Playground, page 4
He did not mean the map itself, although the map did lie. Almost all print maps of the Pacific did, in showing things that, at scale, should have been invisible. Even if the ocean map had been the size of Turi’s nine-foot-wide office wall, the twelve-hundred-mile-long chain of a hundred and twenty–some islands and atolls of French Polynesia would have taken up just over one foot, and Didier’s tiny island would still be only four-hundredths of an inch across.
But the real liar was the man on the other end of the call, the one who bent the truth in two on behalf of the President of French Polynesia. That title was itself a bit of a lie, given that the so-called overseas country over which the so-called President governed was itself a fabrication. The twelve-hundred-mile-long archipelago was not a real country. It was a collectivity, ultimately administered by France, a country that hung on to the former colony despite the mounting costs of ownership.
And the so-called President’s man was pouring falsehoods into Didier’s ear.
“The Council of Ministers believed they had your approval.”
“Bien sûr, bien sûr,” Makatea’s mayor kept saying, which in the local dialect meant bullshit. But the mayor of the island that ought to have been invisible on any but a house-sized ocean map had to admire how well the President and all his ministers on Tahiti knew how to play the game.
“Monsieur le President signed the memorandum of understanding with the American consortium several years ago. It has long been on file for anyone to object to. The representative from the Tuamotus expressed her interest. We’ve received the environmental impact studies for the pilot project. All parties are ready to proceed to the next stage of the joint venture.”
But when had anyone announced that Makatea was the next stage? Now, apparently. An impact study: When had that been done? “I don’t believe that we ever saw any of these American . . . environmental engineers in our lagoon.”
“The ministers understood that they had the approval of your representative and of all concerned.”
There was nothing safe to say, and the mayor of Makatea said just that.
“Congratulations, Monsieur Le Maire. This is exactly what you and your party have been working to make happen for years. Am I right? Hello?”
Didier had no party. The only thing he’d been working for as mayor was the survival of his eighty-two constituents, including himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The signal seems to be breaking up.”
“Seriously? Didn’t the OPT just put in a new cell tower? Quite a gift, for a few dozen people. I was just saying that you must be very happy. Who knows where this initiative might lead? The pilot program alone is sure to boost the well-being of the entire country.”
Certainly. Of course. Except that the country this deal promised to boost was itself a work of fiction.
Didier Turi hated politics. In high school, he’d almost failed civics. He never wanted to be tāvana of anything. The only thing Didier Turi had ever really wanted to do was start in a World Cup as a striker for Les Bleus. Barring that, he was fine doing home repairs and handyman work on Makatea’s old and crumbling buildings. For most of his adult life, doing the latter while daydreaming of the former was all the happiness he needed.
Like everyone else on Makatea, Didier had figured that the previous office holder—the real Mister Mayor—would guide the island forever. Jules Amaru had a vision for how to save the island. Jules Amaru could charm and cajole and make peace and call in favors and blast through his days in high gear on half a shot of kava with a coffee chaser. Jules Amaru managed to outplay the always-circling Australian entrepreneurs who wanted to come in and “complete” the abandoned phosphate mining. Jules Amaru knew how to get Papeete to cough up a budget sufficient to sustain the island and stave off disaster. For years, Jules Amaru had fought the island’s predators to a draw.
But Jules Amaru died in his sleep of an exploded heart.
Didier Turi, on the other hand, was just a guy who used to kick a ball around a little bit better than any other Mihiroa guy his age. A local hero, for leading the vastly outnumbered island to a miraculous fourth-place finish in the once-every-few-years all-Tuamotu tournament. Someone you’d love to have a drink with while throwing a few rounds of darts in a pub, if the island had had a pub.
Just do it for a year, his friends told him. You’re the only person on Makatea who doesn’t have any enemies.
It didn’t feel like much of a qualification.
You’ve never held an unpopular position.
He’d never held any position. Didier struggled with basic economics. He knew nothing whatsoever about history or sociology. His gāti—his clan—was undistinguished. The farthest he’d ever traveled was Wellington. He wasn’t sure where he stood on the whole development question. He wasn’t even a particularly convincing Catholic.
Exactly, all his self-appointed advisors said. Man of the people.
His friends guilted Didier into running on patriotic grounds. They claimed that if the opposition got in, the Australian entrepreneurs who wanted to reopen the phosphate mines would be running the island within two years. Didier ran. He promised nothing. His whole campaign sounded diffident and apologetic. He won in a landslide, forty-nine to nine.
Two years later, he was still on the job and the island was still above water. It turned out there had been nothing much to fear about being a good tāvana. Nothing until now. Now Didier Turi was playing way above his league.
Jules Amaru had studied economics in Montpelier. Jules Amaru could hold his own against the Popa’ā. Jules Amaru would have known how to deal with the Californians and their nonexistent environmental impact statement. Jules Amaru had mana—the respect of everyone—major, big-time mana. But Jules Amaru was dead.
Jules Amaru’s son, however, was alive and well and operating a climbing outfitter business on the edge of the village, not far from the towering falaise. Hone Amaru and Didier Turi had gone to school together in the one-classroom school in the center of the village, although Didier was two years older than the old mayor’s son. The two had liked each other well enough growing up, in the rivalrous way of boys playing on different teams and going to different churches.
But even dislike would not have kept Didier from seeking out Hone Amaru’s counsel. The man’s climbing business was one of few ventures—alongside the pair of tiny pensions and the crab and copra exports—that the island had for making hard currency. Hone’s business was the island’s great hope. In Didier’s eyes, Hone Amaru should have been Makatea’s tāvana. The mayor’s sincere desire was for a peaceful transfer of power, any month now.
Hone Amaru was otherwise engaged. He had spread the word on the Internet that Makatea offered the best rock-climbing challenges in the South Pacific. Every month or two, a beautiful, sleek catamaran would sweep in and discharge a Zodiac or two of beautiful, sleek young Popa’ā—thin, tall, strong, desirable white people possessed of the most impressive arms and legs. These kids with their bottomless purses would proceed to scale Makatea’s spectacular two-hundred-foot cliffs. They’d stay a day or two, probing new ways of getting up to the top of the plateau, sometimes without ropes. They’d tour the ruined towns lost to the jungle and marvel at what the island had once been. In those two days, the children would spend like gods, and all the local boats would go up. Then they’d reboard their massive catamaran and head off on their next adventure, somewhere in the wide and lucky regions that composed their playground.
But the latest party of climbers had come and gone a few weeks before, and no new sleek catamarans loomed anywhere on the horizon. No danger of interrupting Hone Amaru by dropping in unannounced. Didier hopped on the mayoral motorbike—the one great perk of his office—and sped down the gravel path from Town Hall to Makatea Climbing Adventure. The slick new sign, hand-painted onto gesso-primed particleboard, even listed an email and hashtag, on the chance that some wandering adventurer uploaded a photo of it to social media.
Didier found Hone rearranging the wall of ropes, carabiners, quickdraws, and belay devices as if to reassure the impeccably maintained gear that dazzling young foreigners would soon be by again.
“Eh. Hone. Ia orana. You busy?”
The old mayor’s son shrugged and gestured all around him. A tough place to stay busy. “Eh. You know. What’s up?”
“A call from Papeete.”
Hone Amaru grimaced as Didier fed him the details. The old memorandum of understanding. The President of French Polynesia’s intention to lease Temao, Makatea’s ruined port. The California consortium’s shiny new permit to build a factory to manufacture modular floating-city parts. Didier poured out his fears and doubts on his old soccer rival and teammate, hoping Hone Amaru might give up his marginal business and take hold of the reins of power, if only Didier could make the looming crisis clear enough.
The news caught Hone on the chin. He sat down on the top of the wicker desk that was command central for the commercial doings of Makatea Escalade Aventure.
“Incredible. It’s really moving forward, then? I thought the Americans were just . . . shitting around. You know how they do.”
“It’s real. They want to start the proof-of-concept test project next year.”
Hone squinted at his shelf full of ascenders and descenders, as if Makatea’s future lay just beyond it. He shook his head. “And you are asking me . . . what, exactly?”
Didier flinched. He would lie in his bunk that night, still smarting from the question’s harshness. Wasn’t it obvious? He needed help. And he was humbling himself to get it.
“I’m wondering how Le Maire . . .” Le vrai maire, he meant. “How would your father have handled this?”
“Handled? My father?” Hone stared at the question as if at a pig that had wandered into his shop. “My father would have been all over this. He’d be making giant welcome banners and raising them on all the beaches!”
“But isn’t it . . . just more colonialism?”
Hone grinned and whistled like a sandpiper at the fanciest word ever to come from his old schoolmate’s mouth. “For us? Always. Everything. My father just tried to pick the colonizers who offered the best terms.”
DIDIER MOTORED PAST the solar farm on his way back to the Mairie. The four hundred new high-efficiency panels tilted themselves to the sun in a clearing in the vegetation along the old gravel road where the mining train once ran. A single-story battery plant and maintenance shed stood behind the panels. The facility eliminated the need for diesel generators, except in emergencies. The island’s savings were immense.
Manutahi Roa stood outside in the lane between the two installations, cleaning the panels yet again with his special formula and his custom squeegee. He was, by Didier’s calculations, cleaning the panels about three times as often as they needed cleaning, and all the attention was starting to hurt power production more than it helped. But the mayor figured that the secretary of energy’s pride justified the energy overhead.
Manutahi waved and shouted as Didier dismounted, glad for the surprise company. “Hey, Chief! Making the rounds? Not a bad morning for it.”
Didier agreed. A little muggy, too many mosquitoes, two degrees too warm, but as always, a fine morning, all things considered.
Manutahi was excited. “Come see this. Good news is raining down on us!”
They went into the house at the back of the installation, where Manutahi popped open a tiny laptop and pulled up a spreadsheet. “Check this out. We set a record last week. Meeting or beating the estimates, every day. It’s fantastic, Chief. Showered with energy, and we own it.”
The numbers were indeed terrific. “Ah, good work. Bravo! Well done.” The mayor’s need to consult one more confidant before dropping his bombshell on the entire island shriveled inside him.
Manutahi didn’t notice. “Such a good feeling. Farming the sun! With our own freshwater springs and the most fertile soil anywhere in the Tuamotus. . . .”
It was a bold claim. The Tuamotus spread across an area larger than Western Europe from Portugal to Germany. But crops did grow better on Makatea than on the other seventy-some islands in the chain. Vegetables sprang out of the ground, because of the magic rock. The rock that had all but killed the island.
“You’re getting us there, Chief. You’re going to save us. Even the fishing is starting to come back. With a little tourism, and now that we’re making our own energy, we can turn our backs on those collaborationist bastards in Papeete. We can finally tell the Australians to go fuck themselves. Vive l’indépendance, am I right?”
Didier wanted to tell his former co-captain of the Makatea starting eleven that fending off the Australians now seemed like fun and games. Compared to the Americans, the Australians were old friends.
The mayor looked over Manutahi’s spreadsheet numbers and again applauded them. He stood up to leave. Overwhelmed with loneliness, he sat back down.
“You okay, Chief?”
“I’m fine.”
“Was there something you wanted to talk about?”
“No, nothing special.” Why spoil a good man’s happy day? He already had the answer he’d come looking for. “Just thought I’d drop in.”
“Glad you did, Chief.” Manutahi Roa grinned like a man whose dreams of world domination were coming together perfectly. He held up his squeegee and bucket. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go raise the yields a little bit more. Power to the people!”
Didier raised his fist, grinned his mayor’s grin, and mounted the motorbike.
“You should ditch that old gas-guzzler, Chief. They make electrics now, you know.”
The world’s cheapest electric motorcycle would bust the mayor’s budget for the next two years. Didier gave the starter of his Chinese knock-off a kick, twisted the throttle, and skittered away back to his solitary office in the Mairie.
HE THOUGHT ABOUT STOPPING IN to find some solace with the Widow Poretu. He went to her at long intervals when he couldn’t hold out any longer. He’d gotten clearance on the pragmatic sin from all the stakeholder parties, even the angels. Didier loved his real wife, Roti, as he loved the island, but she had gone off sex altogether long ago. A few years into the marriage, it had become for her both painful and unseemly. They had tried for a while longer, but the attempts at perseverance just made them both miserable.
They still shared a bed at times, though less and less often. Roti could rarely sleep next to his constant twitching.
“I’ve failed you,” Roti told him. “I made a promise that I can’t keep.”
“You’ve failed no one,” he insisted. “I’m failing you, by still asking you for it!” But he was too young for celibacy. The stress of it would poison him. And he would not make himself come, like some crazy person living in a self-invented fantasy, faithless to her anyway, in his mind.
Roti let Didier know, through oblique but unmistakable suggestions, that he was to do what he needed to get by. All she asked was to be spared the details. This was not easy, on an island of eighty-two people, most of them honorary aunties and cousins.
The idea wrecked Didier. A hundred years ago, Makateans were as healthy about sex as any culture ever had been. Like climbing or running or body surfing, but seasoned with love. Possession was not the thing. You could no more own a person than you could own land or the sky above the land or the ocean off the edge of the island.
Then the Popa’ā happened. And there was Didier, crossing himself and kneeling in the pew of one of the island’s two churches. Two churches for eighty-two people! Catholic and Mormon, and in the former was the mayor, head down and praying to the angels (because he couldn’t make eye contact with the Virgin Mary, whose perfection embarrassed him), saying, “It’s still adultery, isn’t it? Even if my wife says it’s okay?”
To his astonishment, the angels said, Emergency adultery.
So, for the better part of a year, the lovely and long-suffering Widow Poretu, ten years his senior, had been the cure for pretty much every ailment life could throw at Didier Turi. She made no claims on him. She liked that he came and never stayed long. She did not mind the judgments of others. Her mild contempt for most of her human neighbors made her the most discreet person in the Tuamotus. If her beloved songbirds were happy and well, the larger bipeds could rot in the hells of their own making.
But in recent weeks, the widow had had less time for Didier, unless he was armed and dangerous. The call from the President’s office had disarmed the mayor, and under the stress of the impending catastrophe, he would have been hard-pressed to be dangerous to any woman, even Auli’i Cravalho.
What he really wanted was to talk. To ask the widow her opinion about the Americans, and how to proceed with the matter. But that he would never do. To talk to the Widow about such a deep concern would be true infidelity to Roti. But he could not talk to Roti about the crisis, either. She would simply tell him to do what he knew in his heart was right.
What he really needed was someone to tell him what that might be.
He took the long way home, along the cliffs. Power, the mayor decided, was an isolating thing, especially when power was powerless. For the rest of the day, he told no one else about the call from Papeete. He spent the afternoon keeping the wheels of government turning, which on that day meant listening to a dispute over a flock of marauding chickens.
He went to the evening’s gathering at the community center, but he couldn’t enjoy the music, let alone sing along. That night he lay in the middle of his kapok wilderness, listening to the sound of the surf a hundred meters outside his window. Of course. Of course not. Of course. Of course not.
Still half under the drug of sleep, he got up before the sun and sat down at the Mairie’s laptop. He wrote and rewrote and deleted and then redrafted a letter to the President’s man in Papeete, cc’ing the representative from the Tuamotus. The finished letter read, in full:
We the people of Makatea cannot move forward with this plan without a referendum involving the entire island.
