Worst. Person. Ever.

by Douglas Coupland

  An early and well-known example was supercouple “Bennifer,” referring to film stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Other examples include “Brangelina” (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and “TomKat” (the now split Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes).

  Meshing a name says, “I am you and you are me,” noted Denise Winterman in the August 3, 2006, issue of BBC News Magazine.

  In 2009, the twins John and Edward Grimes followed the growing trend for celebrity portmanteau names when they entered the sixth series of The X-Factor (UK) under the name, “Jedward.”

  The whole thing is just stupid.

  32

  Sometimes a person needs some time alone. While LACEY reclined in the merde-cloaked Melanesian fuck pad—a pad that rested, I noticed, atop six rusting Mobil oil drums, onto one of which was tethered a ferocious black pig that came alive only when I tripped over a nearby yellow nylon fishing net embedded in the sand and landed right in front of him.

  Fuck you, you oinking, amber-tusked chunk of doomed cannibal bacon, I am a free man in Paris, and I am now breaking free of this malarial cumdump. Ha!

  I scrambled like a crazy man for the road. Finding it was easy enough, as the island is barely 50 feet wide. On the other side of the road/island lay another coral lagoon that glowed with health. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be flecked with empty Pepsi cans, plastic water bottles and the cardboard remains of Swanson TV dinners. More artery-clogging shit American food.

  I could see the ghetto of Betio to the west, maybe a mile away.

  I remembered Neal blathering earlier that the island was basically 25 miles of nodules linked by a long, thin path that at times became road-like. Well, at least I wasn’t in handcuffs and/or a prison cell. Small blessings. I was, however, at least 20 miles away from the hotel.

  Two stray dogs growled at me amid the swath of roadside litter. I growled back. They growled louder. Fucking hell, all I needed now was to be attacked by dogs. I decided to ignore them and, thank Christ, they decided the same.

  My sunburned scalp was stinging like mad. I removed my Cure T-shirt, put it over my head and tied its corners together into a square that fit snugly on my cranium. Yes, I looked just like a Gumby from Monty Python, but the sun was like X-rays.

  Gumbys are recurring characters in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. They have toothbrush moustaches and wear handkerchiefs knotted at the corners on their heads, wire-rimmed spectacles, braces, Fair Isle knitted sweater vests, a shirt rolled up to the elbows, missing its detachable collar, trousers rolled up above their knees and Wellington boots. They usually hold their arms in an ape-like position, speak loudly and slowly, and pronounce words syllable by syllable. A popular Gumby catchphrase is “My brain hurts!”

  Where next? The hotel. Right. Two teenage girls approached carrying bundles of laundry.

  I decided to lay on some Gunt charm. “Loves, can you tell me where I might find the main hotel around here?”

  They stared at me in shock and began to shriek, “Vakubati! Vakubati!” They ran away from me.

  Vakubati? What the fuck?

  “Hey, come on—all I want is directions to the fucking hotel,” I yelled, but they were gone.

  From the direction of the pig, I heard LACEY calling, “RayCEY! RayCEY? Where are you, hunny-bunny?”

  What would Jason Bourne do?

  He would steal a car.

  Where is a car to steal?

  A car approached.

  It was a 1986 Chrysler LeBaron, more oxide than metal, with its rear seat removed to make room for chicken hutches. Its front vinyl seats were, like most plastics on this island, disintegrating in the relentlessly destructive sun.

  I waved frantically and the car pulled over. I began talking to the driver as I opened the door. “Hello. I just need a lift to my hotel. If you like, I can pay you, but I really can’t stay here much longer. I’m being followed by a woman with Buñuel’s syndrome.” By then, I was seated. “Chop-chop. Let’s go,” I said, then noticed the man behind the wheel: the driver we had left for dead. Mother of fucking God.

  Dear The Gods,

  What the fuck is wrong with you?

  Yours,

  Raymond Gunt

  I launched a charm offensive. “Why, hello, good sir! It’s you! How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, mon. I’m good.”

  “It seems people on these delightful islands have a culture of forgiveness and peace,” I responded awkwardly.

  “Whatever you say. Next hotel is one hour away. I don’t charge you, but instead you buy one of my fine hens.”

  “Delightful idea. Let’s get going.”

  “Delicious hens. Nuclear fallout makes them extra-delicious.”

  “Doesn’t it, though!”

  As the driver stepped on the gas, I caught a glimpse in the side mirror of LACEY emerging from a cluster of sea grape leaves with a puzzled expression on her face. She was clutching her plastic tote bag of corn nuts.

  “So,” I said, “I take it you’re feeling better after this morning’s tiny bump?”

  “Bump? I no get bump. I pass out in shrub from drinking too much ceremonial tak-tak. Not really remember much before that. I need to limit the amount of tak-tak I drink these days.”

  “Well, don’t we all, don’t we all!”

  Dear The Gods,

  I take all that back.

  Yours,

  Raymond Gunt

  We drove for a few miles or so. Lagoons. Litter. Stray dogs. Chickens in the back seat trying to peck my kidneys. I struggled to remember the name of the hotel Sarah had mentioned. The Douchewater? The Double-Anal? The Deet?

  “Say, driver, have you heard of a hotel called the DEET?”

  “Ah. The Deet. Nice place. Deet a proud part of island heritage. Hotel named to honour the mighty Deet.”

  “Really now!” I expected to hear lurid tales of Marilyn Monroe circa 1958 shagging pretty much everyone alive in a popper-scented sling room in a rear bungalow. Or, maybe an international peace armistice signed behind the shed where they slaughter goats.

  “DEET be a good chemical. It kills insects fast.”

  What is he babbling about?

  “No more mosquitoes and many fewer flies. DEET be the chemical of progress.”

  Oh … he meant DDT.

  “Children on island no so bright as before we use DEET, but they no die from malaria. You want snack cake?” He held out a vile, crumbling yellow rhomboid on which a fly was actively laying eggs.

  I was starving, and calculated that fly eggs must contain at least a bit of protein. “Actually, yes.”

  We drove for miles while I digested his tasty offering. I became chatty. “Quite a thing, this nuclear war, isn’t it?”

  “We used to nuclear war here in Kiribati. Nuclear war invented on our gracious islands.”

  Uh-oh. I felt a politically correct moment coming on—you know, having to make the empathetic face and show solidarity for these Spam-eating bozos kicked out of their grass huts when the Yanks or the Frogs did their H-bomb tests in the fifties. “Oh, really?”

  “Yes. Most of the people on this island are atomic refugees of some sort.”

  Borrrrrrrrrrrrrrring.

  “Our home islands too full of green glow to go back to.”

  I hate political correctness. One moment you’re at the pub making a few biff jokes with some mates, and next thing you know, you’re on trial for throwing an empty lager can at the village lesbian.

  “We live a simple life here.”

  Will this bloke’s plea for pity ever end?

  “Rice. Delicious tinned food from Fiji and Australia. Satellite television. I like Detroit Pistons basketball team.”

  “Say, driver, there’s a local word I’m wondering the meaning of. Maybe you can help me.”

  “My English be shit.”

  “Not to worry. The word is vakubati. Vakubati. Does that ring a bell?”

  He slammed on the brakes and began screaming. Plum-faced, he lunged o
ut of the driver’s seat and pointed at me, screaming, “Vakubati! Get out of car, vakubati!”

  “Fuck you, Tonto. I have a hotel to get to.”

  I scootched over, put the still-running car in gear and peeled off, chickens and all. How dare he try to leave me marooned on some needle-thin chicken path when I, Raymond Gunt, had a job to get to. My mission—well, escaping LACEY, for one. And then my actual job as a cameraman: to document twenty-four soul-dead Americans fucking each other’s brains out before they descended into cannibalism, all for some tiny sliver of crap money they’d only piss away within a few weeks of winning. The saving grace was that this absurd contest would be happening on an island semi-distant from LACEY with absolutely no police, no military and no legal oversight. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime gifts bestowed upon us by the gods to whom I recently wrote a thank-you letter.

  DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) is one of the best-known synthetic insecticides. It was used with great success in the second half of World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops in tropical zones. The Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948 “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.” Its production and use skyrocketed in the fifties and sixties. However, it was banned in the U.S. in 1972 because once it is in an ecosystem, anything larger than a mosquito is totally fucked. If one thing can be said to rape an ecosystem, DDT would be it, and yet for decades people were crazy for the stuff. We are a wacky species, we humans.

  The Pacific Proving Grounds is the name of a number of sites in the Pacific Ocean used by the United States to conduct nuclear testing between 1946 and 1962. In July 1947, after the first atomic weapons testing at the Bikini Atoll—yes, that’s where the word “bikini” comes from—the U.S. entered into an agreement with the United Nations to govern the “Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands as a strategic trusteeship territory.”

  Right.

  Let’s remember that the United Nations at one point existed largely to serve the needs of the U.S. and the West, whereas now it’s a free-for-all of pork and smokescreens. That’s several metaphors in one sentence. Fun fact: The United Nations building in New York City is the only place in all of North America where smoking is still permitted indoors.

  Anyway, the Trust Territory is composed of two thousand islands spread over 3 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean.

  One hundred and five above-ground nuclear tests were conducted there, many of which were of extremely high yield. The largest was the 15-megaton Castle Bravo shot of 1954.

  33

  Turns out the Hotel Deet was a mere half-mile off. A sign pointing away from the chicken path read, THE DEET WELCOMES YOU.

  Fucking brilliant.

  I turned off and drove along a thin strip of coral dust up to a two-storey cinder-block building that looked like a Soviet gulag from the 1960s, except this one was covered in dead air conditioners and drying laundry, with yet another crazed and snorting tethered pig in the front yard.

  As I got out of the car, I heard a familiar voice. “Ray! There you are! How did your epic fuckfest with LACEY go?”

  Christ, did everyone and his dog know about LACEY? I turned around and saw Neal, nut brown, in another of Arnaud du Puis’s Paul Smith linen suits. His pant legs were rolled up, he was carrying a pair of five-hundred-quid loafers and he looked, for all the world, like a blue chip film star who didn’t do drugs and who had invested wisely in real estate, and who now was taking a bit of time out to do a series of prestige ad campaigns for American Express cards, Tissot-Omega watches and a fundraiser for some ghastly disease mercifully confined to Africa.

  “So, why aren’t you on the yacht?”

  “I was, Ray, but then I got sleepy and a Zodiac kindly ferried me back. Forget about me, though. Tell me more about LACEY! Everyone’s dying to know how it went. It was Fi’s idea to give you two a sex holiday.”

  Aneurysm II: Return of the First Aneurysm.

  “Neal, to be honest, I don’t remember anything about the past eight hours. Last thing I remember is reading Spam labels with you in the supermarket. Has anyone blown up New York or London yet?”

  “I don’t think so. But Atlanta is being evacuated. A lot of the satellites have gone down, and most of the major optical cables have been chopped.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  Southern Cross Cables to NZ, Hawaii, Fiji and U.S. Mainland Australia-Japan Cable

  Indonesian Sea-Me-We 3 and Jasaurus links

  Papua New Guinea APNG-2 link

  PPC-1 and Sanchar Nigam links into Guam

  Hawaiian Telstra links

  Gondwana link from New Caledonia to Australia

  Intelsat

  Inmarsat

  SingTel Optus Earth stations

  Zodiac Marine & Pool is a French company known for their widely used small inflatable boats. The word “ZODIAC” is a registered trademark for rigid-hulled inflatable boats.

  We found a patch of shade. “Is this our hotel, then?”

  “Best the island has to offer. Not really any worse than a few of the cardboard boxes I’ve lived in.”

  “Neal, how can anybody possibly have standards lower than yours?”

  “Don’t be so quick to judge, Ray. I happen to know that Monocle magazine rated the food in the Deet’s restaurant as among the world’s best Polynesian cuisine.”

  “Since when the fuck do you read Monocle, Neal? When you were in Brussels attending a Eurocurrency crisis meeting?”

  “Monocle is a taste-making forum for global elites. No harm in a common man like me dreaming of one day living inside a stainless steel meat locker furnished with classic Eames chairs. And instead of being fussy and negative, Ray, why don’t we go inside and give the food a try?”

  We started towards the gulag tower. A thick brown hand inserted a piece of cardboard into a window on the lowest level, reading: RESTAURANT BE OPEN.

  “Din-din is served!” Neil announced.

  As we headed towards the door, I threw a stick at yet another menacing, feral, tethered pig that, no doubt, considering my sunburned skin, saw me as a walking block of Spam. Something about the Pacific always turns one’s thinking to cannibalism in the end.

  “Neal,” I said as I opened the door, “people here have been calling me vakubati and then promptly flipping out and screaming and fleeing my presence. Any idea what that’s all about?”

  Neal said, “Raymond, you’re the vakubati.”

  “Please explain.”

  “Vakubati is the Kiribati word for fuckbuddy.”

  “Since when do you know the Kiribati language?”

  “Everyone in South Tarawa knows about the vakubati, locals and visitors alike. News spread like wildfire.”

  “How the fuck did I become the fuckbuddy-slash-vakubati, or whatever the hell it is?”

  “When we were tripping out in the Spam store, Sarah told everyone in the store that you and I were fuckbuddies—cheeky sense of humour that bird’s got.”

  “Go on.”

  “So the thing is, Neal, the Kiribati blame the world’s potential nuclear war on you.”

  “So then, what—I’m the boogeyman to these people? Why not you, too?”

  “Well, Ray, look at the facts: you’re bright red, you’re a bit on the thin side, you haven’t had a shave in a while and, at the moment, you’re wearing no shirt and a Gumby hat. It doesn’t take too many brains to connect those dots, it doesn’t.”

  “They think I started the nuclear fucking war.”

  “It’s human nature to blame someone.”

  By now we were entering the Deet’s dining area: folding aluminum tables and white plastic stacking chairs supplied courtesy of the trash vortex. As there was no staff in view, we sat down and looked at our menus, printed out in Comic Sans font and, to judge by the stains and wrinkles and scuffing, laminated some time back in the Thatcher years.

  Tuna Schnitzel


  Tuna steak kissed by breadcrumbs,

  served with Australian-made potato chips

  and cucumber slice.

  Tuna Salad

  Raw tuna fish with onions in a spicy sauce,

  served with crusty bread.

  Tuna Tartar

  Raw tuna fish minced

  with hot spices,

  spread onto an inviting garlic bread.

  As seen in Monocle magazine.

  “Globalization is glamorous and good.”

  34

  When no one showed up to take our order, we poked around. The kitchen consisted of a dozen plastic buckets, a small gas stove and shelves holding boxed and tinned items: cocktail sausages, Weetabix, irradiated milk from New Zealand.

  “Pass me that opener, Neal. Fancy a few cocktail sausages?”

  “Indeed.”

  We began emptying tins. “Best we wash it down with this canned milk.”

  “I don’t know about milk that’s been irradiated, Ray. Doesn’t seem right.”

  “But selling milk in a tin does seem right?”

  “Good point.”

  We guzzled the milk supply. Finally I was feeling lucid and in good spirits. “Nothing like having your elevenses at sundown.”

  “Couldn’t agree with you more, Ray.”

  I touched my head. “Christ, I’m still wearing this fucking Gumby hat.”

  “I didn’t want to editorialize on your style, Ray, but yes, you are.”

  I removed the Gumby hat and shook it back into the T-shirt it was. Neal stared at it, his eyes goggling as would those of a kitten shown dangling yarn for the first time.

  “Ray! That’s a Cure T-shirt!”

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “It was in the fuck hut.”

  “I must have that shirt.”

  Ahhhhh, how interesting to have something Neal really wanted. “No, Neal, no. You can’t have this shirt, because it is mine.” I slipped it on for emphasis, and also to cover my sunburned abdomen.