by Tatjana Soli
Potato chips would hit the spot about now. What was he doing? It was getting late. If he could just take a nap, it would feel so good. Maybe it would have been wiser to start smoking after he got to his destination.
Cooked threw the book down, intending to go cold turkey—zero entertainment. He needed peace to tap into the ancestral wavelength to know what to say to Laura Vann that would turn around the last two hundred years of exploitation of the islands. On second thought, he put his iPod back in.
He was going out the door when he saw Dex coming up the path. Like a bloodhound, he had scented good reefbud being consumed and wanted to partake.
Cooked pretended not to see him.
“Hey, bro,” Dex yelled, but Cooked flashed him such a fierce, cannibalistic scowl that Dex stopped in his tracks and went silent.
Cooked had in mind a place on the other, deserted side of the island to set up camp for the night—his and Titi’s favorite make-out spot, full of good mojo. What he hadn’t taken into account was that an island that usually had only a dozen inhabitants now had twenty times that many. They, too, had fanned out in all directions. There were reclining forms everywhere like pairs of beached dolphins; the air was filled with soft moans of pleasure. All of it was making Cooked want to give up this whole vision quest thing and go find Titi instead, dragging her off by the hair if she resisted. At least tomorrow he would fail happy.
But as he stood there, taking out a power bar to nibble on, he had a new thought. If he blew the interview, Titi would deny him for a really long stretch. But if by some miracle, he did okay, she would be his for years because he would be the big kahuna times five. If he ballparked it, well, he would be gold for a lifetime. It was worth sacrificing a night. He continued on.
When he reached their favorite cove, shadowed by overhanging palms, it was as he suspected: occupied. Cooked stood there, indecisive, and a dude yelled, “Hey, bro, you gonna make a movie or somethin’?”
Cooked shuffled inland, stoned, hungry, and aroused, not knowing where to find shelter. Fifteen minutes later, he found himself at the sacrificial stone they had visited on that loser field trip. Until Loren had taken them there a few days ago, Cooked had never known what it was. Now that he did, it sort of freaked him out, but he didn’t know where else to go.
As he had guessed, no one was there because, unlike him, everyone else knew the history. Whatever. It was a rock. The old days were … old. The spot was empty and filled with moonlight and made a nice place to sit and look at the sky and allow the gods to drop a huge pile of inspiration down on his head. He climbed up, laid out his supplies, and lit up his first official joint of the night. Even if divine inspiration didn’t happen, it felt good to get away from everyone else’s craziness for a few hours. Halfway through the new spliff, he realized that this was seriously powerful kine bud. He was seriously blazed. He lay back on the cool slab and fell up into the night sky. It was as if the universe was there for him alone. He flew. He expanded, his face covering the whole of the night sky, his breath the wind in the palms. He was spinning. He put one hand down on the stone for leverage, and his fingers probed a small worn-down cup in the stone, and Loren’s words came back to him: “This is where they did human sacrifices.” He lay there frozen, immobile. Horrific visions of oiled bodies writhing in firelight, stabbing their sacrifices, the bloodletting filling the basins. Although he had no actual firsthand knowledge of how they did it, it was sure to be awful, not to mention gory, kind of like a Polynesian Friday the 13th. Cooked sat up, spooked, and ate all his supplies, intending to hurry home to Titi, but then somehow it became sunrise. He had slept through the whole night! Cracker crumbs were stuck to his lips.
He got up stiff, tired, and stuffed. It felt like he’d wrestled the Great Shark itself, and it had showed him its teeth. With a heavy, thoughtful step, he walked back to the resort, feeling the weight of his footsteps in history, ready for breakfast.
* * *
Seven a.m. An hour passed. Laura Vann should have been there. They had radioed in that she was past Hawaii and over the Pacific hours ago. Everything was on hold; it was sweltering; people were getting jumpy. At noon, Wende got the call.
“She’s not coming,” Wende announced.
“Why?” Dex asked.
Wende grimaced. “The vice president is on a visit to Japan. He fell down the stairs getting off Air Force Two and broke his leg. Everyone is rushing over there to cover it. Because Laura had a jump start, she’s ahead of them all. She’s halfway to Tokyo.”
Cooked bowed his head. The ancestors had talked to him last night, and what they had said was be prepared to be shit on. He had expected this, or not this exactly, certainly not the American vice president, whatever his name was, breaking his leg, but something like it. Look at his people’s history. Cursed. Didn’t this Laura Vann’s change of mind also reflect on him, that he was not as interesting or worthy or important as a clumsy no-name VP? He raised his head briefly, his eyes filled, and then, embarrassed, he turned away.
“No,” Dex said. Cooked’s face spoke to him—a good man beaten once again by the system—and he wasn’t going to have it. “No, no, no, no.”
“What?” Wende asked.
Dex was bobbing his head like a possessed man. “We continue. We go on. Screw Laura Vann and her star-fucking. She just missed the biggest story of her career. Just get us the boat!” Dex yelled.
* * *
Wende sent out a request for a powerboat to make the journey across the Tuamotu Archipelago to Moruroa. Immediately offers flooded in. The best one was from a tech mogul who was also a Prospero fan vacationing on Bora-Bora. He offered his eighty-foot yacht and crew.
“Game, set, match.” Wende and Ann slapped palms.
“I want to go,” Ann said. “It’s going to get complicated out there with the police and the media. That’s my training.” What she didn’t want to say was that she was jealous of everyone else finding his or her purpose, doing something that mattered, never mind if it turned out badly. She wanted her shot.
“Where?” Wende was busy scanning the five thousand comments left on the live cam in the hours after Dex’s “Enlightenment” episode.
“I want to go with Cooked and Dex.”
“Oh … No.”
“Why?”
“Because the power of the message is lessened. Your presence skews it into yuppie adventure travel.”
Ann blinked at the jab. “That’s not nice.” This was her moment of self-sacrifice, of going after the greater good, and this muse was blowing her off.
Wende took Ann’s hand and gave it a quick peck. “It’s not who you are, Ann.”
* * *
By midafternoon the Polynesian wedding party guests were whipped into a passion by the presence of a flotilla of boats. The eighty-foot yacht was anchored outside the lagoon, waiting; inside the lagoon, smaller boats circled. Loren had denied landing rights to the paparazzi so they sat in rowboats and dinghies in the scorching sun, wielding telephoto lenses and waiting for something to happen.
The French military’s mission had changed en route from one of rescuing a world-famous celebrity to restricting said celebrity from making a circus and PR disaster of Polynesian tourism. Not knowing the rebels’ plans to go by yacht, a French bureaucrat in Papeete calculated that by outrigger canoe the Moruroa Raid Party could drag along for weeks before getting there, with daily broadcasts worldwide, costing a fortune not only in military presence but also in lost tourist dollars, and long-lasting, radiation-like bad publicity that would continue on for years.
At first Wende had considered uprooting the live cam to record the trip, but it quickly became apparent that the paparazzi had the situation more than covered. Her job changed now to one of staging. At the appointed time, the fanciest outrigger canoe was pulled in front of the resort, and all two hundred and fifty native guests went crazy as the drums pounded. They threw flowers in the water and sang. The “cannibals” in their new roles as ceremonial rowers
, now sans masks but with palm headdresses (Wende thought they needed some oomph), stepped into the boat. After a suitably long pause in which the mad drumming reached such a crescendo that the idea of cannibalism became totally plausible to the burning, sweating paparazzi bobbing in their boats, Dex and Cooked walked out of the kitchen.
Wardrobe arguments had again raged, but the final decision was to dress nonnative (because a grass skirt looked kooky on Dex and undercut the seriousness of the occasion): subdued shorts and plain T-shirts. As the men left the shady porch of the kitchen and came into full view, the lolling paparazzi started snapping pictures and digitally recording, but it wasn’t till a third figure appeared—slighter than the other two, dressed similarly in shorts and baggy T and sporting a baseball cap pulled down low, but without a doubt a woman (Look at the boobs, man!)—that they collectively went into a frenzy.
* * *
Wende, discreetly headquartered under the shade of a palm grove, was outraged. This was her baby, and she’d emphatically said No! She was used to the backstabbing at home in Los Angeles that went along with being the woman associated, or hoping to become associated, with Dex and Prospero, but she had thought Ann was different. Ann was supposed to be her friend. If Wende ran out and confronted her now, the whole moment, the whole production, would be ruined. Damage-control time, and the same question was in Wende’s mind as in the multitudinous military and paparazzi’s collective psyche: Who was the mystery woman? Guesses were: (1) Dex’s hinted-at girlfriend (which, honestly, Wende thought not credible, especially the way Ann was dressed). (2) Another hostage/tourist (this possibility reignited the military because rescuing women got a lot more mileage in the press). But Wende beat them all to the punch when she tweeted the future tabloid headline from her iPhone: (3) It’s the Cannibal Attorney!
* * *
Ann had worn sneakers even though she would have preferred wearing her reef shoes and saving the others for the boat, but carrying luggage would play into Wende’s fears of looking like they were on a terrorist-adventure-eco-vacation. The sand was blisteringly hot. Going barefoot was not a good option since they were supposed to move in a slow, dignified procession, filled with the portent of their mission. It wouldn’t have been a bad compromise to stop at the water’s edge and slip off her shoes, but, again, squatting in the sand and messing with her shoes could be photographed unflatteringly and diminish the voyage’s gravitas.
An hour before in the kitchen with Dex, Cooked, and Richard, she had taken Dex aside and asked to go.
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Hey, I’m all for women’s rights and being equals. But you sure you want to go get microwaved?”
Ann paused. “I think I know why you’re doing it. I have my reasons, too.”
She had been confused these last days, or rather weeks, or really these last years, holding all these potentially interesting ingredients to a life that weren’t coming together. It was like Richard’s legendary hollandaise sauce: The ingredients looked watery at first, it took forever to whisk over heat, and there was that breath-holding moment when the lemon juice was added. It either curdled or transformed into a fluffy, velvety miracle. This once, she was the exact right person to play this part. She blushed at the ego of it, but she had been born to do this thing she was about to do, whatever the consequences.
Dex nodded. “Okeydokey. Hope you don’t get seasick.”
Ann had never really been on a prolonged ocean voyage, so she didn’t know if she had sea legs or not. She would deal with it. The hardest part of the voyage had been telling Richard.
“I’m going, too,” he said when he heard.
“You can’t.”
“Both of us or neither.” Maybe it took a crisis like your wife being microwaved to realize that life without her was unthinkable.
“No. This is mine.”
He frowned. Even the possibility of Ann getting hurt made him faint with worry.
“Things could get tricky out there,” she said. “Dex and Cooked aren’t exactly grounded individuals. An attorney might come in handy.”
“What would you say if I said no?”
“The man I love wouldn’t.”
“No fair.”
“I’ll still need protecting from thunderstorms when I get back.”
Wende was wrong once again. The secret glory of middle age was the discovery that when you loved, compromise was painless.
* * *
During boarding, the metallic-insect-whirring of paparazzi and their various machines filled the air. Cooked gracefully climbed into the outrigger without any help. Next came Dex, struggling and making a little hop, accidentally stepping down on a piece of sharp coral underwater and cutting his toe. He refused to show pain, just boarded and hid his bleeding foot. The drops of blood dispersed in the water, and sharks two miles away turned and snuffed the intoxicating waterborne blood scent.
A motorboat floated very close by, but Ann ignored it as she trudged through the water, pleased with her sneaker choice after watching Dex’s struggle. She figured she could take her shoes off and dry them once they were aboard the yacht. She had one leg in, one still in the water, straddling the side of the outrigger when it sloshed sideways in the wake of the passing boat. She had to hop after it. One of the “cannibals” rose and held out his hand to hoist her over. Just as she was about to grab it, a familiar voice cried out.
“Ann, is that you?”
She blinked, light-headed from the heat and all the attention, the potential of bashing herself against the skittish side of the boat and drowning in the waist-high waters. Was she simply ill-suited for the heroine life? Was she hallucinating? The “cannibal” yanked her arm, almost dislocating it, and she flew over the side of the canoe, banging her shoulder on a crossbeam. Simultaneously rescued and crushed.
“Ann! I’ve found you!”
The boat had raced to shore despite Loren’s prohibition, and as it cut its rumbling motor, the voice became clearer. A voice she knew as well as she knew her own.
“Ann, it’s me. Javi!”
Fare Tini Atua
(House of the Gods)
Pious harpooners never make good voyagers—it takes the shark out of ’em; no harpooner is worth a straw who ain’t pretty sharkish.
—MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
Titi watched as the outrigger canoe finally pushed away after another boat came alongside it. A man had jumped in the water and splashed after Ann. She didn’t seem happy to see him, so Titi wasn’t either. After a hug and some whispered words between the two, the outrigger continued to move off toward the pass. Amid the sound of drums and singing, arranged by Titi to give the voyage a worthy send-off, the man, accidental conqueror, waded through the flower-strewn waves and touched land as if all the hoopla were for him.
Ceremonies like this were rare nowadays, and Titi was happy that it was performed for Cooked’s sake. He had overcome his fear and gone. People would remember him for generations.
The last similar ceremony she had attended was one of welcome rather than departure. Six years before, press had come from all around the world to celebrate a group of Scandinavian boys crossing the Pacific on a balsa raft, the Tangaroa, reenacting their grandfathers’ victorious landing on the islands. Why did explorers only have white faces? As if her people existed solely to be discovered and rediscovered, over and over, to provide a backdrop for their exotic adventure. What if Cooked’s outrigger paddled all the way to their snowy fjords—would that be newsworthy? Could Cooked say he had discovered Norway and its people?
The leader of the original Kon-Tiki voyage, Thor Heyerdahl, had set out to prove that the prevailing ocean currents allowed migration from South America rather than Asia as had been commonly assumed. When he landed on Raroia in the Tuamotus, he was hailed an international hero. But Titi’s people had endured generations of hardship by staying in place—where was the celebration for that?
None of that had mattered t
o Titi at eighteen, flattered by the attention, the newspaper photographs of herself with the boys. She had been picked because her grandmother had been on the beach for the official celebrations to greet the men from the original voyage in 1947.
One of the grandsons developed a crush on Titi, and she had stayed with him for several weeks. When it came time for them to leave, he had asked her to come home with him to Narvik, Norway. He described what his home looked like: forests, herds of reindeer, and thick-walled houses that burned fires inside for warmth. Although she had seen snow in movies, the reality of living in it was beyond her. The closest she could come was imagining living inside a freezer. It sounded more fantastical than the idea of living on the moon. He described the whiteness as being as vast as the blue of her ocean. He told her of standing on water that was frozen solid, like a giant ice cube, and how he danced on its surface with blades on his feet. “You mean like the ice-skating rink in Papeete?” she asked.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was collecting her, a South Sea specimen, to take home. Not for a moment did she consider going. Her adult life was preordained to be spent with Cooked, on the land that gave her people their strength and identity. This had been taught to her from the beginning by her mother, Faufau, and her grandmother. During her young life, she had observed what being out of place did to Loren. Tuamotuans did not have a word for loneliness. She did not want to experience its meaning in another language.
But the land was ailing.
Faufau told the story of how she woke up early one morning and walked along the lagoon on an errand. A brilliant light flashed overhead. Not in one corner of the sky like a house on fire or the sun rising, but like a great apocalyptic flame. Faufau fell to the ground facedown, shutting her eyes tightly, sure that it was the white god coming to end the world like the missionaries always threatened. A great rumbling started, like the worst thunder, the stomach of the earth growling. The sand in front of her eyes rolled up and down like a wave, like a ripple being shaken out of cloth, then sank away. The ocean rushed to replace the land, reversing the Bible story of creation. Faufau rose, crying, and ran back home.
