The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“Yes. But it’s a secret.”

Some months later, when the American ambassador arrived on Tarawa to attend Independence Day celebrations—had another year passed already?—Sylvia offered her the latest intelligence on Chinese activities in Kiribati. More submarines. Where the Secret Room was in the embassy. The strength of their defenses around the tracking station. The payoffs to the government to keep quiet. The spike in Chinese activities whenever the Americans tested their missile defense system. Sylvia was thorough. She was also undeterred when the source of the rumors regarding the submarines and the guns turned out to be an I-Matang prankster.

“So what?” she said. “You agree that the Chinese are using the satellite tracking station to spy on what’s happening on Kwajalein?”

“I do.”

“And you agree that the Chinese are corrupting the government?”

“I do.”

“And you agree that the Chinese are the biggest polluters on Tarawa?”

“I do, though I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” she said. “And if I can make their lives a little more difficult, then I’m happy to do it.”

Beware the wrath of the roused environmentalist. Which is perhaps why not long after we left Tarawa, four American F-16s did a few low-level flyovers above the satellite tracking station. Which may have led to the Chinese taking down an American spy plane off the southern coast of China. I’m not saying these events are connected. But I’m not saying they’re not.

CHAPTER 21

In which the Author shares some thoughts on what it means to Dissipate, to Wither Away, Dissolute-like, and how one becomes perversely Emboldened by the inevitability of decay, the sure knowledge that today, possibly tomorrow, the Body will be unwell, which leads to Recklessness, Stupidity even, in the conduct of Everyday Life.

I am not sure when it happened, but at some point during my time on Tarawa I stopped wearing a seat belt. I saw nothing unusual in having the pickup truck filled with gas from a pump that was smoking, delivered by an attendant who himself was smoking. The sight of three-year-olds piled precariously on speeding mopeds no longer filled me with wonder. Body boarding in bone-crushing surf was an activity to be savored. Digging flies out of ever-deepening cuts became a thoughtless little habit. Four-day-old tuna? How ’bout sashimi? Six cans of Victoria Bitter? Why not? And hey, smoke ’em if you got ’em.

I’d become immune to disease, not physically, but psychologically. Nothing fazed me. “Do you remember that consultant from New Zealand?” Sylvia asked. “The one who was here to train the police force? Well, his office just sent a fax. Apparently, he’s in the hospital with cholera and leptospirosis. They thought we should know.”

“What’s leptospirosis?”

“Something to do with rat urine.”

“Well, he shouldn’t have had the rat urine… Hey, I found some fresh sea worms for dinner.”

I took it all in stride. Cholera, leptospirosis, hepatitis, leprosy, tuberculosis, dysentery, hookworms, roundworms, tapeworms, mysterious viral diseases, septic infections, there were so many diseases to contend with on Tarawa that it was best to ignore them altogether. Beyond boiling drinking water, there wasn’t much that could be done. What happens happens, I thought. It could always be worse. That’s what I told Sylvia when she was felled by dengue fever.

“I feel like I’m dying,” she said. “Every bone in my body hurts.”

“You’re not dying,” I contended. “Unless its hemorrhagic dengue fever.”

“There’s no cure for that.”

“No there isn’t. But at least it’s not Ebola. Just relax. You’ll probably feel better in about two weeks.”

And she did.

On Onotoa, in the far southern Gilbert Islands, it seemed perfectly normal to have a meal of salt fish in a maneaba where fifty-odd shark fins were drying in the rafters. Afterward, I went swimming. When I did come across a shark in the shallows above the reef, I just smacked the palm of my hand hard on the surface of the water, and off it swam. Sharks had become an irritant, nothing more.

Flying Air Kiribati also ceased to fill me with dread, even after the CASA wrapped itself around a coconut tree while attempting an emergency landing on Abaiang. I’d traveled to Abaiang on a homemade wooden boat, just for fun, and as I stared at the CASA with its sheared wing, I thought, Ah well, at least we still have the Chinese plane.

At a funeral, I had a generous helping of chicken curry. In front of me lay the corpse. It was the custom in Kiribati to lay out the body of the deceased for three days before burial. Kiribati is on the equator. I had seconds.

Somehow, two years had passed since we first set foot on Tarawa, and in those two years I had become, in my own peculiar way, an islander. Certainly I was an I-Matang. But the world from which I’d arrived had become nothing more than an ever-receding memory. Sylvia too had adjusted to Tarawa. When I cut her hair, she no longer cringed in fear. She too had lost her vanity. When she took the electric razor we borrowed to shave my head, she was no longer troubled when her haircuts made me look like a skate-punk with unresolved anger issues. I, of course, couldn’t care less. No hair, no lice, I thought.

One day, she arrived home and declared: “I ran over another dog today.”

“What’s the tally now?” I asked.

“Four dogs and three chickens.”

“Didn’t you run over a pig?”

“No,” she said. “That was you.”

Shortly after she’d arrived on Tarawa, Sylvia swerved to miss wandering dogs. It was instinctual. But Tarawa is a small island, where every speck of land is occupied or used, and to stray from the road’s narrow lane was to risk the lives of humans, and no dog was worth that. And so now, like me, if she couldn’t brake safely, she simply ran over the dog. Perhaps she felt bad about the first dog, but by the fourth dog, she took it as she did any other bump on the road.

When her staff at work declared that one of the rooms in the office was haunted by malevolent spirits, Sylvia did what any manager wise to the ways of Kiribati would do. She organized an exorcism. Unsure whether the spirits were Catholic or Protestant, Sylvia had both a priest and a minister cast out the offending spirits. The staff were satisfied.

We found that we no longer had much in common with the newer volunteers and consultants to arrive on Tarawa. Every six months or so, another dozen I-Matangs arrived on Tarawa, replacing those whose contracts had ended, or more commonly, those I-Matangs who had been broken by Tarawa. The newcomers seemed dainty to us, naive and ill-prepared for island life. Whenever I saw a newcomer, I had only one question: “Did you bring any magazines?”

“I’ve got a People,” one said.

“Can I have it?”

The world on those pages, however, seemed utterly foreign to me. Instead, I found myself asking Bwenawa, “So, tell me a little more about this Nareau the Cunning character.”

Whenever possible, we traveled to North Tarawa or to one of the outer islands. The threat of being marooned no longer troubled us. In fact, we welcomed it, because if one can ignore the heat, and the scorpions, and the awful food, the outer islands of Kiribati are about as close to paradise as one can reasonably ask to experience in this life. I have mentioned the color in Kiribati, and I will mention it again. There is no place on Earth where color has been rendered with such intense depth, from the first light of dawn illuminating a green coconut frond to the last ray of sunset, when the sky is reddened to biblical proportions. And the blue… have you seen just how blue blue can get in the equatorial Pacific? In comparison, Picasso’s blue period seems decidedly ash-