Euphoria

by Lily King

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘I thought it was Eros in Piccadilly.’ She plucked at a pencil on my desk. For a second I thought she was going to start taking notes.

  ‘Many people do. But it’s his twin brother, the avenger of unrequited love. Poetic to the last.’

  Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they’d made it sting. Not Nell.

  ‘Do you have a favorite part of all this?’ she asked.

  ‘All what?’ I said.

  ‘This work.’

  Favorite part? There was little at this point that didn’t make me want to run with my stones straight back into the river. I shook my head. ‘You first.’

  She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected the question to come back at her. She narrowed her grey eyes. ‘It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ I laughed.

  ‘You don’t get that?’

  ‘Christ, no. A good day for me is when no little boy steals my underwear, pokes it through with sticks, and brings it back stuffed with rats.’

  I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilization, right and wrong.

  She told me I sounded as skeptical as my father. She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. We’re always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl. Look at Malinowski, she said. Look at Boas. They defined their cultures as they saw them, as they understood the natives’ point of view. The key is, she said, to disengage yourself from all your ideas about what is “natural.”

  ‘Even if I manage that, the next person who comes here will tell a different story about the Kiona.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘Then what is the point?’ I said.

  ‘This is no different from the laboratory. What’s the point of anyone’s search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.’

  ‘I’m a little mired at the moment.’ I wiped my face with my hands, healthy hands—my body thrived in the tropics; it was my mind that threatened to give out on me. ‘You don’t struggle with these questions?’

  ‘No. But I’ve always thought my opinion was the right one. It’s a small flaw I have.’

  ‘An American flaw.’

  ‘Maybe. But Fen has it, too.’

  ‘A flaw of the colonies then. Is that why you got into this line of work, so you could have your say and people would have to travel thousands of miles and write their own book if they wanted to refute you?’

  She smiled broadly.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘This is the second time tonight I’ve remembered this tiny thing I haven’t thought of for years.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘My first report card. I wasn’t sent to school until I was nine, and my teacher’s comment at the end of the first term was: “Elinor has an overenthusiasm for her own ideas and a voluble dearth of enthusiasm for those of others, most especially her teacher’s.’’’

  I laughed. ‘When was the first time you thought of it?’

  ‘When we first arrived, and I was poking around your desk. All your notes and papers and books—I felt a rush of ideas, which is something I haven’t felt in a while. I thought maybe it was gone for good. You look like you don’t believe me.’

  ‘I believe you. I’m just terrified by what overenthusiasm might look like. If what I am seeing now is underenthusiasm.’

  ‘If you’re anything like Fen, you won’t like it much.’

  I guessed I wasn’t anything like Fen.

  She looked at her husband, who was in a deep concentrated sleep beside her, lips pursed and brow wrinkled, as if resisting being fed.

  ‘How did the two of you meet?’

  ‘On a ship. After my first field trip.’

  ‘Shipboard romance.’ It came out almost as a question, as if I were asking if it had been too hasty, and I quickly added, weakly, ‘The best kind.’

  ‘Yes. It was very sudden. I was coming back from the Solomons. A group of Canadian tourists on the boat was making a great fuss about me having studied the natives unchaperoned and I was full of stories for them and Fen sort of skulked around in the shadows for a few days. I didn’t know who he was—nobody did—but he was the only man my age and he wouldn’t dance with me. And then out of the blue, he came up to me at breakfast and asked what I had dreamed the night before. I learned he’d been studying the dreams of a tribe called the Dobu, and he was heading to London to teach. Honestly it was such a surprise, that this burly black-haired Aussie was an anthropologist like me. We were both coming back from our first field trips and we had a lot to talk about. He was so full of energy and humor. The Dobu are all sorcerers so Fen kept putting spells and hexes on people, and we’d hide and see if they worked. We were like little kids, giddy at having found a friend among all these stuffy grown-ups. And Fen loves to live with an us-against-the-world mentality that is very alluring at first. All the other passengers fell away. We talked and laughed our way to Marseille. Two and a half months. You really think you know a person after that kind of time together.’ She was looking somewhere over my left shoulder. She didn’t seem to notice she’d stopped talking. I wondered if she’d fallen asleep with her eyes open. Then they drifted back. ‘He went on to London to teach for a semester. I went home to New York to write my book. We were married a year later and came here.’

  She was exhausted.

  ‘Let me sort out a bed for you,’ I said, getting up.

  I went into the small mosquito room I slept in. The sheets on the mat hadn’t been changed for weeks and my clothes were strewn everywhere. I shoved everything in the crate I used for a bedside table and spread clean sheets on the mat in the best version of a real bed that I could manage. I had a nice pillow, one from my mother’s house, but the humidity had stuck the feathers together so it felt more like clay than down.

  I heard laughing behind me. She was standing on the other side of the netting, observing my attempts to fluff it up. ‘Please don’t worry about that. But point me in the direction of the latrine, if you have one.’

  I took her out to it. You had to have them built a good distance from the house in the tropics. I’d learned that the hard way with the Baining. The sky had lightened and we didn’t need a torch. I wasn’t sure what state the latrine would be in, having never expected a woman to use it, and I planned to have a look before I let her in, but she reached it first and jumped in before I could stop her.

  Now I was in a predicament. I felt I should stay close by, in case there was a snake or a bat, both of which I had encountered in that small space before, as well as a flying fox and an enchanting red and gold bird Teket thought I had imagined. But I also felt one needed privacy to perform one’s duties. Before I could decide the proper distance at which to stand, her water began to flow at an astonishing rate and kept on for a great while. Then she was out the door and back on the path with me, limping along but with a new burst of energy.

  When we returned, Fen had shifted over to one side and was releasing his breath in great suspended puffs, like a surfacing whale. It felt to me like a terribly intimate noise and I wished I’d gotte
n him to the bedroom before he’d entered such a deep sleep. I thought Nell would go to bed then, but she followed me to the back of the house, where I was planning to make a cup of tea and think of where I could take them to find a decent tribe.

  She asked me what the last piece of the puzzle here was, and I told her about a Kiona ceremony called Wai I’d seen only once, when I first arrived, and my nascent thoughts about the transvestitism involved. She asked if I’d ever tried my ideas out on them.

  I laughed. ‘“I say, Nmebito, did you know that by embracing your feminine side that night you have provided an equilibrium for this community that the overdeveloped masculine aggression of your culture often threatens?” Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Maybe something more like: Do you think men becoming women and women becoming men brings joy and peace?’

  ‘But they’re not reflective in that way.’

  ‘Of course they are. They reflect on when they fished the day before—what it brought them, where they might choose to go the next day. They reflect on their children, their spouses, their siblings, their debts, their promises.’

  ‘But I see no evidence of the Kiona analyzing their own rituals in search of meaning,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure some do. It’s just that they’ve been born into a culture that makes no place for it, so the impulse weakens, like an unused muscle. You need to help them exercise it.’

  ‘Is this what you do?’

  ‘Not all in one day, but yes. The meaning is inside them, not inside you. You just have to pull it out.’

  ‘You’re assuming analytical abilities that I’m not sure they possess.’

  ‘They are human, with fully functioning human minds. If I didn’t believe they shared my humanity entirely, I wouldn’t be here.’ She had real color in her cheeks now. ‘I’m not interested in zoology.’

  Observe observe observe, I’d always been instructed. Nothing about sharing your findings or eliciting analysis from the subjects themselves. ‘Wouldn’t this approach create a self-consciousness in the subject that would then alter the results?’

  ‘I think observing without sharing the observations creates an atmosphere of extreme artificiality. They don’t understand why you’re there. If you are open with them, everybody becomes more relaxed and honest.’

  She was looking like a cuscus again, her face so alert and those wide grey eyes slightly unfocused. ‘Can we sit and drink that tea?’

  When we did she said, ‘Freud said that primitives are like Western children. I don’t believe that for a second, but most anthropologists don’t blink an eye at it, so we’ll let it stand for the sake of my argument, which is: Every child seeks meaning. When I was four I remember asking my quite pregnant mother: What’s the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life. I remember how she looked at me and I felt like I’d said something very bad. She came and sat beside me at the table and told me I’d just asked a very big question, and that I wouldn’t be able to answer it until I was an old, old woman. But she was wrong. Because she had that baby, and when she brought her home I knew I’d found the point. Her name was Katie but everyone called her Nell’s Baby. She was my baby. I did everything for her: fed her, changed her, dressed her, put her to sleep. And then when she was nine months old, she got sick. I was sent to my aunt’s in New Jersey and when I came back she was gone. They didn’t even let me say goodbye. I couldn’t even touch her or hold her. She was gone like a rug or a chair. I feel like I got most of life’s lessons before I turned six. For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.’

  ‘The Kiona give everyone a sacred name, a secret spirit name to use in the world beyond this one. I gave John and Martin new names and I find it helps a bit. Brings them closer somehow.’ My heart was suddenly beating hard. ‘Was Katie your only sibling?’

  ‘No. My mother had a boy two years later. Michael. But I couldn’t go near him. I said mean things about him. I think that’s why they finally sent me to school. To get me out of poor Michael’s hair.’

  ‘And what do you make of him now?’

  ‘Not much. He’s quite angry with me at the moment, because I haven’t changed my name to Fen’s, and that has been reported in the papers in several cities.’

  I’d heard that, too, somewhere.

  ‘Were you close to your brothers?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t know it until they died.’ I felt my throat tighten a bit, but I pushed the words through. ‘When John died I was twelve and I thought, if only it had been Martin. I thought I could have handled Martin better because he was so much more familiar and irritating to me. John was like a beloved uncle who came home and took me frog hunting and bought me jelly buttons. Martin taunted and mimicked me. And then six years after John, Martin did die and I felt like—’ And then my throat closed entirely and I couldn’t force it open. She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense.

  6

  There is no privacy through a mosquito net. Next morning, as Fen and I sat at my table with a map of the river we’d sketched out together, Nell rolled onto her back and slowly sat up. She laid her cheek on a knee and didn’t move again for a long time.

  ‘I think she’s worse today,’ I said. A malarial fever came on hard with a headache that felt like someone was taking an axe to the base of your skull.

  ‘Nellie. Up and at ’em,’ he said without turning. ‘We’ve got tribes to meet today.’ He said to me, quietly, ‘The trick is to outrun it. Stop moving and you’re buggered.’

  ‘In my experience it doesn’t always give you that option.’ When my fever came on, my body felt filled with lead, and I was lucky if I could reach a chamber pot. I fetched the medicine box.

  ‘I’m going to the loo,’ he said to her through the netting. ‘Please don’t slow us down.’

  If she responded I couldn’t hear it. Her cheek remained pressed to her knee. Fen disappeared down the pole.

  She was not in any state of undress—she wore the same shirt and pants from the night before—yet I felt reluctant to greet her. I wanted to give her the illusion of privacy. I busied myself with turning some yams in the ash fire and doing the washing up at the back of the house, though there were only two plates and two cups and they needed little more than a wipe-down.

  ‘Did you sleep at all?’

  I swung round. She was seated at the table.

  ‘A bit,’ I said.

  ‘Liar.’

  Her cheeks were flushed in wide circles like a doll’s, but her lips were colorless, her eyes glazed yellow. I tapped out four aspirin into my hand. ‘Too many?’

  She leaned in from across the table, peering closely at the pills. ‘Perfect.’

  ‘You need specs.’

  ‘I stepped on them a few months ago.’

  ‘Bankson! A fellow’s here,’ Fen called from below. ‘I can’t make out what he wants.’

  ‘I’ll be right down.’ I brought Nell water for her pills and went to the smaller trunk in my office. I swept my hand back and forth across its gritty bottom until I felt the small case in a corner. I hadn’t opened it since my mother gave it to me before I sailed.

  ‘I don’t know how they’ll do,’ I said, handing it to her.

  She snapped it open. They had a simple wire frame, thinner than I remembered. Pewter-colored. A near perfect match to her eyes.

  ‘Don’t you need them?’

  ‘They were Martin’s.’ A policeman had come to the door with them several months after his death. They’d been freshly polished, and a tag on a string had been knotted to the bridge.

  She seemed to understand all that, and lifted them tenderly from their dingy case to put them on.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, moving toward the window. ‘They’re out on the water with their nets.’ She turned back around to look at me, still holding the frames to her face with two hands as if they would not stay there by them
selves. ‘And you could stand a shave, Mr. Bankson.’

  ‘They work then?’

  ‘I think I may be more myopic than Martin, but we’re close.’

  It was lovely, hearing Martin spoken of in the present tense. ‘Keep them.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘I’ve plenty of his things.’ It wasn’t true. There was a sweater or two in my mother’s closet, but that was all. My father had ordered the servants to give it all to a charity shop as soon as his trunks had arrived from London. ‘Happy Christmas,’ I said.

  She smiled, remembering this. ‘I’ll take good care of them.’

  They were big for her small marsupial face, but suited her somehow. You get hounded daily in the field for your possessions, and it felt good to give something away that hadn’t been asked for.

  ‘Bankson, help me out here!’

  I went down to Fen, who was face-to-face with one of my informants, Ragwa, who was meant to take me to a naming ceremony in his sister’s hamlet this afternoon. Ragwa had taken up the Kiona intimidation position, arms bowed and chin stretched out over his feet, and Fen had done nothing but encourage it by taking up his own, either in mockery or for real, I couldn’t tell which.

  ‘Ask him about the sacred object,’ Fen whispered.

  But Ragwa cut me off and said his wife had gone into labor and he couldn’t accompany me today. After that he rushed off.

  “They all like that?’

  ‘He’s worried about his wife. The baby’s early.’ A few weeks ago Ragwa had grabbed my hand and pressed it to his wife’s belly. I felt the baby roll beneath her taut skin. I had never felt that before, never known, honestly, that such a thing happened. It echoed against my palm for a long time after. It was like putting my hand to the surface of the ocean and being able to feel a fish beneath. Ragwa had laughed and laughed at the expression on my face.

  ‘Can I help with the birth?’ Nell was standing in the doorway.

  ‘I thought we were leaving,’ Fen said, not noticing her spectacles.

  ‘But if the baby’s premature.’

  ‘They’ve been having babies for a long time without you, Nell.’