by Paul Theroux
‘I always dreamed of this,’ Millroy said. ‘Why didn’t someone ever tell me about Hawaii? We could have started Day One here. We can still work it out. We can be entirely Day One – melons, figs, beans, pulses, grains and herbs. I’ve got seeds from the Holy Land – heirloom seeds. Originals.’
He looked around and saw a sloping field of spindly trees.
‘Papayas are a kind of Day One melon,’ he said. ‘Hey, we’re not fanatics.’
We were walking down the beach at the margin of the collapsing waves, where the spittle-line of scum was – the high-water mark. The edge of the island was a cliff of black and spiky rock, topped with hunks of soggy grass. Gray crabs scuttled away from our feet.
‘I needed this,’ Millroy said. ‘A spell in the wilderness to rest and give thanks. It’s a kind of exile. I have come back from the dead again.’
He did not mention the police, or the charges against him (of which kidnapping and fraud and tax evasion were only a few), and neither did I.
‘This Is My Body,’ he said.
My mouth went dry and I stumbled in the black sand.
‘We can get down to writing it, angel,’ he said. ‘No interruptions. It’s the perfect setting.’
There was a great black headland rising up several miles away, and above it the rubbly slopes of a volcano, all cinders and smoke.
‘I always thought islands were supposed to be small,’ I said. ‘But this one is wicked big.’
The lava flow had wiped out a nearby town, just sizzled it, then covered it with a three-foot-deep layer of crumbly lava. Half-burned palm trunks lay on top of the lava flow and on sunny days it all smelled like burned toast.
‘This is an American island,’ Millroy said.
He was so happy he worked magic without knowing it. He was rested, he was calm. He blew on buds and they strained and swelled and exploded into bloom, with a sudden gust of perfume.
‘Strawberry guava,’ he said, his mouth over a low bush.
Fierce dogs on the road stopped barking when Millroy approached.
There were also thieves in this area, Puna District. One night we were awakened by suspicious noises – Millroy in his room, I in my cubicle. I heard Millroy laugh, and then there was a howl of pain from a startled stranger, but when I went downstairs I saw nothing at all.
‘What’s that funny smell?’
‘Burned flesh,’ Millroy said. His stare said Remember this, too. ‘Scorched hair.’
I did not want to know more.
Nearer the road there were other houses – Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, other islanders, and people like us they called ‘howlies,’ fat boys who drove pickup trucks, skinny ones on motorbikes. There were large hand-lettered signs that said No Trespassing and Private and Kapu.
‘We’re alone,’ Millroy said. He meant that no one knew us here. He raised his eyes as though to praise the island. ‘Alone in America.’
There was sudden rain, blinding sunshine, high winds, the sight of molten lava. And there were always dolphins.
I had the sense that Millroy had bewitched the island, that he had power over it and could control it, as he had done with the storm in the airplane on our way here.
‘I can prove that I came back from the dead,’ he said. ‘I am simply biding my time.’
We feasted on melons and fish, on honey and beans.
‘I’ll dictate my book to you,’ he said. ‘That way it will be your book, too.’
Our house on the Big Island was on stilts, and secluded, just behind a high cliff on a small empty beach in a cove, which was why that laughter and those screams were so strange. The loud noises were the first we knew that we had neighbors, and then we saw the blue bungalow.
A woman shrieked Please don’t go! and there were the sounds of a struggle. Doon’t!
I heard them clearly from my room at the side. Millroy’s room faced the sea, where the waves rolled in and sometimes thudded into the hollows at the foot of the lava cliff.
I had no fear of these neighbors, not with Millroy around. He had power over flowers and winds and slanting rain. He swam with the dolphins, he calmed wild dogs. Those noisy neighbors – they were the ones who ought to have been afraid.
We went barefoot most of the time, walking along the cliff or on the beach, cultivating our garden, sitting on the porch, looking out to the sea.
‘Everyone says aloha,’ I said, because the word came into my head.
‘Aloha is love,’ Millroy said. ‘Do you think much about that?’
The word love worried me and so I said nothing.
‘Love allows us to see people the way God sees them.’
‘I guess so.’
‘And imagine how certain achievements are possible only if you are loved.’
I tried to imagine it.
‘What’s wrong?’
But he knew. The neighbors had stopped laughing and switched off the music. They were screaming again.
‘That one,’ he said, ‘that’s a smoker’s scream.’
We bought most of our wholefood at the nearest town, Pahoa, at the Cash and Carry and Da Store, and at Mana Natural Foods. Millroy said that pretty soon we would not have to buy anything – we would be self-sufficient in heirloom vegetables and beans and grains. There were howlies in Pahoa, always talking to each other: I just did your chart, Shirley and We made a new batch of candles. Some of the women had tattoos and crewcuts, their children were barefoot, the men had pony-tails.
No one stared at Millroy and me.
‘Fresh vegetables,’ Millroy said, when we shopped. ‘Fresh fruit, just off the vine. There’s a nut farm outside Pohoiki. Fresh nuts! I wanted this in Boston. I guess we came to the right place, sugar. We can live our faith, with our friends.’
I looked at him. We had no friends among the howlies or surfers or candle-makers or tattooed women. Millroy knew what I was thinking.
‘Bees,’ he said. ‘Honeybees.’
Those boxes I had been seeing behind people’s houses on the upper road to Pahoa were beehives.
‘When we finish my book I’m going to be a beekeeper,’ Millroy said. ‘We’ll live on our own honey. We’ll give away what we don’t need.’
‘I don’t know anything about bees.’
‘You’ll be my queen bee.’
Saying things like that to me these days, he always took a step nearer, as though he wanted to say something more, and for me to respond. You’ll be my queen bee worried me greatly.
It felt odd, because he had never spoken that way to me before. The first night in this house, in the dark, his silence and his breathing were a way of speaking, and it made me cringe and tell him to put on the light. His looking at me with hot eyes made me want to step outside.
We were alone now, as he said. We had not been alone for a long time. He was careful not to upset me, he tried to make me feel safe, but still there was something on his mind, I was not sure what.
So I said, ‘What do you want?’
‘To get quiet and give thanks,’ he said. ‘To watch you grow. To tell the story of my life.’
That broke the spell. No more talk about my being his queen bee.
He was not worried about having left Day One behind. He disliked religion, and he felt that Day One had been turning into one, against his will. The Sons and Daughters could carry his teachings around the country, just the simple message, which was ‘Let the Book be your cookbook.’
‘I have delivered my message,’ Millroy said. ‘There will be no re-runs or repeats of The Day One Program. I expressly forbade it. It was in my contract. I have disappeared from the face of the earth. I am invisible now.’
Yet I had the sense that he was not done – anyway, not satisfied. Seeing him looking at a flower or a fence-post I had the idea that he wanted to work magic on them. He seemed restless, although he denied it, and denying his magic made his mag
ic more startling, because he performed it so casually. And I was impressed but I could not understand the point of it, for the only person seeing it was me.
One day we drove into Pahoa as usual, to buy fruit and honey and herbs, cutting through the humid heat in our new Jeep. All around us there were steaming trees, wet grass, thick flowers, the glary green that made me squint and the sweet stinging smell of rotting manure and fresh mud.
The town was just a single street of wooden buildings, some of them abandoned, the few others food stores and a noisy school. The main road continued uphill to the volcano, which I wanted to see, but Millroy did not go there, or anywhere.
‘This is all the life I want,’ he said. ‘How about you, muffin?’
‘I’m good.’
‘But isn’t this landscape ravishing?’
‘It’s pretty wicked.’
‘You could spend the rest of your life here.’
That was another one, like You’ll be my queen bee. And when he said the rest of your life it was as though he was hinting that there was not much of it left, that we would die here, and maybe soon.
‘A couple of hundred years more,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time, if we stick together.’
He had read my mind again. What didn’t he know about me?
Passing one of the larger wooden buildings in Pahoa, he said, ‘This was once a movie house. Probably seventy-five seats or less. A little stage, footlights, a balcony, a podium.’
The peeling name on the front said, Akebono Theater, and I had the suspicion that he wanted to renovate it and preach on the podium.
‘We got too big,’ he said, looking at the wooden marquee with a few torn posters still stuck in patches to hardened crusts of glue. ‘Day One grew so fast it created misunderstandings. I had the weight-loss people after me. The Equal Opportunity people. Envious evangelists. The cable bosses. The Board of Health. The tax man. Not to mention all the religious nuts and New Agers.’
‘The police,’ I said.
That word shut him up fast, the memory of it.
But still he fidgeted, as though he needed to work magic or explain his message. The storm on the plane was the new Millroy – he would not have done it that way in the past. Then he would have been subtler, jammed the meal trolleys, short-circuited the microwave, melted the trays. Instead he cooked up gale-force winds and furious downdrafts and enough turbulence to rock the jumbo. He had done it for me – I was convinced of that.
He was barefoot. He wore fewer clothes here on this warm island. I saw that he was younger, stronger, more muscular than he had seemed in Boston. His bare legs were powerful and straight, and I was reminded that he was a man as well as a magician.
‘Punch me in the stomach. Go on!’
His fingers were always in motion, silently conjuring, now more than ever. Yet we were alone. I did not ask why, but still I wondered. Perhaps it was because there was nothing else to do. Or maybe it was the island, which itself was magical, with volcanoes and honeybees and friendly fish and air sweetened with blossoms. But Millroy’s magic was no longer gentle. It was sudden and explosive, as nervous as knuckle-cracking, unnecessary like boasting or loud music, and at times like showing off.
I did not dare to think these thoughts. I simply kept my mind open and watched Millroy to see what he would do next.
As we stood before the old Akebono Theater, a rusty pickup truck drove past us, then stopped, backed up, and parked next to the curb, beside our Jeep.
A darkish howlie girl got out of the truck and walked to the public telephone that was bolted to the side of the old building.
She was even smaller than me, about twelve or thirteen, with a hard slender body and dark eyes and pretty lashes, but a smudged face and dirty knees and bony elbows, smoking a crushed cigarette. One of her legs was bandaged, a leak-stain on the gauze. Her lips were soft and pink, and she was mumbling. She wore a tee-shirt and shorts and was barefoot, with a scab on her ankle-bone. I imagined that her Gaga thrashed her and called her a tramp, though she was just a little howlie teenager.
Millroy took an interest, watched her dial a number, tapping the buttons on the phone, and then she poked a quarter into the coin slot. She had small even teeth. Her nails were painted with red polish and chipped and bitten.
Opening her mouth wide she spoke a loud swear word and began hitting the phone booth with the receiver, smacking the steel front and still saying the same ugly word.
I stepped back while Millroy leaned over and burned her with his eyes. But I felt breathless and guilty just hearing the girl speak the word.
‘Give it up, pee-wee,’ Millroy said.
She had the cigarette butt in her lips and, braced against the phone, hitting the thing hard, she was still grunting the word.
She stopped when Millroy went on staring.
‘What happened to your leg, sister?’
‘Fell in the shtreet,’ she said. ‘Want to buy some jewelry?’
Jewelry seemed like an odd word for her to use, with her small dirty face and bloodstained bandage, but she looked at Millroy more as a woman than a little girl, and stood there with her hand on her hip, sizing him up like someone much older.
Millroy said, ‘Let’s see what you’ve got, sister.’
All this time, the man in the pickup truck had been watching, and when the small girl called out a too-loud yelp, showing her tongue and teeth, the man cranked the door open and hopped out holding a cardboard shoe box. He was older and sunburned and sweaty, and he might have been the girl’s father, but then I changed my mind from the way he touched her, and where.
‘You like pulls, you like brasslets and peens? You want one necklace. What you like, good price.’
The man had dark swollen eyes. He lifted the shiny pieces from the box, picking them up with dirty fingernails, while the little girl arranged them on the hood of our Jeep, a shell necklace, a string of pearls, a jade pendant, pink coral earrings, a crusty pin, a gold bracelet engraved Rosie.
‘Where did you get these?’
‘From one howlie guy in Kurtistown.’
‘He think we cuckaroach it,’ the small girl said.
‘What’s your name?’ Millroy was looking at the man.
‘Hookie.’
The man’s shirt was torn at the shoulder, he had scraped toes. The girl flipped her cigarette butt into the street.
‘That’s Lerma.’
‘Your daughter?’
‘Third one,’ he said, and it sounded like turd.
She poked the necklace and the earrings with her tiny fingers, and I found her bitten broken nails more interesting than the scraps of jewelry.
‘Now put them away.’
Millroy’s voice was gentle but so insistent it sounded like an order.
The man did so, letting the trinkets slip through his fingers. His swollen eyes did not find Millroy.
Millroy was holding his hands up to show they were empty.
‘Have a look in there, Lerma,’ he said, ‘then put the lid on.’
‘If you don’t want to buy something you could maybe just say it.’
The man seemed frightened saying this, standing sideways, because all this time Millroy’s hands were above him, and Millroy was so much bigger.
‘There’s nothing to buy,’ Millroy said. ‘Take the lid off and look.’
Lerma snatched at the box, knocking the lid aside, then shaking the box and slapping it hard, but nothing fell out. She blinked at Millroy, and at the man, looking smaller and dirtier and weaker, almost a tiny child in her frustration.
The man took the box from her and punched it until it ripped apart.
‘It’s a chrick!’
‘This guy cuckaroach my things!’
‘You don’t like it?’ Millroy was smiling at them. ‘Punch me in the stomach.’
But it was the little girl who swo
re at Millroy, because the man was too fearful of Millroy’s magic to say anything.
‘So what do you think?’
I was right. He wanted to hear that I had been impressed. I did not have the heart to tell him that the whole time I had known him he had been my hero, not for his magic, which often frightened me, but for his kindness. This meaningless magic was like muscle-flexing – it had been that same way with the storm.
I said, ‘You didn’t have to do that to them.’
‘That’s all you have to say?’
He wanted me to marvel at him, he wanted to please me. It was not necessary, yet I did not know how to tell him that.
‘Silence,’ he said, and kept on driving down the narrow road to the black coast.
He hated it when I would not reply to him, but I was simply worried.
That was not the end of it. The next day, walking along the beach beyond our cove, we saw a small girl with flowers in her hair crouched in the sand, on her hands and knees, not playing but crying. Her sorrowing body was angled towards the blue bungalow. When we looked up at it we heard music and voices, louder than ever.
Millroy said, ‘They need help.’
That was his new Remember this voice, with important pauses in it.
At the stairway leading from the beach were stacks of bright flowers and green leaves, some of them twined on the handrail.
Millroy led me up the stairs and into the house, where twenty or more people were moving this way and that – island people, some of them dark, Japanese, wearing bathing-suits and tee-shirts, others wild-looking howlies – big sunburned children, infants and dogs playing together, and men with uncut beards and pony-tails, tattooed women, beer-drinkers, talking loudly, two laughing at a joke, but most of them crying, or with wet eyes as though they had just stopped crying. There was food on every level surface, pasta salad, basins of torn-apart chicken, sausages in piles, bowls of dip and mush and crunched vegetables and crumbly cake and potato chips, with a barrel of ice and beer, and a stack of Jungle Jenky.
In the next room more children watched cartoons on a large television – a cat being hammered flat on the ground by an angry dog with a frying-pan.