The first leaf makes everything smooth

The flower of the likehdou blends from sunset purple at the edges to a deep bruised color in the middle. The thin, floppy green leaves surrounding the flower look like gecko feet. I don’t know and can never know exactly what the witch does with the eight carefully-plucked leaves of the likehdou plant. They end up mashed inside a small sack made from another leaf and tied together with a thin strip from a coconut frond. She whispers to the leaves. She lays her hands upon my wife’s pregnant belly. This will make everything smooth, she says. My wife swallows the medicine.

We drove to the Pohnpei State hospital, walked across the parking lot, and squeezed through a break in the chain link fence to get to the witch’s feast house, a tilting, dirt-floored, bamboo and plywood structure. My wife, Popo, would never put herself in the hands of a Filipino doctor without first getting local medicine.

Ten minutes after receiving the medicine, Popo is in the birthing room of the hospital. I have been barred from entry but can hear… nothing except a nurse laughing. Pohnpeian women don’t make noise when giving birth. Never contradict this statement near a Pohnpeian woman unless you want to be punched in the arm. The door opens and the nurse hands me a plastic bag of bloody gunk. This is the placenta, I guess. I leave the hospital and drive, the placenta in the passenger’s seat, back to Popo’s family. I bury the placenta behind the family’s house. This is where Popo’s ancestors are buried, presumably along with their placentas. And so before I ever meet my newborn daughter, I have already dug the first dirt of her grave.

The second leaf will make you healthy

For such a short, lumpy woman, Popo’s mother is formidable. Her glance is piercing and her smile is disarming. She has had seventeen children. Every morning before sunrise, for eight days, she prepares a cold bath for our newborn daughter. The cold water is mixed with the ground bark of a fig tree and other leaves and flowers. I awake in the gray early mornings and watch her bathe the screaming child in a red plastic basin. Popo’s mother sings. Then she brings the whole basin to her lips, 10 pound baby and all, swallows some bathwater, and spits it back upon the child. This child, my little Peanut, never gets sick.

The third leaf will make you forget

Popo’s mother has strong medicine. Her specialty is forgetting.

Illustario is a pudgy man whose daily costume is nearly always a dingy red track suit and several gold chains. He comes to Popo’s mother with a problem: he walked in on his wife having sex with her boss. It sounds cliched, I know. But the Pohnpei State government offices, even with their weak air conditioning and thin walls, are more active than most college dorms with all manner of fornication. The offices provide neutral space, like the coral-dredging sites, where anything can happen without upsetting a landowner. So this deputy minister of finance or whatever was screwing a secretary, Illustario’s wife. Not a notable event except that Illustario saw it. Illustario found it difficult to be around his family with the image of another plump middle-aged man screwing his large, diabetic wife. He found it hard to function at all, in fact, with this bothersome mental image popping up in his mind while he was at work as a high school counselor. (Never mind the stories about him and the students.) For four days Illustario came to our house, drank half a gallon of brown potion and got a therapeutic massage. Then he forgot. His family life went back to normal. In payment Popo’s mother received, on the fourth day, a fifty-pound bag of rice, sugar, coffee, and five bags of plain donuts.

The fourth leaf only works if it is the kind of leaf that works

There is a bright red growth underneath the nail of my pinky finger. A boil? I’ve had those by the dozens and it doesn’t feel like a boil. It’s angrier, redder, sharper… the pain is unbearable. I lie in bed with this pinky injury, feeling ridiculous. Popo and her mother say that this is bad magic. Somebody doesn’t like me and they’re playing magic. There is little other explanation for my recent unrelenting bout with staph infection and now this… whatever it is growing underneath my fingernail. Popo’s mother applies a poultice of pounded limenkasar leaves to my boils. The poultice draws the greenish white pus to the surface of the skin and forms the eye of the boil. But she pronounces my finger beyond her capabilities.

So we drive up a mountain until the road becomes two deep, muddy ruts. We get out and walk, following a haphazardly thrown up electric wire into the jungle. Up here is where the old man lives. This old man is going to cure my pinky finger.

The old man lives in a small shack with his wife. His wife has lost both of her legs to diabetes. She is lying on a wooden platform, a place she has not moved from in months. She props herself up with her hands to greet us. Behind her a television is blaring a DVD of a Benny Hinn revival meeting in Fiji.

The old man takes my hand, puts his ancient lips near my diseased pinky and whispers. I want to giggle. An old man has never spoken to my pinky before. The pain is great enough, however, that I’m willing to go with it. He blows on my finger then lets go of my hand and looks at me. Is it over? Was that it?

“You have ingin,” the old man declares.

“What’s ingin?” I ask.

“It’s what you have.”

He fixes me in his gaze. I guess the treatment is over.

“But what if my finger doesn’t get better?” I ask.

“Then it’s not ingin,” he says.

My finger got better, proving that it was ingin.

The fifth leaf will calm your heart

When Popo came to live with me she brought with her a small green basin with two changes of clothes, some cheap perfume, and a four-year old daughter. This daughter, Polynn, hated me with impressive passion and vigor. No amount of candy, toys, DVDs, or bribes of any kind would keep her from scratching me if I got near her. Popo’s mother volunteered to take her off of our hands, but I was as obstinate as the child. I dragged her, kicking, screaming, clutching the seat of the car into our house. I made her a room with blinking red lights, a Little Mermaid bed, and more toys than she could have ever dreamed of. She wanted to sleep on the cement floor with her grandmother and play with a stick and a flip-flop.

We took Polynn to the kitchen of the Pohnpei State hospital. The cook was making the meals for the patients: some kind of white corn-starch soup, rice, a banana, bread, and a juice box. The thick, squat little cook smoked while cooking. He turned off his stoves and approached Polynn, cigarette dangling from his mouth in Robert-Mitchum fashion. He picked her up in his wiry, strong arms and began to rock her back and forth. He shook Polynn a few times, dropped her back on her feet, told us to crush the roots of a rehdil plant and place it in her mouth before sunrise. For eight days we brought her back to the hospital kitchen. Each time the cook picked her up, swung her about, shook her, squeezed her legs then gave her back to us. We paid him in rice and donuts on the fourth day and eighth day.

Polynn still preferred the cement floor to the Little Mermaid bed, but she no longer hated me. I was her baba. She was my little girl.

The sixth leaf is a lie

I like to say that I have “man’s sickness.” It’s the kind of sickness you get from doing man’s work: catching fish, whacking at the jungle with a machete, and building your own house. I like the sound of man’s sickness to explain my every ache and pain. In reality, I’m sure it would be impossible for me to contract man’s sickness, given that I do so little man’s work.

The half-naked tough guy with wavy gray hair who is fondling my testicles doesn’t believe that I really have man’s sickness. OK. But at the same time my back is killing me and I can hardly walk.

“Where does it hurt?” he asks.

I begin to explain about how I was trying to push my Jeep out of a ditch (Popo really should not be allowed to drive) and I threw out my back. But each time I begin to explain, he just laughs at me and says, “Why are you lying?”

I explain that I’m not lying, my back really does hurt.

“Why do you lie to me?” he laughs. “Point to where it hurts.”

So I point to my back.

“You’re a liar. It doesn’t hurt there.”

“No really. It really hurts there.”

“No it doesn’t. It hurts here.”

He digs a knuckle into the bottom of my foot.

“Yow!” I scream. “You’re right! It hurts there!”

“See, now you’re telling me the truth,” he says. “Why do you lie to me?”

So this laughing guy massages my leg up to and including the testicles. (Popo says this last bit was not really necessary.)

“I can also treat impotency and depression,” he says.

He takes eight leaves of the weipwul and heats it in a fire underneath a coconut shell. While he does this he tells about his recent trip to Guam where he massaged a stroke victim back to the use of his legs. He’s very proud of this exploit. Then without warning he slaps the hot leaves on the bottoms of my feet.

“Where does it hurt now?”

“My feet!”

“See, you tell the truth now. No more lies,” he says.

The next day I can walk again. The pain in my back is gone.

The seventh leaf will help you see clearly

The Pohnpeian secretaries at the college where I work are hatching a plan to slip some magic in our coffee pot. They cast a little spell into eight mashed leaves. The spell causes divorce. But, they think, what if other people drink the magic coffee? There would be a divorce epidemic among coffee drinkers in Faculty Building B. They can’t think of a way to make me think clearly.

The cleaning crew, librarians, secretaries and even various vice presidents are all united in hoping that I can break the spell that Popo’s mother has cast upon me. This spell causes me not to understand what is going on. Popo runs around every night and yet I don’t seem to register this fact. I’m in a daze where what is normal keeps shifting around. It just seems natural that my fate is to be sucked dry of money, thoughts, dreams, while Popo spends her nights partying at the Skylight Hotel, crashing our car. More than once she has ended up in jail, where she likes to yell at the guards about the affairs she knows they’re having. They’re glad to be rid of her in the morning.

There was no magic, no remedy, no special herbal concoction that caused my mind to realize what I surely already knew. No, it was an American who has that direct quality of Americans that is the opposite of magic. He said that he was my friend and therefore could no longer listen to people laughing at me because my wife is running around with some guy and spending all of my money. He said it in simple sentences that I could understand. I had to leave. Take my daughter, Peanut. Say goodbye to Polynn. Run away.

The coffee was suspiciously bitter that morning.

The eighth leaf will make it all work out fine

After I ran away with Peanut I couldn’t sleep. I was scared that a truckload of Popo’s relatives would come to my new house in the night, machetes at the ready, and steal Peanut away from me. So I slept curled around her like a dog with its pup. I had an escape plan: slice through the window screen with my machete and make a run into the jungle. I slept in ten minute bursts; always at the ready to protect her. I could not send Peanut back to the muddy swamp, drunken uncles, and absent mother we had just run away from.

At the college most people thought I did the best I could, considering that I’m a foreigner at the whim of local magic and unable to beat my wife. One of the librarians told me, while I attempted to check out a book, that a real Pohnpeian man would have beaten on the problem until it got better. If I really took my marriage vow seriously, I would correct my wife when she strayed. That is what she would expect her husband to do. The secretaries, my true friends, understood that my dazed look, lack of sleep, and constant fear of losing my daughter had to be dealt with. So they made an appointment with a witch who lived behind a small store that sold canned meat and Safeway grape soda.

Three secretaries, my father, who had flown in from America, and I went into a cement feast house on a humid afternoon. There lived a happy old woman, her three obese daughters and various grandchildren. The secretaries explained everything to her — every little detail about my marriage, the adultery, the wrecked cars, the magic that had been played upon me. And I sat in the center of the feast house, mute. I was desperate to keep my daughter yet felt helpless. I was numb. I felt constantly stuck between a sob and a scream, ready to lash out at the air or fall to the ground in helpless despair; I wanted only one thing — to be free and to have my daughter. Could this woman help me?

She ordered her daughters to fetch various plants, seir, probably pwetepwet, and others that are secret. What happened next is a blur. I remember the quiet face of my father. It seemed surreal that my father should be here, of all places, on this dot in the ocean, at the exact moment that I needed him. My friends are serious but confident. They sing, I think, a hymn of some kind. It’s sung in a high caterwaul that makes my skin prickle. The witch puts her magic concoction, a little wad of leaves about the size of a quarter, in my mouth. She mentions Jesus and I think that’s a little odd. It’s like my father, the pastor, giving me communion as a child. I feel as helpless as I did as a child who knelt before his own father to be fed the body of Christ. I remember the communion wine, how it warmed me and protected me. I didn’t know then that was just what alcohol does. Funny. The mystery was fermentation. Communion had long since become an awkward family occasion, not spiritual. I was a non-believing American who had placed his trust in a Pohnpeian witch with a sack of leaves.

“Everything will work out fine,” she told me.

And with those words: relief. Genuine relief. To be surrounded by friends and family. To be touched, massaged with oil, fed a magic potion and told simply, that it will all be fine. This was exactly what I needed. And that night I sang the song that I sing to my daughter every night. She was two years old then. I held her in my arms and we walked in the moonlight through the high grass in front of our new house to where we could see the ocean. She asked me to sing “Peanut Went Swimming.”

The truth is that I only know one tune, a tune I picked up as a child in church: “God Has Smiled on Me.” I just change the words to whatever Peanut did that day. And so the atheist and his daughter sing a church tune each night. And the two of them are free. See them, there on the hill overlooking the mangrove swamp and the ocean. The ocean calm out to the reef and beyond that chaotic until the horizon where the moon bursts from behind the clouds and throws a purple light like the flower of the likehdou onto the high grass and wild orchids of the hillside.

Everything worked out fine.

“Peanut went swimming,” I sing. “Then she saw an eel. Peanut went swimming. Swimming with an eel.”

“Again,” she says.

“Peanut went swimming. Then she saw an eel….”

Her eyes half closed now. Her head resting on the man’s shoulder. She’s almost asleep.

“Again,” she whispers.

The way that Senseleen’s dark hair waterfalls down her neck awakens an entire adolescence of adolescent longing. In that long, black swirl I see the paradise of sweltering weather, loose morals, and primordial mystery that Gauguin, Rousseau, countless sailors, wanderers, and convicts sought in the Pacific. Each wave of her raven tresses holds the allure of escape. Escape from civilization, from boredom, from phony, pointless suburbia, from empty, masturbatory America… here is the real, the pure, the original primitive soul in tune with nature’s rhythm, that soul that craves only the ecstasy of the flesh, the soul that spurns the thinky death of the intellect… all that is best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. One flash of those eyes and I’m ready for my own post-impressionistic escapade, where I will contract syphilis and drunkenly paint away my remaining days.

Senseleen is sitting in the front seat of my Japanese sports car and we are parked near the ocean. The Mazda might be impractical — its undercarriage scraped the stones as we meandered down a thin road to this former coral-dredging site, now abandoned and empty — but at least it has a sun roof that allows the ocean breeze and the moonlight to play in her hair. The silver light bounces off of Senseleen’s several golden teeth. Her gold caps have hearts and crosses etched in to them. She is wearing a gold velour top, copious amounts of gold-plated jewelry and high heels that make her walk bow-legged. Juice Newton’s 1981 hit, “Queen of Hearts,” plays on the radio.

Won’t you keep my heart from breakin’ / if it’s only for a very short time?

At the dredging site, thin roads of coral jut out into the ocean. These roads were once wandered by giant metal claws that reached into the ocean and scooped up coral for Pohnpei’s roads. The maze of roads is surrounded by nothing but ocean and mangrove trees. I’ve been to this place before. It took me a year to find it. When I found it I finally understood where everyone was going on the weekends and during lunch breaks. Senators with tinted Toyota trucks hold intimate meetings with their constituents here. The police investigate and commit crimes here. Boozy teenagers occasionally dump their parents’ cars in the ocean.

Things both sinister and beautiful happen here on the complex pathways of the coral-dredging site. It’s an important place. The site provides a neutral space for us to do stuff on. Nobody owns these newly dredged spits of land. Nobody can be angry with you for being “on their land” and no embarrassment for anything that happens here can shine upon anyone’s family. Every inch of Pohnpei is owned by someone, but these few thin roads are free.

I might as well try to kiss Senseleen.

Lovers, I know you’ve had a few / but hide your heart beneath the covers / and tell ‘em you’re the only one.

On my last trip to the coral-dredging site I parked the Mazda in the dark, stopping only when I heard bits of the road falling into the ocean. How I made it to wherever I was, I don’t know. I was a bottle of tequila short of common sense, but I learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes what happens in the front seat of your Mazda in the moonlight when you’re not thinking straight is, in fact, pretty wonderful. I wouldn’t trade the bits of that event that I can recall for anything.

Honey you know it makes you mad / why is everybody tellin’ everybody / what you have done?

Kissing Senseleen is like kissing two cold eels. Canned eel? Is there such a thing? You know that gelatinous goop that rises to the top of a can of Ox and Palm corned beef? That’s the image that comes to my mind when kissing Senseleen. Still, one mediocre kiss shared over the gear shift of my Mazda won’t stop me from being completely smitten.

Getting Senseleen to the coral-dredging site was more convoluted that most drug deals. Here’s how it went down: I must have sounded depressed to her uncle one night when we drank sakau together. Her uncle informed her auntie that my problem was that I was single and needed a wife (everyone thinks I need a wife). So her auntie talked to Senseleen’s mother and asked if I could call Senseleen. Both mother and auntie agreed it was a good idea. I called Senseleen at work. I couldn’t call her at home because of the slight possibility that her father would answer the phone. If her father answered the phone and knew it was me, he would be required to be very angry at both of us even though I had not yet laid eyes on Senseleen. I called up the local school where Senseleen was a teacher and got the principal to pull her out of class so I could ask her out. Senseleen, whose mother had tipped her off, agreed to meet me. Her auntie told me to be ready for “the call” on Sunday. I waited by the phone until the call came. I was told to drive past the auntie’s house. The auntie would follow with Senseleen in her car. We would meet up at the parking lot of the College of Micronesia and there we would exchange “the package.”

In the parking lot, Senseleen scooted into my car and ducked below my un-tinted windows. I asked her where we should go and she looked at me like I was a lunatic. I was expected to act, not ask. In considering where to go there was one rule I had to keep in mind: we can’t be seen in public. Being seen in public, even as a passenger in a car, is all that it takes to be married to someone. This cuts down on wedding expenses, but it can also lead to being “married” to people who I just happen to be walking near, or who I offer a ride home to, or who I sit too close to at a sakau bar. The honest answer to the question “How many times were you married on Pohnpei?” is “I don’t know, but at least once.”

I offer to take Senseleen to my house, which is reasonably private. She again looks at me like I’m a lunatic. She knows my neighbor all too well. My neighbor takes a census of my car every time I drive by. She notes the times she hears my rumbling sports-car muffler leave or arrive at night. In fact my muffler has become known as the “Ghost of Jonathan’s Hill” because its evening moan and wail can be heard throughout the neighborhood, announcing my comings-and-goings. We can’t go to my house. Thank goodness for that tequila-fueled night of good judgment or I would never have known the secret location of the romantic coral-dredging site.

Playing with the queen of hearts / Knowing it ain’t really smart / The joker ain’t the only fool / Who will do anything for you.

I can see Senseleen two times during the day: when she is feeding the pigs and when she is taking a bath. Without her gold trimmings, Senseleen is basically a farm girl. She has muscular, wiry arms and rough pig-slopping hands. She spends her days grating coconut for pig feed, washing pans and clothes in a stream, scrubbing floors, and carrying fifty pound bags of rice up a hill. Her roughness doesn’t make me like her any less. In the evenings I sit with my daughter near the ornery, enormous pigs and watch Senseleen hose them off. My daughter is fascinated by the pig poop that sluices towards the ocean.

Senseleen and her equally if not more gorgeous sister like to bathe beneath the bridge over the Lehnmesi river. They perform this complex feat with colorful skirts hiked up over their breasts. I blame the leering men of the Peace Corps for this habit; formerly, Pohnpeian girls simply went topless. Sometimes I just happen to be taking my daughter to swim in this river when Senseleen, her sister, and assorted younger cousins are bathing there. What does one say to a pretty young woman washing her four-foot-long jet black hair in a cool jungle river? I don’t know either.

After a week or two, my hanging around Senseleen is verging on being disrespectful to her father, who can no longer plausibly deny my existence. It’s not my land. I don’t have the right to be there, even to watch the pigs. I am told I need to get clearance from Senseleen’s father before any further loitering.

Her family’s house is perched atop the twisting, entangled roots of giant mango trees. One Friday night I sit alone in the kitchen of this tree-house, eating cucumbers mixed with kimchi and pretending to enjoy them. I wait one long hour before Senseleen’s father comes home from drinking sakau, the calming and mildly hallucinogenic pepper root that I could really use a coconut-shell full of at this point.

I amuse Senseleen’s father. Out of the blue there’s a thirty-something foreigner sitting in his kitchen, stammering in Pohnpeian and eating spicy cucumber. In the other room his two daughters have plugged in the family’s Casio keyboard and are singing church hymns like two sirens — the mythological creatures, not the thing the on top of an ambulance.

“They’re doing that for you,” says the father.

It’s a-hard to be a lover when you say you’re only in it just for fun

If you notice a pasty guy, half-naked and bobbing alone in the middle of the Lehnmesi river, that’s me. Young boys returning from school call from the bridge, “She won’t be here tonight!” I pretend not to understand what they are talking about. I coolly float in the river like it’s simply the place I want to be. Alone.

Or maybe you notice me patiently waiting near a long cement pen of screaming pigs. I like pigs. Maybe I just want to contemplate these particular pigs. They are fascinating creatures. The passing schoolboys note that she won’t be here either. I have been cut-off, erased. I no longer exist in Senseleen’s world. I’m not sure why except that once it happens her uncle, the secretaries at work, my neighbor, and the lady at the grocery store check-out agree that this is the way that Senseleen always acts. They name at least five other guys who have gone through the same process of pig-slop watching, river-swimming, and hot-cucumber eating. Everyone knows. Didn’t I know?

For all of my effort, I was alone with Senseleen a total of three times. Two times we went to the no man’s land of the coral-dredging site, the another time we wasted watching a bootlegged DVD of Music and Lyrics. All the romantic fantasy I indulged in just made it more fun for her to make me another notch in the thin elastic band that keeps her bright yellow skirt perched above her breasts as she bathes in the river.

Baby, I know it makes you sad / But when they’re handin’ out the heartaches / You know you got to have you some

If there’s one thing that is constant on Pohnpei, one thing that I could count on for the eleven years that I lived there, one thing that is woven into every aspect of the culture, it is Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” off of the album Juice. I have seen young boys in baggy pants line-dance to it at talent shows; I have seen diabetic elderly ladies wearing muumuus shuffle to it at parties; I have heard multiple versions of it in probably all seventeen of the Federated States of Micronesia’s official languages; for eleven years I heard “Queen of Hearts” playing, somewhere, every day. It’s a fact so random that it’s maddening. Why Juice Newton? Why that song and not “Love’s Been a Little Bit Hard on Me”? Why Pohnpei?

I loved “Queen of Hearts” when I was in elementary school. I loved Juice Newton because she looked like Bailey Quarters on WKRP in Cincinnati, who I also loved. When I hear “Queen of Hearts” I am eleven years old. I’m back at Babyos record store playing Donkey Kong, attempting to rescue a girl from a monkey. Juice Newton is on heavy rotation. I am too busy jumping barrels to learn the lesson of the song: you got to have you some heartaches.

Whatever mysterious allure islands hold, whatever romantic notions I might get about the people who live there, are instantly shattered with the first strummings of the intro to “Queen of Hearts.” That song is from my past. I listened to it in a little record store on the west side of Chicago. The song represents everything I am supposedly getting away from. I wonder if Gauguin had a similar experience — perhaps he plugged his ears during nightly turn-of-the-century Tahitian sing-alongs of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Hello! Ma Baby.”

Real island girls don’t live in paradise. They just happen to live somewhere warm that doesn’t require much clothing. Idealize them at your own peril.

Photo by wader.

Sometimes these labels are benign. You know that mehnwai? He’s the guy who joggles (juggling + jogging). Or the guy who cries all the time. Or the guy who dances with old ladies. Sometimes the labels are a bit more extreme: He’s the guy who killed his wife with a two-by-four. Or the guy who locked his student in a closet for an entire weekend until she fell in love with him. Or the guy who molested boys at the Protestant school until he was finally caught because for some reason he put up a website about quantum physics with his own name and the Florida police found him. All of these “guys who” exhibit patterns of behavior that, while sometimes extreme, fall within the usual limits of “guys who” that can be found hiding out anywhere.

That is, until you meet the guy who bit his own finger off.

There is, of course, a comic element to biting your own finger off. And Jim, the guy who bit his finger off, puts up a comic facade about the subject. After you bite your own finger off and then return to kind of sanity, is there much left to do but call it Stubby and go on with your life? This subject could be funny in that shallow, mocking way that every freak show with a YouTube video becomes. That is, until you really think about it. Go ahead, put your finger in your mouth. Make it easy, make it a pinky. Put your teeth at the joint between the distal phalanx and the middle phalanx. Now bite as hard as you can. Did you even make an indentation before the pain became too much to handle?

It takes real commitment to bite your own finger off. According to Jim, “the decision was not difficult to make, but the act was.” The bone didn’t snap off like the bones of a pickled chicken foot. It didn’t crunch or crack like a raw carrot. No, Jim gnawed through the flesh and bone over the course of minutes, the way a dog will really work on a bone until it finally comes apart.

A grenade came through Jim’s bedroom window one night. He could tell by the casing that it was a fragmentation grenade, filled with steel splinters. He saw that his Pohnpeian wife and their two children were still asleep. The grenade’s blast would kill them where they slept. Given the blast radius, perhaps his boys would be maimed, lose limbs, die in horrible agony with their faces blown to dust. There’s no time to warn them or even throw on some clothes. He grabs the grenade and jumps from the window of his small, tin-roofed concrete house down to the mangrove swamp about fifteen feet below. As he falls he gashes open his leg on the rusty re-bar that juts from the cement columns on which his house was built. There is no pain. Not in the gash. Not in the fall. He falls on his back and disappears under the warm, brackish swamp water. For a second all is calm. The swamp has swallowed him. But in the darkness, he thrashes and gets to his feet in the shallow water.

The grenade is forgotten. He has bigger trouble. He is entangled in a tripwire. He can feel the taut, cold wire against his foot. If he moves, a bomb will go off that will surely gut and mangle his entire squad. He can’t stop to wonder why his squad is here, in the mangrove swamp on Pohnpei and not in Kuwait City. He doesn’t know why the bomb is here — it’s enough to know that they will die unless he saves them. There is only one way out, only one way to save his friends and escape the tripwire: he has to bite off his finger. It’s a hard thing to do, but lives are on the line. One bite and he begins to scream. But he has to keep going, has to get through the bone before time runs out. There are bright, searching lights that momentarily blind him as he gnaws on the finger. Helicopters? He is wet and covered in blood and mud. He’s screaming, but not in pain. He’s screaming just to scream as the finger begins to give and he separates bone from bone.

The lights are the flashlights of the municipal police. Most nights in this quiet, rural area of jungle farmers and fishermen, the police hang out in their pickup truck, drink sakau or cheap rum, and maybe visit one of their girlfriends. On this night, they are called on to subdue a naked, trained Marine whose mental state has left him incapable of feeling pain. So they watch him. They yell at him to get out of the swamp.

“You want to see how fucking tough a Marine is?” Jim yells. “I’ll bite off the rest of these fucking fingers!”

The police decide they better go after him. It takes six of them to subdue Jim. The police are scratched, bruised, wet, and blood–spattered, but they finally get him cuffed and dumped into the back of the pickup, like some enormous, writhing catch that got dredged up from the depths of the ocean. They haul their load to the jail, a small, crumbling building that keeps its prisoners locked in more by mutual agreement than iron bars. A chunk of Jim’s finger sinks into the silty mud of the swamp, food for crabs and eels.

The next night I drink rum and chocolate milk in Styrofoam cups with one of the policemen. We sit on plastic fish coolers near his shack that, like Jim’s, is built over the mangrove swamp. The policeman wants to see me. He wants to know why Jim would go crazy like that. I must know the reason. I’m the only other American who lives in the area — “the guy who dances with old ladies.”

In English we have labels like PTSD, bi-polar disorder, and schizophrenia that effectively distance the rest of us, the normals, from the “diseased.” We think that some cause, like Jim’s job doing forward recon in Gulf War I picking up the bodies left behind by Saddam’s retreat, can have some effect years later, like hallucinating a grenade and bomb attack and biting off his finger. But it’s hard to convey these ideas to someone who is not steeped in our cultural psychology; try to explain this along with our belief in “brain chemicals” that can be “out of balance” and it begins to sound every bit as plausible as the explanation that the policeman settles on: bad magic.

A local witch tells Jim’s Pohnpeian family exactly who it is that has been playing magic on him and making him crazy, and Jim, with about half his wits back, tries to keep them from retaliating. The witch speaks delicate incantations to stones and wraps these stones in leaves. What she tells the stones I don’t know. Then she hides them near Jim’s house to ward off the bad magic. A Catholic priest comes and throws holy water on the house. They are protected. The bad magic won’t come and settle into Jim’s brain any more.

If only maintaining sanity were as easy as a splash of water, an incantation, a pill, or a nice long talk. Jim didn’t get better; he just became dormant. Now he says that “every thought, decision, comment, or action is always questioned in my own mind, then looked at a second time by what I call my ‘sanity microscope.’ ” He has become, even to himself, “the guy who bit his own finger off.” He is his own foreigner. Even as he rebuilds his mind, the “guy who” is still there, will always be there, thrashing in the swamp, struggling to surface.

There is only one runway at Pohnpei International Airport and only one plane arrives per day. While this wayward tuna-hauling plane enjoyed a two-week stay on the tarmac, I was stranded in Hawaii on my return from a conference while my wife was pregnant on Pohnpei. Was she pregnant with my daughter or was it one of the miscarriages? My memories, like the plane, have been chopped up bit by bit and moved to the dump to rust. Some day I will recapture the words I wrote to our two dead children and slipped into their caskets. One child was really a nothing, a mere splotch; the other was nearly formed, a misbegotten doll with a doll’s curious stare. Each week I go to the dump and make my offering to the feral cats that live in the hacked-off fuselage of that plane. I try to remember the timeline of births and deaths, but one memory eats the tail of the next and they all swirl together.

Past the dump, you find the only stretch of straight road on Pohnpei, a road built on a man-made jetty. Here I try to coax my used Japanese rust-bucket past 30 miles an hour, just to give it an airing. You might notice a stubby little tree on the jetty. This is where my wife crashed our car, drunk driving with her lover — a sociopath who was either her half-brother or cousin, depending on whose family history you follow. The only thing separating the car and the ocean was this little tree where the car sat half-perched until I dragged it out with a rope and a friend’s pick-up. Continue straight on this road.

You’re now in Kolonia town. There’s the dock where the tuna is unloaded. There’s the German-built Protestant church. There are banners over the street announcing the latest “fun runs.” For the diabetes run, the theme is [sic] “Your Foot: Love It or Loose It” For the nurses run: “Nurses are Power of Care.” For the AIDS day run: “AIDS Men Make a Difference.” As you pass under the banners, note the Ace Hardware store where I stood in line behind a man, an officer in the Salvation Army, who murdered his wife. He was buying a large metal chain, as I recall. There’s the three-screen movie theater, a little slice of suburban America plopped down in the tropics. The dirty and sprawling one-story building on your left is the hospital. Stay away from the hospital unless you want to die. The hospital is where I chased rats from the maternity ward where my daughter was born, where I dressed corpses, where I listened to the death rattles of my father-in-law, Adidos. Keep driving.

There’s the Last Stop Store. The owner of Last Stop took pity on my father-in-law and gave him a job as a night guard. Every night my sickly father-in-law slept in his minivan (called a “Bongo”) in front of Last Stop. An assortment of grandchildren and other relatives slept in the backseats of the Bongo or else disappeared down the road to find alcohol or sakau. The money Adidos made for this nightly duty generally amounted to a debt because his grandkids were prone to getting drunk and breaking the store windows, thereby rendering his position as “guard” somewhat ironic. The store owner was a shrewd businessman and hired as guards the people he knew would break his windows anyway. At least he had a paycheck to garnish. Adidos would have made more money sleeping at home. And while he was asleep in the Bongo… out in the tall grass, next to the store, is where fifteen-year-old Q-leen was impregnated by her uncle and nobody knew she was pregnant until she decided to give birth in the back of my Isuzu Trooper that had rusted through on the bottom — then it was back to the hospital and the surprise birth of an innocent little boy with funny ears.

I named the baby after a cat I had when I was a kid because that’s the kind of thing that might happen: you might wake up one day wondering how to fix your already beaten-up truck that fills with black exhaust from the many holes in the floor and then you might notice your niece lying in the back of it giving birth, apparently. Then you take her to the hospital and suddenly she wants you to name the baby and the only thing that comes to mind is “Patches” because that was your cat many years ago and, anyway, you’re kind of joking. But nonetheless Patches is brought home the same day and introduced to her grandfather who doesn’t know that Patches is also his half-brother…. so just continue past Last Stop Store where Adidos slept in his last days. The store where I bought cotton balls to put in his corpse; flies were going up his nose and, well, it seemed like a kindness to put cotton balls in his nose.

There is a skinny bridge here, just past the store. It barely fits two cars. As you cross you might be struck by the beauty of the little bay you’re crossing and beyond it, the towering green mountains. If you’re lucky you’ll see teams in traditional outrigger canoes in the bay, practicing for an upcoming competition. More likely than not you’ll spot rain clouds casting dark shadows across the water. It’s a gorgeous scene, but watch the road. The bridge ends and you’re back in the swamp and jungle. You’re now passing into a neighborhood known as Pahnimwensahp — it’s here that you might notice an overgrown tin shack that was once my small store. I called it “Buddo’s Friendly Store,” and it left me in massive debt. Next to that shack (and up some hills, and around some corners) is where I lived for many years. If you dig around in this area you may find some things I left behind when I ran away — a little plastic train from my childhood that I brought from the U.S. for my children, a wealth of Dickens books now used to balance poorly made plastic chairs, even a car that has since been overcome by mold and swamp-growth.

It’s a maddening road with a pestering accumulation of ghosts.

Each bend and incline of the circle road holds some memory of past joys or past terrors. My hands on the wheel of my car instinctively know each pothole as well as each memory. I try to avoid both, but on Pohnpei there is no choice. On a circle road, you’re always going over old ground: that stretch of ocean that I jumped into fully clothed and crying, willing myself to drown in the shallow water, is also the stretch of ocean where my daughter used to lie on a little pier, her ice cream dripping down to the darting yellow and blue fish — she giggled at the ice-cream-eating fish and I was amazed to be the father of such a beautiful creature. I was the happiest of single fathers in those days we spent together — just us against the world. I slept each night with her on my bed near the wall. I slept next to her, a machete perched nearby in case someone came to steal her from me. I was sure that someone in my wife’s family would try to take her. I had gone feral.

Adidos took his last, painful breaths in the hospital. Something was wrong with him, but the hospital was out of X-ray paper and there would be none on-island for at least two weeks. So the most we can say is that he was awfully sick: he was bleeding internally and his breaths were tortured. His only help was a valiant, happy Filipino doctor. This doctor’s girlfriend, a nurse, sat on his lap while we talked to him about the case. So add Adidos’s smiling, toothless ghost to the many wandering the circle road. He was a good man, or at least he became one in old age. He built the road. The first major paved road on Pohnpei and he helped lay the asphalt and steamroll it and now there it is. We can go in circles very effectively thanks to men like Adidos. He held his family together, his thirteen children — some natural born, some adopted, some adopted out to other families, his tangled web of grandchildren and nieces and nephews. Things could get crazy, but they would get crazy around him. He kept the circle from chaos and when he died, everything, including my marriage, broke up and dissipated.

So when I drive my car on the circle road, eleven years after arriving in Pohnpei, I imagine Adidos in his hard-drinking and chain-smoking middle age. There he is, building the road that will one day contain my memories. His children and grandchildren, acknowledged or unacknowledged, pounding the pavement in thin flip-flops.

Most evenings I sit on the side of the road and stir infinity patterns in a Styrofoam sakau cup. Shards of sakau root breach the gray surface of the drink then sink down into the narcotic sludge. The sakau sinks into my bloodstream, and the accretion of memories fades. My daughter is on my lap. Nobody likes to see this. It upsets the natural order of things, but try to pass her off to a woman and my daughter will let loose an unholy screaming. A loud noise is a worse offense to a sakau drinker than a man with a kid, so they leave us alone. If there’s one thing I learned from Adidos, it’s “Fuck ‘em.” I really don’t care about traditional Pohnpeian gender roles.

Just as I begin to get full of myself — the foreigner single father of a Pohnpeian girl who ran from one side of the island to the other when things got crazy and screw you if you have an opinion about it like how I should have beaten my wife and it’s my own fault if I didn’t — my daughter’s babysitter arrives and takes her, asleep, back to my house.

A shirtless old man with shaggy black hair and a fishy smell is sitting across from me, drinking sakau and sitting on a cement block. He looks at me, says “get on top!” in Pohnpeian and then gulps down his entire cup of sakau. We laugh. His “get on top!” is a sexual innuendo that refers to the woman-on-top or “coconut grating” position.

It’s the sort of thing Adidos used to laugh at, and likely is still, somewhere on that circle road.

Sometimes a human part of the jungle seems to be sitting in my room at night, watching me in the form of eyeless, yellow-green man: a ghostly presence that won’t leave the land. The sakau root draws us together as an extended family tied to one specific place on the island, a clan. The members of the clan have titles, Soulik, Soum, Madau, followed by a place name — a ridge, a rock, some piece of land won in a war a century ago. When you get that title, and the sakau is offered to you, you effectively become that piece of land. And when you die you will haunt the place and disturb the dreams of those that sleep on your land.

Inside the feast house everyone sheds their names and can only be addressed by traditional title. As I enter into the dark feast house, I am nameless. Without a title I have no place in their culture. Like the ghosts in my dreams, I am not quite fully there. So the Pohnpeians of the Pwudoi clan are forced to make up fake title just so they can talk to me. It’s embarrassing for them not to have to way to address me. They decide to call me “Duke of America.” I am humiliated by this title. It’s a joke title that highlights the distance between us.

So as I stand before the chief, I decide that I will do everything right. I will be more Pohnpeian than Pohnpeians. I’m holding my machete in one hand like a Pohnpeian, balancing a long sakau plant on my shoulder like a Pohnpeian. I am going to address the chief in Pohnpeian, on my knees on the chief’s platform like a Pohnpeian. The only problem, I realize, is that I will be wrong. Where will I sit? The feast house is stuffed with a chaotic mass of men, women, and children. As I stand in the center, there is a raised platform on three sides. Bluish smoke from the hot stones of a nearby earth oven wafts in through the open side of the feast-house. Large women in colorful skirts sit along the sides. Babies clutching plain doughnuts are curled in their laps. Sweaty and shirtless men surround the six huge sakau stones that are balanced on old tires and placed in two rows on the dirt-floored center area.

On the back platform is the leader of the clan, the chief. Our clan chief is a chubby, mustachioed man. He sits cross-legged and shirtless, beneath a faded poster of a white Jesus. Next to him is the other chief. There are two-lines of chiefdom, one for talking-chiefs and one for quiet, more powerful chiefs. Where you are in these lines is governed by shifting, byzantine rules. Beneath the two chiefs in the hierarchy are a wild tangle of clan titles, chiefdom titles, starter titles, newly minted titles, titles with legends attached, titles for widows, titles for children. I tried to help them put this system on an Excel spreadsheet but there’s something about it that resists that kind of cell-based classification; the system can only be stored in the minds of the elders. The chief whispers to me when I greet him: “I hope you are ready for your title.”

I am terrified. The bravado I had before has fled. The truth is that after years on Pohnpei I can enter a feast house, say hello, and then scramble for a seat. That is the extent of my mastery of the feast house. The total complexity of the feast house is known only to a few in the clan. Each wooden post, each stone, each place in the feast house has a name and a function and a set of rules guiding how to act.

What am I doing wrong? Perhaps I didn’t greet the chief with his exact title in the exact language required, or I forgot to take off my flip-flops before I went up the stairs to the platform, or I stood up on the platform (only one man, a sort of feast-emcee, is allowed to stand on the platform) or I hung my legs over the platform, or I put my feet on top of (instead of underneath) one of the four large taro leaves that girdle the sakau stones. Younger, unschooled Pohnpeians are frightened of entering a feast house. There are myriad ways of being wrong and only one way to be right.

Did I mention that our sakau plants have an even number of branches? In some clans it has to be odd, but for us it’s even. My first test is in cutting the branches off of the sakau root. Normally, I would cede this task to one of my betters — which is basically any Pohnpeian over the age of seven. But today the chief has let it be known (quietly, of course) that I have to do things on my own. Do I cut the sakau branch at an angle away from me or toward me? I know it has to be one complete cut. I also know that everyone is watching me. I raise my machete (Am I doing that right? Am I pointing it the wrong way?) and — thwack — the machete cuts through the sakau stems cleanly.

I am told to sit at the front sakau pounding stone on the chief’s side. This stone has a name. All the stones have names. The names change depending on who is present in the feast house, but it’s enough to know that this is an important stone. I am sitting awkwardly on a flattened slab of wood. My friend, a deacon at the Catholic church, hands me a heavy, rounded stone and tells me to take off my shirt. I have rarely felt as white as I do at this moment.

As we wait for the sakau root to be cut and cleaned and dispersed to the stones, men bring in food for the feast. Everything enters the feast house whole. A pile of screaming pigs are led in to the feast house before being taken out and slaughtered. Enormous yams, cases of frozen chicken, coolers of reef fish: all are brought to the center of the feast house. The feast emcee calls on various titled men to stand by the piles of sometimes squirming food and give long-winded speeches about the year that has passed since the last clan feast. Then the yams, chicken, fish, and pigs are sliced, chopped, sliced, and cooked. Later they will be handed out, title by title, to clan.

The cleaned sakau root comes to the stone. We begin the haphazard clanging of stone on stone as the six of us break up the sakau roots into stringy brown shards. One, two, three, hits with my stone and I’m feeling pretty good. Then a minute goes by, and my rarely used muscles feel like sleepy teenagers who roll over in bed in the morning and refuse to wake up. I can’t give up, though. I began with precision but with each thwack of the stone I’m losing control. My sakau is jumping all over the place, even falling off of the stone. Everyone watches. Can the Duke of America pull this off?

A high pitched and happy song intrudes upon my concentration as ten ladies dance into the feast house. They are mostly older, married ladies. It is their job to slather coconut oil on the chiefs and then on the sakau pounders. They also spray us with cheap perfume, wipe us down with off-brand Vaseline and place a garland of flowers on our heads. They sing their song, stamp their feet, shake their large behinds, and giggle like schoolgirls. The younger ladies have cell phones attached to their skirts, a new innovation. We whisper to each other that they are being “kahla,” too proud. When they reach our stone, they lavish their attention on the pudgy, hairy American with the alabaster skin. I’m sweating. I’m shaking with exhaustion. Leathery skinned ladies are caressing me. I stink like a princess. This is about as happy as I have ever been.

The emcee stands at the center of the feast-house, holds the sacred center pole that holds up the first layer of heaven and he shouts, “Sokamah!” All of the pounders at the six sakau stones begin clanging their stones in a precise rhythm. The wet, black rocks are imbued with a spirit in the form of a tone. The musical notes of each stone smack and careen off of each other, sending a loud but strangely peaceful cacophony to the skies. Can I do this? Can I smack the rock in the same rhythm as the other men? I feel the eyes of the clan on me more than ever; I must not screw this up.

Deacon, or Deek, once told me about the old beliefs. To pass from the first heaven, here on the island, to the second heaven in the sky the souls of the dead had to sing a song and walk along a twisting bridge over a great abyss. The song was your life and the song had to be good or you would fall. I now realize, as I try to stay in perfect time with the other pounders, the men who feel the song in their blood, that this is the song. This wild, repetitive, communal clanging is the journey of a Pohnpeian lifetime condensed. My tired muscles can barely take it, but I cannot stop the song. To reach the end I have to stop thinking. As one group we must decide to slow the rhythm, cease for one tense second, and then bang out a loud punctuating coda to our song.

But wondering if I am performing it right takes me out of the song and I must be in the song. The rhythm of our stones cascades down the muddy road to the mangrove swamp, where salt water eels squirm through the narrow, muddy passages. The rhythm leaps up the steep jungle-covered mountain to the cloud forest where a constant, drizzling rain drips and oozes over mossy cliffs. The song calls to old, forgotten gods and spirits. These old gods live on like the roots of a towering mango after the tree has fallen. I feel the stone in my hand and sense the water that smoothed its edges for centuries in the bed of a rushing river. I feel that I am inside the clanging song. I imagine the giant basalt sakau stone being spewed from the belly of the earth, the hot lava cooling and breaking into flat shards. I cast my self, my individuality, Duke of America, onto the stone and pound it to pieces. The song stops. Tension hangs in the air and we all come down in unison for one last, loud sequence of clangs.

Everything that follows is easy. I no longer worry about what I am doing wrong and just act. The chief hands the emcee a title scribbled on page torn from a yellow legal pad. When all of the higher titles have been served the first cups of sakau in the center of the feast house, the emcee calls me by my new title: Souwel en Palikir. Deek is holding the coconut shell cup of sakau. I go to the center of the feast-house, bow my head, take the sakau cup without looking Deek in the eye, close my eyes, and drink the sakau. My lips go numb. My head spins a bit. I am Souwel.

“That was my first title,” whispers Deek.

I try on my new name – Souwel, “so well,” or “So? Well….” It’s a title with a history, once held by my friend. I am the Souwel of Palikir. Palikir is the place where I work, about five miles away. One story I hear is that the title was won in an ancient war from the people of Palikir. The people of Palikir were guarded by an enormous chicken. Its fossilized feces are now called “Chickenshit Mountain.” I work in the shadow of Chickenshit Mountain and sometimes dream, as I sit in my faculty office, about the war for the title of Souwel of Palikir.

Another story is that Palikir means to carry something, like a child, on one’s back. I am the single father of a Pohnpeian daughter and she is never far from my arms — at the sakau markets or the feasts, she hangs around her bahba in a way that makes Pohnpeian men uncomfortable. It’s unseemly. I need a wife to carry around my child.

This is why Deek tells me that the title refers to a traditional Pohnpeian proverb: “an empty bottle makes the most noise.” This is Deek’s way of saying that I’m lonely. Deek makes up traditional Pohnpeian proverbs all the time. I think he got this one from a James Cagney movie. When Deek gives a speech for me on the occasion of this new title he tells a long joke about three virgin sisters on their wedding nights, the punch line of which is “Mom, I can’t make any noise when my mouth is full!” And everyone in the feast house knows exactly what episode of my life this joke refers to because everyone knows everything. The title has meanings within meanings. It cuts and slices through every facet of my life and names each the Souwel of Palikir. Everything brought to the feast must enter the feast house whole. Everything leaves the feast house dispersed to the clan, part of one song, the one song that is this place, the song that hangs in the air and haunts the teeming, tangled life of the jungle.

Four ways to say masturbation in Pohnpeian:

Suk uh ngehi – means to pound yourself. It is similar to sukusuk, which is to pound sakau root. It is even more similar to sukumahi which is to pound breadfruit. In fact, if you are ever pounding breadfruit it’s best not to discuss it.

Fingerlynn – Roughly all Pohnpeian women’s names end in “lynn” (pronounced “lean”) Jaylynn, Ailynn, Beautylynn, Goodlynn, Badlynn – so if you can’t find yourself a real “lynn” then you have to rely on Fingerlynn.

Kumutina and Kendipina are also proper names. Kumutina is a feminized form of kumu which refers to the palm of your hand. Kendip means to “spit,” so Kendipina refers (for those who need it spelled out) to the spit one might desire to put on one’s kumu were one a man who desired to suk uh ngehi. There is no direct translation for these names, though I would like to suggest “Palmolive” as a possibility.

Sinking into my slow sakau-induced reverie, I contemplate the angelic face of Sweety (well, Sweetylynn, but we just call her Sweety). She’s a young Pohnpeian mother of two with enormous eyes and a face that could adorn the walls of some ancient Egyptian temple built for a god of peace. She isn’t drinking sakau, just sitting on a rock covered with a piece of cardboard in the corner of the market. This is a perfectly comfortable seat to any Pohnpeian, but years of pampering with couch cushions have left me handicapped and unable to sit on rocks. What’s she doing there? Perhaps she’s keeping an eye on her husband who is sitting across the market ignoring her with every fiber of his being.

I note that Sweety is wearing pants. Beware of Pohnpeian women in pants; they are looking for a fight. A common, much feared, move in a fight is to attempt to lift your opponent’s skirt and show the world her underwear. Therefore, a well prepared Pohnpeian woman wears pants for fighting.

The sakau market faces the road, for entertainment’s sake. Most of the sakau markets in Kitti, the chiefdom where I live in Pohnpei, face the road. The road, or at least the pavement, is new and interesting to us. Other chiefdoms prefer to contemplate the jungle or the ocean, but here in Kitti we prefer the fascination of the road. For instance, a large woman in a bright red muumuu is now slowly shuffling the overgrown blacktop. She is as solid as an oak. Her steady, slow, bobbing walk reminds me of a sailboat far away at sea.

A wiry farmer, Soum, begins to teach me about types of bananas. Soum is not his name, it’s his traditional title. I’m not sure what his name is, but he is one of many Soums that I know. He writes puhl maht or “boiling banana.” in my notebook and tells me to pronounce it over and over again. He wants me to ask our sakau server for some. I hate boiling banana. Boiling bananas taste like chalk and are quite distinct from the more familiar “edible banana.” The thing is that you have to boil them before you can even entertain the notion of masticating them. Still, I like to entertain Soum, so I ask for some. The sakau market server, a high school girl, looks like she wants to scratch my eyes out when I ask her for boiling banana. Then she cracks up. When I say puhl maht, you see, it sounds like wuhl maht or “stinky dick.” I just asked for a plate of stinky dick. Hilarious. I instruct Soum that “What’s up bouncy bouncy?” is a formal American greeting.

Can any observer be impartial? Does the very act of observing change the behavior of the observed? Was Margaret Mead projecting her own repressed sexual fantasies onto those she thought to be primitive others or are the Samoans she made famous really free-loving partner-swapping sexual adventurers?

The woman in the red muumuu sails near us. She smiles at us. Her teeth are a vivid mix of gold caps and red betel-nut stains. Without warning, Sweety leaps from her rock and jumps on the woman. She scratches her face. The woman screams and topples over into the tall grass with a painful thud. Viewed through a sakau-haze, the fight is abstract and bizarrely distant.

It occurs to me that I ought to do something. Then it occurs to me that this is not my culture. When it serves my needs, I try to play the Not My Culture card. I have lived here for ten years, married here, had children here, killed pigs here, grown yams here… the name I am known by, Souwel, is a title from the clan that lives in a gorgeous piece of swamp and jungle and mountain called Pwudoi… but when the fighting starts, I want to become an Outsider.

There are no more screams, but a lot of labored grunts and whacks. The wailing keyboard music stops. None of us in the sakau market jumps up to aid the fat middle-aged lady in the red muumuu who is about to have her underwear exposed to the world and who is likely permanently scarred by Sweety’s sharp nails. I glance around, waiting for someone to take charge, hoping not to get involved. Soum stands up and yells at the two grown women tussling in the grass. He’s a high-titled person, leader of a kousop or clan. The fact that he is here witnessing this is suddenly very embarrassing for the younger men, especially Sweety’s brothers. They walk over to the fight and pull Sweety off the larger woman. Sweety does not resist. Apparently, she’s made her point.

The bloody and shaking woman begins to yell at Sweety. Luckily I have my dirty dictionary, so I catch a lot of the great invective being spewed. Mostly it has to do with the size and cleanliness of Sweety’s genitalia. I learn a new word that means, roughly, “the state of being fixated on someone’s underwear.”

“Sweety did the right thing,” Soum whispers to me, when things have quieted down a bit.

Sweety’s father, who is well into his Viagra years, has been running around with the big lady in the red muumuu. They were seen driving down the road together in his pick-up, in broad daylight, with her sitting in the passenger’s seat as if she belonged there instead of his current wife, Sweety’s mother. The problem is not that he’s having an affair, but that he is doing it wrong. He’s not sneaking around as he should be. It’s insulting. People are talking. So Sweety put on pants, sharpened her nails, and did the moral thing. Her attack is a way of telling her father, without confronting him, to give his affairs a semblance of secrecy.

The fight has scared away my relaxed sakau feeling. I am seeing things far too clearly and crave the fuzzy, distant feeling of being sakau-drunk. My little blue journal of useful words is inadequate armor to keep Pohnpei at a distance. I have no missionary zeal or anthropological interest to carry me through this night, no agenda to comfort me: I’m here to collect data or I’m here to bring the Good Word.

I’ve literally ingested this place, drank its dirt, gone as far as I could into into its culture. Scratches and skirt pulling my new normal. Two grown women fighting on the side of the road has become the moral thing, the right thing. My former self, with its strange, foreign notions of right and wrong, has slunk away like an eel into the swamp. I am Souwel. And I have built Souwel out of the words of a dirty dictionary. Those lurid scribbles are who I am now. Rather than an agenda or an armor to protect my old self, the words are a destructive force; they have shattered the distance between observer and observed.

“Souwel,” calls Soum. “Have a slap with me.”

“Slap” is slang for a shot of cheap rum. A slap is the perfect thing to put us right.

“I need more than a slap, I need a punch,” I say. Everyone laughs.

I buy a bottle of Tanduay “rhum” from the Phillipines and pour two shots into plastic cups.

I hold the glass up and toast: “Get on top of me!” Soum taught me that toast. It’s not a real toast, it’s just something Soum thinks is funny.

The keyboard player launches into the next high-pitched song. I like this song. It’s the one about the tree in the mangrove swamp that looks fine on the outside but is rotting on the inside. It’s about being in love with an unattainable woman or maybe it’s about being afflicted with tuberculosis. I can’t quite translate it. Still, it’s the perfect song.

Sakau is a mildly narcotic pepper root. The root is mashed, soaked and squeezed through hibiscus bark. It seeps through the soft, wet bark in long, brown, viscous snots. The sacred gloop is caught in coconut-shell cups and passed around at feasts with great ceremony and solemn ritual. Since sakau first floated to Pohnpei from the neighboring island of Kosrae hidden in a goddess’ vagina, the drug has been a central feature of Pohnpeian culture. The sakau we are drinking tonight, however, is not the stuff of legend but commercial sakau. A local fisherman, Limwasahsah, needs gas money for his boat, so he’s opened his sakau market tonight. This sakau is squeezed into a plastic funnel, caught in an old gallon-bleach jug, and sold for a dollar a glass. A glass consists of two level servings from a can of Vienna mini-sausages.

The nearly toothless, always shirtless, pot-bellied fisherman named Limwasahsah sits in the corner of his market, dangling a cigarette from his cracked lips, which is the only thing about him that is remotely like a young Robert Mitchum. He is one of the happiest people I have ever met. His googly eyes dance with mischief as he sits in a dark corner of the market and laughs the night away. It’s comforting to know that nothing could possible happen to me that wouldn’t be inherently funny to Limwasahsah.

Fingerlynn and I usually retire to Try Me First market after work. We sit on cracked plastic chairs around an enormous upended spool used for telephone wire (a cousin works for the electric company). The market is built next to the road. The structure itself consists of a few logs of swamp wood nailed to a tin roof and attached to Limwasahsah’s family’s small store, which has a full supply of Vienna mini-sausages and lollipops to munch/suck on while you drink your sakau.

Fingerlynn and I gulp down sakau, rinse with soda, spit, and watch the traffic. We know the cars, the people in the cars, and the gossip about the people in the cars; the cars that have thick, dark tint on all of the windows, including the windshield, are those of cheating spouses. The police stop by in their pickup truck, three of them standing on the rusty truck bed, in order to get some take-out sakau in rinsed out bottles of Filipino rum. The village can expect an extremely calm, slow response to any emergency tonight. The Seventh-Day Adventist kids, teen-aged American teacher-volunteers, whiz by in their distinctive yellow Chinese firetruck. The ambulance speeds by at 20 MPH, headed down the winding jungle road to the moldy hospital. We can tell by the cars following the ambulance who is sick. People honk and call to us. To each car we call “come drink, come drink…” like the goblins tempting their prey with forbidden fruit in Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Most cars slow down and call back to us, “We’ll be back in a minute.” They won’t really be back, but it’s impolite to say “no.” Every night, we sit and call to the cars. We are fixtures. There’s Fingerlynn and Jonathan, where they always are, every night, getting buzzed and watching traffic. It’s our version of sitting on the couch with a beer and channel surfing, only the couch is on the side of the road and the beer looks and tastes like mud.

Fingerlynn believes that oral sex is a foreign invention, brought to Pohnpei by Westerners in the 19th century along with “pain, suffering, and Christmas.” In a way, she is a cock-sucking, pussy-licking creationist: she believes that oral sex appeared on Pohnpei through the not-so-divine intervention of European sailors.

I, however, have more of an evolutionary take on the issue. My logic is that any human group surrounded both by banana trees and edible clams cannot help but make the simple logical leap to oral sex. Besides that, there is the fact that cultural memes travel lightning-fast on Pohnpei. After a shipload of cheap red hair dye arrived on the island, some kids on the north side of the island began putting a red stripe in their hair, and within two weeks, nearly every man, woman, and child on Pohnpei had a red stripe in their hair. At the turn of the millennium, a beautiful girl was known as a “butts 2000″; this lasted about a month before we all gave it up. For a while we screamed the English word “budget” to anyone who answered a question with a plain yes.

“Are you drinking sakau?”

“Yes.”

“Budget!!!” (Maniacal laugher.)

I have no explanation for this behavior or why it’s funny. Neither does anyone else, really. It just happened. “Budget!” took hold for a few months and then disappeared. It might have had something to do with prostitution or something to do with the woefully inept government of the neighboring island of Chuuk, where the “budget” game was said to have originated.

Logic, reason, science: all of these gifts of the Enlightenment carry little weight with Fingerlynn. Oral sex came from mehnwai (foreigners) because it is a mehnwai thing to do. Like budgets, head colds, AIDS, and customer service, oral sex is one of those sneaky mehnwai phenomena that the forthright and moral people of Pohnpei could never invent. It seems horribly important to Fingerlynn that oral sex not be a spontaneous human invention enjoyed by every culture and instead must be a virus spread by craven, sex-obsessed Westerners. To suggest anything different is to question the very core of what it means to be Pohnpeian.

The sakau wanders aimlessly in my bloodstream and caresses my brain into a pleasant fog. I can’t feel my legs. Or more like my legs aren’t talking to my brain at the moment. After about two hours of banter, we have downed three cups (six sausage-cans worth) of sakau. Fingerlynn and I are passing into a euphoric haze that only exacerbates our argument, which must now navigate the mazy way from its inception in some deadened synapse to actual vocalization on my lips.

“Consider the home-made porn movies,” I say.

Horrific porn movies are being passed around the island. One, involving a large lady with skin fungus that is remarkably similar to the tinted windows of adulterer’s cars, is the sort of thing that makes me want to pull an Oedipus and skewer my eyes. My argument: any culture where cheap video cameras are available will spontaneously begin recording sex. Her argument: the idea of porn and the cameras are mehnwai inventions and Micronesians who use the cameras to record their trysts are more mehnwai than Micronesian. They have been corrupted.

All Pohnpeian men will tell you that sakau enhances their virility. All Pohnpeian men are lying. If the muscle-relaxing effects of sakau weren’t enough to kill any remaining sexual function, Fingerlynn’s final gambit in our argument inevitably does. She mentions a cousin (it’s always a cousin, because everyone is everyone else’s cousin on Pohnpei) who is currently dying in bed. Local medicine and magic cannot save him. His malady? His wife or someone was riding him in the coconut-grating position when she pulled the trick that all Pohnpeian women know: she broke his dick. I now desire sex with a Pohnpeian woman about as much as sex with a female praying mantis, which is to say a lot, even though I know the outcome cannot be good. So there lies this poor cousin, bent over in pain, dying of a broken wiener all because of the wiles, prowess, and anatomical knowledge of the Pohnpeian female. This is the end of the argument.

I will gladly keep the secrets of oral sex to myself, as a mehnwai, if Fingerlynn keeps the secrets of murder by broken dick to herself, as a Pohnpeian.

It is dark now and the cars are infrequent. The market is lit by one weak light bulb, covered with a red plastic bucket. Light and sound are difficult concepts for the sakau drunkard, best kept at an arm’s length. Limwahsahsah has been sitting in a corner of the market and laughing at us all evening. His wife made us some boiled banana to munch on. I don’t miss the opportunity to mispronounce the Pohnpeian name of this dish as “stinky penis.” The jovial gossip and argument portion of the evening is over as we sink in our plastic chairs and drift like tired, overstuffed eels inside our minds. Limwahsahsah turns up the volume on a locally produced CD of Casio-keyboard caterwauling. The tune is a cover of a Creedence Clearwater Revival song; “Lodi” off of the Green River album, I think. I want to protest, but the music has a physical presence, like a blanket made of humid air, that stifles speech. My body is on vacation and my mind is working overtime. The CCR tune re-appropriated for Pohnpeian screech-song seems to be the last piece of the argument I need. It seems terribly important. If I could just impart this last piece of the puzzle. Cultural cross-pollination something something something — it all briefly makes sense.

Fingerlynn and I are now completely drunk on sakau. We grunt, spit, and half-heartedly punch at one another. I really want to leave the sakau market, or at least stumble to the side of the road and pee, but I can’t seem to move. This intense need to leave is perfectly balanced with an equally intense desire to stretch out this time with my friend. I want the evening to last forever and in a way, it is lasting forever. Perhaps there is a sakau-induced quantum shift of some sort. Or maybe there is, like, a quantum snapshot that stuck the DNA of that very moment in time like the dinosaur DNA stuck in amber from Jurassic Park (these are the thoughts that sakau will bring you). I am still, even now, at that sakau market ingesting the dirty nothingness in the coconut-shell cup. The three of us are there under the thin tin roof of the open-air market, having the same argument each night, never reaching a conclusion, laughing at the same jokes, watching the traffic, going nowhere slow.

“You want to say ‘his pig’? Americans say ‘his pig,’” Deon chuckles. “In Pohnpei, if his pig is alive you use nah. Nah pwihk. His pig alive. And if his pig is dead you use ah. Ah pwihk. His pig dead. If he has pig on his plate for eating we say kene pwihk. His eating pig. Live pig. Dead pig. Eating pig.”

My classmate, Christina, groans. Christina is an Australian by way of England, approaching a sun-dried late middle age with a stiffness and resignation that is broken only by an occasional beleaguered moan. Today, Pohnpeian grammar agrees with her about as much undercooked eating pig.

“Kenei pwihk is your pig for eating. Water, house, car all take different ‘my’ words. Maybe you should memorize them.”

“So if I want to say ‘my beer’, I say ngehi beero?” I ask.

Deon hates questions. He chuckles.

“Nime beero. See, because that is beer. Beer is not the same as pig. See? Maybe for you beer and pig are the same thing. I don’t know. That’s American culture.”

Christina and I have reached a grammatical complexity that can only be simplified with gin and tonics. Our ritual is this: we throw worksheets from a Betty Azar ESL grammar book (dubbed the “Black Betty”) at unsuspecting Micronesian students, sputter from school to town in Christina’s Mazda Familia, sit in the Deon’s Pohnpeian class with one other hopeful Pohnpeian language learner, and, finally, retreat to Christina’s house for gin and tonics.

Tantalized by visions of those gin and tonics (mixed very precisely by Christina with an eye dropper of Angostura bitters), we sit impatiently in Deon’s classroom. Lacking the language skills to understand Pohnpeian pronouns, I focus on Deon’s belly. It is held in check by a tight white t-shirt and cascades over an enormous gold belt buckle. Christina is next to me in her usual uniform, a revealing short dress, probably better suited to a much younger woman. The matter-of-factness with which she presents her body to the world has something to do with her entirely reasonable approach to life — of course she looks twenty years younger than her hard-of-hearing husband of the same age. She takes care of herself. She orders her life. For many years, she has lived on remote islands and done it with a kind of “mad dogs and Englishmen” tenacity. She retains a sense of order in the face of an illogical world that is bent on upsetting her plans.

Symbolic of this approach to life are her tomatoes. Tomatoes being nearly impossible to grow on rainy Pohnpei, she decided she must grow them — and she did, though she guarded them with such vigor that I was never allowed to know where they were or when they might be ready. Every once in a while we got a salted slice of tomato with our gin and tonic. She produced it on its own sacred, special plate, like a priest at communion. I half expected her to feed it to me — “This is my body and my blood…” I never admitted that I didn’t really care for a salted raw tomato slice with my gin and tonic. But I understood that the delicate interior architecture of the tomato represented order, culture, and sanity.

“How would I say, ‘Will you dance with me?’” I ask, pen and notebook at the ready. I am always on the lookout for useful phrases, whereas Deon seems to want to impress us with the impossibility of ever learning Pohnpeian. I am thinking of the weekend when I will go to the local disco. I want to know how to say “What’s your name?”, “Will you dance with me?”, and “Would you like to come to my tin shack and visit my bottle of tequila?”

Deon, however, does not like questions. Ask him too many and he will invariably launch into a monologue concerning China O’Brien, a cheap martial arts flick made in 1990 and set in Beaver Creek, Utah. It stars Cynthia Rothrock whose body, in the film, is “the ultimate weapon.” This is Deon’s favorite movie and, in his opinion, a very important cultural artifact from the West that explains quite a bit about the cultural differences between America and Micronesia. Having never seen the movie or its sequel, I take his word for it. As if to punish me for what I thought was a very pragmatic question, he segues from China O’Brien to Pohnpeian counting systems.

“In Pohnpeian, there are thirty ways to count. Americans say ‘one, two, three.’ ‘One beer.’ ‘One pig’ For you, pigs and beer are the same thing. This is funny. Maybe you should think about this.”

We look at him quizzically. How can there be 30 ways to count?

“Pwihk ehu. One pig dead. Pwihk emen. One pig alive.”

Christina groans. Deon glares at our class for effect.

There is a way to count cigarettes, sodas, and other oblong objects; a way to count limbs, hands, and fingers which is also the way to count a school of fish; a way to count leaves that is different from the way to count trees or bundles of wood; a way to count piles of shit, bushes, nights, yams and bananas…

Christina and I stare at Deon in utter confusion and disbelief. He has won. We are ready to give up and go home. We want nothing more than to count gin and tonics, watch the sunset, and shout at Jeffrey, her husband.

How can there be 30 ways to say the number one?

Understanding this conundrum seems to be a key to understanding the Pohnpeian outlook. Imagine a typical Pohnpeian scene: bundles of wood and breadfruit, majestic trees, leaves and flowers of all shapes and colors, an open-air wooden thatched hut, hibiscus bark being stripped in preparation for squeezing sakau, stones and coconut shells set out for pounding and drinking sakau, monstrous pigs jammed in small cages near a creek, women washing and beating clothes in the creek, recently caught fish being fried, banana plants with their drooping phallic red shoots heavy with even more phallic yellow fruit. Now imagine that each of these has a different number one, two, three, and so on.

To “think like a Pohnpeian,” if such a thing is possible, means allowing my numbers to lose their abstraction and sink into the scene. There is a difference between one leaf and one tree, one live pig and one dead pig, one day of a ten-day funeral and one day of a week. Yes, these are different things, but how can they take different numbers? Pohnpeian counting systems hang like a many faceted diamond in my imagination: beautiful, extraordinary, yet somehow beyond the powers of my imagination to fully grasp. And therefore, the inner life of Pohnpeians will always remain one maddening leap of imagination away from my understanding.

In my first years on Pohnpei, I thought I could learn the language and understand Pohnpeians the way that I understood any topic: reading and memorization. So I dutifully took Deon’s worksheet to that evening’s gin-session and set about memorizing counting systems.

“Why is a car counted with the same number system as a can of soda and a cigarette?” I asked Christina.

Jeffrey, who was a supervisor for the electric company, took this an opening to say something.

“We went up the river to work on a line today. And did you know that the river has a different name there from the name here? Here the name is something like ‘prepare my salad’ and up the river it’s called ‘lemming sing’ or something. Yes, ‘lemming sing’. But I wonder, do lemmings sing? You see?” Jeffrey said, laughing.

Christina looked at me and groaned. It was a look that cemented our friendship as fellow travelers. It said, “Here I am, the last bit of sanity and reasonableness in a crazy world.” I returned her glance to acknowledge her predicament. We had a symbiotic relationship for many years: she fed me drinks, and I sympathized with her.

When it felt like time to stumble home and leave Jeffrey and Christina to pleasantly bicker away the evening, I would announce, “I’m crossing over to the other side.” It was my attempt at a witticism: the walk home took me past the Last Stop Store and over the little bridge across the bay.

After a few years, Christina and Jeffrey left to go back to Australia. They missed Pohnpei, but Christina thought it was the kind of place that was “better in retrospect.” She wanted to be closer to non-rat-infested hospitals for her sickly husband. So it was a cruel twist, which I imagine Christina met with a groan, when she found out she had a malignant brain tumor. About a month before she died, I wrote to her that I was “crossing over to the other side” about a trip to America I was preparing for. She responded:

…with the failure of my latest treatment, I query what you mean by “the other side.” If one night in your cozy house a strange light appears through a window, just get out a bottle of gin and that may serve to calm my troubled spirit and I will then stop disturbing you.

Christina, I know that gin would just excite you and encourage you to linger. When you come to trouble me, I will place a slice of tomato on a little dish, salt it, and pretend to like it. This will show you all is right with the world and you need not trouble us.

One friend alive. One friend dead. I can almost grasp how one can be two entirely different numbers.

In 1997, the journey to Pohnpei from Honolulu required four stops. The first stop, Johnston Atoll, has now been decommissioned and apparently left to the turtles and birds that inhabited it before the U.S. military. Very little separates landing on Johnston Atoll and a water landing — a few feet of coral atoll and a bit of man-made extension. The island is exactly as long as the runway. Our landing is so precise that the nose of the airplane, when we come to the famous “complete stop,” juts out over the ocean with a kind of upper-class condescension toward the water, as if to say, “Ha, you won’t get me today!” To this, the gently rocking ocean replies, “Just wait, I’ve got time.”

As the plane turns around on the tarmac, we get a grand view of a factory belching black smoke into the air. The atoll is made up of these things: the runway, a factory, and a collection of neat, yellow tin dwellings.

The books in the Philadelphia Free Library were mum on the existence of Johnston Atoll. Yet there it was, spurting thick globs of black something-or-other into the sky. Kurt Vonnegut called Ohio the “asshole of America,” and I can’t disagree with him. However, if there was an offshore, secret asshole of America, it was surely Johnston Atoll. Here, the U.S. military destroyed chemical weapons (or so they say — what happens on Johnston stays on Johnston). Day after day, the smoke gushed out of one of the most desolate islands in the world, a thousand miles from any other piece of land. It stood with its hulking factory in the middle of an endless ocean looking like an existentialist’s wet-dream of meaninglessness.

The only people who deplane here are large, sullen looking ladies, presumably military or military wives, burdened with overflowing shopping bags from the Ala Moana mall in Honolulu. They balance the weight of the bags to add some equilibrium as they waddle forth onto the tiny atoll. What will they do to stave off madness on this inhospitable lump of coral and hardened bird shit, its factory belching god-knows-what into the endless blue sky, secreting god-knows-what into the endless blue ocean? Maybe play bridge, or eat each other.

As we leave Johnston, the plane lifts above the ocean just as it runs out of atoll. We are headed for the less dire destination of Majuro, Marshall Islands. There is a bit more runway on this atoll, though the width of it leaves little room for pilot error. The runway appears to be below sea level. Haphazard piles of rock on either side of the plane keep the ocean at bay.

On Majuro I get my first breath of Micronesian air. It tastes hot and salty, like an suspiciously flavored ramen bowl. I wander out of the small airport, across a cracked little street, to the ocean. The reality of my departure from all that I had known seeps into my bones with each gentle wave and warm, caressing wind. Perched on a pile of rocks between the runway and the ocean, I strain my eyes to see Lauren Bacall. Lauren Bacall, or simply “Laura”, is a beach on the far end of the atoll. I wondered if Lauren Bacall had ever been to the beach named after her by horny WWII Navy officers. What would happen if you swam in yourself? Lost in my contemplation, I might have missed the plane but for an enormous man who introduced himself as “Mr. Bunglick.” He told me I ought to get back in my seat.

Back in the cement hut that was the departure terminal, passengers were haggling over various shell-based souvenirs, some gorgeous woven purses, and traditional Marshallese star charts, used by the locals of ages past to navigate vast stretches of ocean. The airport was a bustle of colorfully muumuu-adorned women hawking wares and the aforementioned chubby guys on government tickets laconically grazing on local fruit. The spastic SDA kids excitedly wondered where the hell they were, but had little time to figure it out before we were off again.

The next stop was another Marshallese atoll, Kwajelein. We were not allowed to de-plane here as “Kwaj” is a U.S. military base. The atoll is more spacious than Johnston Atoll, but just as incongruous. If Johnston looks like an American industrial corridor plopped into the ocean, Kwaj looks like an American suburb suddenly sprouted out of the coral. There is a golf course alongside the runway and a few ranch-style houses. There are also large geodesic domes that are presumably part of the satellite-tracking and missile-launching capabilities of Kwaj.

Thick-muscled women grab their duffles with military precision and march off the plane, followed by a few Marshallese travelers, including Mr. Bunglick. In all likelihood, he lives on Ebeye, an 80-acre island that is a short boat ride from Kwaj. 12,000 people live in Ebeye’s 80 acres of ramshackle houses and raw sewage, while across a little channel U.S. military contractors practice their golf swings. Each day Marshalese ferry over to Kwaj to work in service jobs, then ferry back to their overcrowded pit known as the “slum of the Pacific.”

Our next stop, Kosrae, is all the more beautiful for having spent the last ten hours flying over unbroken ocean interspersed with tiny atolls, none of which rise higher than ten feet above sea level. It’s a shock to see something that is so clearly habitable, lush, and alive after the cramped atolls of the Marshalls. As a Midwesterner, I can only liken the feeling to stumbling upon Chicago after hours of driving through flat Indiana scrub land (the taint of America). Kosrae is a high island, which means it looks like you expect an island to look. It announces itself in as many shades of green as are imaginable, and then adds a few more for good measure. Its mountains rise in sheer rocky splendor. The shape of the mountains are called the “Sleeping Lady.” Sure enough, if you squint your eyes you will notice a prone female form in the mountains. Her proportions and outline are reminiscent of a Lauren Bacall pin-up.

Besides seeing naked ladies in the rocks, Kosraens mostly go to church and eat oranges. The bag of oranges I buy in the small, open-sided airport are fantastic. The green skin peels easily in one motion, the fruit inside packs the flavor of an entire cart-full of supermarket oranges — they are the apotheosis of orange-ness, beyond which there can be nothing better.

Kosrae is the first stop in the Federated States of Micronesia, the country in which I have come to work. I have one more stop to go: Pohnpei. My excitement has turned to fatigue during the long plane journey. Even the giggly young SDAs are muted in their reaction to the lush mountains of Kosrae. One sits holding a teddy bear and staring at the luggage being unloaded from our plane. We all feel the dread of journey’s end, when the plane will leave us behind in a strange and alien culture.

So we board the plane for the last time without the exuberance with which we began. We are lost in our private thoughts (except for the Micronesians who are happy to doze and gossip). I’m wondering if any one will meet me on Pohnpei. I have no phone number to call or hotel to go to. I’m tired. I am burdened with books and clothes and a laptop that will last about ten minutes in the jungle humidity.

When at last we screech to a stop on the tiny spit of land created for Pohnpei International Airport, I am exhausted from anticipation. The airplane door sighs as it opens, and we are greeted with a blast of humidity that hardly seems breathable. As I step onto the tarmac, the full force of this heat drenches me in the sheer otherness of the place. I sweat profusely and immediately. The calm air is moldy, stagnant. The short walk across the tarmac is unrelenting. The foreigners trudge towards the small terminal, unsure if this new planet is habitable or if we will all soon be writhing on the ground gasping for air.

I want to go home. I have an overwhelming feeling that I should turn back. The whole trip seems surreal, and yet — how exciting to have an adventure to an unknown island before me! How I love to be the sort of guy that goes on adventures. Here I am: a fellow who will hop a plane to unknown climes without a care in the world. How cool I am!

But who’s around to appreciate it? What’s the point of an adventure unshared? How very lonely to be swimming in the humid air toward a little stone building where not one person could possibly know me.

The airport has none of the comfortable regularity of most modern airports — no glass, no air-con, no walls, no fast food, no rental cars, no hotel attached. I’m wondering what I will do if nobody greets me. I move on toward a booth where a Pohnpeian woman is stamping passports. I am already beaten by this intense and aggressively green island where mountains rise thousands of feet in the middle and spill down towards a fringe of mangrove swamp — it’s the life that really gets to me, it’s the teeming life that hits me in my first breath of Pohnpeian air. The island seems to sweat and breathe and just grow and grow and grow endlessly. And suddenly I am in it, a tiny speck of mold in a vast petri dish. And the island gets me. It starts to grow in me and on me even after one breath.

The plump brown woman at the counter is wearing a bright orange and blue muumuu. She has incredibly long, black, greasy hair knotted up into a fancy bun. With her wide eyes she looks like a sinister butterfly. I am suddenly horrified by what I am doing. How much better to have this all ahead of me, in the future, the cool new thing that I’m doing. Now, sweating, fishing for my passport in my sticky leather bag, I am suddenly forced to face consequences that I never clearly thought through. Where will I live? Does the college even know I’m coming? They seemed so vague and mellow on the phone. It’s 1997, but there is no reliable internet connection on Pohnpei. I have none of the e-mail confirmation that we require before travel today. I feel utterly alone, lost, disoriented.

“Oh hi, Jonathan. You’re teaching at the college? I went there. My cousin is a teacher too,” says the butterfly lady.

I am so baffled by the sound of my name that I can’t answer.

“My other cousin works at public affairs, so I picked up your work visa from there.”

She staples a little visa to a page in my passport.

“Jonathan, I think you’re staying at my auntie’s place, right?” she asks.

I can hardly stammer out an “I don’t know” before she sends me along to collect my baggage.

I’ve never been so comforted by the sound of my own name. The feeling must be like what babies feel when they first learn their names. It calls them into existence as this particular thing, this Jonathan or Lauren or Bunglick. And around that name a whole personality, a whole life forms like a sturdy, colorful coral. The sound of my name — even if it’s pronounced with a “t” sound instead of a “th” sound in the middle by a large, brightly colored Pohnpeian woman in a hot airport — means that I am known. My apprehension fades. I step out of the small terminal and into a new life.

My failures, which mostly include my complete ignorance of field trips, meetings, or other events for which I have to prepare food or dress my daughter appropriately, are a result of the unique school-parent communication system employed at the kindergarten. All parents at all times are expected to know what to do without being told. All parents must have the same idea at the same time and do the same thing. This communal hive-mind system works quite well for everyone but me.

If you’re wondering what the big deal is, then you don’t live on a small island. One major screw up will haunt you forever. For instance, if my daughter doesn’t wear underwear to kindergarten graduation (she doesn’t like underwear), then I will always be the hopeless single father who couldn’t even get underwear on his child. Perhaps this seems like a bizarre fear. On the contrary, I once had to speed to Wenik before the school bus, swoop in to catch my daughter exiting the bus, and nonchalantly throw underwear on her before she went to school “commando” beneath her uniform-blue skirt. The piercing gaze of her gelatinous yet eagle-eyed teacher told me that I had been found out and sure enough, my reputation as a poorly-skilled-foreigner-single-father-who-can’t-even-get-underwear-on-his-child (a sentiment that must be dashed) was soon well known. I pointed out to anyone who would listen that Pohnpeian children are not regular underwear wearers at home. In fact, there are whole tribes of mostly naked children that stream past my house and through the jungle like feral cats, stopping only for popcorn and knives. (They use the knives to cut whimsical medicines out of flowers and tree bark.)

On Pohnpei, public appearance is of paramount importance. A child who goes naked most of the week will never leave the family compound without underwear, even if that underwear has to be “borrowed” from the laundry-line of a neighbor. Screw around with this rule and you will be branded forever and be unable to leave the house for embarrassment. That is why I had girl’s underwear stuffed in my pocket at Peanut’s graduation (for convoluted reasons, my daughter’s name is Peanut). My emergency underwear was ready in case the pair I certainly knew my daughter was wearing somehow evaporated.

Just as the school year culminates in that thrilling event known as kindergarten graduation, I also expected the culmination of my failures to be duly noted and graduated to a new level of inadequacy. Kindergarten graduation is a huge event. The mothers and fathers of the children at Wenik Early Childhood Education Center know through cultural osmosis exactly what to do. All but one, of course. I have to track down information like a Washington Post reporter. I need multiple sources, multiple interviews just to get the right time and place. Then there is dress and food to prepare. If one bit of the preparation is “wrong,” then that further justifies the sentiment that I can do nothing correctly because I am 1) not a Pohnpeian and 2) not a woman. In other words, more justification for the one thing that is obvious and in italics to everyone, I need a Pohnpeian wife.

One important part of the graduation are the basins of food that we must provide for our child. The basin I was told to prepare was a “one-way take-out ready-to-eat.” In Pohnpei, the meanings of “basin,” “one-way,” and “take-out ready-to eat” are as obscure and Byzantine as a Starbucks menu. A basin is a plastic tub, available at every small store around the island. The empty basin will be filled with fried food, rice, and canned goods, ready to “take-out” and go “one-way” back home after being sufficiently grazed at the graduation. I was pretty confident that I could get my daughter’s basin ready even though I had only heard about it on the morning I was supposed to provide it. I confirmed this intel with the bus driver, my neighbor, and a teacher aide. I was ready to buy a plastic tub and fill it with “soda, cheese balls, and corned beef.” The school would later add fried chicken, hot dogs, rice, and breadfruit to the basin. The big basin-eating event would take place after the graduation ceremony, in a cement holding pen next to a church. Here we would watch our dolled-up children dip their tiny hands into their basins full of greasy food and chow down.

All I needed to do was buy the items and bring them to school. Confident that I could do this simple task as well as any Pohnpeian woman, I went to the cheese ball aisle at the grocery store. It had been a month since the last produce ship docked on Pohnpei and the offerings at the grocery store consisted of various forms of cheese balls, corned beef, soda, and peach rings. The cheese ball choices stretched down the aisle and dared me to make the wrong choice. At first I settled on the familiar blue Planter’s canister, but when I saw the price I had to return it. Would my basin be wrong if I put $4 cheese balls in it? Would such gratuitous spending mark me as “foreign?” I thought of the teachers shaking their heads and sighing, “Only a crazy mehnwai would spend his money on expensive American cheese balls.” So I put the Planter’s back on the shelf and took a few bags of twenty-five cent Chinese “Cheez Balls.” I faced the same dilemma in the soda aisle. Should I plunk down five dollars for a two-liter bottle of genuine, only recently out-of-date Coca Cola or should I instead buy the smaller Chinese version, Sunlight soda? Sunlight soda tasted like straight corn syrup infused with sad, half-hearted bubbles that struggled for air in the sludgy brown liquid. But cheap Sunlight soda would not mark me as a foreigner, would not embarrass my daughter, would win me cultural acceptance. This Sunlight would mark a new dawn of acceptance for me on Pohnpei. No longer would I be a mehnwai.

Mehnwai is the Pohnpeian word for foreigner. After you hear it often enough, the word takes on a quality all its own. It is a very specific term for a certain type of behavior that the simple word “foreigner” doesn’t suggest. A mehnwai is uptight, worried about minor issues, a complainer, quick to anger, inappropriately emotional, unbending, a stickler for rules and laws, a cheapskate who also spends too much money on bizarre items, and unclear on the simplest matters of local culture.

So when I get to Peanut’s school, I am pretty sure that even this crazy mehnwai can’t fuck up a simple basin with soda, cheese balls, and a can of gelatinous Fijian corned beef. (“Why would you want a can of corned beef directly after graduating from Kindergarten?” you ask. I reply, “Why not?”) There in the back room of her three-room cement open-air kindergarten, in her scrungy yet quaint school with re-bar sticking from the roof like skinny minarets, in the bastion of erudition and education that is Wenik Early Childhood Education Center are thirty basins, each with a child’s name on it. The thirty basins are exactly alike. They are big, red, and each have a liter of Coca-Cola and a big canister of Planter’s cheese balls. Somehow, I’ve managed to do even this incorrectly. I timidly hand over my medium-sized blue basin with a can of soda and three bags of cheese balls and the teacher looks at me with her “get a wife” eyes of contemptuous pity. I’m a mehnwai. I’m not married. I am wrong. I have images of my daughter crying over her small basin and small soda and small cheese balls.

Lucy keeps setting up that football for me to kick, and I keep thinking that this time I’m really going to kick it. After I inevitably screw it up she walks over to my prone body and says, “Just give up, Charlie Brown. Get a wife.”