Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  On Christmas I call again to talk. It’s gotten harder with my family now. Each of us with our own language of death and grieving and no avenue for translation. There’s this weird thing where I don’t get to talk to Dad as much as I used to—whenever I call, Mom has some reason he can’t come to the phone. It’s weird, okay? Our phone calls turn into a board game where no one knows the way to win but everyone knows the way to lose: talk about Noa. So we talk about the weirdest stuff instead. The price of milk. The new route Mom has been driving with her bus-driver job and what the traffic patterns are like. What sort of shoes make my knees not feel like they’re filled with cement by the end of a shift waiting tables at Romanesque. I explain what a hostel is.

  It goes like that, but I keep calling. Christmas is no different.

  “Downtown Pizza, how can I help you?” a voice says.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “We don’t have Dad, but we do still have some turkey pizza. Special today, for Christmas.”

  “I thought this was Hawai‘i,” I say. “Can you put some pineapple on there?”

  “Pineapple!” Dad says. “Shit should be against the law.”

  “So should bad Dad jokes,” I say. But I smile anyway.

  There’s this pause after I say that, and then Dad’s voice is lower than a whisper, almost. Moving swishy and fast and I can’t understand what he’s saying.

  “Dad, what?”

  His voice is still calling. The air in the call between us shifted. I can feel it, like ears popping when you come down from altitude. He’s not on the other end.

  “Dad—”

  “Hey, honey.” Mom’s voice now.

  “Mom, what’s happening?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I mean with Dad.”

  “Your dad’s, uh, there’s someone at our door he had to go talk to.”

  There’s this squeamish fist that clenches in me. I know she’s lying. “Mom,” I say.

  “How’s the break?” she asks. “Are you doing okay up there?”

  She’s done this before and today’s not the day to make it something more, right? I let it pass. “Sure,” I say. “I guess. Glad I made it through another shift without spitting into anyone’s food.”

  She laughs. “Trust me, I know how that feels,” she says. “But you have to go away from yourself. You go to work, imagine it’s Kaui you’re hanging up in the closet, not just your backpack, your change of clothes. That’s you, locked away until the end of your shift.”

  “I know how to survive,” I say.

  “Good,” Mom says. “It took me a long time. A long time.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say, “it’s only like this for a few more weeks, then school starts back up.”

  “Lucky you,” she says.

  And Oh Christ is what I’m thinking. Here we go again.

  “Can we not do this on Christmas?” I say. “I’m—there’s no one here, Mom. It’s just me.”

  “You’re right,” she says. “It never gets any easier, Kaui.”

  “I know,” I say.

  There’s this pause. I realize our cadence now would be that she’d ask about Noa. Every time before this that’s what it would be, but there’s nothing to ask. We both know everything there is to know about him now.

  The call ends. Soon enough everything in my head grinds apart under another stack of days in San Diego. Hostel, Romanesque double shift. Hostel. Shitty foggy mornings and waiting tables. Hostel. All of my time is chunked up into surviving each place: surviving the shifts and surviving the chasm of quiet and solo that comes after.

  The mainland Christmas–post-Christmas bullshit comes in one big tide of gimme gimme gimme and all of a sudden it’s New Year’s. I’m on the last call at Romanesque and catch the final bus home, right? We’re passing people in the street: rumpled black cocktail dresses and flapping loose ties. All of them chasing last call up the boulevard. Horny or hilarious or ecstatic. Colored lights and fireworks and Top 100 Moments on the hostel’s television when I return. I wonder: What am I doing? Is it Van or Noa that did this to me, or did I do it to myself? It wasn’t so long ago I felt I’d cracked open the shell of life and found a bright core of happiness in the middle. But so quickly it seems like it’s crumbled.

  God, please let me forget this winter. Please let me forget this winter. Please let me forget this winter. And time goes. Good, okay. The new semester arrives. Van comes back.

  The first night we’re both back in the dorm it’s quiet, me and Van with our headphones on, staring at our laptop screens. It’s a replay of the end of last year, right? We’re sitting back-to-back at our desks by the dorm window, each trying to pretend the other person isn’t there. Smell of one of her candles burning, tarry and spicy. Suddenly I feel her hand, cupped and patting my shoulder, trying to get my attention. I wonder what this is, if I should hope. It feels like there’s something softening between us while my heart goes Okay, okay, okay. Then I slip my headphones down and turn.

  She locks her gaze on me; her eyelashes are long and easy. Seems like she’s been getting more sleep, all the creases gone from her face. Fuck, she’s already killing me. I turn completely sideways in my chair.

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “Is he dead?” she asks.

  I surprise myself with how fast I answer. “Yes,” I say. “He is.”

  The words just float there.

  “Okay,” she says. Then she gun-points her finger at her headphones, down around her neck. There’s something hummingbirds-in-syrup in the sound coming from them. “Ever heard this song? I bet you’ll love it.” I shake my head no and she slips the headphones off her neck. Places them over my ears.

  Common’s “Drivin’ Me Wild.” I have heard it. But I don’t tell her that and I let the snare snap and Lily’s high and slippery voice run against Common’s verses. I start nodding to it, lean over sideways in my chair so I’m in Van’s atmosphere, right? I close my eyes; I don’t need them. There’s her smell and the headphones hugging the music to my head. That’s it. When it’s over, I say, “Good song.”

  “I have the whole album,” she says. “You remember the one before?”

  “I do.”

  We go back to our classwork, scribbling pens and tapping keys and the flap of textbook pages. Neither of us put our headphones back up. When I’m done I stand and go to the mini-fridge under my lofted bed. Get the milk I stole from the cafeteria and pour it out over the last of my cheap bulk cereal and sit, cross-legged, in the middle of the carpet.

  I’m crunching the first bites of cereal when Van leaves her desk and joins me on the ground. She nods her head to the bowl. I pass it over. She takes a bite and then passes it back, our fingers glancing when we exchange the bowl. I scoop again and crunch and swallow and pass the bowl back. She cups it in both hands, has another bite, passes it back. The spoon rattles in the ceramic. I scoop again and when I bring the spoon to my lips I can still taste her there. Her warmth. Her flavor. I swallow it all down, the milk and the cereal and her. It feels like we’re praying.

  “Okay?” she says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  I’d never felt Noa’s death, really. Not the way I thought I was supposed to, heavy and dramatic. Until right now. It comes down on me like a wave jacked up to its full height and me the shore. Jesus Christ, he’s gone. He’s completely gone. No more phone calls with his hyper-intelligence that pissed me off. No more living link between how we were in our hanabata days, giggling and reading on the couch together. No more is there the idea that we could get back to that or something like it in the future, something bigger and richer. No more bright pride from Mom and Dad—if not for me, then at least I could still live off the warmth even if I wasn’t the firestarter. No more no more no more. Someday I would be the same. And everyone I loved. Nothing.

  I’m dumb with impact. When I almost drop the bowl Van reaches out to grab it, and our hands meet. Strong and steady.

  “Oh,” is what I say. I’m not su
re Van hears it. I don’t want her hands to move.

  And they don’t.

  The feeling settles. The loss becomes as much a part of me as anything. There’s no time for it to take me over. I’m locked back in my work, climb back out of the hole of last semester, top of my class in thermodynamics, swing a few climbing sessions indoors with Hao and Katarina and Van. A weekend comes a few weeks further and we’re out on beach bikes after dark, the four of us. Mist sticks to our cheeks and eyebrows. The road pulses up through the handlebars. We cackle and whoop and blow down the street like we just came off our leashes. I guess we did: a little bag of coke that Van came up with and a few preparty beers at Katarina’s place and then the idea of a bike ride to the house party we heard about. We swerve through the hours at the house party, thick boom of music and rusty voices cackling in the cramped angles of a house, hours where I’m above my bones.

  The house is full of people we don’t know but plenty of people we do. At least their faces. But even if the faces are ones we know the people underneath are—I don’t know—there’s a sameness to so many of the people at these parties, desperate to get the right stance, the right clothes, the right picture. This idea of a perfect night they have and can never live up to, so they do it again, right? Over and over.

  We bump against all these people and find our spots, inside the house and out. We dance and nudge each other’s elbows and hips and drink what we brought in our backpacks and stumble in one pour out the back door.

  There was some sort of idea to all get back to Katarina’s place together, see what damage we could do to ourselves there with more beer, some movies. But they left without us when a designated driver emerged. Now it’s just me and Van again, okay, our skulls whirled with booze. The way she was right after the wine festival, the bathroom—when she said she didn’t feel about me the same way I feel about her—that feels like it was a mistake, that what’s happening now is really what we are. Yes, I think I’m emerging, just a little. From whatever storm rolled in with my brother’s death.

  I take Van’s hand. I’m surprised when she holds mine back.

  “Your hand’s warm,” she says, drifting in her drunkenness. And I’m not sure which of us does it or if both of us do it but then we’re moving back into the house party, together.

  Back inside, the smells: mint and the leftovers of cigarettes. Fresh-cut lime and steamy beer. The halls are crowded and people might be staring at us like they know what we are, what our holding hands really means, but I don’t care, okay? We’re on the dance floor again in each other’s arms. Then we’re in the kitchen, where a ripped bag of tortilla chips is leaning into a puddle on the Formica counter. We scrabble two shot glasses from behind the sink and slip ourselves a vodka each. I don’t taste it—there was blow earlier. Off the top of a bathroom counter. We’re dancing again, each with a thigh in between the legs of the other. Then we’re on a set of groaning stairs that lean us into the walls, the railing. Three or four people coming down as we go up but we just push past. A hall we find an empty bedroom in, the sheets and comforter half poured from the mattress. An obvious wet spot in the middle of it.

  We stand and stare at the room, turn around to all the walls. Like it’s an observation deck.

  “That last shot,” Van says. “I can’t feel. I can’t feel me it.” She giggles. Pokes her own cheeks, her lips, and when she touches her lips they bend and I can see the lines and curves and how pink they actually are. I laugh and poke her cheeks, too. In the half-light see my brown hand against her paler skin. Then I lean over and lick her lips. They’re cracked and salted, they’re curved, they stink. But she opens her mouth just a little and accepts me. Our mouths are wet with each other. I hold the taste, and tell myself, This is how you will remember.

  “Mmm,” she says.

  My head is heavy. Freighted with all the things I’ve done to it. I lean in to Van, who’s just as unstable, and she leans back into the wall. I feel all the places we’re connected, the same, the density of us.

  She rocks with me for a second, but then she goes stiff and pulls back. “Nope,” she says.

  I pull away. “What?”

  “It’s gross, Kaui,” she says. Her eyelids droop but there’s something in there, something hard and mean. I tell myself I don’t recognize it. “I told you.” She laughs. Her hand comes up and pushes into my face. “You’re so gross.”

  Everything in me falls off a cliff. I don’t move, right. Try to think of something to say. Van moves to the bed like it’s taking a lot of concentration to operate her body. She collapses on her back.

  “Van,” I say.

  I back into the door and strike my funny bone on the handle. The hit sends a metal, buzzing echo along the nerves of my arm. I fumble open the doorknob and step into the hall and the bright headache of light. I can feel the hot shame coming to my eyes already.

  “Hey,” a boy’s voice says as I start to close the door. A pale, thick arm reaches over my shoulder from behind, palms the door to keep it open. I turn around. It’s Connor, Van’s date from the wine festival. There are two other guys behind him, leaning against the wall. They don’t even bother making eye contact.

  “Downstairs you two were ready to party,” he says. “Still ready?” He drops a hand to my waist as if to steer me. Sour beer and menthol-heavy cigarettes stinking off his body.

  I clear my throat and slap his hand off me. The other two boys stand up from their leans against the wall. One of them has a hand in his pants pocket, adjusting himself.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” I say. “All of you.” I say it loud and long. And again. So that everyone can hear. Especially Van. All the way back in the room, passed out on the bed. There’s this moment where no one does anything, not me, not the boys. They move past me like the cars of an express train and no stopping for miles. When they pass me, I run, taking the stairs out of the house two at a time, without falling. Without slowing down.

  There’s the dizzy throb of the chemicals in my veins and the sick fist of my stomach clutching and unclutching as I think about me and Van. I was practically begging for her. And what came back from her, that sharp meanness—I start to wonder if there have been other nights. Her and Katarina and Hao without me, where maybe I was the joke that was riffed between them around the table.

  It’s twenty or fifty or a million blocks later when the cold air cracks open my brain with clarity and I see. Jesus, she was alone in that room. Barely awake. Three of them.

  I move fast, the sidewalk rocking and swerving with each leg running. I don’t really know what’s happening with my legs and an edge catches part of me down around my feet. I pitch into wet grass and crack a knee. I’m up and holding a fence to try and lever myself forward faster, with balance. A few blocks later I pitch into the sidewalk again. When I try to stand there’s a pair of curbside garbage and recycling bins that I lean into, and all three of us go over with a sparkling crash of glass and sliding cardboard. I get right and run. The street yawns forever in front of me, on and on. But I make it to the back door of the party house. People are laughing or oohing or holy-shitting when I get back inside. Bodies and words, but I paw through whoever’s there and make it: the stairs, then the door, but the door is wide open and there’s no one inside. Van is gone. The boys are gone.

  Back outside and into the street, where behind me there’s no one I want to recognize and in front of me is a smattering of golden house lights down the block. The dark empty pavement smooth and slithering into the night.

  23

  MALIA, 2008

  Kalihi

  Two nights now since Dean arrived from the big Island with the last things to touch you when you were alive—your backpack, your hiking boot—and tells me the story of your fall. The minute he described it, I knew it was nothing but true. If I’m honest, I’d felt you gone for quite some time, but told myself I was wrong, that I had no idea.

  But of course I knew. You are gone.

  It’s an impossibl
e thing to explain, motherhood. What is lost, the blood and muscle and bone that are drawn from your body to feed and breathe a new life into the world. The bulldozer of exhaustion that hits in the first trimester, the nauseous clamps of the mornings, the warping and swelling and splitting open of everything previously taut or delicate, until your body is no longer yours but something you must survive. But those are only the physical. It’s what comes after that takes more.

  Whatever part of me flowed into you from my body, it turned us tight into two people that shared a soul. I believe that of all my children. Fathers will never understand the way you get deep in us, so deep that there’s a part of me that remains, always, a part of you, no matter where you go. For all the sleepless nights you bludgeoned us with your mewls for milk, for all the car rides you screamed through, the scrapes and cuts and shrieking afternoons at the mall, feverish nights I’d have to hold you to my chest and feel the butterfly flap of your lungs trying to fight off the fever, the shit stains on the sheets Christmas morning and the broken wrist on our anniversary-dinner-reservation night . . . despite all that, there was still something of unprecedented perfection underneath. You’d wake in the crook of my arms with the whites of your eyes alive with brightness and wonder, drinking in every new thing as your impossibly smooth skin pawed at my cheek. Windowsills we rocked by. The fuzz of your first hairs under my nose as I nuzzled you in your sleep. How open your face was at the sight of the first caterpillar we found in the earth, how you squealed laughter when we blew on your tummy, or the days where we’d get the whole family under the comforter at five in the morning and snooze, drinking in each other’s dreams. The whole world was there, in your face, beaming out of your perfect brown skin. Everything was made new, over and over. It shook me with something so holy and complete I didn’t need a prayer to know there were gods with us, in us.