by Paul Theroux
“Sort of suicide?” Luana said.
“No. It’s involuntary,” Dr. Agawa said. “Voodoo death.”
“I adore these rarefied scientific names,” Olive said.
“That’s what a certain Dr. Cannon called it. He’s the fight-or-flight guy.”
Luana said, “A Hawaiian woman eats a coconut under the kapu system. She realizes she broke the kapu and she stops eating. Stops everything. Pretty soon she wen’ make. Old Hawaii tradition.”
“Psychogenic death,” Dr. Agawa said.
Olive said, “From breaking a taboo?”
“Or any serious trauma. You know how trauma affects the nerve circuits in the brain. It can cause the anterior cingulate circuit to malfunction—kills motivation. How do you survive in life if you have no motivation? The next phase is apathy. Give-up-itis. It’s been studied.”
“In the Solomons?”
“All over. Concentration camps. Prisons. Situations of extreme desperation. People give up. Maybe that guy this morning.”
“But they don’t know they’re traumatized?” Olive said.
“I guess they’re not really conscious of anything,” Dr. Agawa said.
Luana widened her eyes and spoke to Olive. “Awesome, eh?”
* * *
That evening she returned to the house before dark so that she could load her things into her car to take them to her room at the hospital, the same one she’d used for her previous escape—but she’d find a better place eventually.
She was thrown by seeing cars in the driveway, a motorcycle she recognized—one of his surfer friends—and the orange-and-white pickup truck of the lifeguard rescue patrol, its warning lights flashing, a jet ski mounted on the trailer.
“He’s going to be all right,” someone said insistently to her as she mounted the stairs, and the urgency of it made it sound insincere. Men and boys, barefoot in board shorts, crowded the lanai. A man in a long-sleeved lifeguard shirt walked quickly toward her, more to prevent her from entering the house than to console her.
Before she could speak, he said, “He wiped out—a big drop at Waimea—and his board probably hit him. He was way under. He swallowed a lot of water. But look”—he was holding her wrists, steadying her, restraining her, because she was fighting him—“he’s going to be fine. We’re talking about Joe Sharkey.”
She wrenched free of the man and hurried into the house, where he lay on his sofa. He was almost unrecognizable—a different man inked with Sharkey’s tattoos, corpse-white, his eyes pink and staring, his hands and feet bluish and badly cut, a blanket slung loose from his body, his hair spiky and wild.
Seeing her, he feebly lifted his hand in a shaka sign, then his hand fell and became a claw.
“Epic wave. Went over the falls,” he said, scarcely moving his lips. “Major hold-down.” Then he became self-conscious, dropping his voice. “These guys saved my life.”
The lifeguard who had followed her into the house stood beside her, as though in protection. Yet she remained watching, horrified by what she had first taken to be a dead man, Sharkey motionless and pale, his face ugly with fear.
“Heavy water,” one of the lifeguards said.
“Monster wave,” Sharkey said, and, tangled in his own black shadow, as though still under the wave at Waimea, oppressed by his life, he began to cry, like a small boy in a strange land.
Part II
The History of a Hero
1
Haole—The Scar
He was a child, and at last, after the ache and fatigue of a long flight, like a sickness on a smelly plane, everything was new and pure. The difference was a sweetness he tasted in the soft air, the breeze like a pillow against his cheek. It was a sound too, the flutter of leaves, the scrape of palm fronds, the ocean big and loud and continually foaming to the beach, waves flopping and swirling in a monstrous flush and then gone. The cliffs and valleys behind the house were deep green, the house so simple, with wooden boards for walls, and you could leave the door open. He was different too, always in summer clothes and often barefoot—and conspicuous for his color among bigger, darker people who lived beyond the perimeter fence of the fort in the high green island that was his new home—Hawaii.
He was happy, a new person, and his difference had a name; the gardener, Abe, laughed and said, “You a haole.”
This was at the Sharkeys’ bungalow on Nimitz Circle in the married officers’ subdivision of Fort Shafter. They’d been transferred from the Presidio in San Francisco, and before that spells at Fort Bliss and in Germany.
“We were in Germany too,” his friend Charlie Miller told him at school when Joe mentioned it. But Germany was a place he did not know; older people described it to him, a foreign country outside the fence of another base. After two years there all he knew of it was the weather—the cold weather especially. Weather and smells, they were the differences in places. Fort Bliss, a few summer months, was hot, with the sting of dust. The Presidio was chilly, with the clamminess of damp grass, but on weekends his father took him down the coast to Half Moon Bay. His father sat and smoked; Joe watched with longing the boys crouched on boards, looking small and fearless and buoyant in the big waves.
“How do they do that?”
“Do what?”
“That.”
“Surfers,” his father said, exhaling cigarette smoke.
His father was a soldier, and it always seemed as though his mind was on bigger things; and if Joe asked too many questions his father would shout at him.
In Hawaii his mother clung to him, because his father was so often away, in training, on maneuvers, in school, getting ready, he said—for what?
But one day at the beach, with his father seeing surfers offshore, Joe said, “I want to learn how to do that.”
“You can do it,” his father said. “But first be the best swimmer you can be.”
After that they swam together in the pool at the officers’ club, and in the waves in the sea at Fort DeRussy.
But when his father was away, his mother held on to him and said, “The ocean is dangerous.”
He saw she was right: the waves were high and thick, and they deafened him when they swept into him, submerging him and knocking him over.
He came to see a pattern at home. When his father spent days with him, swimming or trying to teach him tennis, being hearty, he understood that it meant his father would soon be going away. Then he’d be left with his fretful mother, her warnings about swimming and sharks and sunburn. She didn’t play tennis and often drank too much and became weepy.
So his father’s attention to him made him apprehensive: the outings and ice cream were a prelude to abandonment and to the serious talk before bedtime, calling him by name and saying he’d have to grow up fast.
“Listen, Joe. You’ll have to be the man of the house now.” His father smelled of cigarettes; his words were smoky and sour. “But don’t worry—I’ll write letters, and I’ll call when I can.”
He left but seldom called, and his letters were to Sharkey’s mother, who said that his frequent absences were a sign of his importance. “He’s an officer. Do you see how the soldiers salute us?”
Soldiers in the road at Fort Shafter, seeing the Colonel’s eagle insignia on the bumper, saluted the car.
One day Charlie Miller, his friend at school and on the base, pointed to a stain on his swimming trunks, saying, “I got that in Germany.”
“How?”
“Pickle juice.”
“I was in Germany,” Joe said. “It was cold. Then we went to Texas. Really hot.”
“We were at Fort Lee,” Charlie said. “Virginia. Fort Lee Officers’ Open Mess. That was where I learned to swim, at the FLOOM pool.”
While playing a game they talked of their travels, ten-year-olds, men of the world, Germany, Texas, Virginia, San Francisco. Their game was played with a bayonet on the back lawn of Charlie’s house. They stood facing each other, and one boy would throw the bayonet like a spear into th
e ground nearby. If he stabbed it upright the other boy would shift one foot to the point where the bayonet had stuck. And that boy took his turn to throw the bayonet, so that his opponent had to stretch his leg. And the one who could not reach the bayonet with his foot was the winner.
Joe flicked it in the air. “Where did you get this knife?”
“Germany.”
It was black, longer than any knife Joe had seen, and sharp, a thing of power. They passed this weapon back and forth. Holding it seemed to add to their talk of travel, to make it important.
One afternoon Joe threw it hard, and two inches of the blade snapped. Charlie picked it up and held the broken tip against the end of the blade.
“It’s my father’s.”
Joe dreaded what Charlie’s father would say, and feared being blamed for breaking the bayonet.
“Are you going to tell him?”
“I have to,” Charlie said.
He seemed brave, saying that, with a truthfulness that intimidated Joe. They entered the house together, but when Charlie showed his father the broken blade the man merely frowned. He’d been sitting, reading a newspaper. He put the paper down to consider the broken bayonet, then held the bayonet in one hand, the broken tip in the other.
“Nazi,” he said, putting the pieces on the low table beside his chair. He pushed the pieces away with the back of his hand and frowned and then raised his newspaper from his lap, shielding his face from the boys.
“He’s mad at us,” Joe said outside, but Charlie just shrugged.
Joe didn’t tell his mother. She would fuss. His father was away again, and he felt that part of his being the man of the house now was to keep such incidents from his mother. She’d be upset, she’d blame him, or Charlie; she would try to make the situation better but only make it worse. She’d go over to Charlie’s house, she’d talk too much, and when she got home she’d drink, and cry.
So when she said, “Are you all right?” he said, “Yup.”
He did not report on his day, or anything that happened in his life, and if something went wrong he kept it to himself. He might be reprimanded at the main gate for not checking at the guardhouse—for just walking in, and being yelled at by the sentry. He said nothing. He said little of school. He mentioned his friends’ names but did not elaborate. Sometimes, after he’d spent a whole afternoon at the pool, he’d say (because his mother insisted), “I was at the rec room.”
His secrets were small, but they mattered, because they were his secrets. He wanted to be a better swimmer, a better student, a faster runner. He knew he was unformed, still learning. He refused to offer progress reports. He was ashamed that he was so small and incompetent—not good at anything—but that was a secret too.
His habit of concealment strengthened him. Being truthful was a form of nakedness he could not bear: you were exposed, you were weakened, you’d be ridiculed or scolded. Seeing Charlie Miller explaining to his father exactly what had happened with the bayonet, that truthfulness ended in Charlie’s father’s sulking and silence. And a greater reason for resisting was that grown-ups were themselves strict keepers of secrets—Joe’s father’s disappearances and false promises, his mother saying “I’m exhausted” when she was drunk. They lied; he said nothing, yet his silences were not lies but evasions. Someday he would be strong—in his heart he wanted to be a hero, and wished he knew how. But for now he did not want anyone to know him.
One incident, to his shame, could not be kept secret. Long before it happened, his dread of it, and sharpness of his fear, convinced him that he would face it and be harmed. He possessed the accurate premonition of a frightened person, in the way that someone fearful about tipping over a precious teacup on a tray is certain to bobble it and break it.
It was a dog. What moment, what catch or tremor in the past, had imprinted on him a fear of dogs? Maybe a guard dog slavering on a leash and growling, tugging a soldier past the fence of a base somewhere. It was first of all the sound of them, the hoarse bark that gnawed at his throat, the dog’s bark that said, I am coming for you.
The family’s constant moves from base to base meant they never had pets bigger than goldfish. Joe scarcely saw a dog except the ones leaping at him from behind a fence, but he was keenly affected by a bark. The choking growl was like an expression of hunger for human flesh; of anger too, being denied it. His sense was less that a dog was going to bite him but rather, given the insistent bark, the dog working its jaws, that the creature was going to seize him with its teeth and chew him and eat him. The mere sound of a dog made him hold himself so still as to be rigid, and he knew he had no protection other than his skinny hands.
He always looked terrified, because the owners, or the people nearby, said, “He won’t hurt you,” and when Joe looked tearful and unconvinced, goggling at the thing, the owner would say, often with a hint of satisfaction, “See? He knows you’re afraid. He can smell your fear.”
He hated them. They sensed his hatred. He had come to love ocean waves and learned to duck under them and bob up behind them. The thump and crush of water, the fetch of wind on it, was like the rhythm of life. Even when he was tumbled in the shore break and his father had to yank him to safety, he held his breath and laughed when it was over. He had no fear of water. He did not mind being alone in the dark—he talked to himself. He climbed to the highest limbs of the trees in his yard and swayed there in the sunshine. He knew how to start a fire. But dogs . . .
They shortened their muscly necks to their shoulders and barked at him from behind fences, leaped at him, making the chain links clatter from the force of their yellow claws and dirty paw pads. They dashed to the limit of their tethers, half throttled by their collars as they reared, standing on their hind legs and threatening him with insistent yelps. Even the ones on leashes that he passed on the sidewalks of the base trotted toward him and sniffed him wickedly, the damp prune-black nose prodding him. Was it his smell of fear, his stiffened fingers, his leaning-away posture? Or that he was new here, a haole boy?
The owners smiled, as though the barks proved their dog’s superior instincts, and they seemed to rejoice in the suggestions of the pet’s wildness, the sense that the dog was powerful and fearless—a protector, courageous in its vigilance, perhaps displaying a feral anger and ferocity that its owner was too timid to show, the barking dog like the manifestation of a hidden self, another secret of grown-ups. Sharkey sensed there was an angry dog inside every teasing dog owner.
Seeing the tears in his eyes, the terror on his face, his mother tried to shield him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No!”
But she always consoled him. And his father took the view that the expression of any fear demanded to be overcome.
“I tell my men,” he said, “‘Get over it.’ I have ARVN guys who are afraid of jumping out of a plane—scared shitless.”
Joe stared, knowing what was coming.
“But they jump. I make them jump.”
“What if they really don’t want to?”
“It’s an order. It has to be obeyed. Or we push them out. And the next time it’s easier.”
“That’s different,” Sharkey’s mother said, coming to his defense, and he hated her for suspecting he was afraid.
“It’s fear,” his father said, his mouth going square, showing his teeth. “Experience makes fear go away. I have men in operations, Special Forces from the forward firebase, who are practically gibbering. ‘I don’t want to go!’ ‘Let’s turn back!’ ‘I’m scared!’”
He reached for Joe’s shoulder, got a grip on his shirt. Joe said nothing. He’d heard this before. It was one of his father’s stories, a way of defining himself. You couldn’t interrupt or he’d howl.
“I grab them like this,” and he tightened his grip. “I tell them, ‘Consider yourself already dead’”—he smiled, those teeth again—“‘and you’ll be fine.’”
But of course his father was away when the incident—the inevitable incident—occurred.
It was the sort of hot Hawaii midafternoon when the sun dominating a cloudless sky seemed to burn him small. He’d gotten off the bus at the end of the street and was walking past the house with the dog when, as he expected, and feared, he heard the loud barking. He knew the bark, he knew the dog, the one that could make it to the edge of the lawn on his tether. As on previous days, Joe crossed the street so as not to enrage the dog further, and he waited for the dog to be jerked back on his tether.
But the dog kept coming, making straight for him. He bounded across the street, his tongue thickened and drawn aside by his speed, and he leaped as he approached, knocking Joe to the ground, and began angrily to chew his face, snapping his jaws.
Later Joe wondered why he hadn’t screamed for help, why he submitted and said nothing. He guessed that there is a reaction of extreme terror that silences you—this, and the recognition perhaps that there is no hope; that you’re done for, so desperate that you’re resigned to your fate, to be torn apart by the dog.
In the midst of it, batting at the champing dog, its slaver on his arms, he heard a shrill whistle and a voice shouting a name that sounded like Max, but his terror was so intense by then that he could not react, trapped beneath the dog’s jaws. It was not an imagined pain produced by fear but stabbing paws and teeth in a growling mouth tearing at his face.
“I said, get down.”
What struck him as frightening was the man’s futile voice demanding casually in English that, half crazed in its attack—Joe’s face in the dog’s mouth—the dog would understand and obey. Yet amazingly the dog grunted and let go.
Whoever had spoken dragged the dog away—Joe could see the man and the dog above him as he lay on the sidewalk, the man twisting the dog’s collar, saying, “You all right?”
Gouts of saliva drooped from the gagging dog’s jaws.
