The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  So Graeme was not at all surprised when I asked him if he could fly.

  “Not yet. I haven’t learned that yet,” he said. “But I will. And I will also learn how to swim under the ocean like a fish.”

  “Graeme, you are clearly not a Christian,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, of course I am. All my family is Anglican.”

  If there was one thing I learned as a teenager in my Anglican confirmation classes, it was that you had to choose sides. You were either a Christian or an ancestor-worshipper, but you couldn’t be both. God was jealous. So Graeme’s brand of fusional cosmology was baffling, even though I knew it was hardly unique to Melanesian converts.

  The Roman Catholic Church, in particular, has always excelled in overlooking the lingering heathen habits of its flock. Back in the seventeenth century, Catholic missionaries in the lower Congo Valley were compelled to turn a blind eye while their converts made offerings to their ancestors, particularly during the Christian holiday of All Souls’ Day.

  In the latter half of the twentieth century, a generation of jungle prophets combined African ritual, Christianity, and a powerful psychoactive tea to spawn at least three new proto-Christian churches in Brazil. The tea, known as hoasca in Brazil and ayahuasca elsewhere, was brewed from the bark of a rain-forest vine. It was once an essential tool of pre-Christian shamans, but it has now replaced wine as the new churches’ sacrament. Church leaders say the tea catalyzes direct contact with the divine, though it almost always induces vomiting and cataclysmic diarrhea.

  A similar kind of drug-fueled syncretism has occurred in the southwestern United States, where the Native American Church (which is not affiliated with any established Christian church) has adopted peyote—a small, spineless cactus also considered a tool in pre-Christian ritual—as its own sacrament. The group still combines its hallucinogenic pre-Christian ritual with biblical teachings and has been credited with reducing alcoholism in Native American communities.

  Spiritual syncretism naturally bothers fundamentalist Christians. If theirs is the one true religion, then to water it down and distort it must certainly be blasphemous. Of course, some of these theological hard-liners also happen to be the most likely to cling to a version of Christianity that has created an image of a tall, pale, decidedly un-Jewish Jesus.

  Modern Anglican theologians have adopted a more nuanced stance. Fergus King, an officer of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (the modern incarnation of the mission society for which my great-grandfather was secretary) told me that even John, the writer of Revelation, practiced what he calls “inculturation.” As he preached in Asia Minor, John never hesitated to adopt symbols from local pagan traditions to describe the holiness of Jesus. The evil eye, magic bowls, and the double throne of Zeus all served to strengthen John’s evangelical message in Revelations.

  The Anglican Communion seems to have followed John’s lead. A black Christ? No problem. Rejigged pagan dances and grass skirts in church? Sure. Ancestor worship? Well…yes, as a matter of fact. While conducting research at the School of Mission at Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham, I met a Nigerian Anglican priest and theology student who told me that he and his parishioners still worshipped their ancestors.

  “But all that stuff is against the rules,” I said.

  “Rules?” he chortled. “Look, when the missionaries first came to Africa, they saw us worshipping our forefathers, and they called it idolatry. They condemned us for it. But we soon realized Jesus was an ancestor shared by all of us. That is the Christian message, isn’t it? Jesus was human, and he was also divine. So now we do not feel at all bad about worshipping our ancestors along with Jesus in church. I trust you won’t belittle this. After all, you are the one who has followed the ghost of your ancestor to England. Your great-grandfather has spoken, and now you are following him. Good for you. Listen to him.”

  My great-grandfather considered himself open-minded, but he warned Christians to guard against the infecting influence of other cultures. In a book of advice for clergy he condemned the idea that “all men can form their own conceptions of God, and that one of these is not much more true than another, forgetting that God has made a definite Revelation of Himself.” He would have been bothered, for example, to hear what a teacher at Fiji’s University of the South Pacific told me: that he gave one of his students several months’ extension on an assignment so that the boy could return to Vanuatu to battle a band of sorcerers in his hometown. He would have been aghast at the Melanesian who offered to assist in an Australian woman’s marital troubles by having his brother turn into a crocodile who would eat her problem boyfriend. After all, these people were supposed to be Christians.

  I suppose I was bothered, too. I found it irrational enough to believe in one god, but here were educated, seemingly reasonable people, weaving together strands of clearly conflicting myths. They couldn’t all be true. Were these people fools? Daydreamers? Liars? The anthropologist Ben Burt had told me in London that what impressed him most about Melanesians was their capacity to hold on to such apparently contradictory belief systems at the same time. It was not a sign of intellectual weakness, Burt had said. It required a sophisticated mind to perform such spiritual acrobatics.

  Regardless, it was clear which religion was more powerful here. It wasn’t Christianity that was being given credit for daily miracles.

  I was disoriented but enthralled by my new friends’ fantastical claims, and I was overtaken with a terrible regret as the fires of Pentecost receded behind the Brisk. I told myself I should have stayed onshore, I should have followed Graeme home to his village, I should have begged him to prove his magic. I wasn’t out to change Graeme. He was the evangelist, not me, clouding my thoughts with all his fantastical claims. If I had put his magic to the test, we would see that his magic talk had flowed from his dream life and nothing more, and the frontier between truth and fantasy would be made clear again.

  But when I closed my eyes and drifted toward something like sleep, the stars burned holes through my eyelids and I heard another voice, the dream part of myself, whispering, praying to the sky, asking to feel the mana that once and perhaps still surrounded these islands, seethed through their forests, flowed through the hands of their sorcerers, and made believers out of Melanesians and Irish bishops. The constellations turned in the clear sky above me, then broke apart. The stars fell, rained down on me like hot sparks. When the sun rose, my dreams were imprinted in my skin as they had been the previous morning, only multiplied: a thousand red stars scattered across my arm, my shoulder, my back, my abdomen. My bones ached, and my ears rang with the buzz of unseen mosquitoes, and although the dawn was blinding it felt not so much like a new day as a bleached continuation of uncertain night.

  6

  The Book of Espiritu Santo

  The green and stagnant waters lick his feet,

  And from their filmy, iridescent scum

  Clouds of mosquitoes, gauzy in the heat,

  Rise with His gifts: Death and Delirium.

  —LAURENCE HOPE, “Malaria,” in India’s Love Lyrics

  At dawn on the fourth morning, the MV Brisk tied up at Luganville, on the southern end of Espiritu Santo. This was the end of the run. Luganville was Vanuatu’s preeminent port and a jumping-off point for the Banks and Torres islands, the Anglican stronghold on the country’s northern frontier. After that, Nukapu, my grail, would only be a few days’ sail north.

  So I did not intend to stay long. But by the time the Brisk ground into shore at the edge of town, the rash that had begun as an artful smattering of stars on my arm had spread across my entire body. The stars had lost their form and blended into one another, and my skin was one vast welt. My body sizzled with fever. My head ached. I was dizzy. The sky had shattered into fluorescent pixels. The sun had drawn close to the earth and grown spines. I wanted help.

  Luganville had hosted a hundred thousand American troops during World War II. It was supposed to be a bustling commercial hub, a c
apable place. I found a town anesthetized. There were a hundred broken hedgerows, a hundred empty lots, a hundred rusting Quonset huts collapsing in the grass. There was a boarded-up cinema. There was an empty park with an empty bandstand, from which a loudspeaker blared country gospel songs to no one in particular. The harbor was still but for the tide, which tugged at the skeletons of discarded war machinery.

  Luganville’s lethargy was so thorough that nobody I met could be bothered to wrap their lips around the town’s full name, let alone the full name of the island. Both were reduced to a tired grunt. Santo.

  I lurched along Santo’s one paved avenue, which was as wide and empty as a prairie. Every now and then a beaten-up minibus sputtered down the cracked tarmac. None stopped. The horizons were punctuated by ramshackle monuments to the Chinese diaspora: Wong Store. Shing Yau Store. Ah Yuen & Company. Sun-bleached polyester bras and Bob Marley T-shirts hung in their windows.

  I closed my eyes, shielding them from the blades of sunlight. When I opened them I saw a vision from the outskirts of Las Vegas, circa 1955, right across the street. A line of sculpted concrete buttresses supported an elegant two-story edifice, a collage of postwar modernism surreally out of place here amid the wilting palms. It was a proper hotel. I crossed the avenue, dropped my pack in the forgiving shade, and turned to regard the expatriates who regarded me from the bar. They were Australians. This was obvious because they were drinking beer for breakfast. They looked as though they had been hauled in from the outback: leather boots and faces, sun-starched work shirts, wide-rimmed hats, strong hands.

  There was one woman among them, a tall, middle-aged half-caste clad in a fitted white jumpsuit, gold earrings, and Liz Taylor frog glasses. She was as peculiar and anachronistic as the hotel itself. She raised a slender arm and ordered me closer with one bejeweled finger, introducing herself as Mary Jane Dinh. She had run the Hotel Santo by herself for decades. She had seen the French plantation owners kicked out after independence and the Aussie ranchers move in. Mary Jane was tough. She knew how life was. She also knew malaria when she saw it, and she saw it in my face.

  “Of course the malariar’s got ’im,” bellowed one of the ranchers. “Lookitim! The boy can barely stand straight. Har! Get ’im a beer at once.”

  I was heartened by the diagnosis, and I knew what I required: I wanted Mary Jane to drive me to the hospital in her car, holding my hand, whispering reassurances all the way. I wanted a cup of hot chocolate. I wanted her to mother me. She did not.

  “There’s no need for hysteria,” she said, hustling me out to a cab. “Malaria’s as common as the flu.”

  The government of Vanuatu supported a small army of nurses whose sole task was to gaze through microscopes at drops of blood, looking for the tiny, threadlike plasmodium parasites that female mosquitoes are so good at injecting into humans. One such nurse determined that 5 percent of my red blood cells had been consumed by the parasite. If I were Melanesian, said my doctor, I would have built up a resistance to the disease, and I wouldn’t have to worry about dying from the fever or the cranial swelling that the worst strains of malaria produced. But I was a white man, an autoimmune weakling. He insisted that I stay at the hospital. I gazed around at the peeling walls, the spit-smeared cement, the twittering cockroaches, the torn fly screens, the noses dripping with phlegm, the flickering fluorescent lights. I thanked him, then collected my plastic bag full of pills and retreated to the Hotel Santo.

  It was afternoon. Mary Jane had changed into a floral print dress and pearls. She was taking tea with her ranchers. The avenue, the hedges, the town, the ranchers, had become a blur for me, but not Mary Jane. She was like her hotel: absolutely composed amid the malarial decay. I wanted to curl up at her feet. I’m not sure if I told her that.

  “To bed!” she ordered, and turned back to her tea.

  I shuffled off to my room, irritated by Mary Jane’s casual approach to my possibly deadly malaise—and yet feeling vaguely heroic for having caught it. Hadn’t malaria crippled empires, murdered conquistadors, and baffled healers for thousands of years? Hadn’t it been blamed for killing half the people who ever walked the planet?

  Malaria certainly killed many more traders and missionaries in Melanesia than did war clubs and poison arrows. It was malaria that claimed the life of the first European to discover the archipelago. The Spaniard Alvaro de Mendaña had tried to establish a Christian colony at Santa Cruz, near Nukapu, in 1595, but the fevers killed him within weeks and the survivors packed up and went home to Peru. Ironically, it was Peruvian Indians who would introduce the Spanish to a cure for tropical fevers half a century later. The cure resided in the bark of a shrub the Indians called quina quina, which grew high in the Andes. By the 1840s, exports of the bark to Europe were worth £1 million. Without that bark, and later its active component, the alkaloid quinine, the British Empire would never had held on to its possessions in India or Africa. By the end of the century, the British army was consuming 750 tons of the bark per year in India alone. No wonder tonic water laced with quinine—and gin, of course—emerged as the quintessential British drink.

  In 1906, when the writer Jack London arrived in Melanesia on his attempt to sail around the world, the crew of his fifty-five-foot ketch were still debating whether or not to take quinine pills, even as they were struck helpless by fever, chills, and diarrhea. “Everybody had fever, everybody had dysentery, everybody had everything. Death was common,” he wrote shortly before giving up his adventure. London had no fear of hyperbole, but he did take his quinine tablets.

  I swallowed four tablets of chloroquine (quinine’s synthetic descendant), turned on the ceiling fan, and lay down on my bed. I had nothing to read but the King James Bible, which a Mormon cousin had pushed into my backpack. (“So you can understand your great-grandfather,” she had explained. Though I knew her motives were evangelical, I carried it out of duty, or guilt, or both, with no intention of opening it.)

  It took an hour or so for the chloroquine to hit. When it did, it felt as though it was joining forces with the malaria rather than fighting it. It stole my sense of balance. It gave me cotton balls for fingertips and needles for nerve ends. It seeped into my brain like a yellowing fog, then wrapped itself tightly around my eyeballs until I could not focus on anything more than a couple of yards away.

  The next four days passed in a series of grand hallucinations, interrupted only by the chattering of my teeth and the occasional lunge for the toilet. I opened that Bible. I turned pages with damp fingers. The Old Testament rose around me in a phantasmagoria of dream, delirium, and liquid vision, all spinning through my skull to the rhythmic hiss and click of the ceiling fan.

  I saw the god make two great lights, one to rule the day and a lesser one to rule the night. The god gathered a handful of dust and pressed that dust into a shape with arms and legs. Then the god breathed life into that shape and called it man. I drifted through the garden, saw the oily glint of the serpent’s scales and the shamed flight of man and woman. I saw the flaming sword, spinning in all directions to keep them out. I saw the face of Mary Jane in the blinding light of my window, a vision from a Kennedy cocktail party, flickering like a Super 8 angel. Somewhere a loudspeaker crackled and echoed a call to prayer.

  Genesis. Exodus. Reggae from a distant bar. Abraham’s knife, raised above the delicate throat of his son.

  I didn’t eat. I floated above Sinai, where the god opened a hole in the earth to swallow those who doubted its word. The god came to Moses as a cloud and then a firestorm. It thundered in his ears: I will send my terror in front of you.

  This was a god of war. It told its followers to kill everyone in their path, and when they were not strong or merciless enough to kill, the god used its invisible hand to dash enemy armies to pieces, or to place unspeakable sores on their genitals, or to incinerate them with bolts of fire. The killing flooded my room. The fan turned above my head, spinning the years away. There were rivers of blood. The ashes of the dead fluttered in the w
ind. The blood flowed in rivers. It went on for centuries. And then, forty-two generations after the reign of Abraham, in the first book of the New Testament, in the first verse of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, at dawn on the fourth morning of my convalescence, at the apex of my fever, the tide of violence turned.

  The miracles became gentler. There was the man-god, calming the sea. There he was, turning water into wine. He spoke softly, but his voice was lifted and carried by the breeze. Just love each other, he said, and the idea somehow became the story’s best miracle. It was as though the god of vengeance, favoritism, and thunderbolts had been replaced by another.

  Dawn came as a faint glow through the curtains of my room. Then the piercing glare of day. Then, always in the afternoon, a tapping on the roof and the smell of rain. Then darkness again, and more dreams shot through with miracles and dust and blood, and in those dreams I recognized the god of my own family, the one who helped us smite our enemies yet claimed to love and forgive even those he cast into the wilderness. A god with two faces. My great-grandfather always said we were guided by the god of love, but from our stories I suspected we had always been fired by the god of war. We offered it thanks for every victory the clan ever won and for the spoils we enjoyed in peace. We wove this certainty into a story every bit as bloody as the Old Testament.