“I’ve heard,” Cooper muses, “they are promiscuous.”
The man winces, his mouth working as if on a jawbreaker. “Like rabbits?” he says. “Jungle bunnies maybe?”
“I didn’t mean to be insulting,” Cooper says quickly. “I’m just telling you what I heard.”
“Crap like that makes my job a joy, you know that?”
Cooper raises both hands in surrender, then asks: “Am I going to work with the Marshallese?”
“You will be among them.” Breathless already, the liaison gulps for air. He appears to teeter ever-so-slightly from foot to foot. As big as he is, it seems he seldom sits still. Sourly he says, “They do all of the menial labor on this island.”
“Do they mind?”
“Hell, it looks like they don’t mind a God damn thing. But they mind!”
Cooper nods agreeably. “I guess you mind too.”
“And you don’t?”
“Sweet Jesus, Mr. Norman, I just got here. Nobody’s told me a thing!”
“They won’t either. Do you know these islands have the highest per capita rate of attempted suicide in the world?” The liaison’s face is nearly the color of liver. “This place will fuck you up, son!”
Cooper would like to believe that the man is a jokester, hazing him for a laugh. But until the old man reveals the joke, Cooper feels an urgency to keep talking: “The Marshallese don’t live on Kwajalein, right?”
The liaison nods, seeming calmer now. “They live next door, on a little pile of sand and shit called Ebeye. We ferry them in every morning so they can do our dirty work, then we ferry them back. They can’t be here after sundown.”
“What, it’s like some kind of apartheid?”
At last the liaison smiles. And Cooper thinks of attempting a smile of his own.
“Keep talking like that,” the old man says, “and you’ll win me over.”
“Does the Colonel know,” Cooper begins but then thinks better of it. This can’t be the liaison’s job to alienate every newcomer.
“Fuck the Colonel.” Art Norman lets one hand fly up as if to flash the finger. “I’m two years away from retirement. They couldn’t find someone to do my job if they paid twice the salary. Which would still be shit.”
“Look,” says Cooper warily, “I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.”
The man raises his flaking, freckled brow in surprise. “Are you trying to be funny?”
“Did you think that was funny?” Cooper asks.
The old man sits wearily on the bed, lays down the paper he pulled off the EKG, then shakes his head in dismay or disgust. “I know I’m a fucker, Cooper. I’m not having a good day. And I know you’ve had a hard time.” He sighs: “I’m sorry.”
Cooper searches for something reassuring to say but can think only of sleep. His ass aches from sitting too long in the sling of the wheelchair. He elbows the arm rests to readjust his position but it doesn’t help. His arms itch where the IVs were, his mouth tastes as if he’s been sucking a handful of rust, and his right thigh is beginning to send him a deep, throbbing signal of distress.
When he looks up finally, he sees the liaison watching him as it seems everyone has been watching him today, to see what he’ll do next.
Wiping one freckled hand over his forehead, Art says, “I’m not exactly giving you the official version, I guess you could tell.”
“Fire away, Art. I want the straight dope.”
A bit of sunshine glows from the liaison’s face. Without preface, he begins: “Fact one: for at least 2,000 years the Marshallese have lived from hand to mouth, day to day—taking what they could from the lagoons and the plant life—on flea-speck atolls whose aggregate size would fit inside Washington, D.C., but whose ocean territory is as vast as half the continental United States.”
“Okay,” says Cooper dutifully. “They’re tough and resourceful, these people.”
“You miss the point, son. These people have no place to go. Do you know the ocean’s rising? Highest elevation out here is twenty-eight feet—and that’s the old missile launch-mound at the other end of this island, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Actual average elevation is more like four feet. Before they’re done, they’ll all be living in public housing outside Los Angeles.”
“Four feet?” Cooper asks.
“Maybe six, what difference does it make?”
“All right,” says Cooper. “I’ll give you eight feet and still they’re screwed.”
“Now you get it.” Art nods his approval and Cooper finds this reassuring, as if talking with his own father, who has always possessed the right answer.
“Fact two: The Marshallese have evolved into one of the most compliant, self-effacing people in the world because how else could they have survived together on these tiny rafts of sand? Unfortunately, their amiability has made them thoroughly exploitable. Spain, then Germany, then Japan, and now the United States have all held the ri-aje hostage in one form or another.”
“You said they don’t like to talk about themselves.”
“That’s right.”
“And they don’t wear shorts.”
“Don’t get fixated on the details, Cooper. I’m talking big picture right now.”
“There’s a lot to keep in mind, big picture or small,” Cooper says.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Then you’re my Jiminy Cricket?”
“Your what?” he barks.
“You know, my conscience. Like in the Disney cartoon?”
“I need you to focus, Cooper. If you’re too drugged up, just tell me and I’ll come back.”
“I’m fine. I can listen to this. It’s fascinating.”
The liaison eyes him briefly, then nods as if to confirm that Cooper is sincere. “Okay,” he says. “Fact three: the Marshallese never developed a sense of time or consequence as Westerners know it, since everything out here remains relatively constant, and certainly they never developed the notion of future, since there was little or nothing to work toward, nothing to possess, and therefore nothing to save.”
“Nothing to save?”
“For these people there is no reason to save, do you hear what I’m saying? There’s no winter here, no reason to hunker down and wait it out. A typhoon’s not going to last but a day or two before it moves on. This sense of ongoingness—”
“Infinitude?”
“Fine, infinitude—it has its effects, Cooper.”
“Like the Australian aborigines who believe we live in a world unbounded by time?”
“No, not like the Australian aborigines,” Art says. “There is time here, just not Western time. Not consequential time. Not deadline time.”
“So that’s why Americans think they’re lazy?”
“That goes without saying.”
Cooper closes his eyes and thinks of lazing in the rope hammock on Lillian’s redwood deck after the sun has burned off the Montara fog finally and a warm breeze rises from the meadow across the street, carrying with it the salty scent of ocean waves and the sweet smell