Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  I’d finally taken to climbing well enough that it had all the danger I wanted. The second day in the Creek I took a fifty-foot fall from a splitter crack. The seasick feel of plunging through the air, rope slack and rippling in the air below me. Falling and falling until the rope finally caught on two shaky pieces of gear that left me dangling just above Van’s head. Had those pieces pulled, I would have broken my back. Neither of us said anything for a long time. Okay, I just hung there, trembling from my belly out.

  “We should have brought more number twos,” Van said, all chill and clever.

  “It’s better this way,” I said. “Consequences.”

  It’s what I wanted. Take me and Van: I didn’t know what we were and there was something in the not knowing. In playing at the edge. Climbing was the same. Again and again we did it, teasing the edge of disaster. The consequences made us into something that was completely known when we walked around on campus, right? It spilled over into classes. I was building off those first semesters, establishing myself as one of the best students in every class I took, stoked to be understanding the mechanics of the world: what I could build with my brain, the sciences. I could make buildings or bridges or engines if I wanted. I had no questions now of what was inside me.

  Except with Van. It had been a month and a half since the wine festival and I was cramped with want for her. Our dorm room was a pressure cooker: casual bumps or grazes as we handed each other pens or textbooks or the remote, or when we passed on the way to our lofted beds.

  The week before this trip, she’d come back from the shower, closed our dorm-room door, and dropped her towel. I was on my bed, knees kinked up and reading my Statics & Dynamics textbook. T.I. was playing in my headphones—Paper Trail had just come out—which I remember because I can’t hear “Whatever You Like” now without being yanked back into that moment, her body. Mint and flowers, the white smell of soap, even. It was never her body itself that I cared about. The surface or whatever. It was how she wore it: tension and flex, asymmetric, solid. I remember a few things. The rooty tangle of her barely groomed crotch, the thickness of her wrists and forearms, the thin veins sprung by the climber’s muscles. The flex in her neck. She just stood there naked. My insides kinked and kinked. Then Van crouched and pulled underwear out of her drawer and rolled them on over her clean skin.

  In any chemical solution made up of two or more parts, there’s a solvent and a solute. I knew this. I studied these sorts of things all the time, okay? The solvent does the work, creates the acidic burn. I told myself with Van I was the solvent sometimes, but I wasn’t kidding anyone. Mostly I knew what it felt like to be dissolved.

  Now we were at the Creek and in our tents under great spills of midnight stars, me and Van in our tent together, across the campfire from Katarina and Hao, whose banter we could faintly hear. They never stopped talking, but it was like a brother-and-sister thing. Van turned to me in her sleeping bag.

  “You going to dance hula again tonight?” she said.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Don’t get all moody,” she said. “I like it.”

  I shrugged, because I couldn’t think of how else to not react. “I don’t control it,” I said.

  “Almost everything’s like that, isn’t it?” she said.

  I made a skeptical face. “Yeah, I don’t think philosophy’s your thing.”

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  “So am I.” I grinned.

  Then Van leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, as easy as a European good night. We were all sunscreen and salt and campfire stink. Two days of hard-climbing grime all over us. But I could feel her lips through all of it, a surprise still soft and unfamiliar.

  She pulled back and without looking at me unzipped her sleeping bag to the toe box. Slowly I did the same to mine. I sent my hand out into her bag, drew my palm down along the length of her body, starting at her shoulder. Instead of looking at her face, I watched a space past her, the corner of the tent where I could see the glow of Katarina’s and Hao’s lamps. I let my hand follow the curve of her. Down to her hip. She grabbed my wrist. Tucked it under her shirt, my hand on her belly. She exhaled and pulled my hand farther up, shifted herself against it, and there was the small warm rise of her tit. Her stiff nipple played between two of my fingers. She exhaled again. She’d worked her own hand down under her waistband, into her underwear, and began moving it there.

  “Keep going,” she said, through a flushed face with closed eyes. Her other hand was still over mine, moving on her nipple. I did it. I mirrored what she was doing, my hand inside my underwear, all the way down. My head went swirled and hot. My belly, too. We settled into a rhythm of stroking ourselves and each other. Me all her and her all me, right here, right now, until what had been clenched inside me unspooled in a rush.

  I don’t know if I danced hula in my sleep that night. There wasn’t music in my dreams. But I remember what I felt. I was a seedling under the soil, pushing up. I was a hungry muscle, flexing through the dark earth until I broke in to the rain and sunlight.

  It made sense later. At the end.

  13

  NAINOA, 2008

  Portland

  Find me in the produce aisle, lost beside the fists of broccoli, the slick knots of yellow red orange green bell peppers, I could stand there or I could stand anywhere and it wouldn’t matter, because it came for me anyway. It hit me at Khadeja’s place, trying to read to Rika or tell a joke in the living room, it struck me on the bus, riding to the gym, it stung me when we turned out all the lights, lay low, and Khadeja reached out to knead my neck, it clutched me and it wouldn’t let me go, that moment, the mother’s body, the delicate but desperate child inside, when everything departed.

  I had failed, and in my failure I had killed a mother and her daughter, because I was too stupid to know my own limits. I hadn’t just undone what they were, but what they’d ever been—what was the point of those memories now? could the husband kiss the memory of his wife? could he palm the memory of the swell of the child, could he feel the memory of the kicks?—and then of course I’d taken everything that might have come after, sleepless midnights in a newborn house, school plays, national-park vacations with shitty selfies. I’d taken what the father could have been, I’d taken what the grandparents had earned, even the lovers and angers and jokes the child would never have, years in the future, the artifacts it would have made: songs or stories or even text messages. I’d taken it all.

  And what I had been given in return was a leave of absence, not because anything was suspected (nothing was, Erin had said what I thought she wouldn’t, I was exonerated), but because I was unable, in the hours and days after, to be anything like myself. The company said, Take as much time as you need, which I knew meant no more than a month. Yet a month came and there I still was, barely leaving my apartment, certainly not making it all the way to the station.

  Khadeja would be doing things such as putting on earrings at the full-length bedroom mirror, taking off a dangling pair and fastening simple X’s, then going back to the dangling pair, and she’d say, “Am I right?”

  “About what?” I’d say.

  She’d let her hands drop, then consider me quietly. “You haven’t been listening.”

  “Sure I have,” I’d say, and try to convince her, badly, that I had been listening, and she’d start again, with whatever thread she was on, and I’d declare, “I’m going back to the station today.”

  “Do you like the X’s? They look like crosses. I don’t want people to think I’m Christian,” she’d be saying. Then: “And I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Being Christian?”

  “Going back to the station.” Her hand would find my cheek and she’d look me right in the eyes; at the time I thought it was dramatic, but now I understand it was completely honest, in a way that I never had been, then or since. “You need time.”

  “They need me,” I’d say. “It doesn’t matter what I need.�
�

  But I didn’t go. One morning after I’d slept over I sat at the table next to Rika, watched her dark-brown legs in their polka-dot socks dangle and kick while she stared at the back of the cereal box and two-handed her glass of orange juice, another school day.

  “How come you’re so quiet?” Rika asked.

  “I’m thinking about what comes next,” I said.

  “I go to school, duh.”

  “After that,” I said. “For me.”

  “You go home and feel sad, right?”

  I smiled. “Something like that.”

  “Mom said you’re going through things,” Rika said. “She said, ‘He’s going through some difficult things, try to understand.’” She tried to say the last part in a deep voice, but it came out sounding ridiculous, there was a joke in there somewhere, normally it would have come to me easily, but humor had become a foreign language I’d once been fluent in and was now left searching for the simplest nouns and verbs: it was all there somewhere, just out of reach.

  “Your mom is right,” is all I could manage, instead.

  And I didn’t go to work and I didn’t sleep more, I stole a handheld from the station and brought it back to my apartment, spent the days listening to calls come in, ALOC announcements and vitals summaries, dry dispatch and bored paramedics, descriptions of disaster scenes, and I hoped to hear a mistake, something like the one I’d made. Fumble the neck stabilization, I’d think, get the intubator stuck on the vocal cords, forget to check the pupils for dilation. The colors came for me, the gold and green and silver pulses of the dying owls in Kalihi with their hunt hunt fly eat shit eat sleep hide hunt fly fly and the poisoned dogs with their purple and brown drag drag stand bite breathe bark whine breathe drink drink drink cramp go go go and the patients here, the storms of yellow poison through addict veins, the dark-blue memories of last shared dinners or long mornings in bed before someone was hit by a car. Over and over and over and over they came for me.

  “Oh,” Khadeja said, and I jolted, turned to see her. I was standing in the living room of my apartment, the handheld pressed in close to my ear. “Oh, Nainoa.”

  “What?” I said, then I saw her eyes. When her gaze swept over me, the room, all at once I recognized the blotched burning of my irises and that they must be cracked and red, I felt the raw hairs at my throat and cheeks from days without shaving, the ripe grime collecting at my armpits and feet, the scatter of torn bags of table crackers and licorice, four pint-glasses of half-finished water, the smell of the whole place: wet cows and corn chips. The sudden arrival of the recognition of significant time having passed, of having grown older, how many days I didn’t know, but each one like this.

  Khadeja closed the distance to me in a few fluid strides, slipped a hand against my neck, so that her thumb rested just in front of my ear. “Nainoa,” she said again, as if trying to wake me up. I was still holding the handheld against my other ear, she reached for the arm that held it and gently closed her hand over my forearm.

  I jerked my arm away. “Don’t,” I said, and pressed the handheld closer to my ear again, even as the static exploded and a voice calmly called out a call sign, acknowledged they’d take the call that came in about a bicycle-automobile interaction, possible C3 spinal fracture.

  “Nainoa,” Khadeja said, and she was in front of me, no matter which way I turned, and she reached for the handheld again, this time she had a good grip, I pulled but she pulled back, and the unit slipped free and went spinning away like a top, thumping to the floor. She clutched me in a bear hug, her face buried above my clavicle.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.” When she could tell I wasn’t going to move—when I neither collapsed into her, reciprocating the embrace, nor pulled away—she raised her head and wiped away tears. “I can take you out of here,” she said. “Can I do that?”

  I shot my arms out so hard they broke the hug completely, Khadeja stepped back, and I gripped her right biceps in my hand, began to crush. “What can you do?” I said. I gripped harder, she had no idea what I was, no idea, I gripped harder, imagining the burning and the squeeze, a blood pressure cuff gone too far, wanting to go all the way, for the veins and capillaries in her arm to pop, I wanted the pressure of my grip to transfer everything inside me into her, so that she could feel, but that was impossible. “You can’t do anything.”

  She jerked her arm free. Her eyes went sharp and she tilted her head just slightly, glaring at me. Both of us taking big breaths, her gaze going from knifepoint to rounded stone to puddle as wetness gathered in her eyes and started draining in long runs down her cheeks, she didn’t wipe this time, just stared and stared. She righted her posture.

  “Do that one more time and I’m gone,” she said, but the agreement was already between us before the words left her mouth, because she could see that I realized what a mistake it was, what a mistake I was, and that whatever violence had been in me had departed.

  “Nainoa,” she said again. “I want to help you. Can we do that?”

  But I didn’t answer, the colors came and went, run run fly eat flee eat sleep run fly there is my baby where is my husband here is my body wasting away on your gurney, and the mother and the child and everything I’d destroyed, Khadeja, you would never feel any of it the way I would, I am on an island in a dark ocean you will never be able to cross. I remained silent.

  Khadeja’s face fell; she’d been angry, righteous even, but it was gone. She was trembling as she stepped backward, opened the front door, closed it gently on her way out. As soon as the door closed I stepped to it, leaned against its cheap, prickly grain, feeling her on the other side as she paused, then moved away from me, down the sidewalk, and into the street.

  I was still standing there when evening came, the room growing colder and dimmer, I walked about and turned on the lamps, recognizing my living room more and more as the lights came up, the dilapidated couch and stacks of trash mail, the milk-crate shelves of books, and there beside them, the ‘ukulele.

  Just as I did in our garage all those years, just as I did at Stanford especially on the hardest days, just as I did at Khadeja’s house, I went to music. I opened the ‘ukulele case, ran my hand along the instrument’s koa body, the colors flaming against the light of my living room, windows still open and thumping with moths, but October waiting in the air already.

  I ran through a few scales to warm my knuckles and wrist, let the strings heat and ring. I started with the sort of songs that always made people living-room-excited, “Creep” or “As My Guitar Gently Weeps” or “Aloha ‘Oe,” but there was this version of “Kanaka Wai Wai” by Olomana I came back to sometimes, a solo one I learned from an uncle back home, I came to that one with floating fingers, strummed the strings harder, sang a little even, mine not a throat meant to sing at all but if there were a time to sing I suppose it was then. I could imagine the slack key accompaniments and the rich sad voices of true Hawaiian singers, I strummed and tried. I remembered the shreds of rain forest that made their way to us, from the palis all the way down along the gulch to the fences that separated warehouses, the gulch that barely trickled until the rains came, then roared. I remembered pink clouds above the Ko‘olaus at sundown, perfect temperatures by dinnertime, all of us kids at the table, farting and joking and ignoring our parents’ orders to eat, eat. I remembered Sandy Beach, the waves pitching up into sucking walls of water striped through with different shades of glassy blue, the concrete smack of the waves coming down but me and Dean diving deep, holding our breath, our skin hot and brown from the sun, our skeletons accepting what the tide did to us, and then the time Dean had held my ankle to force the competition to go on, and I’d almost drowned. With the memory of water came the sharks, the rough snout that split into a terrifying cave of teeth, but then the gentle gathering of me in its mouth, the hypnotic muscle of the shark’s body weaving through the water. I played and I remembered all of this, and the memories became a calling, not a voice but
instead a very distant urge that set in my sternum and started to spread like medicine until it was pulling at my mind, directly.

  Home. Come home.

  I didn’t finish the song.

  14

  DEAN, 2008

  Spokane

  This one day I got a call from Noa I wasn’t expecting. Used to be we planned our calls, back when Kaui was doing like Mom said and making all us kids conference-call once in a while, You have to stay connected out there trust me the mainland will try and break you apart. Except on those calls, it was mostly Noa and Kaui trying for see who’s got the most Ph.D. vocabulary. Half the time I could put ’um on speaker and go back to cleaning my toenails or whatever while they jabbered away, forgot I was there.

  But after things went bad at the university, Noa started calling me more. At first I didn’t know what he was doing. Wouldn’t even ask me about basketball or what I was gonna do next or none of that, the way everyone else did. He just started talking about his day.

  He would say stuff he didn’t want to say while we was on the phone with Kaui. We’d talk about work and girls and all that. I think I was the first person he told when he’d started checking out Khadeja, and he’d call and say, Man, I went by their house and Rika was running down the hall naked, just got out of her bath and she’s trying to escape, and even though I’d spent all day with sick and broken people in the ambulance their house would light me up inside like a Roman candle. And we’d talk about Hawai‘i little-kid days, how we used to wrestle at the park like we was MMA champs, or the weird kids down the street that always smelled like fish and ate their boogers, how I used to make them give us candy and then split it fifty-fifty with Noa, partners in crime.