Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  She learned to float for hours, calmly accepting all matter of sea life swirling round her. Clicking dolphins, barracuda like swimming stilettos, silver blizzards of sprats. One day a twenty-foot oarfish wrapped itself round her, thick red Samurai fringe down its spine jangling like tambourines. It slowly tightened its embrace, opened its great jaws round her head, then looked into her eyes. Something registered. Some common wisdom forever known. The fish seemed to sigh, slowly uncoiled, swam off through her streaming hair.

  She wandered aimlessly with a diligence, like someone looking for a sign. Not yet sixteen, she was already a widow, a tribeless woman with nothing but visionary powers. Powers that seemed to do nothing for her; she couldn’t even understand her dreams. A giant in a cape of rain, riding a corpse across the ocean’s skin. A face taking shape inside a wave, teeth snapping a squid behind the eyes. What did it mean? Why did it frighten her?

  One day on the Kona Coast Road she saw a mixed-marriage couple, Hawaiian-Chinese, leading two pack-horses. Seeing Pono, they ran off the road, beating the flanks of the horses.

  “Wait,” she cried. “For taro, rice, I tell your dreams.”

  The couple stopped, slowly approached, uncovering the packs on the horses. Under cooking pots and hammocks were two children, hidden in rolled tapa.

  “Look dere faces,” the husband whispered. “And tell what gonna’ be.”

  Flesh suppurated on each small face. Eroded noses. An eye glassy and blind. There was not enough left to tell they were children.

  “Ma‘i Pākē” the mother said. She looked behind them down the road, then looked at her husband. “Wikiwiki. ‘Fore da māka’i come catch us. No take my keeds away in cage!”

  They were fleeing bounty hunters, running with their leprous children to the mountains. Pono stared at them, then squinted, looking at the sky. “One gonna’ die soon . . . One gonna’ give you ma‘i Pākē. But you three gonna’ live in the jungle for many years.”

  The Chinese husband grasped her hand. “Mahalo! Mahalo!” He pointed to their tiny farm somewhere in the background. “Fresh kine vegetables, taro. Plenny fish in pond!”

  They floated north with their tiny, rotting burdens.

  Two hours later she was stopped by an armed posse looking for the couple. She pointed them in the opposite direction, down toward the sea, talking in heavy Pidgin to give her words credibility.

  “Dey goin’ hide in caves, you know da kine? Wait for one boat take dem ocean. Real pupule, neh?”

  So Pono lived on their tiny farm, harvesting food from their garden, pounding taro root, straining it into one-finger poi. She talked to geckos, scorpions, mongoose, just to hear her voice, give herself back to herself. Farmers, passing tradesmen, women from the fields, brought her tokens in return for telling dreams. Sometimes they touched her arm to see if her flesh was real. She was beautiful, but because of her powerful mana, they backed away not seeing her loneliness. Once she lay still for so long, when she woke a spider web had grown across her mouth.

  She dared everything—exhausting herself by climbing forty-foot palms for coconuts, splitting them blindly with heavy axes. She ate all manner of herbs and roots, searching for company in new sensations. She dashed crazily into the surf, slid onto the backs of giant manta rays, and let them fly her through the sea on wings spread twenty feet.

  One day she dragged in a strange species of seaweed that glowed pink and tasted septic. She stuffed her mouth and chewed, hoping it would kill her. Instead, alkaloids in the weed produced a floating sensation. Standing in the surf, she felt her jaws tighten, then contract, something growing like a snout. Then she was swimming, released from gravity. She plunged down, sporting through coral canyons, through boulevards of light limned by prismatic lens of waves. Her lightness intoxicated her, she could no longer feel the weight of her organs. Huge sharks suddenly bladed along beside her, playful, amorously nudging her. Pono pulled back, terrified, then, in the eyes of one of them, she saw her reflection: a white-tipped reef shark, powerful in size, moving like a bullet. Schools of smaller fish scattered as she lunged. The taste of blood.

  She seemed to swim for days, until she felt irritated, her buoyancy beginning to pall. She felt wrapped tight, restricted. Nerves in the soles of remembered feet began to cry for land. Her joints mourned the heaviness of tissue and musculature that governed them. The profound desire to walk, the lack of power to do so. With a blinding sense of helplessness, Pono saw she had no arms. She was bound in a bag of scales slowly suffocating her. All she could do was open her gills, raise her dorsal fin and swim.

  She tried to push herself out of the water, to fall backwards into air. But long draughts of air almost killed her. Unable to breathe in the atmosphere, she plunged back into water. Then she remembered she was asleep, that her shark form was imagined. They say when one remembers one is dreaming, one is already near the end of the dream. She relaxed, slid through waves, until she slid into a dream of waking.

  She woke on the sand, curled up like an ear. She looked down at her skin, and it was gray, eerily marbling to brown, then golden, and it was rough like sandpaper, visibly returning to petal softness. In her mouth there was blood and the taste of raw fish. After that, whenever she felt too lonely in the world, she went down to the sea and ate the weed that glowed. Then for hours, until she longed for gravity, she entered the world of manō. And, though she was in the world of humans, she was no longer wholly of that world.

  One stormy day, blading through wintry waves, Pono larked off alone from a school of sharks, seeing a face, a human face, taking shape inside a wave. Circling slowly, she came upon the human again, wrestling with a squid large as a steer. Awful tentacles whipped the man’s torso as he drove his knife into its stomach, grabbed its neck, and bit it viciously behind the eyes. The squid shuddered, screamed like a woman, making Pono’s hide ripple. Loosing its tentacles, it died, ink cataracting in clouds.

  She watched as he dragged the thing ashore, laboring over it in a simple loincloth. He was huge, dark, built like a warrior, with the big, handsome features of pure Polynesians. Heavy, brooding brow, long Asiatic eyes, a generous, strong nose, full lips like a woman juxtaposed with a fierce, square jaw. She swam back and forth watching, as finally he laid down his knife, washed his hands, then lifted a huge wave-sliding board, shouting and running with it into the sea. Papa he’e nalu, what haole called surfboards, the sport her people had mastered two thousand years ago.

  Feeling a thrill, a need to follow, Pono bladed along behind his board, huge, slender and stiff, so he seemed to be riding a giant corpse. Kneeling, paddling out to the deep, he slowed where the ocean changed to many-fathom colors. Now he straddled the board as if it were a horse, waiting for something momentous. Finally, a wave thundered in high as a ship, moaning and full of destruction. Muscles knotted with tension, he stood and roamed wintry juices, finding the crest of the wave, riding it home like the prow of an invisible ship.

  The huge man rode for hours, paddling out on his knees, sailing in like a god, and for hours Pono followed. The sky suddenly cracked as if from an ax. Rain poured down so heavily, he seemed to be standing between two seas. Then a wave took him down, he disappeared as the longboard shot into the air. Pono dived deep, searching until she saw him tumbled in a cyclone of coral and shell, tossed and dragged like a doll. She whipped round him, trying to lift him up to air. A shadow fell over her, hung suspended, then the longboard seemed to dive. She heard the cracking sound.

  When one remembers one is dreaming, one is already near the end of the dream.

  She woke lying in the surf, her head numb and bleeding. The storm abated, there was only heavy rain. Far down the beach she saw the huge man sitting up, touching his scraped arms and legs. He propped his longboard in the sand, studying it for damage. And all the while, she watched. Finally, shaking his black hair loose of sand and pebbles, he dragged on a rain cape made of pandanus leaves, that hung from his shoulders to his knees. Wrapping up hacked-off parts of the squ
id, he stood slowly, dragging his board to a shelter in the bushes.

  She came to me from the sea. This is how he would always remember. For, as he neared, Pono struggled slowly to her feet, collapsing again in the surf. Pulling her gently onto the sand, he watched her skin turn from gray to brown to gold, from sandpaper to petals of young jasmine. He saw the snout slowly re-form into a human jaw, saw the curve of human lips as her earthly beauty returned. He wrapped her in his raincape, cautiously, as one touches something that’s one of a kind.

  When she woke, they were on horseback, she was sitting behind him, hands tied securely round his waist. Cool rain ran down her face from his naked back. Steam from his flesh, the man-ocean scent of him, smote her with coital intensity. When she woke again, they were trotting up a driveway ceilinged like a cathedral of giant ironwoods and eucalypti.

  Later, she swam into a sea of billowing curtains, pale porcelain, linen sheets. The sun was painting the room with ragged paws, someone conversing with a doctor. Her old leather pouch had been placed in her palm, all she possessed in the world.

  He approached, leaned over her, dark as a god, teeth savagely bright and perfect.

  “I am Duke Kealoha. I have brought you home.”

  Nā Hūnā

  * * *

  The Hidden

  “NOTHING IS DESTROYED, things merely change shape or form.”

  He was trying to explain about the beans, how they were transformed into coffee, and how the faces in the leaves were real, faces she thought she had imagined in the hallucinatory weeks of her healing, workers twittering like birds, picking coffee cherries in the delicate trees. He talked on about soil, rainfall, ideal altitudes, how it was all done by hand—planting, picking, sorting, processing.

  “Inside the ripe, red cherry is the bean. The cherry pulp is used for fertilizer, mash for livestock. Nothing is destroyed, a thing becomes another thing. I try to think of my family that way, that they are not dead but vitally alive, perhaps in another form, on another plane. I know you have seen them in a dream.”

  Pono’s head buzzed, she sat down, holding it between her hands. Remembrances, awful. Human screams like blades shrieking on lathes.

  “Why don’t I hear clocks in the house?” she asked. “This silence. Why isn’t there ticking?”

  “Here, time has no significance.” He knelt before her, his handsome face distorted. “Are you afraid?”

  Rags of her dream floated by. His family dead. Or kenneled away. Faces rotted, hands withered into artifacts. If she remained with him she would die or grow into a horror. But she had already grown to cherish him as he droned beside her all the weeks of her healing, her fractured skull reknitting.

  Duke rose and stared out of a window. “In time, fear will chase the workers away, the coffee orchards will become a jungle. I will be shunned. The house will fall to ruin.” He asked again. “Are you afraid?”

  Pono looked down, understanding they didn’t have time for love to mature; it had to condense quick. Turning her back on the world as if shutting a book and rising, she moved to him and took his hand.

  He taught her all he knew of coffee, walked her through his orchards, filling her lungs with the scent of arabica, the winey fruit-smell of ripe coffee cherries, describing the spring flowering period when white gardenia-like blossoms turned fields into “Kona snow” and how, after a few days the petals fell, revealing tiny green berries that, in late fall, ripened into bright red cherries, ready for harvesting.

  And as they walked past field hands picking cherries, women raking on hoshidana, men lifting burlap sacks of beans, people bowed, tipped their hats respectfully, his powerful presence acknowledged by all. And moving with him through the town of Captain Cook, Pono saw how people in the streets, and in farthest corners, the smallest shacks and alleys, waved, feeling Duke’s magnetism. He seemed to envelope them in a kind of spell, his size, his dignity, his passion for the land reminding them of their Hawaiianness, their fierce, proud heritage.

  By nature she was excessive, and so he taught her many things, horseback riding and jumping, fishing, and hunting turkey and wild boar in upcountry forests. Because her mind was so keen, he read her Balzac and Thackeray, watched her skin dampen and glow when he wound the turntable, playing Chopin and Strauss. They stood for long periods over maps and globes, as he tried to explain the world to her, the vastness, the explosive newness of some cultures, the golden dotage of others. He tried to explain electricity and thermodynamics. One day he brought home a new Buick, just off the ship from California. Before she would learn to drive, Pono went at both fenders with a hammer, until the car was comfortably dented, less intimidating.

  Duke knew three foreign languages, had traveled the world, studied at the Sorbonne, and owned silk suits custom-made in London. Yet he found Pono the most enthralling female he had ever known, possessing a powerful energy, a charge of heat that stunned all life around her. Her beauty matched her native intelligence. She came to me from the sea, he would remember, knowing magnetic fluids flowed through her, that her skin could change color and texture, that locals in town called her kahuna.

  Nothing they did could shock each other. They stood side by side as equals not needing to experience things others experienced, not even needing to go out in the world, for they had their own mythology. Pono talked him through her history, all the way back to Mathys Coenradsten, and he saw how her family had erased itself through the generations. His had done it in less than five years.

  Some nights they drifted through the house and, seeing it through her eyes, Duke saw it for the first time. Rooms filled with massive furniture of Malaysian teak and koa, ancient, rare Hawaiian prints. Old Persian rugs on floors laid with Italian tiles, lamps of jade and marble shaded with raw silk. There were hand-painted porcelains from China and Belgium, velvet bellpulls, satins, silks. And rooms lined with leather books from which Pono heard a constant hum. Suspicious of printed words, one night, alone, she slapped a book to still the whispering. Her hand came away with dust of termites breeding in the precinct of its spine.

  Peacocks skittered behind them on polished floors, pet mynahs prudently scaled their way up the banister, while Duke showed her a life-size portrait of King Kalākaua, his father’s distant cousin, portraits of grandfathers, great-grandfathers, high-born Hawaiians all the way back to Kamehameha I. As Hawaiians began to die out, each generation in Duke’s family were courted by haole, wanting to buy their land. Then ma‘i Pākē lay waste his family, and, in horror, whites turned away.

  Duke pointed to old sepia photographs. “Mother, father, two sisters. Gone, all gone.”

  His father had been struck first, forced on the leper ship to Kalaupapa, on the neighboring island of Moloka‘i. A year later, ulcers appeared on his mother’s legs, and Duke was called home from university. Then his sisters, one by one, their husbands running from them in horror. Two cousins, a niece. It was as if some code in their family scripture decreed a leveling, a wiping out of Kealoha genes.

  Duke studied his reflection in a mirror. “A matter of time.”

  Each night he examined his body, looking for telltale spots. Numbness in the limbs, puffed earlobes. And, because he believed he was a “contact,” carrying the wild bacteria in his blood, each night he examined Pono before he made love to her, going over her body inch by inch, then embracing her, bowing over her, entering her with the madness of passion and relief. They were in each other’s blood now, lost to each other, and she waited for the numbness to begin, an unhealed lesion, the sly spreading whiteness. Then the glassiness of eyes, thickening of skin, slow putrefaction of the body. She tried to dream, to see if ma‘i Pākē would spare them. But, her heart was so full of this sad, lovely man distributing himself across her—her womb so engorged with his thick, warm lager, brain so drugged with his odor of arabica, gardenia, and soil and rich leathers, and thick hair curled from ocean air and sun—there was nothing left with which to dream.

  Time passed slowly in rich hours, lik
e silk threads of a Persian carpet slowly rewoven to its original design. Pono forgot her life in upcountry cattle grazelands, forgot the red, pine fields of her youth. And she began to forget the family that had turned its back on her. She was re-creating herself, shedding one skin for another.

  For a year, they seemed to float outside the world, privileged, inviolate, doomed. He ordered her dresses from Hong Kong and Paris. Sweeping formal gowns, capes with ostrich collars, cloaks with intricate silk embroidery. Matching shoes and purses of suede, gloves of many colored skins. They dressed for dinner, drank champagne, then wound up the turntable and danced for hours, pretending they were on an ocean liner while he described great ports of call.

  Hugging balloons of brandy snifters, late into the night they pored over picture books, Duke explaining the Prado in Spain. The Louvre. Versailles. They followed Marco Polo on his silk route through Samarkand, and viewed brilliant tapestries of painted human skins hung in imperial summer palaces of Manchu emperors. He read her Shakespeare and Molière and though Pono did not always grasp what he read, she remembered his voice so solid and deep it made her ribs vibrate, like a man speaking out in a cathedral. She remembered his cuffs smelling of lavender and thyme, the sound of mandolins and ‘ukulele from the fields, plaintive old Hawaiian songs, the bite of the brandy sharpening her teeth. These details were absorbed into her, so that years later, when she faltered, befouled and crucified by life, they flooded back, rich and nourishing as blood.