Surviving Paradise

by Peter Rudiak-Gould

  The best example of overkill was the two-ton bathroom door. One room in the embassy needed to be a bunker, capable of withstanding missile attacks or restive outer islanders brandishing fishing spears until a helicopter from Kwajalein could rescue the besieged dignitaries. So the restroom was upgraded with a two-foot-thick solid-metal door, which looked more than ready to survive nuclear war. It was probably the most heavily fortified lavatory in the world. Why they chose the bathroom for this purpose, and how the staff dealt with the inconvenience, I can’t imagine.

  What was sad about these counterterrorism measures wasn’t their excessiveness (the total cost had run well into the millions) or their moot value (the chance of terrorism in the Marshalls was vanishingly small). It was the fact that they failed even at their stated mission. The embassy had a metal detector but the international airport didn’t. The ocean-side wall extended eighteen feet underground but only ten feet above ground. The fence prevented rockets from being shot through the bars but not over the bars.

  Across from the embassy was the ambassador’s house, where the hippieish volunteers were invited to a Christmas dinner with the conservative American ambassador. (She was a Bush appointee who had thanked the Bikinians in a recent speech for their “sacrifice for America.”) Thankfully, the meeting went more smoothly than that introduction would suggest. The ambassador’s living room was divided into four quadrants, with no walls in between. Each of them alone would count as luxurious even by First World standards. “You have such a nice house,” I remarked.

  “Well thank you,” replied the ambassador. “But it’s not really mine. It’s the American people’s house.”

  “Great!” I was tempted to say. “Can I crash here later?” Instead I replied with something pleasantly meaningless. Then she brought up the topic of separatism in Indonesia, and I tried to sound intelligent by rehashing something I had read about it in The Economist.

  We sat down to dinner, waited on by two Filipino servants. The diplomat, ever diplomatic, spoke a nondenominational grace. The only question I had about the food was this: was it three orders of magnitude better than what I had been eating for the last four months on Ujae, or just two?

  If Ujae blurred the line between native and foreign, Majuro did so twice as eagerly. Jungle medicine had poked its head into the commercial sphere; the juice of the nin fruit was touted as the “miracle healer of the Pacific,” curing everything from diabetes to cancer. McDonaldization and the Marshallese no-rush philosophy had reached a compromise in a kiosk called Taco Bill’s Almost Fast Food. (I once dined there, and the advertising was not false: it was indeed almost fast.) If the signs on a few trucks could be trusted, coconut oil was being tested as an alternative auto fuel. Radios piped in rap songs in Papua New Guinean pidgin English and pop offerings that declared: “I love Pacific girls! Polynesian, Micronesian, Melanesian—I love them all!” A poster advertised the “New sound in town! . . . Hottest Teen Group: The Marshall Islands’ WEST SIDE BOYS,” whose just-released album featured such tracks as “Found You Girl,” “Disco,” “New Boy,” “Pump It Up,” and “Li-jera” (“my girlfriend”), and whose six members looked creepily identical in their sunglasses and white wife-beaters. Marshallese urbanites, still operating under the hunger mentality of rural life, prepared for an imaginary famine by piling food absurdly high on their plates at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Teams of two forklifts were used to tow broken-down cars. Quasi-traditional handicrafts—ranging from stunningly intricate woven ornaments to tacky heart-shaped wall hangings—hung in shops for the occasional tourist to buy. Kiosks sold husked coconuts for fifty cents apiece—but they looked wrong to me, sitting and waiting to be sold instead of coming fresh and free from the top of a tree.

  The Western-style supermarket sold expired imported food for 150 percent of its normal price, had sales on Spam and flip-fops, and proclaimed with a gaudy banner that “Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Have Just Arrived” when the occasional shipment of produce came in. Another store sold a towel that said “Marshall Islands” on it, but its picture depicted a white man in swimming trunks standing on a dugout canoe while fishing with a net attached to a pulley off the shore of a mountainous island. The towel was thus inaccurate in every detail, and I imagined that there were other identical towels that said “Hawaii,” “Samoa,” and “Tahiti,” mass-produced in some vast factory of Pacific kitsch. A project called Waan Aelonin Majel (“Canoes of the Marshall Islands”) taught young men and women to build traditional Marshallese sailing canoes, thus carrying on their heritage while also acquiring marketable carpentry skills. Some of these traditional canoes were made of fiberglass. Packs of young men—wannabe thugs from the tropical paradise ghetto—wore flower-print platform shoes, thinking that this footwear made them tough because they were taller that way. And there were even more of those “I Being a Princess” shirts.

  The country’s economic base was obvious as one walked along Majuro’s single road: looking left and right, all one saw were government ministries and stores. People made money in the former, and they spent it in the latter. But where did the money come from? It came mainly from the United States—to the tune of two-thirds of the government’s budget. Another tiny nation of coral atolls had been more imaginative in building up its economy. Tuvalu took advantage of its fortuitous Internet country code (.tv) and sold domain names to anyone who would buy them. It capitalized on its obscurity by selling postage stamps to philatelists who couldn’t bear to have a single country missing from their collections. It sold passports to people who needed a nationality, and it used its 688 area code for a phone sex line that eventually supplied a tenth of the government’s budget. Internet domains, stamps, passports, and phone sex: the staples of any sound economy. Of course, the passport sale stopped when people discovered that terrorists might have been buying them, and the phone sex line was shut down after the church complained. But you had to admire the resourcefulness. Here in Majuro, the effort was different: Uncle Sam had become the new paramount chief, a paternal figure who was morally obligated to share his wealth with the people in return for services rendered.

  One of those services, of course, was to let the country be used as a nuclear testing range—and on that note, I visited Bikini Town Hall. Here the people of Bikini Atoll had stationed their government since the nuclear diaspora. I walked into the sleek and air-conditioned building and was instantly floored by the decorations in the lobby. Large, friendly letters on the wall declared “One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.” Above this spectacularly droll message were paintings of mushroom clouds and thermonuclear fireballs, depicting in bright colors the thing that had destroyed these people’s homes and autonomy. Were the Bikinians proud of their tragedy? They had lived so long with this legacy, and defined themselves so deeply in terms of it, that they appeared to have grown almost thankful for it.

  The atomic tests ultimately proved a monetary boon for the refugees. They were now counted among the wealthiest and least traditionally oriented of all Marshall Islanders. Their new homes—Ejit Island in Majuro Atoll, and Kili, a lone islet to the southwest—were outer islands only in geography. Kili was the size of Ujae but had electricity, running water, air-conditioning, cars, and a gymnasium—and next to no farming or fishing. Ejit was similar: an electrified, Internet-wired dot of privilege where the men never learned to spearfish because tuna came from a can. The Bikinians, in battling for the self-sufficiency that had been stolen from them, had won only money, the one thing that could destroy that traditional lifestyle. The bomb had injured their self-reliance, but it was the new wealth that had killed it.

  They still lobbied for more compensation, including a dizzyingly expensive cleanup of Bikini Atoll so that they could return at last. But almost everyone who had any memory of living on Bikini had died of old age. What were they fighting for anymore, if not for money? Their old way of life was already dead; their “homeland” had been home to none of them.

  The recklessness of the testing
was undeniable. If for no other reason than to discourage such arrogance in the future, it was worthwhile to bleed the perpetrators of maximum compensation. The original Bikinians had indeed suffered greatly, manipulated by powers too awesome to contest, expelled from the only home they knew, sent to starve on uninhabitable islands, given no choices but only alternatives: political humiliation on second-rate land or autonomy on third-rate land. But beyond the goal of deterrence, I couldn’t see that winning more dollars would allow the Bikinians to do anything other than lead an even more Western lifestyle. It would not revive their heritage; it would not restore their pride. I would not be so bold as to say such things if I hadn’t heard the same viewpoint from some Bikinians themselves. One elder had famously said, “We’ve learned to dry our tears of sorrow with dollar bills. But money never takes the place of Bikini.”

  The cult of victimized dependency had won other converts as well. A man on Ujae claimed that the bombs had irradiated not just the northern atolls, but all of the Marshall Islands. Even Ujae? Yes, even Ujae. The radiological reports didn’t agree, but the man was unmoved. It was impossible to blame him: distrust of scientists was inevitable in a country on which a hydrogen bomb had been dropped, and radiation (invisible, inscrutable, deadly) could turn anyone into a conspiracy theorist. But there was perhaps another reason for this eager paranoia about nuclear fallout: many Marshall Islanders, it seemed, felt an ironic jealousy toward the Bikinians, who had managed to convert their cultural loss into such a financial gain. Locals blamed radiation for ills as disparate as breadfruit blights and diabetes.

  But I also admired the Bikinians—intensely, in fact. With no one rooting for them but themselves, a few hundred islanders against the most powerful government on the planet, they had bent the ear of global leaders, won reparations, and perhaps even convinced the world’s mightiest military that there were consequences to abusing the little guy. If some Bikinians had internalized their victim persona a bit too deeply, they had also shown a remarkable forgiveness toward their wrongdoers. They knew it had not been every American but rather a few American leaders who had wronged them. No Bikinian had shown even a trace of resentment toward me for being a ribelle. The Bikinian flag, in fact, was almost identical to the American flag, but it added the phrase Men otemjej rej ilo bein Anij (“Everything is in the hands of God”), a healthily fatalistic attitude for a traditional people caught up in Cold War politics. If Bikini Atoll was no longer where most of them felt at home, perhaps that was because they had moved on.

  It was a disconcerting tale, but not one without hope. The underdog had triumphed, hard feelings had vanished, a haughty superpower had been ever so slightly humbled, and the people of Bikini—if not their old way of life—had survived. But I couldn’t shake a sense of unease at the happy display of atomic devastation in their town hall.

  MY STRANGEST EXPERIENCE IN MAJURO HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH nuclear pride, eccentric expats, or cultural mixing. It had to do with a set of cursed Marshallese artifacts that I had secretly brought from Ujae.

  Allow me to explain. A few weeks before I left Ujae for my holiday in Majuro, a man told me that several villagers had happened upon the buried corpse of an old Marshallese chieftess while digging a pit. This was not the first such discovery. A few years back, waves had eroded the shore in one area, until the unmistakable form of a skeletal foot was sticking out from the ground. This time, the locals found two bracelets and a necklace on the body they had uncovered in the pit. They took the objects, exhumed the corpse, and cremated it. Rumor had it that a demon appeared from the body as it burned.

  The day after the ritual burning, I sought out the accidental archaeologists and asked if I could see the artifacts. To my astonishment, they offered to give them to me. I felt I should decline, but the men were adamant. Had I stumbled into the compliment trap? I accepted the offer and vowed to donate the rare objects to the national museum in Majuro.

  A young man involved in the digging brought the jewelry to me in a coconut half-shell. Each bracelet was a single continuous piece of sand-colored material. The string of the necklace had rotted away, but the colorful beads and curved red centerpiece were intact. All of the items were made from a smooth, hard substance that didn’t appear to be rock, clay, or bone. Alfred examined the mysterious objects and told me they were made from a rare kind of coral that used to be prized for jewelry making. This species supposedly still grew in Ujae’s lagoon, he said, but no one knew where to find it anymore.

  Word circulated among the children that I had come into possession of these artifacts, and they started asking questions: Where did I keep them? Did I sleep in the same room as them? What was I planning to do with them? One child told me a demon would come out of the artifacts during the night and attack me. He was surprised when I assured him I wasn’t afraid of that. Another child told me the ghost of the chieftess had appeared the night before, searched for her stolen jewelry, and struck a local woman in anger.

  Alfred laughed off these stories and told me not to worry. These were the same rapscallions who spun tales of thirty-foot giants appearing on the beach. The children were many things, but impeccably honest was not one of them. Still, in the back of my mind, a fact squawked for attention: it was an adult, not a child, who told me that a demon had appeared when the body was cremated. If the islanders believed in this, then that was reason enough to tread carefully—never mind if I personally dismissed it as superstition. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was making a grave mistake.

  The plot took another twist. One of the men who had so willingly given me the artifacts now said I had to return them. They belonged by default to the chief, who would collect them on his next visit to Ujae. However, as I returned to my house to retrieve the objects, an elderly man—someone I respected very much—told me that the first man was lying. “He only wants to keep the artifacts for himself,” this elder (who shall remain anonymous) maintained. “You should give them to the museum when you go to Majuro—that’s the best way. You can tell the man that the children stole the artifacts, so you can’t give them back.”

  A great deal was going on here—beliefs about the supernatural, controversies over traditional ownership rights, accusations and justifications of deception—and the little bewildered ribelle was in the middle, simply because he was the one with the artifacts. I was way out of my league.

  I decided to trust the elder. If I couldn’t trust the judgment of a friendly and well-intentioned old man, then I could trust nothing on this island. So I followed his instructions: I lied to the man who wanted the artifacts back, telling him that someone had stolen them when I left them for a minute on the picnic table. Then I hid them in my duffel bag and brought them to Majuro, unsure whether I was following the village’s wishes or violating them. I just hoped I hadn’t cursed the entire island.

  In Majuro, I showed the jewelry to the other volunteers, then donated it anonymously to the national museum. I gave the curator a deliberately vague backstory. He wasn’t suspicious at all, which both relieved and disturbed me. Shouldn’t he ask a few questions? I put the guilt-ridden adventure behind me.

  Then I got really, really sick.

  At first, it felt like the beginnings of a nasty flu. My body ached everywhere and my forehead was warm, but I had no cough. I prepared for an unpleasant but not life-threatening week.

  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.