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So Joseph began his freshman year at the University of Hawaii the same way he ended his senior year of high school: sitting by himself, reading a book, oblivious to the ebb and flow of pheromones and hormones, the pitch of tight biceps, or the pull of a heaving bikini top. Only now he was intensely interested in food. He began reading cookbooks, searching for new ways to cook things. And his diet changed drastically. Instead of a bag of potato chips or a cheeseburger, he ate fresh papaya and pineapple; instead of steak or meat loaf, he ate fresh fish. Sometimes he'd go for days only eating raw foods: sashimi and melons. Other days he might roast fresh seafood on the beach, just like his ancestors.

It didn't take long for his body to adjust. The weight dropped off him, like peeling out of an oversized suit, and he soon found himself filled with a strange new energy. He began walking everywhere, walking for hours. He'd let his mind drift on these walks, daydreaming. Occasionally he'd find himself strolling on the beach with a large boner rising up inside his pants like the periscope of a submarine reaching through the murky ocean toward the bright light of day.

If his life was like a book, something he could easily relate to, then Joseph thought of his early years as one chapter, the greasy lonely chapter, and his college years as the next.

When he was younger he never paid much attention to girls and, for their part, they never paid much attention to the pudgy little nerd with his head in a book. So he had never done the things that drive most adolescent boys crazy. He'd never been to a school dance and held a girl close while a cover band blared some crappy ballad by Billy Joel and his penis throbbed like an outboard motor in his pants. He'd never felt the ache and pang of a first crush, never experienced the flush of adrenaline, the bloom of blood rushing to his face as he played Spin the Bottle around a fire pit on the beach, never knew the awkwardness and excitement of a first date.

In his sophomore year of college, all that changed. He chose to major in something called Hawaiian Oral Traditions, because he liked stories and thought someone ought to remember how to speak Hawaiian. When he wasn't jogging on the beach or hanging around the campus learning, through trial and error, his way around the female anatomy, he was working. He got a job in a restaurant, starting out as a dishwasher and working his way up to prep cook and then line cook. Even though it wasn't necessarily the healthy Polynesian food he himself ate, Joseph enjoyed preparing all kinds of things—even the goofy dishes that the tourists craved, like macadamia-crusted
opakapaka
with mango salsa or pork braised in
haupia
milk.

With the responsibility of employment came some financial freedom. Joseph found himself with more spending money than most college students, and he invested that money in his culinary education. He'd take women out on dates, but only to restaurants he wanted to try. He ended up becoming something of a regular at Alan Wong's. He'd sit at the counter facing the kitchen and watch the cooks throw
together a kind of inspired mélange of tropical, French, and Japanese.

It was during these dinners that he realized what he wanted to do. He wanted to be a chef.

His dates didn't understand. Why didn't he want to sit at a table and look into their eyes? They wanted to talk to him, to tell him what they were interested in, what things they liked to do, what they thought about others. They wanted to find things in common. They wanted to communicate.

Joseph didn't want to talk, he wanted to cook.

...

He swung his truck off the main road and turned back down the rutted red trail. He drove slowly, creeping along between the sugarcane, so as not to make too big a rooster tail of dust.

As he pulled into the clearing, he looked over and saw Wilson, squatting near the smoldering
imu,
a human leg on the ground in front of him, picking meat off the thigh, putting it in his mouth, and chewing thoughtfully.

...

Joseph jumped out of the truck. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Wilson looked up, his mouth still full of freshly roasted human flesh, and held up a finger. “Wait a sec.”

Joseph stood there, feeling a bubble of stomach acid rising inside him, and watched as his cousin finished chewing and swallowed.

“Are you insane? You can't eat people!”

“I just wanted a taste.”

Joseph turned and retched. Bitter fluid spewed out of his stomach and onto the ground. Feeling his knees go weak, he collapsed, letting the red dirt rise around him, and began to cry quietly.

Wilson looked at him. “I just tasted it, brah. Don't freak.”

Don't freak?
That's all he wanted to do. He'd been doing all this, digging the
imu
and cooking the corpses, on a kind of autopilot. He hadn't felt anything toward the two men: not hatred, not pity, nothing. But now, seeing Wilson squatting on the ground munching on a thigh? “Don't freak” was kind of an understatement.

He looked up.

“That's a person's leg. A human being. You can't eat a human being.”

“Yeah. But, like, when am I ever gonna get a chance to try dis again? You know wot I'm sayin'? It's not like it's gonna be on the menu at Sam Choy's.”

Joseph didn't say anything.

“It's not dat bad. A little stringy.”

“You're an Ai-Kanaka.”

“Dat's just a story.”

Joseph wiped tears from his eyes. “Those stories come from somewhere.”

Wilson shook his head. He looked down at the leg still steaming on the ground. Joseph thought he saw a strange look flicker on his cousin's face. Not a look of revulsion or repulsion at what he'd done. No. It was the look of a young boy staring at the cookie jar. A look desperate for one more taste.

Joseph jumped up. “Stop. Just—fucking—stop!”

Wilson looked hurt. “I stopped, okay?”

“Move away from that leg!”

Wilson stayed put and looked up at Joseph. “I'm sorry, okay?”

Joseph got up and walked shakily back to the truck. He reached into the cab and pulled out the bag of fast food.

“Here.”

“All right!” Wilson leaped to his feet and stuck his face in the bag. “I was starvin', brah!”

He pulled out a breakfast sandwich—a cold, congealed artery bomb coated with mayonnaise, decorated with two strips of fat-marbled bacon, and smushed between two English muffins—unwrapped it, and took a huge bite. He held it out for Joseph. Joseph looked at the sandwich and at his cousin, who was chomping relentlessly, little blobs of mayonnaise and grease squirting out the side of his mouth; then he looked over at the leg on the ground. Cooling now, it was beginning to attract flies. Joseph shook his head.

“You gotta eat somethin', man. We got a lotta work ahead of us.”

Joseph sat on the bumper and watched as a fly landed on the leg and began doing its fly thing. He wanted to give up, to surrender, just lie down and sleep until someone came and arrested him. Let the authorities lock him away or, better, treat him like the old Hawaiians treated an Ai-Kanaka and pitch him off a cliff to his death. He watched as another fly landed on the leg. He heard his cousin's lips smacking wetly as they worked over the breakfast sandwich. A bird chirped.

“It's not dat bad.”

“What's not that bad?”

“Wot we did.”

Joseph looked at Wilson. “It's bad, okay? There's nothing good about it.”

The anger in Joseph's voice made Wilson defensive.

“Dey were gonna do it to us.”

Joseph nodded. What could he say? Yeah, they were going to do it to us. We were just defending ourselves. Protecting the islands, defending our
ohana,
our way of life. We aren't murderers and cannibals, we're just scaring the conquerors away with some Polynesian craziness. Knocking them off before they take our land and destroy our culture, just like they did to the Cherokee, Crow, Shawnee, and Navaho. Yeah. We're innocent. We're just keeping them from corrupting our culture.

But Joseph wondered about that. How innocent were they? How justified? Who was really responsible for corrupting the culture? Out of necessity the natives had converted their culture into a commodity and sold it so they could afford to live in their own homes. But had they sold out or become subjugated? Why were they spending all their effort and energy welcoming the conquerors, serving them pineapple and poi, offering them leis and mai tais, giving them the spirit of aloha, when what they'd really like to do is feed them to the sharks?

What was the alternative? Should they just give the island land to the haoles and let them turn it into golf courses? Speak only Hawaiian and keep to themselves? Was it better to live in squalor on a reservation than become an Ai-Kanaka? What does it mean to be Hawaiian?

Wilson was well into the second sandwich. He looked at Joseph.

“You gotta eat, brah.”

Joseph wiped some dust off his sunglasses. “I had some papaya.”

Joseph watched Wilson sitting there, devouring a sandwich as a couple of corpses steamed in the
imu
next to him. He hung his head in dismay. Maybe it really was time to walk away from paradise. Maybe it wasn't paradise anymore.

“Put your pussy right in my face.” Strobe lights flashed. Raunchy hip-hop music scratched and throbbed. The lap dancer, encased like a sausage in a fishnet bodysuit, moved up and down, in and out, simulating some kind of strange mix of musical chairs and fucking. She twitched and swiveled around the chair as the old man stared at her, his body listing to the left like a sinking ship. His pale blue eyes bugged out of a face tanned tobacco and leathery from years in the Nevada sun as they watched her curvaceous ass sling from side to side. He licked his thin, chapped lips, feeling the scraggly whiskers of his mustache hanging down, and shifted in his seat. Using his right arm he moved his left arm out of the way. He reached up and adjusted his bolo tie, a large chunk of turquoise embedded in a web of Indian silver. While his left hand was limp and unadorned, his right hand sported several chunky gold rings and a Rolex watch that was so expensive it might have been made from plutonium.

“I wanna smell your bush, baby.”

“Will that get your motor runnin', honey?”

“My motor's always runnin', cupcake.”

That part was true. Ever since the stroke, all Big Jack Lucey could think about was fucking. When he was healthy he hadn't had time for sex, he'd been too busy running his business, but now that half his body was useless, his left arm and left leg hanging off him like an oversized clown suit, sex obsessed him. Whether it was a case of wanting what you can't have or a deep fear that women would now find him repulsive and cut off all contact, he didn't know. One doctor had theorized that the stroke had caused some damage to one of his glands, causing the other glands to compensate and become overactive. Whatever the cause, the stroke had left him oversexed and impotent.

This frustrating and unfortunate dilemma led to a chain of medical mishaps that left him with a constant aching hard-on, courtesy of the inflatable air bags inserted into his penis. The doctors had sold him on the air-bag thing; he was supposed to be able to inflate them when he wanted an erection—there was a little valve and pumper—and deflate them when he didn't. But the gizmo got stuck and Jack found himself with an erection that would never go down.

The doctors decided it was too dangerous to take out the air bags—there might be permanent damage—so they just left it the way it was. He'd just have to adapt, they said. Adapt to the useless limbs, adapt to the persistent raging boner.

The stroke made Jack relearn how to do simple things like wipe his ass and brush his teeth. The malfunctioning air bags meant Jack had to learn how to piss in an arc.

It had changed him, all this adapting and this hard-on 24/7. He used to be a bit of a cutup, a man who was quick to buy a round of drinks for his friends or invite people over for a poolside barbecue. But now he was plagued by an insistent,
demanding urge, like an itch that won't stop, an itch no amount of lotion will ever quench and no amount of scratching will ever satisfy.

A permanent boner is a blessing and a curse.

So here he was, watching a twenty-two-year-old blond girl from Irving, Texas, dance around him like she was a harem girl and he was the Grand Poohbah.

“What's that in your pants, baby?”

“What do you think it is?”

“Oooh, it looks like an anaconda.”

The lap dancer moved his walker, custom made by a retired bicycle racer, a few feet away so she could get down to business. She sat in his lap, thrusting against his thighs, finding his inflated cock and running her ass against its ridge.

“Can you feel it?”

“Oh, yeah, baby, I can feel it.”

Jack leaned forward, almost getting his eye poked out by one of her stiff little nipples protruding through the fishnet. He put his face down by her thrusting belly and inhaled deeply.

“I love the smell of that.”

The music changed and with it the dancer's rhythms. She got serious. She crawled close to him, right on top of him, and began to pump her crotch pneumatically against his lap as she swished her hair around in a circle and pressed her breasts an inch from his face.

“Are you gonna get your nut for me?”

Jack didn't respond; he was at a loss for words.

Her soft hair whipped across his face as her body ground against his inflated cock until he thought the air bags might pop. A spasm slowly worked its way up his spine and through
the right half of his body. His face contorted and he let out a little grunt. The dancer stood up.

“That fun?”

Jack nodded. He realized she was speaking to him as if he were hard of hearing. Sometimes people did that: assuming that if you needed a walker you were deaf or retarded. Normally it made him angry, but he was still a little stoned from the pheromone tsunami that had just washed over him, so he let it slide.