Getting Stoned with Savages (23 page)

I stepped onto the sand, and soon I was madly hopping about
—hot, hot, hot.
Though I was wearing sandals, the sand was scalding. Clearly, marching up sand dunes on a hot, sunny afternoon in Fiji was not the wisest thing to do.
Hurts, hurts, hurts.
I sprinted up the face of the dune. It was agonizing. At the top, where wind swept in over the ocean, the sand was tolerable to stand on, and I spent a moment fanning my feet. Looking down, I saw something. Could it be? It was about a foot long, alabaster white, broad and tapered at the ends. As I stumbled down the dune I noticed that the object was sharp with serrated edges. Was this an artifact? Had I stumbled across some ancient relic? I picked it up. Should I just leave it there, I wondered, and inform an expert of my find? They’d probably want to arrange a dig in this spot. But if I just left it there, the wind would soon cover it with sand, and this, this…find might be lost forever.

After much deliberation, I carried it back with me toward the beach. Who had been the last person to use this implement? I wondered. A chief? A cannibal? Was this perhaps used to carve human flesh? I followed the path along the beach. A stiff breeze whipped up whitecaps on the ocean. An arrow pointed me toward a trail leading back to the road. I noticed a man studiously reading a plaque in front of what appeared to be a very unremarkable tree.

“Look what I found,” I said with giddy enthusiasm. “What do you think it might be?”

He took it in his hands and pondered it for a moment. “It’s a cuttlefish,” he said in a thick Scottish brogue.

Great, I thought. Just when I needed one, I had run into a Scottish naturalist.

“Ah,” I said. “I know that many Pacific Islanders used fish bones as tools.”

He gazed attentively, no doubt amazed by my knowledge.

“The I-Kiribati, for instance,” I went on, “used fish bones for hooks and shark teeth for swords. They even put blowfish on their heads, using them like helmets.”

“Well,” he said, studying the relic. “It is calcified. You should take your find to the park ranger.”

My thoughts exactly. I trudged on through a more wooded area. There was a cacophony of noise, like a thousand rattling rattlesnakes. Were the gods displeased?

When I arrived at the ranger station, I showed the relic to the Fijian woman there. She seemed amused.

“Is the ranger in?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “He’s in Suva.”

Excellent, I thought. I was headed back to Suva the following day. “Do you think I might be able to bring this to him in Suva?”

“You want to bring this to the park ranger in Suva?”

“Yes, if it’s not too much trouble. I understand, though, if you want to keep it here.”

“No,” she said with a laugh. “You may take it to Suva.”

She wrote down the appropriate address. It seemed a trifle irresponsible to let a stranger wander off with what might very well be an important discovery illuminating the history of the ancient Fijians. Nevertheless, I happily drove off with my artifact.

I found Sylvia sitting by the pool at the Fijian, chatting amicably with the Australian woman who had recommended rigorous napping for the last weeks of pregnancy. “This is Beth,” Sylvia said, introducing us.

“Look what I found,” I said, showing them my discovery. “I’m taking it to the park ranger in Suva.”

“You’re bringing a cuttlefish bone to the park ranger?” Beth asked, looking at me rather oddly. How is it, I wondered, that everyone around here seems to know what a cuttlefish is?

“Well,” I said, “I think it might be very old. And did you look at the sharp edges? It looks like a tool to me.”

“We give them to budgies to gnaw on.”

“Budgies?”

“It’s a pet bird. They love chewing on cuttlebones.”

“But…how would this cuttlebone find its way over a hundred-foot sand dune?” I asked.

“They’re very light,” Beth said. “The wind probably blew it. Why don’t you smell it?”

To my dismay, it smelled like dead fish.

O
NE MORNING, WHILE I WAS BROWSING THROUGH THE
bookstore at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, I came across a book called
Misconceptions,
by the writer Naomi Wolf. There had once been a bookstore in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, but it had burned down, leaving the USP bookstore as the last remaining outpost of literature in the South Pacific. Very often, a shop in Fiji would decide to call itself a bookstore, but invariably it sold little more than stationery. As the sole proprietor of books in Oceania, the USP bookshop had a remarkably small selection, a fact that caused me no great loss of sleep. I do not respond well to too much choice, and very often in the U.S., whenever I set foot inside a book emporium containing thousands of titles, I’d leave empty-handed, confounded by options. Choice was not a problem in Suva, however, and presented with so little to choose from, I bought whatever caught my eye.
Misconceptions
was about the author’s experiences with motherhood. Well, isn’t that something, I thought. Sylvia was on the cusp of motherhood, and so I purchased the book, thinking that she might like to read a little about what awaited her.

At home, I dipped into the book, idly scanning its pages. And then I began to read it more thoroughly. Apparently, motherhood wasn’t so wonderful. Indeed, motherhood sounded grim and awful, a curse borne by women.

“Where’s that book you got?” Sylvia asked.

“Uh…I don’t know,” I lied.

In truth, I had hidden the book in the deepest recesses of a closet. This was no time for negativity. I had no idea what having a baby entailed. Indeed, the very idea of having a child still seemed a little amorphous to me. I did, of course, realize that something was afoot. Despite evidence to the contrary, I knew that Sylvia hadn’t swallowed a basketball. But still, the knowledge that there was a baby on the way seemed nebulous at best. All I knew was that it was important to be chipper.

Sylvia had had a happy pregnancy, and she was at her happiest when I’d arrive home with takeout from the Hare Krishna Restaurant. It had become extreme, this fixation with food from the Hare Krishnas, and I feared that our son might be destined for the airports. Now and then, of course, we’d come across someone determined to dent our optimism. “I can’t believe you’re having your child in Fiji,” wagged an American nurse at the Fourth of July party at the U.S. Embassy. Well, Naomi Wolf didn’t make having a baby in the U.S. sound so peachy either, I thought. In the U.S., as I understood, a pregnant woman was subject to a barrage of tests, many with a high likelihood of false positives or ambiguous results. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know that your child had a 19 percent chance of developing Down syndrome, a 22 percent chance of spina bifida, and a high likelihood of developing male-pattern baldness and a hairy back. What is it that doctors expect women to do with such information, except go into angst overload? Fortunately for us, this wasn’t a problem in Fiji, because there was no high-tech testing done in Fiji.

As the due date neared, Sylvia’s checkups were upped to once a week. Her doctor was the indefatigable Dr. Brown, a Fijian doctor from the Lau Islands, one of the handful of doctors who had remained in Fiji after the coup, when many of the Indian doctors took their cue and emigrated. Her office was spare and perpetually teeming with patients. The doctors may have left, but the babies kept coming. It was like being in a Benetton ad. The women were Fijian, Asian, and Indian. One woman was even shrouded in a black burka.

We had long ago learned to ignore the can of roach spray Dr. Brown kept in her office. This was the tropics, after all. At the final checkup, Dr. Brown informed us that the baby was breech.

“Maybe he will turn,” she said. “They sometimes do. But if he doesn’t, I think we should do a C-section. If you were a large Fijian woman with wide hips, I would say maybe we could try to do it naturally, but you are a skinny
kaivalangi,
and breech births can be very dangerous.”

She flashed us a significant look. She knew about kaivalangis and their books, all of which seemed to state that a natural, drug-free delivery was a beautiful experience and that a woman will never truly be a woman until she pushes through a baby unaided by painkillers and preferably, doctors, accompanied only by fragrant candles, new age music, a bathtub, and someone who calls herself a doula.

“Don’t be a hero, darling,” I said.

Sylvia laughed. The only aspect of delivering a child that had appealed to her was the prospect of taking a heavy hit of morphine. She more or less sighed in relief at the idea of a C-section.

We took note of the baby’s position, calculated when he would be fully cooked, and scheduled the operation for a Monday at 1
P.M.
, a very civilized hour for having a baby. I was hoping to avoid a midnight dash to the hospital.

As we found ourselves far away from the wisdom of grandmothers, we thought it prudent to ask for help, for the baby’s sake as much as ours. Anna was a kindly woman who lived in the village of Wailoko, outside Suva. Like Anna, most of the residents of Wailoko were descendants of Solomon Islanders who had been brought to Fiji by the British to help build the roads. No wonder the Fijians looked so fondly upon the British. They brought in Indians to cultivate the land and Solomon Islanders to build the infrastructure, while the Fijians themselves were encouraged to do nothing more than collect the rents. Anna had four grown children of her own, and for many years she had worked as a nanny for expatriate families. She
knew
babies.

“
Uuuueee,
Sylvia,” she said one afternoon, with her customary glimmer. “You are having a baby tonight.”

What’s this?

“Anna,” I said. “If this baby has my genes, then there’s no way he’s going to be early for anything.” I myself had been born two weeks late, a fact that surprises no one who knows me.

“You are a silly man,” Anna scoffed.

And lo, at midnight, I awoke to the words I dreaded hearing.

“My water broke,” Sylvia said.

Men, I discovered, are hardwired for this moment. There is no lingering here. The sleep just dissipates. Every pore of my being was devoted to getting Sylvia out of the house pronto and into the arms of trained professionals. I was on the phone a millisecond later.

“Dr. Brown?…Is that you?…You have to wake up…Hello?…Dr. Brown? Sylvia’s water broke. The baby’s coming.”

“Well, you better bring her in, then,” said Dr. Brown groggily.

Moments later we screeched to a halt in front of the hospital, a brand-new private hospital. “First World Care in a Third World Setting,” said the brochure. Or something like that. Planned before the coup, the modest hospital—elsewhere it would be called a clinic—had been designed to lure the patients in the South Pacific who might otherwise choose to seek medical care in Australia or New Zealand.

“Hello? Anybody there?”

I shook the security guard awake from his kava dream.

“My wife’s having a baby!” Sylvia stood calmly holding her belly. “Is Dr. Brown here? Is there a nurse?…Do you speak English?”

He did not.

“Baby,” I said, pointing to Sylvia. “You know?
…Waaa, waaa.
”

The security guard shuffled off to get a nurse. Meanwhile, Sylvia was overtaken by a contraction. Her fingers dug deep into my arm.
Oh, god,
I thought. “Uh…okay,” I panted. “Um…deep breath…uh…now exhale.”

Finally, the nurse arrived, and soon we found ourselves in the birthing room, awaiting the arrival of the doctor.

At 4
A.M.
—4
A.M.
again!—Lukas emerged into this world, bawling and screaming.

“He looks like you,” said the nurse. Frankly, like all newborns, he looked like the creature from the Black Lagoon. But what a wonder he was.

THERE IS BEFORE AND AFTER.
And the change is startling. One day, you go to sleep with the reliable expectation that when you next arise, a new day will have begun. And then—after—you go to sleep, having first spent a long while cooing over the little angel slumbering in the crib next to you, and suddenly, from the depths of your dreams, you find yourself hurtling toward the ceiling, shaken to the core by the ferocious wail of a hungry infant.

“Wha…who…what’s going on?” I sputtered, once I’d pried myself off the ceiling fan. After Lukas was born, Sylvia had remained in the hospital for four nights, attended by a platoon of nurses. Our boy was one of the first babies to be born in the new hospital, and Sylvia and Lukas were treated like celebrities. I had spent those first days in the hospital and my nights at home. Now, finally, the whole family was together.

“He’s hungry,” Sylvia said as she rose to get the howling baby.

“Well…what should we do?”

“Feed him, of course.”

“Okay,” I said. The baby continued to wail, a cry that pierced my soul. I wanted, more than anything, for the baby to be happy, to know that we were there for him, and to realize that while he might be out of the womb, he remained in a cocoon of love. Also, I really wanted him to stop crying. Even my bones rattled.

“What can I do?…Maybe you should hold him like…Or try…”

Breastfeeding was still a new experience for both mother and child, and while Sylvia remained serene, Lukas grew impatient. I sensed that he wanted his umbilical cord back.

“You know what you should do?” Sylvia said as I fluttered anxiously around her.

“Tell me. What can I do?”

“You should have a Nicorette.”

Unsurprisingly, the cold-turkey method had not worked for me at all.
The baby’s not here yet,
I had reasoned in the months since we’d arrived in Fiji, which meant that I could still…smoke. Yippee! But he was here now, and I quickly stuffed a wad of Nicorette in my mouth, seeking to get a grip on my frayed nerves.

Eventually, of course, like all parents, I grew accustomed to the midnight wail. After Sylvia fed him, Lukas would be handed over to me so that he’d have a warm shoulder to spit up on. Whereas once I had been repelled by the smell of vomit, now I took it as my natural odor. In the predawn darkness, I’d take him outside into the warm stillness of the Fijian night, and having discovered that my repertoire of lullabies consisted of little more than a line or two of dimly remembered Dutch children’s songs, I’d sing him a medley of U2 songs from the eighties as Saki, the night watchman, gazed at us approvingly.

Lukas grew to be very comfortable on my shoulder. Indeed, he was at ease on anyone’s shoulder. He took it as his natural state. This is because in Fiji, a child’s feet never touch the ground. Babies are adored on the islands. We’d enter a restaurant, and the moment we arrived, a waitress would divest us of our son. “Where’s the baby?” my mother asked in a panic when she visited a couple of months later.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I think the bartender took him,” Sylvia said.

My mother looked at us oddly. “You’re going to have a hard time when you return to the U.S. As a general rule, in the U.S. we don’t let strangers walk off with babies.”

“But we’re in Fiji,” I said.

“I know,” my mother said. “Couldn’t you at least wear something nice, though? What happened to the clothes I sent you?”

It was astonishing how warm Fijians were with children. No matter if we were in a village or at a resort, soon Lukas would find himself shepherded from shoulder to shoulder. Sweet songs would be sung in his ear. Rugby players would coo and play peekaboo. In response, he’d gurgle appreciatively.

At home, Anna taught us everything we needed to know. Bewildered at first by our son’s mysterious ways, we had simply listened attentively as she explained the nuances of burping and what, precisely, constituted a good poop. Whenever we had a question, she was there for us.

“I can’t figure out why he’s crying,” I said one day. I had ruled out food, a heavy diaper, and sleep.

“It is because someone is thinking bad thoughts about him,” Anna informed us. The three of us exchanged looks. “Not in here. Someone out there,” she said, gesturing beyond the house.