House of Many Gods (16 page)

The moderator shook his head. “We think winds will hit France and Germany first. As for Great Britain, they are already tracking wind patterns that will blow directly across the Atlantic. They would be affected first …”

People crowded the aisles, wanting to get home to their families, gather their children safe inside.

When Max reached her, she asked, “How bad is it?”

For a moment he winced, then shook his head. “Three Mile Island? I’ve been there. High-leak rates. They’re careless, sloppy. I’d say a twenty-mile radius will be severely hit. Thirty–forty thousand people affected, especially downwinders.”

N
EW SNOW BEGAN TO FALL
. A
S THEY WALKED ALONG THE
B
RIDGE
of Saints, Max gazed down at her. “What a mess we’ve made of things. I wish …”

She laid her hand against his cheek. “What do you wish?”

“That I had met you when I was a younger man. That we had lived life more intensely.”

“Oh, Max. It has been intense. It’s been extraordinary. Much more than I ever dreamed my life could be.”

He seemed not to be listening. “I wish we could have lived in deep, green fields with winding roads. A farmhouse, kids on swings. Dogs trotting by our side …”

He winced again, his face grew pale. “It might be time to go back now.”

In their room he swallowed pills, then they quietly undressed and burrowed under thick old-fashioned comforters.

“I think … this is the beginning.”

She took his face between her hands. “Don’t talk like that. You promised we would fight this. It’s been all right for a year.”

“No. It hasn’t.”

“Max. Don’t give up. What would I do? How could I go on?”

“You have no idea how strong you are.”

She started to weep, then struggled to compose herself.

“Why does it take so long to see things clearly? I stood on that bridge today, and nothing mattered anymore. But you. I don’t want to live without you.”

He took her in his arms. “Thank you. For telling me these things. I have never been sure you really …”

“I have
always
loved you. How could you not know. It’s just … I could never say that word. I never trusted it.”

“Ana. It’s just a word. A way to say a dozen things. ‘I admire you. I respect you. I like your bank account. Your socks.’ ”

She tried to smile, thinking how only in death or near-death did people become real. “Help me. Tell me what to do.”

“We’re going home to San Francisco. You’re going to marry me.”

She began to shake her head.

“Ana. I’m dying. This is what I want. That way no one can touch you. You’ll be, not rich, but financially secure. Besides the house, the bulk of what I’m leaving you is money. Use it wisely, and in some small way it will teach you what power is.”

“I don’t want power.”

“You mean you don’t want to abuse your power. You won’t, you were never greedy. Money will give you the means to help others. I hope you will do that for me.”

“I’ll try. I’ll find a way.”

He coughed, bent forward slightly. “I promise you this. I won’t give up till it gets rough. I won’t put you through that.”

Her heart felt shattered. Her whole chest ached. They fell silent for so long, it seemed they had both got up and left the room.

“I wish I could take you back to Hawai‘i. There are healing people there. Sacred, healing places …”

“I’m not going to heal. You have to face that now. But … there seems very little left for me in San Francisco. And I have always loved your islands. Once when I visited Kaua‘i, I heard Hawaiians chanting in your native tongue. I blacked out. Something beat me up. I woke up bruised and weeping, knowing I’d been punished. Then, I’d been forgiven.”

She took his hands in both of hers. “Maybe, when the time is right, I’ll take you back. I think it’s where you’ve always been.”

T
HEY WERE MARRIED BY A JUDGE IN
S
AN
F
RANCISCO, A CEREMONY
so perfunctory it left her depressed. Then she began to know what it meant to wait, what it meant to dread the future. Some nights she paced for hours. Max filled a glass and swallowed several pills, then followed behind her, watering her footsteps.

Finally, he told her. “I’d like to go back to Kaua‘i now.”

“Soon.” The longer she put it off, the longer he would live.

“Ana, before it’s too late.”

They flew to Honolulu and, waiting to change planes, she felt trade winds embrace her, felt her past drift through her hair. On the island of Kaua‘i, they landed on an airstrip sliced out of cane fields, and rented a bungalow on the quiet, north shore of the island, reached by a creaking one-lane bridge. Their house sat nestled on a cliff, cantilevered out over Hanalei Bay, the rain forest crowding in behind them.

Ana settled them in, lined up Max’s medications, and set up a portable oxygen tank. In a few days when he was ready, she took him out driving, showing him sections of Kaua‘i.

“This is our oldest island, very spiritual. You can feel the
mana
everywhere. The coral layers tell the history of millions of years. At eighty-five
feet down, you’re in the time of Christ. At one hundred and eighty feet, the age of the Pyramids.”

She showed him a bay filled with magical swarms of thimble jellies, and millions of lobster larvae like spun glass.

Max looked down in wonder. “Our predecessors. Which proves we’re just little bags of atoms at the mercy of chance.”

“Darwin. And you don’t believe that.”

He laughed. “Right now I do. Tomorrow I might quote Jesus, the Upanishads. My die is cast, my deck is shuffled and dealt. I’m game to believe in anything.”

Beneath his humor she heard the subtext of a man who knew he was beginning to die. Some days she drove for hours, and while she talked, Max felt his senses rush out to the landscape of his new, his last, life. He began to let go of other things, even his personal history. Sometimes they drove in silences that lasted so long, when Ana spoke she hardly recognized her voice. She sounded almost formal, using the landscape to camouflage her sorrow.

“Folks say this is our most beautiful island. Here is one of the world’s great annual rainfalls high up on Mt. Wai‘ale‘ale.”

“Which means?”

“A Rippling on the Water. Because of the pond up there on the plateau of that peak. Also Wai‘ale‘ale was the wife of the god Kaua‘i.”

She pointed to a peak five thousand feet above them, where clouds hovered over the mountain. “The wettest spot on earth. Five hundred inches of rain a year.”

It was the constant source of moisture plus rich soil that produced the lush vegetation of Kaua‘i and gave it the name Flower Isle. In all directions, miles of vegetation and wildflowers imparted a lovely grace and physical softness to the land.

“How could you ever leave these islands?” he asked.

“That’s something outsiders never understand. Life is very hard here. It takes more courage to stay.”

They drove to the rim of Waimea Canyon, a natural spectacle, where miles of deep gorges cut in red earth were washed by cascading waterfalls. Eroded by the runoff of rainfall from Mt. Wai‘ale‘ale, the canyon plunged three thousand feet in sections, its valleys dramatically serrated as if sliced out with giant blades. Covered in green scrub, the series of gorges turned gold and pink as sunlight slowly shifted.

Max shook his head, astonished. “I thought I knew this island. In
fact, I was blind to it. Perhaps I didn’t feel such beauty should exist after what we did in Bikini, and the Marshalls.”

“You saw too much, Max. You cared too much. In a way, you stopped living.”

As the days passed, Ana began to relax, braiding her hair like a schoolgirl. She went barefoot and wore sarongs. One day while they sat on cliffs overlooking the sea, she smelled morphine, the scent of ether on his breath. She laid her head against his shoulder, terrified, and vastly inexperienced.

“I don’t know what to say, Max. I don’t know how to deal with this.”

“Shhh. It’s all right, sweetheart. It’s when we’re quiet that it all makes sense.”

Even as he languished, he watched Ana metamorphose into something new. Sometimes at meals he had no appetite and pushed his plate aside, while she recounted ancient legends. Unbraiding her hair, combing her fingers through it in a timeless way, shoulders aglow like running water, she flicked her fingers like fireflies, conjuring and embellishing with such dreamy cogency, Max was drawn into her fables.

He forgot his pain, his body seemed to melt and yield, as she described a race of little people, the
Menehune
, who had flourished here, perhaps as the first settlers.

“They were small, muscular people, masters of stonework and engineering feats. They only worked at night, and built ingenious irrigation systems for wetland farming that still exist today … There is a place, called Pu‘ukapele, high up in Waimea Canyon. It was the home of the Menehune. They gathered there to talk and to debate, rather like the Athenian agora. It’s said that on half-moon nights, if you climb three thousand feet to this hill, you can still hear them debating …”

She lit a candle. Her voice was soft and soothing.

“The Menehune also built the first lighthouse in Hawai‘i. They called it Maka-ihu-wa‘a. Eyes for the canoe prow. You see, on dark nights they could not find their way back to land when fishing in deep waters. Their chief loved his ocean men, so he devised a plan … His land workers dug for weeks and months constructing a platform halfway up a ridge rising behind Wai‘oli River. The ridge could easily be seen at night. Then his workers placed torches all along the ridge, so that its reflection in the river would give the seamen double torchlight
 …

“Some folks say the Menehune were a real people of an ancient time, who had migrated from the Marquesas. Others say they were mythical, children of the P
ō
, the night, which is also the Realm of the Gods. That is why they only worked at night. You see, in the ancient time, Hawaiian ‘day’ began at nightfall.”

S
OMETIMES WHEN SHE LOOKED UP
, M
AX WAS SOFTLY SNORING
. H
E
often slept for two days straight, then woke refreshed, and sat poring over picture books and maps. In that way he began to understand the layout of the island, a world of breathtaking and treacherous beauty.

When they drove to the Na Pali Coast, the road seemed familiar to him. “This is the way we drove to the Barking Sands Missile Range Facility, which is engaged in intercepting guided missiles from mainland military bases.”

“That’s right.” Ana pointed west toward a place called Mana. “I once told you about this place, sacred grounds where spirits of the newly dead wandered. And where they wander still, in spite of the bombs that land nearby.”

It was a region of salt marsh and dunes, of coral beaches that barked like dogs when waves rushed in. Here lay the remains of a great temple that was the gateway to the land of Pō, the dim twilight land beneath the sea where gods watched over the souls of the dead. Now guided missiles exploded in these seas.

She continued on the island’s treacherous west coast until they reached the last beach, Polihale. Now they left the paved road behind and jolted through tall, rustling cane fields until gradually a dark ridge of jagged peaks appeared on the right. When she could drive no farther, the beach at Polihale emerged from the base of the cliffs—a stretch of brilliant white powder more immense, it seemed, than the cliffs towering above it. Max fell silent, words seemed so silly here.

“
Polihale
,” Ana whispered. “Home of the spirits. Here the coast road ends and our gods begin. Our
ākua
.”

There was much more to explain, but she suddenly felt afraid, fearing the gods would look down and see a woman who had abandoned her culture, and her blood.

She turned to Max. “We mustn’t stay. The sun is fierce.”

Yet in that moment an icy wind enveloped them. It cut right through her, knocking her down. For a moment, she lay stupefied. Max knelt beside her, shouting, and they heard a rumbling from the cliffs. Ana tried to stand but something knocked her down again.

“What is it?” Max cried.

Her lips hardly moved. “We have to leave this place.”

She lifted her head, cautiously rose to her hands and knees, and crawled across hot sands away from the cliffs. When she finally stood up, she looked haunted. The gods had leaned down and acknowledged her, a change-face.

S
HE WATCHED AS HIS STRENGTH SLOWLY EBBED
. E
VEN WHEN HE
rallied, the bounce back was slight. They began to stay at home where, from their
lānai
, they spent hours looking down on half-moon-shaped Hanalei Bay, its sunshot parquetry of waves, its Titian clouds dazzling as neon. Behind them, rain forests of an astonishing green leading to cliffs called
Hele Mai
. Come Away.

“I can’t think what more I could want,” he said. “Except more time.”

Intense pain came. Nights when he tossed and moaned, when pain threatened to outrun his medications, he swallowed morphine, conservative doses that did not dull his mind. His lung grew more congested. Yet he rallied.

“Tell me more stories of your islands.”

Ana was amazed at the wealth of history she remembered from elders who had taught her as a child. “Talking-story” hour after hour, she spoke so slowly and thoughtfully each sentence seemed three generations long.

“Now I will tell you that some folks say much of the ancient life and history of the Polynesians who discovered this island and lived here for two thousand years has been forgotten … But, a‘ole loa! Absolutely not. Our history is never forgotten. Only hidden … Place-names remain, and with them the names of chiefs and chiefesses, gods and demigods. And all their feats and defeats … In sacred places, they are still worshipped. Their stories remembered and retold …”

Max listened, intrigued, and finally asked, “Why don’t your people teach this fabulous history and its legends? Why keep them hidden?”

Ana’s lips moved, but her voice was that of someone old and wise.