The Sex Lives of Cannibals Read online

  The thing about flying from a place like Washington, D.C., to an island like Tarawa is that, despite the interminable tedium of the journey, there really isn’t sufficient time to make a smooth transition. And I am a transition person. I need those interludes of adjustment. I need coffee, a transition mechanism, to help me adjust from the comatose to, if nothing more, consciousness. I need Pennsylvania, a transition state, to adjust from the Mid-Atlantic to New England. But flying from the heart of the free world to the end of the world offers no satisfying transitional process. There is no spring or fall in long-distance air travel. It’s straight winter to summer. One predawn moment we were inside a terminal seething with ambitious people, business travelers tramping up to New York and Boston for very important meetings, where we stood at a counter under the curious gaze of a counter person, who noted that our tickets read Washington–Newark–San Francisco–Honolulu–Johnston Atoll–Majuro–Tarawa and that they were one-way tickets, causing the counter person to exclaim “Gosh,” and then after many long hours spent in a magic tube, punctuated by semilucid gate-to-gate wanderings, we found ourselves in Waikiki Beach, where we strolled among shops offering the latest from Givenchy, Chanel, and the Japanese porn industry, until we reached the actual strand—surfers bobbing, Diamond Head looming, a sun descending in crimson grandeur—and we began to laugh because life can be funny sometimes.

  Soon, too soon, it was time to leave Nippon… er, Hawaii, and we returned to the airport, where we strolled past the gates where flights to Osaka and Los Angeles drew their passengers, and walked on to the gate where Air Micronesia awaited. Again we were flying, not to the continents straddling the Pacific Ocean, but to another, more distant island. The trip was beginning to feel like an act of willful disappearance. No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific. Tick-tock, tick-tock, the hours, the days, passed with excruciating monotony. It was very blue. Celestial blue merged with aquatic blue, and it just went on and on and on, the blue did, and also the time, and then a descent began and it was still blue, and quickly now we were very near the Pacific Ocean. I felt as if I could touch the water. I saw ripples carving ocean swells. I sensed sharks lurking. There were ominous shadows, twenty-footers at least. And then fingers of coral whooshed by and we landed with a hard whomp, and then we stopped. We were on Johnston Atoll and here, very briefly, we shall pause.

  Johnston Atoll is the vilest place on Earth. In the 1960s the United States used the island for atmospheric nuclear tests, which is a definite no-no in most neighborhoods. Not content to merely nuke the atoll, the U.S. then decided to poison it. This is where America stores and disposes of such wonders from the laboratory as the nerve gas Sarin and other clever agents for delivering disease and death. There are two bleak processing plants and they sit at either end of the runway, steadily burning canister after canister of poison. Between the plants are military barracks with satellite dishes protruding from their roofs, receiving signals from a world that seems very far away. There is nothing else on Johnston Atoll. Now and then, there are little accidents, leakages, small oopsies, and the hapless soldiers assigned here don their gas masks.

  It is tempting to dash off a page or two and expound upon the philosophical implications of Johnston Atoll. The physical manifestations of humanity’s capacity for great evil reside here, and for writers more ambitious than I this would be like catnip. However, sitting in an airplane watching one passenger, a civilian who had made a peculiar career choice, disembark, I was not struck by any profound ruminations. My thoughts were more along the lines of Could someone please close the fucking door before we all turn into mutants? Armed soldiers guarded the airplane and I just knew that they were sporting fish gills, and while I felt deeply sorry for them and their offspring, I just wished that someone would close the door and let us breathe airplane air again, which is only slightly less toxic, but still. And then someone did just that, and we were back in the air, scanning the water closely, searching for signs of Godzilla.

  So maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Johnston Atoll is the transitory island in the Pacific. The illusion-buster. The island that announces to travelers that they should cast aside their naivete, their glossy presumptions, and realize that the Pacific is a big place, a big empty place, and that some may find the emptiness useful. True, Johnston Atoll is just a rock, barren and about as distant from settlement as one can be, and so if one must nuke an island, and gas it too, Johnston Atoll does all right, never mind the fishies. Not so the Marshall Islands. Here, after ever more hours spent hurtling across the Pacific, we arrived, exhausted and crabby, accustomed to movement, and not at all prepared, after all that flying, to find ourselves in a spookily familiar place, as though we were inside a forgotten episode of The Twilight Zone, the one where Dr. Strangelove descends upon the set of South Pacific. We were on Majuro, the capital atoll of the Marshall Islands, a grim island group deemed useful by the United States. It is, frankly, not so good to be found useful by a superpower, particularly one interested in exploring the nuances of the hydrogen bomb.

  It was in the Marshall Islands where scientists finally discovered what, in fact, constitutes a coral atoll. A coral atoll is the crest of a dying volcano. Like many explanations this one derives from Charles Darwin, building upon the work of previous naturalists. Coral only thrives until about 150 feet below the surface, but rather than assume that the coral is steadily rising atop an expanding underwater volcano, which was the belief at the time, Darwin theorized that coral replenishes itself by matching the rate of a sea volcano’s dissolution. As the land far below the water surface steadily recedes into the depths, coral polyps grow from its slopes, seeking the sun, rising first to become a barrier reef, and then, as the volcano continues to disintegrate, slowly inching toward its base, an atoll is formed, the living crest balanced atop layers of dead coral and far below, the volcano itself.

  Of course, it took some time to prove this theory, since one had to dig awfully deep to find the volcano below. Attempts were made, but it was not until 1952, more than a hundred years after Darwin first proposed his theory, when a drill bit was pushed 4,610 feet into Eneewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands and struck volcanic rock, that Darwin’s theory was proved correct. It was incidental, however, to the purpose of the drilling. Enwetak was being canvassed as a sight for testing the hydrogen bomb and the drilling indicated that the atoll was suitable for obliteration. Shortly after dawn on November 1, 1952, a bomb called Mike was detonated, and an island, a home, an ecosystem was blown up, irradiated, and poisoned, leading many to wonder what is the point of having Nevada.

  This was hardly the only apocalyptic event in the Marshalls. I just happen to enjoy the weird symbiosis between discovering the nature of an atoll and blowing it up. Dozens of tests occurred in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s and one would think that nuking the Marshall Islands over and over again would be enough punishment to inflict on the country for one epoch, but the U.S. Department of Defense thinks otherwise. Every year, the United States targets the Marshall Islands with its intercontinental ballistic missiles. These weapons are fired from 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, eeuuwh.

  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.

  Eeuuwh.

  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

  In which the Author finally sets foot on Distant Tarawa, where he is led by the Evil Kate, who seeks to Convince him that Tarawa is not what it seems; and, Conceding that it is indeed Very Hot on the Equator, he Bravely overcomes his Fear of Sharks and encounters something Much, Much Worse.

  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 Am
ericana must be very primitive indeed. Finally on this journey we felt something like elation, a sense of hope that on Tarawa we would find, if not an Edenic paradise, at least an island not yet so distant from the Fall—an optimism that was dampened only a little bit by the plane we would fly, a plane that didn’t allow you to stand up straight, a plane where the pilot rearranged the passengers because of weight and balance issues. That kind of plane. But it would take us elsewhere, away from the American Pacific, the blasted, forgotten periphery of empire, and that was all that mattered.

  The day was very blue, not sharp Autumn blue, but faraway tropical blue, languorous, timeless. The northern Gilbert Islands, our first glimpse of Kiribati, passed below and the islands seemed not like islands, but suggestions of islands, emerald crescents rising from the depths, as if there was something provisional about existence. And then Tarawa appeared. We flew over the northern part of the island, a ribbon of land topped with palm trees and bisected by channels feeding the ocean into the lagoon. The tide was in and the lagoon seemed incandescent, a startling fusion of greens and blues. On the ocean side of the atoll, white streamers of broken waves rushed toward barren beaches. Villages of thatch appeared and faded away. We were very low now. Beside us there was no more sky, but a wall of coconut trees. Any moment we expected contact, the hard bounce of the wheels on the runway. And then… something was wrong. My inner ear was confused. My stomach lurched. The engines screamed. Sylvia’s hand gripped my arm, seeking comfort, finding none. We raced over the tarmac like a careening hovercraft, not quite making contact with the ground. Still flying. And then we began to ascend. Tarawa gone. The blue ocean. The blue sky. Again. The pilot spoke: “Ah… sorry about that. There were pigs on the runway. We’ll just swing around and try again.”