Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  She recalled a day in the city when they were still a family, before she and her husband began to compete for Anna. Before Jess began to know she would lose the competition. She was out shopping that day and suddenly saw them coming down the street together, laughing. This is what they look like when I’m not there, she thought. I have stumbled on the life they lead without me. Seeing her, their movements had changed, their expressions, they drew together almost instinctively. She didn’t sleep that night. The next morning it hurt to rise, to face a marriage of false claims, and a daughter who had deserted her.

  What had been in her husband an almost forgiving permission, allowing Jess to throw herself into her practice, keep long hours, become a success, now became something else—apathy, cold and absolute. She stood on agitated subways rushing close, so close windows seemed to brush against each other. Through one of them a trembling, fleeting moray eye, her own reflection sucked into the black. Once visible as half a couple, she would now evaporate. In the year preceding her divorce, she walked slightly lopsided, like a woman with two legs who remembered having three. And after the divorce, when Anna chose to go with her father, to live with him, Jess wasn’t shocked. By then, she lacked awe for anything.

  “... so I have decided to go home to Hawai‘i. I wanted to discuss it with you.”

  Now Anna looked frightened, defensive. “You’re deserting me.”

  Jess smiled sadly. “We haven’t seen each other in two years. You don’t even visit at Christmas.”

  “Daddy gets depressed at Christmas.” She looked down, a college junior, but looking just now adolescent. “Sometimes, I don’t understand why you two married. I mean, he’s so Southern, you’re so .. . different.”

  “We loved each other for a while.”

  Anna shook her head. “That’s not what he says. He says you married him out of perversity, that you wanted to fix up your parents’ marriage in your head, make it perfect this time. He says he didn’t even really know you.”.

  “He means he didn’t want to know. My family, my background. The native side. He never went home with me. Never saw Hawai‘i. It was like he loved half of me, my father’s white, Southern half, so the other half didn’t exist. He put off meeting my mother for three years after we eloped. And, Anna, she was beautiful. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember she was dark.” She began to cry. “I have this blood in me, right? One-fourth Hawaiian. Suppose I have a child some day.”

  “Yes . ..”

  “And it’s dark, like a Puerto Rican, or a Mexican. How do I explain that to my husband?”

  “Perhaps you should tell him what you are before you marry. People usually do.”

  “Suppose he’s Southern like Daddy? I couldn’t.”

  They were silent, letting the insult of the remark reverberate.

  Then Jess stood up. “Anna, do you know what you are? You’re a racist, a woman ashamed of her blood. God help you. I won’t bother you again. If you need me, you know where I am.”

  “Why now?” Anna looked up at her, demanding. “You’re all set up. You could have a summer home, travel round the world. Why are you throwing it all away, just to go back to those dopey islands?”

  Jess leaned down, hit the table with her fist. “Listen to me. I love you. But you are shallow and cruel. Some of that is my fault. I should have given you more of a sense of identity. Of pride. All those summers I left you with your father, I should have taken you home with me, forced you to get to know Hawai‘i. I hope you grow up, Anna. Your world is ugly and narrow.”

  They walked together, yet apart, out toward a taxi stand.

  “I’m sorry. I love you, too,” Anna said. “I guess I just take after Daddy.”

  Her leavetaking was easy, because she didn’t know her daughter felt the lack of her immediately. She didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, that when she left for the Pacific, Anna would feel something involuntary, something inside of her diminish.

  At night, Jess walked the streets of Manhattan, seeing it as a great ocean liner slowly sinking, straining to hoist itself upright while its chandeliers still glowed. Crumbling bridges. Splintering ramparts of glass and chrome. Caravans of human rags traversing worn spice routes of garbage bins. When she had first arrived, Manhattan seemed frightening, blatant and raw. Now it seemed only weary and wise.

  She thought back on how she and the city had matured together, Manhattan in the face of the Italian grocer Jess chatted down the years, whose face slowly changed to Korean, while her face just got older. She felt great affection for the place, a giant souk where she had pitched a tent, selling her talents, the ability to conjure animals well. She would miss it because she had never been faithful to it, and so it had never quite accepted her. Yet, it had been a refuge, a sanctuary. It let her hide.

  One evening, returning home, she stepped into the dark and paused, feeling a subtle change in her surroundings, a new form brush-stroked into the environment. She stood very still.

  “I heard you’re leaving.” Mars got up from a chair, jiggling a set of keys. “I wanted to return these, and say . . . Aw, Christ . . .”

  He crossed the room, took her in his arms, the beautiful and sudden smell of him, the feel of him, striking her like blows. Jess hung her head, and wept.

  “I know, baby, I know.” His voice was deep and calm. “But don’t you see, it never could have worked. Besides, you’d already started your journey home when I met you. Maybe you didn’t know it, but you had.”

  “I knew it, Mars,” she whispered. “It’s just . . . sometimes people pass through our lives, and we don’t want to let them go because . . . who knows if we’ll ever feel that way again? You woke me up, made me take full measure of myself. And I love you. I always will.”

  He sat back down, pulling her into his lap like a child.

  “Love. That word means so many things. When you’re on the street, fighting for your life, it could mean a dime. A pair of shoes. It could mean someone not pissing on you while you sleep.” He pressed her head against his shoulder. “I know I’m gonna’ miss you. That’s a kind of love. And I know I’m proud of you. You got a grip on things now. That’s a second kind of love. I know I used you. Maybe we used each other, but I think we did it decently. That’s love, too. We didn’t do too bad, girl.”

  They sat all night, holding each other, talking, conjuring their dreams. At dawn she stood at a window, watching him go.

  For days she trailed strangers through her house, moving men built like commandos. One night she stood in empty rooms, the clinic stripped to bare walls, equipment, everything gone. And she felt the final exhalations of the years—animals panting quietly in humid rooms, the argot of incisions, exorcisms. Her cheek against cold bars of a cage. Now she felt a turning, felt herself rotating into position for the next phase.

  She was standing in the dark, just standing, when the phone rang. Hearing Rachel’s voice, her body temperature changed. Jess thought of that night at Pono’s, listening to Ming’s breathing through the walls, of finally seeing Ming’s addiction as just another way to sleep. She even recalled the fungus smell of her cousin’s breath, as Rachel told her Ming was dying.

  Ka ‘Ano ‘Ano Mo’o

  * * *

  Dragon Seed

  HER WOLF WAS CONSTANT NOW, he prowled inside her, pain a personal myth and remembrance etched in scars along the bone. The butterfly rash now descended from her face to shoulders and chest, so her breasts seemed stung with ragged bites. Her eyes looked prehistoric, obsidian crawfish lit from within. One night she was so racked, so far beyond human expression, Ming put the Dragon Seed aside, started drinking laudanum in her tea. Rachel watched, holding the teacup when Ming’s hands shook, knowing laudanum was the last resort. After this there was only the begging for mercy.

  “How disgusting you must find me,” she whispered.

  “No.” Rachel kissed her cheeks and little hands. “Remember what you said? We each have our addiction.”

  “Such
a complex, Western word,” she said softly, “for such a simple act. As normal as breathing.” Knowing her addiction was more than that, a shrieking need, final leap over the battering reef of choice.

  One day, watching her will to live slowly leak away, Rachel called Vanya in Honolulu, and Jess in New York. She took Ming’s hand, asking if there was something special she desired, music she wanted to hear.

  “Everything has been heard,” Ming said.

  Rachel asked another thing. “Cousin, do you pray?”

  “For what? Health? Understanding? How useless prayer is when your senses have closed down. You no longer want to think, read Yeats or Proust, hear Bach, or even the shouts of children playing ... It comes with such clarity, the sudden lack of want. Yes, I pray. That the Dragon will outrun my wolf.”

  She was beginning to talk in riddles, so that Rachel went away perplexed. Pono came, mostly at night when Ming was drugged. She stood over her, weeping, remembering her as a young girl, her laughter like moonlight on water, a thousand dimes tossed. Some nights she heard Rachel crying in the next room, full of a sorrow so distilled, Pono wiped it from her mind. But one night she woke drenched in sweat, glowing like an icon. In her dreams she had finally seen the face of the corpse, elusive for so long. “Ming!”

  The house suddenly bulged with people, Ming’s husband, parents, children, flying in from Honolulu. Then they flew away. She had no wish to see them, to see anyone but Pono, her cousins, and Run Run who battered through the house cursing God, trying to feed Ming back to life, preparing laulau, pigeons stuffed with lotus bulbs, meals no one could bear to gaze upon.

  All Ming seemed to do was drift, watching water-haunted sunlight play on walls, cross-currents of rays and shadows glancing off her lānai. Gulleys beneath her eyes intensified in blue, as if she were being constantly slapped in sleep. She had no appetite, all she hungered for was Seed.

  “As you know,” Rachel said one night, “my husband traffics in the poppy, though he has never let me have the pipe. What is it like, I wonder?”

  Ming spoke with the slow authority of a connoisseur. “It makes everything kind.”

  Rachel frowned. “It kills all sensations. How can you say it’s kind?”

  “Ah, Rachel, don’t you see? Kindness is like fear, having less to do with human emotions than with a certain . . . distribution of chemicals in the body. Did you know, if a spider drinks the tears of someone terrified, the spider will go mad, satanic designs appear in its web ...”

  Rachel turned to Vanya. “She doesn’t make sense. She sounds IōLō”

  “She’s dying,” Vanya said. “She doesn’t have to make sense.”

  Drifting days, need of only drops and puffs. Sometimes she cheated, put extra drops of laudanum in her tea which made her eerily alert, her brain a fertile pit inside a decomposing fruit.

  One night she woke, found Pono hovering at her side. “I saw him, Tütü. Grandfather Duke.”

  Pono lunged forward as if struck from behind.

  “Years back. One day I took the boat to Moloka‘i, the leper settlement. I watched him from a distance for hours, fishing by the sea. Such a big, handsome head! I felt so proud. In all my life I never wanted so much to touch someone, take his hand. Then I took the boat back ...” She smiled dreamily. “Did you think my father could forget his childhood here? This house .. . the rumors . . . stories of the ... bounty hunters?”

  Pono collapsed beside the bed and wailed. “I used you! Used all of you to hide my fate!”

  Ming half sat up, grabbing her arm. “Do this. Do this one thing. Let them know him before he dies. Grandfather is our link, our history.”

  Pono gazed upon this slowly ebbing human, issue of her blood. In that moment, Ming’s face shone as if her skull were an hourglass through which Pono watched sand shift, charting her living seconds. She crawled into bed, took Ming in her massive arms like a little cheeping bird. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

  Vanya met Jess at Keahole Airport in the Jeep, driving the highway like a maniac, ripping through intersections hurling profanities. Jess gripped the seat as they ascended up, up into the coffee hills of Kona District, little “talk-song” towns, Hōlualoa, Kainali’u, Kealakekua, Captain Cook. Cool air gnawed her cheeks like little teeth, and she was not afraid, would not be afraid until it was over, because she could not imagine Ming dying. For now it was only spectacle, her cousin drugged, incessantly drugged, something to be watched in stages.

  “She won’t die,” she said. “Ming would find dying too absolute.”

  Hunched over the steering wheel, Vanya momentarily lost control as if something were wrenching the course of her life from her hands. Gripping the wheel again, she whipped her head round at Jess. “You blind, egotistical, haole.”

  Entering Ming’s room, Jess froze. A pervasive odor of mortal exhaustion, doomed flesh and bone. Nothing moved. Then something turned its head and looked at her, a mildewed gaze. Her cousin was lying in a rust-mottled kimono, and there was little left of her. For the first time, Jess saw the total massacre, saw how a human body could become a battlefield.

  Lupus, like a terrible flame, had scorched Ming’s solar plexus, her joints, marrow, cells, sluicing through her arms and legs, her kidney, spleen, deforming her spine, frying her hands into claws. And yet, each drop and puff of Seed fought back, impaling that flame, a head on a pike. Ming smiled dully, and Jess understood that, for the moment, Seed was in ascendency. Even the memory of pain was blurred.

  But, O! the price. Less than two months ago when Jess had departed, Ming’s pain had momentarily abated, her lovely features resurfacing like an ancient coin from the Orient, elegant ciphers in relief. Now she stood stunned by the change. Ming’s face was frightful, nothing left but eyes on stalks, her mouth uncertain as the rash accrued. Her hair was a prodigy of white spiders. Trapped in that awful grotto of bone, she seemed the living larva of the dead.

  She cried out in horror. “Ming! What happened? I was gone such a short time ...”

  Her voice seemed to issue from an ancient crone locked in chains in the dark and damp. “Who can measure time? Time measures me.” With great effort, she held out her arms. “Am I too hideous to embrace?”

  Jess flung herself upon her, gathering up her sour bones. There was so little left, she could almost feel something spread its wings, lift Ming in a final glide. “Oh, God,” she sobbed. “Don’t leave me!”

  Ming pushed her back a little. “Be still, and listen. I left you years ago. You and Rachel, and Vanya . .. my existence is already your existence. Don’t you see ... in time you will forget if you are remembering me, or if you are me.”

  Jess tried to speak. Ming raised her hand, and drew her closer, slowly and with great fatigue.

  “Milimili Jess, have you ever understood your name? The strap fastened round the leg of a hawk. Jess. The thing that restrains the falcon.” She slumped, exhausted.

  Jess lay her gently on the pillow, kissed her face, and it was cold, like ’ahi hooked in deep December when seas went gray with hurricanes. She held Ming’s hands until it was dark, grief crackling within her. Ming, the vital current, the strength that flowed through all of them. With her as their shield, they had formed a weapon against the world, wielding their way through anything. What would become of them? A tapestry unraveling, a composition breaking down.

  On her last night, Jess knew it was the last, she could smell it, Ming motioned them close from where they all stood sobbing in the doorway.

  “Promise me . . .” she croaked, “. . . look after Toru. I have loved him more than he can know. Jess, stay here at home where you belong.”

  Jess wept, nodding like a child.

  “Now, remember. First will come the sadness, then an understanding . ..

  Wearily she reached up, hugging them in turn.

  “. . . Gradually you will feel that I am here still, that I inhabit you ... and you will bring me back to life. Each of you will even begin to use my gestures. Your expressions wil
l be my expressions. Whatever of me was wise and gentle, I leave with you.”

  Her voice grew thin, a woman passing through a mirror.

  “I will be the conscience whispering in your genes ...”

  In slow motion, she waved them away. And as they closed the door behind them, Ming sighed, reaching for the laudanum.

  For a year she had hoarded drops, slowly filling up a four-ounce bottle. Now she held its dark contents to the light, then took the bottle in her mouth.

  Her hands caressed it sucking it as if she would engorge it make it throb its sloping shoulders exciting her ravenous to feel its contents flowering in her belly nerve ends gaping like discarded mouths her groin alive wanting it like a woman wants the act of love wanted to be full in every rancid cavity she writhed and hardly removing the bottle from her mouth pulled off the rubber stopper sucked the slender thing again like she would swallow it whole felt the first big spurt bitter burn the message in the bottle felt the contents flow and sucked and sucked felt it sluicing in her down her now she was the message in the bottle something coming at her someone running he was coming slick and amber she was coming circuits lit terribly alert. Toru.

  All that night, wailing echoed through the house, Pono shrieking, yanking Ming’s big toe, trying to bring her back from death. In the kitchen Run Run squatted, cursing, waving her carving knife at God. In the morning, Run Run stood in the driveway, waving the knife at a Catholic priest crossing himself as he drove away. He had entered Ming’s room, seen the pipe and empty bottles, and fled, refusing her Last Rites because of her appetite for filth.