Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  “All we can do is add a little grace and beauty to our moments.” He looked at his watch. “And now, is it time for calligraphy?”

  He watched again the grace of her, the shape of her extended arm as she began the ritual of calligraphy, one of silence, patience, precision. Dressed in a black robe, black hair twisted up from her neck, Rachel knelt before a black-lacquered table, the only large object in an eight-tatami room. Her hands were folded in her lap, eyes fixed on the floor in a prescriptural, almost meditative, trance.

  From a small box, she produced the sumi stick, coal black, looking like a hunk of resin several inches long. Beside it, a smooth slatelike inkstone troughed at one end into which she poured a dash of water. Moistening the end of the resin stick she began to rub it against the inkstone with steady rhythms, lubricating the stone with water. Slowly, the surface of the inkstone began dissolving under the pressure of the stick. Mixing with the inkstone, the water gradually thickened, a miniature bubbling, becoming the thick black ink called sumi. This was the ritual of Sumi o suru. A practiced writer knew the consistency of sumi was right when one’s heart quieted, when one’s pulse slowed down.

  Laying the sumi stick aside, Rachel placed a length of felt on the table, arranged a sheet of ricepaper on top, weighting it with an ancient bronze. Everything in the room was black, her robe, her hair, the lacquered table, the case, the felt, the stick, the stone. Only the ricepaper was white. Hiro breathed in deeply, something touched his spine.

  She opened a case, producing a large ofude, a brush, and slowly dipped it into the sumi, kneading the tip until it was moist, becoming soft. Arm outstretched, for an instant, she held the brush poised over the ricepaper, then swooped it down like a sword. Rich, lugubrious, medallioned black loomed suddenly, even as her hand passed on. Arm stroking, flourishing, she wrote on and on like someone in a trance, as if tracing shapes already sleeping in the paper, waiting to be born.

  Lines restrained, slender as arrows, then loud, bold, reverberating like a shot. Then runic slaps as the brush turned in its own wet spoors, sighing down into the vertical. Stuttering loops, obtuse twists, then the brush barely breathing on the paper, skimming it, then . . . emptiness. White suddenly blooming in empty space between black characters, producing form, negative form, so valued by masters of the shodo, the Superior Way of Writing.

  Rachel sat back, exhausted. He heard her heart pounding. She laid down the brush, studied the characters in silence. He sat beside her, studying her composition, a love letter written in kanji, common Chinese characters. Immediately he saw the change. She had practiced daily for eight years, and there was a period when her writing possessed great delicacy and flourish in the pressure of her brush, rhythm of her hand, the quiet of her heart. It gave promise that one day she might approach Celestial Consistency, which was what shodo demanded.

  Now he saw that her writing was bolder but less beautiful, the speed and pressure of handling the brush was more obvious, less abstract. There were decorative junctures, almost academic twists in the structure of her characters, but these were not aesthetic to the learned eye. And in the white of spaces, there was no sound, nothing bloomed. He saw she would never embark on shodo, the Superior Way of Writing, she would always be engaged in shuji, the mere Practice of Letters. She had turned down another road, she was moving in her own direction. He saw she had no conscious knowledge of it, no real control of it. In her mind, she would always be waiting for him in their house overlooking the sea.

  Now, it was early evening. The hour of fantasy and legend, and still the hours far ahead, dinner of Fugu Akirame, their death/lust exercise. But first. The young perfumed prince dancing for Hiro in glittering, caparisoned crimson robe. Coy, at first flirting from behind a fan, then suddenly the face, smiling, dead, a look of cruel eroticism. The boy-prince swooning for him, falling naked in the open robe, lifelike harigata erect between his legs, his boy-groin slowly grinding, pumping, waiting.

  Hiro knelt, touched the boy between the legs, fingers sticky with liliko‘i, so they were like suction disks on the hands of river frogs. The harigata waved, enticing him. Then Hiro fell upon the boy, wrestling with him, cursing him, his silent ugly, laughing face. He pinched the cheeks maliciously, the mask slipped sideways from the back of her head, Rachel on her hands and knees, flesh-like penis strapped to the base of her spine. Righting the mask, Hiro plunged into the freakish boy, gripping the harigata like a pommel. Wrapping his arms round its back, he held Rachel’s breasts, his inexhaustible boy-girl, needing only to be turned like something on a spit.

  And later, in near darkness, Rachel dressed as a bonze, a monk sworn to chastity, in cape and stocking cap, Hiro in wig and robes, a harlot of Yoshiwara, Capital of Sin, playing with the bonze, seducing him, forcing him to stare at forbidden Shunga, erotic prints of Hokusai, Utamaro, from the Edo period. (Samurais ravaging young boys. Courtesans riding giant phalluses. A wrinkled death-face entering a virgin in her sleep. A woman penetrated by a dog, her brother, a priest. A giant tongue, a cleft.) They studied the prints silently, molesting each other, working themselves to fever pitch. And at that pitch, Rachel ready, almost begging to receive him, they abruptly stopped. He let his swollen member settle in his lap, and they were left with inner frenzy.

  They took that frenzy to a room of candlelight and linens where they would play the quietest, most exquisite game, a game that took them to the very brink. A chef appeared, uniformed and businesslike. He smiled, bowed, displayed on a platter, a fugu, a puffer fish, intact, benign-looking. Hiro studied it, touched, sniffed, then nodded. The chef repaired to the kitchen, humming quietly, knife licking this way and that, deftly removing the deadly poisonous skin and organs of the fugu. With the sweet, light taste of raw mahimahi, the fugu, if inefficiently prepared, brought death, prolonged and agonizing.

  Skin and organs of the fish were filled with tetrodotoxin more lethal than cyanide. A sliver of it, no more than the size of a firefly wing, could kill twenty people. This night, the chef prepared the fish raw, arranged elaborately as small white petals on a platter, duplicating delicate petals of the centerpeice, a rare albino orchid. Twice a year he came, and twice a year they played the deadly game of Fugu Akirame, Resignation without Despair. For one must be resigned once the petal was devoured.

  They dined. The terror on their lips, the tingling. This was a special chef Hiro flew in from Kowloon, one schooled in the sly art of dressing fugu, leaving just enough poison in the fish for diners’ lips to thrill, to tingle. In certain streets of certain cities—Tokyo, Kyoto, Hong Kong, right here in Honolulu—there were certain tiny restaurants where people played with chance, lay their lives in soft knowing hands of chefs who, for large sums of money, left more and more toxin in the fugu they prepared. Until lips surpassed the tingling stage, began to shiver, until teeth chattered, the body going into shock.

  Sometimes one bite was lethal, death almost instantaneous. More often, death came slowly, numbness in one limb, one digit at a time. In this way, in those tiny restaurants, in dark pockets of certain cities, fugu devotees had time to argue, even as they died. That death existed. It did not exist. That life prevailed, or it did not. That everything was based on chance, the toxin in one bite. Westerners were not invited to partake of fugu. They were too self-conscious about death.

  And they dined, Hiro and Rachel, eating one small sliver at a time, barely enough to hold between their chopsticks. Lifting tiny petals to their lips, they felt lips stiffen, tingle, felt the tongue draw back. They chewed delicately, waiting until nerve ends calmed, until their bodies would accept. And in that silence, the room was filled with the galloping of their hearts, a gut rumbling, cringing. They swallowed ever so slowly, occasionally laying down their chopsticks, staring at each other until their pulses slowed, hair on their arms lay down.

  And while they paused in their exquisite game, Hiro related his first “fugu-death.” his initiation at nineteen into the Yakuza. He spoke softly, pausing now and then, like a fortune-teller
in an Oriental dream.

  “First a swooning, dizziness, numbness of mouth and lips. I remember I had trouble breathing. Men around the table went on eating, one or two cast a glance my way, thinking I was joking, pretending. My lips turned blue, they said. I had cramps like a woman. And then this crawling itchiness, like maggots hatching in my skin. I turned my head and vomited behind the table. The others went on eating. I was dying, and they were finishing a meal. You see, I had taken too big a bite, too much poison all at once, to prove I was a man!...

  “... I fell back in my chair, slid down a little, and it was like watching a movie on a screen. I was paralyzed, head to toe, yet saw, heard, felt everything going on around me. I couldn’t move an eyelash. I had no pulse. Then these gangsters realized I had died!.. . They hoisted me into a car, drove far out into the country, this hovel of a town outside Kyoto. The man holding on to me had a scar on his temple, small and blue. It was all I saw in front of me, and I thought if I could just hold on to it with my eyes, I wouldn’t die. It was just a scar, but it became so blue, so pure, and beautiful, it took my breath away. I didn’t mind dying then ...

  “.. . After many hours, the car stopped. They wrapped me in a blanket, carried my body to a half-dug grave. I understood they were going to bury me, and yet I had not died. I tried to scream, to move, I was paralyzed. They put me in a box, closed the box, continued digging. I could hear them, smell the earth, three of them, still digging, cursing me for having died .. . And then, my limbs came back to life, a burning, thawing-out sensation. I opened the box, sat up, and asked for a cigarette. I saw what I have never seen again . ..”

  Now Hiro laughed softly. “Yakuza on their knees, screaming for mercy. They thought I had come back from the dead. I suppose I had, neh?”

  In slow motion, in flickering candlelight, he and Rachel took up their chopsticks again, selected a petal, hearts pounding, hands trembling slightly, so tiny fugu petals seemed to flutter to their lips.

  We grow older. She thought. Life is more precious. And still we play these games.

  He saw her look. “Think of it. Life reduces us to patterns. Right now we are outside the pattern.”

  Suddenly, her whole body shook and ran with sweat. She was momentarily blinded, her system shot with adrenaline, fighting the minute particles of toxin inside her. Her teeth chattered, she could no longer concentrate. She gripped the table edge with both hands.

  Hiro leaned forward, perspiring profusely. “Use this moment. Use it. Remember how you never felt so alive . . . bowels trembling, nerve ends shrieking ... as when you put the fugu to your lips. Freeze the terror. Step back. Observe. And know.”

  After terrible moments, her vision cleared, her teeth stopped clacking, she was drenched and totally exhausted.

  “Why do I need this knowledge?” she whispered. “What is it for?”

  “When you know what you can stand, you’ll never compromise yourself.”

  “Hiro, I’m your wife. Not a Yakuza.”

  “This was not learned as Yakuza,” he said softly, “this was learned in ten years of needles piercing every day.”

  That night, his green-crested pleasure sheath within her, Rachel bucked and moaned, loving him as if she were dying. Yet he felt part of her stand aside, coolly observing. He moved slower then, more rhythmically, making the cool, observing side of her lose its balance, pulling her so close, so tight, his hands on her back felt each vertebrae in her spine.

  And he whispered in her hair. “How much I’ve loved you. No one else. And I will always love you.”

  “And .. . you will always hurt me, always go away.”

  Just then he came in her, and came in truth.

  “Yes!”

  Later, feeling her soft, sad snores against his chest, he wondered if in time she would grow fastidious, detesting men. For, what in this world would be new to her? He had taught her everything. She had an air now, a posture that revealed an inner poise. She would never compromise.

  You are my river of clear skin, flowing on your own. I want to wake you, ask your forgiveness. For everything. He sighed, looked out the window at the sky. In the end, all we can do is forgive ourselves.

  ’Imi ‘Ike

  * * *

  To Seek, to Search, to Understand

  “I CONFESS,” Duke said, “to remembering.”

  “No! We promised. To not look back, not mourn what could have been.” Pono rubbed the fingerless club that had once been his hand, koali oil giving it the smoothness and glow of an old artifact.

  “Ah, Beloved, what is the difference? Memory. Dreams. At this age it’s much the same.” He had long ago given up the destructive, repercussive ritual of longing that in younger years had almost driven him insane.

  Now he lay his head against her breast, his thick hair hammered by sun into shimmering white waves. “I was remembering peacocks skittering on polished floors. You wore a Paris gown. We waltzed ...”

  Pono softly chided him, like a young girl with indomitable unregret. “Stop being an old man who sits at a window! There is much to discuss.” She waved newspapers in front of him. “Shark attacks. Filthy geothermal plants. The Miloli‘i mess ...”

  He sighed as she wrapped his hands in soft cotton gloves, placed an old sunhat on his head, and moved behind his wheelchair.

  “... but first, fresh air, the sea. Nature always makes you lusty!”

  Canting back his massive head, he laughed, slid on sunglasses, tilted his hat like a gigolo. Tourists transferring from a tiny plane to a sight seeing bus, saw them in the distance. A giant woman, hair a thick gray shawl, moving with mythic heft and grace along a grassy knoll facing the sea. In the wheelchair before her, a wide-shouldered, big-chested man, profile reminiscent of old prints of Polynesian royalty.

  “Are they lepers?” Tourists asked.

  The driver of the Damien Tours bus hit the brakes and turned, addressing passengers. “We all victims of Hansen’s disease, what you folks call ... ‘lepers.’”

  The strangers looked vastly disappointed. “But, you look so healthy. We thought ...”

  “Dat you’d see apes, minus dere ears and noses. You want take pictures of t’ings in cages, neh?” He shook his head. “Sorry. We got not’ing to show you but buildings, churches, graves. And some spit holes in da floor. You want go back to da plane?”

  In the silence, he eased onto the main road, heading toward Philo-mena Church, the oldest constructed church at Kalaupapa, intact with its expectoration holes in wooden floors. Until the tourist plane lifted off again, most patients stayed home behind drawn shades.

  As the bus passed, Pono pointed at it with her cane. “Sugar’s in a bad mood today. Those haole won’t see much.”

  “Last month he got letters from two grandchildren.” Duke said. “So joyful, he gave a group of Swedes the Super Tour!”

  They laughed. The Super Tour: old abandoned cottages, artificial arms and legs still hanging in closets. And the artifact shop: eating spoons whose handles curled around a fist, for those whose fingers had worn down to knuckles. And the abandoned hospital: operating tables with arm and leg restraints for patients on whom experiments had been performed without anesthesia. And pointed wooden sticks in jars, with which opium-soaked swabs had numbed nasal passages so tissue could be extracted for testing, a method that left patients addicts, and slowly broke down the bridge of the nose. The grislier, the better, tourists loved it.

  Now that leprosy was no longer communicable thanks to sulfone pills, there were only two dozen patients left at Kalaupapa, too old or scarred to live out in the world. Proceeds from the tours benefited them, and some nights, they gathered at Rea’s Bar, drank beers and invented new “horrors” for the tourists. The Mongoose Radical Cure, a jar of mongoose eyes, which in the old days patients had been “forced to swallow.” Old rusty fire extinguishers, which had been “chained round the necks” of those with artificial limbs, cheap flammable wooden limbs that “sometimes ignited, turning patients into fireballs.” />
  Then there was Duke’s favorite ruse—three pet dogs that went berserk when their owner whistled through his teeth. On Super-Super Tour days, the owner corraled them in his basement, whistled up “Amazing Grace” while the tour bus circled round the block, the driver explaining that the bestial howlings issuing from the house were patients who for years had been injected with wild boar blood, a medical experiment gone awry. Asked to see the howling mutations, the driver shuddered, drove away.

  Pono braked Duke’s Amigo wheelchair on a grassy knoll, flung out a blanket, and helped him to the ground, spreading lunch and papers beside him.

  Duke groaned, staring at headlines of the Honolulu Advertiser, “MILOLI‘I ELDERS ON THE BIG ISLAND SELL OUT TO DEVELOPERS.”

  “One of them will die separated from his manhood.” Pono had already seen his legs mangled in the engine of a brand-new powerboat. “There will be other deaths, before they build this cursed resort .. .”

  “Have you dreamed again?” he asked.

  “Yes. Confusing dreams.” Drinking cups of noni tea at night, she was still trying to see her face as she lay dying. But dreams gave her only this blurred, anonymous corpse. Then, lately she had envisioned people running, bodies cartwheeling across moonlit glass. “I wake with the smell of something bitter in my nose.”

  He looked at her, knowing what she saw would in some form or other, come to pass. “And have you seen me in your dreams, Beloved?”

  She stretched across the blanket, lay her hand upon his cheek. “Why dream you, when I have you here? And we have had the best, the most luxurious of lives. We have traveled round the world, heard many languages. Lived in many climates. Perhaps lived with our senses more than most humans dare.”

  He had steeped her thoroughly in life, in history, through decades of reading to her. They had traveled with Marco Polo, fought with Napoleon, ridden with Alexander the Great. They had witnessed beheadings, investitures, assassinations. They had drowned in northern seas off Finland, and starved, exploring the Antarctic. She understood what freezing was, the sense of sinking barefoot in deep snow, blue and solitary particles that fell in whispers, she could count the crystals in a flake.