California, using missiles randomly selected to ensure that if the green light for Armageddon is ever given, what follows will go smoothly. The ICBMs are aimed at Kwajalein Atoll, the catcher’s mitt, where research is also conducted on several missile defense systems, including for some years the Strategic Defense Initiative, and more recently, a humbler defense system (THAAD—Theater High Altitude Defense) that requires missiles to be fired from two other atolls in the Marshalls. Access to two-thirds of Kwajalein is restricted to American soldiers and those who supply them with their weaponry, which in addition to the four islands already poisoned by radiation—Bikini, Eneewetak, Rongelap, and Utrik—results in five islands lost to the U.S. defense industry. With the Bush (II) administration’s decision to discard the ABM Treaty, even more testing will be conducted in the Marshall Islands. For a country with a total area of less than 120 square miles, the loss of five islands is not insignificant. And so payments must be made.
The Marshall Islands had received $800 million of American “aid” over the previous ten years, which amounted to $14,300 for every man, woman, and child in the country. The vast majority of this money was sent directly to the government of the Marshall Islands, which, of course, is the best possible way to instill corruption, inefficiency, and a dependency mentality in Third World governments everywhere. Not only did all this aid fail to significantly improve the health and welfare of the Marshallese, it introduced new afflictions. Hypertension, diabetes, and high blood pressure are now serious problems as a result of the local diet being supplanted by food imported from the United States. Alcoholism and suicide, particularly among the young, have taken root in a society no longer held together by traditional bonds. And Majuro, an atoll not more than two hundred yards wide, is besieged by traffic jams, mountains of garbage, aimless youth fashionable in their East L.A. ghetto wear, and a population as a whole that has already moved beyond despair and settled into a glazed ennui. It is a miserable place where coconut palm trees have disappeared, replaced by concrete and tin.
And there are cockroaches. Enormous cockroaches. I began to wonder. What precisely had caused the cockroaches on Majuro to become so enormous? They trolled like sinister remnants of the Pleistocene era, when everything was bigger, meaner, and just generally more voracious (or was that the Cambrian era?), and because I was fairly well informed about the activities of a certain superpower on these islands I immediately began to think about radioactive fallout and where, exactly, did it all go? Which way was the wind blowing in the 1940s, and the 1950s, and the 1960s, because there are some scary cockroaches on Majuro. In the back of a taxi, they scurried across our feet. They emerged from every nook and cranny in our hotel room. In a restaurant, they rushed across the table and asked, really, if we were going to eat that.
This did not please Sylvia. She’s good with spiders, indifferent to snakes, and unmoved by mice. But cockroaches? They are, in her word,
Surely, we thought, there must be something else to see on Majuro besides the impressive roach population. We were staying at the Robert Riemer Hotel, a modest haven for consultants, and I mentioned to the stout woman more or less attending to us that we fancied a walk, and since this was our only day on Majuro could she recommend a destination. Someplace interesting, worth seeing, touristy is fine.
“You want to walk?” she said. She seemed aghast. She heaved in her flower-print dress. “There is nothing to see.” A cockroach scurried across the counter.
We walked out and turned left, which we discovered was one of only two directional options on an atoll, but after some time wandering we were forced to concede that she was, indeed, correct. There is nothing you would want to see on Majuro. There is a filthy fringe of beach that recedes into soppy mud before disappearing into a lifeless lagoon. On the ocean side of the atoll there is a gray and barren reef shelf stained with what from a distance look like large, whitish-brownish polyps that on closer inspection turn out to be used diapers, resting there under the high sun while awaiting an outgoing tide. On dry land, there are decrepit two-story apartment blocks and garish prefab houses. The road was one long traffic jam and alongside it were the fattest people I had ever seen, wan and listless, munching through family-sized packets of Cheetos. As we passed, nodding our greetings, they offered in return quiet contempt, and it was not long before I became sympathetic to the spleenish air of the Marshallese. This ghetto/island has none of the romantic sense of dissolution found elsewhere in tropical urban areas succumbing to age and wear. Majuro wasn’t built to slowly, grandly crumble. It was built with the ambition of a strip mall, a place for America to traffic trifles to a people who in a generation exchanged three thousand years of history and culture for spangled rubbish and lite beer. New pickup trucks passed by. Every government minister had a chauffeur-driven Lexus. A store offered the latest in washing machines. A video shop displayed the most recent features from Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme. Teenagers loitered in $100 sneakers and trendy baggy shorts. There was money on Majuro, but the overwhelming sense was one of immense poverty.
We were not happy. Pretty close to despair, actually. Tarawa was supposed to be similar, but poorer. It occurred to us that this might not be such a good idea after all, that moving to an atoll at the end of the world is really nothing more than an act of romantic delusion, and it was tempting to succumb to negativity, but we resisted, and instead yielded to a simmering anger, anger at the United States for obliterating a nation, just for practice, and anger at the Marshallese for behaving like debased junkies, willing to do anything for another infusion of the almighty dollar. This included removing the population of one island so that a Korean resort and casino could operate unhindered by the sight of poor, dark-skinned people who presumably dampen the tourist’s gambling instinct, and allowing an American firm the use of an uninhabited island to store the radioactive waste generated by reactors in Japan and South Korea. For a country already so traumatized and polluted by radiation, encouraging the importation of more radioactive waste can only be called pathological.
But for us things did get more negative. In our room, which was not a bad room, I spent much of the night like a taunted monkey in a cage, lurching from wall to wall flinging my sandals at the insidious creatures, and when my tally reached five dead cockroaches (five!), I thought it safe to attempt sleep. And then I felt it. It was scrambling up my back, a sharp pitter-patter with razor fur burning my skin. I knew that very soon I would have a cockroach in my ear. Instinct took over. I emitted a primal scream and bounced out of the bed. Sylvia did likewise. She does not like to be woken up suddenly. I calmly explained the situation and she was thoughtful enough to summon with some urgency several higher-power characters in Christian theology. We found the cockroach lurking behind the headboard and so I shoved the bed hard against the wall and there it remained, and it is probably still there today, emitting a soft green glow.
CHAPTER 4
We were to have awoken at 5:30 A.M., courtesy of the wake-up call thoughtfully provided by the staff of the Robert Riemer Hotel, but their subservience to the American Way was not yet so complete as to follow through on the promise of a wake-up call, and so we arose at 6:10 A.M., ten minutes after the minibus that was to take us to the airport was scheduled to depart. This left us a trifle ill-tempered. We scrambled out of the hotel, bent double like hungry coolies underneath the weight of all our possessions, and boarded the lingering minibus, which contained a gaunt blond Australian man. “About bloody well time,” he said in a voice that suggested his larynx was not what it should be. I acknowledged Sylvia’s look and resolved to quit smoking sometime very soon and then we both gave him piercing dagger eyes. He was wearing shiny white shoes.
We were expected to arrive at the airport two hours before our flight, which seemed inexplicable to me. It isn’t as if Majuro International Airport receives a lot of air traffic requiring complex organizational procedures to ensure that passengers and baggage arrive and depart as intended. It has one runway built upon a reef. It has one single-story dilapidated building that contains customs and immigration and a hole in the wall for baggage to be tossed through. The waiting area is the curb outside. Here, during the one hour and fifty-seven minutes that remained after we checked in for our flight on Air Marshall, we met a friendly Marshallese woman who commented on the amount of luggage we were lugging. We explained that we were moving to Tarawa.
“Tarawa is like Majuro was thirty years ago. There’s nothing there,” she said, betraying in her voice a distinct air of superiority, as if any island not yet awash in the detritus of Americana must be very primitive indeed. Finally
