The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“They would kill him.”

Well. That seemed a mite severe. I thought of the hundreds of I-Kiribati I could have killed. Lucky for everyone that I was blissfully ignorant. I was vigilant when it came to nighttime prowlers, but I was unaware that those who walked by during the day were also slighting me. But no more. Now that I knew that my manhood was being dissed, I resolved to do something about it. I did not think I was capable of murder, but I felt that I could at least look like I was capable of murder. The next time a man walked near the house I fixed him with an ice-cold stare, every muscle coiled with barely contained violence, and I felt pretty confident that my body language expressed contempt and agitation, and if this trespasser did not leave now he would meet his end, and it would be swift and merciless. The trespasser, for that is now how I thought of him, rather than as a friendly villager, met my gaze and quickly his smile turned into an expression of savage hostility, and that’s when I noticed that he was an extremely muscular man and that he was carrying a machete, and that he did, in fact, look like he was capable of murder.

“Mauri,” I said, with a friendly wave. My smile wrapped around my head. I wondered if he might like a glass of water.

Tiabo shook her head sadly. She turned to the man and began to yell at him, chasing him off.

Clearly, Tiabo was not much impressed with my manliness. It did not help when several weeks later I returned from a short snorkeling expedition beyond the reef. The tide had been exceptionally high and for a half hour or so, when the tide was no longer surging, but not yet receding, the breakers had been reduced to flat water. I was curious about the coral and fish life beyond the house, and so I donned my mask and flippers and swam out. By now, I was no longer worried about sharks. I often saw a man swim out with a long spear. Inevitably, he returned a short while later with a half-dozen fish tied around his waist. This could only mean that he possessed an astonishingly small brain, or that this particular slice of reef was devoid of sharks.

Past the break zone, the reef wall descended about forty feet, where it plateaued. Fifty yards farther, the reef plummeted into a blue-black void. As I snorkeled, I hugged the initial drop, periodically emerging to see what the waves were doing. I was pleasantly surprised to see live coral. It was nothing to rave about, a clump here, a branch there, some brain coral, a few splashes of color on an abused reef. Elsewhere the color was provided by those with advanced degrees in marketing and package engineering. There was rubbish everywhere, cans and rags and diapers listlessly swaying in the current. Swimming through and around this garbage were parrotfish and Great Trevallies and longnose emperors, some quite big. It was disheartening seeing what was being done to their habitat. Above an outburst of brain coral I saw a lionfish, a magnificent and exceedingly poisonous fish. I dived to get a closer look, and as I did so I nearly blew out my sphincter. I had dived directly on top of a shark.

In my panic, I filled my lungs with water. Then I began to flail and kick and otherwise behave like weak and injured shark fodder. I was out of sorts. Jittery adrenaline bursts are not helpful when you happen to be in deep water with lungs full of seawater. I had no idea what the shark was doing. I was too busy drowning. For all I knew, it was having a cup of tea, merrily watching me die, which saved him the trouble of having to kill me before he set to work dismembering me limb by limb. Then I heard that little voice that has saved me so often in the past— relax, get a grip, swim up, clear your lungs, breathe, and get the hell out of the water, you twit.

There is nothing quite so disconcerting as having your head above water as the rest of your body dangles below the surface, knowing that there is a shark near, a shark with which you have had an interaction, and not knowing exactly how the shark feels about the interaction. Did I make him mad? Did I make him hungry?

Apparently I had frightened the shark. And it is no wonder. I was twice as big as he was. With my mask back on I could see it swimming rapidly away. It was only about three feet long, a young reef shark. Nevertheless, as I swam back to shore I kept glancing back. Did he rush off to tell his parents? Was papa shark looking for me?

I was breathless by the time I entered the house. My heart was still going thump-thump-thump. Between gasps, I shared my adventure with Tiabo.

“There was a shark… pant, pant… boy oh boy… never seen a shark before… pant, pant…”

“You are scared of te shark?” Tiabo asked with raised eyebrows.

“Yes, of course, I am scared of te shark.”

“Ha, ha,” Tiabo laughed. “The I-Matang is scared of te shark. I-Kiribati people are not scared of te shark.”

“That’s because I-Kiribati people are crazy people.”

She laughed mirthfully. She had another story for the maneaba.

AS THE MONTHS went by and “La Macarena” was etched deeper and deeper into my consciousness, I became increasingly despondent that our package of CDs would never arrive. With each incoming flight I biked to the airport, hoping desperately that our package was on board. The arrival of the Air Nauru plane, the last plane to fly to Tarawa, after Air Marshall finally canceled their service, had become an erratic occurrence. Often weeks passed between flights.

Nauru, a one-island nation of eight thousand people, once had six Boeing 737s. They did not need six planes, of course. But flush with the cash generated by the mining of their phosphate deposits, Nauru set about looking for creative outlets to squander their money. This included financing Broadway shows, supporting the lifestyles of every con man between Taiwan and Costa Rica, buying the world’s most overvalued properties, and maintaining a fleet of six Boeing 737s. No one on Nauru actually worked. The mining of their island was done by I-Kiribati laborers under Australian management. Instead, Nauruans spent their time becoming grotesquely fat. In this they were successful. They are officially the fattest people on the planet. Their planes, when not requisitioned by the wives of ministers who needed them for their global shopping sprees, were often used to ferry Nauruans to Australia, where they obtained the treatment they needed for adult-onset diabetes.

The good times, however, came to a crashing end. The phosphate deposits are nearly gone. The island has been thoroughly ruined. It is nothing more than a desolate moonscape. And the Nauruans have nothing to show for it. They have destroyed their country and wasted its wealth. The planes have been sold off, leaving just the one leased 737. The Broadway shows have closed. The property they own around the world has been allowed to rot. A half-dozen cities are littered with abandoned buildings owned by Nauru. A new government takes power approximately every four months, and during their short terms they do their best to gobble up what remains of Nauru’s cash. Today, the country exists as an international pariah. Nauru has become the global epicenter for money laundering. One would think that by opening up its country to the Russian mafia, Colombian drug lords, African warlords, and Middle Eastern terrorists, Nauru would at least be getting a tidy cut of the loot. But this is not so. Nauru receives no more than a few thousand dollars in shell-company registration fees and mere pennies for washing the money through its system. Clearly, the fat has settled on their brains. Nauru is the most pathetic country on Earth. Try as I might to feel sorry for them, I cannot manage anything better than contempt. The tragedy of this, of course, was that I was dependent on Nauru to bring me relief from “La Macarena.”

Seven long months passed. Once or twice a month, depending on whether Air Nauru had arrived, I biked to the airport, where I searched among the delivered packages for our precious music. The trip was inevitably dispiriting. Not only were the CDs nowhere to be seen, there were often boxes sent from Australia covered in bright red signs: URGENT                  MEDICINE INSIDE                  KEEP REFRIGERATED                  DELIVER IMMEDIATELY TO HOSPITAL. Three weeks later the boxes would still be there, in the suffocating heat. It was tragically typical. A Western donor sends urgently needed medicine, but the government cannot manage to pick it up. I offered to deliver it myself, but the clerks would not release the medicine to me. And so it went to waste.

Then, one day the stars aligned, the gods smiled, and as I rummaged among the packages I saw with indescribable happiness my mother’s distinctive handwriting. Oh, the sweet joy of it. I claimed the package, stuffed it my backpack, and biked like the wind.

“Tiabo,” I said, full of glee. “You must help me.”

She eyed me suspiciously as I plundered through our box of CDs.

“You must tell me which song, in your opinion, do you find to be the most offensive.”

“What?” she asked wearily.

“I want you to tell me which song is so terrible that the I-Kiribati will cover their ears and beg me to turn it off.”

“You are a strange I-Matang.”