18 The contact was actually secondhand; one of Tallent’s colleagues at Stanford, not Tallent himself, was friendly with Smythe.
19 Now Kiribati.
20 This popularly accepted myth is probably a conflation of two facts: first, all U’ivuan boys are given a spear upon their fourteenth birthday; second, the first king of the islands, King Ulolo the Powerful — who unified many of the various tribes scattered among the archipelago in approximately A.D. 1645; his work was eventually completed by King Vaka I more than a century later — was said to have killed a wild boar barehanded before his fourteenth birthday. Since then the boar has occupied a central place in U’ivuan life; although it is a treasured hunting companion and a symbol of the culture’s ferocity to the outside world, killing or taming one is also considered a significant accomplishment and proof of the warrior’s strength and bravery. The fundamentally paradoxical nature of the beast’s place in society — both friend and challenge — is not a contradiction that seems ever to have troubled the U’ivuans.
PART III. THE DREAMERS
I.
June was a month unlike any I had experienced, and at the end of each of its days I would go to bed early, if only so I could think for a few minutes about all that I had seen and felt. As it happened, I had skipped my graduation and departed for Hawaii two weeks before I was to meet Tallent. My last night in Cambridge (which even before I left was vanishing from my memory, as cleanly and swiftly as salt in hot water), Owen had come up from New Haven to see me. Our goodbyes had been unsatisfying — he was brusque and seemed obscurely angry with me — but he did agree to keep for me some things (books, papers, my winter coat, heavy as a corpse) that I wouldn’t need on my travels. We agreed to write to each other, but I could tell from his expression that he was as dubious about that ever happening as I was. It was only after we had shaken hands and he had left with a trunk packed with my things to catch the last train back that I thought about what my life would be like so far away from Owen; it was true that we spoke less and less as we grew older (a detachment that seemed as inevitable as it was mysterious), but he was the only one who knew me, who retained memories of me from each year of my life, because it had been half his life as well. But this regret too quickly dissipated, so eager was I to begin my new existence — it was easy then to believe that my life until this point had been only a long, tedious rehearsal, a thing to be impatiently endured and withstood: a simulacrum of a life, not a life itself.
I had a train ticket to California, and from there I took a ship to Hawaii. In those days, Honolulu was still very much a quiet colonial outpost, with all the attendant flourishes and clichés, and as the boat pulled into harbor, you could see on the dock groups of fat, jolly musicians plucking their plinky songs on their ukuleles, and barefooted boys, half Asian and half something else, smiling and begging for the disembarking passengers to throw them pennies.
It had been arranged that I would stay in a dormitory room at the local university, but because I had arrived earlier than anticipated, the building was fully occupied, and no bed was available until the next evening. And so that first night, after storing my luggage at the dormitory, I took a taxi to the edge of Waikiki, where I walked to Diamond Head on the sand, one beach giving way to the next. Beyond me I could sometimes hear the sounds of bars: groups of men laughing at something, the chingy-changy music. I stood periodically and listened to the dry palm fronds chattering against one another like bones, and to the ocean, its remorseless, lonely conversation with itself, a sound that — though I did not know it at the time — I would not hear again for months to come. I walked with the moon above me, which here seemed to glow whiter and rounder and brighter than it had in Boston, and when I grew tired, I lay under a tree and slept, as I had seen other shadowy forms doing as I made my slow way across the sand.
The next day I ventured to the city’s downtown district, past its pretty colonial buildings. The grandest thing I saw, though, was not a structure, not even the humble, squat palace once occupied by the humble, squat queen, but instead the trees outside it: ancient shower trees, their leaves peachy petals that swirled about them in snowy, gentle cyclones. In Chinatown, I walked around the frayed shapes of sleeping men, the soles of their feet black and crisscrossed with channels and cuts, until I found a bar with an open door. It was not a good place, this Chinatown, with its sad saloon-shuttered buildings out of whose dark interiors poor jazz seeped like poison. But the sun was hotter than I had anticipated, and I was very thirsty.
The bartender was so flat-faced it appeared as if someone had held each of his ears and pulled in either direction, and so sun-darkened that his skin had become glossed and smooth, like a chicken that has been broiled in butter for too long. He was Chinese, I guessed, or at least some sort of Oriental, for his eyes were hooded and narrow, although his black hair was wavy and coarse. I ordered a glass of seltzer, and he watched as I gulped it down. “Where you from?” he asked finally.
“Boston,” I said. I noticed he was missing his left thumb, although he was able to move the stump back and forth, which he did rather expressively, like a dog would its bobbed tail.
He was unimpressed by this information, but there was no one else in the bar for him to speak with, and when I finished my glass, he refilled it without my asking. “How long you here?” he asked.
“Not long,” I said. Now that I had had something to drink, I was able to concentrate on the room, which was low-ceilinged and dark and lacquered, the wooden counter sticky from years of smoke and spilled liquor and cooking grease. “I’m on my way to U’ivu.”
To my surprise, he nodded when I mentioned U’ivu, and when I asked him what he knew, he laughed and said, “Good hunters. Boars.” He refilled my glass again. “Scary.” It was unclear whether he meant the people or the boars. Then, almost gently, “They are very violent there.” I waited for him to say more, but he had begun to hum a meandering, wistful tune, strangely moving in the ugliness of the bar, and when it became clear that he would say no more, I finished my drink and paid and walked back out into the sunshine.
I passed a few more days like this, taking taxis to various beaches on the island, marveling at how they first appeared to be uniformly, indistinguishably lovely but eventually revealed themselves particular and distinct: one had sand so fine that even after beating out my shirt and pants, I still found myself dusting it from my clothes and shaking it from my hair the next day; another was booby-trapped with tiny, unseen pinecones dropped by the fringe of gawky, shaggy ironwood trees that edged the beachfront, so that each step contained a small, unavoidable pain; another had sand the color and texture of wet, raw sugar, making it sludgy and sticky to the touch. One afternoon I went to the library downtown, where the librarian helped me find an old, cloth-covered book on U’ivu. It turned out to be a picture book, a Hawaiian-language primer published by the Honolulu Missionary Academy in 1871, each page containing a simple woodcut and a few lines of text. Because it was in Hawaiian, I could not read it, but the pictures — a boar, its eyes beady and black, its tusks as extravagantly curled as an old-fashioned handlebar mustache; the king, smiling and fat and shirtless, clutching what looked like a long feather duster; a knobby torpedo I took to be a sweet potato — made it seem once again more, not less, fantastic, a place that indeed existed only in children’s stories.