by Rick Wilber
“Aloha,” he said, and all his homesickness welled up in him at once. What was he doing in this cold Eastern city? Trying to find her, of course, and here she was. His heart was so full that he doubted that he could speak if he tried.
“Did you know that I was exiled?” she asked. “The Queen told me that it was better if I didn’t come home. That it would only confuse things for the Royalists and endanger the Republic and our Constitution. But while I’m here, I’m doing all that’s possible to prevent annexation. May I have some of that coffee if you’re not going to drink it?”
“Yes,” he was finally able to make his voice work. “You lived in London, Scotland, Paris, Germany. . . .”
“I’m staying at the Arlington Hotel, to plead for my cause, for the cause of the throne and for rights for my people. But I wonder - who are ‘the people’?” She looked anxious, intense, and spoke as if they were continuing a conversation broken by her leaving to use the bathroom, instead of by an absence of years.
He was afraid to press her, afraid that she would simply vanish. Don’t go, ko’u aloha, my love. Don’t go.
“What do you mean?” His voice was high, and he had to force himself to speak.
“When you plead for a people, for whom do you plead?” She looked down at her white-gloved hands, and Cen saw that the gloves were fastened by small white pearls, which he were sure were real.
“Do I plead for their - our - bodies, which after all will die? Of course, yes - for adequate food, clothing, education. But that’s the least of it. Do I plead for our body as one entire Body, one collection of characteristics which makes us unique? There are so few Hawaiians left now, since smallpox and venereal disease came to the Islands. Do I plead for our old way of life, which was gone before I was born, and, from what I know of it, a good thing, too? It seems that I must plead for something intangible - the life of our soul, as a people - and I don’t know what will ensure that life. I don’t even know what it is. Everything is changing so quickly.”
“I don’t know either,” Cen said. He felt an instant’s shame at having abandoned the Sovereignty Movement.
Tears shone in her deep brown eyes. “It’s not just that the land is being stolen from us by the haole businessmen,” she said. “They did that everywhere they could in the whole world, everywhere they went where the idea of private ownership was a foreign concept. It’s really a battle of ideas, you see. But do you know what makes us unique?” Her eyes blazed.
“What?” he asked.
“We set out for the unknown,” she said. “And we did it because of ideas, and because the world was a different place for us than for the Europeans. We could navigate, you see. We latched onto the stars with our minds and they pulled us. Are you finished yet? Shall we walk?”
Cen could barely get his handheld folded up fast enough, wondering how to begin to talk to her. Memes. Genes. The ideas she was talking about had no names in her time. It was drizzling, but her parrot umbrella was quite large, and he held it over both of them. She was unusually tiny for a Hawaiian, but, after all, she was half Scots. He did not miss a single word she uttered, in her low, cultured voice. She had been tutored in the art of being royal from the time she was born. He had noticed that when he was younger, but he keenly appreciated it now. She was the only one of their people to go forth and survive, to tap the knowledge of Europe for those seven long years. It was her own land that had killed her. Eighteen, he guessed. She had been about that old when she’d come to Washington for the first time. Her hair frizzed more wildly around her face as they walked. The wind was sharp and cold, and reddened her cheeks; it seemed as if the mist was getting more icy.
“What is it like here, Ka’iulani?” he asked. He heard that his voice was desperate, pleading, and he didn’t care. How did she get here? Could she even answer that question if he asked it? He was sure that she could not. What had she called it? Friends of the soul. What sort of energy was that? How could it be defined, mapped, replicated, used?
“There are so many Hawaiians here that we’re tripping over each other,” she complained, in answer to his question. “Washington is full of half-Hawaiians, haole businessmen, other alii, all trying to get things done their way through the newspapers and at parties with Congressmen. Some want the annexation voided, some want Hawaii to be a state, some want it to be an independent kingdom again. A lot of them are upset that I’m here. I met President Cleveland and his wife at a White House audience.” He saw her jaw set. “I was bred and educated to both think and to charm. I did both. I see that people think of Hawaiians as savages, but they could easily see that I am not.”
Easily, thought Cen.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I could cause a revolution in Hawaii. I could unite my countrypeople - but to what end? I’ve studied the histories of the European countries in great depth. They were the same as the Hawaiians: endless wars, both petty and grandiose.” She sighed. “I will get them the vote. When we are annexed, we will at least have the vote.”
“I was in the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement,” he said.
When she smiled, she had a dimple. “What is that?”
“Most Hawaiians don’t vote,” he told her. “A lot of them don’t even read. Oh, of course, there are Senators, college professors - a lot of kind, educated, and hard-working Hawaiians. But many don’t participate in the haole society. They fish, they drink, they collect welfare. The pieces of land Kamehameha II deeded to them were pie-shaped, remember? To make any kind of a living, you needed the mountain uplands and a stretch of ocean too. Some lucky people still have those old deeds, and they go to court and fight the big hotels that think they own the land now. Sometimes they even win. But mostly the Sovereignty Movement is a bunch of angry squatters living in tents on parkland, demanding that it be deeded to them in fact. It’s been going on for decades.”
Tears ran down her face, and he put his arms around her without thinking, drew her close.
She rested her head on his chest and moaned. “What can I do now? What should I do?”
She shook with sobs and he held her tightly, rocked her back and forth, but she would not stop crying.
“Ka’iulani,” he whispered, “I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”
“You’re all I know when I come here,” she said. “I see that things are different. I see that. It fascinates me. You fascinate me. But I can never stay long. Never long enough.”
He looked away from the pain in her face for a second, no longer, and when he looked back, she was gone. Just gone.
After that, he always studied in the cafe of the Arlington Hotel. It was all dark wood and crystal chandeliers, and he had to wear a dress jacket just to sit at a table. During the day he ordered an immense number of too-expensive coffees, and was able to draw out breakfast or lunch to two hours. Sometimes at night, among jeweled Washington politicians and lobbyists, he sat and drank one solitary beer after another beneath Ka’iulani’s picture, which had been taken during her visit and adorned the wall of the bar.
When he was alone, he wept, angry, wishing that he had never met her. He felt as if he was losing his mind. Or that he had lost it long ago. For a few months, he agonized over what he might have said differently, how he could have kept her there with him.
Sandra didn’t like him coming home drunk, so on those nights he didn’t come home at all.
Then, to the bewilderment of his university advisors, he told them that he was quitting. “You could go anywhere” one of them - a short, thin man with an earnest face - told him. Cen sat in a leather chair in his office while cold winter rain streamed down the window behind him. “Harvard. MIT. Think about it, Cen. Don’t quit now. You have a unique gift for mathematics. Sure, the dissertation process is difficult, but you’re one of our youngest, you’re only twenty-one.” He tented his hands and stared at Cen. Finally he said, “Take a year off. Maybe it will be good for you.”
Cen didn’t tell him, as he left, that he had no intention of coming back.
What good was it? He would never have any control over what really mattered to him. And he was beginning to realize that his ideas about the importance of the observer to “theoretical” branching timelines - so real to him - were impossible to prove - at least, for him, right now. He didn’t care about proving anything anymore. He would tell Sandra that he wouldn’t be back, though he wouldn’t tell her that there was another woman. He wasn’t sure there really was.
***
Cen jerked awake and lay still for a moment, wondering what had startled him. The faint, gray light of Berkeley dawn flared beneath the heavy curtains. Cen heard rain tap the window, reminding him that he was beginning to hate this sunless, factory-rimmed squalid bay. The smog was a lot worse here than in the city. But it was cheaper to live here than in San Francisco. The kitchen counter was strewn with dirty dishes; a cockroach scuttled back into a hole next to the stove. Yeah, it was raining all right, a regular torrent.
He had hitchhiked out to “sunny California,” but couldn’t hitchhike across the ocean to Hawaii. He’d taken a menial job - loading for a moving company - and found the money good. He particularly liked the fact that he was much too exhausted after working - often seven days a week, if the work was there - to do much more than turn on the TV at night. Certainly he was much too tired to contemplate anything as absurd as branching universes. He’d been here almost seven months, building up cash for no particular reason. It had seemed like the blink of an eye to him. And in a way, that was good. It was what he wanted. Cen scrubbed the black stuff in the bottom of the frying pan with steel wool, then finally gave up. It was as clean as it was going to get. And it was Sunday, he realized, and still no phone call. That meant that there wasn’t any work for him today.
A moment’s panic rose in his throat, but he grabbed his jacket and pulled it on. He knew of a bar that was open even now. As he left his dingy single room, he felt a weird triumph in the fact that it was completely bare of books, that he owned no computer.
He took BART across the bay and then walked, up and down the hills of San Francisco. He reached the bar he was intending to drink the day away in, but felt no pull and walked past. The sky was not clearing; in fact, it began to rain harder. He settled into trancelike motion, allowing the usual thoughts about Ka’iulani to filter through his mind along with his observations of the weather. It wasn’t as if he could stop them, after all.
The great puzzle was her death. Those curses and portents couldn’t have helped! It seemed that complete helplessness had finally overtaken her. She was like a fine racehorse, tuned and trained for just one task: to rule a country and to rule it well, and to do it with all her heart. She had simply felt powerless.
It took five hours of climbing hills to tire him. And there he was. In front of the place he always ended up at, the Occidental Hotel, where Ka’iulani had stayed when she returned to Hawaii from Washington via San Francisco after a second visit. Here, she met with Liliuokalani, who was still fruitlessly attempting to change things via legislation.
A gust of wind made his teeth chatter. He looked at his faint reflection in plate glass while standing on the sidewalk and realized that, in this bedraggled state, he probably wouldn’t be welcome in the upscale restaurant or bar, his usual haunts. But he felt too tired and cold to go home.
He checked in. They didn’t seem to mind that he was soaked and that he hadn’t shaved. He had money.
The room he walked into was filled with flowers–orange spikes of bird-of-paradise; white, fragrant ginger blossoms; Chinese jasmine, and entire bushes of bougainvillea, yellow, pink, orange, red. The room was immensely old-fashioned, because the Occidental was supposed to be utterly authentic, but the wallpaper was fresh and new, and lit with the gentle glow of gaslights. Outside, it was raining still, but he walked to the window and could not see the spacebase lights, and felt a chill. Maybe they were covered by fog.
Yet, when he turned and saw her, she was entirely expected.
Ka’iulani shut the door behind her and he saw that her eyes were filled with tears. She smiled and they spilled over.
He couldn’t speak. She walked to him and held him more closely than Sandra ever had, pressed her cheek against his so that he could feel all her yearning, inexplicably focused on him. She spoke little that night. She was a virgin, and although he tried his best to be gentle, he was afraid that she didn’t really enjoy it very much, yet she insisted on continuing whenever he stopped and tried to talk about what was happening.
Of course, she was gone in the morning. Everything was in the present: the base had reappeared, and the bill was very much present-day.
But the sun was out. Everything he owned, except his last two days’ pay, was on him. But even if it hadn’t been, he realized that he still would have taken the cab to the airport, as filled with hope and excitement as he was.
***
On the flight to Hawaii, he felt as if he’d been caught in strange patterns of energy that he didn’t understand for a long time, as if he’d been serving some sort of sentence, and that now he was free. His heart lifted at the sight of his green islands strung out below in the intensely blue ocean, rimmed by turquoise shallows shot through with rays of sunset. He recognized South Point on the Big Island.
Tears came when, his face pressed to the window, they swept around Diamond Head past the lights of Honolulu. It had been so long.
It happened in the middle of a Sovereignty rally. Cen tried not to think that it was taking place on the corner across the street from the Princess Ka’iulani Hotel, but despite himself the hotel filled his awareness.
“This is our land,” the woman yelled for the fifth time. “The hell with them all! The hell with the haoles! The Japanese! The American military-”
“We are Americans!” yelled the man standing next to Cen. Just so, Cen thought wearily, and turned.
And stopped.
The rally behind him continued - loud speeches, swearing. He jumped at the sound of a cannon being shot - ceremonial, he knew without turning. Another annexation celebration.
It must be after August 12, 1898, for he was in Ka’iulani’s time. Ainahau, green, lush, filled with flowers and birds, was across the dirt road. And there she was. He stared, his heart in his throat.
A bit beyond the stone wall, Ka’iulani was thin and pale as she bent over a bird-of-paradise plant. Slashes of bright orange bobbed as she cut several of them and laid them on the ground. She wore a black skirt, a plain white blouse, a shawl. A wide-brimmed black straw hat shaded her face.
As he watched, she knelt down and pulled a trowel from the basket at her side, and began poking around in the dirt. Behind her, the old mansion was half-hidden behind mangos and banyans. Her father had built her a new house in 1897, but he didn’t see it - not surprising, considering that the estate stretched out over ten acres. The scent of ginger filled the air, and the raucous cries of peacocks exploded each time the cannon was fired. He left the ruckus outside and walked in through the gate.
The clink of her trowel in the rich dirt mingled with the rustling of the leaves in the offshore trades. The celebration was still taking place, and he glanced up once to see that American marines were there, dressed in uniforms from the past, carrying rifles. Guarding the public from her.
Ka’iulani didn’t look up, so he sat down in front of her, crosslegged, on the cool grass. She was only a foot from him. He reached up with one hand and brushed her cheek. She looked up, and her brown eyes were flat and sad.
“You’re much too thin,” he said. Her smile did not reach her eyes. She sat back, resting on her knees, which were folded beneath her, and left the trowel sticking from the dirt.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. For his part, he felt that there was plenty wrong, and he felt anger rising within.
“Don’t you see the soldiers?” she asked. “I’m a prisoner here. I can’t even have a charity event. They think I’m trying to raise money for the resistance.” Beneath her cheekbones, her face was hollow.
“Then why don’t you do something?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Lily - my aunt, the Queen - surrendered. They held her prisoner in the palace. They claimed to uncover a plot. There was fighting on Diamond Head. Hawaiians were killed. They were going to try her for treason. They threatened to kill her. She keeps advising me to do nothing - not to accept any kind of ceremonial station, because I would only be used to bring the Hawaiians into line. Not to take an opposition course and cause more bloodshed. She’s right.” Her voice was bitter and old. “I never had any real power. I was never anything.”
“You’re something to me,” he said. She looked up, and he was surprised to see that her eyes were filled with gratitude. “Didn’t you know?”
“I hardly ever see you,” she said.
“Whose fault is that?” he asked angrily, then stopped almost ready to laugh. “Look, how do you think this happens? Us seeing each other.”
“I think,” she said slowly, “that it has something to do with the bones.”
“What bones?”
“Kamehameha’s bones. Didn’t I tell you? I’m sure I did. The kahuna used them to curse my mother and she died. He cursed me, the daughter, too. ‘With vision,’ my old Hawaiian nurse told me. When my father found out that she’d said that - I was very young, you know, but I remember it - he was very angry and let her go. From then on, he only hired haoles to take care of me. He’s Scots, and he doesn’t believe in any sort of superstition. I used to laugh about it too. And then, I used to be so happy that I could see you that I thought, if this is part of a curse of vision, it’s more of a blessing. Now I don’t know. It only makes me terribly sad. Not only you. It’s - other things too.” She shivered. “Everything seems so dark. My life is over, the life I was meant to have. The life of my country is over. It’s just a colony now, a place to be looted. And I can never see you if I want to see you. It just happens. Sometimes. Hardly at all, it seems.”
“It has nothing to do with bones,” he shouted, jumping up. “It has to do with you!” It has nothing to do, the subtext in his mind ran, with wormholes, superstrings, “the observer,” or with branching time. Those were only words. “It has to do with will! You’re not doing what you were born to do!”