I walked over all cockroach-quiet. The air smelled like old wood and Noa was taking these weird deep breaths. He was holding something in one of his hands. Whatever it was he had it low in his hands, so I kept stepping closer to see. I got maybe five feet away when I kicked a bottle cap. It went skittering and pinging into some dark corner and Noa jumped. “Hey—” he started, trying to cover things with his hands. But I made it in time. He couldn’t hide what he was holding.
There was a hunting knife in his right hand, long and thick and teethy. On his left thigh, up high where his skin was way lighter, there was a fresh cut. Blood was weeping out.
We started talking all at once. I wanted to know what he was doing and he just wanted me to go away. But I was tired of going. I kept asking was he hurt and should I go get Mom and Dad.
“No,” he said. “No no no. It’s not an accident.”
“I know it’s not an accident,” I said. “You see anyone else in here holding a knife?”
He clunked the knife down on the table like it said something. Like that meant this was over. The cut was weeping blood. Noa was just staring.
“Fix it,” I said.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You mean right now?” I asked. “Or, like, ever?”
We watched it bleed. He was staring so hard I thought his face would pop.
“Noa?”
“It’s never been like New Year’s,” he said.
It made everything make sense. How he would only see people with his door closed, all alone. How the Parkinson’s man came back. “Noa,” I said, “all those people—”
“I still did something,” he said. “I could feel it most times, almost like I was in their bodies. But there are all these things that keep coming, pictures, commands, I don’t know—” And he slapped his palm against his head. Hard once. Then again. Then again, with his eyes clamped closed. And tears ran from the edges of his lids.
I put my hand on his back, but he jerked away like he’d been bitten. “Get away,” he said.
I guess I wasn’t surprised. So I did what he said.
* * *
I WENT BACK to the gym the next day after school. More heat than before. No clouds, making the afternoon almost like a squinty headache. The spitting pop of bus brakes. Voices hollering into and out of the gym. Even the bright crack of people playing pool in the front rec room. I watched the hālau from outside the door.
We had an arrangement, okay. Because I never asked my mom and dad about paying to join. I knew the answer. So the kumus said I could still come if I only watched from outside, right? When Kumu Wailoa—the one with her tissue-paper-worn tank tops, vana of armpit hair poking out, chicken-pox forehead and smile like a dolphin—when she said I could learn whatever I saw, I told myself I’d learn everything.
The kumus started the music for the warm-up. Easy soft slaps of the ipu. I did the warm-up, same as the girls inside: ‘Ami, ‘uwehe, kaholo, hela, the step and swing, arms like lightning bolts sometimes and then like water. Rock and circle of the hips. My back and all those bones. Stiff as a spear. It made me feel right. Like a back-in-the-day Hawaiian woman, the beat of their hula. Their scarred, flexy, almost-black skin, I felt it. Closed lips with mana and their naked chee-chees out in the open, no haole dresses. Fisted hands that wove lau hala mats and pulled kalo from the fields.
So maybe Mom and Dad and the gods didn’t care about me the way they did about Noa. That didn’t mean I couldn’t be something. I was still here.
4
DEAN, 2001
Kalihi
There’s this saying and it’s a poster on the wall opposite the end of my bed so I see it every time I wake up, and I believe it more than anything. It goes like this: Every morning gazelles gotta run faster than the fastest lion or they going get eaten. Every morning lions gotta run faster than the slowest gazelle or they going starve. That’s true, that there’s just the two types of people in the world. I see it all around me at Lincoln High yeah, kids in boro-boro clothes and crying about how prep school kids just get whatever they want and don’t know nothing about real life, but these same Lincoln High kids is only ever just bitching like that and then waiting, palms up. Don’t none of ’um ever stand up and take what they want, I figure that makes them the gazelle. There’s no gazelle in me, I don’t do the scared running. I’m only and always a motherfucking lion.
But even then there’s a third type of person I guess. Not a type really, just my brother, and I don’t wanna believe in him but most times I do. I do. I seen the sharks, then after, how crazy smart he’s getting, people coming to see him because of what they heard happened at New Year’s. Mom and Dad, Mom especially, talking about ‘aumakua and old gods of the ‘āina coming back. When she says it sometimes I get chicken skin, even. So yeah, I believe. I hate it—I hate it—but I believe.
Except, plenty mornings I wake up and there’s Noa across the way in his bed, drool-sleeping with his faded blue sheets, same like when he used to come find me in my bed, nightmares he’d had, and I’d tell him it’s going be all right and let him climb in with me, him hot as a hibachi charcoal. Only now I wake up without him, eating cereal and joking with Mom and Dad, Kaui coming in, and I get them all laughing and smiling, just me. Until Noa shows up, right, and suddenly it’s all questions about what’s happening with his day and did he sleep okay and here’s some thoughts about which extracurricular program he should enroll in at Kahena.
Hard not for get angry at that. I’d feel it like a fist flexing inside my own chest.
Used to be we’d live like this: I’d cup a fart around my brother’s nose and he’d go Quit it, mahu, and come rolling into me. We’d throw into a wrestling knot, even pull Kaui in, all three of us on the cheap-burn carpets at Old Navy or the steep shore at Sandy Beach. Back then it was all grapples, no hate-spit running from our mouths or us putting our elbows in each other’s windpipes, that came later. But when it did it came hard.
Or all those weekend kanikapilas, when we’d both do ‘ukuleles on the scratchy red-and-green folding chairs, singing “Big Island Surfing” while Mom’s pulling Spam musubi out the cooler and Dad’s getting the shoyu chicken going on the grill. That was us, too, until Noa got to be so he could move so fast on the strings and neck of the ‘uke, and he’d do it even faster when I was trying for keep up. Just so he could smile and say, Let me slow down and show you.
Shithead. But he could never beat me footracing, or in any sports, and I could see it wasn’t like how school or music was, coming natural to him. So I kept balling, with him or without him, until I was nothing but flow on the court, until everything out there was mine. Sometimes I’d get Noa to come to the park and play D on me if there wasn’t no else there to play against, I’d even let him score some points, get us in a actual game, before I’d take over and wreck him. For a long time Noa kept coming to those park days, even when he knew he’d never win.
But then, after New Year’s, after the sick and hurt and hoping neighbors started showing up, after the Parkinson’s guy, each one made Noa a little more and more … off. Something breaking, is how I figured it. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, no idea why, sure enough I turn over for face the room and Noa’s awake, sometimes outside the room, and I can hear him going through the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, probably trying everything in there. Or sometimes he’d still be in our room but crouching into my stash box like he’s some Mission Impossible and it’s a bomb, next day I run the count and sure enough I’m short. I wonder if he even knows how to roll a joint, or if he just ate it or what. But you could see how something was getting to him, small-kind, kids all whispering in the hall at school like they always do, Mom and Dad almost like it’s obvious they think something’s wrong with him. Like he’s broken. Even though he’s still bringing home principal’s medals and like that.