Making History

by Rick Wilber

  “For us being able to see each other.”

  “Oh.” He was silent for a moment, then asked, “What’s the word?”

  “Uhane maka,” she whispered, leaning close for an instant. “Friends of the soul.”

  “Ka’iulani,” he said abruptly, shaken, “don’t go to Europe.”

  She looked away. “I’ll miss you, of course. But I have to go. I have to learn history, and languages, and mathematics, and literature. I have to know as much as I possibly can in order to rule well.”

  He couldn’t bear to tell her what would happen to her. It wouldn’t be right. “No,” was all he could say, as fervently as possible. “No, please. It’s very important that you stay.” I will miss you too, he wanted to say, but could not, because he would have to say, I will miss you forever, because you are going to die.

  A bearded man wearing a top hat and tails waved at her from across the garden. She jumped up. “I have to go now,” she said, and lightly kissed him before she ran off.

  “No!” he shouted, jumping up from his chair. Even though he knew she would go. Because she did. She already had. She went to Europe, came back, and died. She’s dead already, he told himself, standing numbly in the bright, dead garden. She’s been gone for over a hundred years. Her bones have been in the earth since before you were born.

  But to him, Ka’iulani was a symbol of all that had gone wrong with Hawaii, the very reason why the United States had been able to annex Hawaii - because of secret deals between some Hawaiian Royals and American businessmen. Backroom manipulation of a trusting people with a completely different mindset from the conquerors. Backroom manipulation of Ka’iulani: a princess, and a pawn.

  Why did they have to make her be a princess? Why did they set her up this way, to fail? It was terribly cruel. They killed her. They were murderers.

  Blindly, Cen turned and fled from the garden, feeling his own world, his own time, close around him again. He knew, as he ran, with tears streaming down his face, that she really would be gone, whatever she was.

  It was more than he could bear.

  More heartsick than ever, he started hanging around the virtual booths in the library. He had to see her again. In the catalog it said that the Bishop Museum had created a single virtual of her. It ran for three minutes.

  He hung around the booths for weeks, carefully watching how it was done. There was a virtual arcade in Waikiki where he’d dropped too much money. He’d been there so much that he could almost tell what virtual somebody was in just by their dance. But this was more complex: the virtuals were hypertexed, and even getting into the system required some computer expertise. He’d used computers in preschool, sure. What was that - ten years ago? Things had changed.

  One night, while he was reading a history of Europe and glancing longingly, every few minutes, at an empty virtual booth, he jumped at a tap on his shoulder.

  He turned and found himself looking into strange gray eyes. The man’s hair was short, light brown with lots of gray.

  “I’ve been watching you,” he said.

  Shit. Cen tensed. I’m not doing anything wrong, he told his body, but years of sneaking and stealing bound his muscles. His heart was beating fast.

  “You know, it’s not hard to learn how to use the virtuals,” the man said.

  “Who are you?” Cen tried to sound rough; belligerent, which was not hard for him.

  The man smiled. “I’m Ross Benet. I’m a mathematics professor at UH, but I come over here pretty often. It’s a good place to think. You’re here a lot too, I notice.”

  Cen didn’t like his searching look. “So?”

  “So, I’m impressed. Not many kids are as interested in learning as you.”

  Not many kids have an uhane maka.

  “You’re really missing out on things without the virtuals, though. I’d like to teach you how to use them.”

  Cen didn’t trust the guy, but what the hell. He wanted to know how to hype. He let the guy lead him over to a booth, and sat in the extra chair he pulled up. Ross slid in his key, watched as the screen told him that it was accepted, then returned it to his shirt pocket.

  “Helmet,” Ross said. “Gloves.”

  Yeah, and I’m four years old. Cen put them on.

  “Judging by your reading material, you’re interested in Hawaiiana.”

  Nosy old coot.

  Cen forgave him in the first rush of virtuals.

  ***

  A month later, Cen was in Ross’ living room, shouting at him. “Find yourself another whore!” he yelled. He threw his beer across the room; it smashed against a black and white photograph on Ross’ impeccably white wall. Glass shattered; beer foamed down the wall; it had arced from the bottle’s mouth while in transit, and darkened a chair covered in a delicate shade of lime-green silk.

  “Cen, my dear,” Ross began. He stood in the doorway to the hall which led from the living room to the bedrooms. Outside, the night traffic of H-4 in downtown Honolulu a few blocks away was like the sound of surf; up here, on the lower flank of the Manoa Valley, crickets hummed, and the breeze rattled the blinds.

  “I’m not your dear!” Cen shouted. A part of him stood apart, amazed at his fury. He wondered if this was how his father used to feel.

  “You knew, of course,” said Ross, his face settling in lines of ironic amusement. He went to the kitchen and came back with a towel, began to wipe down the wall.

  “I’m sorry,” Ross continued. “You are very attractive, and I thought-”

  “You thought that since I live on Hotel Street, that that’s how I made my money. I know. You must have followed me home one night and figured it out, right? Or maybe tattoos turn you on?”

  Ross stood and turned around. “I mean it,” he said. “Forgive me. You

  are a very gifted boy-”

  “Yeah,” Cen said bitterly. “I’m gifted all right.” Ross sat in the green silk chair and held the wet towel in both hands, twisted it into a knot. “Look,” he said. “I don’t need you for sex, Cen, even though you are attractive to me, in many different ways. In fact, I have a steady lover who’d be pretty pissed off if he knew about this. But it’s true that you’re very bright. I want you to have the opportunity to learn. To get ahead. To become educated.”

  Cen stood in the living room, hands on his hips. You scum. He continued to stare at the man, and was impressed that his eyes held no hint of shame. But he did see apology.

  Cen had lived on the streets for a long time. Nothing was a hundred percent right. But he knew when to take advantage of a situation. He had to go to school because Ka’iulani had. She couldn’t know more than him! In spite of what had just happened, he felt that there was something sincere about this weird man and this weird chance, and that he couldn’t run from it.

  “Just as long as you know,” he said, trying to shake the memory of being pulled toward Ross, and that sudden, searching kiss.

  Ross shook his head. “I guess I know.”

  “It’s not that I think it’s wrong. I’m just not interested. I don’t think I’ll change my mind.”

  Ross said nothing, but his smile was rueful.

  A half an hour later, as Cen walked downhill through the darkened campus, he found himself longing for Ka’iulani again. When he was with her, her presence wrapped him in joy. Sometimes he wished he had imagined her. But he knew that she was very real indeed.

  “Kai,” he whispered, as he stood in front of a flood of traffic, waiting for the light to change, “it’s not fair, you know. I can’t see you when I want to.”

  Sometimes when he thought of her, it seemed that he ought to be able to make time move, to flow like a liquid, like the rush of sparkling turquoise water in tidepools, ebbing and flowing. Ka’iulani was like the little islands he kayaked to sometimes with jugs of water and some rice rolls, islands he couldn’t see when he started out, ones he could only feel, guess at, and then they appeared, small dark lines on the horizon, moving toward him as she had moved towar
d him. He never missed. He never used a map. She appeared in his life like that. Just there, all at once, in the trackless ocean of time.

  He slept beneath a hibiscus bush on her heavily landscaped grounds that night, and, when he woke, he knew that she couldn’t see him whenever she wanted to, either. Otherwise she would come to him. She would. Of course she would.

  But she didn’t.

  And after a while, as he waited futilely for her to come, the books in Ross’s library caught like wildfire in his mind.

  First: Gamow, Bohr, Godel, Feynman. On through Einstein’s explanation of relativity for lay people, and then through all the old popular books about chaos theory, and then through everything Steven Hawking ever wrote or said. And beyond. He didn’t understand them at all, of course. But they fractured his already fragile ideas about the nature of time and space, and reaffirmed his conviction that his meetings with his princess had somehow been real, and not hallucinations brought on by pacalolo and need.

  ***

  By the time Cen was seventeen, he didn’t remember when he had first begun to wonder whether Ka’iulani might be a manifestation of some sort of time displacement. He only knew that there seemed to be no spells, no frame of mind, no stance of being which would call her back to him. Angry and hurt and lonely, he just kept on reading, studying, until all that energy was used; transformed. And in the service of that overwhelming passion, he had, almost without realizing it, absorbed years of college mathematics before he’d even graduated from high school.

  Ross had been a kind mentor, never pressuring him for sex after the first attempt, making him into the son that he would never have. Cen still felt cut off from himself, but he accepted it now. He was incomplete, always had been, always would be. That would never change. But somehow it seemed to help him to work for the radical Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, which was gaining political momentum. They claimed that part of the land beneath the new Hickam Spacebase belonged to Hawaiians. They wanted it back.

  ***

  “You can’t continue to speak at these rallies - these riots,” Ross shouted. “You’ll lose your scholarship!” He rattled the newspaper in Cen’s face, the one with the big picture on the front that said, “NATIVE REVOLT.”

  “Fuck the scholarship,” said Cen.

  Ross looked hurt. “After all the work we’ve done. . . .”

  Cen had to admit that it was true. Not only had Ross tutored him toward his HS equivalency test, but he’d relentlessly pushed the scholarship committee on his behalf. He looked out the window of Ross’ house, through the mango trees and across the lawn patched with rotting yellow fruit, and saw the same blue Pacific upon which Ka’iulani had gazed for her first fourteen years.

  Cen was eighteen now. Yes, he was bright. So they said. Much to his surprise. But that did not stop his quest to understand why Ka’iulani had appeared to him. He had gathered all the passion and aching loneliness he’d felt without his uhane maka, and put it into the Sovereignty Movement.

  “You don’t understand,” he told Ross.

  “That’s right, I don’t.” Ross’ hair was almost entirely gray now; his latest lover, a Korean astronomer, had left him rather abruptly. As usual, Cen had been faced with putting the pieces back together, with soothing Ross, making him tea, forcing him to take the skim over to Turtle Bay, drink some Blue Hawaii’s, and take in a tourist show and laugh at its absurdity. “If it wasn’t for you,” he said to Ross, “I’d be just like them. Living on welfare-”

  “Right,” snorted Ross. “I’ve never seen such a capitalist.”

  “Well,” said Cen, “I’d probably have been in and out of jail several times by now. I’m just trying to give back, help them with their awareness of the legality of their situation. You know, old Hili actually won his suit against Marriott over on the Big Island. That land was his, and they had to pay him for it. Through the nose.”

  “All right. But it’s more mystical for you. You’re obsessed with it. You’re obsessed with this princess of yours. You have some sort of crazy dream about the past-”

  “That’s right!” shouted Cen. He stalked out and slammed the door behind him.

  Ross opened the door and yelled, “All I’m asking you is to just skip this rally!”

  He didn’t even look back. Ross should know better than to say anything about Ka’iulani. He’d been a young fool even to tell Ross anything about her in the first place.

  He knew better now.

  ***

  Ross bailed him out of jail about three a.m. “Shall we go to the E.R. and see about that gash on your head?” he asked. “I saw it all on TV. Great stuff. I must say, you’re none too subtle when you get a microphone in your hand.”

  Cen had washed the caked blood off. “No,” he said. “I’m pretty tired. I just want to go home.”

  The next day, he got up late. He walked across town and climbed the twisty streets which laced the flank of Punchbowl Crater.

  He entered the cemetery, with its rows of American graves, knowing that beneath them were the lava rocks of scattered heiau, the sacred platforms where kahunas had killed people to please the gods. The ground was riddled with bones.

  Bones.

  He remembered what Ka’iulani had said about Kamehameha’s bones, and smiled. What a serious girl she had been! He shivered, and something dark ran through him at the thought of the bones. He turned his thoughts instead to her, she who was so very bright. He realized that he was no closer to figuring out why he could see her, why she’d come to him, than he had ever been. He seemed to butt up against mental barriers whichever way he turned. It was a problem too big for his mind. His only hope was to study the limits of time and space, wherever those were - in astronomy, mathematics, physics, cosmology. But if place had anything to do with it, then there was a simple explanation for why he had not seen her in years. She was in school, in Europe. She was in Berlin, being proposed to by a rich German Count, and turning him down because she didn’t love him. She was in the South of France, “flirting,” as she liked to say in her letters. “Better to have my fling now than later!”

  Looking down the white stepping-stone rows of rectangular markers set flat in the ground, Cen felt the energy which gave the site its real name–Puowaina, Hill-Of-Sacrifice. The gods had to be appeased, the gods of the moment, whether they were the gods who lent fury to Kiluea in fountains of flaming lava or the gods who whipped the entire world to fury and war and had claimed these rows of bodies as their snack, their obviation, their very proof of existence. He had been studying history. It made him very sad.

  He gazed over the rim, down the steep brambled hillside, past the Spacebase at Hickam. At the end of vision, he could just see Kaena Point, a gray blur on the horizon. It was hallowed ground, the point from which souls departed for whatever lay beyond this life. The blue Pacific ceaselessly caressed the beaches at Ewa, Nanakuli, Makaha.

  Cen sighed, and hiked down the road, smelling ginger and garlic as someone prepared dinner in one of the tiny frame shacks which snugged together on the steep hillside, inhabited by Asians who couldn’t speak English. He wished there were no gods, but knew that there always would be, however they might disguise themselves. They may have found more graceful forms in other cultures, but Cen thought that maybe the Polynesian expression of them - horrific grimaces; gaping maws lined with dog teeth - was in the end pretty honest after all. Give them all they want, stuff food into their mouths, keep them off your back. As for him, he already had a goddess.

  ***

  During his first year at UH, Ross died in a stupid wavesporting accident when his suit malfunctioned. Cen transferred to American University in Washington, D.C. They had what he wanted–one of the best programs in theoretical physics in the country. And besides, he remembered - how could he forget? - that Ka’iulani had paid that city a brief visit many years ago. If the program hadn’t been so good, he would have thought himself an idiot. After all, didn’t it snow in Washington?

  ***


  Cen’s head was bent over his handheld. He alternated bursts of furious key tapping with gazing out at the street. He had started late this morning after an argument with his roommate and lover, Sandra. She was pretty smart. Maybe that was why she was always in such a bad mood. It was as good a reason as any, he thought. They had fought like cats and dogs ever since they met a year ago. Cen wondered why one of them didn’t leave, when he wondered about it at all. Mostly, he was busy working on his dissertation. Rain streamed down the window of the M Street cafe he had chosen. Washington, D.C. was pretty cold for a Hawaiian on a scholarship. The scholarship covered his tuition, but didn’t leave much for things like a warm coat or regular meals. Sometimes he taught, but not this semester. He rarely noticed hunger, anyway. Cold, now - that was another thing. He sealed his vest in response to the wave of cold air which eddied back into his corner as someone came inside; he glanced up briefly, annoyed. The woman who had just entered had her back to him, and was folding a bright yellow umbrella decorated with green and red parrots.

  She gave it a brief shake, then stuck it in the white plastic tub with the rest of the umbrellas. She had attempted to gather her dark brown kinky hair into a long braid, but much had escaped into a wild halo. Her lime-green canvas raincoat was highly tailored, so that, even with it on, she was exquisitely slim. The long white dress, with its ruffle at the bottom, and boots that probably required a buttoner to close the row of about a hundred tiny buttons, did not seem out of place in Georgetown. Her face, when she turned and looked at him across the crowded cafe, was very dear. And, when she sat across from him, her smile was decidedly impish. “Bonjour,” she said. And then, more softly, “Aloha.”

  Cen lifted his cup, and the coffee trembled in the thick white cup. He set it down, and coffee splashed onto the table.

  “Well,” she said, “Aren’t you even going to say hi?” She reached over, touched the hand holding the cup.