The Islands at the End of the World

by Austin Aslan

  “Akoni and his ‘calculations,’ ” Dad says.

  “Well, let’s see your numbers. What does your global network of ham radio operators think? You said this could be a problem before we even met Uncle Akoni. And … don’t you remember? The night all this began, you were making popcorn in the microwave. But it wouldn’t pop.”

  Dad falls silent for a moment. “Because … there was no radiation in the microwave.”

  He’s starting to understand.

  “But … if you’re right … what do you want me to do? If radiation levels are rising again, now that the Orchids are leaving, how would we ever measure it?”

  My legs grow weak. The iodide is gone. It’s over, isn’t it? It’s all over. Unless …

  “What if I called them back? Got them to stay?”

  I shiver. Why would I even think such a thing? They’ve done us so much harm. Turned us wild. Into killers. Erased a century of technology in the blink of an eye. If they were to go, maybe we could get that back—not all of it, but most of it. It’s not too late to pick up the pieces.

  But if the threat of global radiation is real … it would all be over anyway, wouldn’t it? We’d turn on our toys just in time to be buried with them. That wouldn’t make any sense at all, would it? Maybe crews could contain the fallout once the power comes back on. Maybe the Orchids could stay just for a few months. Just long enough for us to get the word out and make sure all nuclear materials are stored somewhere safe. “How would you call them?” Dad asks.

  I shrug, but even as I do, the answer comes to me:

  “The second you reach Hilo, you go up on the mountain. Stand at the mouth of the cave. And when you hear the whisper, see if you can’t answer back. You promise?”

  “We have to go up to Mauna Kea,” I say. “We should try.”

  Dad is silent; then: “When?”

  I shrug again. “Now? They’re leaving. We don’t have much time.”

  “Tonight? Lei, what about our family?”

  Where are they? Why can’t they just be here? When will this nightmare end?

  This is ridiculous. What am I proposing? “I don’t know. I don’t know what we’d do, anyway.”

  Dad changes his tone. “The scientist in me needs more proof, Lei. But I’m going to take that hat off, okay? The Dad in me has faith in you.”

  “Really?”

  “We’ll go in the morning. We’ll find a way. But we’ll go at first light, okay? It’s insane, but … I’d rather try and know than watch you all get sick, wondering.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  CHAPTER 29

  I awaken from a sound sleep just after dawn. Strangely, I was dreaming of Aukina. We were holding hands on the beach. I shake the image away. Aukina’s on his way to the mainland right now. Forget about him.

  Dad is already up, working on various projects. Mom and Kai and Grandpa have not magically appeared, and I steel myself against a growing sense of panic. The sunrise is beautiful through our broad living-room windows, casting a pink ribbon across the distant ocean horizon, but I have no room for joy.

  They’re okay. They’re not far. Don’t worry.

  I see the T-shirt Dad’s wearing and bark with laughter. He grins. It’s the exact same grin Kai gets after he makes me laugh.

  “You’re sick, you know that?”

  The shirt is printed with a windy, jungle-covered road. Bright green letters say I SURVIVED THE ROAD TO HANA.

  We eat fast, leave a note, and pile into the hybrid. I’m wearing fresh clothes. They feel glorious, even though the shirt hangs on me and I need a belt to keep my pants up. A warm jacket sits bundled on my lap; the cold on top of Mauna Kea is a force of its own. I frown absently. The note we left might as well have read:

  Hi, Mom! We’re back. Everything’s okay, but we had to run off for a bit. I can talk to the Emerald Orchid. Turns out it’s an alien, and it thrives on cosmic radiation. It has a soft spot for our atmosphere and for thermal nuclear meltdowns—which are happening all over the globe, btw. We’re heading up to the summit to try to convince it to stick around for several hundred million years—or at least long enough for people to fix nuclear power plants around the world. You know, save all life on Earth and all that. Wish me luck! Brb.

  Dad presses the start button on the hybrid. Nothing. “I can’t even turn it on to check the charge?”

  I crack up. “ ‘Go green. Save the planet.’ So much for that.”

  “It won’t even turn on.”

  “Let’s forget it, then. Okay? It’s a stupid idea anyway.” I already know that he thinks this errand of ours is just as foolish as I do. But even as I say the words, I know that we must try.

  “No, hon. We’ll do it. We’ll figure it out.”

  The Civic is nearly empty, which was why Dad thought to take the hybrid, but we switch over to it when he finds half a gallon of gas in the old lawn mower at the back of the garage. The car turns on after the fourth crank of the ignition. We reluctantly pull away from the house. I can’t believe we’re leaving so soon. It feels like we’re abandoning a dream, acknowledging that there was no happy ending. As we wind down to the highway, I keep reminding myself we’re coming right back. We’re not ditching Mom and Kai, or giving up on their return.

  We pull onto the highway and scan the lay of the land. A truck drives toward us from the direction of town, so we press forward, cautiously optimistic that the highway leading into Hilo is passable. Every couple hundred yards we pass heaps of cars. Mostly rentals. I’m guessing they were abandoned during the chaos surrounding the tsunami.

  As promising as the roadways near Hilo prove to be, neither of our cars would have a prayer on the steep dirt switchbacks of the summit’s final ascent. We try firing up several abandoned rental Jeeps, but there are no keys hiding above visors, no way to start engines.

  This is nuts. What are we doing? We’re in denial, that’s what. The Orchid is long gone. Nuclear winter is around the corner—even for Hawai`i. “Thanks for doing this, Dad,” I sigh.

  I think he’s going to suggest we turn around, but he doesn’t. “Let’s keep trying. We can do a little more.”

  In Wainaku, just a stone’s throw from Honoli`i Beach, I spot a rusty old four-by-four with a Baptist church sticker, facing downhill. Dad parks the Civic off a side road to make it look like it’s been abandoned, and we scurry over to the van. The driver’s-side door pops open. We jump in.

  “Father, forgive me, for I’m about to sin,” Dad mutters. He searches briefly for keys. Nothing. He sticks his Civic key in the ignition, and I’m shocked that it turns. “Just like my old Ford,” he says. “Three decades of sea-salt damage. I bet a quarter of the cars in Hilo will start with any key.” The ignition won’t turn over, though. He presses the clutch to the floor and we begin to roll. When he pops the clutch, the vehicle springs to life and the needle shows that it’s three-quarters full. “Bet you a million bucks we’re not the first people to steal this piece of junk.”

  The van backfires loudly. “Don’t be so sure,” I say. “There may be a good reason why this rust bucket was dumped here.” Out of habit I try the radio as we slowly advance into Hilo. The old thing works, but we get only static.

  As we turn up Waianuenue Avenue, we pause. I feel light-headed and shaky as I see the destruction. The Hilo that I knew is gone. The old downtown is burnt to the ground, a rotten cavity along the bay front. The highway and parks in the low-lying areas are buried beneath debris. Hilo Bay is a giant stew of rubbish. The water laps against the shore like a heaving, swollen landfill.

  “So many lives,” Dad says. “So many. If we hadn’t been away, that could have been us.”

  The chilling thought sends waves along my back. “What if Mom and Kai were here, Dad?”

  “They weren’t. We already know they’ve been around home, as recently as a few days ago.”

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

  As soon as we can talk to the Emerald Orchid and find Mom and Kai
and Grandpa, I know what I need to do next: find Tami and her mom. Their house is on the corner of a street across town that is marked with a LEAVING TSUNAMI EVACUATION AREA sign. Around here it doesn’t look like the damage has reached as far as the warning signs, but it’s impossible to tell for sure.

  We continue up the mountain. Above the tsunami zone, Hilo breathes—but just barely. Cars seem deliberately parked, rather than discarded, but the rubbish heaps are everywhere. Many lawns seem tidy, but roadsides are overgrown with grasses and weeds. Pedestrians are skittish. Lots of cyclists. An open market bustles in the ball field near Rainbow Falls. It’s probably the farmer’s market that used to happen on the bay. It’s a relief to see people carrying on some of our old ways.

  The upper edge of town provides our first serious challenge. There are abandoned cars all over, and we have to break through several tight squeezes between vehicles. Our van is definitely on its last journey. We listen with dread as it struggles up the steep saddle between the world’s biggest mountain—Mauna Loa—and the world’s tallest when measured from the sea floor—Mauna Kea. We might find ourselves stranded twenty miles away from anything. The Saddle Road is a ghost highway.

  It takes us well over ninety minutes to reach the top of the road, a trip that used to take about half an hour. But we’ve made it this far. Dad’s sigh of relief is barely audible over the groaning of the motor. “Well, we’ll make it one direction, at least. Feel anything yet?”

  I shake my head. No.

  What are we doing?

  From here it’s another ten minutes to the observatories’ visitors’ center, perched at ten thousand feet. We turn onto the summit road and slog forward. Just before the visitors’ center, we pass a large sign, often shrouded in mist but real. Like the falling-mango warning, another artifact of a strange age.

  BEWARE OF INVISIBLE COWS

  It means that roadside cattle are hard to see in the fog. “Try not to hit one, okay?” I say.

  Our old joke. Dad glances around. “I don’t see any. Do you?”

  The visitors’ center is a necessary stop: you have to acclimate to the high elevation before scaling the final four thousand feet to the summit. Dad turns the van around and faces it downhill so that we can easily pop the clutch again. There’s only one other car in the lot. I’m used to seeing herds of tourists here, filing into and out of buses. This place feels very lonely—which is somehow fitting.

  As I jump out of the van, soaking up the silence and the stunning view, for the first time I feel that something has been corrected by the disasters. These high slopes were always overrun with tourists, but they should be lonesome. I stare across the silent expanse toward the distant bulge of Mauna Loa. The largest shield volcano in the world (and the third largest in the solar system), Mauna Loa is nearly as tall as Mauna Kea, but its slopes fade into the sea, as if it prefers to be mistaken for a pitcher’s mound. Mauna Loa presses in on the ocean floor sixteen thousand feet deep, like a thumb indenting the surface of a balloon.

  These are sacred places. Who could ascend these slopes and absorb their stillness—broken only by the volcanoes’ occasional trembling—and not feel that they are trespassing upon the home of a power far greater than any human? My heart stills, as if it has finally achieved its true homecoming.

  If ever there were a place to speak to the gods … to the creatures of the stars … this would be it.

  Dad and I stand beside each other at the overlook, staring at the distant sea. “Thank you for doing this,” I say.

  “I’m glad we came.”

  “Me too. Dad, what if this doesn’t work? What if it’s already too far away, or it doesn’t come back?”

  “Lei. This isn’t your burden. It never was. This was … never going to work.”

  We sit on the stone ledge overlooking the world for about twenty minutes. No traffic interrupts the silence. Nobody comes or goes, searching for the exit. It seems that we have all of creation to ourselves.

  “Are you ready?” I finally ask Dad.

  He lifts a can of diet cola. Full of aspartame; it should trigger a seizure. “I guess so.”

  “Don’t shake it, lōlō.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  As we walk toward the van, I’m surprised to see the front door of the visitors’ center standing open.

  Uncle Akoni’s voice echoes across the windswept stillness:

  “Go up on the mountain. Stand at the mouth of the cave. And when you hear the whisper, see if you can’t answer back.”

  I enter.

  CHAPTER 30

  The interior is dimly lit by skylights. Inside, flashy curiosities of science are on display, trinkets for sale. There is a small movie theater with thirty or so chairs facing a blank canvas. Framed posters on the walls. Large telescopes on rolling tripods crowd the foyer.

  At the counter stands an older man with a bushy but trimmed brown beard. He’s wearing a plaid-flannel long-sleeved shirt with red suspenders. He grins at me over the cash register as I step inside, as if he’s been expecting me. “Oh, hi,” I say.

  “Good morning.”

  “Are you … are you open?”

  He smiles gently and motions toward the open doors to say, I believe so.

  “Why?” I approach the counter.

  He shrugs. “People still show up. Not so much in the mornings, though. There’s not much else for me to do during the day, to tell the truth.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man waves to Dad, who enters behind me. “I go by Buzz. I’m an astronomer.”

  “Like Buzz Aldrin?” I ask.

  “No. Comes from Buzz Lightyear, I’m afraid. And a bad haircut a few years back.” As he talks, he spins a gyroscope on his pointer finger. “I was in charge of a very big telescope. Now … I’m back to looking through actual lenses. But there’s still a lot to learn—if you know how to look.”

  “If you know how to listen.”

  He nods. He leans across the counter and transfers the gyroscope from the tip of his own finger to mine. Childish delight dances in his eyes. “And why are you here? Who are you?”

  “I’m Leilani. This is my dad, Mike.”

  “Flower of Heaven.”

  “Actually, we …” I pause.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  Dad says, “Lei, tell him.”

  “I … can’t,” I whisper to Dad. But Buzz has captured me with his patient gaze. Tractor beam. I look up from the toy balanced on my fingertip and take the plunge. “Did you know it’s alive? That it’s a creature?”

  He startles. “We … but …” He falls silent. His expression grows grim, focused. “Richard. He put you up to this, didn’t he? Richard!” He calls out the front door.

  “There’s no one out there,” I say. I lower my finger to the countertop and help the spinning gyroscope hop to its surface. “She’s leaving, isn’t she?”

  “She?” Buzz’s eyes flick between us.

  He knows, I think. He won’t admit it. “The Orchids,” I say. “There are two of them. A mother and a baby.”

  “Orchids?” he asks. “I haven’t heard that. We call them Star Flowers.”

  “The O`ahu newspaper called it the Emerald Orchid. Name stuck,” Dad explains.

  “So …,” I say, “you’re admitting there are two?”

  Buzz stiffens. “What in the world makes you think …?”

  “Lei can hear the mother’s thoughts,” Dad says. “During her seizures. She’s epileptic. Some … electrical thing. We came to see if we could … if Lei could talk to it. We can’t let it leave.”

  Buzz studies us. “Uh. Seizures. Well, this isn’t your average visit, is it?” He snatches up the gyroscope, freezing its momentum. “You talk to it? You interpret its signals?”

  I shake my head. Buzz’s eyes drill into me. “No. I can’t talk to it. That’s why we came here. I want to try. I can only hear it. I don’t know why, or how. I’m not the only one, though. The
re’re epileptics on Moloka`i who put it together first.”

  “Wait, so … can all epileptics hear it?”

  I don’t answer immediately. The way he said that bothers me. Then it hits me: I don’t like the idea of sharing the Orchid. “I have no idea.”

  Buzz stares at me.

  “I know how it sounds, believe me.”

  Buzz clears his throat. He circles around the displays to stand in front of us. “Epilepsy.” It’s not a question, just a word, as if he’s thrown it up on a chalkboard to study it.

  We wait.

  Buzz takes a deep breath. “That Star Flower’s signature has been off the charts every which way. We were studying it like mad even before it blossomed onto the visible spectrum. Then it surged, of course, destroying most of our equipment. But we recognized that the transmissions were from a sentient being from the moment it entered the solar system.”

  “Hold on. You knew about this thing before it … blew up in everyone’s faces?” Dad asks. The weight of his question punches me. Everything we’ve been through … If we all could have had more warning …

  “Slow down.” Buzz raises his palms defensively. “No one’s ever dealt with a first-contact scenario before. We had no idea it would pop all of a sudden.”

  “The president knew.” Dad raises his voice. “The prime minister of Japan knew! We were thirty miles away from the observatory! Why did they get all the warning?”

  “The Subaru scope up here—it’s funded and operated by Japan. You’ll have to ask those folks what they relayed to their government. We’re on the same mountain, but we don’t necessarily coordinate. As for us, we contacted the Defense Department, in accordance with protocol. They called the shots. There’s a mandatory cooling-off period built into the protocols. No leaks.”

  “A cooling-off period?”

  “Dad.”

  Buzz drops his head. He runs his hand through his hair while he looks at his shoes. “Look, if I had to do it over again, we would have gone public immediately. Hindsight is … We had no way of knowing.”