The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“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.

The 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.”