He stared down at the postcard, turning it back and forth in his hands. The light filtering through the high canopy of the banyan tree’s branches reflected off the glossy surface of the photo side: a generic pink sunset shot that looked like it had been taken in Maui. But then, tourists didn’t come to Hilo, so why would there be pictures of it on postcards? Sometimes it felt like the only parts of Hawai’i that mattered were the ones where the mainlanders went and that the rest of it may as well not even exist. His whole life, an afterthought.
Dejected, he nestled into a hollow of the drooping roots, wondering if maybe the tree could absorb him into its cathedral vastness. It had been two days since he’d last seen Kalani, since the dizzying highs and devastating lows of their night swim.
Andrea had given him a photo of Saul Kanazawa. It was old enough to predate digital cameras, sun-faded and marbled with white creases. He held it next to the oversaturated postcard beach until the contrast hurt his eyes and he slipped the postcard behind the photo. Saul stood at the edge of a crowded beach-park barbecue scene, looking down and out of frame. He was a big man, dark-skinned, with long hair tied back in a loose ponytail, shirtless and wearing a simple shark’s tooth corded necklace. Despite the last name, he looked mostly Hawaiian. And he looked like he was guarding something. Then again, the evasive angle of his face could be absolutely random, or the result of some reflex to shy away from the camera, or…
Stop this, Ori told himself. He’d drive himself crazy trying to read this man’s mind through the haze of years past.
Cracking his neck, he returned to the postcard. He underlined the anything in I will do anything twice, then stared at the card, as if he looked at it hard enough, the letters would rearrange and become something more meaningful and persuasive. He just had to hope that finding out Kalani was Keola’s son—the child of the man Saul loved, even if by the woman who’d taken him away—would be enough to sway his grief and his jealousy. Ori liked to think that if things had worked out differently, if Kalani had never been attacked and had settled with a woman, that Ori would still love any child of Kalani’s as much as his own son. He wanted to believe that love could win out over jealousy, even if it hurt.
Hushed whispers. Clicks and flashes of light. He tore himself away from contemplation to see a small group of sunburned tourists staring up in awe at the towering banyan tree. He pulled his knees to his body, trying to withdraw into the shelter of its roots and out of their shots. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first—or the last—time he had his picture snapped, accidentally or otherwise. There was a certain subset of middle-aged haole men who seemed to materialize out of the ether every time he and Kalani marched in from the waves to collapse together, exhausted, surfboards and all, in the sand.
The damn postcard—he couldn’t even send it. The last known address wasn’t reliable. What if some relative or friend read it and threw it away, or… Would Kalani even want his parentage advertised like that? He’d have to go back to the post office and put it in an envelope.
As he left the long shadow of the banyan to walk back to Hilo’s main street, the tourists smiled and waved to him. He couldn’t help but smile back. Whatever he thought of mainlanders, he kind of appreciated the effort these ones had taken to get off the beaten track a bit. And the banyan was a thing of beauty.
Ori retraced his steps down Banyan Drive, back to the same tatty shop where he’d found the postcard in the first place. The shop wasn’t much more than a hole in the wall, overcrowded with dust-covered kitsch and even a rack of calendars from 2009 on sale for 10 percent off.
“Back so soon?” asked the little woman behind the counter, eating a fruit salad with a pair of chopsticks. “Let me know if you need help finding anything, okay?”
Saul Kanazawa. Where are you? Will you listen to me?
“An envelope is all. Mahalo.”
She gave him one for free. He dropped off the sealed postcard in a salt-corroded mailbox farther down Kamehameha Avenue. He did it quickly, before he had a chance to stop himself. He’d gone through three other generic postcards of Maui, that way.
Please. Please. Please. Please save Kalani’s life. Please have pity. Please have compassion.
He held on to the mailbox’s metal handle much longer than he should have.
Kalani, please. Don’t leave me alone again. Not now, please.
* * * *
The man Ori visited later that day called himself a kahuna, but turned out to be nothing but a hack, running a bogus “natural health clinic” out of his living room, where he also sold wildly overpriced magic magnets and boxes of dream catchers stamped with “Made in Taiwan”. To top it all off, he puffed his f’s suspiciously like a Filipino.
As Ori guided the little car down the winding hill road into Hilo, he reminded himself that he had other more promising leads, both here and back on Oahu. Not many, true, but he’d find the right kind of kahuna—a kahuna ho'opi'opi'o—if he kept looking. There had to be someone left somewhere. If there was a man alive who could cast this curse, there had to be one who could fix it. There had to.
He was acutely conscious of the weight of the phone—how it pressed into his thigh as he took the tightest turns. It would take days for Saul to get the message, days before he could conceivably call, but he still shifted it upward in his pocket for easy access. Just in case.
It rang. He had it flipped open and pressed to his ear before the ringtone had looped. “Kalani,” Anela’s voice gasped out. “Kalani, Kalani, oh Lord.”
His heart leaped. His hand tightened around the phone to the point that he
thought he’d snap it in half. “What! What?”
“He’s moving. He moved his eyes. He moved his fingers. He made some sounds. Not talking, but it sounds like he’s trying. It’s a miracle—” A hitching sob broke off her words.
“Anela, I—I’m coming back right now. I—fuck!” He’d let a wheel edge over the yellow line. The horn blast of an oncoming car scared him straight. “Sorry. I’m driving. I’ll go to the airport. I’ll be there tonight.” I don’t care how bad he looks. I don’t care how long he’ll take to get well again. I don’t care I don’t care because he’ll be there and he’ll be real and I’ll be there for him and oh God this is something that is happening.
The road swam with tears, and he blinked his eyes rapidly to clear them. He should pull over, take a few deep breaths, hang up the phone, get back under control. No.He needed to be there by Kalani’s side. He needed to be there. He wished he’d never gone away to Hilo. He should have stayed by Kalani’s side.
“You come,” she said fiercely. “He’ll want to see you. You’re his— Oh yes. He’ll be so happy. I should never have—”
“That’s not important now,” said Ori. Nothing he used to think was important was, not anymore. “I’m coming.”
* * * *
He should have just taken the stairs. Craning his neck, he watched the elevator’s display change from Three to Four and then Three again. He could have taken the stairs three times by now. Every second seemed to take an hour to pass.
He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t a race. Tried to accept the reality that when he got to Kalani’s ward, the same bedridden unconscious body would greet him… Or fail to greet him. Kalani had moved, yes, but that didn’t mean he would again, and it especially didn’t mean that a full recovery was imminent.
Ori told himself that, but he still needed to be up there yesterday. He wanted to be there when Kalani woke up. He wanted to be the first person Kalani saw. The doors wheezed open, and Ori paced inside. It was one of those old seventies constructions, rickety and dark and walled with faux-wood paneling. He pressed the button for Kalani’s floor and fell back against the far wall. He wasn’t sure if he could hold himself upright anymore. The last evening flight from Hilo had been canceled, so he’d crashed in the airport departures lounge in order to make the earliest morning one. He’d arrived here at the hospital wearing yesterday’s clothes, and he didn
’t need a mirror to know he looked like hell. He hoped Kalani wouldn’t hold it against him. He hoped the nurses wouldn’t give him shit for showing up outside visiting hours. He hoped Kalani would remember his out-of-body experiences and that they wouldn’t be starting at square one again.
He hoped Kalani would wake up. That was the only thing that mattered. Why weren’t the goddamn doors closing? He stabbed DOOR CLOSE until the elevator groaned into action, enfolded him, and jerked upward. And clattered to an abrupt stop.
“Fuck!” Ori gave the doors a hard boot. The floor screen still read M, which meant he was between floors. He pressed the DOOR OPEN button anyway, but the doors just made a grinding noise. He tried the CALL HELP button. No answer; no surprise there. He was lucky his hair wasn’t long enough to tear out by the roots. He settled for scratching violently at the sides of his scalp instead.
The fluorescent light flickered and let out an alien whine. Tracer fire, and he was inside it. Nowhere to run or duck or hide. Nowhere to take cover. A twinge of pain jolted through his sinuses and needled into his eardrums. The darkness between the bursts of light was dark like water, an inky fluid outswirling.
He would have been paralyzed with fear less than a week ago. Now, he welcomed the madness. He screamed Kalani’s name into the strobing light, into the electrified, crackling air.
A high creaking noise, like metal being rent, then a hiss. A narrow jet of water shot from between the elevator doors, and then another, another. Ice-cold water hit Ori’s body and began to pool at his feet. A flashback? No, this was nothing like the dark dry highways of his war. This was somebodyelse’s nightmare.
“Kalani! Kalani!” Ori braced himself as best he could, took a deep breath, and held it. The light died for a single second that squeezed like a fist. When it flicker-whined to life again, Kalani stumbled into him, shivering and naked and dripping with cold water that smelled of salt and death.
“Ori!” Kalani choked out. He was as cold as a corpse, and when he pressed himself to Ori’s body, frigid damp soaked through Ori’s clothes. It didn’t matter. He threw his arms around Kalani’s shoulders and gathered him in tight.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you.” Except it wasn’t okay at all. The water spraying through the elevator doors was already up to their calves and as black as the Marianas Trench.
“You have to s-stop it.” Kalani’s voice was high and weak and boyish, consonants slipping and twisting. “Ori. I’m dying. I’m drowning. I’m going to die. Not here, in the other world. Shadows. Kuewa. Please, they’re going to eat me alive. They’re so hungry. I can’t— I ran. I tried to go back in my body…”
Oh God, and they’d taken his movements as a sign of hope. “What can I do? How can I stop them? We just have to hold off a little longer, Kalani. I can find someone to fix the curse. I just need more time. Tell me how to fight them.”
Up to their waists, now, some horrible parody of the other night, when they’d stood in the surf together as lovers. “You can’t. I’ve seen them move right through people. They’re like smoke to you—real to me. But I can leave them behind, if I can leave my body.”
Leave his body? Hadn’t Kalani done that already? “How?” Anything. He’d do anything. He’d save Kalani from whatever was chasing him, whatever nightmare creatures Saul had called up to claim him.
“I know where I’m supposed to go now,” said Kalani, his eyes filmed with saltwater and shining with pain. Somehow, Ori knew: when the water had pulled him under that night, it had taken Kalani too, but Kalani hadn’t been able to break the surface and follow him free to the shore again. “I finally understand. My ‘aumakua live in the cloud-land over the ocean. I can go home, if I’m free. And I think my mother’s there too, Ori. I don’t belong down deep in the water. You have to help me go home. I’ll be safe. I’ll be free.”
“It’s all so— I don’t understand the rules of this…this spirit world.” I don’t understand anything. I’ve never understood. “But just tell me what to do, Kalani, and I’ll do it, I swear. You know I’ll do anything for you.”
The water lapped around their shoulders, threatening to swallow them both, but Kalani just buried his face in Ori’s neck, breathing deeply, like he was trying to inhale him. “Not this, I don’t think,” he murmured, sadly. “But you have to.”
“Anything,” Ori repeated, like a magic spell. “Try me. Just try me.” “Kill my body.” Ori tried to protest, but Kalani pushed on, barely stopping to breathe, “I—I’m not afraid of dying, Ori. But I’m afraid of this. I’m afraid of what’s happening now.” Ori could feel shapes slithering around his ankles, eels and black-tip sharks and schools of little darting fish, luminescent deep sea creatures lying in wait for prey to pass in the dark. Kalani threw his head back, baring his throat, gasping for air, then let out the hard-won breath in a ragged sob as the water level carried him to the elevator ceiling. “Please. I love you and I want you and I’m so, so sorry, but I have to go home. Please—”
They’d floated up and up and up until their backs were pressed to the roof of the elevator. No space to rise, no space to escape to, not a single bubble of air. The water was over their heads. And Ori could still breathe.
This wasn’t real for him, not like it was for Kalani. The suffocating cold was all in Ori’s mind and heart, and he finally understood the truth of his duty. He was Kalani’s protector. He always had been. Anything, he’d promised. He opened his mouth and spoke into the water.
* * * *
When he stopped to look behind him, his shoes left only the faintest wet marks on the gleaming floor. They shrank, drying into nothing, only a few heartbeats later. He turned and forced himself to keep moving down the corridor, down to the ward where Kalani’s body lay. A cold, grim compulsion had overtaken him, and now he was at the door.
Anela was sitting alone at Kalani’s side, a book open in her lap that she obviously wasn’t reading. It’s time to say good-bye to her, Kalani , he wanted to say, but couldn’t, not when she was right there in front of him, too lost in thought to have seen him yet. He didn’t even know if Kalani was here, in his spirit form, or if he was still back in the elevator, trapped in his drowning. He didn’t know if that was a mercy or not, to not have Kalani there to watch him do what he was about to do.
“Auntie,” he said. Anela’s head jerked up, as if she was stirring from sleep. Her brow furrowed; she was taken aback by his solemn tone, maybe.
“Oh Ori, you made it. He’s been quiet the last twelve hours. I’m sorry. I think I called you back too soon.” Her eyes were red—with sleeplessness or tears, he wasn’t sure.
“Auntie.” Just say it. Just say it. “Auntie, can I have some time alone with him?” He thought—hoped?—maybe she’d fight or ask why, but her face tightened into a knowing expression, and she nodded.
“Of course. I’ll go down to the cafeteria and get a coffee. Do you want one?” Ori looked down at Kalani’s body, at his shriveled muscles and ashen skin, his odd haircut, his slack mouth that looked like it would never smile again. Anela had risen from her chair. There was a fluffy pillow nestled in the seat that she’d been using to support the small of her back.
“Maybe you could go have some breakfast instead.”
Chapter Nine
2003 The hospital room overflowed with balloons, bobbing and twirling in the breeze of the air conditioner. Ori had brought another one, identical to one already tied to Kalani’s bedrail. A yellow happy face with a band-aid on its forehead.
“Ori! Took you long enough to get here, brah!” He sounded…completely normal. Happy, healthy, not at all like someone who could have died, who could have bled out into the ocean, his body dragged under by sharks and torn to pieces.
The I love youdied in Ori’s throat.
* * * *
2011
Ori stood by the elevator doors, gaze fixed on the dull dance of the indicator lights. A familiar, removed sense of calm filled him. They’d probably know what happened, once they
looked at the body. Had he put the pillow back on the chair? He didn’t even remember. He was headed straight back to prison. Maybe that was for the best.
Or he could walk out of here. Nobody would remember him, and he’d disappear like a ghost. Anela would never tell anybody he’d been the last one to see Kalani. She’d be angry, but she’d never betray him that way. She’d understand, or at least she’d think she understood.
Except then he’d be leaving her to find Kalani’s body. No warning, no nothing, and that wasn’t right. So he turned away from the elevator doors and walked to the nearest nurse’s station, where a Filipina woman in deep purple scrubs sat doing a crossword, her chin in her hand. Because there were no monitors to alert her to what Ori had done, he realized. He really could leave without a trace, if he wanted.
No. He’d decided.
“Hey,” he said, softly, so as not to startle her. “I’m here visiting my cousin, but there’s a guy in the coma ward, I don’t think he’s breathing so well. His lips are all blue. He’s by himself. Maybe you should check up on him.”
“Call a code,” the nurse said briskly to another woman seated behind the counter. Then she stood and sprinted away, legs pumping hard but arms held close to her sides. Urgent, but calm.
Corridors of light in all directions. A labyrinth. He was hopelessly lost.
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