Lily King - Euphoria

I heard them on the mats they’d set up in the large mosquito room beside their desks. The mats creaked and snapped. Whispering. Breathing. The unmistakable rhythm of sex. A cry cut short. Laughing.

Daylight and he was yelling. I turned and saw him towering over Bani, who was crouched by the dining table. Fen smacked him on the ear and he fell over whimpering, curled in a ball.

‘Where’s Nell?’ It felt like days since she’d sat in the chair.

‘Out counting babies. She thinks I’m doing such a stellar job she’s promoted me to head nurse.’

He was shaving me again.

‘You’re like a bear,’ he said, though he was far furrier than I.

He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth. I didn’t need a shave, didn’t particularly want a shave, but I breathed in the smell of his hands and breath. He wiped me with a dry towel.

‘You have three freckles, right below your lip.’ He was drunk, quite drunk, and I felt lucky I hadn’t been cut. He leaned in to touch the freckles and kept leaning until his mouth was on mine. I barely had to press a hand on his chest and he sprung back, wiping his lips as if I had initiated it.

Nell read from Light in August , which a friend had sent her a few months ago. Fen lay on the bed beside me and Nell read from the chair with a bit of hauteur, the same sort of pretension American actresses had when they spoke their lines. She was self-conscious, reading aloud, in a way she wasn’t at all in regular life, when the words were hers.

Fen and I caught eyes after the first sentence. He pulled a face and she caught me grinning.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s a good book.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘It’s naïve tendentious American drivel,’ Fen said, ‘but go on.’

He was so much at ease with me that I began to wonder if I’d hallucinated the kiss. After Nell stopped reading she climbed on the bed too and we lay there the three of us watching the bugs try to claw their way into the net and talking about the book and about Western stories compared to the stories told here. Nell said she’d gotten so sick in the Solomons of hearing their pigman creation myths and their enormous-penis myths that she told them the whole story of Romeo and Juliet.

‘I really dragged it out. I acted out the balcony scene, the stabbings. Of course I set it all in a village much like theirs, with two rival hamlets and a healer instead of a friar, and that sort of thing. It’s a tribal tale to begin with, so it wasn’t hard to make it familiar to them.’ She was on her side and I was on my side facing her and Fen was on his back between us so I could only see half her face. ‘So finally — and it took me well over an hour in that stinking language; six syllables a word! — I got to the end. She’s dead. And do you know what the Kirakira did? They laughed. They laughed and laughed and thought it was the funniest joke ever told.’

‘Maybe it is,’ Fen said. ‘I’d take a pigman story any day over that rubbish.’

‘I think it’s the irony they’re responding to,’ I said.

‘Oh, no doubt.’

Ignoring him, Nell said, ‘Funny how irony is never tragic to them, only comic.’

‘Because death is not tragic to them, not in the way it is to us,’ I said.

‘They mourn.’

‘They feel sorrow, great sorrow. But it isn’t tragic.’

‘No, it isn’t. They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There’s no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?’

‘We’re sort of big dramatic babies in comparison,’ I said.

She laughed.

‘Well, this baby’s got to take a piddle.’ Fen got up and went down the ladder.

‘Please use the latrine, Fen,’ Nell called.

But he must not have moved more than a foot from the house before his stream hit the ground with great force.

‘This will go on for a while,’ she said.

It did. We were facing each other on the bed.

‘And then there’s going to be—’

Fen broke wind.

‘That.’

‘Togate,’ Fen said quietly, which was Tam for excuse me.

We laughed. My head felt clear. Our hands were a few inches apart on the warm spot where Fen’s body had been.

3/3 Bankson went back today so we had 2 days with him in decent health. We took him to the other Tam hamlets — or he took us in his boat that zips around to the astonishment of all the fisherwomen wading in the water. In the hamlets we were able to cover a lot of ground. Bankson’s Kiona is understood by many. He is trying to adopt our ethnographic ways but they don’t come naturally to him. You get the sense he would have a hard time asking for a light in a pub. But he’s an excellent theorist. We talk & talk. Topics that are sure to cause tension between Fen & me become productive discussions with B there. Fen is more reasonable around him, and maybe I am too. Bankson agrees with my assessment of where the power is accruing — with the Tam women — and we are able to have useful conversations about it, all 3 of us. B is intuitive about F’s possessive nature so that I haven’t had to say a word, like last night when we were talking about sex roles in the West and B & I fell perfectly in step and I could sense how much further we could take our thoughts, but B rerouted it back to Fen’s Dobu at just the right moment. He navigates it as if I had given him a bamboo & shell chart to hold up to us.

Last night he pushed us out the door for a hike. The moon was nearly full and everything lit up silver and the stars at the edges of the sky were whirling & dropping so fast and even the bugs looked like chips of meteorites falling through the air at us. A few people were out and followed us down the road but when we veered up the path into the hills they whispered a warning to us and turned back. The Kirakira weren’t scared of the night but the Anapa, Mumb., and Tam are all wary of the spirits in the bush who will steal your soul if you give them half a chance. Bankson collected some rotten branches covered with something he called hiri, a fluorescent fungus that cast a pale light on the ground as we climbed. F & B got into a little male one-upmanship and we went higher and higher until we discovered a small nearly perfectly round lake and the moon bathing right in the center of it. F and B plunged in. I felt I should hide my inability to swim from Bankson — he’d be shocked and want to teach me on the spot and somehow F would take it both as a criticism and a threat — so I splashed around in the shallows and we looked at the stars and talked about death and named all the dead people we knew and tried to make a song out of all their names.

Bankson told us what he has learned about the old Kiona raids, how the killer at the end of a battle stood in his canoe and held up the head of his enemy and said, ‘I am going to my beautiful dances, to my beautiful ceremonies. Call his name,’ and the vanquished on the beach called the name of their dead man then cried out to all the victors as they pulled away, ‘Go. Go to your beautiful dances, to your beautiful ceremonies.’ Bankson said he once tried to explain the war and the 18 million dead to Teket, who could not comprehend it, the number alone, let alone that many killed in one conflict. B said they never found the whole of his brother’s body in Belgium. He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions. We were standing very still in the water then and I would have liked to hold him.

It is a bit of a dance we three are in. But there is a better balance when B is here, too. Fen’s demanding, rigid, determined nature weighs heavily on one side of the scale and Bankson’s and my more pliant & adjustable natures on the other, equaling things out. I can’t help but think I can use this inchoate theory in my work, that there is something about finding the balance to one’s nature — perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people. I don’t know. Too tired to think it through any further. Maybe it’s just we’re both a little in love with Andrew Bankson.