Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  All the veins of retarred cracks in the road plus pink-gold smogginess of sunup plus the prickled slack palm trees and flat brown rectangles of unused land. Van drove down two wrong streets and past a barely up chain-link fence with frothing pit bulls, barking their guttural balls off.

  Katarina and Hao were bantering like the stupidest siblings. Now Katarina was suggesting Hao touched himself while listening to boy bands on the radio. Now Hao said it wasn’t masturbation, he was just learning the dance moves. Which brought them back to me, hula, oh God—

  “Are we almost there?” I called out to Van.

  “Okay, okay,” Van said. We all bounced with the sudden potholing of the car. Gravel popping under the tires. “Here we are,” Van sang out. She swung a sudden right and locked the brakes into a skid. The dust cloud caught up to us and when it cleared we were looking at the darkened husk of grain silos, columns of cylinders weeping unidentified industrial creams, skeletal crane arms and scaffolding lurking behind them. A small flock of crows ribboned into the breeze, crying out in creaky voices.

  And then we were inside the thing. The ground floor of the elevator crammed tight with riveted beams and spears of light, huge pipe joints and all along the train-car-shaped center aisle, rail tracks for whatever carts used to move here. I couldn’t believe how holy the air felt.

  It was just me and Van standing in there at first, Hao and Katarina still catching up. Van’s breaths sounded small and even as she turned to take it all in. She hooted once, softly. The brightness in her face. I said okay, this was okay, only I wasn’t talking about the climbing or the elevator. But I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t tell her how much I wanted what was happening, right now. All around there were so many angles and edges and blunt corners and places to grab and hold on and go up.

  “Sometimes this is all I think about,” she said. She nodded off to Hao and Katarina as they entered. “I love them,” she said. “Let’s see if you can keep up.”

  “You tell me how my ass looks in these jeans when you’re watching me from below,” I said.

  She laughed. We were looking right at each other. Take a match and hold it to the strip, start the strike. Somewhere at the microscopic level there are whole worlds of hot light that gather and jump to the match tip. That’s what we were.

  “All right, hula girl,” she said. “Be a bitch on it.”

  We climbed. At first just me and Van, straight up our columns of iron, clutching the ridges and edges and using our rubber-soled feet like paws, dancing and moving and pulling, going up together. As we went we spread out, all four of us, grunting and clattering and rising up off the floor, climbing our way into the ribs of this long-dead steel giant. Toward the heart of the thing. I moved closer to Van, Katarina, Hao. I wanted us together, wanted them to feel with me the big nameless thing we’d worked our way into, a silence like the presence of our own private God.

  I talked to my parents on the phone but I hated it. They kept me a person of two places, okay? A person of here and there, and not belonging in either place. But if it was a give and take between the two, Hawai‘i was starting to lose. I could almost feel the sun and sand and salt of Hawai‘i flaking off.

  “How’s the haole land?” Dad would ask, his favorite way to start calls.

  “No one showers and the food sucks,” I said.

  And Dad straight cackling on the other end of the phone. Almost so I could hear his smile lines. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew it. Fuckin’ mainland and its stink-ass haoles. So, what, you’re running the campus now or what?”

  So you are paying attention, Dad, I thought. Maybe just a little bit.

  “You know it,” I said. “I started robbing banks on the weekends, too.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Dad said—both to me and to Mom, off-phone. “Better be, with the bill they’re sticking us with.”

  I wanted to say I’d cosigned on the loans and it wasn’t just him. That some of the kids here didn’t have any loans, or if they did, spent them like the future was a certain thing: new laptops and nights out at restaurants and the sort of apartments where the cabinets were, like, Scandinavian sexy. While I was working off scanned pages or library-lifted books where I’d removed the magnetic strip. Quadrupling up on the McDonald’s Dollar Menu to stash enough in our mini-fridge for half the week, then chopsticking bricks of saimin on the late nights. I didn’t forget where I was from or how each semester’s tuition bill alone felt like I was holding a gun to their heads. And my own.

  I clamped my mouth shut. So hard pain cranked through my teeth. “I know, Dad, trust me, I know.”

  “People these days,” Dad said, “it’s like everyone’s out to get as much money from you as they can, yeah? Like, if they figure the price can be just a little higher, every time, they raise ’um up.”

  “So life’s good at home?” I said. “You and Mom still doing your thing?”

  “What, you mean like sex?” he asked. “Yeah, we still oofing. In fact, just last night we was—”

  “Dad—”

  “No, serious, just last night we went for happy hour at Osmani Bar, and I was like, ‘Babe, no one gonna see nothing in the parking lot, and—’”

  “Dad! I’ll hang up the phone. I swear to God.”

  He laughed and laughed. “Only joke! Sheesh, everyone’s all uptight over there. We doing good, Kaui, we doing good. I dunno. Working our asses off. Price of paradise and like that. It’s home.”

  We went on for a minute, things here and there about neighbors, a couple of people I knew from high school that Dad saw at the airport, working security jobs or ticket-counter jobs or as flight attendants. There was a training program he was hoping to get into, so that he could move into a flight-mechanic position. “All those guys is badasses,” he said. “Marines and all that. I should have gone military.”

  “So you could be yelled at by haole guys with skinhead haircuts for, like, six years or something? Come on, Dad.”

  “I coulda seen the world, though,” Dad said. “Got real skills, you know? They learn things there, at least.”

  “Yeah, they learn how to shoot other brown people,” I said.

  “Okay, okay,” Dad said. “I get it, you know everything now that you been at college for a semester or two, yeah yeah yeah. I love you. Here’s your mother.”

  The phone tumbled from hand to hand.

  “You’re doing okay,” Mom said, barely a question.

  “Of course,” I said. “Did some great climbing last week with Van-guys.”

  “Climbing,” she said. “I hope you don’t think you’re just there to party.”

  “I just got all this from Dad,” I said. “I know what I’m here for.”

  She cleared her throat. “How are classes, then?”

  “Hard,” I said. “But I like engineering.”

  “Good,” she said. “At least you’re not studying, I don’t know, American history of comic books or something like that.”

  “Right.”

  “You getting enough sleep? Enough food?”

  When I can afford it, I wanted to say. But I already knew where the call was going. It didn’t matter what I said, so I stayed quiet, so that we could get where we were going faster.

  “You talk to Noa lately?” she asked. There you go. Didn’t take as long as I thought.

  “I mean, maybe,” I said.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Didn’t you just talk to him?”

  “We did,” Mom said. “But you know, kids don’t always tell their parents things.”

  If only you knew me, Mom, I wanted to say. I’ve felt the midnight crush at a strip club, me and Van and Hao and Katarina there almost like a joke, but still pulled in by it, the red lights and sweat and gritty beats. Did you know I’d been so many times drunk or stoned or snowed, trying not to trip my numb legs on themselves while walking dark o’clock streets. Or did you know I’d climbed without a rope at terminal heights at least a few times, just me a
nd air and death.

  “Don’t be worried,” I told her. “We’re fine.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “We did a lot to get you there, you know.”

  She had to stick it in, right? She never said shit like this to the boys, only to me. Like I was supposed to be guilty of ambition while they were just living their full potential. “I know, Mom,” I said.

  “We miss all of you,” she said.

  And I said I did, too—and I did. But feeling it then, the missing was different than I expected. Less desperate, I guess. And getting smaller all the time.

  8

  NAINOA, 2008

  Portland

  I recognized the house even though I’d never seen it before, recognized it even if the two police cars hadn’t been there, they were all the same these days (the places we went): the bedsheeted windows, the trash-choked clapboard siding, the greasy scatter of engine parts on the clumpy lawn.

  “I love what they’ve done with the place,” Erin said, yanking the ambulance’s shifter into park. She dropped the lights and we each pulled a fresh pair of blue latex from the box. I went around back to get the kit, she started toward the officer on the porch, speaking to him in bored tones, preparing for the state of the apparently traumatized skulls inside.

  The radios spat, it was otherwise quiet. The officer at the top of the porch bowed, toed open the door. “There’s one in the living room near the fireplace,” he said. “Looks like the other one fought in the kitchen before he gave up.”

  Erin stepped up the creaking stairs, through the yawn of the door, a plastic scent like old diapers, a hot bloom of air. I went right behind her.

  The light inside was sooty, the wood floor gouged and cross-slashed from years of use, crown molding and naked bulbs. Near a dingy sectional couch was the first patient, skeletal and sallow, with an officer bent over his torso, ramming him with chest compressions.

  Erin dropped to the floor by the officer’s side and he understood, pulling his hands back like it was time to wash them. “The second?” Erin asked, even as she started compressions, and the officer nodded toward the kitchen. I went, around the corner, into the stench, it was as if a cat had pissed into a moldering refrigerator. The wall above the stovetop was scorched, something like a war bomb burn, and on the floor a topology of discarded cookware and trash bags, organic refuse, and in the back corner, near the refrigerator, the third officer was negotiating a grizzled rope of a meth addict onto a stool.

  The addict was breathing like he’d just surfaced from drowning, but he was breathing, through his tangled roots of goat beard, a face pecked with bloody scabs.

  “The fuck is this party,” he said.

  I was confused and turned toward the officer. “He looks alive,” I said.

  “That’s the problem,” the officer said, his nose red and swollen, it looked like he’d taken a punch there. He jerked the addict by his shirt scruff into a better seating position.

  “Any other problems?”

  “My mortgage, my kids, your questions,” the officer said. He looked like he was waiting for me to leave. “Maybe check his friend in the living room.”

  But I was already gone as he said that, back to where we came in, I saw the baseball bat for the first time on the floor, grip tape blackened with palm sweat, the end pink and spiked with bits of hair. There were fist-sized hamburger wrappers balled all over, an empty bookshelf leaning drunk against the back corner, and there was Erin working on the one who’d been beaten, paddles in her hands. The patient was still on his back, his left leg folded wrong, bent sideways and high. Eyes closed, the blue bloom of his lips.

  “Hey, inspector, you want to help here?” Erin said, holding the paddles, and I already had an idea. I dropped to my knees, there was no pulse, not a hint at the carotid or ulnar.

  “D-fib isn’t working because his heart isn’t beating,” I said. Now the stink of sweat and urine, there his crusty shirt already yanked up around the splay of his armpits, a dollop of gel at the ribs, another at the pectoral.

  “I lost it,” she said, dropping the paddles. “It was there.”

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Airway clear?”

  “Fuck you,” she said. “I’m not an idiot. It’s the bat that did this.”

  “Maybe the drugs,” I said. “Let’s try again.” I stitched my fingers together, put the edge of my palm into his sternum and compressed, careful to avoid the xiphoid process and the hemorrhage that could follow its snapping. His body: at the beginning it was just him, a man, but my eyes and teeth pinched as I compressed his chest, the oxygenated gasp of everything that moved in him, and then I felt as if I were squinting my brain. He was the him I saw but also a him I felt: I felt the weave of his skin and the buttery chunks of fat underneath, the hush and rush of what could only be his blood, so long and blowing, all of this just a feeling, it was nothing I saw. There were other muddled sensations deeper down, but strongest was an effervescent urge, his body eager to start repairing itself, but even that came and went so quick I still couldn’t separate all the this from the that. There were colors I felt, he had the yellow tarry rush of meth’s hate booming through his veins, then the jagged red memories of anger that came and went like thunderheads inside his skull, a color I’d felt many times before—and all the while the truth of my hands, chest compressions, shoving blood around his husk. I was on my knees and over the patient, my palms at his sternum, dropping my weight down and letting it come back up, one two three four five six seven, on and on and on. The liquid pop of the already broken ribs went like a clock. Something sparked, it certainly wasn’t the compressions, it was only that I was searching, the same as I always am when I do this now, searching and feeling and trying to understand what the injury was, at the same time that I understood what his body should be. I think something had already started—

  Erin was saying my name like a chant, her fingers hooked into my right deltoid, I realized she was shaking me. The look I must have given her as I took my hands off the body.

  “It’s been five minutes since you started, superhero,” she said. “No change. We need to transport.”

  I was breathing hard, as she had been, and I could feel the slick cool sweat patches at my back and chest. But the addict’s body was quiet; everything was finished, wasn’t it. The police officers watched us pull back from the body, the still point of sound when everyone understands.

  “Transport,” Erin said again.

  She was gone and returned with the gurney, bashing it up the steps with one of the officers, bright metal crashes as it hit each stair. I was still doing compressions until we lifted him into the gurney, then rolled it back down the stairs and into the wide-open back of the ambulance. Erin legged up into the back with the gurney, and had started to close one of the ambulance doors when the patient sat up calmly, spat Erin’s plastic rescue breath guard from his mouth, and said, “Holy, holy, holy.”

  We froze: Erin reaching for the still-open door, me about to secure the other, we stared across the gap between the end of the rig where we were and the risen body in the back. Even from that distance I could see the yellow-blue flush had left his skin, the wrinkles shallowing, his hair thicker, it was as if he’d been made younger by fifty years. He looked, in a word, healthy. He curled his spine forward and hacked a wave of vomit onto the snow-white sheet covering his lap.

  His mouth was slack. He looked down at his mess, then back up at us, wiped his jaw with his wrist. Glanced again at his lap, where the sheet had swelled into a pyramid with a thick knob at the apex.

  “I think I have a boner,” he said. “What happened?”

  It was our last call of the shift. We weren’t even sure if we should still take him to the hospital, every vital sign was perfect all of a sudden, nothing to report, and what could we have said that wouldn’t have put us both in the psych ward anyway. But it seemed even worse to leave him there with the officers, who were already foldi
ng the other addict into the back of a car, ready to be done with him and back to their desks, the reports. So we took the risen one to the hospital with a single police escort and ran down the situation to the ER staff, who said, “If he isn’t dead he can wait in line with everyone else,” and Erin said, “Thank God,” and the addict demanded cigarettes of everyone that passed our chairs in the waiting room, until a female nurse said, “Jesus Christ, shut up,” and produced a loosey from a desk behind the attendant’s window and placed the cigarette in the addict’s palms like a dog treat. Erin and I started back for the rig and saw the officer’s slow-blinking face and purpling nose as he realized how much longer he’d be the responsible one. We signed our papers and drove out from under it all.

  Back at the station Erin cleaned the rig, running through inventory as loud as she could, she wasn’t saying a word, but the slapping of tape rolls and trauma shears and intubation packs in and out of their places, the crackle and squealing zip and scratchy Velcro tears, she was still telling me her opinion. Are we doing this again, I thought, so I waited, leaning against the outside of the rig, behind the open back door, listened to her fumbling with a hose as she moved it back and forth, the fold and rustle of a duffel.

  “I’m going to go sit down,” I said as if the door weren’t there. “Maybe just a quick granola bar or something.”

  She leaned around the door so she could see me. “You go do your thing.” She flapped a wrist in my general direction. “The way you always do.”

  “At least a cup of coffee?” I said. “You look tired.”

  “So do you.”

  “But I’m not,” I said.

  “Right, I forgot, Mr. Invincible.”

  “Did I do something to offend you?” I asked. I was always the one that had to be the adult this way, although Erin was two years my senior.