Na Akua

by Clayton Smith

  Water and coffee, he thought. And then, greasy breakfast. But the thought of food crippled his stomach, and he lunged sideways so he wouldn’t choke on whatever vomit might come up, and in doing so, he threw himself right over the side of the bed and crash-landed on the floor. “I just want to die,” he said, but his words were muffled by the thin hotel carpet, and the Hawai’ian gods did not hear.

  It took a full ten minutes for Gray to struggle to his feet, and another twenty for him to figure out the coffee maker. Every sound was a cacophony; every step was torture. But finally, finally, he managed to down a few glasses of water, grab the steaming cup from beneath the coffee drip, and shuffle out to the balcony. He felt sure that the brightness of the sun would explode him to ashes like a vampire, and as he eased himself down into the chair, he gave thanks for the small mercy of a room with west-facing exposure.

  When his eyes had adjusted enough for the blue sky to no longer sear his vision, he blinked up at the clouds and inhaled deeply. The salty air filled his lungs, and the pale ghost of the moon had faded so much that it seemed translucent. Memories of the previous evening bumped and banged their way to the front of his brain, so he shut his eyes against the pain. He was shocked to realize how much of the surreal and magical night he remembered…and he was infinitely less shocked that, though he had come to Hawai’i in an attempt to forget a woman, he had somehow managed to fall for a different one he knew almost nothing about. “I am a champion of life,” he muttered miserably. Then he sank down in the chair and willed the coffee to stave off his imminent death.

  •

  The morning passed slowly. Gray felt marginally less like a walking corpse after a breakfast of loco moco, which was a victory. The combination of hamburger, fried egg, brown gravy, and rice weighed down his stomach and kept it from rocking right out of his throat.

  He waited near the pool bar until it opened, thinking he could use some hair of the dog, though he kept getting looks of pity from the happy couples who passed his lonely chair on the way to their tandem sunbathing. When the bar finally did open, he ordered another Mai Tai, but whoever started that “hair of the dog” nonsense was full of it, because after only three sips, he threw up in the bushes behind the towel caddy. No fewer than seven people saw him do it, and when he stood up and wiped his mouth, he saw the horror and disgust that painted their faces. Before they could fetch a hotel employee to give him five vacation demerits, or whatever they used to punish sad sack guests, Gray plunged through the bushes and forced his way through the hedge wall to the other side. He tripped on a tangle of roots and fell out of the cluster of bushes, but a lukewarm pond broke his fall, so it could have been worse. He spluttered and splashed his way to the banks and made rude hand gestures at the swans; even they were looking down at him with pity. He ran across the lawn and up the stairs, into the lobby and down the hall, past the conference rooms, and out the side door of the hotel to avoid confrontation with irate hotel employees after his performance. He wrung himself out in the parking lot next to the service entrance, then strode around to the front and walked through the main doors with his damp head held high, as if he was returning from a leisurely stroll.

  Just another fun-filled day in Hawai’i, he thought.

  After that fiasco, he decided to be a bit more conservative with the time he spent near the pool, where people would instantly, and maybe vocally, recognize him as “that guy” who’d thrown up next to the pool. He puttered around the lobby instead, sticking his head into the hotel shops that sold overpriced sunblock and honey-roasted macadamia nuts. He made small talk with the maintenance men who watered the plants in the lobby, but that, too, ran its course after they’d covered the weather, the beach, and the best places to get a good piece of fish. The only other thing he could think to discuss was his crippling loneliness, and he felt fairly certain they didn’t want to talk about that.

  Every time he passed a mirror, he glanced at his reflection, and every single time, he was startled that he still looked so much like himself. His brown hair was messier, his pale skin was a little tanner, and his eyes were rimmed with red, either from crying so much or from the chemicals in the swan pond. Probably both. But on the whole, he saw the familiar face of Grayson Park; things had hardly changed at all, and after everything he had gone through, he found it wholly perplexing that not a single bit of him had actually slipped away, even though he could feel himself flaking apart on the inside, little by little, like ash.

  He considered heading down the beach walk, a newly paved sidewalk that wound and curled its way down Kā’anapali, slinking past the other resorts and unfurling in front of a shopping area called Whalers Village. He wasn’t much for shopping, but he had a hunch that even though the rum had been a bust, something easier on the stomach—like a beer, maybe—might be just the ticket to righting his ship. With his own pool bar now more or less off-limits, he could beer-hop his way from resort to resort, all the way down the coast. But if he did that, he wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on the hotel for Hi’iaka...and wasn’t that really what today was all about—the enchanting woman he’d met in his drunken stupor the night before? If she were leaving the resort, which she almost certainly would be given their conversation, maybe he could catch her on her way out and try to persuade her to stay…and if he couldn’t stop her from leaving, well, he could give her his phone number at least. Or they could make plans—real plans—to meet up in three or four days, after her bizarre full-moon dream-running game was over. He’d be in Maui for another week; there was no reason it couldn’t happen. And if not that, then he could just tell her, just try to thank her and maybe explain to her what a strange comfort she’d been to him last night...how, like a sweet, cool breeze she had blown soothingly across the raw pain of the Lucy-shaped hole in his body.

  If he left the hotel, he wouldn’t get that chance.

  So he sat in the lobby, trying to be inconspicuous and avoiding his unchanging reflection as he begged his head to stop hurting.

  And he watched the elevators. And he watched the doors.

  And he waited for Hi’iaka to appear.

  And he came to miserable grips with the extraordinary fact that he had fallen in love with yet another impossible thing in the shape of a beautiful woman.

  Chapter 3

  Gray checked his watch. Two minutes to midnight.

  His palms were slick with sweat, so he looked around for something to dry them on, something that wasn’t his shirt or his shorts. He came up empty. So he just shook them instead and hoped for the best.

  He glanced nervously up at the moon—or rather, he glanced up at where the moon would be, if not for the blanket of clouds in the nighttime sky. “Come on, la luna,” he whispered, bouncing on his toes. “Don’t be a jerk.”

  The day had ended with a few room service beers and a pretty good pork sandwich, all of which he’d consumed from his balcony…which, he realized after five wasted hours in the lobby, actually looked out over the front entrance to the hotel. For the whole afternoon, he’d stared out at the sloping driveway, hoping to catch a glimpse of Hi’iaka. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d do if he saw her—he kept the empty beer bottles close, in case he had to start smashing them from three stories up to get her attention. But it didn’t matter, in the end, because he didn’t see her.

  He hoped it meant she was still at the hotel.

  Now here he stood, back on the lanai, feeling nervous and awkward like a high school kid praying for his prom date to show. There was no sign of her yet.

  But she still had two minutes.

  “So much can happen in two minutes,” he told himself, swinging his arms and clicking his tongue in his cheek. “You could ride fifteen bulls in two minutes. Most people never even find the time to ride one at all.”

  He frowned down at his t-shirt and wondered for the fiftieth time if he should have worn a button-down.
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br />   No way, said a little voice in the back of his head. She would have thought you were a total nerd.

  “Yeah, but now I look sloppy,” he argued, smoothing out the cotton.

  It’s not sloppy, insisted the voice, it’s beach-casual.

  “Yeah. Beach-casual. Okay. Yeah. I’m beach-casual.” He lowered his voice an octave and leaned back with his elbows on the railings. “I’m...beach-casual,” he crooned, giving the empty patio a wink. Then his elbows slipped on the streaks of sweat his hands left behind, and he fell backward, his armpits slamming into the metal railing for the second time in two days. “Ow!” he whined, pulling himself up and shaking out his arms. He searched for bruises and found a pair of circular sweat stains instead. “Seriously?!” he cried, flapping his sleeves in a desperate attempt to get them to dry. “Why am I such a mess?”

  You’re a beach-mess, the voice said in the most soothing tone it could muster. Then it thought for a second. But...man, yeah. Seriously. You’re a disaster.

  “Thanks.”

  He looked glumly down at his watch once more. Precisely midnight.

  Hi’iaka was not there.

  “She’s probably on beach time,” he reasoned aloud, pinning his arms down at his sides so no one could see the rapidly-spreading stains around the pits. “She’ll be here. Probably. I mean...right? She’ll probably show.”

  At 12:47, he decided to call it a night.

  “Impossible things,” he sighed over the sound of the ocean below. “Impossible, impossible, impossible things.”

  He was about to walk back into the hotel when the moon broke through the clouds, washing the beach in its soft white glow. “Save it,” Gray called up to the sky, shaking his head. “She’s not coming.”

  But something caught his eye, something illuminated by the moonlight down on the beach below. It was movement of some sort that he couldn’t quite make sense of. He leaned over the railing and squinted into the darkness. Something was definitely moving in the sand…

  The trail of activity broke up the beach and crossed onto the hotel’s lower patio. It looked like a long string snaking its way across the concrete.

  It was headed for the ramp that led to the deck where Gray stood.

  “What…is that?” he whispered, cocking his head to the side and furrowing his brow at the thin white thread. “Is that a…no; tapeworms only live inside of people. Don’t they? Or…wait, do they?” He wished he’d continued med school for another semester. He almost certainly would have had a biology class.

  The thread continued to grow as it wound around the pool deck, and soon it was twenty feet long and counting. It really did look like a tapeworm. Gray was rapt with fascination and disgust and couldn’t look away. The front end of the thread reached the sloping walkway toward the deck where he stood, and in the wash of moonlight, he could see that it wasn’t a thread at all, but a long, wavering line of moving, skittering somethings.

  “What are those?” he muttered. He looked around for someone else, anyone else who might be witnessing this phenomenon spewing forth from the beach, but he was alone on the lanai. This entire end of the resort was deserted, as far as he could see. Even the bar was untended, and that was definitely not normal. He turned back to the army of single-file creatures and recoiled when he saw how much progress they’d made in the few seconds his back was turned. The head of the line was almost all the way to the top of the ramp now, and the train trailed all the way back to the beach….where it was still growing. He took a few steps backward, peering down in wonder at the tiny white creatures. He could see them clearly now; they were hideous little monsters, with vicious, snapping claws and bulging, waggling eyes as dark and black as ink. Each one skittered on five pairs of legs, with hard exoskeletons that scratched and scrabbled against the cement. They were unsightly. They were grotesque. They were…

  “Sand crabs?” Grayson Park had seen many strange things in his life. He had seen a rooster do a tap dance in Texarkana. He had seen a woman set herself on fire while swallowing swords on Coney Island. He’d even once seen a cloud in the sky that looked exactly like fat Elvis, jumpsuit and sweat and microphone and everything, and he had the picture on his phone to prove it. But a fifty-foot line of sand crabs scuttling sideways in unison into a Hawai’ian hotel at forty-eight minutes after midnight had them all beat. He knew it, and so did his knees, which was probably why they turned to jelly the second it all computed, sending him crumpling to the patio, dazed and terribly, horribly confused.

  The sound of the crabs as they drew nearer was deafening. Tiny though they were, the clack-clack-clack of thousands of claws on concrete could be heard over the soft roar of the ocean. The crabs reached the deck, turning at the top of the ramp. They moved straight for the spot where Gray lay collapsed on the ground. The entire army of crustaceans came for him, snapping their claws and wagging their terrible eyes. He wanted to leap to his feet, to sprint to the elevator, to run screaming to his room, to stuff towels under the door so they couldn’t come in, couldn’t rip the skin from his flesh and feast on his organs. But he was paralyzed, frozen in his confusion and amazement, and his traitorous body refused to react with either fight or flight. Instead, he lamely put up his hands, shielding his face from the pale white onslaught.

  But when the head crab reached his foot, it turned to the left.

  The second in line turned to the right.

  The third went to the left, the fourth went to the right, and so on—left, right, left, right, so that the long line of sand crabs broke like a wave at the toe of his flip-flop and spread around him, enveloping him in a sea-life circle as the two curving columns met behind his back. When the circle was complete, the next crabs in the line split off and made a second ring just outside of the first, and when that circle was whole, they formed a third, and a fourth. Gray could do nothing but watch helplessly as he was surrounded by more and more sand crabs on all sides.

  After a few minutes, the procession ended, and the final circle was complete. The crabs surrounded him in concentric rings more than thirty rows deep.

  He finally climbed to his feet and made a full spin, gaping down at the crabs that covered the deck like a blanket. The crabs didn’t move; they stared up at him with their black eyes waving on their little stalks, like they were waiting for some signal.

  “What is happening?” he asked.

  The crabs began to click their claws in the air. Then, on some imperceptible cue, the tiny monsters to his right broke ranks and spun open like a door, leaving a man-sized break in their crustacean wall. The crabs looked up at him expectantly. They blinked. They blinked again.

  They waited.

  “Is that...for me?” Gray asked, pointing at the opening. His cheeks flushed a little at the realization that he was addressing a host of sand crabs. But then again, they seemed to be the ones with all the answers. “Should I...go?”

  The crabs clicked their claws. Their eyestalks bobbed.

  Gray stepped through the opening.

  The crabs that formed the open door broke free of formation once again. They thinned themselves into a single-file line and click-clacked their way back to the top of the ramp. When they reached it, they stopped and turned back to look at Gray. Click-click-click went their claws. They blinked again.

  “Down there?” Gray asked, pointing at the lower patio. The eyestalks bobbed. He shook his head in weary disbelief and threw up his hands. “What the hell?” he said, stepping toward the walkway. He remembered something he’d told his students during the unit on Edgar Allan Poe the previous year, and he smiled in bewilderment. He gestured toward the crabs and the dark beach beyond and declared, “You might as well embrace the weird!”

  He marched down the ramp and followed the crab line around the pool. He chanced a look over his shoulder and saw the circular mass of crustaceans unspooling itself and foll
owing him down the walkway. He whistled and shook his head. “Pretty neat trick,” he murmured.

  An incident from a month or so earlier popped into his head: his buddy Patrick had rounded up a few guys Gray barely knew, headed down from Chicago, picked him up in his old Impala, and driven the whole crew down to Memphis for Gray’s bachelor party. It was a pretty depressing experience, all things considered, at least the parts Gray remembered. Except for Patrick, the other guys were practically strangers, and the town itself had been in something of an economic gutter. But there were definitely some highlights, and one of them presented itself as they stumbled through the Peabody Hotel that Saturday morning as a shortcut to the next bar and saw a line of trained ducks marching down the carpet and climbing into the hotel fountain. It was a strange and wonderful thing to watch, especially after a few beers, and it had left quite an impression on Gray.

  He remembered those Peabody ducks now. If you can train a duck, he thought, maybe you can train a crab, too.

  He set a mental reminder to give the hotel five stars on Yelp for their impressive work with crustaceans.

  The crabs shuffled around the pool, waving past the deck chairs in the soft moonlight with uncanny precision. Gray followed slowly, careful not to crush any of the creatures underfoot. They led him around the edge of the pool, under a line of umbrellas, across the beach walk, and right onto the sand.

  “I am not following you into the ocean,” he warned, pulling off his flip-flops and stepping onto the beach. “I’ve seen Jaws. I know how this goes.”

  But the crabs stopped about halfway down the bank. They began to clump together, forming a tight collection of shells and claws that grew larger and larger as the laggards caught up and filed into place. The crab pile grew so big that Gray had to take a few steps backward just to give them more room. The last crab joined the group, and there were a few seconds of tense silence as they stood there as one, bobbing their eyestalks, clicking their claws.