To Paradise (40 page)

I didn’t ask this. And I didn’t even protest too much when he gave first me and then you our new names. But you know—or I hope
you know—that I didn’t let our name be taken from us. I hope you noticed that I only called you by the name he gave you when he was present, that at all other times, you were still my Kawika, and always will be. And I resisted in another small way as well—although I learned, eventually, to call him Paiea, in my head I continued to think of him, to refer to him, as Edward.

I am struck, now, telling you all of this, by how make-believe it was. We knew almost nothing of anything: nothing of history, nothing of work, nothing of Hawai
‘
i, nothing of responsibility. And the things we
did
know we tried to unknow: My great-grandfather’s sister, the one who had succeeded him as monarch after he had died prematurely, the one who was overthrown, the one with whom the kingdom died—had she not been a Christian herself? Had she not given power and wealth to some of the very men, Christian, white, missionary men, who had later taken her throne? Had she not watched as her people were taught English and encouraged to go to church? Had she not worn silk gowns and diamonds in her hair and at her throat like an English queen, had her black hair oiled and tamed? But these were facts that complicated our imaginings, and so we chose to ignore them. We were grown men, long past the age at which we should have been pretending, and yet we were pretending as if our lives depended upon it. What did we—what did I—think would happen? What did I think our pretending would amount to? The most pathetic answer is that I didn’t. I pretended because, when I was pretending, I had given myself something to do.

It’s not that we wanted something to happen—we wanted the opposite. The world was becoming less explicable to me the older you got. At night, I watched the news, the reports of strikes and protests, marches and the occasional celebration. I watched the war end, and fireworks exploding over the Statue of Liberty, the water beneath shimmering as if flooded with oil. I watched a new president be sworn in and images of a man in San Francisco who was assassinated. How was I going to explain the world to you when I couldn’t understand it myself? How could I let you go into it when all around us were terrors and horrors, nightmares from which I’d never be able to wake you?

But inside Lipo-wao-nahele, nothing ever changed. It was not so much a fantasy as a suspension—if I was there, then time would stop. If you never got older, there would never come the day when your knowledge surpassed mine, when you learned to look at me with scorn. If you never got older, I would never disappoint you. Sometimes I prayed time would start traveling backward—not, as Edward would have it, two centuries back, so I could see the islands as they once were, but eight years back, when you were still my baby and learning to walk, and everything I did was marvelous to you, when all I had to do was say your name and your face would open in a smile. “Never leave me,” I’d whisper to you then, even as I knew that my job was to raise you to leave me, that your purpose as my child was to leave me, a purpose I myself had failed to fulfill. I was selfish. I wanted you to always love me. I didn’t do what was best for you—I did what I thought was best for me.

But as it happened, I was wrong about that, too.

Kawika, something very important happened to me last night: I went outdoors.

For months, I was only able to walk around my room before losing my breath, not to mention my courage. And then, last night, for no particular reason, I pressed the handle of my room door and stepped into the hallway. One second, I was in my room, and the next, I was outside of it, and nothing had changed in that moment except that I had tried. It’s like that, sometimes, you know; you wait and wait and wait—because you’re frightened, because you’ve always waited—and then, one day, the wait is over. In that moment, you forget what it was to wait. This state that you’d lived in for sometimes years is gone, and so is your memory of it. All you have at the end is loss.

At the doorway, I turned right, and down the hall I went, running my right hand against the side of the wall to guide my way. Initially, I was so nervous I thought I might vomit, and every small noise I heard made my heart seize.

But then—I can’t say how far I’d walked, in length or minutes—something very strange happened. I felt a kind of elation overcome me, an ecstasy, and suddenly, as suddenly as I’d pressed on the door handle, I dropped my hand from the wall and stepped into the center of the hallway and began to walk with a swiftness and certainty I couldn’t remember ever experiencing. Faster and surer I walked, and it was as if with each step I was creating new stone beneath my feet, as if the building was growing up around me, and the hallway, if I never turned off it, would stretch on infinitely.

At some point, I turned right, reaching in front of me with my hand, and there, once again as if I’d willed it, was a handle. For some reason, I don’t know why, I understood that this door led to the garden. I pressed down on the handle, and even before I felt the door yield, I smelled p
ī
kake, which I knew—because Mama had told me—had been planted all along the walls.

I began to walk through the garden. I had never thought I had paid much attention to its dimensions and paths while I was being pushed through it, but after almost nine years—I stopped when I realized this, my elation abruptly vanishing—I must have memorized its contours after all. So confident was I that for a disorienting moment I wondered if I could see again, if vision itself had changed and this was what it now felt like. Because although all I could discern was the same dark-gray screen I saw every day, it seemed not to matter. Up and down the paths I marched, and I never had to stop to grope before me, I never had to rest—though, if I had, I knew, intuitively, where the benches were.

At the far end of the garden there was a door, and I knew that if I turned its handle I would be outside—not just outside in the still, warm air but outside of this place, out in the world. For a while, I stood with my palm against the door, thinking of what I’d do, of how I’d leave.

Although then I realized: Where would I go? I could not return to my mother’s house. And I could not return to Lipo-wao-nahele. The first because I knew exactly what I’d find there, and the second because it had disappeared. Not physically, but the idea of it—it had vanished with Edward.

But, Kawika, you would have been proud of me. Once, I would have been dispirited by this. I would have lost my bearings, I would have lain on the ground and moaned for help, I would have put my arms over my head and begged, aloud, for the mountains to stack themselves atop me, for everything to stop
moving
so much and so fast. You saw me do this, many times. The first time it happened was the winter after we left for Lipo-wao-nahele, and I had been overcome by what I had done—how I had taken you from your home, how I had enraged my mother, how nothing had changed after all: How I was still a disappointment, and frightened, and how I hadn’t grown out of those traits but had instead grown into them, so that these qualities had not kept me from becoming someone else but in fact had become who I was. You had been visiting that weekend, and you had been scared, you had held my hand as you knew to do when I was having a seizure, and when it became clear that this was no seizure but, rather, some other kind of state, you had dropped my hand and run across the plain, yelling for Edward, and he had returned with you and shaken me, hard, yelling at me to stop acting like such a dummy, like such a baby. “Don’t call my father a dummy,” you’d said, so brave even then, and Edward had hissed back at you, “I’ll call him a dummy if he acts like a dummy,” and you had spit at him then, not to actually hit him but just to do it, and he had raised his hand. From my position on the ground, it looked almost as if he were trying to blot out the sun. And you, so brave, stood there, your arms crossed in front of you, even though you were only eleven, and you must have been terrified. “I’ll spare you this one time,” Edward had said, “because I respect my prince,” and if I had been able to laugh, I would have at his pomposity, at his pretension. But it would be a long time before I would think that, and in the moment, I was as scared as you were, except the difference was that I was supposed to take care of you, not just lie on the ground and watch.

Anyway—I did not fall to the garden floor; I did not weep and wail. I instead sat with my back against one of the trees (I could feel it was a skinny little banyan) and thought about you. I understood then that my job was to keep practicing. Tonight I had navigated my way through the garden; tomorrow, or perhaps next week, I would
try to leave this property. Every night I would go farther. Every night I would get stronger. And one day, someday soon, I would see you again, and say all this to you in person.

You remember the day we left. It was the day after you graduated from fourth grade. You were ten. In June, you would turn eleven.

I had packed a bag for you, which I had stored in the trunk of Edward’s car. Over the previous two months, little things had been disappearing from your room—underwear and T-shirts and shorts and your favorite deck of cards, one of your skateboards, your favorite stuffed animal: the plush shark you were too embarrassed to admit you still occasionally slept with, which you kept hidden beneath your bed. You didn’t notice the clothes, but you did notice the skateboard: “Da, have you seen my skateboard? No, the purple one. No, I looked—it’s not there. I’ll go ask Jane again.”

I had packed food as well, tins of Spam and cans of corn and kidney beans. A saucepan and a kettle. Matches and lighter fluid. Packages of crackers and instant noodles. Glass jugs of water. Every weekend, we took a little more. In April, we’d set up the tarp and hidden the tents beneath a pile of coral rocks we lugged from the sea. “Later, we’ll build a real palace,” Edward said, and as always when he said such things, such improbable things, I remained silent. If he meant them, I was embarrassed for him. If he did not, I was embarrassed for me.

Here my story joins your own, and yet there’s so much I don’t know about how you felt and what you saw. What did you think that afternoon we arrived at Lipo-wao-nahele and saw the tents—one for me and you; one for Edward—arranged under the acacia, the tarp stretched taut between four metal poles we’d scavenged from the abandoned cement plant on the western side of the island, the cardboard boxes of our food and clothes and supplies beneath it? I remembered you smiling, a little uncertainly, looking from me to the tarp to Edward, who was unloading the hibachi grill from his car. “Da?” you had asked me, looking up into my face. But you
hadn’t known what to say next. “What is this?” you finally asked, and I pretended I hadn’t heard you, though of course I had—it was only that I didn’t know what to say.

That weekend, you played along. When Edward woke us early Friday morning to recite a chant, you did so, and when he said that, beginning that day, the three of us were going to take Hawaiian lessons together, that this would be a place where only Hawaiian was spoken, you looked at me, and when I nodded, you shrugged, acquiescent. “Okay,” you said.

“ 
‘Ae,
” he corrected you, sternly, and you shrugged again.

“ 
‘Ae,
” you repeated.

Most of the time, you were inscrutable, but I watched bemusement scud across your face, and amusement, too. Did Edward
really
expect you to fish for your food? Were you
really
to learn to cook it over the fire? Would we
really
go to bed at eight, so we could wake with the dawn? Yes, it seemed; yes, and yes. You were smart even then, you didn’t challenge him—you knew as well that he didn’t play, that he didn’t have a sense of humor. “Edward,” you once said, and he didn’t look up, he pretended he hadn’t heard you, and I watched as a kind of understanding came over you. “Paiea,” you said, and he turned: “ 
‘Ae?
”

I think it was because you were never able to trust my abilities as a father that you learned early that people would not behave as they should, and things were not what they appeared. Here we were, your father and his friend, whom you had known since you were a baby, and we were having a fun beachside camping trip. And yet was this really what it seemed? No one had said anything about fun, and, indeed, there was something toilsome about your time at Lipo-wao-nahele, even though here you were getting to do everything you liked to do—fish and swim and climb up the edge of the nearby mountain, foraging for greens. But something was amiss—something was wrong. You couldn’t articulate how, but you sensed it.

“Da,” you whispered to me the second night, as I blew out the candle in the hurricane lamp between us. “What’re we doing here?”

I took so long to answer that you poked me, gently, in my arm. “Da?” you asked. “Did you hear me?”

“We’re camping, Kawika,” I said, and then, when you were silent, “Aren’t you having a good time?”

“I guess,” you said, reluctantly, finally. You weren’t, but you couldn’t explain why you weren’t. You were a child, and the problem isn’t that children don’t possess the full range of emotions that adults do—it is only that they don’t possess the vocabulary to express them. I
was
an adult, I
did
have the vocabulary, and yet I too couldn’t explain what was wrong about the situation, I too couldn’t express what I was feeling.

That Monday was the same: the Hawaiian lessons, the long hours of boredom, the fishing, the fire. I saw you staring at the car at odd moments, as if you might be able to call it like a dog, have it come revving to your side.

On Thursday, you were to begin attending a camp where you’d learn to build robots. You were so excited about this camp: You had been speaking of it for months, rereading the brochure, telling me about the kind of robot you were going to build—it’d be called the Spider, and it’d be able to climb up to the tops of shelves and retrieve things that Jane couldn’t reach. Three of your friends would be attending as well.