I had a feeling there would be more of this, that their absence was something that would rest inside me, like the salt underneath my skin, rising out of my pores to sting my eyes when I least wanted it to.
“Something is out there,” Lukas says suddenly, and I’m pulled from my memories.
“What?” I say.
Saskia says something gentle to Lukas in German, Lukas replies almost playfully, his voice going up an octave. “The land is something,” Saskia says, turning back to me. “It is a person and an animal and other things, I don’t know.” She leans over, places her head on his shoulder. “We don’t have religion,” she says to me, “but we both say this place is somehow like that.”
There’s a queasiness of happiness that starts then, quickly, inside me. If these two could feel something, if they think this place is special. “Yes,” I say, “there is something here…” and I start talking, too fast, the words don’t touch my mind before they leave my lips, all the things I’ve wanted to say about what I’m feeling here. By the time I catch up to myself, I’m saying “… it could make the whole world better, couldn’t it. If the right person was using it.”
They smile, but there’s a question behind it, their brows raised and crinkly with incomprehension. There’s a sudden flatness to whatever had been between us. “Wait,” I say, although no one is doing anything. “I’ve got an idea.” I fumble the bag of rainbow candies from my backpack, tear it softly, and offer the opening to each of them. I turn and pull my ‘ukulele from the backpack, open the case. “Have you heard any of our songs?”
I offer the candy again, each of them takes one. Lukas sucks his a moment, then frowns. He says something to Saskia and she spits her candy softly into her hand, motions for him to do the same with his, then cradles both to the jagged hole in the window and ejects them into the night.
“We can hear the songs,” she says, “but no more of this”—she gestures to the candy bag—“please.”
I laugh. “It’s only candy,” I say. “You don’t have candy in Germany?”
She fetches an elegantly decorated bar of chocolate from her backpack; she peels back the foil, breaks us each a shard of the dark chocolate.
“Here,” she says. “We do it right.”
“Give us your songs, then,” Lukas says, his eyes gleaming. “Tell us about this place?”
I lift my hand, feeling all of it, from the night marchers until now. When what’s in my mouth hits my tongue it blooms, dark and sweet and barely bitter.
* * *
MORNING COMES, I wake in the corner of the shack, the damp pocket of my sleeping bag. The room is worse in the dawn: the wood everywhere is dark and I can feel the moisture coming off the boards, the swelling steam of decomposition, ceiling joists are bowed, sagging, spattered with the remains of bird nests. The table we were sitting at last night, sturdy enough then, in truth has ragged legs and a warped, bleached top. Rot has chewed through several small spots in the ceiling, and when a cloud splits apart above, through those holes, rods of white light slant down and scatter on the walls, the floor.
I stand, go to the table, where a green plastic bowl waits, heavy with oatmeal. I lay my palm over the top and feel a last bit of heat rising. They left it for me, and I can’t help but smile, although there is no spoon. I sit on the creaking chair and listen to the clack of the leaves, I scoop the oats with my fingers, as if they are poi, feeling my body hum to life.
Ever since I’d taken my hands from the body of the mother, the feeling of connection—to the physical world, to the people I talked to or lived around—was gone. Wherever I was, in a crowded room or on an empty sidewalk, in the ambulance or at home, sleeping against Khadeja, I ended at the tips of my fingers and toes. There was nothing shared or passed to another, nothing I took from them, I was alone, all of me wrapped up in the voices and memories and souls of the animals and people who’d passed through me. But now, this morning, that has all quieted, replaced instead by a light, steady tug, a desire, but not a voice, wanting me to join it; I’m home.
By the middle of the day I don’t remember all the walking that came between the morning and now. I know that there was exertion, that I stepped and rose and fell with the trail and hacked bush in some places and tramped through the same track that Saskia and Lukas bore down the day before, but it had come and gone without my attention. I’m sweating and thirsty but I don’t stop, I can’t, the valley is opening up for me, as if in invitation. All the branches bend away rather than claw, the mud firms itself for my feet, the mosquitoes scatter rather than swarm. Every step I take, I bounce back stronger and lighter.
Here I am, I think to myself, not as a declaration, but as an offer. This is where I should have been all along, I should have stayed in the islands, worked harder to listen. What did I think I could have accomplished alone, trying to mend broken bodies on the mainland? A whole parade of patients couldn’t teach me as much as a place like this; connections are leaping out at me, revealing themselves, without any effort from me. The way my sweat takes the cells of my skin, mingled with dirt, from my body and drops them into the soil, and how the mist drapes the trees and the trees drink of it and then the sun lights it up and takes it back into the air, and how the plants breathe and their exhale becomes my inhale, the same way so many of the people of these islands once pressed their foreheads together in greeting and inhaled the same air, as one.
The path breaks in front of me. A clearing appears off the main trail and I take it, slipping between the trees. My backpack bangs against the branches, but I continue, push along. I want to see the valley from the sky, I want to see the ocean, it’s there just past the break. The ground slopes down toward a lookout edge, and when I arrive it’s clear how far I’ve come. Waimanu and Waipi‘o, distant and massive but closely tactile all at once, clefts of green with curving bays of rippling surf.
I am far above the valley floor and I stand and watch, but then the ground shifts under me. I feel weightless for a moment, as if I’m leaping, then the swerve of acceleration in my belly, a blur of grass and rushing wind, something jerks and tears at my shoulders, my spine is wrung with heat, popping, the yawning of my body swinging, then I see sky, or ocean far below, something snaps, my femur, I’m spinning, weightless again, the air rushes, Oh wait, oh wait—
PART III
DESTRUCTION
18
KAUI, 2008
San Diego
After me and Van at the Creek, I was moving like a bullet train on fresh rails. I started telling all my engineering professors that gave out group work that I didn’t want to be part of a group—boys after boys after boys and always the same, me fighting each one of them for a voice—so I’d do all the work myself, even if it was four times as much, okay? I did all the work and stood at the top 1 percent of all the hard classes.
Me and Van (and Hao and Katarina) would climb buildings at night if we couldn’t get away from campus. Sometimes me and Van would sit on the floor of our dorm room with our backs to each other, right, while we scribbled in our notebooks, read and highlighted our chapters, our shoulder blades running over each other the way I wanted our hands to. But we didn’t go as far again as we had at the Creek. It was like we were at the top of the diving platform, eyeing the water far below that could soak us, could cool us, but we didn’t leap. We were back to something less, but not nothing. I could feel myself run to a fever by it, fighting to keep myself from flat-out begging for all of her.