The Color of Air

by Gail Tsukiyama

  “Pele using her fire to let us know who’s boss, yeah!” yelled a local in the crowd.

  As soon as Koji saw Nori and the other aunties standing outside amid the crowd, he relaxed.

  “You’re here, yeah,” Nori said, happy to see him.

  “Any damage?” he asked.

  “Just some broken bottles,” she said.

  “What’s that?” He eyed the jar in her hands.

  “Mango jam,” Nori said. “The mangoes from Mariko’s tree,” she added.

  Koji felt something inside of him slowly dissipate, something hard in the middle of his chest. He wanted to reach out and hug Nori.

  Instead he asked, “Daniel?”

  “He hasn’t arrived yet.”

  Another eruption colored the sky. Koji was captivated by the raw power of Mauna Loa. He knew all they could do was worry and wait. It was just the beginning; the real fear was the unstoppable flow of lava, the searing slow-moving rivers of fire that could continue to flow for months in any direction. Just nine years ago, memories of the 1926 eruption, which had buried the village of Ho’opuloa Makai on the other side of the island, still haunted—the lava that crossed roads and fields, setting trees, shrubbery, houses, and anything else in its path on fire with a chorus of popping and sizzling methane bursts, could now be heading toward Hilo.

  As if she read his thoughts, Nori asked, “When will the geologists know the direction of the flow?”

  “I’m sure they’re keeping a close watch, yeah,” Koji said. “It won’t be long now.”

  Most of the locals stayed on at the market, waiting for word.

  As darkness fell, fountains of lava continued to spew from the fissure. The air grew oppressive with the stink of sulfur, clouds of ash, and the red-hot beast that illuminated the night.

  6

  Homecoming

  Daniel Abe stood on deck and watched as Hilo town slowly appeared in the twilight, watery and indistinct. Even from a distance he knew the town by heart, the paved road and railway tracks running the sixty-five miles along the Hamakua coastline for the trains that carried sugar from the plantations, or goods and passengers all the way from Paauilo through Hilo to Glenwood, stopping just eight miles from the Kilauea volcano. On the left he could just make out Reeds Bay, next to Hilo’s deepwater port, while to the right lay the crescent-shaped Hilo Bay. And directly across from Hilo Bay, running along Kamehameha Avenue, stood the rows of two-story clapboard buildings that housed the downtown businesses, including the Okawa Fish Market. Beyond downtown the sprawl of houses had inched closer to the foot of the volcanoes Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea.

  The steamer engine droned on as the boat bobbed against the waves, dipping to one side and back. A door opened and closed. Most of the passengers had retreated into the main cabin. Daniel was almost home and he finally felt like he could breathe again. He leaned against the railing and watched the gulls circling above, tasting the salt spray on his lips, on his tongue as the warm wind picked up. He’d forgotten how simple, how welcoming it was as the steamer approached Hilo and lifted the weight of Daniel’s ten years away.

  In grand succession, he had received his medical degree from the University of Chicago’s School of Medicine, followed by his residency, and the offer of a position at the University of Chicago’s Medical Center. Daniel had proudly accepted, knowing that so few Orientals were ever given the opportunity. He remembered the feeling of triumph, thick and warm, something he had strived for ever since he was young, watching his mother sew for others, scrimping to save, always half hoping deep down that his father would return to them. But he never did.

  In Chicago, Daniel was a respected mainland doctor at a prestigious hospital, where many of his colleagues had no idea where Hilo town was. He was ashamed to admit how easy it was to leave his old life behind, embrace the new, and allow himself to believe he was special. When his mother was dying, he’d gone back home, but he hadn’t been ready to return to Hilo for good. At the time, he didn’t know if he ever would. Eighteen months later, it took one wrong diagnosis and a costly mistake to bring Daniel home again.

  His life in Chicago had been fast-paced, filled with raucous city sounds: screeches and shouts, automobile horns and gunning engines, all to be replaced by the comforting echoes of his childhood: the buzzing of mosquitoes; the loud haw of the nene geese; the wind whistling through the banyan trees; the lapping of water; and the chirping, rustling, wailing sounds of the rain forest. Only then did he realize how Hawai’i remained an enduring spirit that had seeped into his body and flowed through his veins. “Might not be a fancy big city, yeah, but home comes from within,” his mother reminded him when he first left for the mainland. Her absence still stung, but his homecoming had also rekindled thoughts of his childhood, including his father’s distant voice that now returned to him like the constant buzz of a mosquito.

  “Why is the island so noisy?” Daniel had once asked his father as they walked along the Wailuku River. He was a boy of five and had so many questions.

  “The island voices are talking to us,” his father had answered.

  Daniel studied the pale white zigzag caterpillar scar that ran along his father’s left side squirming toward his back, a fall onto jagged lava rocks when he was a bit older than Daniel. He wanted to reach out and touch it, make it disappear. He thought his father suddenly looked sad.

  “What are they saying?”

  His father shrugged. “Things you wouldn’t understand.”

  Daniel grew hot with impatience. He’d wanted his father to explain it to him. Tell me. He could still taste the words on the tip of his tongue, but his father’s quiet moment of attention had vanished and he’d turned away.

  The following year he was gone. If the island voices were what told his father to leave them, then they were the same voices that had called Daniel back home.

  * * *

  Daniel stood stunned at the railing of the steamer, heart racing as his eyes followed the billowing smoke erupting from Mauna Loa. Moments later, it was followed by the bright blood orange curtain of lava that shot upward toward the darkening sky. Daniel felt the boat rock beneath his feet as a horn blew and passengers filed onto the deck to watch the erupting volcano. This was a homecoming Daniel hadn’t expected, though eerily coincidental, since he’d been born in the early hours of another Mauna Loa eruption, in 1907. When he heard the steamer’s engine reverse, the rumbling quieted, and he hoped they wouldn’t turn around and head back to Oahu. He was so close to home. He thought of Uncle Koji and his Hilo Aunties, realizing that this might be exactly like all the boyhood stories Koji had told him, how the island could rise at any time and remake itself, destroying all that was man-made.

  Daniel watched the surge of lava rise and fall, rise and fall, until the molten liquid pooled and flowed down over jagged lava rock like streaming tears, hot and blistering.

  It was as beautiful as it was terrifying.

  7

  Waiting

  Koji stood just inside the screen door of the Okawa Fish Market. A good two hours had passed since the first eruption, and everyone remained indoors waiting for news from the geologists at the Volcano Observatory Center. Outside, the air thickened with heat and the noxious smell of rotten eggs. Wilson and Mano hadn’t returned yet, leaving Koji to wonder if Daniel’s steamer laid waiting just outside the bay, or if it had returned to Oahu. He knew Daniel wouldn’t be happy about turning back so close to home. Koji was reminded of a younger Daniel, so smart and curious, asking questions that he wasn’t always able to answer.

  Over the years, Koji had remained the closest thing Daniel had to a father. As boys, Koji and Franklin Abe were once as close as brothers. Whenever he and Razor could get away from the plantation, they’d spend all their free time down in Hilo with Franklin, who always took the lead with his smooth-talking, easy ways. He was a good-looking hapa: a mix of Japanese, Portuguese, and Filipino on his mother’s side, while full-blood Japanese on his father’s side. When they wer
e young, he seemed invincible. But when Franklin’s mother unexpectedly died, and his father returned to Japan and remarried, he was seventeen and chose to stay in Hilo. Frank had always been restless, but it seemed to intensify from then on, and later it was Koji who remained a constant presence in Mariko’s and Daniel’s lives after Franklin had abandoned them.

  * * *

  Through the screen door of the market, Koji saw a glimmer of light moving through the hazy darkness, growing sharper as Gus Yamamoto’s boy came into view, flashlight in hand. Gus had a phone at his gas station down the street, and Koji hoped his son was bringing news the locals at the market had been waiting for.

  He pushed open the screen door and the boy dashed in.

  “The geologists at the observatory just called,” he announced, his voice rising with importance. “They say the lava is flowing toward Mauna Kea volcano and away from Hilo town.”

  The news was met by rousing cheers from the waiting crowd of locals, but he didn’t see Razor.

  Koji looked at the faces of his longtime friends, their anxious air lightened by the news. They never took the island for granted. They lived on sacred ground. What Koji loved most about his Hilo family was their toughness, generations who had withstood so many hardships and disasters. Even through the difficulties of the Depression, Hilo’s local community had maintained their everyday lives, fishing, hunting, and bartering to make ends meet. They were survivors.

  “We dodged another bullet, yeah,” Samuel said, handing him a beer from behind the koa counter.

  Koji nodded. “Lucky this time.”

  “Now let’s hope the boys arrive soon,” Nori added.

  Koji heard the worry in her words. The room hummed as voices rose with relief and laughter. Before Koji could respond, he turned toward the whine of the screen door opening and watched as Daniel stepped into the market just ahead of Wilson and Mano, the three of them talking and joking like boys again. Wasn’t Koji once that young and full of spirit? Nori and the aunties were the first to pull him into their hugs. Koji stepped back to steady himself when a smiling Daniel turned his way. It was her smile, just a glimpse, but enough that he felt the warm rush of the past return to him.

  8

  In the Quiet

  It was late by the time Daniel returned home from the market. He stepped inside the green bungalow for the first time in more than two years, closed the door, and stood a moment in the quiet of the darkened room. In the air warm as breath, the slight scent of his mother’s perfume lingered, or so he imagined. Before his mother died, she told him to scatter her ashes in the wind from Pilani Point. “Finally get to see the world, yeah,” she’d said. She smiled and Daniel could only nod his head, his throat so dry he could hardly speak. Tonight she was the only one missing at the party, the only one who would forgive all his mistakes. When Daniel switched on the light to see the spare and comfortable living room, a small part of him still hoped his mother would be standing there waiting for him.

  All night at the party, laughter and words had flowed with the ease of music. Seeing his Hilo family again, Daniel realized just how much he had missed them. He was happily slapped on the back and pulled into tight hugs by the locals as the room suddenly vibrated with their energy, Mauna Loa momentarily forgotten. Daniel knew every inch of the market, having crawled as a baby across the wood plank floor of the vast room, racing along in diapers with Mano. Born weeks apart, they were as close as twins growing up. Here he was, surrounded by the Hilo aunties and Uncle Koji, so unlike the cold or curious stares directed his way in Chicago, where he hated the whispers, the occasional remarks that followed him as he walked down Michigan Avenue or Rush or Division Streets, “Slanty Eyes,” or “Chop Suey Louie,” or “Ching Chong Chinaman go home.” His blood boiling, gut pulling, he had pushed past the insults and kept going.

  No use in causing trouble.

  At the university, where he’d been the lone Oriental in his medical school class, the voices were more inquisitive yet just as invasive “Where are you from?” his classmates asked, “China? Japan? Philippines?” They were more interested in what he was instead of who he was. He’d gone from a town where everyone knew him to a city where no one did.

  When he’d finally proved himself and was offered the prized position at the medical center, it wasn’t just about getting the job; it was about being recognized for who he was.

  * * *

  Daniel woke with a start. Confused at first, it took him a moment to remember he was home in Hilo, awakening in his old room, where the relics of his childhood remained. His books and baseball trophies still filled the bookcase above his desk, his well-worn, oil-stained glove and bat lay tucked away in the closet, and his beloved anatomy chart, pinpricked and faded, detailing every artery and organ of the human body, remained tacked to the back of his bedroom door.

  It was still dark outside, his room quiet and stuffy with the window closed against the hovering volcanic fog. Nevertheless, the scent of rotten eggs seeped in through the cracks and crevices. Mauna Loa’s eruption last night was just another reminder that the gods would always have the final say. While the Volcano Observatory Center kept a close watch, the locals knew they would simply have to wait for Pele to calm down again.

  Daniel’s own birth was forever tied to Pele and Mauna Loa. His mother liked to tell the story of how he was born unexpectedly at home on the night of an eruption. Daniel had arrived two weeks early, while his father was away working at a construction job on Maui, leaving his twenty-year-old wife alone as his son began to push into the world. If Mauna Loa hadn’t erupted, Uncle Koji wouldn’t have come down to check on his mother, finding her in labor. “Mauna Loa erupted in happiness and not in anger the night you were born,” she always said. “Means Pele will always watch over you.”

  Is Pele watching now? Daniel wondered. And if she is, is Mauna Loa erupting in happiness or in anger at my return?

  * * *

  Sleep was fruitless. Daniel heard a rooster crow, a dog barking in the distance. He turned on the light to see that the clock read just past 4:00 a.m. It was midmorning in Chicago, and if he were still there he’d most likely be at the hospital looking at charts, starting his morning rounds. It would be a typical day, just like that early morning the four-year-old was brought in to the hospital with a slight fever and loss of appetite. She’d been lethargic and vomiting, her parents said, all flu-like symptoms. Daniel checked all her vitals, gave her a small dose of aspirin, told the parents to keep her hydrated, and sent her home. The little girl returned two days later, unconscious after suffering a seizure. Daniel’s thoughts turned over and over in his memory. What had he missed on her first visit? Had he been too complacent, too quick to dismiss her symptoms as the flu when he should have been more thorough? He’d been tired, working an extra shift in the emergency room with patients still waiting. Not long after the little girl returned she’d gone into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing. By the time they resuscitated and stabilized her, she had suffered permanent brain damage. What Daniel assumed was a case of the flu had triggered something else, an abnormality sparked by his giving her aspirin. “You couldn’t have known,” his colleagues reassured, unable to look him in the eyes. It could have been any one of them, and the relief that it wasn’t could be seen in their fleeting gaze. There wasn’t much he could do except to make the child as comfortable as possible. Daniel had seen fatalities before—death was a part of his profession—but he couldn’t help but feel his mistake had damaged the little girl’s life in a way crueler than death.

  Daniel quit his coveted position at the hospital, refusing to be branded the Oriental doctor who had made the tragic mistake. All that he’d worked so hard for was suddenly gone.

  He had nowhere to go but home.

  * * *

  Daniel got up and rummaged through the hall closet until he found the box he was looking for and carried it to the kitchen. He looked out the window; the stark gray light of dawn had begun to filter its way thro
ugh the soupy fog and ash that hung in the air. He flicked on the light, made a pot of coffee, and set to work. The box held his entire train collection, divided into smaller oblong boxes. One by one he opened them, the power box, the metal tracks and train station, the Lionel railcar numbers 1 through 13, given to him by Uncle Koji over the years. He added the latest addition, the new railcar Koji had left for him. Daniel remembered all the hours of happiness the train set had given him. He blessedly felt like that boy again snapping the metal tracks together on the kitchen table and lining up each railcar behind his favorite number 5 engine. He connected the wires to the power box, plugged it in, and pressed the switch.

  Nothing happened.

  He reconnected the wires and made sure the screws were tight. “Please,” Daniel said aloud, stirring the quiet. “Please.”

  Suddenly nothing felt more important to Daniel than the train moving forward. He pressed the switch again. The power box buzzed. The light flickered and then remained green as the train began its wobbly start, click-clacking around the table once before picking up speed.

  Ghost Voices

  MARIKO, 1914

  I light the kerosene lantern and set it on the table. The kitchen is suddenly aglow again after we were left in darkness. Outside, the storm rages on with the wind punching and moaning, striking down everything in its way. I only hope the house is strong enough to withstand it. I should feel better with the lamplight, but the shadows grow and seem to be lurking as the wind and thundering rain become deafening. It started out as a typical rainstorm, but it grew in strength as the evening wore on. Earlier in the day, Nori and Samuel asked if I wanted to stay with them. “No need, yeah, it’s just a rainstorm,” I said. “Daniel and I will be fine.” Now it’s too late, the storm has grown into a typhoon, and it’s too dangerous for us to leave the house. I look up to see Daniel standing in the doorway, watching me.