The Sex Lives of Cannibals (28 page)

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?”

EPILOGUE

In which the Author expresses some Dissatisfaction with the State of his Life, ponders briefly prior Adventures and Misadventures, and with the aid of his Beguiling Wife decides to Quit the Life that is known to him and make forth with all Due Haste for Parts Unknown . . . well, not entirely unknown, though fatherhood was new, causing the author to share a page or two of Exuberantly Gloopy Prose on how wonderful, really and truly, it is to have a Little Island Boy.

T
he urinal spoke to me. This had never happened before. True, there had been occasions when toilet bowls had spoken to me. Don’t do shots, they said. Particularly tequila shots. I listened, and no toilet bowl has ever spoken to me again. But this was the first time a urinal had spoken to me. It made some comments about my manhood. “Ha-ha,” it continued, “just kidding.” The urinal called himself Norm. Norm had a television show. Norm wanted me to watch his television show. It aired weekly on the ABC network. When I finished, Norm quieted. Then someone else approached the urinal. Norm the urinal began to talk again.

I returned to my seat at the Childe Harold, a bar in Washington D.C. I had met Sylvia there for an afterwork drink.

“The urinal spoke to me,” I told her.

“What did it say?”

“It said its name was Norm. It asked me to watch his television show on the ABC network.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Norm, I piss on you.’”

Sylvia looked at me oddly. “You’re not adjusting very well, are you?”

“I am too.”

“You have to accept that bathrooms are an acceptable place to advertise television shows. That’s how it’s done here. This is our home now and we have to adjust.”

Sylvia was wearing a shell necklace. She carried a purse made from pandanus leaves. Her shirt said “Stop Toxic Hazardous Waste in the Pacific.” In the two months since we had returned from Kiribati, Sylvia had yet to reveal so much as her ankles to the world at large. Before Kiribati, she wore short-shorts and miniskirts. She was often referred to as the leggy blonde. Now, the Taliban would have been proud of her modesty. Sylvia was not a model of adjustment. I pointed this out to her.

“I am adjusting,” she said. “It’s just that I find shopping to be so . . .
hard
.”

The shopping mall. The American shopping mall. It frightened us.

After we left Kiribati, we had spent some time traveling around the Pacific. Fiji seemed to us a vast country. Its capital, Suva, felt like a megalopolis to us. We rarely left our hotel room as we were too busy marveling at this strange new wonder called air-conditioning. On the islands of Vava’u in Tonga we met yachties who reveled in their escape from civilization. “This is the end of the world,” said one. There were hotels, restaurants, cars, whale-watching tours, tourists, and twice-daily flights to Nuku’alofa. None of the yachties, or cruisers as they insisted on being called, had ever sailed to Kiribati. In Vanuatu, we stood on the rim of an active volcano and saw dawn emerge, and then flew to Port Vila, where we fattened ourselves up on French bread and cheese and smoked salmon and the most delicious steaks it has ever been my good fortune to eat.

Nevertheless, despite these forays into the world beyond the reef, we remained utterly unprepared for America. It was a shocking experience. From the moment we landed, we began to quiver. Driving on the L.A. Freeway in our rental car, we were honked at, cussed at, gestured at, and moments away from being shot at. I could not understand how anyone could drive faster than thirty-five miles per hour. I tried accelerating up to forty, but it seemed dangerously fast to me, and I slowed down.

We had decided to return to Washington, D.C. This was a poor decision. What we should have done was move to Hawaii and slowly ease ourselves back into America. A couple of years in Hawaii, and then maybe we’d be ready for Key West. Instead we moved to the capital of the most powerful country on Earth, where we immediately felt like yokels from another planet. “Would you look at that?” I’d say to Sylvia. “I think that there is what’s called a limooosiine. Golly. Sure is big. Must be some real important folk inside.”

Once we’d found an apartment, I made a foray to the supermarket around the corner for provisions. Two hours later, when I had failed to return, Sylvia went out to look for me. She found me staring blankly at a display of maple syrup. My shopping cart was still empty.

“Did you know that there are thirty-two different varieties of maple syrup?” I said.

“Well, just choose one,” Sylvia said.

“But which one?”

This stumped her, as it had stumped me. Confronted by so much, how does one choose? Regular or low-fat? The gourmet syrup from Vermont or regular old Aunt Jemima? Glass bottle or plastic? Fortunately for us, someone else eventually selected a bottle of syrup, and we decided that if it was good enough for her, an experienced American consumer, then it was good enough for us. Then we moved on to the butter section. Did you know that there are forty-three different kinds of butter and margarine? By the time we finished our shopping, winter had arrived.

Eventually, we had to go to the mall. We both needed new shoes and a new wardrobe. I was perfectly happy with my flipflops, but once we arrived in Washington, I noticed that people hurriedly crossed the street when they saw me approach. Even though the thermometer said it was 78 degrees, I found it excruciatingly cold, and so I walked around with several layers of tropical shirts and socks with ingeniously cut slits to accommodate my flipflops. So attired among the besuited Washington throngs, I discovered that I elicited the kind of reactions typically reserved for gun-toting crackheads.

Inside the mall we fell silent, our chins dangling below our knees. Before us were acres of climate-controlled, Muzak-enhanced retail space devoted to satisfying every consumer desire. It was breathtaking. We had become accustomed to no options whatsoever, and suddenly we were in a shopping mall, an
American
shopping mall. Bloomingdale’s or Hecht’s? Khaki or denim? Loafers or laces? All around us, people confidently walked into stores and made purchases. We moseyed around as one might do on the moon, feeling awed and bewildered. The dragon ladies at the makeup counter eyed us wearily. I was in tattered shorts and a flower print
Bula
shirt I had picked up in Fiji. Sylvia’s T-shirt promoted the nutritional value of
bele
, a weed that can survive on an atoll. Flip-flop, flip-flop, we wandered around the mall. And then we wandered right on out of the mall. It was too much. Taking pity, my mother solved our fashion problems by shopping for us. She has very strong opinions on how a man should dress and, having no other options, I obliged her. It was Sylvia who drew the line at the cravat.

Once I had shoes, I set about getting a job. I had hoped that after two years, the credit card people and the student loan people would just forget about the past and let things slide, but this turned out not to be the case. “Remember that nice meal we had in Annapolis three years ago?” I said to Sylvia. “Well, after three years of interest and late fees and finance charges, that meal is going to cost me $1,500.” This did not please Sylvia. On a piece of paper she added our rent, our monthly grocery bill, utility costs, and various miscellaneous expenses, and divided it in two. “This,” she said, circling the figure, “is what you need to earn each month. Not a penny less.”

Fortunately, due to a terrible misunderstanding, I soon found myself working as a consultant to the World Bank. I am not exactly sure what it was that led the World Bank to believe I had any expertise in infrastructure finance. I had never even balanced a checkbook. I hadn’t even tried. There is not much reason to balance a checkbook when your checking account rarely tops the three-figure mark. And so, to the Third World countries who had the misfortune of working with me on their infrastructure projects, I wish to apologize. I was just kind of making it up as I went along. I hope you understand. I needed the paycheck.

It was a large paycheck too. A large, tax-free paycheck. I was grateful to the World Bank. I understood what they were doing. They were alleviating poverty one consultant at a time. To earn this generosity, I played a game of pretend. I pretended to feel comfortable in a suit. I pretended to know what a derivative was. I pretended to be aware of the Asian financial crisis.
What Asian financial crisis?
I thought. The only financial crisis I was aware of was my own.

At a luncheon hosted by the chief economist of the World Bank, I was seated beside the Minister of Infrastructure from Haiti. He described how painful privatization would be for his country. Thousands of people would lose their jobs. Many more would find themselves destitute. I nodded sympathetically.

Yes,” I intoned. “It will be painful, but necessary.”

That was my mantra at the World Bank—
painful, but necessary.
Privatization will lead to greater efficiency, which will lead to greater productivity, which will lead to an increase in capital, which will lead to more investment, which will lead to wealth and prosperity for all. I absorbed this like an infant absorbing the strange new world he finds himself in. I sat at my desk like a sponge soaking up the conversations in the corridor, internalizing the e-mail traffic, trying to decipher what my boss was talking about.
Painful, but necessary
.

It took many months, but eventually drinking water straight from the tap no longer seemed like a provocatively dangerous thing to do. Wearing shoes began to feel natural again. Restaurants ceased to be intimidating. After we got married, Sylvia and I honeymooned in Brittany. When a business trip took her to Brussels, I joined her for a long weekend in Amsterdam. We vacationed in the wine country of Sonoma. Somehow, inexplicably, by small increments, we became part of the cosmopolitan class. We lived well. We traveled comfortably. We read the right newspapers. We subscribed to the right magazines. Conversations alighted upon the IMF’s role in Turkey, the cuisine of Andalusia, market reform in China, the animal life of Zambia, and where to find white asparagus. We were adapting to millennial America.

At the World Bank, my coworkers and I discussed the pressing issues of the day. Which airline has the best business class, Singapore Airlines or British Airways? Which stock should I buy, Nokia or Qualcomm? Where should I buy a suit? Burberry’s or Brooks Brothers?

On a trip to the Middle East—business class, via a rest stop at the Park Lane Sheraton in London, with an automatic upgrade to suite—I spent two weeks at the InterContinental Hotel in Amman, Jordan, ostensibly to help organize a conference on infrastructure finance. I had little to do beyond ensuring that the PowerPoint projector worked correctly. The most pressing task was composing a birthday greeting to King Abdullah on behalf of the World Bank and the senior government officials attending the conference. It took the better part of a day before the French-speaking Moroccan, the robed Saudi clutching his prayer beads, and the jittery Syrian agreed that the felicitation was sufficiently flowery for the occasion.

When the conference ended I traveled to the south of the country to visit Petra, the golden city in the canyon. I had long fantasized about going to Petra. I had always envisioned approaching it after a hard journey across the desert, guided by Bedouin tribesmen, pressing on in the blazing sun, resting at the occasional oasis, where we would water the camels and pass the time discussing
The Thousand and One Nights
. Instead, I barreled through the desert in a chauffer-driven black Mercedes. I was with my boss, a Persian who often reminisced about the caviar served in the first-class section on Iranian Airlines before the revolution, and a professor from the Harvard Business School. They were engaged in an animated discussion about the deal Goldman Sachs had made to finance a new power plant in Qatar. We passed through Palestinian refugee camps. In the desert, young boys herded their goats. We were overtaken by an enormous white Cadillac with Saudi plates. Above, a squadron of military helicopters hovered near the Israeli border. It felt so odd passing all this life in a chauffer-driven Mercedes, and suddenly it occurred to me that I had become what I once loathed—a grossly overpaid consultant dithering in the sun. I was wasting my time. As you may have gathered, I am generally amenable to wasting time, but not like this. I felt like I was perpetuating a fraud, and while I can’t say that I felt any particular moral outrage, I did appreciate the ridiculousness of my situation, and if I was going to live a ridiculous life, I could do better.

Sylvia too had since become dispirited with life in Washington. For a long while, she had simply absorbed the sights, sounds, and realities of life in the most important city in the world. She was like an automaton. She had some distant memory of this world, but it felt like a long-forgotten dream. Confident now that she understood life in Washington, she began to form opinions. “This sucks,” she would declare after another day of forging partnerships, promoting synergy, attending conferences, disseminating knowledge on the Internet, producing vapor. In Kiribati, she had worked with the tangible. In Washington, she worked with the gaseous. How exactly will a link on a corporation’s website improve the lot of the two billion people living on less than a dollar a day? Presumably, they don’t have broadband access. Quite likely, they don’t even have electricity.

One evening, returning home after an excruciatingly long day, which was devoted solely to massaging the prose written by a nonnative English-speaking economist into something approaching coherence, I was pleasantly surprised by a proposition put forth by Sylvia.

“Would you be inclined to move to a small island in the South Pacific?”

“Oh yes please.”

And that is how two years after we returned from Kiribati, we once again found ourselves on a distant island, enveloped by the familiar blue waters of the Pacific.