And when her lovers woke, they would touch the hollow in her pillow and still feel her heat. And they would know her stories were not fables.
HO ‘OPA‘ I
Revenge
SHE DREAMED OF WOMEN BOBBING FACEDOWN IN THE SEA, stirred in the wake of exploded boats. She dreamed of hanging corpses shimmering like earrings. Then, too, she dreamed of pink-cheeked Allies, offering food and penicillin and, later, hints and vacillations. They were the victors, they owned the spoils. She shrieked herself awake and sat all night beating dreams to death with her cane.
She rose, looked out at the dawn. It seemed to promise a new beginning, as it often did, before daylight turned up the noise of humans. She gazed round her simple room, her putty-colored jade hare walls. From outside, the hotel looked decrepit, sunlight snagging on its cracked façade. Yet she had grown comfortable here.
The day already felt electric. Something had awakened her, called her from her bed as if she were being led to a showplace, unsure what was going to be shown. She lingered at her window. Someone in another room was reading; she heard a brown sleeve turn a page. She had come to imagine her neighbor as an ancient woman with no tongue. Their silences spent time together. Sometimes the woman vanished into slumber. Sunny heard her book groping for her hand, heard it hit the floor. She imagined one eye on sleep, the other on unread pages at her feet.
From small shops below, the virulent smell of coffee brewing, sweet mochi buns side by side with pig’s cheeks. Some days she forgot how long she had been back in Honolulu. Time was no longer part of her existence. Outside, light grew across the city, roofs palpitated, palm trees trembled into flames. Then everything was glare, the sun’s alchemy. She drew her shades.
She had thought it would be another church day, sitting in shadows in hard pews, listening to Keo coach kids on horn and piano. Maybe he would play some Ellington, a little Chopin. Sometimes leftover tar—incense from masses—made her head ache; she would leave the church before his playing ended. But always, if the jacaranda man was there, she waited. Patient, attentive.
Even if she was dying, even if she had no feet. She would follow him forever. To restaurants, tea shops. To the ripe moment. One night she stood so close, she smelled his breath, a crackling deep inside him. She was not going to let life burn him to a crisp. Not let his ashes blow round a corner. It was not enough.
Now and then, when she grew weary of crowds at the Swing Club, she walked the streets of Honolulu. Inside little shops, the human tableau. Butchers meticulously carving fowl, bakers kneading rice paste. In the background, mothers crooning, nursing their infants. She touched the sad, shriveled skin of her breasts hanging like taffy.
Some nights she stood across the street from the shop called Malia Designs. Inside, a woman driving a sewing machine like a race horse, fabric flying like pennants. Sunny could almost feel the red-hot needle’s hum as Malia urged the Singer on, sometimes even shouting at it. Watching her brought Sunny a moment’s laughter, peace. She touched the label on her dress, and, in her shop, Malia looked up as if someone had touched her neck.
One night Malia breathed in sharply, feeling chilled. A presence in the shop behind her.
“Forgive me . . . for intruding. . . .”
She cried out, knowing who it was.
“Please. Don’t turn around.”
Malia waited for she knew not what. Finally she spoke. “I named my daughter Anahola. In memory of your child.”
“I know. . . .”
“She loves Keo like a father. He’ll never be alone.”
“I came to thank you, Malia.”
She kept her head down, terrified. “Sunny, let me be your friend. Let me help you!”
Sunny answered with profound tenderness. “Only . . . remember.”
The shop was still again. Sunny continued walking the streets, ending up in Chinatown. She haunted a dozen little shops crowded with jars of the endangered and the rare. Head of an albino king cobra. Freckled penis of a rhino. Bound feet like little hooves. A pygmy fetus. Under swaying paper lanterns, vials of deadly poison oils. ‘Oliana, oleander. Nn honua, angel’s-trumpet flower. Snake venom. Anti–snake venom. And in quiet yards between the shops, temples, gongs, the look and smell of saffron.
And shopkeepers telling her how two hundred years ago captains of opium and tea ships, ignorant of the value of jade, used it as ballast when sailing back from the Orient. And how at night coolies carried off the jade, burying it for decades, so their children’s children might not starve. Wizened men and women who told such tales were aunties and uncles of shopkeepers she had lived among in Shanghai. Hearing their voices made her think of her sister, Lili, and Sunny grew very still. They comforted her, patting her arm with cracked, seamed hands, refined with the labor of centuries.
Some nights she and Lili stood outside their father’s house, watching through the windows.
“He was so dynamic,” Sunny whispered. “Now, see how he sits bone-idle.”
They watched as their mother, Butterfly, cut his hair, lathered his jaw and shaved him. Some nights he and she played cards like equals, tenderly slapping each other’s hands. And sometimes while he slept, his daughters stepped into his dreams, twice-forgiving him.
Always Sunny went back to Chinatown, sitting in herb shops and seed shops with jars of dried fruits in fourteen different colors—li hing mui, si mui, hum lum, mango seed, sweetsour salty crackseed. Shop owners smiled, having grown used to her, and went on reading their papers. Some invited her to tea, and talked in scholarly ways of herb cures and root cures, poisons and balms. Most often she sat at the Anti-Mango Luncheonette, across from a certain small hotel where she watched the coming and going of a blue man.
Now she sat in her jade hare room, chilled by air that felt electric. It was midmorning when she heard the bells, the cheering. Her neighbor in the next room stood and gasped. Sunny parted her blinds, and shuddered.
HE DREAMED HE WAS HOME IN TOKYO, HAVING JUST COMPLETED officer training. Wearing his thousand-stitch belt made by his mother and sisters, he was dancing British-style with a beautiful Japanese girl who spoke three horizontal languages.
He bragged about his training. “. . . judo, bayonet-fencing, swordsmanship, horsemanship.”
She laughed in his face. “You are going to war, not on holiday!”
In his dream, the ballroom was suddenly overrun by tanks covered with nets that made him think of glamour-girl snoods. Allies pointed machine guns from the turrets. Endo reached up with his sword, taking the head of one of them. His dance partner screamed. He turned, studying her neck, feeling his sword-arm quiver. The sound of war planes, bombs whining down, turning the city into an inferno.
He woke up screaming. “Mother! Father!” His blue cheeks stained with snot.
Fully awake, he still heard planes, then sirens, tolling bells. He shook so hard, his bed bounced. He burrowed under sheets, counting explosions. He hid for hours. The bells grew louder, sirens grew louder, outside, people running like rivers.
They will turn us to ash. The city will burn for fifteen miles. I must save my parents.
He rose, reaching for his sword. There was nothing, not even his uniform. Now people screaming in the halls. Out in the streets it was late afternoon, so many fires in the hills, so many explosions, the city was fogged and dusklike. He heard cannons from warships out at sea, he saw buildings sway. Outside, he started running against the tide of thousands. Trying to reach his parents before the Allies.
He headed west in their direction, but nothing looked familiar, no one hurt or wounded, just madness in their faces. So in shock they were grinning, even dancing. With each explosion he threw himself against buildings. Still, the church bells tolled. Far in the distance, he saw planes approaching, trucks of soldiers.
Tokyo is lost. Already invaded.
Endo looked between buildings to the sea: destroyers, aircraft carriers, massive cannons pointed at his city. Now and then a BOOOMM! that tore up streets, threw cro
wds against each other. Yet they kept flowing forward, smoke everywhere, the rat-a-tat of guns. A car blew up. A city expiring.
He pressed on, trying to outrun the fires that would roll right through them. He called out for his mother and father, his sisters, knowing he could never reach them. People momentarily fell back, aghast at Endo’s face, his screams. Fluorescent colors overhead, lights coming on like fractured jewels. A sun hideously dying.
At dusk, in the distance, over a place called Sand Island, he saw planes dropping log-shaped bombs. Then, all of Sand Island exploded, flames shooting skyward. From somewhere, infantry divisions fired off countless rounds. He threw himself to the pavement, feeling nothing as crowds ran over him. He shimmied to his feet against a wall.
Time stood still. He stood still, mobs rivering against him. Then he was on a bridge, looking at the full horror of Sand Island, an inferno leaping a hundred feet into the sky. It looked contained, they would probably stoke it with gasoline until it was a fury, then un-leash it on the city accompanied by bombs. Where were his men, his forces? He saw destroyers and carriers massing, moving closer to land, saw fire from their cannons split the dusk. He continued running west.
Mother. Father. I will die with you. The emperor has ordered this!
Up a street going mauka, toward the mountains, he saw behind a fence an open field, a hillside slouching to a stream. Thirst, he felt such thirst. He would drink, then press on. Behind him, Allies in the streets, advancing. Folks would soon be dying by the thousands. If he could just get home.
He staggered to the fence, ripped his shoulder crawling through barbed wire. He crossed the field, looking down a rocky embankment. His body snapped back, struck by a stench that had haunted him. The city was threaded with streams from upland mountains that collected algae, dirt, and sewage as they deepened into flowing currents on their journey to Honolulu Harbor. In the stench, he smelled red clay.
He slid down the rocky embankment, knelt at the dirty stream, cupped his hands and drank. Then he looked up. The mouth of a tunnel gaped at him. A rusted, clay-packed metal pipe ten feet high, through which mountain water gushed in flood seasons, emptying into the harbor and the sea. He stood, and moved closer, peering into the opening.
. . . We are going underground. The tunnels of Rabaul, last sanctuary.
He advanced two steps. A place of rust and decay: walls looked bloody, the water was scum.
Inside, the stream narrowed, the uplands weren’t flooding now. There was just a quiet trickling within. Dim light showed silt along the walls, gathered in lumps of filth and weeds. He heard voices, echoes, walls behind walls. Large rats skittered on ledges beside him, staring into his eyes. He thought if he stuck out his tongue they would take it from his head.
He heard footsteps behind him. Someone breathing. He plunged deeper into the tunnel. There were soldiers he had to save, officers he had to warn. The Allies were here, and soon they would mine their way through the tunnels. He tripped on a large, shredded dog. He saw bones in the shape of a human doll. He retched, and slogged forward. Rounding a corner, he saw what looked like a passage branching off.
Down there our fortress begins. Three hundred miles of hidden tunnels!
“They are coming!” he shouted. “Command your posts! Ready your ammunition!” His voice echoing and echoing.
Again, he heard footsteps. And breathing. He turned; light hit him in the face.
“Who is it? The enemy?”
She moved the flashlight back and forth. Her hands were muddy where she had slid down the hillside after him. She wiped them on her dress. Outside bombs burst, ship’s cannons exploded. The walls of the tunnel shuddered, so that rust peppered their faces. Overhead thousands of humans running. Now he smelled fires of the city. The bells went on and on.
“Who is it?” he cried again.
She stepped closer, shining the flashlight up at her face. “Look at me. Do you remember?”
Leaning close, he studied her, then studied the walls, clay walls. He studied her again. The past stood up, inhaling.
“Moriko!” For that was what he had called her.
“My name is Sun-ja. Moriko was your whore.”
“Where is she?”
“Dead. And so am I.”
She shone the light in his face again. “I have followed you a long time. Do you wonder why?”
He was insane, yet something in him understood. “I have out-lived curiosity.”
Another explosion, screaming crowds. A hot wind rushed through the tunnel, so their skin felt singed. Heat of the burning above them.
Suddenly he grabbed her hand. “Rabaul is finished! They will capture us like this. We must retreat. Look, where the passage branches off to deeper tunnels, then hidden chambers. Allies will never find us.”
Was he pretending, or had he gone mad? She slapped his hand away. Her flashlight flew around, illuminating eyes of watching rodents. Outside, sounds like columns of soldiers in sturdy boots. Planes, bombs. The dying. Her mouth was so dry, she could not swallow. Her tongue like bark, lips cracked, her juices evaporated. She felt drops. Condensation on the walls. She was a whore in a Quonset hut.
. . . Very carefully she rises, gliding like algae through humid air. She bends, licks condensation from the wall, then moans, listening for the sea. For that is what she longs for—waves cataracting, corroding her to crystals. . . .
Leaning, she put her tongue against the filthy wall. The walls trembled and bulged, as if her tongue were against a man. Endo’s face was in his hands. Was he sobbing? Or moved to be with her? Cannons in the harbor, tearing the city apart.
“We will be buried. Gas will suffocate us like before. My sword. Where is my sword?”
Another shocking heat wave. Then she, too, heard voices in the walls. Jap soldiers crying, P-girls moaning, locked deep in airless chambers of red clay. Every scar, every stitch in her body screamed. Every organ cut out, every cell diseased and dead, every part of her already buried.
He went down on his knees. “Moriko, take my hand. Quickly! We must go deep where they will never find us.”
He looked down, shocked by his erection. He remembered bucking and hollering inside her.
Already starving, diseased, but still enough left of her to desire. Still warm and wet, a sucking fruit closing on me, clasping me. Me flooding, not in coming, but anticipation. Thinking how afterwards . . . ahh! after, there was still her neck. . . .
She swung her light at him. On his knees, he was holding his erection, his face grotesque.
I am so tired, she thought. Maybe I’ve come far enough.
She felt her big shoes sinking. Slowly she sat down in filth and mud, thirsty and exhausted. She laid her cheek against a wall and thought of cool, wet clay. She heard crowds singing far away. She thought of wasted, haggard girls entering a shower for the first time in years. She thought of them touching clean, gleaming white tiles, fingering them like the blind.
She thought of them touching soap like precious hunks of ivory. Soaping and rinsing and soaping again, singing ever so softly. Holding each other like mothers, like children, praying to cascading water baptizing their faces, their broken bodies, as if it could rinse them young and clean. Rinse everything away. Some would survive, some would find they had lived enough. She wept. Only a little, there was so little left.
The man before her begged, all blue and babbling.
“Moriko, come! If they find us, they will kill us. Bring my sword.”
He was gone. She had no further purpose here. And yet. Some things could not be permitted without redress. She thought again of Quonset huts in the Pacific. Typhoid barracks in Jakarta, Manila. Frozen tents and boxcars in Manchuria, Nanking. Kidnapped P-girls forced to march into blizzards, into swamps, into battle, defending their executioners. And when they were raped to death, diseased and finished, their bodies were split open, their warm organs used to thaw cold feet, or feed the army’s livestock. Thousands of young girls. Hundreds of thousands.
&n
bsp; Sunny hung her head remembering how her mother, Butterfly, had told her long ago of the ancient koa whine, women warriors of Hawai‘i. She told how these young women had followed their men into battle, carrying calabashes of food and gourds of water to replenish them, their wails and chants urging warriors on. She told how, when a husband or father was killed in battle, the women took up their clubs and battle-axes and javelins. With fierce war cries, koa whine rushed forward to destroy the enemy.
“That how a girl became a woman,” Butterfly had said. “When she learned ho‘opa‘i. Revenge.”
Now her mother’s words were like an army marching behind her. Sunny put down the flashlight, opened the pouch at her waist. The vial, the hypodermic needle. The Chinese herb man had instructed her so patiently, so meticulously, she could do it in the dark. When the needle was ready, she aimed the flashlight and moved closer. He saw the needle, his eyes yawned wide.
She plunged it deep into his neck, saw blue flesh suck down deadly juices of nn honua: angel’s-trumpet flower. She saw him freeze, deafened in the trumpet’s blare. It would take time. Death would come in slow, staccato riffs, piercing cell by cell, paralyzing limb by limb. He would watch his body die in segments like a worm.
He lay still. He saw her sit. She was waiting for something. The trickling stream beneath him nibbled at his skin. While streets outside exploded, while humans ran in waves, high in the Ko‘olaus it began to drizzle. Drops gathered in rivulets, which gathered in slow streams. In time, the stream beneath him would rise, imperceptible and sly. In time his heels and buttocks and shoulders would begin to sink.
She sat attentive, hour after hour. By dawn, city fires smoldered, exhausted crowds retired, thundering cannons had died. In the silence, an older thunder shook the earth. He saw her look up toward the sound. He saw her smile. Thunder would bring rains, incessant rains. And they began. It rained a full day, then a night. Ditches flooded, streams began to swell.
Song of the Exile Page 37