Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  “I knew that addict’s heart had stopped beating,” she said. She moved out of sight, back behind the door, then locked a buckle, the clean clip-sound echoed in the flat morning of the garage, us all alone then for a minute, the other paramedics and EMTs back in the lockers or the kitchen. “And I knew that there was risk to the femoral artery when we were extracting the biker,” she went on, “and I knew not to give insulin to the hypoglycemic drinker. But there you were.” I crossed my arms and waited, it was always better to let her boil over, there was even something to enjoy in it, almost a taste to her fury, when she’d really get going, when she’d call me a snot-nosed book rat or wonder-boy mansplainer, all my attitudes and ass-stuck explanations, she’d been here so much longer and why was it so hard for me to remember that. She came back out of the ambulance.

  “You always have to say something, don’t you.”

  “Only when I’m right,” I said.

  “There you go,” she said. She was finally looking at me, her cheeks hot, a flex and pulse to her throat. Her eyes were ringed with bruise-colored skin. “I can’t wait until you go to med school.” She started toward the side entrance to the station, the hall with the bathrooms where every shift we scrubbed off all the remains of everyone we’d touched that day.

  “I don’t know how he came back, either, Erin,” I lied, loud enough for her to hear. “He was almost gone. I don’t know how he came back.”

  She stopped walking, but stayed faced away from me.

  “But you were following the right procedure,” I said. “The chest compressions.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. “You did something.”

  I turned back to the ambulance, considered all the stinking howling leaking hours we’d spent in it. What did I do, Erin? Even I was still trying to understand, I only knew that when I touched a broken body, I held an idea of what that body should be, and that idea became the muscle of a heartbeat, or the fusing of bones, or the electrochemical bolts storming through synapses. I’d felt the addict’s body wanting to be repaired, and then the body had done just that, chased the overdose from its own blood and brain.

  “All I did was work,” I said. “Just followed procedure.”

  We both knew she’d made a mistake with the paddles, I’d seen it in her eyes, the panicked flex of recognition that I had caught the mistake, as much as she had. “You did what you were supposed to,” I said. “I’d say that to anyone who asked.”

  She was still facing away, but I saw her exhale.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Get some sleep,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” she said, but I could hear the ease returning to her.

  The night echoed in my head, the burning-cat-piss stink of the meth house, the air of hate and rage between the men inside, the stickiness of death and neglect. And something deeper, the trembling understanding of what I was becoming capable of. I was home now, considering my open refrigerator, all condiments and partially finished boxed mac and cheese. A queasy knot in my stomach. I closed the refrigerator and stared at the biology anatomy chemistry textbooks that were propping up the thrift-store television in the corner.

  There had been an effervescence under my skin as I’d come home, popping with excitement at what I’d done, but now, as I stood in the center of the apartment, the energy all slithered away, taking so much strength with it, it was all I could do to move toward my bed, my legs slower with each step, the feeling of being underwater. I got enough of my clothing off before I slumped into bed and plunged through the softness of the mattress into darkness.

  When I woke, it was clear some time had passed. The air had moved from morning crisp into the thicker afternoon, the light already thinning outside the window. I checked my watch, three-thirty, turned to look at my bedside table, where I saw a photo-booth strip of pictures, me and Khadeja and her six-year-old daughter, Rika, clumped together like a bouquet in front of the tiny camera, blown out with black-and-white light. The heaviness in me was gone; only that fizzing underneath, all the ideas of what I’d seen. When I sat up and saw the dim, bare truth of my apartment, the excitement within me felt so suddenly incomplete, so bottled and lonely, that I knew I had to get out.

  I had my shower and clothes on and hopped a bus to Khadeja’s office.

  “You’re outside?” Khadeja asked, after I’d called her from the sidewalk.

  “Just for a second,” I said. “Come down.”

  The building all glass and steel, polished and blandly imposing, but through the three-story foyer I saw her walking. Khadeja. The boom of her Afro pulled back in a ponytail pompom, eyes full of gleeful intelligence, the draping fabric that floated off her broad arms, the lines of flex in her calves with each clacking step toward me. I can only imagine it was a stupid smile I gave at her arrival, I was stoned for her in that moment.

  Five months we’d been seeing each other, met in a bar when she was out for a friend’s birthday and I was winding down with two other guys from work, after that it was us meeting at first at strange times, early-afternoon drinks or lunches during the week, all of which I understood later when she finally had me over and I met Rika. And it worked, we worked, and we’d continued; only now did I think there was enough there that I could do this, show up unannounced at her office.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  I’d expected a gaze that was annoyed and busy contemplating balance sheets and compounded interest, but she appeared genuinely happy to see me. “I know you’re busy at work,” I said, and she shook her head.

  “Company party,” she said. “Celebrating another strong quarter.”

  “Vegetable dip with only the celery left,” I said. “Store-brand soft drinks and gas-station wine, a few balloons taped to the sides of the micro-kitchen.”

  She laughed. “How did you know?”

  I shrugged. “It’s an accounting firm.”

  “They were about to start Pictionary.”

  “You think you could steal some of that wine?” I asked.

  Five minutes later and her purse was warming a bottle of low-grade red, we walked along the streets to the North Park Blocks, evidence of a recent peace vigil: shriveled thumbs of burned-out candles rested on every solid surface, then soggy cardboard signs discarded gently against statues and the legs of benches. Study War No More, they pleaded, and a few of the larger signs had been repurposed as mattresses by the homeless that haunted the park.

  “Not my favorite place,” Khadeja admitted.

  “What’s not to love?” I said, trying for comedy, suddenly scared I could ruin this feeling I had, rather than expand it to hold us both. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to see you, is all.”

  The simple truth of that brightened us both, for we had both been, when we first met, so much older than those around us, aged with the things nature had asked us to carry—she with Rika, who she’d borne so young, me with my accelerated path through school, the work I was trying to do now—and in that state it had been that much more exciting to find someone else that understood true circumstances, and how much more important that made a present tense you me us we are doing just this that could exist only briefly before we were dragged back into those circumstances.

  “Well,” she said with a flash of her teeth, spreading her arms, “I’m here. Entertain me, Mr. Flores, and you better make it fast.”

  “So,” I said, scooting over next to her where we sat on the steps of a statue, “did you know I have powers?”

  She touched her tongue to her top teeth, still smiling. “That’s right, we’re doing that thing where we still have secrets from each other. Go on, go on.”

  “It’s quite simple, actually,” I said, with no idea what I’d say next. “It will require wine.” We’d neglected a corkscrew, but I showed her how to finger the cork back down through the neck until it bobbed in the wine below, we each took a pull straight from the bottle.

  “I’m connected to things no one else can see,” I said
. I took her lower back into my hand and gently guided her snug against my hip. “Listen,” I whispered into her ear.

  And we were quiet, and she heard the birdsong that was emerging, as I had been hearing for blocks at a time already, over the city noise rather than under it, because of what I was. I didn’t think there was any way to amplify it, but I told her again, “Listen,” and what was in the trees came back bright and clear.

  “It sounds like they’re searching for each other,” I said. “But if you listen closer . . . none of them are actually lost.”

  Khadeja was perfectly still. She had her eyes closed. We both listened, the bird calls went, bouncy and bright. The smell of wet bark, rich and papery, from the recent rain.

  Khadeja listened a minute more, then opened her eyes and looked at me. “That’s one of your things,” she said. “Animals.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  I noticed that she didn’t move, stayed close. “I’m serious,” she said. “Maybe it seems negligent, but when I first saw you act that way—what was it, our second date or something, remember the little dog outside the restaurant, that woman all in yellow that was far too drunk and looking for the elevator?—you did this thing,” she said. “Where you crouched down and just barely brushed the dog. It was going nuts, and when you arrived, it went so calm it might as well have been drugged. That was when I knew you’d be good with Rika.”

  “Because I petted a dog gently, I was going to be good with your daughter?” I said. “That is negligent.”

  And she laughed. “Don’t tell Rika.”

  With a hand gripped on the neck of the wine bottle I gestured off the sidewalk. “Look,” I said. I pointed down to massive puddles that had formed in the soggy ground, bad drainage, and to a cluster of ants there that had made themselves into a lumpy ball, each ant linking to another ant with nothing more than smell and touch to understand the need to survive, and that to do so they’d have to weave together into a fabric thick and solid enough to repel water, and float that way for as long as the water carried them, and that some of them would drown for it. I was narrating it all as we sat there, pulling from the wine, warm and corky, the bits of it that tumbled along our tongues. We both kept spitting the crumbles into the dirt. I was still talking about the ants, I wondered what the world would be like if we were even a fraction as mighty as they were, to build our bodies into a raft for each other—

  “That’s it,” Khadeja said, and shook her head, though she still smiled. “That’ll do, Mr. Flores. I didn’t come for a biology-and-holiness seminar.”

  I realized how much I’d been talking and was immediately embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”

  “Just be quiet,” she said, “just for a second.” Then she tilted her head and leaned in to me, our lips finding each other, again and again, until we left the rest of the bottle on the steps and found ourselves wandering back through the damp spring park. We’d made something, just sitting there together, meeting each other over and over, and now whatever it was we’d made echoed off the streets and buildings around us as we walked, our arms hooked into each other and cuddled so fierce that it was almost as if we’d created new bones that joined us at the ribs.

  9

  KAUI, 2008

  San Diego

  Summer break was coming and there was nothing in me that wanted it.

  Summer break in Hawai‘i would be Dean walking around, getting shakas and fist bumps from strangers, high school girls hoping to get him to their beach party, Mom and Dad letting him lie around the house, all because for a few months he threw a ball through a hoop with other boys and got it in more than he missed. Noa, if he came home, too, would have his own room—they’d move me to the couch, guaranteed—and would mostly be in there alone, right, or in the garage like he’d been before, or out and away, seeing what new laws of the universe he could bend.

  Summer break in Hawai‘i would be me with a job at a mall or a fast-food place or maybe at a hotel. If I was lucky. Whole ocean between me and climbing. Between me and being an engineer. Between me and Van.

  “Come home,” Mom said, on the phone.

  “And do what?” I asked.

  “Whatever we need you to do,” she said.

  Sometimes I don’t know if the fight finds me or I find the fight. Especially with my family.

  “You mean sweep up the lanai, get Dad a beer when he wants, maybe even bag groceries?” I should have just shut up. But there was me and there was the rest of the family. “You don’t need me for that,” I said. “Someone already has that job.”

  “You don’t ever think before you talk, do you?” Mom said. “You’re the only one that’s like this.”

  “Like what? Independent? Guilt-free?” I said. “If this is about money, I can make more here. And spend less. I’ll send you a check every month, if you need it.”

  “It’s not about the money,” she said.

  “Mom,” I said. “In Hawai‘i? If you’re not making bank like a lawyer or something? Everything’s at least a little bit about money.”

  I knew what it was really about. She could see what the mainland was doing to me, okay? What it was giving me. Big-sky space, opportunities, and oxygen to burn and burn and burn bright.

  “I talked with a couple of your dad’s friends,” Mom said. “Kyle and Nate–them, you remember?”

  I had no idea who these people were. “Sure,” I said.

  “They’ve got a few engineering jobs. Some work they’re doing over in Pearl Harbor, one of them has a solar-energy company in the industrial area.”

  She had me there. That did sound good, right, at least compared to anything else I’d get, late as it was in the semester. I swear, it was almost like no one in all of San Diego had a job. Offices full of consultants and advisers and part-time-appointment-only business cards for hire.

  “You tell them thanks but I got it,” I said to Mom. “I can make it work here. I gotta go. Studying. It’s almost exam week.”

  But with Hao and Katarina and Van, when the end came? You’d think there’d be speeches, right. Since it was before summer break and it would be months until we’d see each other again. We’d become each other’s habit, as much a part of the morning and night as brushing teeth. And just like that we’d cut ways for long enough that it almost felt like we wouldn’t be quite the same when we came back. But no one really said anything about it. We just rolled out of the two piles we’d made of ourselves, me Van Katarina Hao, our ripe tangle of denim and brambles of hair and hot-mouth yawning. Around us on the tabletops and counters a few beer cans gone halfsies, grease-freckled pizza boxes, the television remote by our toothbrushes. This was the us left over from the end-of-year parties and the party after those parties. Smearing now our stink all over the room and each other. We had different planes or cars to catch and there were hugs and see you soons. Van was heading home and Hao was heading home and Katarina was heading home. Then the medicated weather of summer San Diego opened up yellow and orange and polite in front of me and me alone.

  I found what I needed to stay. Students here always rented their lives out over summer. They went to six-week language school in Nice or volunteer vacations in Oaxaca or wherever else the tear-away flyers in the student union suggested as a glossy possibility. And left behind? Their work-study jobs. Their three-person close-to-campus houses. An easy fit for a short time for the leftovers. Like me.

  That was the summer I learned: almost anything becomes tolerable if you get yourself a routine.

  One. Wake in the morning after two or three snooze buttons. Sit up in the blue sheets that haven’t seen a wash cycle since the day they were bought. The right mornings I’d pour myself into my running clothes and quick-step down the front stairs and run good splits in the sticky cold fog. Gasping for oxygen through a sucking wet shirt, way before breakfast. Bowl of cold milk and no-sugar cereal, a piece of fruit. Walk to my first job, an office job, fresh and hot clean from a shower, my legs stretchin
g with the afterburn of the run.

  Two. Choose between maybe too tight or maybe too low-cut, maybe it’s dowdy or maybe it’s infantilizing. But you have to wear something appropriate to the campus office job, okay? Elevators and office foyers, hallways. Dark, ridged, rounded wood. Me pulling from stacks of printed papers, efficient-fingering the data-entry key combinations. Form e-mails and easy chatter with my office-mates—there’s one other, a haole girl junior who takes smoke breaks every twenty-five minutes. On her return the first thing she always does is gather her textured, fake-leather purse in her lap, crinkle free a piece of gum, and bend it onto her tongue. It’s that smell and the sharp citrus of whatever they put in the bathroom hand soap. And she’ll ask where I got the blouse. The earrings. The necklace I hated but wore anyway. And on and on and on.

  Three. Tuesday Thursday Saturday I hop a bus to Romanesque to wait tables for the dinner shift. Four hours of walk-running to the kitchen and back, memorizing and then scrambling and rememorizing the orders of patrons. Remember the specials, the allergen considerations, wine lists, and ironed white shirts and ass-sucking black pants, of course those help me get tips. Even with a body that feels as tita as mine.

  Weeks go by, right, me not even knowing what the date was, just the day of the week. Which shifts I was working. Some nights I’d split sides of the couch with one of my dull roommates, the kind of haole girls that were up-and-coming members of the Future Trophy Wives of America. Bland as saimin without the sauce. Other nights I’d get itchy hands and grab my climbing shoes, find a closed-down crafts store or bricked-up condemned industrial block, and climb and climb and climb. Slip my toes into cracks or the ledges and dimples of architecture. Hook my fingers into dime edges, get up off the ground and breathe terror.

  But mostly it was time like a dull buzz. Routine and sunup sundown hello goodbye. Time like a filament made incandescent by a weak electric current.

  If Van was here, I thought, that filament would get so hot it would pop. If Van was here, there would always be something to laugh about, right? Something we’d make, some new experience I never would have guessed I’d do but that would suddenly seem to say more about what I wanted to be than anything that had come before. If Van. If Van.