The Girl at the Center of the World

by Austin Aslan

  I brush my hair in the upstairs bathroom. Eyeliner. A little blush. Lip gloss. All of it impossible to scrutinize in the dim natural light through the frosted shower window. I file my worst nails, make sure there’s no dirt under any of them. Finally, my favorite earrings. Small aquamarine zirconium studs, nothing fancy. I allow myself a smile. I look pretty okay!

  I meet Aukina at the corral.

  We’re going to ride `Imiloa together up to B plot. It makes no sense that I’d go with him, but I use the excuse that I need to review some final instructions. He reaches down to help swing me into the saddle. I take his hand, and he pulls me up with a strong grip. I settle into the saddle behind him, and we ride into the brush. I’m so close to him—but I’m careful not to hold him too tightly. It’s not until we’re off the bumpy, windy side path and back onto the dirt road that what I’m doing really sinks in. I have my arms around him.

  I squeeze him more tightly as `Imiloa lurches into a trot. Think. Slow down. Aukina’s back is warm. I smell coppery sweat. Feel his muscles. I rest my cheek against his back. He doesn’t say a word. I smile, loving the feel of my face nestled into the muscular indentation of his spine. There’s sudden warmth in my belly, and my heart is racing.

  When we arrive at the plot and turn to see a clear view of the roof of my house, he helps me dismount and then climbs down himself. “Well, you get that question about the code all figured out, then?”

  Warmth rushes to my face. I look away from him, hiding an involuntary smile with my fingers. “Yeah. Um. Thanks.”

  A breeze dries up the film of sweat along my face. I lift my hair so the gentle wind can cool the back of my neck, too. I can smell flowers, a beautiful bouquet eddying through the air. Fleeting storm clouds are bunching up mauka. The rain will bring its own smells.

  He eyes me for a moment. “Why don’t you take her back. I’ll walk down when you’re done flashing me.”

  I bark laughter. Now he turns red. I can’t stop laughing, but inside I’m mortified.

  “Lei.” Aukina motions me toward the saddle. Now I want to gallop away. I’m probably as red as an `ōhelo berry. “You know,” he says slowly, “this Morse code thing? You don’t have to keep this up. I’ll come visit anyway.”

  Is he—is he waiting for a kiss? I think he is. I desperately want to reach up on my tiptoes and kiss him. Instead I clamber up into the saddle before I change my mind, before he decides for both of us. Too much going on. My breathing is impossibly loud in my own ears as I fumble to loop my foot through the far stirrup. My chest feels like it’s going to pop.

  I smile weakly. The corner of my mouth twitches. I turn `Imiloa away from him in order to hide my face. “This isn’t a ruse,” I say. “You’ll see. I really want to learn this.”

  “Why?” he asks. It’s the first time he’s asked.

  My eyes settle on him, my twitch gone, my cheeks no longer warm. I wonder if I’m about to tell him the truth. This is working. Don’t ruin it. I shake my head, but so softly he might not have even noticed.

  He hands me his military compass—the needle is useless, but it has other sighting tools. “Don’t forget to set the right angle before you start jostling the mirror. You don’t want to rifle off the whole message to the tree over there while I don’t see anything at all.”

  “K’den,” I manage. Anything more and my voice will crack. I bite my lip. I turn away from the road, nearly spur `Imiloa into a sprint.

  * * *

  Dad is supposed to be on gate duty, but before he takes his post, he insists on joining me on the roof in case I blank or have a seizure. We go upstairs to Mom and Dad’s bedroom, and he climbs out his window onto the aluminum roof above the kitchen. He reaches inside, pulls the stepladder out, and secures it against the side of the house. As I bend to pass through the window, my elbow bumps Dad’s Blu-ray player, resting on his TV. It almost falls, but I catch it.

  What’s the point? It’s already fried. Sometimes I still feel sad when I see things that don’t work anymore, like our dust-covered blender in the kitchen cabinet, or a traffic light filled with birds’ nests stacked one atop the other like some kind of avian apartment building. But this Blu-ray player and the tower of discs beside it don’t make me feel anything.

  I step through the window, climb the ladder onto the roof. The pitch is gentle, but the corrugated-aluminum surface is slippery. Dad and I work our way to the highest vantage point. From here the observatories crowning Mauna Kea are visible as indistinct white nodules along the distant peak. My crater on the slope of Mauna Loa is also visible.

  I pull the sighting tool from my pocket and carefully sit down next to Dad. I immediately slide down the roof on my frayed jean shorts, give a nervous laugh, and catch myself. Dad hoists me back.

  “Is this a good moment to complain about those short shorts?”

  I give him the stink-eye.

  “Have you picked a phrase yet?”

  “Why? You want me to quote a few lines from Star Trek?”

  “ ‘Space, the final frontier,’ ” he mimics. “No. I was thinking maybe…” He trails off. I urge him to finish. He says, “Have you told him?”

  I feel a prickle of adrenaline, shake my head. He shrugs, pulls a note from his pocket, presents it to me. “I don’t know. Test this out, if you want. Focus-grouped, polished, approved by your corporate sponsors.”

  “Dad.”

  “He’s going to find out anyway, isn’t he?”

  “No, he won’t. When I send the message using the Orchid, I won’t do it over Hawai`i. There’s no reason.”

  “Australia, Japan, China, Korea? The U.S. West Coast? The Orchid will be visible on the horizon from here over those places.”

  I stare at him. He says, “You should tell him.”

  “Do you like him?” I ask.

  “He’s da kine, Lei. Yeah, I like him. Just…remind him that I have lots of shotguns nowadays.”

  “Dad.”

  “He can see us. He’s probably waiting.”

  I snatch the note from him, read it carefully. My heartbeat quickens. “He’s going to run and never come back.”

  “Nope. He’s not like that. He knows who he is. He went AWOL, you know. That wasn’t easy for him, but he’s comfortable with it. People like him don’t feel threatened by the gifts of others.”

  I feel like I did when I first jumped off the cliffs at Big Island’s South Point. Fifty feet down to choppy water. I knew I could do it. Just leap! You’ve seen others do it! But it took me fifteen minutes to build courage. When I finally jumped, my stomach caught in midair; I lost my breath. I hit the water a full second later, hard—but I was fine.

  I line up the compass mirror with the sun and put Aukina’s figure in my sights. I close my eyes, visualize flicking out the message Dad has prepared. With halting Morse code I practice sending the most important “tweet” the world will ever see:

  I PREVENT NUCLEAR FALLOUT. FORCE ALL YOUR UNSTABLE REACTORS TO BLOW NOW. I WILL LEAVE ONCE I ABSORB ALL RELEASED RADIATION. RPT

  I repeat the message and then fold the compass mirror shut with a dull click. I place it on my lap with a trembling hand.

  “That was fast,” Dad says. “You looked like an old hand. How’d it feel?”

  I look off toward Aukina on the hillside. I can see his gears grinding from here. He’s going to put two and two together. He might not trust his own conclusions at first, but he will figure it out. I shouldn’t have done this. I should have kissed him when I had the chance.

  Dad pats me on the shoulder. We sit in silence, watching Aukina come in and out of view as he slowly approaches through the patchwork of brush and trees. “You don’t think that message is too short?” I finally ask Dad.

  He shakes his head. “It has to be concise. You can’t click out a long missive. It’ll take the right folks a minute or two to realize the Orchid is using Morse code, another minute for them to run and find paper or whatever. Meanwhile, you could lose your line at any moment just by
turning in your sleep.”

  “Short and sweet,” I say. Aukina breaks through the tree line and into our yard. He stops, peers up. My stomach flips. He waves a piece of paper toward me and hurries toward the house.

  “Where’s she now?” Dad asks.

  “Right above us,” I say. He glances up, but he won’t see her; she’s too dim against the blue sky and the high sun.

  “Have you heard that voice again?”

  “Not a hint,” I say. “I’ve been listening. But it may require a full-on fit. I don’t know. If you think about it, we’re unlikely to be ‘logged in’ at the same time anyway.”

  “Makes sense. Still—creepy as hell.”

  Uncle Hank pulls up to our driveway in the old truck. We watch from our high vantage point as he gets out and inspects a potato sack full of fresh kalo.

  “Hank!” Dad calls down to him. Uncle Hank glances in our direction, shields his eyes from the sun, and waves at us.

  “Aren’t you on patrol?” he shouts up.

  “I’ll be down in a minute!” Dad says. He turns to me, his eyebrows arched. “I better get going before the sergeant has me doing push-ups!”

  He rises. I shift onto my feet, too. He stops me. “I’ll send Soldier Boy up.”

  “Dad!” How does he know that nickname? He winks, lowers himself carefully down the ladder.

  Before I can gather my thoughts, Aukina’s head pops into view. We study each other. He rises, makes his way over to me, and unfolds his paper. I take it from him, unable to meet his eyes. The note reads exactly as it should. I stuff it into my pocket, watch Uncle Hank and Dad meet at the truck.

  “Lei,” Aukina asks cautiously, “what is that?”

  He knows. He just wants to hear it out loud. “Look up,” I tell him. “You see the Orchid?”

  He glances about, shakes his head.

  Flare. I pull at the kite string, put all my energy into the command. “Look again.”

  This time, his eyes go right to it. I follow his gaze. There she is, a faint, knotty bruise against the sharp, pure blue of Hawai`i’s sky.

  “No shit,” Aukina says.

  We sit in silence. I dim the Orchid, releasing my focus. He looks at me with questioning eyes. I tell him, starting with our escape from the O`ahu military base using the bolt cutters he gave me. I don’t leave anything out, even Maui, Dad’s near execution at the hands of the sheriff of Hana. When I finally finish, his eyes go wide. “Lei…I had no idea.”

  We share the silence on the rooftop.

  “I should’ve left with you. Taken you and your dad to my parents’ place in Pearl City. It would have been far safer. I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  I turn uncertainly and gaze at him. That’s what he wants to talk about? “Didn’t you hear what I just said about the Orchid?”

  “I believe you.”

  I look away, put a hand to my chest, draw in a slow breath.

  “So that was you?” He points with his chin toward the debris field visible on Mauna Loa. I nod reluctantly.

  “So you woke her up?” he adds. “Pele. You woke her.” I don’t know how to answer that. He elaborates. “People say Pu`u `Ō`ō is flowing, pouring right into the sea down near the end of the 130. Kilauea’s steaming. Mauna Loa herself is stretching, yawning. Yeah? They’re saying there’s been some fissure activity out of view on the backside. And it’s all thanks to you! I’ve always wanted to see lava. Now I can! Lived on O`ahu my whole life. Too expensive to get the family out here.”

  Now I get what he’s doing. He’s changing the subject. He’s reading me like a book, steering us away from what’s making me uncomfortable without being too dismissive. He’s turning this into a good thing. I force myself to meet his eyes. He’s so cham. I suddenly find myself trying not to stare.

  “Um, how did you get out here?” I ask.

  He stiffens. I can feel the walls go up. I’m not surprised. No one wants to relive their journey to the Big Island. If it was successful, it required…sacrifice, compromise. It required things worth forgetting. “You want me to follow your story with mine?”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m just teasing.” He nudges my shoulder. “I’ll tell you. It’s no big deal, though.”

  I cross my legs and shift my weight, settling on the aluminum roof as he shares. As he speaks of our brief time together on O`ahu, his eyes soften. I have to remind myself to breathe.

  “For about a week after you escaped, I couldn’t think of anything but you and your dad. Drove me nuts not knowing how you were doing. I began to plan my own escape, mostly as a distraction from thinking about you. But everything got real when my lieutenant gave us our orders: we were to ship out in two days’ time, for an undisclosed destination, with a brief port-of-call along the U.S. coast to drop off the thousands of stranded mainlanders we’d collected.

  “Everyone got the sense that this was a one-way mission, that the entire fleet was together. Word spread that our orders were the same, that we’d engage in the Atlantic. But there were other theories. The orders didn’t make sense. We argued all the time. Why would the fleet ditch the islands? What was so bad out there that we were abandoning the most strategic post in the entire Pacific Ocean? Some thought the top brass had gone mad, just wanted to get home to family. Maybe the generals really thought it was the end of the world. Biblical Rapture, beginning of a thousand years of tribulation. No point in languishing on the islands, where food and gas were already all but gone. Others were convinced the brass knew something about the nuclear subs stationed in the region, that we were running from an imminent malfunction. That’s what I believed.”

  “Wait,” I say. “You thought a nuclear sub was about to go pop, you had a free ticket to the mainland, and you went AWOL anyway?”

  “`Ohana, Lei. Like you told me. I couldn’t cut and run and leave my family to die. Even if I knew it meant I would die, too. I wanted all of us to be together.”

  “Yeah,” I say. Those thoughts exactly plagued my entire journey home.

  “My brother agreed. It was a little risky to get off base, but we managed. We took supplies, made our way to Pearl City, but our parents weren’t home. Took us a week to locate them at their friends’ place. They had hoarded food and supplies. Disaster-prepared long before Arrival, Lei. Preppers. We added our rations to the mix and hunkered down with them. We waited for a month before everyone was convinced that things were never getting better. The Orchid started to leave, then it came back. Confused everybody. We waited and waited for it to leave again.”

  I nod, look down.

  “No, Lei. I get it. I mean, the truth is crazy. Completely lōlō. But…it’s like I’m not surprised. You know? I bet a lot of people won’t be surprised. We all know—in our bones—we all know something weird is going on.”

  I smile at him, then look at Dad and Uncle Hank in the yard.

  “That’s when we knew we needed a plan,” he continues. “Our food wasn’t sustainable. We’d have to live off the land if we were going to survive. My parents wanted to move to Kaua`i, but I insisted that we come here. Because…” He stops, his gaze locked on me.

  Was he going to say: Because of you?

  He starts again. “The trip wasn’t like yours. We waited so long to leave O`ahu that a ferry system finally started. A small fleet of large yachts, a couple vintage merchant ships, and some lighter sailboats. Quite a racket. Defended by a bunch of heavily armed marine jocks. Passage is a month’s worth of food. You have to justify your stash to the assessors before boarding. And then you’re allowed to get off the boat once, when it stops either on Maui or Big Island. The water’s rough, but people know the risks. The sheriff of Hana hasn’t messed with their operation, as far as I know. But if he really intends to rule the islands, he’ll have to take them on eventually. They probably own O`ahu.

  “We got off at Kona. Trekked and bicycled over to Hilo on the Belt Road, eventually found a place to settle. I started looking for you the day we arrived.


  “There were some scary moments, a couple unfortunate confrontations that my brother and I had to deal with. They didn’t end well—for the others. But basically that’s our story. We have a lot of good training. I’ve seen how hard it’s been for others, though. Most people who are left have what it takes, you know? Most people who died off were never going to make it in this new world. They had no idea how to get by without the grocery store, or the repairman, the cops, a phone call away.”

  Silence. Aukina’s story echoes. I have a ton of questions, but I don’t want to press him. His story has drained him. I’m certain he’s left details out. I know how he feels.

  “I should show you the lava sometime,” I say. “Maybe we could get up to Volcanoes after dark. The orange glow is amazing. No more park rangers, no more rules. We could hike right up to the edge of the Halema`uma`u caldera and look in.”

  “One of these days we’ll do it. It’ll be a while, though, eh? We’re only two miles from the zoo and I haven’t even seen that. Not that there’s anything left to see.”

  “I haven’t thought about the zoo. Poor animals.”

  Aukina grunts. “I heard the tiger escaped. Someone freed it. Most of the other animals have been poached for food.”

  “The white tiger’s roaming free?”

  “Yeah. White tiger out there prowling the Pu`u Maka`ala reserve somewhere like a ghost. No doubt doing just fine on pigs.”

  I know it’s dangerous, but “I’m glad it escaped,” I say.

  I hear the yelping of dogs and a distant crack of gunfire. Someone must be hunting pig down in the ravine. The barking grows fever-pitched and then dies as several more pops echo. I get this image in my head of the white tiger ambushing some poor hunter. Awful. “Reminds me of a myth about Pele,” I tell Aukina.

  “Oh, yeah?”