Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  “. . . And tonight,” Duke said. “We will fly into the future. I will read you H. G. Wells.” He pulled her close, so close they lay like youngsters in a gale. “Ah, Pono, except for this solitary peninsula, and this hellish tomb of a body I inhabit, we have lived like swashbucklers!

  Seen more than most people can imagine. We have had the time. I wonder ... if a life lived only in the mind is any less intense? If all the senses are engaged what is lost, but fact?”

  They wandered in and out of daydreams, as if oblivious to the beauty around them. He had been in that place so long they ceased to see it, it was in them now. Just-thrown fishing nets hovering like jeweled skin across the sea. Lush green peninsula washed a blinding gold, sun turning it into an emperor’s slipper. And massive cliffs, like robes of purple chinoiserie, the emperor’s shoulders hunched round them. And nearby, the old dance pavilion washed with waves, a broken diamond.

  (Yes, they had danced after years of blackouts. Victory Dances of the postwar forties. Victory over leprosy, the sulfone cure that, for many, came too late. Sometimes, sitting near the cracked and crumbling pavilion, wind blew them the memory of saxophones, mandolins, concertinas, plaintive steel guitars, voices singing softly in falsetto. And sometimes Duke thought he saw ghosts still whirling, couples spinning round the floor, withered legs, broken arches, useless hands giving them unique, undaunted rhythms, articulations of perhaps a newer, better race.)

  “Now, back to business.” Pono sat up, pointing to a headline Run Run had circled. “What about this fellow?”

  A fifteen-foot shark had killed a local woman swimming in known breeding waters, a resting place for ’aumākua manō. The Department of Land and Natural Resources had hired professional shark hunters who slung bloody bait across the bay, then sat in boats with loaded rifles. Hawaiian activists had massed together, threatening to kill the shark hunters. Even the media was taking sides. Locals had come to Pono, asking for advice.

  “What can they do?” Duke’s voice was angry. “Kill every shark they see? Murder all our ancestors? Manō respect us, they do not come ashore. They swim and breed in their own waters, leaving our waters alone. Why can’t we respect them?” He read the article quickly. “That wahine was pupule. She swam in Shark Bay on a dare, knowing it’s kapu.” He paused. “Tell them for every shark they kill, we will take a hunter.”

  Pono smiled, for this was how she had instructed the angry activists. Eye for an eye, the way of their ancestors.

  “Now.” She pointed to another article. “More geothermal refugees.”

  The explosion of a geothermal well ninety miles from Captain Cook had caused a steam eruption of noxious hydrogen sulfide that spewed all over the small community of Puna. Locals had fought the building of the $100 million Israeli-owned project, because of dangerous air pollutants. Now the air smelled like rotten eggs, children couldn’t keep food down, elders suffered from respiratory ailments. People in neighboring communities were sick from fish caught in the waters near the plant. Milk and beef cows were lying feet-up in comas. Even as they demanded shutdown of the Puna Geothermal Project, locals were being forcefully evacuated by the Hawaiian Civil Defense.

  Duke slammed his fist to the ground. “Do our people have to die before they shut these plants down? Or are they being used as guinea pigs? Now that they’re sick, they tell them they have to permanently relocate, rip up roots, their lives!”

  “They refuse,” Pono said. “They will not become nomads like the ‘lava refugees’ who lost their homes to Pele. Homes no one would insure.”

  “Tell them,” he said, “to stand and fight. Fight until those plants are all dismantled. Get the media behind them. Vanya has connections.”

  He struck the ground again. “Israelis. My God! As if they didn’t know about extermination.”

  She felt his fury, his frustration, knowing he was thinking of all the lepers through the years, imprisoned, experimented on, abandoned. Wiped from their family genealogies. She thought how there were many forms of extermination.

  He shuffled through the stack of papers and his cheeks were wet. “They’re rinsing us from history. All we can do is fight, until the end. That’s what our children must remember. We fought valiantly, honorably, until the end.”

  After a while he pulled himself together. “Tell me about our girls. How is Ming? The illness, has it progressed?”

  “It comes and goes, this lupus. She is often in pain. Little appetite .. .”

  He was silent, afraid to ask.

  Pono took his hand. “No, it is not your illness. There is no ma‘i Pākē in her blood.”

  Yet there were nights while Ming slept, when Pono still pulled back the sheets, searching her skin, telltale signs, sly suppurations. Forty years had not distilled the fear.

  “She takes her medication. She endures. That’s all one can do with this disease.” She didn’t tell him the rest, Ming’s little pipe, days of drifting, leaving all of them behind.

  “And the others? How are they?” he asked.

  They think I’m old and near-sighted. That I don’t see what they’ve become. A whore. An addict. A concubine. And one whose pale skin slaps my face. And yet, each time she saw them turning up the drive, tremulous and fearful—like young nuns rushing toward that which terrified them, toward rumors of the fibrillating heart of God—something in her surged, something noble trying to articulate.

  “They’re coming home slowly,” she said. Perhaps saying it would make it so. “Not understanding their past makes the voyage very hard. Duke, why can’t we finally tell them the truth?”

  “Truth is temporary.”

  “But one day we’ll be gone. They’ll be women without history.”

  His voice was harsh, ungiving. “I’m part of the past they will have to fill in with conjecture.”

  “Not telling is a form of lying. Your daughters never knew you. Now, another generation, and still the lie persists. How can meeting your granddaughters hurt you?”

  “Pono. I will not leave a legacy of horror.”

  “It’s so unfair. You deny me even my history.”

  “Yes. Lepers are selfish, too.”

  “I will die asking this one thing of you. I will never stop.”

  In his stubborn silence, she studied his face, thinking how the years had taken pity on him. Leprosy, so pronounced in outward manifestations years ago, had with the sulfone drugs, almost entirely left the surface of his face. What was left were indentations, keloids, pits, a dearth of bone about the nose and cheeks. His mouth twisted sideways somewhat. But hideous suppurations, the bloated “lion look” was gone. Between the scars and pits, his skin was dark and smooth again, the face still somehow handsome, one could see what he had been as a healthy young man. Yet, with the visible retreat, came the advance to his interior, ravages of the years of experimental drugs, which had damaged his kidneys, lungs, the heart.

  She thought how much easier life could have been had she been able to tell her granddaughters the truth. They might have forgiven all the years. They might have loved me. She knew that sometimes when she slept, they stood outside her door, waiting, hoping that in her dreams she might call out. And they would know everything.

  “I have this fear,” Duke said. “This racking, blinding terror, that you will let them see me in my coffin.” He took her hand, pressed it to his heart. His body shook. “My granddaughters looking down. This broken, pitted horror peering up at them through satin ripples. Oh, Beloved, promise me!”

  She had a vision then, so sudden, she thought her ribs had splintered. Duke, charioting the foam, lapped by cold, moon-spattered waves. She caught her breath, drew his face to hers. Her fingers ran in panic over his features like fingers on a flute.

  “No one but ’aumākua will gaze upon us then. For I will be beside you.”

  Jess moved as stealthily as a cat burglar, fingers drifting over brushes, combs, picture frames, an ‘ukulele Pono sometimes played softly in her room. Gone for almost a week now, of
f on one of her ghostly, monthly errands, she would return the way she always returned, veiled in a grand, soft silence no one could penetrate. This woman, silent for so many decades no longer harbored her secret, it harbored her.

  “Where does she go? Who does she see?” Jess asked.

  Run Run had stood at the kitchen stove, holding in her hand what looked like someone’s brain. “How many years you ask dat question? How many years I tell you no need know everyt’ing ...”

  “She has the nerve to ask us to come home. What home? This mausoleum of riddles. Jesus, I hate it!”

  “Hate a big word, Jess. Take more muscle dan you got. You one brave wahine when Pono not here, screaming round, demanding dis and dis. When you gonna’ learn to wait?”

  “I’ve been waiting all my life.” Her voice turned soft. “It seems that’s all I’ve ever done.”

  Now, she stumbled in the dark, smelling Pono’s perfume, the way it pervaded the house even when she was gone. A scent that had always troubled Jess, hint of bergamot and vetiver, warm Eastern mosses. She opened the bottle, put it to her nose, was struck as if from a blow. She sat down unsteadily, remembering her mother in silk slips like peachskin aged to transparency. Ancient, delicate kimonos. Oriental shawls. A certain scent hanging in her hair.

  Jacarandas tumbled across the lānai, moonlight turning them into cool, blue throats of infants. Mother. Did you have a childhood? Did she allow you one? She tried to imagine her a girl, mothered by someone like Pono, so powerful she called down eagles, chanted giant squid in from the sea, a woman whose glance brought wild boars to their knees. She pictured Pono gazing at four unwanted daughters, her malice like broken glass on which they had to kneel.

  Each pregnancy must have been like a powerful gun kicking back, its shout reverberating, lingering for years. Until one by one each daughter revolted, each in her own way. Why had she bothered birthing them? Why not rip them from her womb? She had the power. Her grandmother was not a woman who lived life as a victim, chained by circumstance. Sitting in that room, it occurred to Jess for the first time that at some point, Pono must have had a plan, some definite design.

  Our mothers weren’t accidents. She wanted them! But then, what in her life had gone monstrously awry?

  Her head began to throb, as it always did when she tried to understand the past, know what it wanted from her, what she would have to pay. The door opened, a blade of light sliced the dark. Jess felt such terror she went momentarily blind. In that second even the house seemed to hold its breath. She heard plants sigh, something moist turned into dust. She will crunch my bones like chicken parts.

  “She find you in here, in her room, she break you up good.” Run Run spoke softly, crossing the floor.

  Jess moaned with relief, threw her arms round her, weeping. “She wears my mother’s perfume. Why? Who was my mother? Who am I? It’s killing me!”

  “Maybe you got it wrong, keiki. Maybe all dese yeahs yoah Mama wore Pono’s perfume. Don’t dat tell you somet’ing?” Run Run stroked her head and crooned. “Lissen me. I make one promise, neh? If Pono never say, and die before I do, one day I tell you t’ings. So life stop killing you. Maybe den, you let your mama rest in peace.”

  Jess saw her mother’s face then, sinking, blurring into sand. And she saw herself sliding her hands beneath that face, lifting it up to air, as if lifting her own reflection from a pool.

  Pono returned, sat with them, not seeing them, ate meals without tasting, even held conversations, her voice distant, almost formal, as if coming from another age. And dreamily she floated down the halls, brooding for hours in front of bookshelves in the study, a room she left untouched, stale tobacco smells, fingerprinted glasses furred with mold, crumbling antimacassars on dusty chairs. She sat in those chairs, open books on her lap, not reading, just staring, as if studying the way the words seemed to comfort the page. Some nights she stood over Jess or Ming while they slept, touching a foot, a head, with so much feeling. Some nights she sat with Run Run, weeping until she fell asleep, exhausted.

  After a few days, she snapped back into the present, striding through coffee orchards, whacking at bushes with her ugly cane, consulting with the foreman about weather, distribution of fertilizers, pesticides, asking after the health and punctuality of workers. Herself again, she lectured the women at dinner, bullied them. When would they commit themselves? Did they want the farm? Did they understand the importance of owning land?

  Land. Land. Jess thought. What we need is our history, a legitimate past. She dropped her head, exhausted, unable to meet Pono’s gaze.

  Pono turned to her, feeling her withdrawal. “You could probably do the most here, Jess. Your knowledge of animals, nature. Of course, someone needs to oversee the staff. Rachel would be good for that. Where is Rachel?”

  Run Run cleared her throat. “Honolulu. Hiro come home foah few days.”

  She rode right over it, never having acknowledged him.

  “. . . and Vanya for the legal end, tax abatements, so on . . .” She pressed a drift of linen to her lips, then placed it on the table. “Or do I delude myself? Maybe we should just put the whole place up for sale?”

  Only Ming had the nerve to say it. “Why do you keep pushing this, Tūtū? You’re in perfect health.”

  Pono stared at her indignantly. “Do you know what old age is? I will tell you. On rare days, when you wake up with no pain . . . you think you’re already dead.”

  They laughed then, even Pono laughed.

  “You’re stronger than all of us,” Jess said.

  “I’m no longer strong, dear. Just determined.”

  “How can we take over?” Jess complained. “A house we don’t even know is legally hers. What’s its history? How did she acquire it? Don’t you want to know?” She lay in Ming’s room, avoiding her cousin’s eyes now permanently ringed in blue, her face a pale gray moth’s. Even her hair was thinning, becoming the memory of hair.

  “Ah, Jess.” Ming stared down at her small, arthritic fingers, the way they seemed to curl and nod. “Too much knowledge makes one desperate. What do you really want to know?”

  “.. . What makes her tick. That’s what.” She sat up, looked at Ming straight on. “Sometimes I think you know. I see our history racing just behind your eyes. Your mother was firstborn. She must remember things. Things she never told her sisters ...”

  Ming shook her head, spoke softly. “You feel responsible for your mother’s death, don’t you? Because she died alone. You saw her for one minute in a morgue, then they cremated her. It happened too fast. Do you know that sometimes you refer to her as if she isn’t dead, just traveling? You were never given time to break down in the presence of her corpse. We need these rituals, Jess dear. Now you think solving Pono’s past will be the proper gesture, a rite of mourning for your mother.”

  Jess sat motionless, in shock. After a while she found her voice. “Yes, I’m guilty of what you said. But maybe guilt, like love, is a way of keeping her alive so I can understand her. How else can I understand myself? How can I accomplish any of this without understanding Pono? Look at us, this not knowing in our lives. It ruined our mothers. It’s warping us.” Her voice grew louder. “I’m tired of feeling I’m not this, I’m not that, so I’m not worth a damn. If I’m not worth a damn, I want to know why! I want to know who screwed up.”

  “Cousin. Leave it alone. Move on to the next stage, not the past.”

  Ming suddenly sat up, coughing, a horrible rattling sound like parts of her were shaking loose. Jess smelled the blood before Ming spat it out, a pinkish quivering on the sheet.

  Ming covered it instantly with her hand. “... A tissue, please. And now,” she whispered, “I need to be alone.”

  The hour of little gestures. The lighting of a pipe.

  “No!” Jess wanted to drag the pipe out from under the bed, confront her with it. Did she think they didn’t know? “That filth . . . can’t you see you’re mortgaging your future?”

  She pulled Jess clos
e, her breath hideous. “I have no future. I’m shrinking. My spine is bent. When I sit down my feet no longer touch the floor.”

  The feet themselves seemed shrunken, a footbinder’s dream, as if she could walk in shoes the size of teacups.

  She pushed Jess gently away. “Now, please. Get out.”

  Jess lay in bed shaking. Overwhelmed by this sick, doomed tribe she was part of. She wanted to pack, run, get clear of this place of sleeplessness, conspiracies and whisperings, and pain. In that moment she wanted to break all ties to this scraping, lacerating nightmare-link of family handcuffed to her wrist. She pictured the woman in the next room clutching a pipe, a small mummy cindering within, its scant drip secreting into her, her sighs staining the walls around her. Jess heard a rat squeal down in the guava trees, imagined the mongoose clamping down, gleaming teeth, slick lunar fur.

  This is no place for me. I’ll get up and go away forever.

  She half sat up but, feeling drugged, fell back, one foot raised in flight. Dreams blew her visions of Pono’s rough, man-working hands, rememberance of how, when Jess was young, she saw Pono kill and clean a wild boar quicker than a man, cutting out the liver, eating it still steaming from the beast. Seeing Jess, she had turned with the bloody, dripping thing, offering her a bite. A test. Jess had bitten off a chunk, held the thing between her teeth, her stomach churning, legs wobbling as if coming unscrewed.

  She had stood there chewing slowly, staring at her grandmother, thinking I will not throw up. I will show her. Workers had laughed, waiting for her to spit out the bloody mass. She chewed and chewed. And when they saw she had swallowed it, field-workers cheered, swung her through the air. That night, all night Pono held Jess in her lap, while workers strummed ‘ukulele and sang before a fire. Only hours later in her bed did Jess remove the hunk of meat stored inside her cheek.