Thursday, June 19, 2014

Hāʻole

Hāʻole:
A tragedy by Nicholas Becher

Breathe

They call me the haole. The breathless one.
There is an ocean in every direction and the tide is always taking people outward and outward. I thought about who I would tell about all of this. About the waves and the tide. I couldn’t think of anyone else to write. So you will read this - or you won’t - and this will all seem so unsolicited and uncanny that you might just feel me on the other side of the world calling out to you.
What I mean about the outwardness of it all, here on this island, is that nothing is ever here to stay, and nobody is ever home. Everything is always headed outward. I was alive one time - I mean really alive you know, like when we used to go into the cemetery across from the high school, when I would hold your arms into the grass and you’d soak up the dew and the surfacing skin and bones of the beautiful dead. I was alive like that, on top of a mountain that overlooks the entire island. I heard of this place you could climb a million stairs and you’d be in heaven. So I go there, up a million stairs, and I’m just so alive. And I’m in heaven. I’m in the clouds and the ground I stood on wasn’t there anymore. I was just an angel with wings looking out at everything that had disappeared. Nothing was real anymore. The people or the cars or the skyscrapers. Nothing was there. It was just the Earth, unscathed.
The day after I climbed the stairs, I was sitting at home with this girl. She was there with me on the mountain, we had climbed it together. This was about two years ago now. I was with this girl and I loved her. You know how I get with these girls - falling in love every Saturday and by Monday I’m destitute in a corner of my bathroom with the shards of a shattered beer bottle interspersed between my legs like a stained glass window. But I thought she was a safe bet. Not a safe bet that smells like desperation and loathing. A safe bet like I felt her so much in my heart that I couldn’t lose.
Well I was with this girl after we climbed those million stairs, and I was just thinking back on the orange-pink clouds cascading across the skyline and the cool morning air falling down from the stratosphere. I’m sitting there on our couch just staring out the window at the rain, and she sees me and realizes that we would never be there again. That we just climbed to the top and that was as free as either of us would ever feel as long as we were in it together. And I could feel her start to pull away from me just then - well her heart, you know?
All of it reminds me of that summer after freshman year. When you and I had those shitty restaurant jobs at the pizza place next to the middle school and we’d go to the Triple-A hockey games every Friday night. You were dating that fat kid with the pretzel nose. I remember you were telling me how his chubby gut flopped over his pecker and reminded you of a baby’s belly button. We were out back by the creek smoking Camel Unfiltered and I was laughing so hard I choked on the smoke. And I keeled over coughing up this cigarette smoke so hard that I lost my footing and rolled down into the creek. I was soaking wet. You laughed at me and helped me out and ran your hands through my wet hair, dirty blonde in the sunlight between the tree branches overhead. And I could tell you wanted to kiss me but I never thought you would. But when you did, it changed everything for you. Before that, the pretzel nose kid was just what you needed. Then you felt more and knew he wouldn’t be enough. You left him the next day.
That’s what this was like. This girl and me at the top of the mountain. You and the fat kid in high school. One moment we think all of it is ethereal and we sing our swan song, until the next moment when we see what heaven is like and we’ve lost our sense of rhythm and harmony all together.
So they started calling me the haole. The breathless one.
One day, just all of the sudden, I was alone. I was here on this island with the impossible task of self-definition. I had this idea, before she left, of who I was and what I was supposed to be and where I was headed. Then she was gone and I felt the whole purpose of my living here had been denigrated. And all the people on the island were watching me lose myself - lose my breath.
Like I said that was almost two years ago now. But today when I was sitting in the back of my hatchback with my laptop writing a poem about the ocean, I looked out at the drop-off into the ocean where a little ledge protruded out, and an old Japanese man walked up to it at a snail’s pace. I imagined his skin falling away from his bones as he took each infinitesimal step toward the black-green sea. I imagined him exposing his forever-hidden feathers underneath that skin. I imagined him becoming a seabird and flying away. But as he inched his way toward the ledge, he looked down at the cliffside leading into the abyss. He looked out toward the setting sun - a sun he had seen repeating itself since he was a child - throwing its rays horizontally through the atmosphere, illuminating the island in its expansiveness. He looked up through the glow of the blue sky and saw the stars in his mind’s eye. Then he looked, finally, back at me looking down at him.
He mouthed something to me. Just a word without any sound, “Breathe.”
And he closed his eyes and stepped out over the ledge, falling like a leaf into the waves crashing against the cliff below.
I don’t know what happened with the Japanese man. One can only assume. I just sat and watched the sunset, trying to breathe. Because if I had stood to look down and find the man in the water, 30 feet below, it would have all been lost. The knowledge and wisdom and love that the old Japanese man could instill in the final experience in his body, all lost. So I just sat there in the back of my car with my laptop and let the island fall asleep. Then I moved to the driver’s seat and drove away. And the whole time I moved across the concrete, I dreamt the man would only fall long enough to grow his wings to take flight as the seabird within him. Birthed into a new mind. Born into a new self.
I dreamt you were somewhere in the South, maybe Arkansas or Georgia or Louisiana. You always loved Baton Rouge, although I don’t think you ever went. You were always pretending you had that drawl. I liked that about you - that you could imagine you were somebody different from yourself. I dreamt you could sense me thinking of your golden eyes.
I dreamt you were trying to breathe - the same as me.
The haole. The breathless one.
Dragonflies

There were dragonflies everywhere.
Springtime in the Midwest with your parents and brothers. We were too young to drink but your mom and dad didn’t mind as long as we didn’t leave the house. Granted, it didn’t take much back then to get me to pass out on your couch. They knew me for so long they probably would’ve let me sleep in your room downstairs, but I wanted to be respectful and I know you hated that.
Your backyard was on a hillside and your little brother was throwing a frisbee in the air trying to hit the dragonflies. They were too fast for him. He launched the frisbee and it caught a gust of wind and I remember everything seeming to move in unison - the dragonflies and the frisbee and your brothers short brown hair and your mom and dad dancing to Fleetwood Mac on the porch. Everything was swaying to and fro in perfect harmony. But the frisbee caught the wind and wedged itself between some branches in an overhanging oak tree. Your backyard was on a slope so we were straining our necks to try to get it down. Your brother must have been five or six at the time.
I don’t think there are dragonflies on the island. Sometimes I go to a little spot in the mountains that leads back to a tiny waterfall. And if I look at things at the perfect moment, the dust in the air might be whisked away by a sudden wind and look like a little bug with dragonfly wings. But that’s the closest it could be. They have geckos here. I sometimes see them slither in between the cracks of the sidewalk and I try to imagine what life would entail being so small. Every maneuver so delicate.
I suppose it’s not that much different than what I do every day.
I grabbed a fallen branch from the woods at the bottom of the hill - one long enough to reach the frisbee in the tree. Your brother grabbed the biggest stick he could hold in his tiny hands. I couldn’t help but smile at the little guy. The branch I held was about a foot short of the frisbee, so I started jumping into the air to knock it down. Every time I jumped, your brother jumped too. I could feel you behind me falling in love.
When I first moved here I lived down in Waikiki. I came to this place with that same girl I climbed the mountain with. I imagine you would want to know what she was like. That’s what was great about you and me - you never got jealous and I didn’t think you could make mistakes. But I know you would’ve wanted to know about this girl. You never met her but she was beautiful. She had green eyes. The greenest I had ever beheld. She was small, like you. Maybe a hundred pounds on a good day. And her hair was jet black. But I think the most beautiful part was her eyes. They had this way of making you forget what other colors looked like. As if you saw this celestial jade and it blinded you. The rest of the world, for a few seconds after, was a poignant green.
She had been living here a few months before I moved. So she had the place in Waikiki all set up. It was a shitty apartment. Smaller than our one bedroom in Bayless, over by the Dairy Queen. And there were roaches crawling through the electrical outlets and a moldy scent to the carpet and the ceiling had dust that hung like tiny stalactites. But I didn’t hate it. In fact, it was the happiest I had felt in my life up to that point. The first time I set foot in that grungy place, my heart was so full and pure and infallible that none of it mattered in the slightest.
There was a night when the green eyed girl had to work pretty late - she was waiting tables at a cowboy bar down on Kalakaua - and I was drinking Jack straight from the bottle. So I was sitting there reminiscing, listening to the screaming tourists fuck each other and forget themselves, when one of these geckos slithers in through the doorway to the patio (I would later find out that on the island, a patio is called lanai) and starts to make its way across the wall. At first I thought about grabbing it and throwing it back outside, but I was drunk and I didn’t really feel like hurting anything, so I just let it go.
The gecko makes its way over to the outlet, and it just sits there staring down at the three prong holes. And I’m there staring at the gecko, who is staring at the holes. Then I start to wonder if someone is staring at me, staring at the gecko, staring at the holes. And then I start to wonder if the roaches inside the holes are staring at something else and if all of us are just staring and staring and staring like we are in an art gallery. Until, finally, a roach peeks its little head out of the hole in the outlet. And the gecko just waits and waits and waits until the roach decides to make a run for it. So the gecko sees him lunge out of the hole and snatches the roach into its mouth.
I started thinking about the dragonflies. I started wondering if your brother turned out anything like that little gecko. That patient little guardian. A few months later I would find out that, in Hawaii, geckos are a sign of a spirit that watches over you when times are hard. I saw it in a film I watched for college. Some heroin addict looked up at the ceiling as he was about to shoot up and saw the gecko staring at him. Just staring and staring. And he sticks the needle in his arm and starts to spiral into a euphoric high. But when he gets back, the gecko is still there. And the guy thinks that the only reason he survived that trip was because of the gecko. The patient little gecko.

Staring and staring.

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