by Rob Swigart
Then someone cut the knot, and they were two people lying in a bed. The earth turned slowly under a moon that graced the sky and touched their room.
Later she spoke into the silence. “The ancient gods came from the tuberose, so fragrant a flower, called Bäk-nikte’. It is lovely they come from such a flower. I love you.”
He said nothing for a time, staring into the ceiling without thought. His fingers traced a spiral on her opposite shoulder; she shrugged it into his palm and rolled toward him once more. She put her arm across his chest, traced fingernail lines down his rib cage, across his belly so the flesh puckered under her touch, the graying hair damp with their sweat, up the near side. She took his cheek in her own palm, and turned his face toward hers, and kissed him. He kissed her back, and she reached down for him. “Bäk-nikte’,” she said. “So fragrant a flower.” And later she said, softly, “Chich,” and they made love once more, and their bed was made of leaves that rustled beneath their movements together, and the air was warm and humid as if it were noontime when all other motion was suspended in the heat and wet.
Later Chazz thought about her fear of having children and said something. She shook her head. “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t worry. Not about that.” She watched the moonlight, steeply slanted now, almost down behind the scrub outside. It tracked across the walls, catching a glitter from time to time as if this were a fairyland of mica dust; and then the moonlight faded and the room turned dark.
“Clouds,” she said.
Chazz made a sound. “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “A rain shower, perhaps. The weather is benign. This is paradise, you know.”
He could hear her smile as she said, “I believe I read that somewhere. So what is happening to spoil it?”
For a moment he thought it was something he’d done to the mood, then he knew she meant the reason he’d called her here, their meeting with Takamura, the deaths, and he said he didn’t know, not yet, but that something was loose here in the darkness under the sunburst surface of things. Probably, he thought, it was a virus with a new kind of vector, but perhaps she could suggest some other way of seeing it, something that would break the deadlock.
She moved closer to him in the dark. “Akau!’,” she said. “The moon is gone. That would be a bad sign in Yucatan, under the circumstances. Are people spreading this? Witchcraft is often held accountable for inexplicable deaths, but inexplicable means without explanation, and we scientific Westerners have explanations for everything, don’t we?”
“Not at the moment,” he said. “No explanation. Akua, perhaps, those shambling monsters in the dark, out of our nightmares, eh?”
Cool and rational she might be, but she slid her own hand between his legs and held him gently there, for comfort, for reassurance.
Dreamily then, as the darkness deepened, she told him about the formal parting before sleep of the Lacandon Maya. “Ki ‘iba’ a wilik,” she murmured. “It means good night. It means be careful what you see.”
28
Once Koenig’s van had vanished up Kapuna Road, Sammy Akeakamai heaved himself out of the yellow Toyota. He looked up at the sky, which seemed to glower back at him.
He wore a loose short-sleeved shirt patterned with criss-crossing palm leaves of a virulent green on a light blue background hanging outside his baggy white trousers. Takamura had told him it was perfect camouflage if only he were standing still against the wallpaper of the lobby at the Kauai Luau Hyatt. Sammy shrugged when Takamura said that. “Surveillance,” he said. “It’s my surveillance shirt.”
This was surveillance.
Despite what Lieutenant Takamura called his reprehensible clothing and high-poi diet, Sammy was very good at surveillance. Without question, the subject, Charles Koenig, did not know he was under observation.
Sammy looked up and down the road. It was clear. He trotted across to the condominium side and walked slowly along the shoulder. In seconds his shirt was stuck to his back. The air was close and dense. He vaguely envied the Koenigs their trip to Koke’e, where at least the altitude, if not the clouds themselves, would give relief from this unseasonable heat and humidity.
He paused in front of the complex. There was no one in sight. The surface of the pool was flat and dull, without a ripple. The palms leaned away from the prevailing, though at the moment nonexistent, wind. The leaves of the enormous ficus drooped in silence.
A silver Subaru Brat appeared around the corner, moving slowly. The driver seemed to be looking at address numbers. He cruised past the complex, then abruptly speeded up.
Just then a kid came around the corner carrying a long aluminum pole with a net on the end and a coil of thick white plastic hose. While Sammy watched, the kid began to skim the few leaves adrift on the surface of the pool. He didn’t notice the overweight Hawaiian by the road. Sammy stood there peeling his damp shirt away from his chest and back while the kid hooked up his hose and began to vacuum the bottom of the pool.
Then he sauntered up to the pool. “Hi,” he said.
The kid jumped.
“Sorry,” Sammy said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oh.” There was an awkward pause during which Sammy grinned at the kid. “Tuesday,” the kid said finally. “Pool-cleaning day.”
Sammy nodded, still grinning.
“Hot, huh?” the kid said.
Sammy nodded.
The kid vacuumed for a while. Sammy stood and watched idly. There was a faint film of algae growing on the bottom and sides of the pool. The vacuum swept over the thin green and left behind the clear blue. The blue was very close to the background color of Sammy’s shirt.
“Gonna be a storm, I heard,” the kid said, not looking up.
“Heard that too,” Sammy said. “Place full?”
“Huh? Oh, the condos. Naw. Tourism’s off this year.”
Sammy nodded again. “Live here?”
“Me? Yeah. My father’s the manager.”
“Had any problem with the phones lately?”
The kid frowned. “Nope. You with the phone company?”
Sammy made a vague gesture that could have been assent.
“Got to button down for the storm,” he said.
“Oh.” The kid moved his vacuum over the final patch of algae and pulled the vacuum to the surface. He unhooked the hose and coiled it on the surface. The water still fell very quickly, reflecting the palm leaves and dull sky.
“You want to check the wires or something?” he said.
Sammy nodded.
“Okay, sure, help yourself. You need a passkey or anything? The housekeeper should be over by the three hundreds now. She’s got a key. Tell her I said it’s okay. I’m Billy.”
“Okay, Billy,” Sammy said. “Thanks. You’re a big help.” He ambled off in search of the housekeeper. It was always better to have inside help.
The housekeeper was a pretty haole girl hardly out of high school. She gave Sammy the key without a question.
Koenig’s condo was on the west wing corner. The kitchen entrance was on the back, facing the scrub land next door, undeveloped as yet. Sammy was not likely to be observed.
He moved swiftly through the condo, checking drawers, closets, cabinets. Finally he unplugged the telephone and unscrewed the mouth and ear pieces, probing with his blunt forefinger, moving wires aside. He grunted when he unscrewed the bottom plate on the phone and looked at the printed circuits inside. He shook the handset and a small wafer dropped into his palm. He looked at it thoughtfully for a few moments. Then he replaced everything and plugged in the phone again.
Outside the kitchen door he examined the phone wires, tracing them out to the pole on the street with his eye. Satisfied, he strolled back toward the road.
He walked west for a while. An old dirt road went inland here, the low stone walls on either side indicating that this was an ancient cane road, long since abandoned. He walked along the dirt road for a while; the scrub was taller than his head, and he could see no
thing to either side. Once the dirt road had bent a little, he could no longer see anything but sky and the twiggy trunks of this old forage.
After walking a few hundred meters, he paused in a small clearing, then climbed onto the stone wall. He was tall enough now to see over the tops of the scrub. The condos were very close here, though walking through that stuff would be a real chore, especially in wet weather. He checked the dirt for tracks. Certainly there had been locals driving up this road. It was covered with an ancient mat of dead toads, but there were no fresh ones. The road had not been used for some time. It was ideal.
He waddled back to the Toyota.
The heat and clouds were increasingly oppressive. This was going to be a hell of a storm when it hit.
29
Patria was explaining her theory of cross-cultural substrates.
“But substrate is a term in microbiology,” Chazz insisted. “A substrate is what enzymes and some RNA molecules work on.”
“No it isn’t.” She laughed. “It’s an underlying cultural or political structure.”
They both were laughing. “Well, I say it’s a chemical.”
“So are underlying cultural structures.”
A wind was picking up the dust by the roadside. Dust devils swirled along the shoulder. There was the promise of rain, but no rain, only heat. Yet they were laughing at the metaphors one science borrowed from another, how quarks get charm and how God does not play dice with the universe.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Patria suggested, and Chazz intoned in answer, “Applied science is a conjurer, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas – Aldous Huxley.” And Patria said, “The scientific method is a cultural substrate.”
“What about children?” Chazz asked, apparently irrelevantly.
“Don’t bring that up again,” she said softly. “We were doing fine.”
He lifted a hand from the wheel. “All right.”
He turned off the Kapuna Road onto the highway and headed west. “Where’re we goin?” Patria wanted to know.
“The Grand Canyon,” he said.
“Come on. That’s in Arizona.”
“Wait and see.”
“Ha”
The road rose and dipped through cane fields and along the bluffs beside the sea. Sunlight fell far away through holes in the cloud cover, slanting in broad shafts onto the ocean surface where it danced in brilliance amid the dark blue of shadow. No sun fell here, on land, locked down by a low ceiling of thick cloud. Dust devils danced alongside the van.
“It was here,” Chazz said suddenly.
Patria looked up. “What was?”
“A weird traffic accident. I found him. A real freak.”
“The Russian spy?”
“Yeah. Even spies take vacations.”
“Sure? Maybe it wasn’t a vacation. Maybe it was business.”
“Come on,” Chazz chided. “What business? There’s nothing secret here. They grow sugar.” He gestured at the cane fields all around them. “They grow pineapples. Used to, anyway. They grow condominiums.” They swung down into Hanapepe. The town was asleep, the stores shuttered. There was bad weather coming. He had to stop twice for signs. At the second sign he looked in the mirror.
“That’s funny,” he said.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” Chazz said. The van’s engine whined on the upgrade. They passed a Japanese restaurant with Hawaiian architecture and Chinese food. “It’s just that I keep seeing that car.”
The silver Brat was hidden beyond the turn behind them when Patria turned to look, and did not reappear.
Kekaha was a modern town, with new shops and a prosperous-looking school. He had to wind through the back streets to find the canyon road. The streets seemed oddly deserted. This was not a tourist area, and Chazz couldn’t account for the apparent prosperity of the village. Perhaps it was the traffic up to the canyon and the Alakai Swamp. Or perhaps it was the Pacific Missile Approach Network Facility a few miles farther up the road. This could be where the Naval personnel lived off-base. The last building at the edge of town was a bar called The Honeycreeper with a pay phone by the entrance.
The Koke’e Road wound up the mountain in a series of sharp switchbacks. About halfway up he spotted the silver truck again, two switchbacks behind them, following. He pointed it out to Patria. If they were being followed, there was nowhere for them to escape, and the van would be no match for the Subaru. By now they were close enough to the cloud base to touch it.
Soon they entered a gray womb of fog. Narrow streaks of water condensed and ran down the windshield. When he turned on the wipers they smeared the water in an arc across his vision. There was enough dust on the glass to turn the water to paste. He found himself hunched at the wheel, squinting through the smears of mud until finally the windshield wiped clean.
“Maybe we should turn and go back,” Patria suggested.
“We’re almost there,” Chazz said. “We’ll just go to the first lookout. You should see the canyon.”
“See? See? What’re we gonna see in this?”
He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Could be clear there. Here’s the Waimea Canyon Road. It’s just a little farther.” He was right. Around a sharp turn he made out the sign for a canyon lookout through the fog. There was a car park at the end. It was empty.
“So,” he said. “Here.”
Patria hugged his arm. The cloud thinned as they climbed the cement walkway over the ridge to the lookout. Chazz found himself listening for the sound of a Subaru engine behind him, but the silence was complete.
Strangely, he had been right. The bottom of the canyon was clear. The lookout was perched on the face of the cliff plunging 1400 feet to the winding canyon floor, where the river was a dull lead color amid the dark greens. Just overhead the shreds of cloud blew east like tattered ribbon.
The layered rock walls seemed to write in an unknown language the story of millions of years, red and tan, ochre and brown and orange rock absolutely horizontal, thin, layer after layer, winding around the eroded points and ridges, the shallower slopes covered with green broken by outcroppings of cliffside, points and curtains and ripples of endless rock that vanished into the overhead gray.
“It does look like the Grand Canyon,” Patria said, leaning over the railing to look down.
The cloud closed in again when they returned to the parking lot, so at first they didn’t see the silver Subaru waiting for them.
30
Cobb Takamura looked out his office window at the low clouds and frowned.
The storm warnings had been coming in for days. Tropical Storm Walter was in the central Pacific, moving toward the islands. Satellites charted arctic air flowing southeast out of Siberia. The storm could just as easily move south of the islands as north. Takamura had felt in the warmth and humidity a tropical pressure pushing northward.
In fact, he wasn’t thinking about the weather at all. Weather was a big, tangible and familiar force, destructive at times, but known.
Takamura was thinking about the interim report on his desk. It had come up this morning from Drs. Shih and Strachey. It included an enormous amount of technical verbiage, behind which Takamura detected an ominous uncertainty. The deaths were due to disease; that much was clear. That the disease had been induced was far less certain. Hall was a junkie. While his arms were riddled with puncture wounds, so were several other parts of his body. The wound on his leg could have been one of those. None of the others had visible puncture wounds.
He had another report. The propeller in Rake Wyman’s garage was from an old Navy wreck, the Valiant, sunk off Kauai in 1943. The wreck had never been found. Perhaps he had found it.
Rake Wyman had no puncture wound.
The boy, Freddie Delarota, half Portuguese and part everything else, also had no apparent puncture wound, though the face had been mutilated, perhaps
to conceal it.
Whatever it was, it ran a similar course in all of them. Photomicrographs from Atlanta were in the report, side by side with pictures of the victim’s brain tissue. The pictures from Atlanta looked almost the same, not only to Takamura’s uncritical eye, but to the doctors downstairs as well.
The photos from Atlanta were of sheep brains.
“There aren’t any sheep here,” Takamura told the clouds.
“Pardon,” a voice asked from the doorway.
“Oh, hello, Doctor. I’m glad you’re here. Your report is…” Takamura paused, groping. “Puzzling,” he finished lamely.
Dr. Strachey nodded, expressionless.
“It’s quite technical. Much jargon.”
Strachey nodded again. He tried a weak smile, let it go.
“We often cover ignorance with jargon, Lieutenant. It’s a course in medical school. I came up about something else, though.”
Takamura sighed. “Yes?”
“There’s been a snag of some kind in Atlanta. The help I requested’s been delayed. I don’t know why.” He held up his hands helplessly. “The two of us are overworked down there. We need more help. It’s crazy.”
Takamura turned back to the window. He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels. The clouds had not changed. They seemed carved from some durable substance, like monuments. “I’m a policeman,” he told the outdoors. “I’m not a doctor. I’m not even sure this is police work. We’ve had four strange deaths from disease, a traffic accident and a murder. The murder at least is police work. I don’t know. Perhaps I should call Honolulu, get some state help for you.”
