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By Root 843 0

led to believe that we inhabited the center of the world, that the rest of the globe spun according to our whims and priorities. This can be a heady feeling. Should the Namibians have electricity? We decide. Should the Laotians be able to trade sugarcane? If they would just ask nicely. Is the Haitian government getting uppity? Fuck ’em. We’re taking them out. This tends to attract a certain kind of person, and when I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed my gray suit, my Brooks Brothers shirt, my silk tie, and my soft leather Italian shoes, I realized that I was not such a person. I felt like a tourist, dreamily walking through a life that was not meant to be mine. Some people are attracted to power. I’d rather be plucking at a ukulele on a faraway beach. I was not a soft-leather-Italian-shoe kind of man. I was a flip-flop man. And as a flip-flop man I knew what needed to be done. Kiribati may not have been paradise, but I was ready to keep looking. I knew how to do it too. My wife would have to find another job in the South Pacific.

IT WAS SO EASY, REALLY. Unexpectedly so.

“The South Pacific would do nothing for my career,” Sylvia had countered.

“Career, schmeer.” Blue, blue water.

“And it would mean a pay cut.”

“I have money, and if it runs out, well, we can live off love.” Swaying palm trees.

“But I do think the South Pacific would be a great place to start a family.”

“Er…”

My wife, clearly, was an out-of-the-box thinker. It had been my understanding that when women felt the urge to procreate, it was usually accompanied by a need to settle down, to own a house, perhaps even in the suburbs, where the schools are rumored to be good and the neighbors chirpy. Not Sylvia. The motherhood instinct had somehow elicited a desire to flee, to remove herself as far as possible from America. She too had experienced the bewildering dissonance, the extreme culture shock that was the inevitable result of moving from a place like Kiribati to a city like Washington. Perhaps she wasn’t as inclined to romanticizing island life as I was, but there was enough of the islander in her for her to conclude that, all things being equal, she’d rather have children on an island far, far away. “It takes a village,” she said. “There are no villages left in America.” What fortuitous timing, I thought. I also had the urge to flee. And if it meant that sex might lead to a little bundle of consequences, well, I thought, abstractly, that would be pretty wonderful too.

Soon there was a job for Sylvia. The organization that she had worked for in Kiribati, the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific, had asked her to be the regional manager, a position that was based in Fiji. Fiji, of course, was not Kiribati. We knew this from experience. After we left Kiribati, we had spent a month traveling around the South Pacific, including to Fiji. Knowing its status as a favored destination for the rich and the beautiful, we were fairly confident that we were unlikely to encounter the deprivation that had so defined our experience in Kiribati. If Fiji was good enough for Nicole Kidman, we reasoned, it was good enough for us. Suddenly, life was looking pretty good. We had a plan. A fine plan, I thought. We would move to Fiji, the happy islands. I would write a book about Kiribati, and if that didn’t work out, there was always yam farming. Sylvia would do noble and uplifting work for the good people of the South Pacific. Our house would echo with the pitter-patter of little feet. With the future looking so bright, I felt confident enough to start hitting the snooze button.

And then our plan went up in smoke. I arrived at work one morning, comfortably after 9 A.M., more like 10 A.M., well rested, refreshed, and as I scrolled through my e-mail, there in the midst of innumerable agendas and consultant reports was a message with the heading COUP! That caught my eye. It was a mass mailing sent by an acquaintance of ours in Fiji. We’re safe now, it began, which I thought was a very lively way to begin an e-mail. The message was a stream-of-consciousness