Kalihi
I can’t hear your voice, but I know that you’re still listening, always. And so I can tell you: sometimes I believe none of this would have happened if we’d stayed on the Big Island, where the gods are still alive. Fire goddess Pele with her unyielding strength, birthing the land again and again in lava, exhaling her sulfur breath across the sky. Kamapua‘a, wanting her love, bringing his rain and stampede of pig hooves to break her lava down, make it into fertile soil, the way it is all across the grassy hills of Waimea, down into the valleys, surrounding where you were born. Or there is Kū, god of war, who one day plunged himself into that same soil, turning from a father and a husband into a tree, a tree to bear fruit for his starving wife and children. The first breadfruit. He was a god of war, but he was also a god of life. Sometimes he came as a shark . . .
So I wonder if some of him is you, and if some of you is him, the way the ocean and the dirt and the air here are all made of the gods. It was what I believed at first: That you were made of the gods, that you would be a new legend, enough to change all the things that hurt in Hawai‘i. The asphalt crushing kalo underfoot, the warships belching filth into the sea, the venomous run of haole money, California Texas Utah New York, until between the traffic jams and the beach-tent homeless camps and big-box chain stores nothing was the way it should have been. I believed that you could defeat this.
With shame now I see that could never have been the case. But I remember when I was especially full of faith, and it was the day your father and I discovered your graveyard.
Do you remember? You were a junior in classes, although barely sophomore-aged, and still Principal’s List and Science Club captain and playing the ‘ukulele like you’d swallowed the whole Hawaiian history. And it was good, all of it. Excellent. Though the truth is that, for all the pride we had in everything you were doing, there still was, especially for me, a feeling of failure. We’d pushed you the wrong way after that New Year’s, expecting you to fix the people who heard what you were capable of and came to our door, hollowed out with desperation. Yes, I thought, this is it, he’ll start with them, and it will grow.
And yes, there was something in it for us, too. We did want—we did need—the extra money that came in. I’m sorry.
When you stopped taking those requests, you closed off from us even further. So much about you became a secret, and I don’t think you ever completely came back. This we also came to understand after that graveyard day.
Do you remember the graveyard? I do. The rare day your father and I were both home in the after-school hours; we noticed you’d left and hadn’t come back.
“He just took that same path he always takes,” Kaui said, shrugging when we asked.
It was late. We wanted you back. So we took the path, too. Around the corner and across the street from our house, the brown footpath dropped behind frazzled hedges to an open field. Scummed water trickled through a canal to the left, and beyond, a hurricane fence fronted the dusty backyards of muffler shops and industrial warehouses. Tuna smells bloomed along the path, which continued straight to a distant clump of trees. Along the path, as we walked, we saw cairn after cairn, each rock pile newer than the one before. Only the cairns weren’t all stone: they were spiny and flashing with bike cogs, car engine parts, abandoned elbows of pipe. Some were already covered in weeds.
“What are these?” I asked your father. He squatted next to one.
“Look like graves to me,” he said, which I had already known would be the answer.
“Augie,” I said.
“He’s down here,” your father said. “Somewhere.”
Your father turned toward the trees at the end of the path. From the industrial lots came the sound of metal slicing over itself, the crack of a pallet dropping in the dirt.
We stood and went on along the path, the graves at regular intervals, shin-high piles of rocks and scrap metal. The last cairn before we reached the trees was topped with a half-buried plastic robot, something you had built in one of your incredible science classes at Kahena. The robot was a sun-scalded blue, scoured with animal marks.
I bent and touched it. “This is Nainoa’s,” I said to your father. It looked like a few brown scabs of blood were clinging to the inside of the robot’s arms. What I smelled coming off the cairn was mostly a rocky smell, but underneath, faintly, something of old wet leather and rotting cotton.
“Some of the other stuff, from before, that was from our garage, too, I think,” your father said. “Had an old gear from his first bike.”
The trees were as close as they were going to get without us going into them. There was a dizzy feeling starting in my head.
It wasn’t as dark as I had expected inside, the trees were low with sun breaks. As we walked the dizzy feeling I’d had expanded, running down my skull along each rung of my spine and throat, into my chest. My eyes felt fogged, blurred, and when I opened them wide again, I snatched your father’s hand, as if I might fill with whatever I was feeling and float away.
We stopped. There was a clearing on the other side of the trees and you were there, sitting in the grass, your knees kinked up with your elbows resting on them, fingers playing at the air between your ankles, as if you were waiting to be picked up after school.
“Thank God,” your father said. “I thought maybe he was back here playing with hisself.”
I told him to stop, which never works with your father.
“No, it’s okay, I got a few friends that was like that back in the day. Did I tell you about how John-John tried with his dog’s—”
“Augie, shut up.”
There was a mess in the sky. A dark shape wobbled through the break in the trees, flapping and tumbling, and smacked into the earth right next to you. A feather fluffed through the air. The shape rose—I saw that it was an owl—and dragged itself toward you, a few sloppy heaves of its bulk before it collapsed at your feet, chest up. We watched that chest swell and shrink, slower and slower.
You closed your eyes and put your hands on it.
“Is he,” your father said.
The owl’s breathing slowed again, and again. It was such a paper-light thing. Your face tightened and furrowed, sweat rolled down the line of your jaw. The dizziness in me surged. I was weightless, I was in the sky, beating my arms, only they weren’t arms, they were the stringy muscle and soaring sheets of feathered wings. I rocketed into the sky, all blue everywhere but for the knobbed ridges of the Ko‘olaus getting smaller beneath me. Everything was air, fringed in golden light, and I rose toward the sun like I was riding the fastest elevator, surging and expanding, until everything I was seeing popped, like the lightest bubble.
I was back in the trees, standing with your father, and in the cradle of your hands, the owl had stopped breathing. Without shifting from your kneeling position, you yanked the owl’s body up by the wing and pitched the whole body hard back into the grass. A leg flopped crookedly in the wrong direction.
“Shit!” you called out once, your voice warbled and breaking, the true voice of a boy. You clutched your head in both hands and wailed at the ground.
“Don’t,” your father said, lurching in one crackling rush from our hiding spot, before I could stop him. “Don’t!”
You turned at the sound, your face snotted and flushed. As your father moved forward, you scrambled back.
“Don’t touch me,” you warned, and your father froze in a crouch, arms outstretched to gather you up. Our gazes locked, then moved apart, and I turned mine again to the owl. One wing was jutting up from the limp mess of feathers, and tufts of fluff fluttered when the breeze came through. I wasn’t even a little sad, as I’d expected I should have been; instead I was filled with the echoes of what I’d felt and seen just before, golden and rising.
“We just wanted to make sure you was safe,” your father said.
You stood, went to the owl.
“Nainoa,” I said, because you seemed small and guilty of something, black-brown hair shorter than your brother’s with that side part you used to have, and you were still in your white polo and navy school pants, your right arm across your body, gripping the biceps of your hanging left. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” you said. That was when I saw the trowel, you must have brought it from our garage. You yanked it from the ground and began digging.
“Do you want help?” your father asked.
“You can’t help me,” you said.
And so your father came back to me. We didn’t stay to watch you dig the rest. It didn’t seem right.
We stood outside the trees, by one of the cairns.
“Did you feel anything in there?” I asked Augie.
“Felt like I was flying,” Augie said. “Might as well it was right into the sun.”
My mind was just catching up with what we’d felt, what we’d seen. “Augie, my God, how long has he been seeing things like that? Doing things like that?” I wanted to count the graves, to consider how many animals you’d lived their last breaths with, how many times you’d tried, and failed, to make a difference. How many other things you might be seeing and feeling without us, all of it like running into a wall over and over. The thought that we’d be able to help you through this, to guide you to what you were supposed to become, was total stupidity; along with what we’d been asking you to perform for us, in our home, with the desperate neighbors we’d subjected you to, the stories we told you about what we thought you were. It came unspooling from me as we stood there.
“I use whatever I can find,” you said. “When there aren’t enough stones.”
You’d come up behind us while we did our own thinking. You had more to say, and if we’d asked, if we hadn’t, it didn’t matter; you kept talking. Waved the trowel at the grave we were considering. “This was a dog,” you said. “Some poi dog, like I couldn’t tell what kind.”
You said you’d found it down there when you were out messing around along the canal, skipping stones and taking a break from everything. The dog had been hit by a car. Probably one of the shipping trucks or construction monsters that were always grinding and shuddering along the canal. After it had been hit, the dog dragged itself, all its broken parts, to the clearing. I can only imagine the jammy trail of its insides it must have left along the ground.
You said that you’d tried to fix it, that when you’d laid hands on it, for the first time you felt something important: all the broken places in its body. It was like a puzzle, you said, and all you had to do was put the pieces back together. But you worked in one place and another would start to die. Then you’d turn to that place and the part that you fixed before would be unraveling itself, and on and on, until finally you lost. “I was the dog at the very end,” you said, and started shivering. “I was running on this bright road. Paws ticking into the mud, my body this bouncing knot of muscles. It was like I was dumb with happiness, I don’t know . . . I ran and ran and ran, but everything got weaker and weaker, until I was just . . . floating into darkness.”
You’d buried the dog here and sometimes came back to visit. You said it always made you feel better, lighter, as if you were again the dog, running.
And standing there was exactly like that. Later the field would be fenced off and the fence would become a wall and the wall would become another building, storing and manufacturing cement, and the graveyard was gone, somewhere under the foundation. But I remember it as it was then.
You explained that other animals had come after the dog. Flocks and strays, poisoned from antifreeze and wrecked from car strikes and being chewed up by cancer, crawling on their last to arrive here, waiting for you. To give up their last sparks.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” you said. “I keep messing up.”
Augie put his hand on your shoulder. “No you don’t,” he said.
“What do you mean?” you asked.
“Feels way happy, doesn’t it?” Augie asked. “Right at the end. Feels that way to me, anyway.”
But you shook your head. “I have to start fixing things.
“I have to fix everything,” you corrected.
Whole nights after the sharks, your father and I had been wondering what would happen, what you would be. I believe that graveyard day was the first time we truly understood the scale of you. If you were more of the gods than of us—if you were something new, if you were supposed to remake the islands, if you were all the old kings moving through the body of one small boy—then of course I could not be the one to guide you to your full potential. My time as a mother was the same as those last gasping breaths of the owl, and soon enough you’d have to gently set down my love, fold it up into the soil of your childhood, and move beyond.
I remember leaning back against your father’s chest as we sat in the grass. Shadows had moved over the water in the canal, but far beyond that, the lights in Honolulu were winking on. The golden feeling of the owl’s last flight stayed with me, even if the vision had long since coasted into the dark.