Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  Ho’omana’o . . .

  * * *

  Remember . . . Remember . . . Remember . . .

  UP IN KOHALA, TORU STUMBLED ACROSS A PASTURE, whistling in his horse. Leaving a dark wake in silver grass, the great black stallion floated forward, whinnying affection. Toru rode his hand along its back, buried his head in its mane and wept so hard the horse danced off, alarmed. Blindly, he flung himself face-down against the earth.

  Ming. How we traveled deep in Seed, how we parted the walls! Once more, he walked with her, took her by the hand to Chinatown, taught her how to smoke, to find that place in the Gobi where a Mongol milked a singing horse. Taught her to receive him, slick and amber, to love things she didn’t have a name for. And then deserting her for smack, journey I could only take alone . . . Pono snatching me back, long rehabilitating climb. And finding Ming again, lost to what I had instilled in her. A craving.

  After a long time, he clutched a handful of tall grass, seemed to suck the oxygen from it and finally stood, empty of everything save all the urgent chronicles he and Ming had never shared and should have, all the lustful, panting dialogues that give humans history, something to recollect. Paniolo straddling a fence watched at a distance as Toru approached a pine tree thick as his waist. He stood before the tree, apologized, and hit it, attacking it because he didn’t know how he could bear to go on living.

  He could live without her everyday presence, perhaps, live without forbidden nights of stroking her drugged and childlike body. But how could he live without existing in her conscious mind, her thoughts of him his only definition. He hit the side of the tree again with the edge of his open palm, a sharp karate chop. Numbness, then fire up his aching limb.

  He rubbed his hand against his chaps, then whacked the tree again, the impact rolling his eyeballs back. Men approached warily as he embraced the tree, trying get his balance, embraced and groaned as if about to penetrate, to mate, his hair now needled, elbows full of bark. He groaned again, as if ejaculating, as if he would, with this tree, create a thing whose blood was green. He whacked the tree again. It shuddered.

  “Hey, brah” someone yelled. “Yoah karate not so good. Gonna’ broke yoah hand.”

  He hit and hit the tree, the impact resounding in the woods. His hand split, squirting blood, he noticed bone. A crew boss rode up shouting, reining in a piebald with a quirky trot. The pine tree listed, began to creak and whine. This sad, blind, grieving human, whacking! whacking! even as the tree went down. Alarmed, doves suddenly shot the sky, soaring like white sheets of music. He looked up, thought of Ming, her love of Telemann and Bach, and pointed with that hand, splintered bone, shredded flesh bursting from his skin like atoms. He felt nothing, his pain deeper than human tissue. The shock of feeling nothing smote him, and he fainted.

  What stood for years between Toru and his past was now erased. He sat up in the dark, propelled by blinding flashbacks, children floating face-down in green paddies, tanks sprouting human heads. Dismemberment, evisceration, taking a human being down to its very marrow. Funny, the enemy looks like me. GIs circling a naked girl, hands kneading testicles. The tale behind the valor. Ming was the only one he told it to. Even pronouncing the word . . . ’Nam ... was like lifting a corner of some awful veil, glimpsing a final horror. Now he was there again, other times, other places. He walked on tiptoe, waiting for ambush, feeling for trip mines in the dark. He woke with nostrils singed from the smell of phosphorous grenades. He tried to snap out of it. Nothing signified, all hopes gone. It was a world with new definition for what it now denied him: Ming.

  He grew tired of remembering, tired of running, of standing still. He thought of dying, cleverly and fast. But something pressed against him, something backed by rage, enough to keep him going. His wounded arm was in a cast, he walked it like a friend, hiking into valleys, across far fields. He sat on cliffs overlooking the Pacific, in lashing rain and blinding sun, unmoving, unseeing. Weeks passed, grief held, yet it was generous, making room for something else. One day he looked around, feeling stretched and cured like hide left out in weather. What was all the suffering for? It must have been for something. Someone stole twenty years from me. What happened to it? How can I get it back?

  He thought of Ming, how she used to tell him, “Find the thing that keeps you angry.”

  Maybe, he had a mission, a pathetically small task on the grand scale of living, but for now it was implicit and would do.

  He stood on the sand at dusk, while muscled paddlers took Ming’s remains out beyond the reef. Up and down torchlit beaches drums throbbed, kāhuna chanted, while Pono stood majestically, scattering ashes from the canoe. Arms lifted high, she stared into the depths, calling, calling, and slowly, one by one, and two by two, ’aumākua manō, shark ancestors appeared. Random iridescence of Ming’s ashes on their snouts, they circled round and round, rubbing mournfully against the drifting hull. And there were crowds, students, friends, so many who had never really known her, only knew about her pain. They lined the beaches, clefts in sand. The night was isolate.

  Pono came ashore, poured something in his hand. “My granddaughter, who felt many things for you.”

  Toru stared down at his palm, holding the woman he had loved. With consummate grace, he flung his hand out, casting her ashes into the waves.

  “E Pūpūkahi.” We are one.

  Jess, Vanya, Rachel gathered near. Tall, muscular, wiry, smelling of sweat, grass, steer and saddle, and mountains and myth, this man, vessel of their youth, looked terribly injured, old. In the violent, static smack-years after he came home from war, Ming had been his solace, his confessor. And after? in between? before? he had been to her, for her, what none of them were sure of. Young and dreamy suitor? Procurer? Lover? Past all reasoning, he and Ming had retreated together into a place unspeakable, impregnable. Toru had known her best of all.

  They attended him, waiting for some utterance, some pronouncement that would give everything, her death, this day, a grace and clarity. He looked round, wanting to tell them they were silly, mediocre, because they knew nothing of pain, real pain. Ming had been a soldier. She understood combat. Together they had traveled far. Journeys that would shock. He said nothing.

  After a while, he rolled his Stetson in his hands, set it on his head and walked away. Passing Vanya, he paused, seemed to fling his face at hers so that their eyes connected, and held. He nodded slowly, pushed his Stetson back from his forehead and walked on.

  That night, in Pono’s house, Vanya snapped out of sleep. Tension like electricity ran through her. As if answering a summons, she pulled her sleeping sarong around her, made her way downstairs. Toru’s truck idled in the driveway.

  “The monastery . . . tomorrow afternoon.”

  “.. . for what?” she asked.

  He inhaled, flicked a butt across the lawn. “Don’t act stupid, Vanya. You want in on this, or not?” Before she could respond, he shifted gears, eased back down the drive.

  All night he studied the play of moonlight on walls, insects skittering across bare floors, snores of men in sleeping bags. Bivouac, is what it’s like, half sleep, cold sweats, waiting for dawn and combat. Only it wasn’t combat, they were still in the talking stage. Nearby, a stray cat woke, licked its private parts. Moonlight shifted. The outline of the long-gone Buddha seemed to sparkle on the wall, reminding him of Bangkok, saffron robes of virgin monks, glittering Wats. Tongue of a girl-whore engorging him, his journey into smack. He shifted, dug deeper into his sleeping bag, remembering Morse code from combat training, tapping out on his chest, BORN TO DIE, tapping tapping until sleep took him down.

  Driving up that afternoon, Vanya heard the din before she reached the dirt turn-off to the monastery. She drove slowly through slums of frangipani sticking to the tires, through chandeliers of bees drunk on honeysuckle, and dragonflies in ginger. The music was so deafening, she swerved into a bush, crushing blue flowers like tiny feet.

  It was angry music, clearing her brain like a shot. Music that broug
ht back years of deadly newscasts—monks in fierce self-immolation, Diem, napalm, My Lai. And she felt the weight of those years pass through her. Someone had pushed a button, and all the boys, in all the graves at Punchbowl Cemetery came to life, marching in formation. The music grew louder, uglier.

  The lunatic is in the hall / the lunatics are in my hall / the paper holds their folded faces to the floor / and every day the paperboy brings more . . . [©]

  It seemed as if speakers were everywhere.

  . . . the lunatic is in my head I the lunatic is in my head / you raise the blade, you make the change/you rearrange me til I’m sane / You lock the door, and throw away the key / There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me . . . [©]

  Music gathering the day into a mad geometry. Music of the Apocalypse, of men whose young lives had burned away as light passed through them, leaving them without belief in normal things.

  Toru stood in the doorway like something smoking, about to ignite. He waved with that oversize, dirty cast, making his arm look like a gray lobster’s claw. When he hugged her, she felt his muscles hum, so jazzed up, it seemed all the things that could have been, were now cut loose within him.

  “Turn that awful music down.” She watched men, like maturing larva, crawl out of sleeping bags. “What is this? What war games are you playing?”

  His words came out mean and brittle, like they’d been saved for twenty years. “The games are over. We’re calling in the debts.”

  She sat for hours with men who were vets, and some who were not. Some were just angry locals, watching their island go to the highest bidders: resort developers, marina designers, spaceport advocates. And as she listened, looking over diagrams, manuals on hand bombs, Vanya saw her sense of logic leap from a high window.

  “What is there to lose?” they asked. “They talk of sovereignty, but we have nothing. There is nowhere left to even cry.”

  They talked all afternoon, an exchange in which outrage was the currency. All they had to do was organize. She had a vision then, of the need in her for vengeance, payback. After all the years, it gave her life a point. All the years of working for law firms, doing “piecework” as a female attorney. The years of courting the media, the speeches, years of shouting for her people. Theater, mere theater.

  I’m over forty, and I have not made a difference.

  She listened and listened. Hawaiians were tired of feigning subservience, tired of false modesty. A hapa-Pākē described the alkali shrouding his village from a leaking geothermal well. His face was sickly and sallow, he showed her Polaroids of his children with stomach ailments. They looked embalmed. Others listened silently, held in the equilibrium of waste and loss, the dying of their island, of all the islands:

  Irreversible pollution of coral gardens at Kāneohe. Stockpiling of nuclear weapons at Waikele. Radiation of productive fishing grounds at Pu’uloa by nuclear submarines. A proposed rail transit system on O’ahu, that would devastate the tiny island’s fragile volcanic foundations, traumatizing Hawai‘i’s entire ecological system. And the hideous and dangerous H-3 Freeway under construction, costing $1.2 billion federal dollars. While high schools crumbled. Day-care centers went to rust. While college scholarships for native locals disappeared. While unemployment, alcoholism, crime, suicides soared among Hawaiians.

  “No more exploitation,” someone said. “One hundred years we been enslaved. Dey stole de throne from out our queen. Sovereignty too late, an empty word. Now time foah payback.”

  “People might die,” Vanya warned.

  “So? We take death by surprise.”

  “What about your wives and children? Your elders?”

  “Hey! Vanya! You forget? All Hawaiians warriors! Try wait, you see how dey been ready!”

  She pictured them on every island, massing, marching, fighting for their land. Remembering the old Aborigine, Digger, in the Kakadu, she felt she was setting a course then, sighting down the barrel of her life. She sat back, watched men brood over maps, blueprints for revolution.

  Yes. There is obligation. Rage must be expressed.

  And it began, spreading among locals from village to village, passing through walls like molecules. It was only a matter of organizing, determination, and being ready to die. Throughout each island they began to meet, doormen and busboys, and doctors, teachers, and maids, Hawaiians tired of living on their knees. They formulated plans, drummed up cash donations. They studied maps, sewed banners together, frightened, but resolved. December 7, 1991, fiftieth anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, was the occasion on which they would begin.

  Nothing stopped them. Tourists jeered, the military shoved them back, roping them off. Dignitaries, survivors of Pearl Harbor, families of Pearl Harbor’s dead, drove past them, shocked, uncomprehending. A human chain of thousands, they lined the highway outside Honolulu, leading to Pearl Harbor Naval Base, the Arizona Memorial Center. No chanting, no demonstrating, just the silent, thoughtful gaze of people who remembered. Above their heads broad white canvas banners were stitched end to end, one continuous, awful artery lettered in black, mourning the casualties of war, of invasions, of forced annexations, calling the U.S. government into account.

  Hearing sirens in the distance—the motorcade bringing in the president of the United States—they raised their arms higher, banners bursting into white battalions as far as the eye could see. His limousine approached, flanked by motorcycled military escorts. Cameramen, the international press ran alongside his motorcade, romancing his profile as he passed—cosmetic smile, eyes entirely unseeing—hand waving gently like a wand. MPs leaned inside the ropes, viciously elbowing back the bannered crowds. And they were silent, arms stiff below the fluttering white, their gaze unflinching, as the president of the United States rode by.

  And what passed through him down the miles? Recognition? The ghosts and gallops of invasion, domination? Or through his tinted windows, was there only blur, a passing whiteness, on which black forms accrued:

  REMEMBER BAGHDAD . . . REMEMBER PANAMA . . . REMEMBER NICARAGUA . . . REMEMBER GUATEMALA . . . REMEMBER THE FALKLANDS . . . REMEMBER ARGENTINA . . . REMEMBER EL SALVADOR . . . REMEMBER LIBYA . . . REMEMBER MY LAI . . . REMEMBER CAMBODIA . . . REMEMBER LAOS . . . REMEMBER KENT STATE . . . REMEMBER MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA . . . REMEMBER MISSISSIPPI . . . REMEMBER THE BAY OF PIGS . . . REMEMBER MICRONESIA . . . REMEMBER BIKINI . . . REMEMBER HIROSHIMA . . . REMEMBER NAGASAKI . . . REMEMBER ALAMAGORDA . . . REMEMBER MANZANAR . . . REMEMBER TULE LAKE . . . REMEMBER THE 442ND. . . REMEMBER THE HILO MASSACRE . . . REMEMBER LILI’UOKALANI . . . REMEMBER . . . REMEMBER . . . REMEMBER . . .

  And finally, when the president stood weeping on the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, hand across his heart like an opera tenor, asking the world to “Remember Pearl Harbor,” his brothers-in-arms of fifty years ago—1,200 young men wounded when Japan attacked, 2,400 still lying in this watery grave—people wept, the eyes of the world were cast down.

  The world was not allowed to see the rest, highway miles of bodies gaudy with sweat, holding glowing banners. It didn’t see the miles of locals weeping hard and long for their own Pearl Harbor victims—locals accidentally killed, burned, mutilated by American military antiaircraft in the chaos following Japan’s attack. Locals wept, too, for young haole sailors entombed in the Arizona, and for local boys of Guadalcanal and Anzio, Korea, ‘Nam, the traumatized in vets’ hospitals, the graves in Punchbowl Cemetery, the living dead, the druggies, the outcasts.

  And when the U.S. president left Pearl Harbor, traveling in reverse, the banners were still floating high, the words reflected on his tinted windows, REMEMBER . . . REMEMBER . . . REMEMBER. . . As he approached, Rachel, trembling violently, grasped Vanya’s hand raising their banner higher, and Jess stood beside them clutching Toru’s hand, the four of them a run of colors, composite of the crowds: fair, amber, tan, mahogany. For a moment, the president glanced out, pale eyes appraising: a subminority, a people tentative, easily ignored.

  Behind his motorcade,
men in plain cars, dressed in cryptic coloration, drove slowly by, videotaping the crowds. And still they held the banners high, glaring at the cameras, belligerently pointing to their T-shirts . . . MĀLAMA ‘AINA . . . ALOHA OHANA . . . refusing to hide their faces, to turn away.

  The day had passed, palms clattered under cool, respirating breezes. Fog came, soothing aching wrists. Some folks could not drop their arms. Elbows seemed frozen, fingers welded to their banners. Then, with a long gigantic sigh, wind brought the banners dancing down. Exhausted, people rolled them up, embraced, shook hands, and shuffled homeward in night’s obscurity.

  Yet something audible, like footsteps, walked softly in the dark beside them—the unemployed, the homeless, families living in card board containers, in blue yurt-like tents of A’ala Park’s new ghetto. And what they heard resounding softly in the air—what seemed to drift like ash among them, even sifting through their dreams—was one simple word, a sound. Children woke from sleep, eerily alert, couples sat up like covert, nocturnal listeners. And what they seemed to hear floating in the alleys, the guttered streets, the tenements of cardboard boxes, what seemed to illuminate the small blue tents of A’ala, was that one word. HULL Revolution.

  Elders shivered, remembering the word from other centuries, memory chains linking back to warrior days. For, in the word was something sacred, ancestral, nearly forgotten: valor. People fell back into sleep. Morning would bring the usual vicissitudes of trying to survive. But later, days, maybe weeks, in the intuition of an instant, the word returned, floating up in conversation. HULL It was with them now. It permeated, filled the vacuum of their lives.

  He Mōhai o Na Maka

  * * *

  An Offering of Eyes

  PONO LEANED ON HER CANE OF HUMAN SPINE, fighting a terror she could hardly bear. She paced her room, eyes unnaturally bright, shoulders exhausted from holding herself erect. Downstairs Run Run pattered round, filling rooms with armloads of plumería, heliconia, orchids, torch ginger, Bird of Paradise. Whenever she was frightened, she made the house a jungle. Now there was cursing from the kitchen, Run Run plucking notoriously at a chicken, then viciously kneading poi. Suddenly she appeared upstairs, scratched and mauled by Ula, the mongoose, whom she had accidentally set on fire.