Making History

by Rick Wilber

  He finally rose, covered with goose bumps, and turned on the faucet. He looked at the water for a minute, trying to remember why. He flared the stream with one finger. Slowly, he washed the place on his head which burned, and washed his face until the red rivulets no longer swirled across pitted white porcelain.

  Face dripping, he reached up and took his mother’s tin box from the window sill. She kept a little money in it, and a few other things. He stared out the window. There was no reason to call the police. There was nothing they could do now. The memory of the gun’s coldness flashed through him, and he realized that he didn’t know whether or not it was still there, and that he didn’t care.

  He turned, looking very carefully only at the chipped blue knob on the screen door. Night sounds filled the house. The ragged banana trees outside the window clicked in the wind, sounding like rain. He reached up with his left hand and turned off the light over the sink, still staring at the doorknob. He walked toward it, holding the tin to his chest.

  ***

  Damn you, Ka’iulani!” Cen said, his legs aching. He raised his eyes from the trail and gazed about. He was high on the mountain, and he didn’t even remember getting here. A cold, misty breeze ruffled the tree- tops. He lifted his hand and brushed his face. It was wet from the last quick shower. Or from tears. He shivered. His chest hurt. He began to walk, but his legs felt very heavy. He trudged upward, knowing. Knowing that he had killed his mother. And knowing that Ka’iulani was not real. She was not even a ghost. He had made her up entirely, perhaps from stories his mother had told him, perhaps from something he’d learned when he was in school so long ago. Couldn’t people do that, split their mind, hallucinate?

  And why should the bones be real, either? He had made that up, like he’d made up Ka’iulani, to make himself feel better, to have one good thing in his life. He couldn’t trust anything he thought he remembered, could he? He meant to laugh, but it was a harsh sound, pulled away by the wind: funny how his mind could twist things around. Yeah, pretty damned funny. Except that the blood was real, and that he had killed his mother.

  All that stuff his father had said, about him not being alii, about it not mattering anyway, even if he was - that was what was true. He’d invented that bone story and hugged it to him, to keep himself from thinking about the truth. He had made the whole world into a ghost to keep from remembering. This mountain, this gentle rain, the sweet smell of hidden jungle flowers - all phantasms, like Old Hawaii. Unreal as his imagined destination, or all his crazy ideas about time and space.

  When he was a kid, he’d run around on these mountains like a wild goat with gangs of childhood friends, playing Hawaiian, playing Chiefs, playing The Olden Days. That was the only reason he knew where this trail was, and it led nowhere special. It was time to go back. Time to get real.

  Then he rounded the bend and stopped. A delicate waterfall drifted down the face of a high cliff and shattered to foam in a tiny pool. Fairylike white flowers bloomed from black lava rock. He wanted to turn and run.

  What he saw was a shimmering curtain which he could easily rend. It would all turn to dust if he dared to look too hard, a fragile and ephemeral decoy of beauty sent by the darkness in mockery of what he, Cen, really was: a murderer.

  Yet, he realized as he stared, he did remember. For some reason. This was the place he could come to at night, after he woke sweating from dreams of blood, and hug to himself. If he dared to go further, could he bear to lose this solace, this idea that somehow he was someone? Why not? He might as well lose everything at once. He walked across the clearing and leaned against the wet stone, pressed his body against it, raised his arms. His fingers entered hollows which seemed to reach out for them.

  He moved like a spider across the face of the rock. The rock was real. He could feel it. Just like he had felt the cold steel of the gun just before it killed his mother. If only he hadn’t fought with them-

  He sagged against the rock, nestling himself on a shallow shelf, and cried. He saw his father, cross-legged on the lanai, painting, cursing when the mimosa flowers littered the air like pink butterflies and landed on his work. He remembered his proud presentation of money to Cen’s mother, not once, but for several years. Cen felt the darkness and alcohol to which he’d retreated when that big-shot New York art critic laughed at him and his Hawaiianness, even though his wife had told him that it was nonsense.

  A sensitive man, Cen realized, his face wet, his cheek pressed up against the rough lava. A bitter man, caught between his wife’s idealization of old Hawaii, his own artistic dreams, and the necessity of living in the present the haoles and the changing times had made. Alcohol and ignorance had killed his mother.

  “Not me,” he whispered. “Not ME!” he shouted, and it echoed through the small clearing and rolled down the mountain into the misty rain forest. Cen reached fiercely for the next hollow in the rock. “Not real?” he muttered, panting. “Just a ghost? Just stupid superstition? We’ll see, Dad. We’ll see.” Excitement and fear filled him like a fluttering of tiny yellow o-o birds in his stomach as he reached the shelf. The large rock grated as he pulled it across the stone shelf. The waterfall roared in his ears. His hands shook as he pushed the rock aside and reached inside.

  Alii,” he whispered, and slid the rough package out. The last hands to touch it had been his mother’s.

  Cen sagged back against the rock, pulled his legs up to his chest. Gladness filled him like light, and he gasped with laughter and shook with tears.

  “You were right. Princess Victoria Ka’iulani! Maybe I am worth something, after all!” He felt as if she were next to him, watching.

  But was it Ka’iulani? Maybe, instead, it was his mother. Maybe she could rest now.

  He unfolded the old tapa cloth and revealed the bones which had haunted his childhood dreams. As he touched them, he knew: time shimmered from them in a special way, infecting alternate times, linking with universes which might or might not be real, depending on the fleeting glance or the long engagement of the observer. Hawaiian magic. Which one day he might dissect, prove, commit to mind and paper.

  Time became for him so fluid, and so very beyond anything that he could possibly comprehend, that he may have sat there holding the bones for minutes, or maybe for hours, holding them as tightly as one would hold one’s last - or first - shred of reality.

  Perhaps he felt the power coming from them just because they were real. Maybe it was just that they validated him, made him strong in a way he never had been before. The past slid in behind him as if it were an alternate past: the past he had tried so very hard not to see. Perhaps so hard that it had made him crazy.

  No. For the first time, he thought not.

  For the first time in his life, he felt utterly real.

  He panicked, counting the days. He had so little time. In old newspapers, he had found the day of the parade he had seen. It was only a month before Ka’iulani died! And he had wasted most of that time drinking.

  He took the first flight he could get to the little airport on the Big Island’s Kona coast. Rented a car, and drove. Up through the rolling emerald hills which were the volcano’s flank, up toward the ranch where she had met her death, his heart twisting within his chest. Mist rolled down from the heights, as it had that day when she had been caught in the rain while out riding. He rolled up his window and turned on the heat. It was cold up here on the mountain. At 5,000 feet - and almost 14,000 at the summit - the slope of Mauna Kea was much colder than it ever was on Oahu. Much colder than an Oahu woman caught in the cold rain might be able to stand. In the winter, the slopes on these high volcanoes filled with snow skiers.

  There were no truly accurate records of the trail she had taken on her last ride. Only that she had passed by an old kahuna who she claimed had cursed her, she who should have been the next queen, as the agent of old Hawaii’s demise. Cursed her to death with a curse so powerful that she simply lay down and died, even though the doctors said there was no real reason,
that it was just a simple cold. They had put her on a boat and returned her to Ainahau and her doctors in Honolulu, but it had been too late.

  Cen wanted to catch her here, if he could. While she still, maybe, had a choice. By god, he didn’t care what happened - he would twist time for her and more, if that was possible. He could make her stay here. Here, in his time. He knew it, with the certainty of a mathematical proof He was on the verge of understanding, a place which was very bright. Together, they would figure out how to use these bones. If he saw her again, he would never let her leave.

  He whipped into a pull-out, hands sweating. He was about three miles from the main house at the Parker Ranch, which was now open to tourists, with an art gallery and everything. He wondered if there was a little plaque there that said Ka’iulani Slept Here. Ka’iulani Decided To Die Here.

  He gripped the steering wheel with both hands, rested his forehead on it, and cried.

  “I must have been born under an unlucky star,” he whispered, and then, “No!” He ran up the trail for an hour, then ran back to the car. After that, he drove to the ranch and took a tour of the house, feeling like a zombie or at the least a very crazy man, peering around corners until the guide curtly told him to stay with the group, please. And finally, feeling at the very edge of whatever mind might be, he gave up.

  He got in the car and drove without much thought.

  The road took him to South Point.

  Hawaiian chants and archaeological records had it that Ka Lea on the Big Island, the southernmost point in the United States, was where the first Hawaiians had landed in the islands. The haole name was South Point.

  It had been one of the first sacred sites claimed by the Sovereignty Movement.

  The sea was calm in the afternoon. Below the steep cliff where Cen stood, it lapped at old iron mooring rings driven into the cliff; he saw several small fishing boats bobbing half a mile out. The air was cool.

  The waves beneath the rocks where Cen stood played endlessly beneath and through one another, and he saw their energy as a weaving of levels, almost as if each wave were a time, and those times intersected one another briefly in that heaving dance, over and over. The waves had a memory, were memory itself, the visible form of transmitted energy.

  What was human memory, anyway, but an invisible wave which somehow invested matter with meaning?

  Cen felt as if he had relatively little memory left himself, standing out here at the end of the world, on the most isolated land on the planet. He was a particle of energy riding some current he could never understand, grab hold of, or trace back to its source.

  He let go, dove and danced, knew the water as intimately as when he had been a boy, here in the dangerous Ka Lea currents. Why not, who cared if he was swept away? This was a Point of Death and Life, where spirits came to make their leap to the Otherworld. At times, the sun caught him, then he was pushed below, and interfaced with scaly fish bodies, shimmering and nosing through sheaves of light wavering on the ocean ledges below in brilliant parallelograms. A school of red akule engulfed him, brushed him with slight touches all over his naked body, and he remembered their appearance was said to mean that an alii would die soon. Why would he think of that? Oh, he was Hawaiian all right, and as plagued with ghosts as they all had been.

  Finally exhausted, he pulled himself out of the water.

  The tapa cloth, made of pounded taro dyed with the juice of plants, was brittle. Little bits of it flaked off and were taken by the wind as Cen unwrapped the bones. Where it had been creased, it fell apart, until, when he was finished, the tapa lay in several large pieces.

  Cen looked at the bones for a long time; he picked up a long one, which he thought might be the thigh.

  Navigator. Attuned to the stars in a powerful way, so powerful that their minds flipped, so that the world, the stars, and the islands moved, not them. Still point on a turning world.

  The people who played out the program of the DNA in these bones were populators. Called by the stars, they had set out on journeys which looked to haoles to be foolhardy, impossible. Yet, Cen knew, though the trip from Tahiti, a matter of several thousand miles, was not in the category of island-hopping, commerce between Hawaii and Tahiti had been constant. It was not as if they had bumped into these islands by chance, blundered into them, at least not after the first star-minded navigator had returned and communicated their exact position in regard to the stars.

  These islands had been the last frontier for white Europe. They’d found not gold, but whales, and land held in trust by the king for the community: green, lush forests of sandalwood and koa; birds of brilliant feather; land bursting with wealth, that ignorant chiefs allowed to be carted off.

  He arranged the bones on the grass in front of him.

  “Uhane maka,” he heard, and turned.

  Ka’iulani stood there, and she looked tired.

  She was not dressed in white, but a simple floral dress. She couldn’t be older than twenty-three, when she’d died, but she looked much older than that, much more worn. Cen wanted to hold her, but for the first time ever he was afraid. Best, perhaps, not to disturb her; she looked so fragile and pale, despite her dark skin.

  She sat on the grass, and he sat next to her.

  “These are Kamehameha’s bones,” he said.

  She turned to him. “I’m very glad to see you,” she said. “What are you going to do with these bones, these bones of the dead king?”

  “Use them to save you,” he said.

  “From what?” she asked.

  From death, he wanted to say, but his tongue would not move. From a loveless, lonely life. From your universe, which has somehow crossed wires with mine and illuminated my life. I want to pull you across this awful chasm and keep you safe forever.

  “Throw them into the ocean,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “That’s where they came from,” she said. “That’s where we all come from. That’s where they belong. Old bones,” she said. “Old superstitions.” She shrugged, looked out at the horizon. “I love it here,” she said. “I thought that I could do something for my country,” she said, “but the old ones, the protectors of the old customs, the ones who save bones like these, hate me. Without them, I can do nothing.” He thought of her in her wide bed, suffocating.

  “We went riding this morning,” she said, and his heart contracted. The ride in the rain, the ride that killed her. “Up on the Parkers’ ranch. It’s so beautiful up there, the hills are so rolling and green, greener than Ireland, and the slope down to the ocean is so immense. It almost seems that I can see the horizon’s curve, you know? Then we rode into a cloud, and I couldn’t see it anymore.”

  She was silent for a moment. “I have so much energy,” she said. ‘There’s so much I could do for my people, if the government would only let me. I have dreams,” she said, “And not only of you, Cen.” Her face filled with anguish.

  “Of what?” he asked. “I’ve seen Pearl Harbor,” she said, “And Hiroshima. And a lot of things in between. Lots of - of what? The future? Can all these horrors possibly be true? I was at these places. Just like I’m here with you. Places in Siam. China. Even Berlin, Paris, London, those beautiful cities where I spent so much of my life.” A chill went down his back as he stared at her. He remembered that Ka’iulani’s mother had decided when she was going to die. He could almost hear Ka’iulani’s mother’s rasping voice: “You will live far away. You will never marry. You will never be queen.” What an awful burden for her to carry. How easy to succumb when it seemed as if it would all be true. Ka’iulani had seen her own death, close up, bearing down upon her. Hawaiians, it seemed, were cursed with this form of seeing. “Vision,” Ka’iulani said, and her voice was hopeless. “It’s better not to have vision, I think. Better to know nothing.”

  “You never told me about - those visions.”

  “They had just started the last time I saw you,” she said. “After I lost all hope. After we lost our country. It was l
ike they were waiting like vultures for me to finally let them in, to let in all the horrors the kahunas predicted for me. They were tied in with other horrors too. Before, it was always just you. Then suddenly I was everywhere. Seeing everything. I can’t eat, can’t sleep. It’s been getting - worse. Much worse. Sometimes I think that I can’t stand it anymore, this seeing. The future is the same as the past. Nothing but war and exploitation.”

  “Stay here with me,” he said fervently. “You can stay. And live. I found the bones for you. Just for you. They’re the reason we could see each other, because I held them when I was a child. It must be that. They do have power.”

  She smiled and touched his cheek. “Possibly,” she said. “But I think that it’s just that you’re my very dear friend of the soul. That’s more powerful than any other force there is, I think.” Yet, her face was desolate.

  She looked away from him. “I’ve finally realized, Cen, that there is one thing I can do. Something I can at least try. Something I must do. To save my people. To keep these terrible things from ever happening.” She laughed wryly. “That is, if I can really do anything. And if I can, I must, mustn’t I?”

  “What is that thing?” he asked, not liking the sound of her voice.

  “I was betrothed to a Japanese prince when I was very young,” she said. “They have lately told me that they are still amenable to this marriage of state. I think that I will marry him. The vision I have must be put to some use. I will not lie down and die!”

  Cen rose, filled with joy and dread at the same time. “You can’t-” he said.

  “I can,” she said, and already color was coming into her cheeks again. “I must. I have no choice.”

  “You do!” he cried. “You can stay here. With me. Volition is the key, my love. Volition, coupled with vision. Will influences what will be. Not predictions.”

  She looked up and he saw she was crying. “Don’t you see, Cen? Don’t you see who I am?”