I was shocked not just by Papa’s cruel words but by the fact that Mama had even repeated them to me. It was the first time in my life that an adult had shared such a thing with me . . . such a raw, adult pain.
I went to her and hugged her, and she held me to her for a long while as we sat there on the lnai. Then finally she said, sadly, “There’s nothing more we can do for him, Nani. We did our best.”
That night, Papa sat me down and explained to me the laws of physics and the inviolate rules of science. He didn’t scold me, just warned me not to let my imagination get the better of me, and never to credit any of Mama’s “fairy tales.”
After that, he also stopped offering me a ride to school. I think he was afraid that being in the car would trigger another “wild burst of fancy,” as he put it.
Two months later, Papa was on his way to work, driving too fast down a steep hill, when he lost control of his beloved Model T and plunged into a ravine. The last of the series of rolling impacts punctured the ten-gallon fuel tank under the front seat, which exploded, killing him instantly.
When I think of my father, I think of fire.
Those were sad days for our ’ohana. Papa’s body was burned so badly that his casket had to remain closed during the services at the Nu’uanu Funeral Parlor. I had never heard a Hawaiian kanikau before, a lamentation chant; the mourners cried the traditional wail of “Auw! Auw!”—“Alas! Alas!”—as I stared helplessly at the coffin, unable even to kiss my papa goodbye. But this was so much harder for my sisters, because Papa’s death had come as such a complete shock and surprise to them. Mama and I had been more prepared, and shared our own secret sorrow, our inability to prevent what we’d known would come to pass.
But in addition to my grief, I also felt a budding anger at one who’d given me, I felt, false hope.
After Papa’s burial I didn’t even bother to change out of the black dress I was wearing before I went charging up Punchbowl Hill. I got my dress torn and dirty, black ash soiling black lace, but I didn’t care. I raced across the crater’s desolate face to the lookout, where, of course, I found a uniformed solider standing with his back to me. Johnny turned as I approached, his eyes sadder than the saddest kanikau. “I’m sorry, Nani,” he said.
I ran at him and began pummeling him with my fists, screaming, “You told me I could save him!”
He winced, but it wasn’t from my blows, I’m sure. “I told you to try.”
I kept pounding at him, ineffectually, with my little fists. “What’s the good in seeing what’s going to happen,” I cried, “if I can’t change it!”
“Nani, listen, listen to me.” He squatted down, took my hands in his, and closed his big fingers around my balled fists. “You did change something.”
“I didn’t change anything!”
“You did. You did save someone.”
“Papa’s dead!”
“But you’re not. You saved yourself, Nani.”
I stared at him, not comprehending. He let go of my fists. I let them drop helplessly to my sides.
“I swear, it’s true,” Johnny said. “After your mama told your papa what you saw, he stopped asking you to ride with him to school. Didn’t he? And if he hadn’t, you would’ve died with him in that car.”
Disbelievingly, I said, “Me?”
“He’s thanking you for it, Nani. Can you hear him? He’s thanking you for telling him, so his little girl didn’t die with him.”
I couldn’t hear Papa, and I didn’t know how Johnny could, either.
“You—said you didn’t have ‘twice knowing.’ ”
“I don’t. But I know, in a different way, that there are some things in the future you can change, and some things you can’t. What happened to your papa was one you couldn’t, I’m sorry—but there’ll be others that you can. Don’t give up, Nani. Your gift saved you—it can help save lots of other people too.”
He stood up, and as he did, I heard a kind of low thunder rumbling in the distance behind us.
“You hear them, don’t you?” Johnny asked.
“Yes,” I said, baffled. “What is it?”
“Something else you can’t change,” he said sadly.
In moments there were dozens of airplanes—more than I’d ever seen, in strange unfamiliar shapes—roaring above us. They were flying so low that I could see the markings on their sides—a bright red circle, like a burning sun at daybreak. They thundered on, swooping low over the harbor, where they began dropping torpedoes on the ships at anchor there. The explosions were deafening, even from here, and they turned mighty destroyers into flaming wreckage within minutes. Columns of thick black smoke rose from the ships like grave markers. Wave after wave of planes came, until there were so many they almost formed a cloud that resembled the mo’o lizard I’d seen in the sky—but this was more like a dragon breathing bursts of fire onto the land.
Johnny stood there on the lookout, as flames leaped and smoke rose behind him, and smiled his gentle smile.
“There’s nothing you can do for me, either,” he said, adding fondly, “Aloha, Nani. Use your gift wisely.”
And then I blinked, and he wasn’t there any longer. Neither were the airplanes, or the burning ships in the harbor. Not knowing what was real and what wasn’t, I walked slowly to the edge of the crater and peered down at the city. Honolulu—the Honolulu of 1918—lay dozing peacefully below me, as if what I had just seen were only a bad dream the city was having while it slept.
I would see this carnage again, of course . . . though not for another twenty-three years. But I never saw Johnny again.
As Honolulu’s day of destiny approached, I did try to warn the authorities about the Pearl Harbor attack, even though Johnny had said that it couldn’t be prevented. I wrote letters to the Navy, but they all went unanswered. In the months leading up to the bombing, it seemed as if every other week the local newspapers were full of speculation that the Japanese might attack or invade Hawai’i, so I’m sure I appeared to be just another vocal alarmist. The few officials I managed to meet with in person dismissed me as well, and even had they believed me, they were at such a low level in the chain of command that they probably could not have made any difference. The Japanese planes came, and the rising sun breathed its mo’o fire onto Honolulu. All I could do was to warn people I knew personally, and try to get them to safe havens where they might survive the aerial assault.
This is what I’ve tried to do all my life, what Johnny wanted me to do: to use my gift wisely. He was right: if there were some things I couldn’t change, there were others that I could. Sometimes that meant warning a friend away from a certain place at a certain time, avoiding an accident that would have claimed his life; sometimes it was telling a neighbor family that a fire would break out in their apartment the following day, or warning a pregnant woman that her baby was backward in her womb and would need special medical attention if it was to be delivered safely. Some people heeded my advice; some didn’t. I’ve never counted the number of lives that have crossed mine in this way, but I imagine it would be nearly a thousand over the long course of my life, and I am proud to say that a majority of those lives were improved for having touched mine.
I’m grateful, now, for this gift I’ve been given, as well as for the young man who crossed so huge a gulf to help me understand it. Once a year, in his honor, these old bones of mine make a solitary pilgrimage up Punchbowl Hill. Of course, it looks considerably different than it did when I was a girl: today the crater is graced with lush green grass and tall white monuments to the thirty-five thousand fallen souls who now abide there. One of the most beautiful of these monuments bears an inscription—a quotation from Abraham Lincoln—with words I’ve always found ironic in this place that was once known as Puowaina:
THE SOLEMN PRIDE THAT MUST BE YOURS
TO HAVE LAID SO COSTLY A SACRIFICE
UPON THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM
When this National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific was first dedicated, the man
y graves were marked with thousands of small white crosses, each like a tiny sapling whose life was cut short too soon; but today these have been replaced with simple flat headstones. I make my way slowly across the serene expanse of lawn, carrying a plumeria lei to one particular grave located not far from the lookout where I first met my old friend, in sight of his onetime home. And now, as I bend down, tears fill my eyes, as they always do, and I drape the lei across a granite marker that reads:
JOHN ROBINSON KUA
HAWAII
PVT 25 INFANTRY
WORLD WARII
MAR 2, 1920 DEC 7, 1941
Call it, if you will, “the time element”—and across that bridge of years is passed a torch of friendship, hope, and valor—no finer gifts to be bequeathed anywhere, in or out of the Twilight Zone.
Consider one Mr. Wilson. A tired man in a wrinkled suit, driving an old car, wearing a haunted expression like an ancient dueling scar. A man forever traveling and watching nervously over his shoulder for something that, in the words of baseball great Satchel Paige, might be gaining on him.
H
e was a young man in an old black car, parked out by the railroad tracks near an oil well that still pumped, pulling up that East Texas crude. I got word of the car from Mrs. Roark, who lived on the far side of the tracks. She called my office and told me that car and man had been sitting there since late afternoon, and from her kitchen window she had seen the driver get out of the car once, while it was still light, and walk to the other side, probably to relieve himself. She said he was dressed in black and wore a black hat, and just the outfit spooked her.
Now, at midnight, the car was still there, though she hadn’t seen him in a quite a while, and she was worried about going to sleep, him being just across the tracks, and she wondered if I’d take a look and make sure he wasn’t a robber or killer or worse.
Being Chief of Police of a small town in East Texas can be more interesting than you might think. But, not my town. It had a population of about three hundred and was a lazy sort of place where the big news was someone putting a dead armadillo in the high school principal’s mailbox.
I had one deputy, and his was the night shift, but he had called in sick for a couple of days, and I knew good and well he was just spending a little extra time at home with his new bride. I didn’t tell him I knew, because I didn’t care. I had been married once, and happily, until my wife died suddenly in childbirth, losing the baby in the process.
Frankly, I’ve never gotten over it. The house seemed too large and the rooms too empty. Sometimes, late at night, I looked at her photograph and cried. Fact was, I preferred the night shift. I didn’t sleep much.
So, when Mrs. Roark called and told me about the car, I drove out there, and sure enough, the car was still there, and when I hit my lights on high, I saw that it looked like it had seen a lot of road. It was caked in dust, and the tires looked thin. I bumped the siren once, and saw someone sit up in the seat and position his hands on the steering wheel.
I left the light on to keep him a little blinded, got out, and went over and tapped on the glass. The driver rolled it down.
“Hello, sir,” I said. “May I see your license?”
He turned his face into my flashlight and blinked, and took out his wallet and pushed his license out to me. It said his name was Judah Wilson. The license was invalid by a couple of months, and the photo on it looked somewhat like him but it was faded and not reliable. I told him so.
“Oh,” he said. “I should have noticed it was out of date.”
“This is your picture, here?” I asked.
He nodded.
I thought about giving him a ticket for the problem with the license and sending him on his way, but there was something about him that made me suspicious; the photo not being quite right. I said, “I tell you what, Mr. Wilson. You follow me to the station and we can talk there.”
“Is that necessary?” he said.
“I’m afraid so,” I said.
At the station, I found myself a little nervous, because the man was over six feet tall and well built and looked as if he could be trouble. His hat and suit were a bit worn, and out of style, but had at one time been of good quality. He shoes needed a shine. But so did mine. I had him seat himself in front of my desk and I went around to my chair and, without thinking about it, unfastened my holster flap where he couldn’t see me do it. I studied the photo. I said, “This looks like you, but . . . not quite.”
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m older by a few years. A few years can make a difference.”
“I just need to make a call,” I said. I wasn’t able to go somewhere private and call, since I was the only one there, and yet I was not in a position where I felt comfortable locking him up. I made the call and he listened, and when I finished, I said, “I guess you heard that?”
“The owner of the license is dead?”
“That’s right. That means you have another man’s out-of-date license.”
He sighed. “Well, it wasn’t out of date when I first got it and it’s not another man. Exactly. It’s just that I can’t duplicate another person completely, and some less than others, and this man was one of the hard ones. I don’t know what the difference is with one and then another, but there’s sometimes a difference. Like you buy a knockoff product that has the same general appearance, but on closer inspection you can tell it’s not the real deal.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said, “but I’m going to ask you to stand up and walk over to the wall there, and put your hands on it, spread your legs for a pat down. I got reason to hold you.”
He did what I asked, sighing as he did. I gave him his Miranda rights. He listened and said he understood. I marched him to one of the two cages we had in the back. I put him in one and locked the door.
“You really ought not do this,” he said.
“Is that a threat?”
“No, it’s a warning.”
“You’re behind bars, sir, not me.”
“I know,” he said, and went and sat on the bunk and looked at a space between his shoes.
I was about to walk away, when he said, “Watch this.”
I turned, and his body shifted, as if there was something inside him trying to get out, and then his face popped and crawled, and I let out a gasp. He lifted his chin and looked up. Inside his black suit, under his black hat, he looked almost exactly like me.
I felt weak in the knees and grabbed the bars for support. He said, “Don’t worry, I can shift the way I look because I do not have a core, but I can’t turn to smoke and flow through the bars. You’ve got me. And that ought to worry you.”
There was a bench on the outside of the bars for visitors to sit and talk to their friends or loved ones on the other side, and I sat down there and tried to get my breath. I kept staring at him, seeing my face under that black hat. It wasn’t quite right. There was something missing in the face, same as the one he had before, but it was close enough.
A long moment passed before he spoke. “Now watch.”
He closed his eyes and tightened his mouth, shifted back, and looked the way he had before, like Wilson. Or almost like Wilson.
“It’s best you let me out,” he said.
I shook my head.
He sighed. “I’m not like anyone you’ve dealt with before.”
“I don’t doubt that,” I said, and took my pistol out of its holster and laid it on my knee. He was behind bars, but the whole thing with his face, the way his body shifted under his suit, I couldn’t help but think I might have to shoot him. I thought I ought to call my deputy and have him come in, but I wasn’t sure what he could do. I wanted to call someone, but I couldn’t think of anyone to call. I felt as if every thought I had ever possessed was jumbled up inside my head, knotted up and as confused as Alexander’s Gordian knot.
I made myself breathe slowly and deeply.
He took off his hat and placed it on the bunk beside him and stared at me.
I said, “Tell me who you really are. What you are. Why you’re here.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” he said, and smiled at me. The smile had about as much warmth as a hotel ice machine.
“Are you . . . are you from somewhere else?”
“You mean am I from Mars? From somewhere out there?” He pointed up to give his words emphasis.
“Yes.”
“No. I’m not. I’m from right here on earth, and I am a human being. Or at least I once was.”
I bent forward, overwhelmed, feeling light-headed and strange.
“What I can tell you is there is something coming, and when it gets here, you won’t like it. Let me out.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Because I’m not who I say I am?”
I nodded. “And because the man you look like is dead.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t kill him. He died and I took his identity. It was simple, really. I was in the hospital, for a badly sprained wrist; had to have a kind of support cast. Accident. Silly, really. I fell off a ladder working in a bookstore. But I was there, and Wilson died because of a car accident. It was time for me to move on anyway. I can’t stay anywhere very long, because it’ll find me.”
“It?”
“Just listen. His family was in his room, and when they left out to do what was needed to be done about having the body dismissed, I went in and found his pants and looked through his pockets and took his wallet. I pulled back the sheet and studied his face. I became him. It was okay until tonight, long as I kept on the move and didn’t have trouble with the law. But tonight, me being tired and you checking me out . . . It’s come to an end.”
“You could be me if you wanted to?”
“I could. If I killed you and hid the body, I could go right on being you. But not here. I wouldn’t know your ways, your mannerisms, your experiences, but I could use the face and body and move on; become you somewhere else. Or use the face and not the name. There’s all kinds of ways to play it. But I’m behind bars and you’re out there, so you’ve got no worries. Besides, I don’t kill. I’m not a murderer. Thing is, none of it matters now; I’ve lost time and I’ve lost ground. It’s coming and I need to put enough miles between me and it to give myself time to truly rest.”
Twilight Zone Anthology Page 13
