“DEET be a good chemical. It kills insects fast.”
What is he babbling about?
“No more mosquitoes and many fewer flies. DEET be the chemical of progress.”
Oh … he meant DDT.
“Children on island no so bright as before we use DEET, but they no die from malaria. You want snack cake?” He held out a vile, crumbling yellow rhomboid on which a fly was actively laying eggs.
I was starving, and calculated that fly eggs must contain at least a bit of protein. “Actually, yes.”
We drove for miles while I digested his tasty offering. I became chatty. “Quite a thing, this nuclear war, isn’t it?”
“We used to nuclear war here in Kiribati. Nuclear war invented on our gracious islands.”
Uh-oh. I felt a politically correct moment coming on—you know, having to make the empathetic face and show solidarity for these Spam-eating bozos kicked out of their grass huts when the Yanks or the Frogs did their H-bomb tests in the fifties. “Oh, really?”
“Yes. Most of the people on this island are atomic refugees of some sort.”
Borrrrrrrrrrrrrrring.
“Our home islands too full of green glow to go back to.”
I hate political correctness. One moment you’re at the pub making a few biff jokes with some mates, and next thing you know, you’re on trial for throwing an empty lager can at the village lesbian.
“We live a simple life here.”
Will this bloke’s plea for pity ever end?
“Rice. Delicious tinned food from Fiji and Australia. Satellite television. I like Detroit Pistons basketball team.”
“Say, driver, there’s a local word I’m wondering the meaning of. Maybe you can help me.”
“My English be shit.”
“Not to worry. The word is vakubati. Vakubati. Does that ring a bell?”
He slammed on the brakes and began screaming. Plum-faced, he lunged out of the driver’s seat and pointed at me, screaming, “Vakubati! Get out of car, vakubati!”
“Fuck you, Tonto. I have a hotel to get to.”
I scootched over, put the still-running car in gear and peeled off, chickens and all. How dare he try to leave me marooned on some needle-thin chicken path when I, Raymond Gunt, had a job to get to. My mission—well, escaping LACEY, for one. And then my actual job as a cameraman: to document twenty-four soul-dead Americans fucking each other’s brains out before they descended into cannibalism, all for some tiny sliver of crap money they’d only piss away within a few weeks of winning. The saving grace was that this absurd contest would be happening on an island semi-distant from LACEY with absolutely no police, no military and no legal oversight. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime gifts bestowed upon us by the gods to whom I recently wrote a thank-you letter.
DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) is one of the best-known synthetic insecticides. It was used with great success in the second half of World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and troops in tropical zones. The Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948 “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.” Its production and use skyrocketed in the fifties and sixties. However, it was banned in the U.S. in 1972 because once it is in an ecosystem, anything larger than a mosquito is totally fucked. If one thing can be said to rape an ecosystem, DDT would be it, and yet for decades people were crazy for the stuff. We are a wacky species, we humans.
The Pacific Proving Grounds is the name of a number of sites in the Pacific Ocean used by the United States to conduct nuclear testing between 1946 and 1962. In July 1947, after the first atomic weapons testing at the Bikini Atoll—yes, that’s where the word “bikini” comes from—the U.S. entered into an agreement with the United Nations to govern the “Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands as a strategic trusteeship territory.”
Right.
Let’s remember that the United Nations at one point existed largely to serve the needs of the U.S. and the West, whereas now it’s a free-for-all of pork and smokescreens. That’s several metaphors in one sentence. Fun fact: The United Nations building in New York City is the only place in all of North America where smoking is still permitted indoors.
Anyway, the Trust Territory is composed of two thousand islands spread over 3 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean.
One hundred and five above-ground nuclear tests were conducted there, many of which were of extremely high yield. The largest was the 15-megaton Castle Bravo shot of 1954.
33
Turns out the Hotel Deet was a mere half-mile off. A sign pointing away from the chicken path read, THE DEET WELCOMES YOU.