"Neal, you're a former paramedic," I said. "What should we do here?"

Neal crouched to do an a.s.sessment. "He's definitely not dead. Doesn't seem to be anything broken. Let's call the police when we get into town."

Our Aussie friend was relieved. "You guys are the best."

"Always happy to help a fellow traveller."

"Good on ya. Here's four hits of Ecstasy, and if you get desperate, there's exactly one flush toilet on this island that works. It's in the Mormon high school building. If you act all serious and pretend to like G.o.d, you're in, and there's five minutes of heaven awaiting you. Cheers!"

And our fellow traveller was off.

30.

We looked at the pills in their Ziploc baggie. I was about to tuck them into my pocket when Neal said, "You know, Ray, why not give these pills a try right now?"

I considered this for a moment. "Hmmmm ... You know, Neal, I like your att.i.tude. Indeed, let's say 'yes!' to life."

We each popped one; they tasted bitter, sort of metallic. Sarah and Elspeth declined, and we got back into the van, Neal at the wheel. He asked, "Sarah, why do we have to buy groceries? Someone in your position shouldn't be doing scoutwork like that."

"Because of the nuclear crisis, all food shipments to the island from Australia and Fiji have been stopped indefinitely. The locals don't know this yet-we have a one-hour head start to secure all we need for the shoot. We have to clean the stores out before word spreads and looting begins. Let's just go in, max out our credit cards and exit without leaving a ripple in the water."

The goats before us had cleared to make way for our van. Fortune was smiling on us.

Gilbertese, or Kiribati, is a language from the Austronesian family. The word "Kiribati" is just the modern rendition of "Gilberts," after Captain Thomas Gilbert, who happened upon the Gilbert Islands in 1788. Unlike many languages in the Pacific region, Kiribati is far from extinct, and most speakers use it daily. About thirty percent of Kiribati speakers are fully bilingual, also speaking English.

FUN FACT: One early difficulty in translating books into Kiribati was references to features such as "mountain," a geographical phenomenon unknown to the people of the islands of Kiribati (heard only in the myths from Samoa). Such adjustments are common to all languages. For example, the Gilbertese word for "airplane" is te wanikiba-"the canoe that flies."

About 107,500 people speak Gilbertese, as follows: In Kiribati: 98,000 In Fiji: 5,300 In Nauru: 1,700 In Solomon Islands: 1,230 In Tuvalu: 870 In Vanuatu: 370 In Ooga Booga: 13 Okay ...

I'm not proud of what happened next, but history demands a full account.

I remember beginning to giggle as we pulled into an appalling slum. "A slum?" says I. "How can there be a slum in the middle of the tropical Pacific? What the h.e.l.l?"

Neal was agog. "Ray, this is Betio! The magic slum of the Pacific! I saw it on BBC4 at the Russian k.u.m Guzzling Traktor s.l.u.ts' lounge when they were giving me a pedicure. All the islanders living here were relocated from their old coral atolls because of the nuclear testing. But there's f.u.c.k all for anybody to do here, so they sit in squalor for a living. Is that a verb ... to, uh ... squalor?"

The Ecstasy was kicking in. I ventured, "I'm squalling. These islanders sont squalling. Nous nous squallons."

Neal pulled up to a cinder-block grocery store and parked. Sarah and Elspeth vanished inside, while we sat there transfixed by a shiny piece of red plastic hanging from the store's eaves. It turned sort of rainbow colours the longer we stared at it. Then it started to make faint chiming sounds. A wind chime was our initial musing.

"Neal, that piece of plastic is f.u.c.king amazing."

"It is magnificent. It wouldn't be out of place in a New York art gallery."

We got out of the car to better appreciate the plastic. Its magnificence blossomed ever outward, fractally, and I felt connected to all life-not just my own, but also the lives of all human beings on the planet, and possibly the universe.

Neal said, "Ray, we're just grains of sand in the scheme of things."

"Neal, you are so right."

"All we are is dust in the wind."

"Look, it's turning blue-laser beam blue."

We stood there gawping until a fly landed in my mouth and I horked it out, laughing. It was terribly funny. It just was. Neal thought so too, and we both laughed to the point where our stomachs dry-heaved. Small children with sticks stopped and stared at us, while stray dogs avoided us, rightly fearing our magnificent grasp of the true fabric of the universe.

We were s.h.i.tf.u.c.k stoned.

"I must own that piece of plastic, Neal."

"To the victors belong the spoils."

"Give me a leg up."

"Sure thing, Ray."

Neal kneeled and offered me his cupped hands. I stuck a foot in and he lifted me up to make a swipe at our piece of sacred plastic, but I overreached and fell onto my b.u.t.t, my elbow landing in, of all things, an octopus somebody had abandoned, goopy and s.m.e.g.m.acious. I shrieked like a wee girl. Neal found this utterly hilarious-it wasn't. I frantically removed the fine linen shirt that had once belonged to poor, doomed Arnaud du Puis, while Neal sat doubled over atop some plastic milk crates from Australia until he could catch his breath. As I sc.r.a.ped the worst of the octopular sludge from my arms, Neal hopped on one of the crates and grabbed the piece of sacred red plastic from its string, placing it in his dapper linen jacket's inside pocket.

"Neal, that's my piece of red plastic."

"Sorry, Ray. Fate gave you one chance to grab the bra.s.s ring, and you missed. Then fate gave me a chance, and the sacred talisman is mine."

"You thieving b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Sorry, Ray. Law of the seas."

"It's no such thing."

"Ray, I'll let you look at the plastic every so often, but fair's fair."

One thought went through my head: Neal must die. As he turned to walk back to the van, I jumped him from behind. To this, he said, "Oh Christ. Ray, just cool down. Maybe they have some ice cream in the store. Let's go get some."

"Die, you smarmy b.a.s.t.a.r.d." I tried strangling him.

"Okay, Ray, but I'm telling you, this'll hurt you more than it does me." He effortlessly unclamped my arms and hurled me into the ashen remains of what must have once been a sizable pile of snack cake wrappers and fishbones.

I coughed salty dust and watched Neal enter the Island Mart. Suddenly, feelings of love and brotherhood welled up in me for my slave friend. "Neal! Brother! I love you!" But Neal was already inside. I followed, shouting, "Neal! I love you! You're my brother! I'm sorry I tried to kill you," as I pushed through the door.

Neal was staring at a pile of tinned goods at the end of an aisle. Elspeth approached me with a cart full of tinned meats and whispered, "Raymond, for f.u.c.k sake, get your s.h.i.t together. Stop shouting, we're trying to fly under the radar."

Sarah was speaking with the manager. She turned to look at me: shirtless, raving, enslimed and sugar-frosted with ashes of trash. I waved at her. A glint in her eyes told me she had a plan afoot, and that I'd better not interfere. In a voice loud enough for the ten other customers in the store to overhear, Sarah explained, "That's Raymond. He's in the final stage of AIDS. Just look how red his head is. The TV network volunteered to take him to a hospice in Brisbane, but, as you can see, the virus has gone to his brain. Poor thing. It's the fantastically contagious strain of the disease, too. I have no idea why he's not wearing a shirt, but I think that goo on his arms might be leakage from suppurating lymph nodes."

Elspeth parked her shopping cart next to Sarah. "And that person staring at the tinned luncheon meats is Neal, Raymond's f.u.c.kbuddy. It's a modern, liberated term that bespeaks the proud man love of those two brave souls. They're political, those two are. It's inspiring the way they still go at it, even in Raymond's final, sad, wildly infectious days."

The man running the store now looked so stressed out I could practically hear his own T-cells suiciding.

Sarah went on, "It's hard to believe Raymond escaped his bio-containment stall at Bonriki Airport-a lovely airport, by the way. But don't worry, we'll have him out of your store in a jiffy, just as soon as we can pay for the multiple carts of groceries required by our crew. Our silly supply ship got marooned in the trash vortex. They called it propeller fatigue. The ocean basically turned into white glue around it."

Elspeth added, "Such a tragedy that vortex is. I hope humanity one day finds a way of making things right with Mother Nature." She paused and added, "Go green!"

The store manager was drenched in sweat and vibrating with worry. Sarah dragged him to the till, saying, "Do you have any jams, jellies or preserves? They make such lovely souvenirs."

"Look!" shrieked Elspeth. "Thong bikinis for sale!"

By this time, the store had totally cleared out.

I heard Neal calling me and found him in aisle 3: Tinned Luncheon Meats.

"Holy s.h.i.t!"

"It's Spam, Ray, an entire aisle of Spam-or, rather, a whole aisle of products highly similar to Spam, yet not really Spam!"

It was almost holy the way the store's sole functioning fluorescent tube lit aisle 3's primary-coloured grids of rectangular tins from all over the planet-although mostly they seemed to be from China.

"Neal, most of these cans are from f.u.c.king China."

Neal was crestfallen. "I may be snackered on Ecstasy, Ray, but no way in a million years could you make me eat what's inside any of these tins. Christ only knows what's in them."

Drywall Melamine Hitchhikers Nurses Diseased sheep lungs Crisps Cat food too scary for cats Jellied donkey p.i.s.s Yoga mats Vinyl pool toys Venereal ovaries Braided gerbil urethras Shredded car parts Dolphins Neon tetras Tetra Pak boxes Broken dreams Kittens with mittens Mutton leavings Silicon chips Pregnant fetal pigs Unsold Shrek DVDs That bucket of blood from Carrie Angioplasty sc.r.a.pings w.a.n.k tissues Biopsy leftovers Sentient colon polyps I sat down on the floor and opened a sample can of G.o.d's Meat with its little key. Its clear jelly bits soaked up a ray of sun coming through a plastic roof vent. f.u.c.king marvellous: like the beginning of the universe, really. Subtle beige chunks of tallow surrounded by pinkish grey mystery tissue: fine Roman marble! f.u.c.k that piece of red plastic Neal stole from me!

I scooped into the can, gorging like a seagull on bites of its holy contents. Here was the answer to the mysteries of life. Here I found truth. Here I found something to live for. Here I ... here I blacked out.

Potted meat food product, or potted meat, is made of cooked meat product, often creamed, minced or ground, which is poured into cans, sealed and heat-processed. Beef, pork, chicken and turkey are used, as well as non-skeletal meats. What is a non-skeletal meat, you ask? You may regret having asked. Non-skeletal meats include organs and glands, as well as extremities such as feet and tails or retinas or eyelids or udders.

The canning produces a h.o.m.ogeneous texture and flavour, but lower-cost ingredients can also affect quality. For example, mechanically separated chicken or turkey is a paste-like product made by forcing crushed bone and tissue through a sieve to separate bone from tissue. In the United States, mechanically separated poultry has been used in poultry products since 1969. But the real question here is, What do the Chinese use in their potted meats? Insert nightmare here.

From The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux (1992) "It was a theory of mine that former cannibals of Oceania now feasted on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. 'Long pig,' as they called a cooked human being in much of Melanesia. It was a fact that the people-eaters of the Pacific had all evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. And in the absence of Spam they settled for corned beef, which also had a corpsy flavor."

31.

Okay.

We've all of us gone overboard once or twice in our time and perhaps had a lager or two too many. Or perhaps a flute of champagne past the 0.08 limit. I mean, life is short! Rejoice! And who among us could judge?

When I came to, I found myself on a bamboo deck of some sort, walled on three sides with woven panels made of palm fronds and panda.n.u.s leaves, but with no wall in front of me, just the vision of an aquamarine lagoon with gently whooshing waves filled with gumdrops and cartoon characters. My pillow was soft and cool, and the single thin sheet over me was heaven on my skin. I could smell flowers. Okay now, this was the Pacific I'd dreamed of.

I looked to my right to see a firm, milky leg-Sarah's!-and I was seized with grat.i.tude to G.o.d for having delivered me unto Eden after so many days of total goatf.u.c.ks. My eyes followed the line of her thigh up to her torso, and a wash of regret pa.s.sed over me: I had no memory whatsoever of what must have been the absolute best drug-fuelled f.u.c.k of a lifetime. What is wrong with the universe? Just let me have this one f.u.c.king memory, is that too much to ask?

Well, old Ray, maybe the memory will come back to you. Relax. And think of it: there will be other killer s.h.a.gs. The planes are grounded worldwide. No one's going anywhere. You must surely have enough tinned meats to last a decade. The sky and ocean are beautiful. Life is good.

I reached over and traced Sarah's creamy leg. What a perfect f.u.c.king ten. What a woman in a million.

My fingers travelled farther upward. I gently brushed the almost invisible hairs that ran from her biff up her crab ladder to her navel. Then I finger-walked over her remarkable knockers up her throat to her ...

Holy f.u.c.king G.o.dless mother of f.u.c.king h.e.l.l!

She turned towards me, smiled, let out a small coo and said, "Well, bunny-wunny, I knew one day you'd be mine."

I looked back in frozen horror: LACEY.

How do things like this happen? How many of the G.o.ds have to be taking a sick day for me to black out and wake up with the hospitality gorgon of LAX? How did she even get here? How did I get here? Last thing I remember I was ... high and with Neal looking at tinned meats.

"Ray, don't fret. You were great."

"Where is everybody? Where am I? How the f.u.c.k did you get here? And why are you calling me 'bunny-wunny'?"

"Ray, we have plenty of time for talking later." She shimmied closer to me, pressing her remarkable b.r.e.a.s.t.s (how did I miss them first time around?) into my flank.

I shuddered. I had just a bit too much history with young LACEY to ever go that route. Now that I was conscious, you might as well ask me to bang a Ford Cortina. "Where's Neal? Where's Elspeth? Where's Sarah?"

"They're out on the yacht."

"The yacht?!"

"The TV network banquet should be starting just about ..." She looked at her watch. "... now."

"Oh, f.u.c.king h.e.l.l." Standing up, I slipped on Arnaud du Puis's pants. I looked for a shirt, and all I could find was a vintage Cure T-shirt.

The Cure is an English rock band formed in Crawley, West Suss.e.x, in 1976. The band has experienced several line-up changes, with front man, vocalist, guitarist and princ.i.p.al songwriter Robert Smith being the only constant member, best recognized as the band member with the crazy red mushy lipstick, and you can't believe he's been doing it for all these years, and you sort of wonder if you'd recognize him at the mall if he walked past you without lipstick on.

I left her in bed and climbed down a small rattan staircase onto the beach, which was loaded with ... thousands of bin bags? Oh, dear G.o.d, thousands of trash bags full of the foulest sorts of fish heads, rotting paper towels, rusting cans and fermenting dead wh.o.r.es, and-my nose twitched-everywhere I looked, the sand was peppered with human s.h.i.t, miles and miles of it, kissed by the loving surf.

LACEY called out, "The locals don't believe in our Western sense of personal hygiene. They just walk into the water, go to the bathroom and come back onto land. So free, and so liberated. You said as much yourself earlier today as we went to the bathroom together out in the lagoon." I turned back to stare in further horror at her as she reached for a nylon sack. "If you're hungry, I brought a duffle bag filled with packets of corn nuts from Los Angeles, and I have half a bottle of water from the drive here in the Jeep."

"Jeep?"

"Yes. Your friend Stuart dropped us off. And your ex-wife. She's nice."

Aneurysm.

"Stuart said he wouldn't disturb us for at least twenty-four hours. I'm so glad I'm not working at the airport bar anymore. Garcia was starting to get too possessive, and the thrill was gone. And after I met you, he could tell things were no longer the same between us."

Stroke.