by Jill Malone
I shook my head, leaned my shoulder against the drab cement wall, and mindlessly straightened one of the many precarious stacks of books on her desk: “That’s spurious and terribly oversimplified and you know it. What do craft and ritual have to do with drastic leaps in evolution? Are you suggesting that egregious lawlessness is an evolutionary trait?”
“Never forget, Elliot, that academic institutions are insular. There is a wide world of evil and ignorance out there. Evolution, by its very nature, concerns the development of acute survival skills. In a single word: savagery. Consider why crocodiles and sharks are pinnacle predators—creatures that have reached the most sophisticated level of evolution possible for their species—and what that means. Savagery, Elliot, to be the strongest, fastest, most brutal creature in your environment, this is what the crocodiles and sharks have mastered. The only threats to their dominance are humans and each other.”
I kicked the base of her chair, “Don’t try to use crocodiles against me. Your theory underestimates the vital shaping power of intelligence.”
“Not at all. I simply doubt its ability to limit the sprawl of criminal enterprise.”
“You really need to give up teaching at the prison. It’s fractured your mind. So you see fatalism in evolution? You see a prescient consciousness? What about the prey’s evolution?”
“Evolution involves simply the struggle to stay alive through any means necessary. The prey evolves over time so that it will continue to outwit the predator. Therefore the predator’s savagery inspires the prey’s evolution, or the prey’s extinction. I do, in fact, see fatalism in evolution. I will not mislead you. I believe there is a god, but he does not love us.”
She guffawed good-naturedly and handed the journal back to me.
“A pretty poem for a tragic age, my friend,” she said.
“I never realized the depth of your pessimism.”
“You’re right; I should stop teaching at the prison. One more essay from a nineteen-year-old who cannot spell don’t properly and regrets above all else that she disappointed her children, and I will howl until the ice caps finally melt and end all suffering. I hope that Rilke is right and flight is our reprieve.”
When Delvo had gone, I sat in the office alone, examining the sheet upon which she had written the English translation. Why this poem? What had my mother seen in the lines? Was it hope?
During my second class that afternoon, Amber, a bushy-haired haole in pre-med who had aced the last three tests, stopped reading her translation and looked at me.
“I hated this myth,” she said quietly.
“Why?” I asked, noting that several of the other students had nodded in agreement.
“It’s so evil. Actaeon just stumbled upon her. He wasn’t some pervert trying to see her naked or attack her or anything. He was lost. He made a wrong turn.”
“Our justice system holds people to a similar standard. You can be convicted of a crime whether or not you knowingly broke the law.”
“Yes, but we don’t let your dogs devour you.”
The class laughed.
“The gods exact vengeance as they see fit. Diana is chaste. Any man is a threat to her chastity, no matter what his intentions.”
Unconvinced, Amber shook her head, returned to reading the translation. Disturbance of a sacred place, a virgin, a god—these were heavy sins—though Delvo might have argued Actaeon was compelled to agitate Diana. That the Fates had already cast him as a stag in the final act, and the resultant savagery had been made inevitable by Diana’s being stronger, faster, more brutal. I too was starting to transform: the wounds on my back precluded bikini tops, surfing, chummy pats on the back. I began to seem a different creature with my long-sleeved shirts and stiffened gait.
XXXI.
On the rainiest weekend I’d ever witnessed, Nick took me to the Honolulu International Film Festival to watch the day-long anime exhibit. Upended umbrellas clogged the aisles, their wire tips grasping at our pant legs as we scuttled down a row of soggy, shivering attendees. A rotund film critic introduced the anime shorts and explained the transformative storytelling vision of Japanese animation, where moral ambiguity made a clear bad-guy inconceivable and imagination took the stories from underground cities to flying pirate battleships.
Nick watched each film like a child—gasping with delight at the intense scope of the animation (the worlds of hyperrealism), sniggering at the silly characters and incidents (the chipmunks mating like humans), suffering through the often heart-rending experiences of the characters (the chipmunks parted when a hunter shoots the female). When an artistic young man was dragged away by the Establishment and tortured into believing he had never seen a mermaid, much less loved one, Nick clenched his fists and held his breath as if contemplating some method of rescue for the pencil-looking character on the screen.
In his basement flat, Nick had organized a giant home theater in which his collection of hundreds of movies could be viewed with superb acoustics and just the right amount of light to keep one from going blind after an 18-hour movie marathon. The first film we’d watched together, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, had taken nearly six hours to get through since, in addition to numerous smoke breaks, Nick had stopped the movie repeatedly to give me background information on the actors, sets, cars, direction, etc. In the scene of the final chase through the condemned building, he stopped the tape and told me I was about to see the most beautiful thing imaginable. I nodded appreciatively and prepared myself. He’d been referring to the derelict, crumbled foyer of a once grand hotel, where the camera paused momentarily before ascending the staircase in pursuit of Spencer Tracy’s double-crossing cop. Did I know so little about beauty?
During the festival’s afternoon break, Nick and I sprinted four city blocks through the blitzkrieg of rain to a dive of a Chinese restaurant; he ordered beef broccoli and pork fried rice for both of us. Stripping our jackets, we dripped all over the torn cushions of our booth, and stole napkins from the next table to use as towels. From the walls, black and white porcelain cats glared at us. After several cups of hot tea, I felt the ache leave my fingers.
“I was born in Okinawa,” Nick said. “My dad was stationed there until 1969, and one of my first memories is watching ‘Ultraman’ on television with Andy. Sort of a precursor to ‘Power Rangers’—you know, a live-action robot warring with various monsters. Probably pretty cheesy now, but at the time we were insane for ‘Ultraman’—had the action figures and used to act out the various fight sequences, sing the battle songs, I’ve dug anime ever since.”
“I remember ‘Ultraman’—the red and silver robot, yeah? I remember the boys at school collected each one. They had different masks or something.”
“Different helmets. Yeah, each successive action figure looked tougher and more futuristic—different suits as well. I can’t believe you remember that.”
“God, it was all those boys talked about for months.”
“What’s your earliest memory?”
I thought of the orchard, and navigating the paths beside my mother. How the long grasses swayed like souls against her legs. Always the wind in the branches confused with the croon of birds.
“Walking through the orchard with my mother. But I don’t think it’s accurate.”
“Why?”
“I remember her holding my hand, but she wouldn’t have. She rarely touched me.”
“What do you mean? She had to touch you sometimes.”
“She was so intense, you know? Every movement, every expression, I had this sense of her, this awareness. I’d tuned into her presence, but she was removed, peripheral, like an electron orbiting a nucleus. I remember her stories, and being beside her in the orchards. I can hear her voice all these years later, and the smell of her, but I don’t remember ever being held or kissed.”
Nick leaned across the table and brushed my hair back from my forehead. Contracted under his thick eyebrows, the hazel seriousness of his eyes worried for me.
Could he not understand how that thought terrified me more than any other? The waitress brought our heaping plates and another pot of tea. Around us, the other booths had filled slowly so that the restaurant buzzed with conversation. Nick hadn’t shaken his concern. With his chopsticks, he stirred his sauce in a whirl, tangling broccoli, carrots, and meat with the noodles.
I scooped the rice greedily into my mouth. In the booth behind us a man reported to the waitress that the rain hadn’t let up as it streaked down the windows directly across from where she stood, waiting to take his order.
“Who’s your favorite actor?” Nick asked.
“It’s still Emma Thompson.”
“Oh, I’ve asked that before? OK, what’s your most embarrassing moment?”
“When I caught my hair on fire in the school cafeteria blowing out my birthday candles.”
“Seriously? Which birthday?”
“My seventeenth. My buddies put too many candles on the ice-cream cake. Singed off my eyebrows, all the hair around my face, and burned these round sores into my lips. And Jesus, the smell—too horrible to describe—all this black smoke rising from my head in a dark halo. Everyone just sat at the table with their mouths opened, watching my head flame like a tiki torch.”
He laughed at me: “Oh my god, that’s classic. I wish I’d been there.”
“I had to shear my hair to get rid of all the damage. Really sexy.”
“You look good with sheared hair now. OK, first kiss?”
“Second grade, Michael Watanabe’s bedroom closet. And then he showed me his little dick.”
“Favorite band growing up?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not going to.”
“Simon & Garfunkel.”
He laughed.
“They were my dad’s favorite,” I said. “We listened to them all the time when I was a kid—wore the records out.”
“I never would have figured.”
We finished the plates, and reclined in the booth to sip the last of our tea as the restaurant emptied around us. Outside, the fog of moisture hazed pedestrians and vehicles.
“What was your finest hour?” he asked.
I thought of the day I’d graduated from Trinity, how the dentist had prepared a lavish dinner of Chilean sea bass with tart, spicy sauce and we’d drunk an expensive bottle of white wine that made me giddy and euphoric. I had loved her then. Her dark eyes pulling at me like the moon.
“When I was offered the research position at the Linguistics Institute.”
“Really? But you left three years later.”
“Still,” I said by way of explanation, and shrugged.
I stretched my legs under the table, had an image of the dentist returning from her vacation in Greece to find my sullen note and nothing more. Nothing more. Scouring through his wallet for the correct amount to pay our bill, Nick’s head bowed into his task, his lips moving as he calculated tip. I ate my fortune cookie, left the scrap of paper on my plate unread.
“So you ready for more anime?”
I nodded, clapped my hands: “Bring on the moral ambiguity.”
XXXII.
During the mornings I worked at UPS on the ramp—with Grey wearing his requisite white shirt and tie!—the tough physical work was a relief to me after months in the classroom. For those five hours I didn’t have to worry about cutbacks, Nick, tadpoles, or my own inadequacy. My body found a groove and I worked past exhaustion and pain to a sort of bliss.
“How long before I’m driving forklift?” I asked Grey one morning when he picked me up for work.
“You’re unreal. I’ll partner you with Chance Chang—he’s my best guy. You’ll be driving forklift in a matter of weeks.”
During the fall semester, I had to shower at school Tuesdays through Fridays, but the extra money was worth it, as well as the added benefit of worrying less about the negotiations, then underway, to avert a teachers’ strike. UPS had killer benefits as well and Grey—one of the few non-asshole supervisors—looked out for me. Partnering me with Chance made for a sweet time: the guy was hapa (white mother, Chinese dad) and had gone to the hippie Evergreen University in Washington, where he’d smoked pot and blitzed on mushrooms all the while avoiding the unpleasant constraints of a grades-dictated education as he majored in Philosophy. Two years out of college, he worked mornings at UPS for the benefits, and afternoons at the landscaping company he owned with a buddy from high school. Thin and lanky with scraggly, orange-tinted brown hair, he ate poi and tuna on white bread compulsively. When Grey told him I surfed longboard, Chance and I were buds for life.
“Longboard girl, oh yeah? Shoots, you come out one Sunday morning, yeah? 4:00 a.m., we surf Queens: get choice waves and no fucking tourists.”
I’d seen Chance at Anna Banana’s with some of his surfing buddies: very earthy fellows who were obsessed with grabbing each other’s crotches, but they’d seemed silly and harmless.
“You teach U.H.?”
“Yeah, Latin.”
“Ho, Latin? You’re like European?”
“I went to school in Ireland. I grew up in Maui, on an orchard near Haiku.”
That was my second score; Chance wanted to know every detail about the orchard and what it had been like to grow up among the trees. He would have loved my mother; listening to her stories in the mango grove would have been Chance’s idea of nirvana.
Since the fall rains had made everything dismal, Emily and I started racquetball wars at her gym. I’d played tennis in high school, but racquetball was a different species. Certainly some people were adept at targeting low flat shots or wicked unrecoverable angles, but Emily and I simply wailed. I’d go into the musty echo chamber with my body knotted tight as cornrows, punish that sweet blue ball with my dwarf racket until I couldn’t grip the handle anymore, and then break for water. We’d play best of seven and every set was like being reborn—all sins purged; we were purified.
A shocking amount of swearing and grunting droned through the room with a frequency to rival the winged ball. Emily played well, and what I lacked in skill I compensated for with aggression—hurling myself into the walls, diving across the wooden floor with my racket stretched optimistically toward the lowest of low shots, battering into Emily like a wrecking ball. All too often our rackets connected with our competitor’s body rather than the ball (mostly by accident), heightening the level of tension in the swampy, tropical room where Emily had been reduced to playing in a sports bra and boxers. I kept my shirt on despite the sauna.
Emily and I had reached Appomattox—no one had disarmed, but we’d established a ceasefire. I hadn’t slept with her since the nipple piercing. That night, she’d stayed in my bed, where I applied ice compresses wrapped in washcloths, vigilant and worn with the weight of desire, with ending. Since that night, we’d drunk beer in the garden, gone for breakfast or sushi, and played racquetball three times a week. A tension lingered, but only a variation of the sexual energy that had always complicated our relationship.
After we’d played for a solid hour, one Saturday in November, Emily slammed her racket into my back, catapulting me onto my belly. With a screech, my knees grated against the floorboards before I came to rest, the taste of sweat and dust in my mouth.
“Shit, I’m so sorry. I know that hurt.”
She tried to suppress a wave of hysterical laughter that erupted when I groaned.
“Oh, you bitch!”
“Are you OK?”
She knelt beside me, coughing and spurt-giggling, as she rubbed the spot on my back where she’d nailed me. Having finally caught my breath, I’d meant to clamber up and redeem myself when my brain ignited: a feverish sting tore through my back from the press of her hand; as I writhed from her grip, I couldn’t quite capture a reflexive yelp.
She recoiled, “What the fuck?”
Mistaking my yelp, she tightened
her grip and forced me back onto the floor, straddling my body with her own longer one.
“Don’t move. Jesus, I may have damaged your back. Stop squirming, honey.”
“It’s OK. Forget it. I’m fine, Em. I’m fine.”
She’d already pushed my shirt up to examine my back, and then I felt it: she shuddered. I felt her shudder. Her hold on my torso relaxed, her weight shifted off me, and I lay there, eyes closed, waiting for her to say something. Christ, oh Christ. In a moment I felt her hand on my back again, lightly with a caution that might have been tenderness.
“Jane?”
I waited, still unable to move as if her hand on my back were a winch securing me to the floorboards. My body started to tremble involuntarily. She let go then and I stood to stop the trembling, to shake the chill that had spread over the room. Already the spot where her racket hit me had begun to tighten. I pulled my shirt down; a grimace slid like rainwater over my features and vanished.
“Jane?”
She hadn’t moved: still crouched on the floor with her arm stretched out, hovering there over the shadow of my body. I wanted her to recover quickly, to ask something more than my name. Anything, I thought. Ask me anything.
“Look at me,” she said.
I did. I turned and met her eyes and I was ready. I could have defended myself and Nick and the whole scenario. I could have been eloquent and impassioned. I could have changed that startled, horrified expression. At that point I wasn’t afraid.
“Why?” she asked.
“It’s complicated.”
“Try.”
“I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel at all. I can’t remember the last time I slept.”