Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  After a while it got so that on the calls Noa started slipping in these comments and questions about me, way after everyone else had stopped talking about my future. He’d say, There’s so much you can still do with your life. Maybe basketball isn’t the only thing. I’d be like, You don’t understand, if there’s no basketball, there’s no me.

  And so he’d say, Well, you can still win, then. You just need one good break, he’d say. You’ll get lucky, just keep working hard on the practice squad.

  It was hard for figure out how to take what he was saying. It lifted me some, but it wasn’t enough. For real, more he said the right things, the things I wanted for hear, the more it made me go the other way. It was like I was still fighting with him: if he was going for be the better brother then I was going for push him off. It got all tangled up with how I was feeling about Coach and the team and how basketball was feeling sour, so that I wanted to burn all of them, and that’s what I did, all the way to the end, when I got cut and dropped out.

  Didn’t stop Noa, though. He kept calling, even after Kaui stopped enforcing the group phone calls. Sometimes I hardly said anything, Noa would just talk, but it still did something for both of us, just to be on the same line, just for a little bit.

  But this one time he called and even now I wish I could do ’um again. I didn’t do what needed for be done.

  “What’s up?” I said when he called.

  Right from the start there was a pause. “Nothing,” he said. “Just thought I would call.”

  Oh, man, I thought, one of these-kind calls. I started watching SportsCenter again, but it was all hockey highlights, haole guys bashing each other’s brains against the walls while, like, moms and dads got their kids on their shoulders, cheering with blood flying in their beer and everything.

  “What are you doing?” Noa said.

  “Just curing some cancer while I figure out how to make nuclear energy with my ass,” I said. “How ’bout you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He took this deep, wet breath.

  “What, are you crying or something?” I said, and Noa said he was, yeah, and said it this weird way. Like he was talking to the empty air, not me, didn’t matter who was listening. “Noa, brah,” I said. “What is it?”

  “I just,” he said, “I made a mistake.”

  “A mistake,” I said. “Like calling one girl another girl’s name. I done that this one time and you shoulda seen—”

  “They were here, then they were gone,” he said. “I almost did it. But I shouldn’t even have tried.”

  And I said what the hell, because I had no idea what he was talking about, and he said that there was a car accident, a pregnant mom in the one car, she’d died on the way to the hospital, while he was trying for save her. The baby was gone, too.

  “You did everything you could,” I said, which, I wasn’t even there yeah, but I knew my brother.

  “You remember New Year’s?” he said.

  “’Course.”

  “I thought that was the start,” he said. “I thought I knew what was coming.”

  “Noa,” I said, but then nothing came after. And on his side of the phone there wasn’t nothing, either, just something cold. Might as well he was calling me from inside a refrigerator.

  “What do you think I am?” Noa asked.

  “What you are?” I said. “A smart-ass, is what you are.”

  “No,” he said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Like what you got inside you,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Whatchyou want me to say?” I asked. “Aren’t you doing what you’re supposed to? Fixing people like you did back in Kalihi? Isn’t that what it is? Or you’re, what, gonna be a badass kahuna emperor, like Mom thinks.”

  “What if they’re wrong?” he said. “What if it’s not just supposed to be me?”

  “What?”

  “Did you ever feel anything yourself?” he asked. “From the islands, from back home. Or even after, in Spokane.”

  When he asked again, for real, this feeling came inside me. Back then I didn’t know what the feeling was, but now I do. I was scared, is what it was. I thought if I said yes, if I said I believed, that it meant it was true, what Mom and Dad and everyone back home had thought about him, and what they’d thought about me. All the old anger came foaming back up. “Shit, Noa, you tell me,” I said. “I thought you was supposed to be the smart one.”

  Something went stale in the call. Like he pulled back, I could feel it. He sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’ve just got this feeling. I don’t think all of this is about me. I need to go home to find out.”

  I didn’t say nothing, so he filled the space. “You believe in destiny?” he asked.

  I only had to turn my head a little and I could see the last pair of basketball shoes I got at the university, custom-made, so that they matched our jerseys. “What,” I said. “Like you show up at the right place at the right time, and everything gonna go the way it’s supposed to?” Those shoes was still mostly new, stuck in the corner under some old magazines. I snorted. “I don’t believe in none of that no more.”

  Noa coughed, cleared his throat. One of those forced ones. “I figured you’d say that,” he said.

  You take me back to that call now, I’d do it the right way. I’d be the man I was supposed to be, not the boy I was. But I wasn’t ready yet, I guess. I shoulda been.

  Give me that call back.

  “Good talking with you, man,” my brother said. And then he hung up.

  15

  NAINOA, 2008

  Kalihi

  For the first few days when I arrive home, my parents believe what I tell them, which is that I needed a break, that I’m on vacation, and will return to Portland soon. We have vacuous dinners together, full of easy pleasantries, where I’m able to lie about my life with Khadeja and Rika and they talk about uncles and cousins and different hānai family in the islands, gossip and trite news to fill the air. There’s katsu and teriyaki and saimin and Zippy’s chili, shave ice and Leonard’s Bakery and even the classics, pōke and poi. Blue-sky noons when both parents are at work, I make my way through concrete Honolulu, the cacophony and open-market whirlwind of Chinatown, the quiet fury of the homeless city in Kaka‘ako, the polished bougie product of Waikiki. I’m home but I’m not home.

  Khadeja calls me, over and over, I don’t answer. She starts calling Mom, Khadeja’s clever that way, street-smart, relentless, and while she calls less often as the weeks go by she doesn’t stop.

  I visit the island like I’m a tourist. Arizona Memorial, Sea Life Park, Hale‘iwa, Aloha Stadium Swap Meet. Just to walk around in crowds, to have faces I don’t know and don’t want to caroming around in my mind, feel the collective rhythm of conflicting desires and states of being, to try and think of Hawai‘i as a place that I don’t owe anything to. I get sunburned like I never used to and then I get brown again the way I was, nothing else changes.

  On the third week, Mom stops me as I leave the bathroom, my breath still cool and thick with toothpaste. “You have to talk to her,” she says, meaning Khadeja.

  “No I don’t,” I say. “She doesn’t understand.”

  “She wants to,” Mom says.

  I shrug.

  “You know,” she says, “since you’ve been back, I know you’ve visited some of the old places. Does it feel like it did when you were a kid?”

  “When I was what?” I ask.

  “When you were young.”

  “I don’t remember that,” I say.

  “Remember what?”

  “Feeling young.”

  For a moment it’s clear she thinks what I’m saying is ridiculous, and I believe another day or a different child—Dean or Kaui—and she’d say, Get it together, drama queen, with all her salt and thickness. But she pauses, she’s searching my face, the same way Khadeja had, but there’s something bigger in her, more insistent and unflinching, as if she can see the
me I am now, but also all the versions of me that were here, with her, for so many years. “What’s happening?” she asks.

  She doesn’t say anything, I don’t, either, at first, but then it all comes spilling out, what I had been learning to do with myself in the ambulance, how I’d been close to unlocking all the mechanics of human life, but at the same time starting to resent the patients, their weaknesses, how I’d been stupid and arrogant and wasted the life of a mother and child, that I’d left Khadeja and Rika behind.

  “I hate this,” I say. “I hate what’s in me.”

  “What’s in you,” she says. “What’s in you is a gift.”

  “It should have been given to someone else,” I say, my voice louder. “You’re so grateful for it, maybe you should be the one to have it.”

  A slanted smile on her face now, she won’t break her gaze with me. “You know, I could have left this place years ago, even after I met your father,” she says. “I could have gone to the mainland, too. Just like all three of you keikis. I had excellent grades.”

  “Why didn’t you—” I start.

  “Don’t interrupt me, Noa, not now,” she says. “I’ve been to the mainland, I’ve traveled to San Francisco and Chicago and New York City. There’s something here, in Hawai‘i, that’s bigger than all those Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous places. It’s what woke the night marchers. It’s what pulled you from the water and sent the animals to die with you, what gave you all these gifts.”

  “Gods,” I say.

  She shrugs. “That’s one name for it.”

  “All the stories you told me,” I say. “Some ancient relative, floating above me in the clouds, turning into an animal when I need it, guiding my destiny. I don’t feel anything like that.”

  “I don’t know the rules,” she says. “Listen. I’d lift it off your shoulders if I could, Noa. There are so many places and people that need what you have.” She seems more sure of herself the more she talks. “But I believe you can still be what’s needed.”

  “It’s like you haven’t been listening,” I say. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  The slanted smile she had earlier comes back, as if she’s in on a joke that someone told her behind my back. “So you’re done,” she says. “Fine. But tell me. You could have gone anywhere after what happened in Portland. So why did you come back here?”

  “Free food,” I say, halfheartedly. “Free rent.”

  She shakes her head, she knows, I didn’t even have to tell her. “It just felt right,” I say. “It felt like what I needed to do.”

  “That feeling,” she says, “it’s something speaking, Noa. So listen.” She gives me a quick hug. “We’re glad to have you home.”

  And so I listen, I do. I leave the concrete parts of the land, I find the parks and the valleys and the oceans, I let green and blue and gold songs scatter around me in the dawn and dusk in wild places. Illegal trails and vacant strips of sand, all the hidden places I knew about as a teenager, places kids would go to smoke a joint to the roach or play with each other’s bodies or realize a dare. I walk and I catch the bus and I hitchhike, crisscrossing the island, until it happens.

  There’s a morning when I’m on the windward side, a steep trail somewhere between Makapu‘u Point and the tide pools after. There’s a slice of sand that plunges into midnight-blue water and I slip into it, let the current drag me into the deep. Ocean swells roll in above my armpits, rock against my shivering torso, the water below me clean and clear.

  The pull had been strong, to come here, to get in the water, the call was almost its own gravity, it doesn’t take long before I see what’s been waiting.

  The sun is just risen, and I can see four lashing shadows in the water, headed directly for me, slowing to a liquid glide as they close the distance. They are sharks, and for a moment my body shoots with fear, I should go, I should go, there’s still time, but another part of me is done with fleeing, and that part of me makes a stand. I tread water gently, and the sharks begin to circle.

  They go clockwise, gray reef sharks, and I name their parts as they pass, snout, pectoral fin, dorsal ridge, caudal. Snout, pectoral fin, dorsal ridge, caudal. They circle sleepily, barely dancing their bodies. Their eyes find mine and my stomach wells with fear and excitement.

  I reach a hand out, the circle closes just enough that I can touch each one as they pass, their bodies are ice-slick, thick with potential violence, and when I touch, something blooms at the point of contact, travels the length of my arm, a channel of feeling that is the same as what I felt when I worked in the ambulance, only now I don’t see inside anything, but rather outside myself: Waipi‘o Valley, its rivers, then lo‘i paddies of kalo stalks growing plump and green, swarming the valley bottom, and there my family is among it all, with many families, on the beach sand or along the river or standing among the trees. The figures of our bodies become shadows and warp and diminish into the paddies, the river, the bay, as if we are made of the same water, beating into the current with the same motion the sharks are making now, everything blending into the other, it all flows into me and I flow into it.

  My eyes are open, the sharks are gone.

  It’s just me, floating chest-deep in the ocean, cold water, warm sunrise, but I know where I have to go, where it all began of course, the valley.

  16

  MALIA, 2008

  Kalihi

  If a god is a thing that has absolute power over us, then in this world there are many. There are gods that we choose and gods that we can’t avoid; there are gods that we pray to and gods that prey on us; there are dreams that become gods and pasts that become gods and nightmares that do, as well. As I age I learn that there are more gods than I’ll ever know, and yet I have to watch for all of them, or else they can use me or I can lose them without even realizing it.

  Take money: my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, Kānaka Maoli that she was, had no use for paper printed with the silhouette of some faraway haole man. It gave nothing. What was needed was food from the earth, housing from the earth, medicine from the earth, a sense of one’s place in the system. What was provided and what had to be cultivated. But ships from far ports carried a new god in their bellies, a god who blew a breath of weeping blisters and fevers that torched whole generations, a god whose fingers were shaped like rifles and whose voice sounded like treaties waiting to be broken. And money was the name of that god, and it was the sort of god that preyed on you, made demands and laid its hands on you with such force as to make the Old Testament piss its pants.

  We were made, eventually, to pray to it, whether we wanted to or not. Your father and I still pray to it now.

  Take language. ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, which was not written, only passed from one mouth to the next, less letters than the English that soon roared over it, and yet it contained more mana of Hawai‘i than anything that foreign tongue could twist itself into. What do you do when pono, a healing word, a power word—a word that is emotions and relationships and objects and the past and the present and the future, a thousand prayers all at once, worth eighty-three of the words from the English (righteousness, morality, prosperity, excellence, assets, carefulness, resources, fortune, necessity, hope, and on and on)—is outlawed? When our language, ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, was outlawed, so our gods went, so prayers went, so ideas went, so the island went.

  Take you, my son. You are not a god, but there is something that moves through you that may be one. Does it revive what came before, or build something new? I can’t say.

  But when you returned from Portland with a broken hope I did my best to help. It’s hard to guide what you can’t feel, and there are so many days in this modern Hawai‘i in which I don’t feel anything. But when you are near, there is something, just under the surface, that I can feel. It is bright and warm and ready, but I can feel it, like a gentle swell of the ocean that contains a million pounds of power underneath.

  And so I encouraged you to visit the valley, it’s true. I t
rusted in what you were feeling, and that to follow that feeling would hopefully bring forth that which was inside you. See that? Hope can be a god as well. It’s something that can be prayed to.

  17

  NAINOA, 2008

  Waipi‘o Valley

  Two days out and I’m still walking, still feeling the call, the gravity, ever stronger every day. I’m here, the Big Island, heading up out of Waimanu Valley, second valley after Waipi‘o, heavy with the feeling I will find something, just around the next turn, just behind the hala trees and on into the gritty mud of the trail, all the mosquitoes and flies tickling my skin, scattering from my slap.

  The sun hasn’t broken through and the gray smears of cloud rush past, the gusts make the bushes sizzle. I’m nearing the ridge, the point past which almost no one visits, out of this side of Waimanu and into the valleys beyond that have no name, it is said to be a broken and impossible path. I step up into the mist and muck and swing my machete, and I walk and I hack, knowing if I keep going something will be revealed, that I can finally understand what I should become.

  At dusk it’s clear that I’m not alone. I’ve been bushwhacking for hours, stomping and slashing, the folds of my shirt flapping with sweat, when I break through a heavier section of branches into a clearing. It’s more space than I’ve felt since the morning, and I can smell the eggy metallic scent of a lit camping stove. Fifty feet away there is a shack, the boards lepered with moss, the tin roof copper with rust and blanketed in leaves and twigs. There is no window on this side, but I hear a murmur of voices and so make my way across the clearing.

  When I am close enough I circle around to the front of the shack. It has an official bearing, perhaps a building once used to shelter park rangers or trail crews or rescue workers. The front wall has collapsed in sections, complete chunks gone like a house in a war, so that you can see through large holes into the room inside, it looks warm and dry, and even if the wood floor is rotting, it’s certainly soft.