Surviving Paradise (24 page)

The pre-flu symptoms persisted. As my fever grew, I started shivering. At night, my mind was tortured by absurd requirements. My limbs and blankets had to conform to a geometric ideal, some sort of triangular pattern which was impossible to achieve yet felt desperately necessary. For several hours I could think of nothing else than achieving this, and was endlessly frustrated at my failure.

I started having inexplicable flashbacks to a Berkeley psychology lab I had worked at one summer in college. I was a test subject and had to bite on what was descriptively called a “bite bar” to steady my head during vision experiments. Now, in Majuro, I had the constant sensation that I was biting into that bite bar, and I couldn't get bite bars out of my mind. It made no sense, but there it was.

Then, one night about a week into the illness, I woke up convinced that my hand was irreparably destroyed. It looked normal, but underneath the skin, my bones and tendons had turned to metal wires, crisscrossing, tangling, bending, breaking. I moved my fingers. I hit my hand against the wall. I poured water over it. With every attempt at repair, the wires only became more snarled and twisted, brittle, broken, and mangled. I was convinced that my hand had been ruined forever, and nothing could be done about it.

Somehow I fell back into my feverish half-sleep. In the morning, I didn't consider the incident a hallucination. It seemed like nothing more than a mistaken thought. I told my friends, with no realization of the absurdity of what I was saying, “I had a weird experience last night. It wasn't exactly a hallucination, but for a little while I thought my hand was made of wires and they were tangling with each other and breaking.”

“Peter . . . that's a hallucination,” they replied.

They hauled me to the hospital which, unfortunately, was
air-conditioned. I had been shivering in the midday equatorial sun, and now I was freezing. We reached the entrance of the emergency room, but the doctor wouldn't let me in because there were no free beds. Instead he took my temperature.

One hundred and four degrees.

I had felt frigid since entering the building, but now I suddenly became overheated, broke into a sweat, and felt faint. I wondered if I was dying.

Suddenly an unoccupied bed materialized, and I was placed upon it. A nurse hooked me to an IV. Between memorizing the pattern of dots on the ceiling, I struck up a quick friendship with my Australian bed-neighbor.

“So what are you in for?” I asked.

“I cut my hand down to the bone while cleaning a yacht. You?”

“I have a 104-degree fever and hallucinations from the curse of the ghost of an ancient chieftess from a remote outer island.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

My fear of impending demise began to subside. But some things in the emergency room did not inspire confidence. A few cockroaches were milling about on the floor in their aimless robotic way, and the occasional mouse scampered from one hole in the wall to another. The door to the emergency room said, “Absolutely No Admittance,” but it was wide open, and my friends sashayed in and out at their leisure to check up on me. Another sign, in plain view of the patients, said, “ We have done an audit of all the narcotics in all the wards. There were many errors and omissions. This is unacceptable.”

I was moved to another room, where I spent the night. In the bed next to mine, separated only by a curtain, a Marshallese man and woman were chatting in a mix of their language and mine, although they barely spoke the latter.

“Long time no
mona
,” said the man.

“No eat, no eat,” agreed the woman.

I decided then and there that “Long time no
mona
” was another candidate for the volunteer T-shirt slogan.

By morning, I was far from well, but the fever had eased to the point where I could be discharged. The hospital fee, as always, whether they
treated me with aspirin or open-heart surgery, was seventeen dollars. If I had been Marshallese, it would have been five. In some respects, I realized, the health-care system of this Third World country was ahead of my own.

I started a course of antibiotics, but after a few days I noticed that I would run out of the prescription before the ten-day cycle was finished. I went to the pharmacy. The pharmacist confirmed that the printed dosage was in error, and I had been taking twice the correct amount.

“So have I done anything horrible to my body?” I asked.

“No. In fact, you did something good to your body. You cleaned it out of anything at all you might have had.”

That was comforting. Then again, this was a country where they handed out antibiotics like they were candy.

In the follow-up consultation, the doctor told me that the diagnosis was unclear, but typhoid was a possibility. Having already survived the disease, I was hoping that it was indeed typhoid: a deadly sounding scourge if there ever was one. How impressed people would be when they heard that I contracted this exotic malady and lived to tell the tale.

Of course, I had my own theory: the Curse of the Ancient Chieftess.

I had learned two things: 1) take no chances with weird possessed objects, and 2) if you think you might have destroyed your hand, you should seek medical attention whether or not you actually have.

MAJURO. I COULDN'T BELIEVE I WAS STILL IN MAJURO. I HAD MISSED
my scheduled flight back to Ujae while recovering from my demonic curse. Then the next flight was canceled. The next flight after that was also canceled, then uncanceled without anyone being informed of it, so the plane took off without me. The flight after that was canceled and remained so. Now I had missed two flights to Ujae, and I wondered what my family and students were thinking. “He must hate us,” perhaps. It wasn't far-fetched, considering how displeased I had looked that last month.

I needed to go back. I needed to let them know I wasn't giving
up. But I was at the mercy of the airline. In the comparatively huge capital city, I started to feel more bored and confined than I had ever felt on Ujae. The boundaries of tiny Ujae had rarely pressed against me: they were simply the edges of my world. But in Majuro I began to feel the languor and dissipation of being where I knew I shouldn't be. A pathetic case in point of my boredom was when I went to a restaurant and spent seven straight hours there, eating breakfast and lunch on the same tab. I started to pine for the island that a few weeks ago I had been so thrilled to leave.

I took advantage of my extended vacation to visit Arno Atoll, where another volunteer was teaching. Majuro and Arno lay side by side, with the shore of each visible from the other on clear days. The journey between the two was only a short boat ride.

Arno Atoll had a few claims to fame. In two places, the loop of the atoll doubled over on itself, forming small secondary lagoons. But if that bit of geological esoterica isn't exciting enough for you, I've got something much better: Arno was also renowned for the “Love School” on Longar, which had reputedly instructed young women in the art of pleasure. Some called it a tourist's myth, while others claimed that classes were still held. The atoll was also home to the last practitioners of
maanpa
: the martial arts of the Marshall Islands. Again reputedly (one heard many stories in this country) the proper practice of this skill required one to ingest the
wut in kio
, an orange blossom that grew only on Wake Island, five hundred miles north of the nearest inhabited atoll. Sailing across these lonely waters to retrieve the flower was once a test of valor for chiefs-to-be. For
maanpa
men, the
wut in kio
slowed down time, sci-fi action film style, so they could watch their opponent's fist traveling toward their face and dodge it.

Allegedly, a boat called the
Lakbelele
traveled to Arno every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at around noon. I looked for an office or a posted schedule. I found neither. After six months in the Marshall Islands, I still believed that there would be an official process to it all, that the boat was required to do what it did. In reality, the
Lakbelele
came and went as its owners pleased, and I was lucky it followed any vague pattern at all.

I arrived at the dock several hours early, to slightly reduce the chance that I would be too late. Sitting near the harbor was a group
of ten Marshallese men, drunk beyond all recourse at eleven
AM
on a Wednesday. They introduced themselves. Most had respectable jobs, and one was even a principal. It was not at all obvious what these working men were doing downing beers at the waterfront on a weekday morning. They helped me pass the time, though, and this was a good thing because the boat I had arrived two and half hours early for ended up leaving an hour and a half late.

Aboard the
Lakbelele
, I started to feel a bit cocky. It was a predictably beautiful day. I was chatting in a little-known Austronesian language with the passengers. I didn't feel the slightest bit seasick. I was looking forward to a relaxing passage to the tropical paradise that Arno surely was.

Things went downhill from there. As we left the haven of the lagoon, the waves grew larger and larger, until the distance from crest to trough was a good ten feet. That may not impress veteran sailors, but it scared the hell out of me. The ocean, which I had always known as gentle hill country, was now a mountain range. The boat started rocking on every axis, sending water, cargo, and myself flying across the deck. An icebox tipped and spilled its contents. Children began crying. I became violently seasick. I steadied myself on a bench, only to find at the next large wave that the bench wasn't attached to the floor. Then the crew caught an enormous fish—this was not a fishing boat, but they had line out, just in case—and so, in the midst of this watery chaos, there was suddenly a leviathan flopping like mad on the deck, and the men were trying to subdue the monstrous beast with the age-old technique, no doubt perfected over many generations, of hitting it repeatedly on the head with a hammer.

Between contemplating whether my nausea was worse than or merely as bad as my fear of drowning, I gained a new appreciation of ancient seafarers. In handmade canoes, a hundred times farther from land, with no rescue teams, they had braved weather as bad as this or worse and lived to beach their canoes again.

Like them, I arrived intact. At the dock, Emily, the American volunteer on Arno, was waiting for me. We caught a ride along the bumpy jungle road on a decrepit pick-up truck. It was truly an outer islands vehicle: the back had been completely reconstructed out of wood, and, as for the windshield, there was none. After the long ordeal required
to start the engine of this jalopy, only a fool would dare to turn it off before the end of the journey. Unfortunately, one of the tires also had a permanent leak. Instead of patching it, they simply drove on while it deflated, and then jumped out to inflate it again while the car inched forward. This car could exist nowhere else but in the outer islands.

We arrived in the village, and I met Emily's Marshallese host family. I mounted a preemptive strike on the inevitable question: no, I was not her boyfriend. Contrary to popular Marshallese belief, not all American men and women who appeared in public together were romantically involved. They accepted my visit anyway.

Emily's host brother decided to give me the country's standard greeting: a coconut to drink. In order to do that, he first had to retrieve it from a thirty-foot palm tree. He climbed to the top, hardly using the notches that had been cut into the sides to help him, and knocked down a green fruit. He climbed back down and showed off a skill no self-respecting Marshallese man would neglect:
eddep
, or husking a coconut. He approached a sharp metal stick that had been planted in the ground at a forty-five degree angle. Holding the coconut firmly in both hands, he brought the fruit down with frightening strength and accuracy on the pointed end of the stick. One inch too far in one direction and it would have pierced his hand; one inch too far in the other direction and it would have pierced the nut, sending juice everywhere. With the sharp stick implanted in the fibrous outer covering, he put his weight on the fruit and ripped off a large chunk of husk. After a few deft repetitions of hold, slam down, and twist, the inner nut was exposed. He gave me my drink.

(It took him thirty seconds to
eddep
. The one time I had tried this on Ujae, it had taken me thirty minutes. The next day I was sore in my shoulders, back, chest, upper arms, forearms, hands, and fingers. It was the Marshallese extreme upper-body power workout. But I stopped my training because I was too afraid that I would miss the coconut and end up husking a part of myself instead.)

I reciprocated with several gifts of my own. I had given the family only an hour's notice of my arrival, and I hoped that the rice, flour, sugar, coffee, creamer, cookies, Spam, canned tuna, canned corned beef, and chewing gum would make up for that fact. They did. “
Kwomaron bar itok jabdewot iien
” (“You can come again any time”),
declared Emily's host mother. I was welcome to sleep in their house for the two nights I was planning to spend on Arno.