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Part Five
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PartFive The Body—borrows a Revolver— He bolts the Door— O’erlooking a superior spectre— Or More— c. 1863, emily dickinson [18.212.102.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:46 GMT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Obscure Malady October 29, 1990, and I’m reading the New Yorker and come across an article by Terence Monmaney, “An Epidemic of Brain Disease: This Obscure Malady.” I still have the magazine; there’s a pumpkin on the cover with a man’s face inside of it. Monmaney documents the work of a neuropathologist named Zimmerman—an expert on ALS, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease—who was brought to Guam to investigate “diseases of military importance.” Torticollis as a disease of military importance? My brother thinks it’s only a disease of soldiers. Zimmerman discovers an inordinately high number of cases of ALS on Guam, where the Japanese notoriously cut off fifty-one heads before the United States takes the island back. Magellan called Guam “the Island of Thieves.” The myth about the high incidence on Guam of ALS—called “lytico and bodig”—is that it is the result of a curse. A Catholic priest cursed a native and all his descendants for picking mangos he had been forbidden to harvest: a Catholic conspiracy. In this scenario, disease results from the Catholic attempt to govern the native population of Guam, to bring so-called light into so-called darkness—a plague resulting from an errant empire-building enterprise . In WWII, the navy inadvertently brings tree-climbing snakes hiding in the holds of their ships like stowaways in Trojan horses. The snakes kill and eat all the birds: the island turns silent. The navy destroys music by accident. After the war, doctors find that a large number of Guamanians suffer from a new neurological disorder that acts like a combination of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s—impairing movement and erasing memory. Was it a familial disease? Was it 112 Part Five an environmental disease due to diet? My father did not have ALS, but he did have symptoms of both Parkinsonism and dementia. My aunt remembered that his LST routinely stopped in Guam for food supplies. I write to Monmaney, persuaded, excited, and half hopeful that the secret of my father’s mental deterioration lies in the prehistoric jungles of Guam. I clutch at the idea that he may have been poisoned by eating tortillas made from cycad that hadn’t been sufficiently detoxi fied. I know it sounds insane, but there have been cases of “lyticobodig ” after only one taste of cycad and the disease can lie latent like a ticking bomb for decades. I speculate that had he never entered the navy he may never have developed his disease, and if the navy had never landed in Guam, tree-crawling snakes might never have devoured all the birds on the tropical island. They would still be singing . Monmaney writes me back that other children of other WWII soldiers who got their food supplies from Guam have written to him. Their fathers also suffered from neurological disorders. Recently I discover that the only problem with this theory is that by the time the United States took Guam from the Japanese, Bill had already left the South Pacific. So he couldn’t possibly have ingested toxic cycad—a prehistoric plant that looks like part of the set for Jurassic Park, a horror movie with dinosaurs, an image of paradise run amuck—the seeds of which kept Guamanians, driven into the jungle by the Japanese, alive. There will be no dinosaurs in my father’s horror movie, only humans. Then, four years ago, the New Yorker presents the theory of a botanist who posits that it was the eating of a now-extinct bat, a delicacy among native Guamanians, containing an extraordinarily high concentration of cycad, that produced such a high concentration of neurological disease in a population now mostly dead, the secret cause mostly dead with them. The lytico-bodig is vanishing, and my father has vanished before I can decipher him. Two parts of Monmaney’s article still fit my father: brain disease and obscure malady. I reread Oliver Sacks’s chapter on Guam in The Island. Sacks wonders if the lytico-bodig may have been caused by some sort of virus that came and went: “Some mutant virus, perhaps, with no immediate effect, but affecting people later as their immune systems responded.” Sacks describes the sense of community of the Part...