Infestation
For submission to The Encyclopedia Britannica, 1982 Edition for the article “Easter Island.” To be jointly credited to Roberto and myself and cross-referenced under “Reproduction.”
Easter Island
Remote South Pacific island. Known as Rapa Nui in the local dialect, or Isla de Pascua in Spanish for its discovery on Easter Sunday, 1722. Population: 2,614 (historical high of 10,000; low of 110). Annexed by Chile in 1888 and considered part of the Chilean mainland, which is its nearest neighbor some 2,000 miles away. Settled by Polynesian explorers around 400 AD.
This isolated volcanic triangle is best known for its enormous sculpted stone heads. Many scholars consider the existence of these heads to be a great mystery because the barren island contains hardly a tree with which to construct new boats, build fires, or create levers with which to transport the stone. Moreover, Easter Island’s tropical location means that it should resemble a set out of South Pacific—palm trees and coconuts and women garlanded in flowers. Thus, another mystery arises: What happened to the land?
Archaeological, historical, anthropological, and linguistic evidence now shows that Easter Island was in fact a tropical paradise when those first sailors in long boats braved the thousands of miles of open ocean between Easter Island and Tahiti. Many have compared the original island to the Garden of Eden, full of dense tropical foliage, game birds, and all the naturally occurring fruits, vegetables, and seafood one would need. We might picture those early islanders as hale, healthy people with great tans, great food and great sex. However, Easter Island’s natural abundance also became its undoing: its people, unskilled at agriculture and too content with lives of ease, grew too big for the land. The trees and vegetation are harvested and no one replenishes them. Soon, all the islanders have are prayers.
The gods are silent, as usual. The people offer sacrifices. No avail. There is panic. Theft. Disease. Islanders come down with scurvy, sores popping, hair falling, fingernails dropping into the sand. Scraps of old wood become the focus of arguments and slaughter. Slaughter becomes war. War becomes cannibalism. The bodies of the elderly, the ill, children. Imagine the Garden without even a wilderness beyond it for proper banishment. As he chops the last tree down, a man thinks how cruel life is that we have been planted on earth carrying the very seeds of our own destruction. And amid it all, starving, hallucinating, killing each other off, the islanders summon what little strength they have left to carve these sculptures, giant SOS signals. We are here. We are suffering. We are scared. We need help.
Roberto licks his lips, though he’s barely touched his chicken breast or cole slaw, only nudged them with his fork. Then we get to the heart of the matter: the earth is Easter Island, only bigger. “What’s going to happen when there are really too many of us?” He rattles off a list, on his fingers: starvation, thirst, new diseases, wars for food and water, self-destruction.
I tell Roberto about the pictures of famine in Africa that I see in the newspaper and National Geographic. I tell him how I think, “What am I adding another soul to this world for?” I tell him about how, when I was pregnant with Heather, my mother sent me this book from a women’s group. There were pictures of fetuses at different stages of evolution: from egg to blastocyst to tadpole to tiny little humanoid. I remember the fabulous colors, the tiny pink, red, yellow, and blue forms backlit in their amniotic slime. And I remember thinking how disgusting it was, this wet little organism feasting off of me, looking more insect than human with its sacs and gills. I remember thinking, even after Heather was born, through all those months of screaming colic, that she was nothing more than a little monster, a pest I’d conceived to loose on the already overpopulated world.
The thought hangs between us like a strand of spaghetti sucked from both ends: in the background, we hear the noises the creatures make in the night, the constant writhing and dripping. We sit there marveling at the power of these tiny specimens to shake our world. With the lights low and the candles flickering and the absence of crickets chirping, just the white noise of the caterpillars, it feels like a séance. We’re conjuring up spirits of our ancestors from beyond the natural world.
Just before they go, Roberto grabs me by the arm and talks to me hush-hush, tells me that he didn’t want to bring it up at dinner. He tells me that the moths outside are intricately connected to his research concerns. This is an issue we’re just beginning to understand. Beyond the scope of economics, science, history, or politics. He’s been talking to some bright minds in biology, agriculture, and climatology at the university. Something is happening to our weather, to our climate. We’re changing the earth, making it unsuitable. He can’t go into details, but the proof is accumulating beyond the scope of error or irregularity. World-wide warming. Shifts in ecosystems. Diluvian change. Little wings flap inside me. “You’re a beautiful genius, I say.”
I leave the plates until morning. Then for another two days. Malthus runs away and returns unharmed.
My whole line of ancestors should have seen it coming, should never have gotten into those little boats for America. This is what Andy should be writing about, not ridiculous analysis of diet and economics in the the postwar Soviet Russia. (It’s going to collapse, he says, greedily.)
Lying awake in bed at night, against all my motherly instincts, I imagine waking Heather up in the morning and finding an insect in diapers, legs grasping at the air.