Love at the Speed of Email

by Lisa McKay

  So for the past year, my focus has been on behavior change: improving hygiene practices that complement improvements in infrastructure. But while assessing this project, I’ve been particularly moved by something that isn’t directly related to safe water or improved sanitation.

  Before our project, the women walked an hour or more to get water. To relieve themselves, they walked far into the bush or the mangroves. The women told us they used to be sexually assaulted by men hiding in the bush. Now that there are water taps and toilets close to their homes, they no longer get attacked on trips to fetch water or go to the toilet.

  Domestic and sexual violence against women is prevalent in the Pacific. I reckon that women tend to get the short end of the stick all around the world, but it seems to me to be particularly bad here. In the Pacific, the women are damn lucky if they get any of the stick at all, because most of the time the men take the stick and beat them with it. Given a choice, I reckon I’d prefer to be a woman in Afghanistan than a woman in Papua New Guinea.

  On Petats, the women told me that they felt safe when they used the new toilet.

  “You know the Bible and I know the Bible,” I said to Pastor Barry. “You know that Jesus loved the mamas and he loved the weak and the vulnerable. I think Jesus wants you to build a toilet for the women.”

  I hope he will.

  Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu

  Pouring Sunshine and Rain

  There’s a chemical in your brain

  It’s pouring sunshine and rain.

  You can never know what to expect

  You’re manic, manic

  (Plumb, Manic)

  Los Angeles, USA

  While Mike and I were busy writing emails and wondering about hope and passion, my family and our mutual friends were starting to see the odd public exchange on Facebook that made them wonder about us.

  My parents put out the first feelers, and they were remarkably unruffled when I informed them that I had invited “that Mike guy I’ve been emailing” to come make himself at home with us for ten days during our family holidays.

  “Well, I’m sure that’ll be lovely for him,” my mother said with a commendable lack of questioning or histrionics. “If he’s been living in Papua New Guinea he probably needs a holiday somewhere nice, anyway.”

  “Yeah, I think he does,” I said, trying to sound as if concern for this poor overworked email buddy in PNG was all that had motivated me to issue an invitation.

  As the weeks slipped past and the date of my trip to Australia drew closer, however, my parents’ restraint on this topic started to fray. It started with the odd inquiry as to how Mike was doing, and then it turned into one sort of query or another during every phone call. None of these queries, mind you, ran anything along the lines of “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” or “Are you out of your mind?” On the contrary, my parents appeared to be most nervous that Mike might have a sudden change of heart and decide not to come after all.

  “How’s Mike?” Mum asked me one night shortly after Christmas. “What’s up with his plans for January?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, distracted because I was trying to finish something on the computer and talk at the same time despite the fact that I regularly scolded Mum for that very practice. “We were emailing about this the other day. There’s this big meeting in Port Moresby in the middle of January—”

  “Awww,” Dad interrupted me. “He can’t come then?”

  “Oh, no,” I hastened to reassure them. “It looks like he’s going to make it for at least a week. Maybe more. And assuming we’re getting on and haven’t freaked out during the first two days, we might both go to Melbourne together that last weekend, too. It’s not quite sorted.”

  Dad sounded thrilled. “Oh, that’s good then. He knows there’s going to be a whole bunch of other people here, too?”

  Oh, that’s right, I remembered. Not only would my brother and his now-fiancée be there, as well as my sister and niece, but so would the six other friends we had collectively invited north for the Australia Day long weekend.

  “He’ll be fine,” I said. “I think he’s pretty … adaptable.”

  “That’s great!” Mum said. “He’ll have a great time. It’ll be very relaxing. Tell him we’re glad he’s coming.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Make sure you tell him, okay?”

  “Mum, okay! I’ll tell him.”

  *

  The first of our mutual friends to question me about Mike was Shelly, younger sister of my first crush, Paul. I’d tutored Shelly in French when she was nine and I was sixteen. Shelly had somehow managed to learn how to speak French fluently in spite of me. She was now a doctor, living in Melbourne.

  “Hey Lis, how’s things with your new friend, Mike Wolfe??” Shelly emailed me out of the blue with characteristic directness. “Seems you two get along pretty well.”

  “Shells, you rascal,” I wrote back without addressing her question. “You’ve just swung the door wide open for some reference-checking. So, do you want to send me ten words or phrases that describe our mutual friend Mr. Mike?”

  “Reference-checking, ay?” Shelly replied. “Well those of us in Melbourne who know you both commented on it a little while ago, and we thought it good. Ten words or phrases, hmmm:

  “1. talkative

  “2. thoughtful

  “3. fun

  “4. kind

  “5. real

  “6. integrity

  “7. out there

  “8. energetic

  “9. compassionate

  “10. and again, talkative

  “So, what’s the story, my friend….?” she finished.

  “There is no ‘story’ yet,” I wrote back. “But there is probably what I would call ‘potential to be a story.’ It is rather hard to judge story potential when you’ve never met face-to-face. Hence, reference checking. So feel free to send any additional thoughts, lists, or formal reference letters my way. If this made a family dinner conversation on your end and was pronounced good, then the story potential just went up a notch. There is, however, a lot of space for notches between L.A. and PNG.”

  *

  After my exchange with Shelly I decided that reference checking might actually be a good idea, so I wrote to Ryan.

  In the three years since I’d visited him in Vancouver, Ryan had moved to Pakistan. There he’d fallen in love with Pakistani woman named Celestina and married her. Canadian officials hadn’t exactly proved overeager to recognize the marriage and issue Celestina residency papers, so as the earthquake-relief programs they were working on began to wind down, Ryan and Celestina moved to Liberia to work and wait out the slow grind of Canada’s immigration processes.

  Ryan had not been writing nearly enough essays for my liking, something I harassed him about via email every couple of months. It was easy enough to slip a casual query onto the end of a note.

  “I can’t write more now,” I wrote. “Am running late, and this week is stacking up in advance of heading to Australia in two weeks. I’ll be spending some significant time there with another friend of yours, Mike Wolfe. You worked together in Afghanistan, didn’t you? Did you get on? Impressions? I’m curious, and there’s potential (nothing more at this stage, but potential is a good start) that it could be more than a passing interest.”

  “I met him years ago in Afghanistan and we’ve bantered back and forth with bits of writing and aid-worker angst,” Ryan replied. “He seems much more suited to development work, judging from the flavor of his recent writing. Maybe because in development you work on a smaller scale but see real change if you see it at all – unlike relief work, where you work on a large scale and wonder constantly if you are making any difference a
t all other than to your own life. Anyway, all that to say, I think he’s a good person to have potential with.”

  *

  Third-party encouragement from Australia and Liberia was all well and good, but I spent much of the last two weeks before I got onto the plane to Australia wondering whether Mike and I were even going to get the chance to explore this potential. For as the new year ticked over, things started to go wrong on both sides of the Pacific.

  At my place in California, things went from bad to worse very quickly after Christmas.

  Now that we’d broached the topic of the reality show again, Travis was like an uncorked bottle of warm champagne, fizzing over every time I came near him. Nothing seemed to help. Letting him talk for hours about his delusions got us nowhere; he just got progressively more worked up as he explained it to me over and over again – improbable scenario stacked upon improbable scenario that he had somehow fashioned into story and then forged into desperate conviction.

  He was starring in this reality TV show, he kept insisting. We were all in on it. Why couldn’t someone just tell him the truth?

  By early January I made exactly zero progress convincing Travis that he wasn’t autistic, that our house was probably not bugged, and that I definitely wasn’t his pathologically deceptive co-star in a reality television program. I was also no closer to convincing him that he’d suffered some sort of psychotic break and was in rather desperate need of psychiatric care.

  I’d talked to some of Travis’ family, but they were just as overwhelmed as I was. He refused to see a psychiatrist and we couldn’t force him. He couldn’t be involuntarily hospitalized unless we could prove him a danger to himself or others, and the closest Travis had come to this was holding a knife to his wrists in the kitchen one night.

  He was begging me to level with him, talking about the pressure he was feeling knowing that everyone was watching him all the time, when he suddenly reversed the angle of the knife he was using to chop vegetables and held the blade against his arm.

  “If I did a good enough job,” he challenged me across the kitchen bench, “you could never get the ambulance here in time.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, gambling on my instinctive sense that he wasn’t serious, not yet. “So please don’t. That would really mess up my evening plans.”

  Without a more obvious threat I knew that the police could, at most, only hold him for three days anyway, not nearly long enough for most antipsychotic drugs to really kick in.

  I was stuck. And seven days before I was supposed to fly to Australia I was done.

  *

  That night I unsuccessfully tried to head off yet another three-hour conversation with Travis by playing one of the few trump cards I thought that he, being a writer himself, would respect.

  “I need to write tonight,” I told him long before we finished eating dinner together. After dinner was done, I started moving around the kitchen, stacking the dishwasher, deliberately giving off “I’m preoccupied” signals.

  “Will you sit down?” Travis said, irritated. “It’s very difficult to talk to you when you’re messing with other things.”

  “I need to go work,” I said.

  Normal cues didn’t work that night. I had to interrupt him several times to remind him that I had other plans. Finally I had to tell him that I was going to walk away now, that we’d talk more about this later.

  Undeterred, Travis followed me upstairs, stood in the door of my bedroom, and continued talking. Five minutes later he hadn’t paused for breath and I had to interrupt him again.

  “Look,” I said, willing my voice not to shake. “I am not going to talk about this with you anymore right now. I can’t see any productive way that we can have this conversation. I’ve told you that I believe you’re temporarily paranoid. There’s nothing that I can say right now that’s going to convince you that you don’t have autism. There’s nothing that you can say right now that will convince me that you do. And, I have to work!”

  Travis looked at me, startled, and left.

  I sat there, shaking, trying to catch my breath, knowing that whatever else I was going to do that night I was wrecked for any productive writing.

  Two minutes later, before I’d decided what on earth I was going to do when I certainly wasn’t going to come out of my bedroom for the rest of the evening, Travis called up from downstairs with just a hint of sheepish in his tone.

  “Do you want a glass of wine? I probably owe you one.”

  “Yes, you do,” I called out, not feigning how much I suddenly did want a glass of wine. But as I heard the cork come out downstairs and the wine gurgle into the glasses, I suddenly wondered …

  Would he ever put anything in it? He still believed someone had slipped something into his drink in Vegas months ago – would he ever do something similar? Was he just play-acting calm? Was he angry that I’d shut him down? As I took a deep breath and told myself not to be ridiculous, I also wondered whether paranoia was catching.

  When he bought the wine up he offered up a toast.

  “To this next year being the best year for both of us,” he said. “And to me overcoming my autism, and my paranoia.”

  He had spoken in desperate jest, but I offered up a silent and hearty “Amen. Please let it be so.”

  I drank the wine as a small, silent statement of faith that he would not hurt me. Then I shut my door, feeling sick to my stomach, and wrote a long, anguished letter to Mike called Tonight’s washing machine of negative emotions.

  “It’s such a mixture of stuff,” I wrote after I’d described the evening. “I’m so sad because I’m watching someone who I know well and care for deeply spiraling down this slide of paranoia and I can’t do anything to get in the way. I can see further than he can, and all I see at the bottom of this slide is depression and worse. And despite what I said to him tonight, when he drew breath long enough to ask for my professional opinion (again), despite the fact that I was so careful to place the word temporary in front of the word paranoid, I don’t know if it is actually temporary now.

  “I knew I should not expect to be able to talk him out of his delusions, but knowing the theory is one thing. Seeing it in a client is one thing. Seeing it in someone you know well – that’s another thing entirely. But I’m supposed to be a psychologist, for crying out loud. How could I not have seen this coming? However you look at it, if anyone should be able to get in the way of this and break his fall, it should be me and I’m failing. I am failing in this. I know that may be an impossible task, and it isn’t really my (quote) responsibility (unquote) to save him anyway. But to some extent it is, you know. Because you don’t get much closer a neighbor to love than your flatmate.”

  But as I sat in my room that night writing to Mike about the whole mess, I knew that I was effectively about to abandon Travis to his battle. With the sound of pouring wine had come the realization that I was starting to doubt my own judgment. That I was losing my grip on this situation, if I had ever had one to begin with. That I needed to move out as soon as possible.

  Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

  In Papua New Guinea, meanwhile, Mike was trying to wrap up his work before taking time off and mourning being robbed for the third time in a month.

  When he’d been in the Solomon Islands four weeks earlier, his favorite pair of shoes had been stolen off the porch of someone’s house while he was inside having dinner. As he only owned about three pairs of shoes, this was no small loss, and he’d immediately ordered another pair and had them shipped to me so that I could bring them to Australia and hand them off. I still had no idea how tall Mike was, but after his new shoes arrived, I did know that he had size thirteen feet.

  After the shoe incident, however, the thefts became more serious.

  During the Christmas party that Mike threw at his house, two people were robbed of their bags, wallets, and keys, and one person was knifed while trying to retrieve them. Mike described it this way in a letter:

/>   “Bobby was able to find the boys. He got the keys back, at least. They knifed him. I brought him into my kitchen and washed out his knife wound and got my first-aid kit, then I called for Laurence because he’s a doctor and I’m not. Laurence said it’s a long wound, but shallow. Bobby will be okay. We washed it out and bandaged him up. I gave him another beer. At 1 a.m. after everyone leaves I’m still buzzing and unable to sleep. I take a Valium.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” I wrote back the next day, “A Christmas party isn’t a Christmas party if it doesn’t involve a stabbing and end with Valium.”

  On January 1st Mike was in Port Moresby and it was his turn to have a bag stolen – a bag containing his laptop, cash, his passport, immunization records, a GPS, an iPod, a digital camera, sunglasses, backup documents, and a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

  After a day spent driving around settlements and negotiating with the local hoodlums, known as raskols, four hundred dollars in “assistance fees” retrieved the computer, camera, GPS, flash drive, and sunglasses.

  No passport. No iPod. No cash. No Salman Rushdie.

  From our point of view, the most serious of these losses was the passport, since (as I learned the hard way several years before) you can’t travel internationally without a valid one. Mike tried telling the gangs that the passport had an embedded computer chip in it and that the U.S. military could track down the people who’d stolen it.

  “They can. They won’t.” Mike wrote to me. “I wonder if the raskols read my bluff?”

  Figuring they probably had, Mike had immediately lodged a request for a new passport with the U.S. embassy in Port Moresby. He was promised it would arrive within two weeks. We crossed our fingers.

  But six days before he was supposed to leave for Australia, Mike was still in Port Moresby and still without a passport, and when he rang his home base in Madang about a work matter, he learned he was now also without many of his remaining worldly possessions. Thieves had broken into his house again and looted it.