Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  Pale fluorescent light flashes through the holes and I hear the voices clearer now, a European language of some sort. The light turns full into my face and I hold up a hand to shield my eyes against the blast of white.

  “Yes, okay, hello,” a man’s voice, thickly accented, comes from the inside of the shack. “What does he want with the machete, don’t come closer.”

  “I heard you from the trail,” I say. It sounds apologetic, but the light remains blinding in my eyes. I step toward the door.

  “Stop,” the man says, and I do.

  There is a series of whispers that slash back and forth between the man and someone else, a higher and rounder voice that sounds like a woman.

  “Can’t I come in?” I say. “I’ve been sleeping in the dirt for the last two days. I’m very tired.”

  More whispering.

  “Maybe tell us something.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “From where you are coming, what trail you were on, these things maybe.”

  I sigh, leave one hand up, still blocking the light from hitting my eyes. “I’m from here,” I say. “I grew up in Honoka‘a.”

  “And the—”

  “—I’ve been on the trail starting at Waipi‘o. It gets very thick coming out of Waimanu. I’ve had to hack my way out to get here.”

  They whisper again; I don’t wait, I don’t care, I pitch the machete through one of the holes in the wall and the clang of it on the floor stops their discussion. “You keep it for the night if you need it.”

  With the blade out of my hands, whoever’s inside is satisfied. The light swings away from my face and I’m able to step up to the front door and enter. Bare walls, grim-frosted windows, a small wooden table where the man and the woman are sitting.

  Even above the thick smell of mildew, I can smell the couple. It’s an organic stink, like a pile of compost in the sun, lemon peels and old coffee and vinegar, and I can’t help but think, Fucking haoles. It’s the way Dean would have put it if he were here: he’d always bought the local perception of white people—hopelessly ignorant, awkward, dirty—and as much as I resist the stereotype, sometimes it smashes itself in my face. The man with his dark, tangled hair pulled back into a stumpy ponytail, a pubic beard crawling his throat, hunched at the table like a new kid at school, then the woman’s blond hair, hacked boy-short, frames her mouth, a crooked fence of teeth I see while she whispers. Both are vaguely athletic, piercings across their faces—all their ears, he the eyebrow, she the nose and lip—and they have dark-blue circles of sleeplessness around their eye sockets.

  Their camping stove, basically a small metal fist, continues hissing. Battered metal plates and utensils are cluttered around it. I gesture at the table; they nod and I sit. I slip free from my pack, and when I do exhaustion slides over me, pulls at my eyelids, I lean my head down into my crossed arms and rest it there, trying not to fall asleep.

  “Are you taking a meal, perhaps?” the man asks.

  I raise my head and stumble through a response, yes I do eat and I haven’t eaten, I have some things here and should probably start, and I unzip my bag and withdraw wadded clothing, finding my own small pot underneath. I’ve stored some of my meals inside the pot—packages of mac and cheese, tins of tuna, a small, crackling rainbow bag of candy—and they spill out when I open it on the table.

  “No no no,” the woman says, smiling. “We can eat some with you. It’s not needed.”

  “It’s always needed,” I say. I offer up a tin of tuna, the man shrugs and slides the tin to their side of the table, then we all sit and watch the pot belch steam.

  Eventually, the man speaks. Our stomachs are full now with the heat of the pasta, tang of tuna. We’d said few words about ourselves while eating, talking first about the trail. They’d started out days ahead of me, their intention to cross all the valleys to Pololu, except about a day’s journey farther up the trail its condition became so degraded and unstructured they were certain it would kill them if they continued. They were Germans, on the island for another week and a half before visiting bits of the mainland as they made their slow way home to Munich. As we talked now the woman, Saskia, loosened up, she mentioned how much she wanted to see the volcano, asked me about my “child-time” in Hawai‘i. She talked with her mouth open and scratched her armpit, she was blond, and yet when I saw Saskia it was Khadeja that was there, not because they were at all the same but because of the way I could feel her presence on Lukas, as if the very air between them was filled with invisible threads that stitched them to one another. They could stand and carry plates away to the dilapidated shelves, or step outside to relieve themselves, and yet you’d feel each one’s attention to the other tugged along. In it I recognized what I had, too, Khadeja and Rika, and memories tumbled down and stacked on each other so that I was playing pool at an ashy bar with Khadeja just before closing time, watching her lean over the pool table, the way her lips parted just slightly while she focused and her fingers delicated the cue, those same fingers she’d use to brush an eyelash from Rika’s eye when we were all on our way back from a picnic at the park, smelling of sandwich turkey and lazily full of afternoon sun.

  I had a feeling there would be more of this, that their absence was something that would rest inside me, like the salt underneath my skin, rising out of my pores to sting my eyes when I least wanted it to.

  “Something is out there,” Lukas says suddenly, and I’m pulled from my memories.

  “What?” I say.

  Saskia says something gentle to Lukas in German, Lukas replies almost playfully, his voice going up an octave. “The land is something,” Saskia says, turning back to me. “It is a person and an animal and other things, I don’t know.” She leans over, places her head on his shoulder. “We don’t have religion,” she says to me, “but we both say this place is somehow like that.”

  There’s a queasiness of happiness that starts then, quickly, inside me. If these two could feel something, if they think this place is special. “Yes,” I say, “there is something here . . .” and I start talking, too fast, the words don’t touch my mind before they leave my lips, all the things I’ve wanted to say about what I’m feeling here. By the time I catch up to myself, I’m saying “. . . it could make the whole world better, couldn’t it. If the right person was using it.”

  They smile, but there’s a question behind it, their brows raised and crinkly with incomprehension. There’s a sudden flatness to whatever had been between us. “Wait,” I say, although no one is doing anything. “I’ve got an idea.” I fumble the bag of rainbow candies from my backpack, tear it softly, and offer the opening to each of them. I turn and pull my ‘ukulele from the backpack, open the case. “Have you heard any of our songs?”

  I offer the candy again, each of them takes one. Lukas sucks his a moment, then frowns. He says something to Saskia and she spits her candy softly into her hand, motions for him to do the same with his, then cradles both to the jagged hole in the window and ejects them into the night.

  “We can hear the songs,” she says, “but no more of this”—she gestures to the candy bag—“please.”

  I laugh. “It’s only candy,” I say. “You don’t have candy in Germany?”

  She fetches an elegantly decorated bar of chocolate from her backpack; she peels back the foil, breaks us each a shard of the dark chocolate.

  “Here,” she says. “We do it right.”

  “Give us your songs, then,” Lukas says, his eyes gleaming. “Tell us about this place?”

  I lift my hand, feeling all of it, from the night marchers until now. When what’s in my mouth hits my tongue it blooms, dark and sweet and barely bitter.

  Morning comes, I wake in the corner of the shack, the damp pocket of my sleeping bag. The room is worse in the dawn: the wood everywhere is dark and I can feel the moisture coming off the boards, the swelling steam of decomposition, ceiling joists are bowed, sagging, spattered with the remains of bird nests. The table we were sitti
ng at last night, sturdy enough then, in truth has ragged legs and a warped, bleached top. Rot has chewed through several small spots in the ceiling, and when a cloud splits apart above, through those holes, rods of white light slant down and scatter on the walls, the floor.

  I stand, go to the table, where a green plastic bowl waits, heavy with oatmeal. I lay my palm over the top and feel a last bit of heat rising. They left it for me, and I can’t help but smile, although there is no spoon. I sit on the creaking chair and listen to the clack of the leaves, I scoop the oats with my fingers, as if they are poi, feeling my body hum to life.

  Ever since I’d taken my hands from the body of the mother, the feeling of connection—to the physical world, to the people I talked to or lived around—was gone. Wherever I was, in a crowded room or on an empty sidewalk, in the ambulance or at home, sleeping against Khadeja, I ended at the tips of my fingers and toes. There was nothing shared or passed to another, nothing I took from them, I was alone, all of me wrapped up in the voices and memories and souls of the animals and people who’d passed through me. But now, this morning, that has all quieted, replaced instead by a light, steady tug, a desire, but not a voice, wanting me to join it; I’m home.

  By the middle of the day I don’t remember all the walking that came between the morning and now. I know that there was exertion, that I stepped and rose and fell with the trail and hacked bush in some places and tramped through the same track that Saskia and Lukas bore down the day before, but it had come and gone without my attention. I’m sweating and thirsty but I don’t stop, I can’t, the valley is opening up for me, as if in invitation. All the branches bend away rather than claw, the mud firms itself for my feet, the mosquitoes scatter rather than swarm. Every step I take, I bounce back stronger and lighter.

  Here I am, I think to myself, not as a declaration, but as an offer. This is where I should have been all along, I should have stayed in the islands, worked harder to listen. What did I think I could have accomplished alone, trying to mend broken bodies on the mainland? A whole parade of patients couldn’t teach me as much as a place like this; connections are leaping out at me, revealing themselves, without any effort from me. The way my sweat takes the cells of my skin, mingled with dirt, from my body and drops them into the soil, and how the mist drapes the trees and the trees drink of it and then the sun lights it up and takes it back into the air, and how the plants breathe and their exhale becomes my inhale, the same way so many of the people of these islands once pressed their foreheads together in greeting and inhaled the same air, as one.

  The path breaks in front of me. A clearing appears off the main trail and I take it, slipping between the trees. My backpack bangs against the branches, but I continue, push along. I want to see the valley from the sky, I want to see the ocean, it’s there just past the break. The ground slopes down toward a lookout edge, and when I arrive it’s clear how far I’ve come. Waimanu and Waipi‘o, distant and massive but closely tactile all at once, clefts of green with curving bays of rippling surf.

  I am far above the valley floor and I stand and watch, but then the ground shifts under me. I feel weightless for a moment, as if I’m leaping, then the swerve of acceleration in my belly, a blur of grass and rushing wind, something jerks and tears at my shoulders, my spine is wrung with heat, popping, the yawning of my body swinging, then I see sky, or ocean far below, something snaps, my femur, I’m spinning, weightless again, the air rushes, Oh wait, oh wait—

  PART III

  DESTRUCTION

  18

  KAUI, 2008

  San Diego

  After me and Van at the creek, I was moving like a bullet train on fresh rails. I started telling all my engineering professors that gave out group work that I didn’t want to be part of a group—boys after boys after boys and always the same, me fighting each one of them for a voice—so I’d do all the work myself, even if it was four times as much, okay? I did all the work and stood at the top 1 percent of all the hard classes.

  Me and Van (and Hao and Katarina) would climb buildings at night if we couldn’t get away from campus. Sometimes me and Van would sit on the floor of our dorm room with our backs to each other, right, while we scribbled in our notebooks, read and highlighted our chapters, our shoulder blades running over each other the way I wanted our hands to. But we didn’t go as far again as we had at the Creek. It was like we were at the top of the diving platform, eyeing the water far below that could soak us, could cool us, but we didn’t leap. We were back to something less, but not nothing. I could feel myself run to a fever by it, fighting to keep myself from flat-out begging for all of her.

  One night there’s a call from Mom. It’s about Noa, of course. Only this time it’s different.

  “What do you mean he’s missing?” I say. The only thing I knew was that he’d had some sort of accident at work. Someone had died on his watch and maybe it was his fault, so he was getting space and time to deal with it, gone back to Hawai‘i. But home should be safe, right? That’s the point of home.

  Mom explains the trip Noa had taken to the Big Island. A walkabout it sounded like. Hiking all the remote and sacred spaces in the valleys near Honoka‘a.

  “He was called there,” she says.

  “Called?” I ask. Not this bullshit again, I’m thinking.

  “The ‘aumakua,” she says. “He was feeling it strong once he got home. The valley was where he needed to be.”

  “You’re searching for him now?”

  “We’re flying out tonight. Dean’s coming in soon. The county has a search-and-rescue team started up.”

  “I’ll come home,” I say.

  “No,” Mom says, “you’re not leaving school.”

  “But you just said Dean is coming home.”

  There was a sigh from her, like I was being stupid. “He’s not in school anymore, Kaui,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say, stripping all emotion from my voice. “This is that you’ve-gotten-an-opportunity-we-never-had speech, isn’t it.”

  “Watch it,” Mom says.

  “It’s like you know what I want, and then force me to do the opposite,” I say.

  “Everything that got you to where you are, the mainland, a university,” Mom says, “it’s not just you making your life happen.”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “It’s the only thing that is.”

  I figure that does it. Let’s go, yelling or maybe cold quiet fury, Mom can do both. But she says the strangest thing, I’m still thinking about it later, when it’s all done.

  “Oh, Kaui,” she says. “I know you. I was you. Stay there. What happens if you’re here, and don’t finish the semester?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. But the more I start thinking the more I see she’s right. It’d take another semester to get caught up on whatever classes I missed, at the very least. Which means another five digits of debt. It would hurt. I could do it. But I knew what would happen in Hawai‘i: Noa would come back from the valley, probably flying on a unicorn that was farting rainbows, and he’d shower more miracles on the family, news stories and donations flooding in and another round of perfect golden light. If I went home I’d be nothing but a spectator, at best, okay? I wasn’t worried about my brother.

  And what hits me then is relief, big and strong. I’m not going home. They don’t want me. Relief relief relief. What sort of shitty sister does that make me?

  I tell myself this is what everyone wants and not just me. And actually, does it matter if it’s only me that wants this? I get back to work. Days with just my books and classes, all platonic with Van, wondering where and how we’ll finally jump. If it’s my move or hers.

  But something about that call changes everything, I swear. A curse or something. It all stops. Van stops coming back to our dorm room, and she doesn’t answer when I call. We’d scheduled ourselves to take one of those bullshit requirements together, Christ and the Crusades or whatever. I figure I’ll see her there, ask her what’s up, right? But she doesn’
t come to class. I send her one text message and make myself not send another.

  I go itchy with want, thin on sleep. I feel her fingers in mine. The jolt of her laughter. The way we could be both hard and soft on each other. Her sandy voice calling out as I climb one exposed cliff after another. Up, up, up. All night this all goes through me, the four hours of sleep I get. I slip up on my latest Structural Designs homework set, score a 70 percent, barely on the curve.

  Not like you, the professor notes on my exam.

  When I talk with Hao and Katarina, ask about Van, they shrug and say she’s acting different, won’t talk to them, either. Two days after the call from Mom, I wait in the student union, just around the time Van normally comes by for her coffee. I fold myself into a corner love seat, across from the announcement corkboard. Okay, she comes along soon enough, backpack hooked over both broad shoulders. Hoodie navy blue and logoless. She has a wide, lazy stride, her bob tangled and unbrushed, her small overbite peeking out between sips of coffee. When she gets closer, I stand up.

  She stops. “Kaui.”

  “Hey,” I say.

  “What’s up?” she says. Glances to the side. “I’ve got class.”

  I should take it easy, right? I know. Find the gentle words. But my heart is too strong. “Bullshit.”

  She scowls. “What?”

  “Something’s going on.”

  “I have class,” she repeats. She starts walking. I don’t say anything right away, just start following her out of the union, into the parking lot.

  A skateboarder rumbles by. His wheels grinding over the rough concrete. We both watch him go by. His white cotton boxers muffining out of his slouched jeans, the burred outline of his wallet wearing through his pocket. We watch him like he’s the best skater in the world, following his passage with our eyes, saying nothing.