Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  That summer there was this one time Noa called me. I was walking from the bus stop to Romanesque.

  “Dial a wrong number?” I asked, when I answered.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Bad joke,” I said. “I was just surprised that you called.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Me, too.”

  That was weird. “Okay,” I said. “I’m heading into the dinner shift, so make it fast.”

  “You’re a cook?” he asked.

  How many times. “I wait tables, Noa.” And it wasn’t that he was forgetful or stupid or any of that, right. He just didn’t care enough to remember. It was him and what he was doing, that was all that was in his head. “This is why I don’t tell you anything, because it’s not worth it. What’s up?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “You called me to say nothing’s up,” I said. “Great, thanks for the call, Noa, you can do this anytime—”

  “Remember how Skyler’s hand was when he came back to school? After New Year’s?”

  Something in his voice, like how Van was sometimes. How I was sometimes, when we had the right chemicals in our veins. Everything expanding. The memory of Skyler’s hand jumped into me. I’d never seen the hand again myself, after he blew it up. It was only that I’d heard there was something off about it, when they uncovered it in the emergency room: The skin was too smooth. The perfect shape of the fingers. Kinda different, almost like it’s one statue girl’s hand or something, is what Dean said. “Everyone thought it was too pretty.”

  “Like a sculpture.” Noa laughed. But just as fast, something went tight and quiet in him. “You don’t believe that was me, do you?”

  If he was just calling for a verbal handjob. My shift started, like, two minutes ago. “Noa, I don’t—”

  “It seemed like you were always the one just playing along. Dean believed. Of course Mom and Dad did. They saw . . . they saw other things, too. But you never believed, did you?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “I’m seeing all these things out here. The people I’m with in the ambulance, the people right on the edge—there’s all this light and thread that makes up our bodies. It almost feels the same as the ‘uke. Like when there’s a voice and the strings humming from a chord, I can do that now, with a human body, the bones and the heart and the lungs, I can make it sing—”

  I laughed at that. “Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t laugh, you just—you sound a little nuts.”

  “There was this addict—” he started, we’d been talking at the same time, but a little nuts just hung there in the air.

  “Noa,” I said. “It’s okay—”

  “No, I get it,” he said. “You’re right.”

  “Maybe you should spend less time in the ambulance,” I said. “Take a break or something.”

  He cleared his throat. “What makes you think I can?”

  “You can do whatever you want,” I said.

  “No I can’t,” Noa said. “You can, but not me.”

  Part of me was tired of him this way. When he acted like he was the one suffering, when really all the rest of us were having to deal with what it meant to not be him. Who knew what he was going to be able to do with his abilities someday, while I had to check my watch and see I was late and late meant maybe getting fired and maybe getting fired meant I’d lose the wad of tips I always went home with, the only real money I’d make all summer, okay?

  “Hey,” I said. “I gotta go. Time to indulge ridiculous gluten requests and pretend everyone is my friend for the next four hours. I didn’t mean anything by laughing, Noa. I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I can listen, I swear,” I said. I don’t know why I got apologetic at the end. It seemed like something was slipping away.

  “I know,” he said. “I know that.”

  We said goodbye and hung up.

  I tried again later. I tried with him and Dean at the same time, party call. I wasn’t good at stuff like that—it quickly became an obligation. But Noa was gone by then, anyway, or at least it felt like that when he’d talk. Like he was back out in the ocean among the sharks, bobbing alone. I could see him there, the waves and tides and gods dragging him around. But I’m in the water, too, I wanted to say. And there are plenty eyes on you. No one’s watching to see if I stay afloat.

  But soon summer break was over. Everyone came back: Van and Hao and Katarina. Like nothing had happened in the two and a half months apart, because nothing had happened. It couldn’t have been more than a week into that fall semester and Van had something for me: did I want to check out this uppity party she had tickets to.

  “Except,” she said, “I don’t have have tickets.”

  She clarified: “There are these boys we have to bring. They have the tickets.”

  So we went to Connor’s house, paint-chipping trim and a Corona sign in the window, right, a mashed and faded couch on the porch. Lacrosse stick leaning against the electricity meter.

  “You’re kidding me,” I said.

  Van shrugged. “They have tickets. Connor’s got a body like a swimmer.”

  She was one step ahead of me on the stairs. I slapped her ass, hard enough that it stung us both. Her muscle, my hand. It was all we needed to say.

  The festival was in Ramona, its front entrance was a large white tent surrounded by fuzzy gold globes of light and cream-colored linen and enveloped in a fog of constipated pleasantness. All these haoles of a barely wrinkled age, prevailing interest rates and the latest New Yorker. We stood on green grass, me and Van easily the youngest two people there. Like, it almost looked illegal.

  Van was wearing a sleek black top, shoulderless on one side, a pair of immaculate white shorts with gold buttons. Me in this blue dress that I guess could be little except the way some parts of it stretched wrong on me.

  At one point we were separated. Sean and I were out on the bluff. Below and distant, pinched hills bearing what looked like mesquite and bougainvillea. A truck from the thirties or something, strategically placed off the bluff, casks in the back cocked just so, right? It was so disingenuous, it might as well have been a movie set. The high humid sonata of the crickets. Grass crinkling under our shoes.

  “You’re going to say something,” I said to Sean, “and it’s going to ruin this goddamn moment.”

  “What?” Sean said.

  “You see?”

  He laughed. “I swear, Kaui.” His teeth were the white of new snow, his skin was dark brown, knotted and roped through with muscles I didn’t even know existed until I saw him with his shirt off. He’d been a gymnast and then he was studying—I shit you not—sports marketing. But he answered me the same so often: You’re crazy, or What am I going to do with you. He didn’t know a thing. It was like talking to a sack of hammers.

  “Wine’s good, though,” he said, finally.

  “I can’t tell,” I said. “It all tastes the same to me.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  “I’d die for a beer right now. Literally die.”

  He smiled. “Right. So—Connor tells me you’re studying engineering.”

  “Yep.”

  “Sounds hard.”

  “Yep.”

  “Enginerd. You ever heard that one? That’s what we used to call engineers. I mean, not all of them. And not you, obviously. Only—”

  “I get it,” I said. Just for the hell of it—because it was, like, polished and jumping with strength, the sort of dark brown that reminded me of boys back home—I stroked his right biceps. I could maybe do this, I thought, wondering how much wine it would take. More than I was willing to put in me.

  “Cheers,” I said. Tilted my wineglass back, and swallowed.

  While I was drinking, something caught my eye. I turned to focus on it. On the far side of the bluff, Van’s voice had come up. She was talking to Connor. I couldn’t make out the words. But I could see his weight shift. Leanin
g with his chest out, like he owned her space. But those things never worked on Van. Instead, she finished her glass of wine in one pull. After she got it all in her mouth she looked at him straight and spat the wine into his face. Then she placed her glass on the nearest cocktail table and walked back into the tent.

  I started walking after her. “Stay,” I said back to Sean. “Or go to him. Whatever.”

  It was much hotter in the tent. As if something large was sleeping just above the crowd. And it was starting to smell, in some corners, a little like armpits. Everyone’s voices inside were excited. I found Van by the snack table. She was stacking cheese on crackers and chomping them down. Plus holding another glass of wine.

  “You spilled your wine out there,” I said. “On Connor’s face.”

  She laughed. “I guess I’m clumsy when I drink wine.”

  She crushed crackers and cheese into her mouth. “Think it was a good idea to come here?”

  “If you wanted to be fancy, we could have just gone to something fancy in the city,” I said. “Swing-dance clubs downtown.”

  “Do I look like I swing-dance to you?”

  “You do right now.”

  She shrugged, crunched another cracker sandwich. “We’re going to leave school one of these days, probably faster than we think. All over. We’re supposed to be women out in the world—office heels and bank accounts. I don’t know.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “Talking to Sean is like talking to a crash-test dummy. I’ll stay in school and get another degree.”

  “But he has good arms, right?” Van asked.

  My turn to laugh. “Right?” I said. “They’re, like, lickable. I want to rub my—Aren’t you lactose-intolerant?” I asked, watching her pinch more cheese into her mouth. Cracker dust stuck to her lips, even after she took a sip of wine.

  “Kaui,” she said, as if tired, “just eat some of this ridiculous food with me and have a fucking glass.”

  Forty-five minutes later we were in the bathroom. Van was bending at the waist like she’d been punched in the gut. I was struggling to get the zipper down on the back of her shorts.

  “You have to hurry,” Van said.

  “It’s caught on all this thread, Van, I’m trying,” I said.

  She shuddered. Slapped my hands away. Started backing up toward one of the bathroom stalls. “Oh God,” she said. “This toilet is going to get it. So are my shorts. God, I’m going to shit all over myself.”

  “Just let me,” I said.

  She doubled over again. Her eyelids clamped down. “Hurry up!”

  She looked at me quick. There was a flex of panic in her face and she backed all the way into the stall. Still doubled over and stress-breathing. I knew I had about ten seconds. She was fumbling with the zipper. Gritting her teeth. As she shifted and struggled her calves flexed. I stepped into the stall with her, smacked the door closed, hitched one of my legs up on the toilet’s valve—it was one of those weird metal things, like a miniature fire hydrant—and jerked down on the zipper on her shorts. It burned sharply in my thumb but didn’t move. Van groaned.

  “There’s, like, a turtle head coming, Kaui, it’s going to be all over me in a minute—” I clutched at the shorts’ waistband and pulled down as hard as the fabric would let me. Something ripped and the shorts got below her knees and Van slammed herself down on the toilet seat and the volcano in her guts erupted. I flinched, banging my elbows against the stall door.

  “Can’t you just—” I started, but there was nowhere to go, and Van grunted and let loose again. Wet sounds crackled out of her bottom. She was pressing her hands against the sides of the stall and panting as the food jetted out of her in one endless run. I was still holding on to her legs, where the shorts had stopped. I wanted to cover my nose, to back away, but it was already over. Van shook with laughter. A stench steamed oppressively out of the toilet.

  “Oh my God,” Van gasped. “I don’t even smoke, and I feel like that deserves a cigarette.” She laughed. I did, too.

  “How was the cheese?” I asked, tears in my eyes, although it was hard to know what from, the stink or the laughter. “Worth it?”

  “Worth it,” Van said, forearms on her knees, hanging her head. “Definitely worth it. God, my ass smells terrible. Who knew.” I let go of her shorts and stood. From up there I could see the hunch of her back. Gentle knuckles of spine. The big and small of her breathing. Her shorts puddled around her ankles, the explosion of shredded fabric and mangled zipper track. Just then the main bathroom door groaned open, followed by the sharp clack of a pair of high heels. Whoever the woman was, she didn’t make it far. After a few seconds the heels retreated. The roar of the party came up, then swung back to silence with the closing door.

  “Exactly,” Van said, as she wiped. “Run for your life.”

  But we did need to leave. “Let me try this zipper,” I said. I squatted again, and when I shifted my weight, my left knee, the purple-brown spatters of scar on top of my dark-brown skin, that knee pressed against her shin. I left it there. Van had finished wiping. I tried the shorts, their zipper, but after a few pitiful jerks I gave up. The wine was letting me know how much of it I’d really had. My head throbbed from the effort of pulling and I let my skull roll forward onto Van’s shoulder. Then sideways into the scoop of her collarbone. We paused. Breathing: my head, her neck. I lifted my head slightly and our ears touched; our necks, hers damp. I lifted my head, knowing what I was moving for. My lips drifted across the small hairs on her cheek and then into her mouth.

  Sweat stippled her upper lip. She opened her mouth slightly, me, too, and we pressed ourselves together. Her lips were way softer and more foreign than I thought they’d be and there was a short wet flash of our tongues meeting, thick and warm with spit, plus the cooked pocket of our breath. I prickled, all over my face. Our lips stayed together. Pressed harder. Then we disconnected.

  Soon we were single file on the dusty road away from the parking lot. A purple dusk was coming. We put our thumbs out into the yellow beams of headlights coming from behind, stripped off our shoes, and walked backward so we could see the faces failing to pick us up. Eventually a car whined to a stop alongside us.

  They were an older couple with ashy hair. Neck wattles checkered with creases and liver spots. She had a long face like a horse and lipstick so bright her lips didn’t look real. His hands were on the wheel, and all the way up to his blue golf shirt his arms were wrinkled with dissolving muscle. But they were smiling and said they’d remembered what it was like to be in a place like this, young and broke. They said they’d take us all the way.

  We got in and the car creaked down the dirt tracks that led out to the blacktop road.

  We hadn’t said a real word to each other since the bathroom. I still felt Van’s lips on my own. Their perfect curve and the way they were soft and sticky with a little of her lipstick. I can still feel them now, anytime I want to remember. You can talk about a thing over and over. Or see movies or listen to songs that you think say something about it, right? But still it’s nothing compared to the whirling jump of blood in your chest when you find, at last and at least for a moment, someone that wants you as much as you want them.

  Van shifted her legs around. It made the leather seat groan. Her hand was spread next to her leg. I slid my hand out so that my fingers touched hers. The delicate ridge of her cuticles, so light I might have imagined them. She took my hand full into hers, our fingers zippered up together.

  “Kaui,” Van said. Like she’d discovered something.

  The car bumped off the dusty lawn-road and met the hard, straight asphalt. The blinker clicked, over and over, as we leaned into the freeway. We were touching, me and Van, all the way home.

  10

  DEAN, 2008

  Spokane

  Six a.m. lights are up and we work the line, loading all the time. It’s all cardboard boxes everywhere, rumbling around metal trays and chutes, underneath there’s gears and rubber belts, bunch o
f whirrs and clanks and clatters. That’s the thing I’m inside for my eight hours, loading and loading and loading. Everything across the belts and into all the open backs of the trucks, or else you’re working farther back, forklifting or roller-carting pallets of stuff, making all the stacks neat and fast with the sthunk sthunk sthunk of cardboard stacking on itself.

  Loader, that’s me, right, but I was training for a driver job, figure I make a little bigger paycheck and get outside, so I got for do a few ride-alongs and see how deliveries work. This was what, April. Of course one of the first routes I’m on goes right to the university and I was all, “I’m not going in there.” Carl, the driver, said, “The hell you talking about?”

  The way he said it I could see the tooth that was missing, far right side just at the edge of his always-chapped mouth. Him every time with his skin like a pirate, not shaving for days and days. What a bald-ass, chewed-up haole. First day I went for a ride-along with him, Carl gleeked the last of his dip into a 7UP can with the top peeled off and asked from under his weird blue eyes, “What are you?”

  I was like, What.

  “I figure it’s like you’re black, but I dunno. You have Chinese eyes and hair like this one girl I used to know. She was a Jew, I think.”

  I figure would’ve been bad to false-crack him right then so I just said, “Hawaiian Filipino,” the same I had to say to everyone, everywhere, except back home.

  Then we was on our second run together and I bet Carl already couldn’t remember what I was. Us at the university and me still in the passenger seat in the delivery truck. The back side of the union was where we’d parked, where all the deliveries got done, and Carl was already starting for the back of the truck while I was still trying for figure out if any of the students going by was people I knew, or if they knew me, which was what really mattered.