To Paradise (38 page)

So, when I finally did encounter him, I was only surprised it had taken as long as it had. It was a Wednesday, which I know because every Wednesday, after dropping you off at school, I took a long walk, all the way to Waik
ī
k
ī
, where I sat beneath one of the trees
in Kapi
‘
olani Park we had sat beneath together when you were a baby, and ate a package of crackers. Each package had eight crackers, but I’d only eat seven; the last I’d crumble into ash and feed to the mynah birds, and then I’d get up again and keep walking.

“Wika,” I heard someone say, and when I looked up, there he was, walking toward me.

“Well, well,” he said, smiling. “Long time, no see, brother.”

The smiling was new. So was the “brother.” His hair was even longer now, almost blond in parts from the sun, and twisted into a bun, though strands of it floated around his head. He was tanner, which made his eyes look lighter and brighter, but the skin around them had wrinkled, and he had lost weight. He wore a faded aloha shirt, bleached a pale blue, and cutoff jeans—he looked both younger and older than I’d remembered him.

What remained the same was his lack of surprise at encountering me. “You hungry?” he asked, and when I said I was, he said we should walk to Chinatown and get some noodles. “Don’t have the car anymore,” he said, and when I made a sound of concern, or sympathy, he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll get it back. I just don’t have it now.” His left incisor was stained the color of tea.

The biggest change was his new volubility. (In those first six months of our most recent reacquaintance, I was always measuring what was different in him and what was familiar, which invariably led to the same unnerving realization: I didn’t know who he was. I knew a few facts, I had a few impressions, but the rest I had conjured, making him into whoever I needed him to be.) Over lunch, and then the following months, he talked more and more, until there were days when we would drive for hours (the car, which had vanished mysteriously, had reappeared just as mysteriously) and he would talk and talk and talk, and at times I would stop listening altogether, just lean my head back against the seat and let his words wash over me, as if it were a boring news report on the radio.

What did he talk about? Well, first, there was how he talked; he had adapted a kind of pidgin inflection, except because he hadn’t grown up speaking pidgin—he was a scholarship boy, after all; he wouldn’t have gotten into the school if his mother hadn’t been
vigilant about his speaking standard English—it sounded artificial and weirdly formal. Even I could appreciate how rich and robustly casual pidgin sounded when spoken by natives: It wasn’t a language for exchanging ideas but one for trading jokes and insults and gossip. But Edward made it, or tried to make it, a language of instruction.

He didn’t need to ask if I understood the way things were—he knew I didn’t. I didn’t understand why our fate as Hawaiians was linked to black people’s fate on the mainland (“There are no black people in Hawai
‘
i,” I reminded him, echoing my mother’s statement as we watched a news report about some protest among blacks on the mainland one day. “There are no Negroes in Hawai
‘
i,” she had announced, the ghost of what she didn’t bother to say next—
Thank goodness
—hovering in the air between us). I didn’t understand how we’d been used as pawns, or his argument that the Orientals were taking advantage of us—many of the Orientals I knew and saw were clearly poor or, at the very least, far from rich, and yet, to Edward, they were as much to blame as the haole missionaries for the disappearance of our land. “You see them now, buying houses, opening businesses,” he said. “If they’re poor, they won’t stay poor forever.” Yet it seemed impossible to separate the Orientals and the haoles from who we were—every Hawaiian I knew was also part Oriental, or part haole, or both, or in some cases, like Edward’s (though I did not say this), mostly haole.

One of the most difficult concepts for me to understand was this idea that I, and my mother, belonged to an
us
at all. Those thick brown men, slow-moving and massive, whom I saw drunk and dozing in the park: They may have been Hawaiian, but I felt no kinship toward them. “They’re kings too, brother,” Edward reprimanded me, and although I didn’t say it, I thought of what my mother would tell me when I was young: “Only a few people are kings, Wika.” Perhaps I was like my mother in the end, though I meant no harm; she would have seen those people as unlike her because she thought them beneath her, while I saw them as unlike me because I was scared of them. I wouldn’t deny that we were of the same race, but we were different sorts of people, and that was what divided us.

I had assumed all along that Edward was a member of Keiki k
ū
Ali
‘
i—in my dreams, as I have said, he was not only a member but their leader. But that turned out not to be true. He
had
been a member, he told me, but he had soon afterward left. “Bunch of ignoramuses,” he scoffed. “Didn’t know how to organize themselves.” He had tried to teach them what he knew about organizing from his time on the mainland; he had pushed them toward being more expansive, more radical in their approach. But they had wanted only small things, he said: more land set aside for poor Hawaiians, more social welfare programs. “That’s the problem with this place—it’s too provincial,” he often said. For, as appalled as he would be if this were pointed out to him, he too could be a snob; he too thought himself better.

I had played an unwitting role in his disenchantment with the group, he said. It was he who had pushed for the restoration of the monarchy, he who had introduced the language of secession and overthrow. “I told them, I already know the king,” he said, and although it was less a compliment than a statement of fact—I
would
be king, after all; would have been king—it was as if he’d praised me anyway, and I felt my cheeks grow warm. Yet talk of secession and overthrow had proven, he said, too intimidating for most of the members, who feared it would jeopardize their chances to earn other concessions from the state; they quarreled, and Edward lost. “A shame,” he told me now, letting his fingers flutter out the car window. “They’re so small-minded.” We were on our way toward Waim
ā
nalo, on the eastern coast, and as he zagged down the road, I stared out at the ocean, a wrinkled sheet of blue.

We had meant to stop at a plate-lunch place Edward liked just before Sherwood Forest, but we instead drove on. At some point I had a seizure, and I could feel my head slumping against the seat and hear the sound of Edward’s voice, even though I couldn’t distinguish his words, and the sun throbbed behind my eyelids. When I woke, we were parked beneath a large acacia tree. The car smelled like fried meat, and I looked over to see Edward staring back at me and eating a hamburger. “Wake up, lolo,” he said, but good-naturedly, “I got you a burger,” but I shook my head, which made me dizzier—I was too nauseated to eat after one of my attacks. He shrugged. “Suit
yourself,” he said, and ate the other burger, and by the time he was done, I was feeling a little better.

He had something to show me, he said, and we got out of the car and began walking. We were somewhere in the very northern part of the island—I could tell by how empty it was. We were standing in a large plain of sun-dried, unshorn grass, and around us was nothing: no houses, no buildings, no cars. Behind us were the mountains, and in front of us was the ocean.

“Let’s go to the water,” Edward said, and I followed him. On our way, we walked across a bumpy, silty dirt path; there was no paved road in sight. As we went, the tall grasses grew sparser and thinner and eventually gave way to sand, and then we were on a beach, where waves lapped against the shore and withdrew, again and again.

I cannot describe to you what made it seem so foreign. Perhaps it was the lack of people, though back then there were still places on the island where you could go and be alone. Yet there was something that felt especially isolated about this area, isolated and abandoned. Though I was unable—and am still now not able—to say why: Here was sand, grass, mountain, the same three elements you would find all over the island. The trees, palms and monkeypods and halas and acacias, were the same as we had in the valley; the stalks of heliconia were the same. And yet it was different in some unexplainable way. Later, I would try to tell myself that I had known from the moment I saw this land that I would return to it, but that was fiction. What is more likely is the opposite: That, given what happened there, I’ve begun to remember it differently, as a place that felt meaningful, when at the time it hadn’t struck me as special at all, just a piece of unoccupied land.

“What do you think of it?” Edward asked, finally, and I looked up at the sky.

“It’s pretty,” I said.

He nodded, slowly, as if I’d said something profound. “It’s yours,” he said.

This was the kind of thing he’d taken to saying, gesturing out the window at beaches, where kids ran up and down the sand, lofting kites in the air, or at parking lots, or on our walks through
Chinatown:
This land is yours,
he’d say, and sometimes he meant it was mine because of who my ancestors were, and sometimes he meant it was mine because it was also his, and the land belonged to us because we were Hawaiians.

But when I turned, I found he was staring at me. “It’s yours,” he repeated. “Yours and Kawika’s. Here,” he continued, before I could speak, and pulled from his pocket a piece of paper, which he quickly unfolded and presented to me. “I went down to the property records office in the state building,” he said, excited. “I looked up your family’s records. You own this land, Wika—it was your father’s, and now it’s yours.”

I looked at the paper. “Lot 45090, Hau
‘
ula, 30.3 acres,” I read, but I was suddenly unable to read anything else, and I handed it back to him.

I was at once very tired and thirsty; the sun above us was too hot. “I need to lie down again,” I said to him, and felt the ground beneath me crater and then sink, and my head fall, as if in slow motion, into Edward’s palms. For a while, there was silence. “You big lolo,” I heard him say at last, but as if from far away, and his voice was fond. “You dummy,” he said, “you dummy, you dummy, you dummy,” repeating the word like a caress, while above me the sun stopped in its path, turning everything around me a bright, unyielding white.

Kawika: I can now walk all the way around my room without getting tired. I keep the wall on my right and use my hand to guide me: The walls are stucco and cool and bumpy, and I can sometimes convince myself I’m feeling something living, like the skin of a reptile. Tomorrow night I’ll attempt walking down the hallway. Last night I tried the handle for the first time, assuming it was locked, but it depressed easily in my hand, so easily I was almost disappointed. But then I remembered that I had something new to try, and that with each night I was able to prove myself able to walk farther and farther, I was getting closer to you.

Your grandmother came to visit me today. She talked about the price of pork, and her new neighbors, of whom she clearly disapproves—he’s Japanese, raised in Kaka
‘
ako; she’s haole, from Vermont; they’re both research scientists who got rich manufacturing some sort of antiviral—and a blight that’s infected the
‘
ō
hai ali
‘
i tree; I had hoped she might have news of you, but she didn’t. It’s been so long since she’s mentioned you, and sometimes I worry that something’s happened. But this is only during daylight—somehow, at night, I know you’re safe. You may be far from me, maybe too far, but I know for certain that you’re alive, alive and healthy. Recently, I’ve been having a dream of you with a woman; you two are walking down Fifty-seventh Street, just as I once did, your arms linked. You turn to her and she smiles. I can’t see her face, only that she’s dark-haired, like your mother was, but I know she’s beautiful, and that you’re happy. Maybe this is what you’re doing right now? I like to think it is.

But this is not what you want to hear. You want to hear about what happened next.

The day after my trip to Hau
‘
ula, I went to visit Uncle William, who was surprised to see me—it had now been more than five years since I had stopped by the office—and asked him if he could explain to me, in detail, the family’s real-estate holdings. It now seems absurd, even shameful, that I had never asked him before, but there was no reason for me to be concerned. There was always money when I needed it; I never had to consider its origins.

Poor Uncle William was delighted that I was expressing an interest in the trust, and he began detailing what land we had and where. It was far more than I had expected, though all of it was modest. There were seven acres outside Dallas, two parking garages in North Carolina, ten acres of farmland outside Ojai. “Your grandfather bought cheap land on the mainland all his life,” said William, as proud as if he had bought it himself.

Finally, I had to interrupt him. “But what about Hawai
‘
i?” I asked, and then, when he drew out a map of Maui, I stopped him again: “O
‘
ahu, specifically.”

Once again, I was surprised. Along with our house in Manoa, there were two run-down apartment buildings in Waik
ī
k
ī
, and three consecutive storefronts in Chinatown, and a small house in Kailua, and even the church in L
ā
‘
ie. I waited as Uncle William worked his way around the state counterclockwise from southern Honolulu, pitying him as I never had before for the caress in his voice, for the pride he took in this land that wasn’t even his.

But if I felt pity for William, I felt disgust for myself. What had I done to earn any of this? Nothing. Money, my money,
did
grow on trees: on trees, and in fields, and between blocks of concrete. It was harvested and cleaned and counted and stored, and whenever I wanted it, even before I knew I wanted it, there it was, stacks of it, more than I could ever know to desire.