The Ghost Apple (20 page)
Authors: Aaron Thier
Q: I’ve heard that one remedy for intermittent fever is to tie your hair to a tree and run forward.
A: This will leave the fever, as well as the hair, attached to the tree. The shortcoming of this remedy is that it may only be performed once in a period of several months, for it leaves the sufferer hairless.
Q: How will I know when I’ve taken enough quinine?
A: The drug has produced its effect on the system when you experience a singing in the ears, deafness, and throbbing in the temple arteries.
Q: Now I’ve got a headache!
A: The juice of fifty limes may be rubbed into the hair, and a jug of cold water poured over the head.
Q: Okay, I’m on the island and I’ve just eaten a bucket of uncooked mangrove oysters. What happens next?
A: When vomiting or nausea begins, apply a mustard poultice to the pit of the stomach, below the breastbone and a little to the left. Then take two drops of chloroform, or thirty drops of chloric ether, with a little lime juice.
Q: Jeez, man. Now I’ve got diarrhea.
A: The best and hardiest remedy is Dr. Collis Browne’s “Chlorodyne.” If the evacuations are large, it may be well to allow two or three motions to pass away before attempting to arrest the discharge.
Q: How can I distinguish dysentery from simple diarrhea?
A: Almost invariably, with dysentery, there is a very distressing sensation of weight and an apparent want of unloading about the fundament and lower bowel.
Q: Now I’m suffering from sunstroke. What should I do?
A: The bowels should be made to act, but not too violently, by castor oil given internally, or by purgative enemata. Injections of warm soap and water can be used, and to these turpentine may be added.
Q: These physical problems are one thing, but what about my mind? I’m going crazy in this place.
A: From prolonged exertion in a climate which is naturally enervating, or it may be simply from the climatic influence itself, a student often falls into a state of weakness and languor which, if it does not absolutely incapacitate him, certainly makes him disinclined for active work, and renders his life more or less a burden to him.
Q: Something’s wrong with my eye!
A: A watch-glass should be obtained and used to cover the healthy eye. This will prevent its infection with purulent material from the affected eye.
Q: Maybe it’s not my eye. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not!
A: An overdistended state of the stomach, flatulence, and indigestion may often produce palpitations, shortness of breath, and a sensation of giddiness. Study of the scriptures will afford some comfort.
Q: I think I’m just going to sit down.
A: Great care must be taken when sitting down, as parasites and biting insects abound in the tropics.
Q: I don’t care. My feet are swollen.
A: Oedema is a common affection and often develops as a hypertrophied heart subsides into a dilated one.
Q: My feet feel like they’re going to burst. I’ll just make an incision and allow the fluid to drain.
A: Careful study of the scriptures will be found more grateful in this case.
Q: Oh no, now I’ve cut myself!
A: If the bleeding is from an artery, the blood will be scarlet in hue, and will come out in jets.
A Modest Proposal / January 21, 2010
A message from Commandant Kabaka of the Antillia Liberation Army
To the shareholders, executives, and employees of Big Anna:
To the people of the United States:
We have been asked what we are fighting for. It’s all very well, you tell us, that history has not been kind to us, but history is history. Don’t we have televisions in our rum shops? Don’t we have our steel drums and our homemade soccer balls? Don’t we have plantains and curry goat when we’re hungry? Don’t we live in paradise? Don’t we see the sun rise over the luminous tropic sea every day of our lives?
We will tell you what we want.
We want the same chance you have. We want to live like middle-class Americans. Who are you that you should profit by our misery? Who are we that we should be miserable?
Here is our first demand:
The federal minimum wage is set at $7.25 per hour in the United States. The same rate applies to the U.S. Virgin Islands and to some industries in Puerto Rico.
St. Renard, like those islands, is a vassal state, its economy swallowed up by the monster in the north. But workers on St. Renard are paid only a fraction of what workers on neighboring islands are paid. Big Anna® banana workers on St. Renard make $6 per day.
If we are to live at the mercy of the United States and Big Anna®, if the United States and Big Anna® mean to tell us how our democracy should operate, then let Big Anna® compensate us at rates equivalent to the legal minimum wage for U.S. employees.
Let’s do the math:
Say a Renardenne man works three hundred days a year on the banana farm. This is a conservative estimate.
If he earns $6 per day, in one year he will make $1,800.
If he works for fifteen years at this rate, he will earn $27,000.
Can a man live on $1,800 a year? Can he support a family? It will be said that the cost of living is lower on St. Renard, but so is the standard of living. Can a man earning so little expect to give his children a better life than the one he has had?
Twenty-seven thousand dollars in fifteen years. It isn’t enough to pay for one year at a good private college in the United States.
Now consider how much this man would earn if he were paid at the minimum rate required by U.S. law. Say he works three hundred days a year for an average of ten hours per day. He could expect to earn $21,750 per year.
It isn’t a princely sum. A Big Anna® executive thinks nothing of spending three and four times as much for another car to add to the enormous fleet in his garage.
This, then, is our first demand.
Our second demand is that Big Anna® make restitution to all current employees, according to the following formula:
Total payment = (years of employment × 300 days per year × 10 hours per day × $7.25) – (years of employment × $1,800)
The Renardenne who has worked for one year on a Big Anna® plantation, and who earned $1,800 during that time, is owed $19,950.
The man who has given fifteen years of his life to this company is owed $299,250.
Are these demands unreasonable? Is it unreasonable to demand a sum of money that the U.S. government regards as minimally sufficient for its own citizens? Upon what is the concept of minimum wage based if not on the belief that human beings are entitled to some minimum amount of dignity? Why should that dignity not be available to us as well? Are we not human beings? Does Big Anna get to decide who is human and who is not?
A prisoner on work detail in the U.S. is given room and board. In essence, he is paid a subsistence wage. He is paid what a Big Anna® banana worker is paid.
We are prisoners of neoliberal economics. We are being held without trial. What have we done to deserve it?
It took me a week or two to get used to the heat here on St. Renard. At first, I thought the sticky tropical air would be nice, a relief from the cold, but almost as soon as I stepped off the plane, I was dizzy and I felt like my underpants were too small. I was already sweating heavily as I stood at the airport taxi stand, though lately I’d begun to think I was past the age of sweating. In addition, the image of Bish Pinkman’s face kept flashing through my mind, and in this tropical setting it mingled bizarrely with memories from my days in Vietnam.
I’d reserved my room at A Piece of the Indies the night before, and now I gave the address to the cab driver. At first, he didn’t seem inclined to go anywhere. He said something dismissive and fluttered his hands in a gesture I couldn’t understand. I just sat there. Eventually he sighed and put the car in gear, although I almost wished he hadn’t. He drove with stunned incompetence, as if he’d just been slugged in the face. It was a terrifying experience, and it reminded me of riding with my daughters when they were first learning to drive. He drifted through intersections without looking right or left, he never signaled, and sometimes, when he was turning, he let the car drift in one direction before cutting the wheel and turning sharply in the other. He had the windows rolled down and his cigarette smoke kept blowing into my face. In the hot wind, with a face full of smoke and a head full of gruesome images, I thought I’d be sick.
Luckily it was a short ride, and in about five minutes we came to a prosperous neighborhood full of big white houses and tall mahogany trees. Other travelers—at least those inclined to write online reviews—seemed to like A Piece of the Indies, and my own first impression was favorable. It was a beautiful old house with a wide verandah on the first and second floors, a few guava trees in the front yard, and a tidy tea service laid out at a small table in the shade of the garden.
I got out of the cab and fumbled with some Renardenne currency I’d gotten at the airport, but the driver asked for American dollars. With a mischievous smile, he said, “Give me five dollars now, sir.” I could tell he thought he was trying to cheat me, but the attempt was so pathetic that I gave him twenty.
I stood looking up and down the street for a moment before I went up the walkway. I recognized some of the trees from my time in Vietnam. There were traveler’s trees, royal poincianas, a few tropical fig trees with their amazing aerial roots, and lots of different palms. Bright pink bougainvillea poured abundantly over the low stone walls. In some respects, it was a beautiful scene. Steep wooded hills were visible in the east, and I could hear the ocean just down the road.
But it was too hot, and it was too quiet, and it was too still. Stupefied tourists walked by without a sound. I had a terrible sense of foreboding.
I went inside and registered with the owner and proprietor, an inscrutable British expat named George Codrington. He gave me a glass of champagne and led me around the house and grounds, explaining this or that feature of the establishment in pedantic tones. Somehow he managed to communicate the feeling that he himself took no pride in any of this but that it was better than I deserved. There was a long narrow pool in the courtyard, a mango tree, and a sophisticated vending machine filled with bottles of fancy wine.
When he finally let me go, I was puffing and sweating in the heat, and he left me with this advice about adjusting to the climate:
“Let the sun scorch the skin and blister it until it peels, and scorches and peels again, and scorches and peels alternately until, having no more dominion over the flesh, it tinctures the very blood and transmutes mere ruddiness to bronze.”
What a way of talking! I went up to my room and turned the air-conditioning up as high as it would go. My accommodations were very comfortable, which was a relief. There was a large wicker ceiling fan, white drapes, white sheets, and a general sense of light and comfort. But I couldn’t enjoy it just yet. I fell asleep before I got my shoes off and dreamed that I was playing badminton with Mr. Pinkman III, who kept slipping on the long folds of bloody skin that hung down his back. I woke up screaming and it took me a full minute to remember where I was.
It seemed clear that I wasn’t meant for the tropics. I hadn’t enjoyed Saigon as a young man, and I wasn’t any better adjusted at this stage of life. I wondered whether it was even worth the trouble. Shouldn’t I just get on a plane and head back to Tripoli? But then I thought once again of Pinkman, and I thought about Megan, and I promised myself that I’d stick it out.
I think I was just exhausted, because the next morning everything was different. The world seemed full of possibility and excitement. I woke up a little before dawn and witnessed, for the first time in almost fifty years, the abrupt, explosive radiance of sunrise in the tropics. By the time I got out of bed, it seemed like the sun was already high in the sky.
When I’d eaten my breakfast and enjoyed my coffee, I thought I’d head to the beach. It was only a short walk down the hill at the end of the street, and it turned out to be just what I needed. The water was a delirious Listerine blue, a color you could lose yourself in forever. Everything was still and warm and soft. The palm trees were motionless and picturesque in the deep golden light, and I saw a cruise ship pressed like an ornament between the sea and sky. It was perfect. The Caribbean morning looked just like a Caribbean morning, and I thought suddenly of John Morehead Tripoli, grandfather of Tripoli’s founder, who had been marooned on this island three hundred years before and who’d written a compelling narrative about his experience. If you were going to be marooned somewhere, you could do a lot worse.
I sat looking out over the clear water to the reef, where the waves broke. The sand was bright white—actually it was mostly crushed shells—and there was a large heron standing in the surf. With its long legs, its upright posture, and its air of deadly patience, it looked just human enough to be strikingly alien.
