Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  Yikes.

  Soon, however, he had bigger problems. There were the letters for Sam McClure, the newspaper publisher, that he was contractually obliged to write. He never quite reconciled whether these letters should, one day, be stand-alone chapters for his big book, or merely source material, or something else entirely. A letter for a mass circulation newspaper is an entirely different thing from a chapter in a tome about the culture, geology, ethnography, and history of the South Pacific. And since he was predisposed to write the latter, his dispatches from the South Seas were met with a torrent of criticism. Henry James wrote to say that he “missed the visible in them—I mean as regards people, things, objects, faces, bodies, costumes, features, gestures, manners, the introductory, the personal painter-touch.” More troubling, was McClure’s displeasure. Stevenson’s letters, he felt, failed for “it was the moralist and not the romancer which his observations in the South Seas awoke in him, and the public found the moralist less interesting than the romancer.” McClure told Stevenson that he had not fulfilled “the definition of the word ‘letter,’ as used in newspaper correspondence.” But publish them he did.

  To which I can only say, Louis, you are a lucky man you’re not around in the twenty-first century. Take up the quill now, and best-case scenario you’ll find that eventually you are merely a vendor for a multinational corporation, one headed by either a German accountant or Rupert Murdoch, and staffed, at the upper reaches, by a small army of MBAs and lawyers—evil people, Louis, evil people—who look upon you, green eyeshades perched upon their foreheads, as they do their ink supplier. Nothing wrong with that, of course. No reason why purveyors of words, alone among professions, should be allowed to live in an airy-fairy world far removed from the balance sheet. The marketplace sharpens the quill. But if these consiglieres of publishing come to believe that they are unlikely to get their nickel, they will look to see whether or not you have fulfilled “the definition of the word ‘letter,’ as used in newspaper correspondence” and they will come after you, Louis, and slit your throat.

  Let’s say, hypothetically, that you are a modestly successful writer, and by this I mean you only need to work part-time at Denny’s to make ends meet. You sign a new contract with your longtime publisher and receive what is quaintly called an advance, but should rightly be called a loan from people who will gouge out your eyeballs. Of this loan, 50 percent immediately disappears in the form of taxes, agent commissions, and what we call health insurance premiums, which, because you are self-employed, supporting a family, and living in America, are onerous and absurd. Another substantial percentage is devoted to research, which, because you are an idiot who never really thinks about the costs involved in producing a book, include a couple of lengthy trips to, let’s say, oh, I don’t know, India. Now let’s say, hypothetically, that while you are riding the rails the length and breadth of India, a neutron bomb explodes at your publishing house. The consiglieres will call this a reorganization. They will use the word synergy. And now everyone you have worked with over the past eight years has disappeared. Poof. Gone. Reorganized and synergized. And you find that your little book project has now been assigned to a different imprint.

  Well, you may think, that was most unfortunate but, because you are a professional, you carry on. And now let’s say—and again, this is completely make-believe—you have a reputation for being a trifle late with manuscripts (Note to current hypothetical editor: Um . . .) and so in your contract, to avoid this problem, which, apparently, causes much mayhem and stress for editors, copy editors, designers, basically everybody in the Central Office, you have this peculiar obligation to submit a first draft of a number of chapters every few months, as a means for ensuring that steady progress is being maintained on The Work, as contractually defined. So you submit the first sixty pages of a first draft—and you know what those first sixty pages are like, of course, the grasping in the dark, looking for the light switch—to your newly assigned imprint, who has inherited you and your contract during the reorganization. And then kaboom, your life is destroyed.

  Let’s say—hypothetically, needless to say—that your previous book’s sales did not justify the size of the loan from people who will gouge out your eyeballs. And now they’re looking at these few pages of a first draft and the consiglieres will decide that they want their money back, and they will find a way to shred that contract, Louis, and they will hunt you down. They will demand immediate repayment of this loan from people who will gouge out your eyeballs, which, of course, has already been spent. And now they will suspend all royalty payments from your previous books. Suddenly, in an instant, you have gone from being a modestly successful writer to beyond broke and onward to heavily indebted to an organization that from time to time sends threatening letters in spine-tingling legalese threatening personal ruin and eternal damnation. You will beg and plead and send them revisions and new book proposals, promising to work off this loan from people who will gouge out your eyeballs, but the decision, as they say, is final. And now you are financially ruined.

  Now, for the fun of it, let’s say that you are an alcoholic who only recently quit drinking and was presently on the Marijuana Maintenance Program. I don’t know about you, Louis, but I’d think now would be a good time to start hitting the vodka. If such a thing were to occur, I suspect I’d be nearly suicidal for a good long while, but in the end, Louis, I’d think I’d be grateful to the consiglieres for hastening the inevitable. Best to have your world collapse all at once rather than draw it out, don’t you think?

  But, Louis, these Fakarava chapters? What were you thinking? I know how you spent your time here. Sailing through the channel on board the Casco, you noted that the “water, shoaling under our board, became changed in a moment to surprising hues of blue and grey; and in its transparency the coral branched and blossomed, and the fish of the inland sea cruised visibly below us, stained and striped, and even beaked like parrots. I have paid in my time to view many curiosities; never one so curious as that first sight over the ship’s rail in the lagoon of Fakarava.” You took to a little cottage on this narrow band of land, a house with “three rooms, three sewing-machines, three sea-chests . . . and a French lithograph with the legend: ‘Le brigade du Général Lepasset brûlant son drapeau devant Metz.’” Fanny, the ever-industrious American, managed to rescue a rusty stove from the beach and return it to life, cooking hardy breakfasts. During the day, you wrote in a letter: “I am in the water for hours wading over the knees for shells.” And you spent your evenings hosting the French-Tahitian Monsieur Donat-Rimarau, the acting vice-resident, who regaled you with stories about the islands. The moonlight cast shadows of the rustling palm fronds “so sharply defined that one voluntarily stepped over them,” as Fanny observed, and you slept on the verandah, the lagoon breeze offering a respite from the heat of day.

  But do we read of any of this in The Book? Hardly. Instead, for reasons known only to yourself, you abandoned the flow of narrative and instead offered the reader, what? Ghost stories? Observations about the occult? Third-hand tales told to you in the Marshalls? Boring, Louis, boring. And yet, right there at the top of your chapters on, ostensibly, Fakarava, you observed the true curiosity of this magical place. And it lies in the water.

  The lagoon in Fakarava is an officially sanctioned UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Typically, once someplace is deemed special and worthy of preserving by UNESCO, it is ruined forever. See, for instance, Lijiang in Yunnan, China, which was once a lovely village in the foothills of the Himalayas, but now gets 16 million tourists a year, shattering all that was idyllic and distinctive about the place. Fortunately, no such ruination seems imminent for Fakarava. There can’t be more than two dozen fales on the atoll, and what tourists there are head straight for the water. Nearly every visitor I encountered was a hard-core diver, and with these people, the tattoos get really interesting. Everyone begins with a shark or a turtle, but I met one Dutch couple who between them had an octopus, th
ree clown fish, a sea horse, two rabbit fish, a bunch of angelfish, a manta ray, and a moray eel. Just talking to them felt like being inside a Pixar movie. They’re a peculiar crowd, some of these divers, and few things are more discombobulating than listening to people get all rapturous about their encounter with a ten-foot tiger shark and a twelve-foot hammerhead, in Dutch, during the morning’s dive.

  I spent a couple of days waiting for my cut to heal. The dog’s teeth had broken through the skin. I treated the wound with antibiotic cream and let it close before doing any serious snorkeling—and incidentally, I do very much like the phrase serious snorkeling. If I could somehow figure out a way to incorporate the sentence I’m a serious snorkeler, bitchezz without it seeming like a gratuitous aside, I would. And I guess I just did. It’s magic, really. But getting back to our tale, no, I was not concerned about rabies. They were merely island dogs, semi-wild, semi-cared for, and I had startled them by being a stranger who was running in the late afternoon torpor, a time when all should be still. Their instincts had kicked in and they just did what island dogs do, which is to make one think back fondly to Old Yeller and its delightful ending. If those dogs had been truly rabid, the islanders themselves would have long ago disposed of them. Biting strangers was fine; biting locals not so much. Dogs are smart and they know this.

  Once the cut closed, I tested things out by wading into the lagoon in front of my fale. In the hour or two before sunset, the inshore waters were alive with ripples and dorsal fins as dozens of reef sharks swam languorously by. The scent of my blood failed to stir them, and soon I found myself becoming strangely accustomed to their presence. When Shark Boy asked if I wanted to snorkel the Tumakohua, or the South Pass, home to, literally, thousands of sharks, I surprised myself by saying yes.

  It was more than twenty miles distant from Rotoava, a long journey over water on the dive boat. The water was incandescent and reminded me of the lagoons I had come to know in Kiribati. But Fakarava is different in innumerable ways. The tides go in and out twice a day, and while on the ocean side of the atoll it was noticeable as low tide revealed a barren reef shelf, a stony wasteland of jagged coral and tidal pools, on the lagoon side of the island the flow of water seemed to pass with hardly a murmur, the land barely expanding or contracting at all, reflecting the depth of this inland sea. Away from the village, the coconut palm trees, the fruit trees, and the casuarinas gave way to an arid shrubbery, the natural flora of draft-ridden atolls, suggesting it has been some time that the people of Fakarava lived a purely subsistence lifestyle, unlike Kiribati, where nearly every precious acre contains a family’s food trees.

  On the boat, as everywhere in Polynesia, were a few more European pensioners, Italians and French. They’re all, like, fifty-five and spend their time traveling the world. I spoke to a Frenchman who had been a ship’s pilot on Réunion Island, retired, and now was traveling with his wife for two months throughout French Polynesia and ruminating on whether or not to take a house on Moorea for another three. Meanwhile, one of the Italians on board was forever standing and falling on the rest of us as he tried to take pictures from a speedboat that was rocking along as fast as its twin engines could take it. Rarely have I seen anyone so clumsy or oblivious of other people or common sense. He was of the type who dawdle on the sidewalk, five abreast, at 6:00 P.M. as everyone else rushes to catch a subway, or who drive thirty-five mph in the fast lane, making phone calls and texting, as others swerve around him, giving him the bird, which he never ever sees. I’m not sure why these thoughts occurred to me. Was I becoming a type-A kind of person?

  The Tumakohua Pass is narrow, perhaps three hundred yards across, and lies next to an abandoned village, the ruins of dwellings and an old church lying forlornly in the sun, its inhabitants long ago forced to depart due to the absence of freshwater. As we stepped off the boat and made our way to a small cove, sheltered by a reef, a swimming-pool-size lagoon of its own jutting toward the depths of the channel, we were immediately greeted by an enormous three-foot napoleon fish with a bulbous head and a friendly disposition.

  “That is Jojo,” Shark Boy informed me.

  I blinked a few times. “And are you on a first-name basis with all the fish around here?”

  He simply laughed and returned to the boat, vowing to reappear in a short while with the fish that would be our lunch. And in the meantime the sharks gathered. First one. Then another. Then three more. Another six. We hadn’t been here but ten minutes and already roughly thirty sharks, all black-tip reef sharks, had gathered in a semienclosed area not much larger than a backyard pool. Naturally, Capitano Oblivious was the first to wade in, donning a mask and flippers, and I stood by, watching with baffled curiosity. Don’t you think we ought to wait for Shark Boy? I thought. He could probably tell us which were the alphas, the nippers, and the bullies. He probably knows their nicknames. The translucent water was now swarming with sharks, and they seemed a jumpy lot to me, like oversize piranhas sensing that it was feeding time. They circled and darted and squabbled with each other as the Italian dunked his head and kicked himself forward, and now I waited for the real carnage to begin. Capitano Oblivious swam blithely onward from the sandy shallows through a school of sharks who grew increasingly jittery, as if they knew a meal was coming and could barely contain themselves. But they parted for the Italian, who made his way forward, searching for an opening in the coral headlands that would lead to the deep water. Lagoon channels, particularly narrow ones such as the Tumakohua Pass, are notorious for their powerful currents. Did we even know what the tides were doing? Was it ebbing or flowing? It certainly wasn’t slack water, that much I could see. But soon, Capitano Oblivious had found his way to the deep blue of the channel, and now everyone was in the water—experienced divers all—putting on snorkeling gear, sharks swirling around their knees.

  I stood there, pondering the bandage on my Achilles tendon. I peaked inside. There was the faint remains of a scab. Just how sensitive were sharks to the scent of blood? Should I flick off what remained of it? By now, all the others were swimming toward the channel, and I thought, better get in the water quick before I was all alone, to be picked off like a stray lamb by a pack of wolves.

  Have you ever shared a tight, confined space—say, about six feet wide, a watery alleyway—with a half-dozen sharks? Exciting doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s more like Holy Fuck Holy Fuck Holy Fuck. Never in my life had I been so close to sharks. Visibility was about a hundred miles, enough so that I could see every tooth, the brownish-gray tint of their toughened skin, the black tribal markings on their fins, and the unblinking, startled expression of their eyes, as we shared this aquatic thoroughfare from the beach to the . . .

  Holy Mother of God. There were hundreds of sharks swarming below me now, over the edge of the reef, a wall of multihued shimmering color, a palisade of coral, descending into a blue-black void, where eagle rays, giant trevally, big fat groupers, a lone barracuda, our friendly neighborhood napoleon, and a gazillion tropical fish, schools, no universities of them, hugging the cliff wall, and all around were the sharks—blacktips, whitetips, vast amounts of greys, and a few massive, beefy silvertips. I swam, floating like chum, with eyes as big as dinner plates, over the steep precipice. Holy Fuck Holy Fuck Holy Fuck. It was shark nirvana, hundreds—hundreds!—of primeval, carnivorous, saw-toothed vessels of destruction, emerging from the darkness beyond, their shadows taking form, as they glided silkily past. And soon I felt . . . strangely calm, completely blissed out by the spectacle below. It is not very often that you behold a true wonder of nature, but this surely was one of them, an expressway of aquatic marvels. I dove as deep as I could, immersing myself in this astonishing world, next to soft coral that swayed in the current, among multitudes of vividly colored fish, and just yards away, always, from the sharks. To my surprise, I saw the Italian pirouetting below, so elegant and aware now, as he swooped into the depths, holding his breath forever, getting up close and personal w
ith an eight-foot silvertip shark that loomed beside him, each studying the other.

  I’ve snorkeled all over the South Pacific, but nowhere have I seen a place more bewitching than the South Pass of Fakarava. We emerged, speaking a Babel of languages, all expressing our amazement, as Shark Boy, who had returned with his catch, stood cleaning fish while the blacktip reef sharks stirred themselves into a frenzy. He threw a rock from time to time to keep them at bay, but otherwise remained in the shallows, unconcerned. This guy, a kid really, needs his own TV show. He lit a fire and grilled the fish, and soon, after lunch, we were back in the water, following Shark Boy as he led us on a drift snorkel, where we floated like aquanauts, flying with the streaming current around the headland of the channel, as the tide ebbed toward the ocean. It was a fast current and as we flew over the curiosities below, we got a sense of a fish’s true character. Did it go with the flow, or did it fight it? Some just glided alongside us, and others struggled mightily, titanic manifestations of fishy willpower, as they resisted the current. And the sharks? They did whatever the hell they wanted. Up-flow, down-flow, whatever. A shark goes where it wants to go. But there were fewer now—dozens, rather than hundreds—and I wondered where they all went, until later, when we hopped in the boat, and launched ourselves over the sides in the middle of the channel, and there they were, the grays at least, circling forty feet below, in water that descended into a stellar, inky blue void, their forms still glittering with sunlight, like ferocious stars of the deep.