San Diego
The first time I met Van we were at the black throat of a culvert with a slice of cocaine between us and she was asking did I want some. I was still coming down with no oxygen after escaping a skunked and stale house party that had been busted by Campus Safety, same as Van and her friends, and when they saw me on the sidewalk after we’d ran, Van said, I heard what you were playing on the stereo, and she turned to one of her friends and said, This bitch was playing Jedi Mind Tricks! And the friend, Katarina, laughed in a way that made her lip ring shine with the wet flash of her teeth. They were two haole girls and a Vietnamese boy, who had unwrapped his dick from his pants so he could turn away from us and hose a spattering piss onto a sidewalk hedge. Katarina said she wished she’d pissed in the face of this one guy who wouldn’t stop talking to her at the party, and Van said that guy probably would have liked it, and Katarina said, Well, I’d poop in it, then, and I knew I’d found my tribe before they even knew my name.
“Kaui?” Van repeated when I told them. She was the one. She had this hacked bob haircut and eyes that were both bored and ready to start a fire. “Yeah,” I said. “Volcanoes,” she said, “angry natives.” And I had to laugh. Partly at least because there was no Getting Lei’d, get it or Do you surf and oh the fruit there is unbelievable it ruined me for everywhere else or I’d love to visit Hawai‘i, why did you ever leave. Van had thick arms, right, same as me, only hers jumped with muscle when she did the slightest thing with them. Katarina was the whitest, with sloppy black hair. Skinny like someone had tossed a Nirvana T-shirt on a coat hanger. The pisser was Hao, his blocky Vietnamese torso dressed for yachting, and he joked while he was shaking himself dry that he should start wearing a catheter to the keggers. “Seriously, though,” Hao said. “I heard about Hawai‘i. There are parts of the islands where they hunt white people for sport, right?”
“Only in the elementary schools,” I said.
“I like her,” Van said to no one. I was blurred through the fog of four beers and didn’t remember how we’d even left the party together, really. The roar and dogmouth steam of the party and then the quiet night like a sheet thrown over my head, and now we were here. On the concrete embankment of a drainage ditch outside the entrance to a culvert big enough to swallow a truck. Above us, cars blew past on the boulevard. I was three thousand miles from Hawai‘i and anyone who knew anything about my brother, okay, and I’d never again need to be the sister of a miracle. And there was the cocaine, neat on the back of Van’s phone.
“First time?” Van asked.
“Don’t worry,” Katarina said, and she went, a quick dip and sniff. Stood and sucked in all the air like she was surfacing from deep ocean. She leaned her head all the way up to the sky and stretched out on the embankment. Let the crown of her skull rock against the concrete.
Van sliced another line and didn’t say much, and Hao said, “You or me?” and I realized he was asking me. I sniffed up the little mound Van had made and my blood rocketed up into my head and exploded into light. Happiness prickled across my everything. Friendship, I was thinking, right? Love. Feels like this.
Somewhere far away and right next to me Katarina said, “Let’s do the culvert. We can do the culvert. Guys, guys,” her sharp-teeth smile. A laugh from somewhere.
“The culvert.” Was it me or Van that echoed it? “Easy.”
And then we were there, down under the city in the gaping culvert, sprinting and whooping in the blackness. Running our hands along the endless baffle of steel ridges while our feet slapped through the murk. In my head I’d be like: There’s a turn just up ahead, if we go far enough we’ll see light. But the culvert just kept getting darker, the smell of batteries and old laundry. So dark my eyes were making things up: globes of red and blue flittering in my eyes when I blinked. Dry scratching and skittering on the walls in front of us, animals departing in the dark. The feeling that something was always just ahead. It could’ve been a cement wall. A fence of wire coming undone into a sheet of daggers. Didn’t matter, said my beating body. We’d boom through whatever headfirst, all hard bones and hot power. Locomotives. What was this train we’d made ourselves into so quickly? It was roaring me away from Hawai‘i. Then and now. And yes that was what I wanted: San Diego, yes; goodbye, the islands, the gods, legend of Nainoa.
We did this many times that year. We never found the end but we always found our way back.
I WAS AN ENGINEER AT SCHOOL, or anyway studying to be one. There were books, doorstop books with page-long equations. They chewed into my spine when I set them in my backpack and the titles were profound and sexy, right, like Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics. Plus I was always in the labs: places with wood-paneled walls, old glass beakers, peeling tables of commonly used physics equations taped to the walls and corners of desks. And boys. Always, always boys. Whole classes, boys shaped like teddy bears or tree lizards. Always first to pull out their opinions, shove their knowledge at each other. I guess there’s many ways engineering could feel but mostly it felt like any place feels where there’s twenty boys and three girls. I had to go in with my back like a rod. Be the baddest bitch is what I said, in my head. And then did.
Sometimes I would sit by the other two girls in class—Sarah, Lindsey—but us being together felt like we were all doing it because we thought we needed to. And after a few choppy conversations? They were so haole—Idaho or North Dakota or whatever—it was obvious they’d never even sat that close to a brown person before. Meaning I was on my own, right, but whatever, I liked it. Until a few weeks into class we started group work and since I’d iced out the girls I was grouped with a bunch of boys.
Group work the way I remember: Phillip with his raging boner for the sound of his own voice, always the first to pipe up with the proposed solution. The rest of us sitting around the table as he drove forward with scribbling on the final sheet. I’d do all the homework problems myself separately—the only way I was sure I’d understand everything anyway—so he and I were always getting into it. It reminded me of Nainoa, the way when we talked now he had an answer for everything, just bulldozed whatever I was going to say until our calls degenerated into snark and cheap shots for the weak places in each other’s armor.
In group work it would go something like this: “Wrong frictional coefficient,” I’d say. And Preston or Ed would sigh, and here comes Phillip.
“No it’s not,” he’d say.
“Look,” I’d say, and start to write out the equation again, explaining how the final speed he’d calculated made no sense in the given context.
And if it became clear from arguing that I was right, Phillip would start talking about how what I’d said originally was phrased incorrectly, okay, and so what he was really talking about was this other thing. Or that he meant I’d balanced the equation incorrectly, not that the final answer was wrong. “The math you were doing before was in the wrong order.”
Or sometimes, through just enough grinding him down, I could prove that I was right. But by then Phillip would just come back with, “Calm down.” His hands up like I was pointing a gun at him. “You’re overreacting.” Preston or Ed would shrug and the shrug would feel like a nod and I’d want to fart all over all of them.
“Call of Duty 4 is coming out this weekend,” Preston offered once, as a white flag. Or maybe it was that other kid in the group. Gregory, was it? It didn’t matter who said it. They were all capable at any moment of saying something like that, right. I mean they even smelled the same. Cheese that had been licked by a dog and then left out overnight.
I sighed. “What,” I said, “is Call of Duty 4?”
Quiet for a second. The sense they’d all be happy if only I’d step out of the room and never come back.
“I’m definitely getting it,” Preston went on. “I’m going to stand in line tonight at Best Buy.”
“Who isn’t?” Phillip said, voice full of excitement.
“I’m not,” I said.
Silence again. A chair scraped, the circle closing just a little, me on the outside. As far as I was concerned, just go for it, boys. But not Ed. Ed the courageous one. He took his cue, when the others hunkered together. Came over and sat down at the desk next to me. His weak chin and fruit-punch-red lips. “Kaui,” he said, like it was a word he had practiced in the mirror. He hunched closer and nodded. “I’m not buying Call of Duty, either.”
“Oh God, Ed,” I said. “I’m not going to let you touch my vagina.”
PLENTY DAYS I’D lift my head from one of my textbooks, some opaque corner of the library. Faint smell of paper decaying into must, wood glue, and cold steel. Me greasy with lack of sleep, eyes charred from too much reading. And I’d realize it had been forever since I’d danced hula.
I figured there would never be hula here, but there was. San Diego had hella Hawai‘i people, closest you could get to the islands without falling in the Pacific, I guess. I went to find them once, I did. All the Hawai‘i kids in the university club. They did hula on the quad in the bright months of the year and it would’ve been so easy to get wrapped in with them. Their hapa Hawaiian, Japanese-Portuguese-Tongan, Spanish-Korean brown skin under pilling hoodies from high schools whose whole reputation I knew. Mynah-bird laughter and Nah for real, got musubi we’re making tonight or You heard the latest Jake Shimabukuro, was nuts, yeah, and barefoot in their dorm rooms, Bocha at night of course, all the other things that were as much a part of me as my bones, but that felt wrong now, somehow.
I knew they’d know Nainoa, or Dean, all the legends I didn’t want to be mine. If I stayed with those kids and did my hula, what then? Old Hawai‘i life would slip back into me like a sleeping pill. Sludge me down until I was just another member of the club. Just again his shadow, shaped like a sister.
BUT THEN THERE WAS THE CLIMBING: That day when in the bland and heavy, pancake-smelling dining hall Van said to Katarina, “I bet you she can climb. You think?” And Katarina said, “Let’s find out.”
Van’s friend had a car he’d gotten on the cheap. A busted-up Japanese sedan from who knows what year, right. Bumper duct-taped and fence-wired back to the frame. All the seat belts cut or chewed or sawed or burned off, a radio that sounded like electrocution. Upholstered in, okay, a vague armpit smell. All that mattered was it had four seats and a trunk big enough for our climbing gear and that Van’s friend had this communal key he’d leave around like a treasure hunt and if you found it you could drive the car. If it was still in the lot and hadn’t been towed.
It was still in the lot. We took it north. It was a golden early California hour. We had the windows down like you do in Hawai‘i and everyone’s hair was bucking with the beat of the wind, except Hao, his swirled explosion of spiky hair too short and stiff to move much. We stayed in the left lane all the way, the billboards and the barbed-wire lots and the shitty endless sameness strip malls slipping in and out of view with their stucco white. And the matchstick-brown-and-sagebrush hills. Until Van blinkered us off the 5 and it wasn’t until the loop and drift of the turn gave me gravity in my belly that I realized we’d been doing above ninety the whole way.
All the veins of retarred cracks in the road plus pink-gold smogginess of sunup plus the prickled slack palm trees and flat brown rectangles of unused land. Van drove down two wrong streets and past a barely up chain-link fence with frothing pit bulls, barking their guttural balls off.
Katarina and Hao were bantering like the stupidest siblings. Now Katarina was suggesting Hao touched himself while listening to boy bands on the radio. Now Hao said it wasn’t masturbation, he was just learning the dance moves. Which brought them back to me, hula, oh God—
“Are we almost there?” I called out to Van.
“Okay, okay,” Van said. We all bounced with the sudden potholing of the car. Gravel popping under the tires. “Here we are,” Van sang out. She swung a sudden right and locked the brakes into a skid. The dust cloud caught up to us and when it cleared we were looking at the darkened husk of grain silos, columns of cylinders weeping unidentified industrial creams, skeletal crane arms and scaffolding lurking behind them. A small flock of crows ribboned into the breeze, crying out in creaky voices.
And then we were inside the thing. The ground floor of the elevator crammed tight with riveted beams and spears of light, huge pipe joints and all along the train-car-shaped center aisle, rail tracks for whatever carts used to move here. I couldn’t believe how holy the air felt.
It was just me and Van standing in there at first, Hao and Katarina still catching up. Van’s breaths sounded small and even as she turned to take it all in. She hooted once, softly. The brightness in her face. I said okay, this was okay, only I wasn’t talking about the climbing or the elevator. But I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t tell her how much I wanted what was happening, right now. All around there were so many angles and edges and blunt corners and places to grab and hold on and go up.
“Sometimes this is all I think about,” she said. She nodded off to Hao and Katarina as they entered. “I love them,” she said. “Let’s see if you can keep up.”
“You tell me how my ass looks in these jeans when you’re watching me from below,” I said.
She laughed. We were looking right at each other. Take a match and hold it to the strip, start the strike. Somewhere at the microscopic level there are whole worlds of hot light that gather and jump to the match tip. That’s what we were.
“All right, hula girl,” she said. “Be a bitch on it.”
We climbed. At first just me and Van, straight up our columns of iron, clutching the ridges and edges and using our rubber-soled feet like paws, dancing and moving and pulling, going up together. As we went we spread out, all four of us, grunting and clattering and rising up off the floor, climbing our way into the ribs of this long-dead steel giant. Toward the heart of the thing. I moved closer to Van, Katarina, Hao. I wanted us together, wanted them to feel with me the big nameless thing we’d worked our way into, a silence like the presence of our own private God.
I TALKED TO my parents on the phone but I hated it. They kept me a person of two places, okay? A person of here and there, and not belonging in either place. But if it was a give and take between the two, Hawai‘i was starting to lose. I could almost feel the sun and sand and salt of Hawai‘i flaking off.
“How’s the haole land?” Dad would ask, his favorite way to start calls.
“No one showers and the food sucks,” I said.
And Dad straight cackling on the other end of the phone. Almost so I could hear his smile lines. “I knew it!” he said. “I knew it. Fuckin’ mainland and its stink-ass haoles. So, what, you’re running the campus now or what?”
So you are paying attention, Dad, I thought. Maybe just a little bit.
“You know it,” I said. “I started robbing banks on the weekends, too.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Dad said—both to me and to Mom, off-phone. “Better be, with the bill they’re sticking us with.”
I wanted to say I’d cosigned on the loans and it wasn’t just him. That some of the kids here didn’t have any loans, or if they did, spent them like the future was a certain thing: new laptops and nights out at restaurants and the sort of apartments where the cabinets were, like, Scandinavian sexy. While I was working off scanned pages or library-lifted books where I’d removed the magnetic strip. Quadrupling up on the McDonald’s Dollar Menu to stash enough in our mini-fridge for half the week, then chopsticking bricks of saimin on the late nights. I didn’t forget where I was from or how each semester’s tuition bill alone felt like I was holding a gun to their heads. And my own.
I clamped my mouth shut. So hard pain cranked through my teeth. “I know, Dad, trust me, I know.”
“People these days,” Dad said, “it’s like everyone’s out to get as much money from you as they can, yeah? Like, if they figure the price can be just a little higher, every time, they raise ’um up.”
“So life’s good at home?” I said. “You and Mom still doing your thing?”
“What, you mean like sex?” he asked. “Yeah, we still oofing. In fact, just last night we was—”
“Dad—”
“No, serious, just last night we went for happy hour at Osmani Bar, and I was like, ‘Babe, no one gonna see nothing in the parking lot, and—’”
“Dad! I’ll hang up the phone. I swear to God.”
He laughed and laughed. “Only joke! Sheesh, everyone’s all uptight over there. We doing good, Kaui, we doing good. I dunno. Working our asses off. Price of paradise and like that. It’s home.”
We went on for a minute, things here and there about neighbors, a couple of people I knew from high school that Dad saw at the airport, working security jobs or ticket-counter jobs or as flight attendants. There was a training program he was hoping to get into, so that he could move into a flight-mechanic position. “All those guys is badasses,” he said. “Marines and all that. I should have gone military.”
“So you could be yelled at by haole guys with skinhead haircuts for, like, six years or something? Come on, Dad.”
“I coulda seen the world, though,” Dad said. “Got real skills, you know? They learn things there, at least.”
“Yeah, they learn how to shoot other brown people,” I said.
“Okay, okay,” Dad said. “I get it, you know everything now that you been at college for a semester or two, yeah yeah yeah. I love you. Here’s your mother.”
The phone tumbled from hand to hand.
“You’re doing okay,” Mom said, barely a question.
“Of course,” I said. “Did some great climbing last week with Van-guys.”
“Climbing,” she said. “I hope you don’t think you’re just there to party.”
“I just got all this from Dad,” I said. “I know what I’m here for.”
She cleared her throat. “How are classes, then?”
“Hard,” I said. “But I like engineering.”
“Good,” she said. “At least you’re not studying, I don’t know, American history of comic books or something like that.”
“Right.”
“You getting enough sleep? Enough food?”
When I can afford it, I wanted to say. But I already knew where the call was going. It didn’t matter what I said, so I stayed quiet, so that we could get where we were going faster.
“You talk to Noa lately?” she asked. There you go. Didn’t take as long as I thought.
“I mean, maybe,” I said.
“How’s he doing?”
“Didn’t you just talk to him?”
“We did,” Mom said. “But you know, kids don’t always tell their parents things.”
If only you knew me, Mom, I wanted to say. I’ve felt the midnight crush at a strip club, me and Van and Hao and Katarina there almost like a joke, but still pulled in by it, the red lights and sweat and gritty beats. Did you know I’d been so many times drunk or stoned or snowed, trying not to trip my numb legs on themselves while walking dark o’clock streets. Or did you know I’d climbed without a rope at terminal heights at least a few times, just me and air and death.
“Don’t be worried,” I told her. “We’re fine.”
“I hope so,” she said. “We did a lot to get you there, you know.”
She had to stick it in, right? She never said shit like this to the boys, only to me. Like I was supposed to be guilty of ambition while they were just living their full potential. “I know, Mom,” I said.
“We miss all of you,” she said.
And I said I did, too—and I did. But feeling it then, the missing was different than I expected. Less desperate, I guess. And getting smaller all the time.