Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  I woke with the frost of the alley pressing up into my ribs, clavicle, patellas, lips gritted with road filth. I was lying in the same place where the dog had been, only now the sun had shifted behind the buildings completely and there was no warmth in the alley, I composed myself on my knees and shivered, again and again.

  Never before had I saved something so far gone, human or animal. Death looked just as I’d expected, silence and a hollow darkness, and from that place I’d pulled back the lightning of life.

  I squatted on the concrete, leaned against the clefts of mortar in the brick wall, birds shot across the gray above, I smelled the happy-hour grease of a kitchen heating up, roving packs of baggy boys passed at the far mouth of the alley, a delivery truck backing halfway toward me from the other end with its incessant beeping. In my pocket, my phone lit and buzzed. A message from Khadeja:

  Hungry for some dinner?

  With all the things banging around in my brain, the galaxies of exhaustion, I still answered, probably too quickly, Yeah, you at home?

  The answer came back as quickly: Wasn’t inviting you over, just asking if you were hungry, haha.

  “The hell,” I said out loud, but just as quickly she wrote, Just kidding. See you soon?

  I hate you, I sent back. Let me get a shower first, my ‘uke. Be right there.

  And so I went, on wiggling quadriceps, deltoids hived with weakness.

  When Rika opened the door for me the television was on, puppet animals gabbing at each other, then a flash to trembling cartoon numbers that counted down from ten, then two bright puppets entered from opposite sides of what appeared to be a public-housing street.

  “Mom’s making curry,” Rika said, turning back to the screen. Her schoolbag slouched in the corner by the love seat.

  “Don’t you have studying to do?” I said.

  “Come on,” Khadeja’s voice called from the kitchen, “people have been telling that child what to do all day. Give her a little freedom.”

  “Freedom to watch television,” I said.

  “Yes,” Khadeja called out. “You could maybe come in here and help me.”

  “But you’re doing such a good job,” I said.

  Only a skeptical snort from the kitchen.

  “Sounds like trouble,” Rika said to me, without turning from the television.

  “She didn’t say anything,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Rika said. “You’re really in trouble.”

  I mussed Rika’s hair, even as she protested and tried to escape. “What do you know, anyway,” I said. “You’re six.” I headed to the kitchen.

  And it was Khadeja, her strong cheeks and bright eyes, intricate Arabic earrings dancing against her dark-brown neck, hair pulled back in that same Afro bun. Down to a white V-neck but still in her black office pants, her thick thighs pressing through. She was evaluating the curry, as if it had insulted her.

  “How’s it going in here?”

  “Curry’s a little off,” she said, but when she turned and saw me she stopped. “Jesus, Noa.”

  “What?”

  “You look exhausted,” she said. “I know I’m not supposed to say that, but seriously.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You look fat in those pants, as long as we’re being honest.”

  She laughed. “Sorry. But, Noa, you look like you ran a marathon and only ate cigarettes the whole time.” She hid a smile behind her hand. “I can’t believe I just said that.” In the living room the television babbled on and on, more puppets and some sort of giant animatronic elephant, it seemed they were talking about what makes rain.

  “Are you still here?” Khadeja asked. I hadn’t realized how long I’d been staring at the distant screen. Khadeja came so close to me, one of our shoulders brushed, hers smooth and warm as a cheek.

  “There was this dog today,” I started to say. “It was—” Khadeja placed a palm against my stomach, eyebrows raised in concern, all at once I wanted to tell her everything. But I remembered the last time people knew me: all the neighbors that had heard and suddenly and always after needed me, the small stacks of cash my parents would bring in . . .

  I shook my head. “Never mind,” I said. “I make it sound worse than it is. It’s mostly allergic kids eating peanut butter, cats stuck in trees, people faking heart attacks so they can get out of jury duty.”

  The smile she gave was flat, polite. “I’m right here,” she said. “I can listen.”

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t say anything else.

  After dinner Rika did her normal game of trying to avoid a bath and bedtime, was clever about it, asked after the ‘ukulele I’d brought over, if she could hear me play it.

  “It’s too late to play now,” I said to Rika. “You only want me to play when you’re avoiding something.”

  “‘Ukulele,” Rika said. She chanted it, I refused, she hollered it out loud, ‘Ukulaylaayyyyyyyyyy, I stood and mugged my face, she scrambled from her chair and grabbed the ‘uke herself, began to strum it terribly. It was a fifteen-hundred-dollar ‘uke, more than that, a graduation gift from my parents for Stanford, I never did know how they’d afforded it, and all the answers I’d imagined since tore my heart so bad I played it even when I didn’t want to play it, and it said for me the sharks, the graveyard, everything my parents thought would come after. I mugged and moved, Rika ran, down the short hall, made it to the corner of her room, tried to strum again, but I was there too quickly.

  “Give it,” I said to her.

  “It’s mine now,” she said, not even holding it right, upside down, missing the frets, missing the strings when she tried to strum. “I’m the best ‘ukulele player in the world. Like way better than you.”

  I snatched it on her next attempt, and cradled it in one arm. She reached for it and I turned to shield, wait, I told her, just wait. I strummed the chords, twisted the tuning pegs. “You knocked it out of tune.” Just then I felt Khadeja arrive in the doorway behind me, just her shadow and the vanilla-floral scent of her.

  They both knew to listen when I had the ‘uke, I knew it was one of the things that made me for Khadeja, I knew that. I did this often at their place, made music, sometimes after dinner, sometimes after Rika was asleep and it was just Khadeja and me in the living room, Seagram’s we’d cut with ginger ale, or just as often sober, I’d pull out the ‘uke and play, sing well enough for it to work, warm honey. It did things to me, to be that sort of person for them.

  I played a few songs, right there, right then, “Guava Jelly” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” each chord better than the last, the extra notes I could stick in and make ring longer, I warmed to it, Rika wanted “Somewhere over the Rainbow” but I said I was sick of it, played a version of “Bring Me Your Cup,” ran that into “Stir It Up,” the way I believe Marley would have liked it, his hoarse and wailing voice, it was the best end for all of us, when the last chord went down I said to Rika, Enough, enough, now, it’s time for your mother to give you a bath.

  “Why is it always me?” Rika asked. “You never take a bath.”

  “Me and your mom do sometimes,” I said, grinning at Khadeja, the horror in her face. I chucked a few chords. “That’s how babies get made.”

  “In the bath?” Rika asked.

  “No,” Khadeja answered. “Well, sometimes. Listen,” she said, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll draw you pictures.”

  “Cool,” Rika said.

  “Nainoa,” Khadeja said.

  “Bath,” I said to Rika, practically giggling, then stepping out of her room, toward the bathroom, so that for a moment I was in the black of the hallway, looking for the door frame in the dark.

  How many nights did we make like that? How long was I stupid enough to believe we were indestructible? But that’s the problem with the present, it’s never the thing you’re holding, only the thing you’re watching, later, from a distance so great the memory might as well be a spill of
stars outside a window at twilight.

  September then, I flipped to the six-to-six overnight shift and somewhere after midnight we got the call, a mother thirty-six weeks pregnant in early bleeding labor, in a car accident on the way to the hospital.

  “Great,” Erin said after dispatch broke away, after the static and just us in the rig, her hitting the switches to start the siren shriek again. “Sounds bad.”

  “It’s only potential premature childbirth and high-speed blunt-force trauma,” I said. “What’s bad about that?”

  “When we get back to the station,” Erin said, “remind me to have you push the water cooler through your anus. Then we can talk about childbirth and easy.”

  “I’ve done that water-cooler thing before,” I said. “Ask Mike.”

  “You’re disgusting,” she said. “Just drive.”

  I drove and the rain came down in strange pulses, pouring, then spitting, then pouring. Traffic was already backed up on the freeway, a quarter of a mile before the accident, so slow to part we might as well have gotten out and walked. When we finally arrived the car was facing the wrong way on the street, accordioned and blistered with airbags, spatters of glittering glass, all of it soaked with rain. A much larger truck had skidded to the other side of the road, the front barely crunched by comparison. The driver of the truck was sitting with his back against the lane divider, his legs curled up close to his chest, muttering something to the interviewing police officer. We stepped out into the blare of all the traffic headlights, the night so strangely quiet in a pure way, the tap of the drizzle on our jackets, smell of pine mulch spilled from the pickup truck bed, the pink-orange blossoms of the road flares lit by the police. We approached the car.

  We saw her, although even now it’s hard to recall as exactly as I’d like, the position of her body, and was she really still breathing, which was the frame of the car and the fabric and which was her own body, the tang of bile and the deep arterial blood, almost black, the poisonous smell of burning metal, electronics, but we were able to extract her, neck collar and get the gurney underneath her, even as some of her leaked onto the car seat, then the concrete, then the pure white of the gurney cloth.

  Erin was murmuring to the mother and I had my hand on her body, trying to find the sources of the blood. There were raw, clawlike scrapes on her face and neck, her chest where the cotton shirt had been shredded through. Now I was sensing her, the life inside her body was like the center of a forest fire, all I could feel was the red evacuation and orange breaking and tearing of blood vessels and subcutaneous tissue, her torqued spinal column, then the sudden blue flickers of the child inside her, its infant essence fading already.

  I was in the back of the rig, hands on the body, we weren’t more than half a block from the wreck before I screamed at Erin to stop the ambulance.

  “Are you kidding me?” Erin said, turning to face me, her hands steering the rig in a lazing slalom between the vehicles on the road in front of us, even as she watched my eyes.

  “We take her to the hospital and the child dies,” I said.

  “Fuck that,” she said.

  “They’ll have to choose between the mother and the child,” I said. “You know what they’ll choose.”

  “That’s their job.”

  “I can do more,” I said.

  “No,” Erin said.

  “I’ll keep them both here,” I said. “No one has to choose anything.”

  Erin shook her head.

  “Erin,” I said. “You know me.” It was all I had. I didn’t even know me, but I had to pretend to something greater, and to invoke all the gory hours Erin and I had been through. We lurched to the side of the road and stopped. Erin jammed her palms into her eyes, saying fuckfuckfuckfuck, which I suppose was the best she’d give me, us stopped near a building, and the ambulance lights whapped red and blue and red along the windows.

  “Three minutes,” Erin said. She punched the steering wheel. “That’s all, you hear me?”

  I returned to my examination, the baby’s essence fading, the mother’s as well, her body less a fire now and more a lava river, molasses and a soft hum, the vibrations churning through my hands. I couldn’t find the spark, the life’s desire. Everything was falling apart at once, it was too much to hold, I had the vague sense that both of their lives were ready for flight.

  Again I let my mind enter her body, I searched for the spark, the same as what I’d seen before, it was there but going. I was trying to find them both, the mother and the child, to hold them at once and then shove everything broken back together, as I’d done with the dog in the alley. But nothing happened; it was quiet. My brain was clenching so tight that there was a tearing feeling below my waist, a sheet of something hot on my own quadriceps, only later was I able to identify it as urine, rusted with whatever had been beaten out of my kidneys by the force with which I tried to revive the lives underneath my hands. Still I couldn’t find inside the mother any source of light.

  “Almost,” I lied.

  “No time,” Erin hollered. “I’m driving.”

  There, did it flicker, there was another, a distant lightning bolt at the edges of the mother’s horizon, I sent everything I had at it, every part of me that could wrestle with her life, convince it to contain itself, to begin the repair, even as I tried to imagine what that repair would look like: start with the gashes and ripped places, seal them, begin the amassing of platelets and the thatching of fibrin protein, clot please clot please clot, and your oxygen to the child, and the volts to their hearts and brains so that everything still has the hum and pump that I feel no longer, and the wounds again, stitch yourself, stitch yourself, the light went out.

  “Wait, okay, wait, please, you’re cold. Not yet,” I said, “you’re cold. Not yet.” Then the vague knowledge that the rig was moving. The shrieking sirens. I was outside of her again, resident only in myself, looking down at the mother’s body and beginning the resuscitation techniques they train us in, the only thing left.

  By the time we arrived at the hospital the mother’s blood had flowed arterial dark, then slowed, skin ashen, uterus wall still curved where the child was silent inside her. Every revival I’d attempted—defibrillation, chest compressions, rescue breaths—was met only with chill and limp apathy from the mother’s body. We’d jerked to a stop at the emergency room, Erin opened the doors and sobbed at the sight, it must have been the gray and blue colors of the mother, even as the crew of nurses rushed the rig, a wave of clatters and yanks and cracking voices that broke over us and pulled away the mother’s husk to what I already knew would be her final resting place.

  12

  KAUI, 2008

  Indian Creek

  That fall we lived in the landscape. We climbed on the fringes of crusted mountain ranges once plowed by glaciers as big as cities. We set our toes and fingertips on razored bits of stone and slipped ourselves into the veined cracks of sheer walls of limestone or granite or basalt, all of it ceilinged by a thunder-brained sky. I felt the first people in those worlds. The earth that generations of Shoshone had lain on was there still, underneath our tents, right? Frigid air that cycled off the snow-caps, what had once been of the Kiowa’s breath, passed through us the same.

  With Van, with Hao, with Katarina, suddenly I wanted fright-fest run outs at Smith Rocks. The Totem Pole in Australia and El Potrero Chico in Mexico. The Salathé Wall in Yosemite and El Chorro in Spain. The more we climbed the more it got in deep. Under my skin.

  And something even better happened. Those hard-climbing nights I’d collapse in the wet-dog smell of our tents and plunge into black oceans of sleep. I’d dream of what must have been Hawaiian gods. Women as large and distant as volcanoes, their skin dark like pregnant soil, dolphin-kind bodies thick and slick and full of joyful muscle. Their hair tangled and tumbled down into the trees until I couldn’t tell the vines from their locks and their eyes were golden or blue or green without white and smoldering. Everywhere they touched the land, the l
and grew into them, skin blending with earth, until you couldn’t find where one ended and the other began.

  I guess that was when I danced. Or at least that’s what Van told me every time the dream happened, especially at the start, right. She said I’d be deep in it: On my back out cold, sleeping bag slipped to my hips, dancing hula in the tent. Arms locked and pointing forty-five degrees, periodically sweeping across my body, hips rocking in ‘ami or knees going in ‘uwehe. She said she had to duck and flinch so I didn’t smack her with my gestures.

  She asked what did I dream about. There was no point in explaining the women—it would just sound stupid—but even explaining the ambience wouldn’t work. It felt like I was being dragged, like I was in a riptide, thick cords of current carrying me to a nameless destination.

  Indian creek will never be the same for me, because of what we did there. It was the start of the end, I see that now. It was our fall-break trip. Indian Creek with its sandstone cliffs going copper in the early sun. The smell of coins, strong from the distant lake. Hao and Katarina were there, but we’d started to pair off for our climbing in the same configuration, more and more: Hao and Katarina, me and Van. Me and Van. We climbed like it was a conversation. She was elegant and precise. Fatigueless. I was powerful and dynamic—big sweeping moves and hard lock-offs. And we displayed those things to each other, she responding to me and me responding to her, so that we were pushing each other, even as we admired. We were turning each other into the sort of people we wanted to become, creating the sort of experiences I never knew I wanted until I was having them.

  “You need to flow more,” she called up to me, as I worked my way through a hard series of locks on a finger crack. “Settle into the flow. You shouldn’t have to try most of the time, only at the crux.” And I was like, Sometimes I don’t want to flow. In those cracks in particular for me it still went like a war. I’d fumble among the smallest gashes in the rock and all the muscles in my back would be yanked through with strain and I’d have to squeeze and quit breathing and grit my teeth to pull through. Van up there before me on the sharp end of the rope like a liquid snake. All spread knees and leg flagging and delicate camming. I’m the hula dancer, you bitch, I wanted to say. Then I did say it, and she laughed, right? Because we knew each other.