Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  “Help me stack all this,” Carl called from around back of the truck. “It’s always faster with two.”

  For maybe a minute I was thinking I could probably just duck down right there, sit on the floor, and curl up, but I’m six five and there’s no way you can keep me hidden anywhere. And anyway I never liked hiding, so when students started walking past I just tried not for make eye contact with none of ’um. But I don’t think nobody even looked at the delivery truck—I know I never did when I was a student—so I was probably more invisible than I ever been before. I hopped out and went around back to Carl.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I said.

  “Kid wants a participation medal,” Carl said, stacking the bigger boxes on the handcart he’d set up. His bald head was all sweat and shine.

  “Used to be I was at the student union all the time,” I said. “Late-night snacks and like that. I never really been around back like this before.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know all about your story, superstar,” he said. “Everyone does. Well, now you’re around back all right.” He chin-pointed to one of the biggest boxes in the back of the truck. “Lift that one there.”

  We rolled the cart in toward the union and Carl went on about all the ways to be a top driver: Never ignore the GPS driving directions because the GPS is always right, park wherever the hell is closest to the entrance, just hit the flashers and unload, and always always always lock the back before you make the drop. More time you shave from the route without breaking the speed limit, the more bonus you can pick up at employee review.

  We struggled the cart up the small hill at the loading dock, Carl was still talking. We went by all the weeping milk from the garbage overflow next to the tied-tight stacks of cardboard, Carl was still talking. We took the heavy freight elevator crashing and squealing to the second floor, Carl was still talking. Then it was the mail room, mostly staffed by work-study students, and so of course, even though had been two years since my last game, the girl and guy at receiving fully recognized me.

  Chubby plain Jane with her caked-makeup cheeks and moled neck, and the guy with pink dyed hair that was starting for wash out, sharp-ass nose, and two thick earrings in one ear. Yeah, I can see the thing, when it happens, still. Them with their eyes up and on me like I’m just another delivery guy, then there’s this flex moment, where they’re like, Isn’t that Dean Flores? The guy smiled, even. Like he couldn’t wait for get off shift and tell his friends, Guess who I saw at the mail room today, no, at the mail room, delivering packages. He’d say it all happy because of how it was when I was starting two-guard and he was just another punk haole student at the school, and now here we are. I couldn’t let him get away with it.

  “The fuck you looking at?” I said to him.

  Punk’s smile dropped through the floor. I seen the fear. “Sorry?” he said, like he didn’t hear me.

  I was about to say more, but then Carl frowned at me so hard his face went like a raisin. “Boy,” he said. “Get the last of the stuff.”

  I stared Punk down, though, just a minute more, so he knew what was what. Then I went back around the corner, to the door we’d come into the mail room by, got the last few boxes, brought ’um back. I could feel Carl watching me the whole time so I didn’t do nothing but what I was supposed to until we left.

  “Trying to get fired on your second ride-along?” Carl asked, us back in the truck and the engine grumbling and the fibery smell of cardboard and old coffee all around.

  I shook my head but didn’t apologize.

  “You know that guy?”

  “Nah.”

  “This gonna be a problem, you doing a route through here?” Carl asked. Gave me one of his hard looks, one of his dad looks.

  “Let’s just drive,” is all I said. “We’re losing time.”

  Ask me how it happened.

  How do you have the world by the nuts and then let go.

  Shit is so simple anyone that’s not as dumb as me would’ve seen ’um coming. That sophomore season when I took over, our team went late in the tournament, made it all the way to the Final Four, with me leading in scoring and third on assists, double-double as easy as pissing in the shower. After a season like that, how could I not recognize what I was?

  Howbout the party in me started small and got bigger, just a little here and there and then epic, all the time epic, blackout epic. Howbout reggae, howbout pass the dutchie, howbout freshman girl hips and my hips and everyone in the living room when the bass drops. Howbout those days I was missing the beach bad and wanted to bring all the aloha back. Howbout if you try hard enough you can make the beach show up anywhere, even Spokane in the off-season, a little beer a lot of beer couple other brown boys and good beats, girls down to their hot pants and scooped-out necklines and we go. My grades was barely enough through spring semester and summer. Howbout I can see now, can’t nobody do it that way, not for long. Howbout I remember when I should have started for pay attention, when summer league started and I tried for all my mongoosing on the court, dipping into the flow, and something felt syrupy slow and numb. But I was only twenty, how could that be? Howbout island love can only do so much, at least for me, since there was arguments at practice with Coach, always telling me what to do and I swear half the time he was wrong, even Rone and Grant and DeShawn, I dunno what happened but soon wasn’t none of ’um talking to me, and me right back at ’um. Get your shit together, you’re getting sloppy, you’re getting slow, you’re getting fat. Used to be I was a razor, sharp and flashy bright, till I went and dulled myself.

  Now it’s just deliveries. Whole string of 6:00 a.m.’s go, me with more ride-alongs. Boss is saying maybe I get to start on my own. Don’t even have to help the loaders, maybe just a little bit, stacking everything the way I like it in the back of the truck, which I get all kapakai the first few weeks, like putting the big boxes for the closer addresses too far back in the truck, stacking all the crates wrong so that I’m always reaching bent over, like that. But I learn. I bet no one thinks I can, but I do. And Carl must have said something to someone for real about the university because I never gotta go that way again. I guess that’s his route anyway.

  There’s the fuzz of the cardboard boxes, when I hold one I can feel ’um in my fingers like little hairs on some pet I gotta take care of. There’s the flex and whank sound when I step up into the back of my delivery truck, then all the angles and edges and the silver shine of the walls inside when the sun’s coming up and I’m delivering. I’m delivering.

  Plenty times after work, me and Eddie and Kirk-guys all met in the back of the parking lot to tailgate, like we were headed to a ball game or something, but it’s just all us getting off our shift and chilling, just for a minute. Before some of the guys gotta run home to the edge of town in whatever small little house they’re all crammed into we stand around the back of Eddie’s car, far side of the parking lot, cracking beers from the trunk.

  “Anybody going to the game tonight?” Eddie asked.

  It gets all quiet.

  “Right,” Eddie said, not looking at me. “Sorry.” His shitty little child-molester-looking mustache and squirrel cheeks, raising his can, everyone else did the same. Guys is slamming their beers since they gotta get home to their families, except a few guys that chilled and drank slow, like we was at a bar and trying for make it last so we don’t gotta order another, just stay and listen to the music.

  11

  NAINOA, 2008

  Portland

  A seventeen-year-old girl with a collapsed lung was breathing no oxygen but death, I kept her alive. A construction worker with a severe incision of his left forearm, dropping into hypovolemic shock, I held him together. Parks in the ceaseless damp of a late cold spring and their gray alcoholics, stripping their clothes in a fever of hypothermia, so drunk and cold they were delirious, how desperate their heart thumps were, body cores falling below ninety degrees as they grew waxy, fetaled underneath benches, I kept even the coldest ones alive. We got t
he hemorrhoid calls and the imagined myocardial-infarction calls and the stomach-flu calls, yes, the street-corner raving lunatics and juvenile fistfight losers, we got their ambulance calls again and again, every day and all the time, the dull act of standing on stoops with supposed patients while we ran through the symptom list of everything this mild illness, that tickle of the chest, this I don’t feel right might be, but when the significant ones came, the ones me and Erin wanted but never confessed we wanted, the way our lungs and hearts and skulls were roaring with adrenaline when we arrived to another bloody, screaming scene, when those came I was getting better every time, pushing further and further into the borders of death’s country.

  I poured myself into work. Inside the rig, the rush and struggle and the essences crowding inside me were like a habit now, always rubbing me for attention, saying, Just a little bit, just give me a little bit, every day, so that soon visiting Khadeja and Rika and helping with elementary-school projects, opening bills and taking out the garbage at my apartment, groceries and laundry, is it movie night at Khadeja’s or gym night by myself, all were just footnotes to the next time an ambulance could catapult me to a dying body.

  Weeks and weeks passed as this. The chaos of being on shift, long stretches of meaningless work, easy calls we didn’t need to be at, then the harder calls with true accidents, fingers lost in a meat slicer in the back of a bright white supermarket deli, a pathologic humerus fracture from a domestic ladder tumble of a cancer patient, low-speed bicycle/car interactions . . .

  As I began to understand myself, to learn what I was capable of, these basic traumas became things I could repair, even as I was masking the repair, so that by the time the patients had made it to the hospital in our ambulance, their bodies were set on a trajectory to be fully healed, but not so quickly as to be a miracle. I can only imagine the number of ER doctors that pulled back bloody dressings only to find the wound underneath far less severe than had been described in the paperwork.

  For a time Erin said nothing, but eventually she stopped me outside the front of the station at the end of one of our shifts.

  “You have to tell someone,” she said. I smelled her cola-sweetened breath and our compost-heap body odors from another long shift.

  “Tell someone what?” I asked.

  “Don’t insult me,” she said. “We can’t just keep on like this.”

  “We?” I asked.

  That flex in her jaw. “You,” she said.

  “Describe it,” I said. “What this thing is we should be telling people about.” I watched the station cleaners chuck giant popcorn-ball-shaped garbage bags of medical waste into transfer bins.

  “You’re doing things to our patients.”

  “And what are those things?”

  “Putting them back together, I don’t know.”

  “So you’re going to tell someone, ‘Nainoa’s doing I don’t know’?”

  She tucked her hands into her pockets and shook her head.

  It was the end of the shift and my skull was angry and crammed with sharp dehydrated headaches, I wanted her to see this, to accept she didn’t know what I was, leave me be.

  “I know you’re doing something,” she said.

  “I’m doing my job.”

  “That’s the problem,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Not like that. I just mean”—she cleared her throat—“is this the best place for you?”

  “Erin—”

  “We’re in one of the worst parts of the city,” she said, “and I still don’t think we help as much as—”

  “Spit it out,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t be in this station,” she said. “You should be in, I don’t know, a war hospital or a—a—Calcutta. Where there are thousands. Millions.”

  “I’m not Jesus,” I said. I’d seen the strand of gold she wore around her neck, coming on shift or going off it, the delicate cross, the ash on her forehead in spring.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I want to work here.”

  “No one wants to work here,” she said. “Except people that can’t go any farther. We’re just Band-Aids. Think of all—”

  “The people I could help, I know, you already said that. I appreciate your perspective on my life,” I said. “It means a lot, especially coming from a girl whose sole accomplishment off shift has been to binge-watch whole television seasons.”

  Erin’s brow furrowed, her jaw flexed as she turned so that I could see the profile of her face, she watched the city two streets over, the plastic bags hooked by the air, the gray-cracked property lot stitched with weeds. “Wow, okay,” she said.

  Inside me the storms of all the animals and humans I’d touched were churning, so that, yes, I was standing on a sidewalk, concrete holding me up and air that smelled of dryer sheets in my lungs, me talking with her, Erin, yet also I was the panting ribs of the graveyard owl from Kalihi that knew only green hunger sleep shit fly fly breathe hunger breed breed fly hunt breathe fly and red fight fight take fly fear, and also I was the old woman I’d treated on an earlier shift in Portland, who had collapsed on her walk to the park and her blue flashes of forty years waking at the certain side of my husband our curled mornings under the sheet, the orange and pink and brown cradling of a child to my breast its sleeping in a warm milk-drunk state and the long white pain of her regrets that streamed so fast among the others, a roiling mass of lives, all inside my body all at once, every one of my patients. They all stayed resident and never left my skull, and though they would come and go inside me in waves, the intensity of them was rising in a rush after these last few months, since the night with the addict. The more I understood what we were all made of, the more everyone I’d touched stayed inside me, still crying out, showing me their injuries over and over and over and over and over.

  “Don’t pretend you know what this feels like,” I said.

  Erin put her hands up. “I’m sorry I said anything,” she said, then pivoted and started to walk away. “See you around.”

  I wanted to stand there, to think about what she’d said, but I knew if I did she’d realize she’d had an effect on me, so instead I gathered my wallet and phone, a few other things from my locker, and started out for my apartment by foot, I’d catch a bus on the way when I needed, but first I had to think.

  Erin wanted me to be something more, the same as my family always had, the same as I did, as well. But I couldn’t, I wasn’t. I was only here. It was that I didn’t know enough yet, I decided. I couldn’t move on to something else because I hadn’t yet mastered what I was, and if whatever came after this asked more of me than I was capable of . . .

  I was turning these thoughts over, barely stopping for crosswalk signals, jaywalking in slants across busy thoroughfares, when something caught my eye. I’d passed two buildings, the alley between them, and saw the asymmetrical slab of a dead Labrador, resting a hundred feet down the alley.

  I had no idea what had happened to it but I was certain it was dead, felt the rigor mortis running along its torso, as unyielding a curve as a frozen hillside, and when I touched the body the colors I felt inside were barely more than whispers of violet and midnight blue. The dog was long dead. I searched inside anyway, all along the body’s length, finding the jagged wound of the broken skull, there but crushed by something I could only assume was a tire. Even with my eyes closed and everything in me pouring into the dog’s body I knew I couldn’t do this, the body wasn’t listening the way they normally did, eagerly awaiting my vague explanation of how to make themselves right. I thought again of what Erin had said, what my family had always alluded to, what I was supposed to be, I flexed myself harder, trying to encourage the life to show itself again, just for a moment, so I could harness it. Something in my head popped, went bitter, bursts of fire and twisting ache all along my back as I bore down, how can a skull recognize itself, to want to be whole again, there was nothing, then the echo of nothing.

  I dove further in, I
forgot myself. All blackness, could I start something, I tried and failed, it was like yelling into the bottom of a lake. I pushed harder, my whole body gripping the idea, the want of life, can I make the life here again, you’re going to come back. I gasped, opened my eyes briefly. The same gray alley and stained stucco walls, my vision splattered with the patterns I’d been seeing inside, then came chill swamps of sweat at my armpits, neck, crotch. I gathered myself again, closed my eyes, flexed everything.

  There was a spark, something shifted in the dog’s body, the trickle of electricity that was all that was left of a life, it was something at least, it was in the dog again when it hadn’t been a moment before, and I held it with my mind along with the injuries—the skull fragments, the messy smear of teeth and jaw bone—and pushed harder. The electricity flared then faded, the dog went dark in my mind and my whole skull hurt, the teeth I’d been grinding, something behind my nose made a crepitus sound. I wouldn’t let it go, no, having resuscitated something of a soul. My hands were still there, somewhere, holding this animal’s body, the legs that had padded softly and flexed and shot the often desperate hungry body between the dark barrels of trash cans, the hot relief of recently parked cars, legs that supported a trembling, casual defecation, legs that had cupped and tapped and batted trash and rats and kittens, this animal had tasted joy and terror and time, I could bring it back. And the spark inside became a steady trickle of light, and the trickle became a flood, and brightness coursed through the animal’s body like a city waking from a blackout.

  I opened my eyes. The dog’s skull was sealed and it lay there, gently panting through its thawed fur, as warm and leathery as a boot left in a sunny mudroom. It stood, shivered, shook its head so hard its ears made slapping sounds against its perfect skull, then trotted away, leaving the alley.

  I wanted to call out to it, to ask the dog to stay, could I take it home, but exhaustion rolled over me so fast that I collapsed on my ass and fell over sideways onto the ground, closed my eyes.