by Joe Denham
If either knew the geography of Hawaii they would know they were less than two miles from the boat. But instead they’re both feeling lost, dusk is falling, and Francis is the first to assign blame. “I told you it didn’t feel right Miriam. For Christ’s sake. Now what? Even if we get to shore and figure out where the boat is, who is to say they won’t be waiting for us there?” They’re standing on a large outcropping of black pyroclastic rock above the falls, the rain relentlessly pelting down. At the edge of the rock, an eighty-foot drop into an emerald pool of water, the falls roiling the water to white at its high side. They yell to be heard above the swollen, raging waterfall.
“It’s not like we had any choice, Francis. You think if we refused to get in the truck with Tito he would have just left us with the float? Not a chance. Evidently someone wants it bad enough they’re willing to kill to get it.”
“I’d say they have it by now, wouldn’t you, Miriam? Don’t you think maybe it would have been smarter to stay home and wait for them to come to us?”
“Wait for who? Sunimoto’s boys with their machine guns, or the guys in the helicopters? What makes you think we’d be any safer at home than here?” When she says this the thought of Anna and Willow flashes through his mind. Jin Su and Emily, too, and he realizes how stupid he was to come here, to this foreign island, where he’s at the mercy of things he has no resources to control. Where he can do nothing to protect his family, both his families, and he again feels sick to his stomach. He turns from Miriam toward the forest, readying to retch, when he sees the grey-black liquid running out from beneath the underbrush. It streams in thin rivulets down into the river.
“What the fuck’s that Miriam?” he asks, turning to her. The rivulets widen, and widen, until there is a continuous flow spilling from the forest, steaming and hissing as it enters the river.
“It’s lava,” she answers. “That’s a lava flow, Francis,” she says again, comprehending what’s suddenly upon them. She swings her head around, scanning their surroundings while Francis watches the dark liquid gush just beneath their slightly elevated perch. “We have to jump, Francis. We’ve got to get under the falls.” Francis looks down into the pool below, still green though the white froth of the falls is starting to blacken with the infusion of the thickening lahar now risen to within inches of their feet. “We have to jump!” Miriam yells as she grabs his arm and, running, pulls him over the edge into the air.
In the Cave of the Goddess of the Moon
“I’M COLD, FRANCIS,” she says, shivering. It’s his turn to hold her body still now. On any other night the fall’s white water would be illuminated by the moonlight, but tonight the Wailuku River runs black, a cascading curtain across the cave mouth, so Francis and Miriam huddle in a darkness thick as that in Fairwin’s fort. They’ve both stripped off their drenched clothes and are sitting side by side on a low rock shelf at the back of the cave. Exhausted and disturbed beyond the prospect of sleep, they both stare silently into the roaring dark, reliving the day, bewildered.
Miriam can’t comprehend how Tito knew they’d be arriving at Radio Bay when they did. She’d lied to Francis when she said she’d arranged the meeting with Sunimoto over the shortwave that first day on the boat. Without her cellphone, she was unable to recall any of the contact numbers she would have needed to do so, so she passed some time at the nav station putting in another call to her eldest daughter Esther instead, then lied to Francis to keep the boat moving westward, knowing she could always sort things out once they got to Hawaii.
She doesn’t know that Fairwin’ found her phone, or that he had its memory recovered. And even if she were to guess at that, and at his contacting of Arnault Vericombe, she wouldn’t ever suspect or imagine that Sunimoto was in fact an employee of Arnault’s. So she’s perplexed, just as Francis is at the more obvious intrigue of the day’s events. Who is Sunimoto, really? And what about the men who attacked his compound by helicopter? Francis accepts that Sunimoto knew he and Miriam were coming because he doesn’t know of her deceit. But what about the ambushers? How did they know of their arrival? And why, really, is the float of such value? If it truly was to be broken by Sunimoto and thrown into the Mauna Kea’s reopened conduit, who would want to stop him? And why?
Miriam has asked herself the same questions, and she’s thought to voice them, but has remained silent instead knowing any speculations would be only that, and so without purpose or consequence. When she finally speaks, it’s because the air in the cave has become a creeping chill up and down the naked skin of her back and she can no longer bear it. “Please hold me,” she says to Francis.
“Where are you?” he asks—meaning in what way do you want your body against mine?—but she is already leaning against him, easing him down onto the rock. She curls her back into his chest, pulling his arm across her stomach. His hand cupped in hers, she presses it over one of her breasts.
The lava cave beneath Rainbow Falls is said to be, in some accounts of the Hawaiian myth, the former home of Hina, Goddess of the Moon. It’s said that Hina lived there with her mortal husband and her two sons until the day she grew weary of her worldly work and family and decided to climb the rainbow that forms in the mist at the base of the falls. It is said she first attempted to climb to the sun, but its intense heat overwhelmed her once she was above the protection of the clouds. So she returned to the earth to regain her strength. Then one night she climbed up on the moonbow which forms also at the base of the falls. Her jealous husband fought to keep her this time, wounding her leg onto which he clung, before she kicked free of his grasp and ascended to the moon, where she has resided since, and always will, at peace in her home in the heavens.
The first time Miriam and Francis made love was marked by a desperate intensity. It was devoid of temperance and tenderness, awash as they both were in Francis’s sickness and the sea’s still-waning temper. But being inside the cool, dark, resonating ground is pure yin. Miriam takes him into her, plunging like he did into the pool as she pulled him from the edge of the ravine at dusk. His body falls deeper and deeper into hers, unseen in the unriven dark. When orgasm finally flushes through him he exhales, only then realizing that for a long, long time he’s been holding his breath, a diver caught in an undercurrent of water; and lying intertwined with her afterward, he thinks of the bliss supposedly felt when one dies of drowning.
•
She dreams of hovering over her house in Jim’s helicopter, watching the tsunami wash over her orchard. Then she’s standing amongst its apple and plum trees, the crickets singing in the tall grass beneath a full and radiant summer moon. She smells the first windfalls turning on the earth, the salt breeze up from the beach. The helicopter is ascending swiftly, vertically toward the sun. A single plum in her palm, broken, so summer soars out. Its sweet scent and kaleidoscopic light. The whirring blades lifting, lifting over the earth. A dragonfly’s-eye view. An endless humming of insects from inside the grass. Yule. Francis. Yule-Francis. Her womanhood beating like insect wings inside her. The blurring propeller overhead. She unbuckles, unlatches the door and dives from Jim’s side into the air, ascending through the blue sky as though rising up through water, through water to moonlight cast above a surface of rippling waves.
He dreams, too, the archetypal dream of breathing underwater. He dreams her—Miriam, Anna and Jin Su—amalgamated in a single, ever-fluxing body of water. His soul’s ocean, or so he dreams it. He’s carrying Willow and Emily, both as infants, in a sac of flesh on his back like a seahorse does his young. Emily and Willow grow larger as he swims, now stretching from his lumbar to his shoulders, now from the back of his knees to the crown of his head. Then they swim off, and in the blindness of the depths Anna’s voice comes through the pressure roaring in his ears. He feels cold, through and through.
For a long time he hears the voice only as a distant, drifting melody, like listening to her hum in the shower down the hall while cooking dinner in the kitchen of their home. He’s set the table for
two, a single candle burning at its centre. He hears her open the bathroom door and start toward him down the hall, her gentle footfalls, the shower still running, as he takes two plates of food to the table. He sets them down, steps to the window and looks out over their front yard to the quiet country road beyond. Anna comes up behind him, naked, wraps her wet arms around his chest, and looks over his shoulder at the moon he’s been staring at, too bright and too close in the sky. Everything appears pale and frigid, as though coated in frost.
When they wake in the first light of morning they’re in the opposite position to that which they fell asleep in, Miriam cradling him now, warm despite her naked back being open to the air, Francis huddled and shivering in her arms.
I’M OUT ON the front deck smoking the last of a pack of tailor-mades I bought after the homegrown ran out. I wouldn’t have thought I’d have so much trouble going without the nicotine, but since hearing news of the eruptions in Hawaii last week I’m at my wits’ end, so I’m taking my smoking of shit-tobacco in stride. Willow’s at the beach again. The weather has been our saving grace, hot and humid every day and night. It helps to keep the mind in the immediate. Helps keep a relatively positive outlook on things, which is all I can do, given the lack of any word from Ferris. I’ve got to keep it together for our son; keep him convinced that everything’s all right. I lied to him a few days back and told him his father had called, and ever since then the anxiety that was starting to wrinkle his forehead has relaxed and he’s been down at the beach long days again instead of hanging around the house worried and clingy as he was starting to do.
I haven’t seen Svend or his niece since they were here for dinner, but I can’t stop thinking about Jin Su. It was like déjà vu having her in the house. Almost like I’d seen, even known her before somewhere, somehow. I thought maybe she’d been at UBC in the years I was there, but she said she hadn’t been. Then I thought maybe we’d been neighbours, but when I told her where I’d lived in the city she said she’d never lived anywhere near those places. She seemed uncomfortable after that, so I stopped asking. But it’s been bugging me ever since. She just seemed so naturally here to me. Like she already had some place in my home, in my life. It must be what kindred spirithood feels like, an instant familiarity. It’s like I’ve already known the particular smell of her. And her way of quietly pausing before she speaks.
So I’ve tried to see her several times since, but there is never anyone at Svend’s when I go by. Which is probably for the better. I know I’m just looking for distraction, someone to talk me out of my own head, of the worry whirring around, keeping me up all night smoking. And all day too, sitting out here on this front porch with my little pack of corporate sinsticks and my dog-eared copy of The Plague, possibly not the best medicine for my affliction, except it has in it for me, in some of its passages, a nostalgic familiarity that’s comforting.
But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing over-importance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worst side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.
What’s interesting to me is how people today call upon our ignorance, our collective unknowing, to justify their killing. People won’t stand against the fish farms because the science is incomplete, inconclusive. So too with global warming. And of course it always will be, as the scientific method is not designed to address problems of such magnitude. It encourages exclusiveness, not synthesis. Specification, not generalization. And so people have turned to our inability to shrink the intricacies of the natural world down to lab-sized proportions as their excuse for carrying on with business as usual. The diesel’s burning cleaner, but it’s still diesel. Everyone still does the once-a-decade reno, but now it’s LEED-certified. There was a time in the movement when people were hopeful. They thought that if the public just knew what was going on, if the information was made available, or even better, if it was made saleable, marketable, packaged up and sold in theatres and on television, that things would surely change. They agreed with Camus insofar as they thought too that people on the whole were more good than bad; that callousness and apathy were not the general rule. Which they may not have been, in Camus’s time. Ours has shown otherwise.
Of the two, our modern apathy is the vice that seems to get all the attention; it’s a kinder, gentler killer. It assigns responsibility elsewhere, whereas callousness assumes it. Given the knowledge that the acidification of the world’s oceans is killing off marine life—from krill to coral to blue whales and cod—and that this carbonic acidification is caused by shipping food from across the globe to our refrigerators, or flying ourselves around the world to gorge at all-inclusive smorgasbords, most people continue to fill their cupboards and fridges with box-store groceries. Even of those who make the leap to locally grown, organic food, most still see the virtue in a quick flight down to Mexico mid-winter for a week-long stay at some swank gluttony palace. What, other than an all-pervasive callousness, can such obvious disregard be attributed to? Near-sightedness? Weakness? Stupidity?
In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.
People can’t see beyond their own noses. Or if they can, they don’t seem phased by the fact that the view is of a world diminishing in our poison and ill care. It’s their own ambitions and dissatisfactions, their own anxieties and fears that occupy their minds, when you get right down to it, not the dwindling of species, not the desert we’re making of the future. I’ve been thinking for days of how to save the salmon from the farms under such conditions. The judicial inquiry Alexandra has put so much hope in is shaping up to be a whitewash. So what’s left if not the courts, the government or the people? Eco-terrorism? But how do you sabotage fish farms without doing collateral harm to the wild species you’re acting to protect? And what does one person rotting in jail for such a crime accomplish?
There are over 130 fish farms in BC, or there were before the tsunami. So there’s still probably 100. Who cares? Sometimes I feel like the fight has been pared down to a few delusional contenders shadowboxing in their little corner of a ring no one’s watching. Sometimes I think Ferris is right, I keep it up out of sheer habit. Last fall he wagged the latest issue of The Walrus in my face, insisting I read the cover article. The Fix for Planet Earth: How human ingenuity will save the day, the title set over a front cover painting of futuristic airplanes and some kind of massive particle emitters towering into the sky. “Get that trash out of my face,” I’d said to him at the time, and if it weren’t made of glossy magazine paper I’d have used it for fire starter. I found that issue under his bedside table last night and sat up reading the article he’d so wanted me to nearly a year ago now. It’s full of pathetic statements of dark resignation dressed up in glittering facades of courage and hope: Our future will be very, very different both from today and from some idealized pastoral past, likely much more artificial, and yet luminous in the constellations of possibility it offers. What a load of urban-centric horseshit! But I had to pause at the author’s critique of the movement when he quoted the aphorism, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, because that’s what we, what I’ve been doing all these years.
Despite all our ef
forts, things get exponentially worse. For the salmon, the whales, the bats and honeybees, our children. So where does that leave me? With a choice between resigned complacency or anarchy? Between inaction or terrorism? The future decline is a fait accompli. But there’s still the question of what kind of world we’ll build within it. It’s a redundancy, my sitting here thinking this all out on my front porch. But it helps, my time-worn copy of Camus and this ongoing argument with Ferris occupying my afternoons. Helps me forget that I’m only passing time here, a simple small-town girl with a head full of half-baked ideas, trying not to think of him as he is now. Out there. It helps take my ear from its anxious anticipation of the silent telephone in its cradle.
•
Fairwin’ Verge comes through the garden gate and up the front path with a tall, skinny man in tow. He’s got a pencil-thin moustache, this man, and he’s wearing glasses thick as engineered glass. They’re both marching in a very hurried and deliberate manner. I hardly get out of my chair and they’re already up the stairs and beside me on the stoop. “Where’d you get off to?” I ask Fairwin’, but he doesn’t address me with an answer.
“Where’s Willow?” he asks.
“He’s not here. Why? Who’s your friend?” I don’t trust a single person I’ve ever met from Lasqueti Island, especially not crazy old Fairwin’, and I don’t trust this spindly bespectacled man he’s brought along with him either. Then it strikes me as possible that they’ve come with news of Ferris. News of the worst kind, and my knees almost give out beneath me. “Have you heard from Ferris?” I ask, my voice cracking under the strain of my fear.
