Evolution has no consistent game plan. While famous for remaining true to certain elegant forms (Dr. Luce likes to point out, for instance, the structural similarity between mussels and the female genitalia), it can also, on a whim, improvise. That’s what evolution is: a scattershot of possibilities, proceeding not by successive improvements but just by changes, some good, some bad, none thought out beforehand. The marketplace—that is, the world—decides. So that here, on the Casuarina Coast, the flowers have evolved traits that Luce, a Connecticut boy, doesn’t associate with flowers, though botany isn’t his specialty either. He thought flowers were supposed to smell nice. To attract bees. Here it’s something different. The few lurid blooms he’s unwisely stuck his snout into have smelled pretty much like death. There’s always a little pool of rainwater inside the cup (actually digestive acid) and a winged beetle being eaten away. Luce’ll snap his head back, holding his nose, and then, in the bushes somewhere, he’ll hear a few Dawat laughing their heads off.
These ruminations are interrupted by the puling of the boy on the next skull over. “Cemen,” the boy cries out. “Ake cemen.” There’s silence, a few Dawat muttering to themselves in dreams, and then, just like every night, Luce feels the kid’s hand come snaking into his shorts. He grabs it gently by the wrist, fishing for his penlight with his other hand. He switches it on and the pale beam illuminates the boy’s face. He’s resting his cheek on a skull, too (his grandfather’s, to be precise), which is stained a dark orange from years of hair and skin oil. Beneath his kinky hair the boy’s eyes are wide, frightened by the light. He looks a little like a young Jimi Hendrix. His nose is wide and flat, his cheekbones prominent. His full lips have a permanent pout from speaking the explosive Dawat language. “Ake cemen,” he goes again, which is maybe a word. His trapped hand makes another lunge for Luce’s midsection, but Luce redoubles his grip.
So, then, the other complaints: Having to do fieldwork at his age, for one thing. Getting mail yesterday for the first time in eight weeks, ripping open the soggy packet with excitement only to find, right on the cover of The New England Journal of Medicine, Pappas-Kikuchi’s spurious study. And, more immediately, the kid.
“Come on now,” Luce says. “Go back to sleep.”
“Cemen. Ake cemen!”
“Thanks for the hospitality, but no thanks.”
The kid turns and looks into the darkness of the hut, and when he turns back the penlight beam shows tears welling in his eyes. He’s scared. He tugs at Luce, bowing his head and pleading. “You ever hear of a thing called professional ethics, kid?” Luce says. The boy stops, looking at him, trying to understand, then starts tugging again.
The kid’s been after him for three straight weeks. It’s not that he’s in love or anything. Among the many rare characteristics of the Dawat—not the precise biological oddity that has brought Luce and his team to Irian Jaya but a related anthropological one—is that the tribe maintains strict segregation between the sexes. The village is laid out in a dumbbell shape, thinning in the middle with a longhouse at either end. The men and boys sleep in one longhouse; the women and girls in the other. Dawat males consider contact with females highly polluting, and so have organized social structures to limit exposure as much as possible. Dawat men, for instance, go into the women’s longhouse only for the purpose of procreation. They do what they have to do quickly and then leave. According to Randy, the anthropologist who speaks Dawat, the Dawat word for “vagina” translates literally as “that thing which is truly no good.” This, of course, incensed Sally Ward, the endocrinologist who came along to analyze plasma hormone levels, and who has little tolerance for so-called cultural differences and out of sheer disgust and justified anger has been denigrating the field of anthropology to Randy’s face whenever she gets the chance. Which isn’t often because, by tribal law, she has to stay down at the other end of the village. What it’s like over there, Luce has no idea. The Dawat have erected an earthwork between the two areas, a mud wall about five feet high with spears jutting up. Impaled on the spears are oblong green gourds that at first looked refreshingly festive to Luce, like Venetian lanterns, until Randy explained that the gourds are only stand-ins for the human heads of yesteryear. At any rate, you can’t see much over the earthwork, and there’s only a little pathway where the women leave food for the men and through which the men go, once a month, to mount their wives for three and a half minutes.
As papal as the Dawat appear to be in reserving sex for procreation, they are a hard sell for the local missionaries. They’re not exactly celibate in the Longhouse of Men. Dawat boys live with their mothers until they’re seven years old, at which point they come to live with the men. For the next eight years the boys are coerced into fellating their elders. With the denigration of the vagina in Dawat belief comes the exaltation of the male sexual parts, and especially of semen, which is held to be an elixir of stunning nutritive power. In order to become men, to become warriors, boys must ingest as much semen as possible, and this, nightly, daily, hourly, they do. Their first night in the longhouse, Luce and his assistant, Mort, were taken aback, to say the least, when they saw the sweet little boys going dutifully from man to man as if bobbing for apples. Randy just sat taking notes. After all the men had been satisfied, one of the chieftains, in what no doubt was a show of hospitality, barked something at two boys, who then came over to the American scientists. “That’s OK,” Mort had said to his kid. “I’m good.” Even Luce felt himself breaking out into a sweat. Around the hut, the boys went about their business either cheerfully or with mild resignation, like kids back home doing chores. It impressed upon Luce once again the fact that sexual shame was a social construct, completely relative to culture. Still, his culture was American, specifically Anglo-Irish lapsed Episcopalian, and he refused the Dawat offer graciously, that night and, now, this.