The world—and really I mean the West—has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilate them.

She stopped to take a breath. She looked like she had about forty-five other ideas for me.

She was a chameleon, with a way of not imitating them but reflecting them.

I've always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It's not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.

'Tragedy is based on this sense that there's been a terrible mistake, isn't it?'

Alone was not something you saw among tribes she'd studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil.

Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain you find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is my point exactly.

It was over by the time I got there. I cut my engine and heard no celebrating from any quarter of the village. On the beach crows and buzzards fought for position on the ribs of a wild boar and flies marauded taro skins and fruit rinds nearby. The fire pits were cold, beads and feathers lay half buried in the pounded sand, and the air itself felt exhausted.

Nell was in full health. From what I could see her lesions had healed, her limp was less pronounced. Her lips were the deep red of a child's. The Tam diet clearly suited her; she was rounder, and her skin looked smooth as soap. The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.

'How are your warriors?' Fen asked as we went back up into the house. I recognized it as an idle question, a question posed by someone who was thinking of something else, the way my father might have asked me about school when I came home for a holiday, his mind on a set of cells or tail feathers.

Inside the box was a slim manuscript, not more than three hundred pages. Its pages were flat, its edges perfectly aligned. We stood in slight awe of it, as if it might speak or burst into flames.

I couldn't help questioning the research. When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

She claimed that because of the emphasis in the West on private property, our freedom was restricted much more than in many primitive societies. She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits had become compulsive and overgrown. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was 'a major means to the good life.' She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.

I went off to my my in their study feeling a bit like the family pet who'd been put outside for the night.

Orientation.
'The idea that cultures have a strong pull in one direction, at the expense of other directions.'

I felt the world had finally carved out a little place for me.

'Personality depends on context, just like culture,' she said. 'Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don't you think?'

The water was warmer than the air and felt like the first bath I'd had in two years. I sank in up to my neck and let my feet float to the surface as the rain hammered the water as if it were a sheet of silver.

I try not to return to those moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love's first mistake. Perhaps love's only mistake.

She hollered and shook Xambun, tears, spit, and sweat coming off her as she moved, as if she believed that with enough force she could bend back the universe.