino could operate unhindered by the sight of poor, dark-skinned people who presumably dampen the tourist’s gambling instinct, and allowing an American firm the use of an uninhabited island to store the radioactive waste generated by reactors in Japan and South Korea. For a country already so traumatized and polluted by radiation, encouraging the importation of more radioactive waste can only be called pathological.

But for us things did get more negative. In our room, which was not a bad room, I spent much of the night like a taunted monkey in a cage, lurching from wall to wall flinging my sandals at the insidious creatures, and when my tally reached five dead cockroaches (five!), I thought it safe to attempt sleep. And then I felt it. It was scrambling up my back, a sharp pitter-patter with razor fur burning my skin. I knew that very soon I would have a cockroach in my ear. Instinct took over. I emitted a primal scream and bounced out of the bed. Sylvia did likewise. She does not like to be woken up suddenly. I calmly explained the situation and she was thoughtful enough to summon with some urgency several higher-power characters in Christian theology. We found the cockroach lurking behind the headboard and so I shoved the bed hard against the wall and there it remained, and it is probably still there today, emitting a soft green glow.

CHAPTER
4

In which the Author finally sets foot on Distant Tarawa, where he is led by the Evil Kate, who seeks to Convince him that Tarawa is not what it seems; and, Conceding that it is indeed Very Hot on the Equator, he Bravely overcomes his Fear of Sharks and encounters something Much, Much Worse.

W
e were to have awoken at 5:30
A
.
M
., courtesy of the wake-up call thoughtfully provided by the staff of the Robert Riemer Hotel, but their subservience to the American Way was not yet so complete as to follow through on the promise of a wake-up call, and so we arose at 6:10
A
.
M
., ten minutes after the minibus that was to take us to the airport was scheduled to depart. This left us a trifle ill-tempered. We scrambled out of the hotel, bent double like hungry coolies underneath the weight of all our possessions, and boarded the lingering minibus, which contained a gaunt blond Australian man. “About bloody well time,” he said in a voice that suggested his larynx was not what it should be. I acknowledged Sylvia’s look and resolved to quit smoking sometime very soon and then we both gave him piercing dagger eyes. He was wearing shiny white shoes.

We were expected to arrive at the airport two hours before our flight, which seemed inexplicable to me. It isn’t as if Majuro International Airport receives a lot of air traffic requiring complex organizational procedures to ensure that passengers and baggage arrive and depart as intended. It has one runway built upon a reef. It has one single-story dilapidated building that contains customs and immigration and a hole in the wall for baggage to be tossed through. The waiting area is the curb outside. Here, during the one hour and fifty-seven minutes that remained after we checked in for our flight on Air Marshall, we met a friendly Marshallese woman who commented on the amount of luggage we were lugging. We explained that we were moving to Tarawa.

“Tarawa is like Majuro was thirty years ago. There’s nothing there,” she said, betraying in her voice a distinct air of superiority, as if any island not yet awash in the detritus of Americana must be very primitive indeed. Finally on this journey we felt something like elation, a sense of hope that on Tarawa we would find, if not an Edenic paradise, at least an island not yet so distant from the Fall—an optimism that was dampened only a little bit by the plane we would fly, a plane that didn’t allow you to stand up straight, a plane where the pilot rearranged the passengers because of weight and balance issues. That kind of plane. But it would take us elsewhere, away from the American Pacific, the blasted, forgotten periphery of empire, and that was all that mattered.

The day was very blue, not sharp Autumn blue, but faraway tropical blue, languorous, timeless. The northern Gilbert Islands, our first glimpse of Kiribati, passed below and the islands seemed not like islands, but suggestions of islands, emerald crescents rising from the depths, as if there was something provisional about existence. And then Tarawa appeared. We flew over the northern part of the island, a ribbon of land topped with palm trees and bisected by channels feeding the ocean into the lagoon. The tide was in and the lagoon seemed incandescent, a startling fusion of greens and blues. On the ocean side of the atoll, white streamers of broken waves rushed toward barren beaches. Villages of thatch appeared and faded away. We were very low now. Beside us there was no more sky, but a wall of coconut trees. Any moment we expected contact, the hard bounce of the wheels on the runway. And then . . . something was wrong. My inner ear was confused. My stomach lurched. The engines screamed. Sylvia’s hand gripped my arm, seeking comfort, finding none. We raced over the tarmac like a careening hovercraft, not quite making contact with the ground. Still flying. And then we began to ascend. Tarawa gone. The blue ocean. The blue sky. Again. The pilot spoke: “Ah . . . sorry about that. There were pigs on the runway. We’ll just swing around and try again.”

The pilot’s voice revealed nothing. No tremor. No gulping for air. No crackling of the chords to indicate that we had very nearly met a most pathetic end, the unknown void, courtesy of errant swine. We made a second approach, landed, and in the rush fleetingly saw children on the side of the runway, as if they had been playing in a suburban cul-de-sac and had given way for a passing car. I absorbed this. We had departed a country where children are swaddled in helmets and body armor, and only then allowed to ride a Big Wheel in a carpeted living room, and now we had arrived in a country where children play on active runways.

We emerged from the plane and were immediately stricken by the heat. It was astonishing, a wonder of nature, a blazing force that left us awestruck. As we walked—slithered actually, slowly melting, panting—across the tarmac, hundreds of people, dressed in the brightest of hues, observed us from behind the steel fence separating the two barnlike structures comprising the departure and arrival areas of Bonriki International Airport. The fence, clearly, was there for decorative purposes only. The runway had been reclaimed by children playing soccer. A shirtless man pedaled serenely across on his bicycle and was swallowed by a tangle of coconut palm trees. A dog was in urgent pursuit of five squealing piglets. Go, dog.

There were two other planes on the tarmac. This would be the Air Kiribati fleet. One looked like a sickly dragonfly with a thin fuselage—was that tin?—and spindly wings. Each passenger had their own door. The windows were made of plastic sheeting with snap-on buttons. It was less an airplane and more a treacherous carnival ride. Could the pilots be carnies? The other airplane must have been the runt of aviation. It had a complex geometrical shape, as if it were a seven-sided box, and wings that did not seem to align. Shirtless men, the mechanics presumably, sat in the shade underneath the crooked wings, pondering the Air Marshall plane, a Saab 2000 turboprop, which suddenly seemed enormous, and it was not an enormous plane. One pointed at the Air Marshall plane, and I could see him thinking,
You see. I knew the wings had to align
. I could think of only one circumstance that would compel me to fly Air Kiribati. I wondered if there was any crack on the island.

With trepidation, we approached the immigration desk. We didn’t have visas. The Republic of Kiribati doesn’t exactly maintain an impressive diplomatic presence abroad. It owns no imposing embassies. It does not have a fleet of black sedans immune from parking laws. It does not send forth trained cadres of expert conversationalists skilled in the usage of acronyms. Kiribati was not, in fact, even a member of the United Nations. There was no place to go to obtain visas. But there were procedures, and we followed them closely. We had letters from the District of Columbia Police Department stating that after an extensive search it was determined that we did not have criminal records. And we had letters from doctors asserting that after comprehensive examinations it was found that we did not have any communicable diseases. Being very broadly informed of the health situation in Kiribati, I speculated that the country was seeking healthy host bodies through which to transmit a little bit of Kiribati to the rest of the world.

We handed over our letters and passports to the immigration official and explained that we wanted to live in his country and so far we had found it very lovely indeed. The immigration official had tattoos on his forehead. He looked at the papers and asked if we had onward tickets. No, we said. “Okay, no problem,” he said. I was pleasantly stunned. There is
always
a problem. He took out a cigarette. I lit it for him. I have learned to be deferential in these situations. I contemplated a kind remark about his tattoos, green stains that folded and bounced on his crumpling brow, but before I could inquire about his gang allegiance, a tall, rail-thin American woman appeared beside us. Here was our Kurtz.

“You must be Sylvia,” she said, coolly appraising her successor. “And you must be her husband.”

Oh, that’s right. I had forgotten. We were going forward with the marriage ruse for certain bureaucratic reasons mainly having to do with health insurance and also because we weren’t sure how a simple living-together arrangement would be received in Kiribati. But this was the first time I had been referred to as a husband and I suddenly felt a little older, more mature, content, though desirous of children. I patted Sylvia affectionately.

The angular woman was Kate, the person Sylvia was sent out to replace. She was about fifty years old, and from the picture we had seen of her in Washington, she typically appeared years younger. One year on Tarawa, however, had aged her considerably, quite likely because she was suffering from malnutrition. She had the hard features of a bird of prey. Kate admitted this. One year on Tarawa, she calculated, was like five years elsewhere. She was leaving Tarawa mid-contract because, as she cryptically put it to Sylvia, “I just can’t take it anymore.”

Kate turned to the immigration official. “I have letters here from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health indicating that Sylvia will be the new country director of FSP and that her visa and residency permit should be processed immediately. These letters were forwarded to the Department of Immigration but I gather you did not receive them.” She stared at him hard.

“Okay, no problem,” said the official.

“And um . . . I’m Sylvia’s husband,” I added helpfully.

The immigration official stamped our passports. I was pleased to see that it was a modest little stamp, unlike most developing countries, which seemed to have decided that if they couldn’t be Great Powers, they could at least have Great Stamps, ornate displays of grandeur occupying a full passport page, sometimes two. The more irrelevant, troubled, dictatorial the country, the larger the stamp, and so the small ink stain made by the immigration official seemed to bode well, as if Kiribati was declaring
We are small. We are content. We have no illusions
.

But we had a few illusions and no one, certainly not Kate, a walking spout of bilious bile, was going to deprive us of what we wanted to see. We had traveled far, uprooted our lives, moved to the end of the world, and there was no way we were going to concede that we had made a mistake. The proverbial glass would be half-full today. We gathered our bags and emerged into Tarawa proper, where we were immediately enveloped by neon munchkins. Dozens of little ones gaped and giggled and twittered as we walked through, and all of them pointed and repeated the same word over and over again.
I-Matang
. Meaning what? I asked Kate.

“One who comes from the land of the gods,” she hissed, Brando-like.

Cool.

Around us, entire extended families were gathered on mats weaved from pandanus leaves. It seemed as if they resided here in a swirling display of color. The women were attired in a bewildering kaleidoscope of primary colors displayed on wraparound lavalavas, crude sarongs featuring orgasmic flowers and melting sunsets, matched with extreme discordance with sleeveless tops that made each woman seem particularly buxom. The men seemed impossibly fit and weathered, bulging muscles and deep lines, tattoos and festering sores. These were outer islanders awaiting a rumored flight to their home island. A woman of prodigious girth did a brisk trade selling coconuts. She, I gathered, was the airport café.

We put our bags in the back of a pickup truck and drove off with Kate, our eyes on the shimmering lagoon and the palm-topped islets that stretched and stretched until absorbed by an ambiguous horizon where lagoon and ocean and sky touched and were seamlessly fused into a blue-green oneness and the whole scene was one of such calm and tranquil prettiness that I couldn’t help but sputter about the beauty of the lagoon and that this sight right here was what the romance of the South Seas was all about.

It’s polluted
, said Kate.

The homes we passed were traditional structures of wood and thatch, small stages raised on platforms with walls of flapping mats. These homes seemed well engineered, sensible, and cool.

If you don’t mind rats, dogs, and prowlers.

There was a vitality in the villages we rumbled through, not the brooding stillness we found on Majuro, but a sweet familiarity, a sense of playfulness that we sensed in the smiles and laughter of people trading and gossiping.

The I-Kiribati are like children, and you must treat them as such.

The island was awash with fish. Alongside the road, women were selling their families’ catch out of large coolers.

Most fish are toxic.

Boys clambered more than fifty feet up coconut trees rich in nuts, where they sang and worked to extract toddy, the nutritious sap.

They should be in school.

Small children played with ingenious toys made of sticks and string.

Most children have chronic diarrhea and there are indications that cholera has returned.

Tarawa was the loveliest place I had ever seen. The water, the beaches, the palm trees, the colors, the sky, and the hovering silver-blue clouds bisected by the horizon.

Tarawa isn’t a disaster waiting to happen. It is a disaster.

We drove on. I was hoping we could be deposited at our new abode, wherever it might be, and have a cup of coffee and absorb atmosphere for an hour or two. But there wasn’t any time, we were assured. We would have a full schedule today.

Besides, there is no coffee to be found on this island.

A tic seized my eye.

Our first mission would be to obtain driver’s licenses at the Bikenibeu Police Station, a humble two-room cinder-block building with a tin roof. A barefoot policeman snoozed on a bench outside. In front of the station was a doddering pickup truck with a cage in the hold. The paddy wagon, presumably.

“You do have a driver’s license, don’t you?” Kate asked me.

“Oh yes . . . though it’s a little expired.”

A withering look. We weren’t getting along very well. I found her to be a contrarian.