Kalihi
Picture this, the mother and the father still living after you’re lost, where every day feels like a fog: no way forward, no way back, no idea which is which, everywhere the cold heavy colorless feeling of floating, alone in the middle of nothing. Picture the work they do anyway, the father heaving the luggage from the belts to the shuttles to the airplane bellies, steel flashing in fluorescence, the blast of sun and clean high burning smell of jet fuel, the dull rumble of departures and arrivals. The mother with the hours of torque on her back as she captains the city bus from salty beachside streets into the cool green orderly neighborhoods and back again, glass high-rises downtown flashing like knives, the shudders and bangs and shoves of the road. This way and that. Picture the call that arrives, it is always a call, this one about the other son, charges and detainment in the county facility while awaiting arraignment, the policies and procedures as foreign as the land—Oregon—on which they’re being implemented. Picture the incapability, the lack of money and work schedules and the distance, and how the mother and the father have nothing to do but listen from afar as their daughter describes what’s coming.
Picture the father’s mind, drained as a reservoir in a drought, now comprehending another loss, the other son, who was perhaps farther away than the father ever thought, more than a phone call, more than a plane ticket, and getting farther. Picture the animated glitter of a healthy mind at work, and then that same mind—the father’s—locking up, sputtering and choking on circumstance. Going black.
Does the wife see? She sees the start, the long night journeys, the husband’s whispers to ghosts she does not know. But she cannot see it all, cannot know exactly how the madness seizes the husband at his place of employment. Perhaps he staggers from the luggage line out into the striped grids of the tarmac, the flight patterns, and endangers whole crews and passenger loads and himself. Perhaps he wanders instead to the chain-link fence, desperate for the midnight mountain prayer garden he’s been digging; perhaps he just sits, and sits, and sits, and mutters to himself in the break room while the luggage piles up and spills over on a shorthanded day, the other luggage handlers screaming his name, demanding he get back to it. The wife doesn’t see this, she only sees that his uniform stops leaving the closet, that their car stops leaving the Kalihi curb of home, and the bank account starves.
Picture the corporate conversation, the mother begging, something she thought she’d never do, the airline company executive saying, We’re sorry, we can’t. He wasn’t fit to work here anymore.
Picture the mother, the wife, now the last bones of the family. Hard and old and cold, holding everything up. Let’s not call it hope. It is a labor of sorts; that is all. Picture her as she realizes she can no longer go to work, because of the father, the constant observation he needs, and her employment goes almost as quickly as his. No money from him, no money from her. This means, in the city, they are dead.
There’s only one place left to go, back to the Big Island, the land of your birth, where family still resides, your father’s brother and his successful business, extra buildings on his extra property that can house the diminished count of us.
If she doesn’t beg, exactly, there’s still a quiet resignation to the mother. There’s still a kneeling, and opening of the palms upward, asking for something to be placed in them. Hands that used to push and take and grip their own way through the world.
Picture what we’ve become without you, my son.
Can you see it?