House of Many Gods (20 page)

In the 1930s the U.S. military began using Mākua Valley as a gun emplacement. Then, during World War II, they had expanded into the entire valley, using it for “war maneuvers,” aerial bombardments, exchange of live ammunition between troops. In order to do this they had evicted several thousand farmers and torn down their homes. Old valley
kūpuna
still recounted the “Murder of the Church.”

“Dey painted one big white cross on our Mākua church. Den, swear to God, dey bombed dat church fo’ target practice. Bombed it to dust.”

Just down from the valley, homeless families had begun using Mākua Beach as a temporary residence, a
pu‘uhonua
, or refuge. The elderly and the sick were brought here to lie in the nourishing sea and in the rock pools on the beach. People healed, and stayed, sweeping their beaches clean of garbage. They became once again
kahu o ka ‘āina
. Stewards of the land.

Now these settlements were under assault by the military and state police. It made Mākua a double symbol of resistance, exposing the contradiction of local poverty and homelessness alongside the military occupation of Hawaiian lands. Each time the military scheduled war manuvers at Mākua Valley, or the beach, they found large groups of Hawaiians there, braced for confrontation.

I
T WAS A
M
ONDAY, AND THEY WERE GATHERING ON THE HIGHWAY
, making their way out to Mākua Valley near the northern tip of the coast. As the crowd moved closer, they saw patrol cars at regular points parked along the highway.

Lopaka slowed his truck. “The main thing is to keep everybody calm. It’s a vigil, not a conflict.”

“It’s a confrontation,” Ana said. “We’re going to face down police, and the Marines.”

Crowds of people shuffled down the road. A woman holding a child stepped up to their truck, tears tracking her dusty face.

“They tore down our shack! No place to go. Rural assistance program full … I got two boys in high school trying graduate this summer. How they going finish school if homeless?”

Lopaka gave her the number of a priest taking in families and watched two cops approaching.

He stuck his head out the window and lied. “We’re looking for cousins living on the beach, want to take them home.”

They motioned for him to pull over off the highway. “Find your folks and get them out of here, quick. Marines are landing in four hours. That beach has got to be secured.”

They pulled off the highway just before the beach, a long stretch of undeveloped coastline where bulldozers were flattening wooden shacks and tents. Dozens of eviction-notice servers roamed campsites, shouting at the homeless through bullhorns.

“YOU ARE OCCUPYING LAND UNDER THE JURISDICTION
OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES. YOUR RESIDENCY HERE IS UNAUTHORIZED. YOU HAVE ONE HOUR LEFT TO LEAVE.”

Ana watched families forcefully escorted off the beach. She looked out to sea where just ten years ago great schools of dolphins had leapt and played, and whales had come with their calves. Now the seas were empty of marine life.

“What is an amphibious landing, anyway? The Marines land. Then what?”

Gena followed her gaze, then looked up at the valley behind them. “Then I guess they crawl up the beach ‘under fire’ and make their way to their ‘objective.’ One of the hills behind us they’re assigned to take.”

Ana stared at scorched and cratered sections of the valley, then turned to Lopaka. “What do you know about O.B.O.D.?”

He watched a cop handcuff a woman trying to kick him in the groin.

“OPEN BURN/OPEN DETONATION. How do you know about that? It’s supposed to be classified.”

“I read your files …”

“It’s a twelve-acre site up in the mountains behind Mākua Valley, part of those four thousand acres the Army took from us. That’s where they openly burn spent ammunition. Spent rockets. Even Chinook choppers carrying nuclear-weapons parts that exploded up there on takeoff. Pilots, their clothes, everything. All carefully incinerated, so there’s no proof. They either bury it or burn it.”

“And toxic poison is released in the smoke of those fires. We inhale it, ingest it. It’s in our fields, our food …”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “That’s why the military calls this coast ‘Death Row.’ ”

In the silence, they watched burly cops with rubber truncheons battling big, angry men.

“Those cops are Hawaiians. Even they’ve been turned against us. We’re either dying or trying to kill each other.”

Behind them, almost one hundred demonstrators spread out along the beach, pretending to be looking for homeless relatives. Then, on cue, they slowly unfurled their banners. NO MORE MILITARY BOMBING. GET OFF OUR SACRED LANDS. They stood waiting for the Marines to land and come ashore, wondering why the cops ignored them, why they lingered in the background. Finally, hot and tired in the sun, they formed small circles and sat down.

In that moment, the gentle, graceful curves of the sloping lower hills
reminded Ana of a woman. A nurturing, caring woman of
kahiko
time, the old days. She felt the breath of Mākua, felt the landscape turn to her, imploring.

In the absolute silence, a powerful explosion ripped the air. The ground literally shook beneath her. Then another, so strong her chest vibrated with each concussion. People shouted and staggered to their feet, hills of red soil erupting in the air. They saw Mākua bleed.

Lopaka shook his arm crutch at the sky. “Those bastards tricked us! There’s no amphibious landing today. They’re bombing up in the valley.”

In the background, along the access road to the beach, dozens of cops stood laughing. News reporters with camcorders hanging by their sides looked clearly disappointed. Then groups of deputies approached.

“Okay, you clowns. Go home. You had your day.”

Lopaka spun around. “You assholes.”

One of them grabbed Lopaka’s arm, hustling him along. Lopaka flipped his hand off, swinging wildly with his crutch. It missed, but anger turned the man into a bull. He spun Lopaka around, tried to pick him up by his armpits and throw him facedown in the sand. Gena ran up with a rock aimed at his head, and cops swarmed over them.

Ana remembered glimpsing a fist, a bleeding nose, then she went down. She woke handcuffed, her mouth full of dirt, as they loaded her into a van with half a dozen injured people. A cop slammed the door, then sat facing them with his rubber truncheon.

“You’re a brother,” she said. “How can you do this?”

His shoulders sagged, his face remained resolved.

“Auwē. Auwē,”
an old woman cried. “Our own boys, trying to kill us …”

Ana bent down to her and held her hands, so full of rage her body shook. As they sped down the road she looked back at the valley, bombs still exploding in the mountains. Again, she felt the suffering of Mākua, felt the land imploring her.

T
HE YEARS OF MED SCHOOL SEEMED A BLUR, A LONG BAD DREAM OF
scutwork at the teaching hospital—running blood samples back and forth to labs, trotting up and down for X-rays. Most of the doctors were white or Asian males with a continuing disdain for female physicians, but Ana stood up to them, challenging them in lectures. When her diagnoses were questioned, she defended them aggressively, confirming her reputation as a “toughie” from the Wai‘anae Coast.

Observing procedures, she constantly elbowed her way ahead of male students so that during an emergency thoracotomy she leaned in so close the chief resident asked her to step back. Instead she leaned in closer as he inserted a metal spreader between the patient’s ribs. When they were far enough apart, he dipped both hands into the chest cavity and squeezed the heart. Blood shot out of the patient’s chest, spraying Ana’s face. Afterwards, she calmly walked down the hall and threw up in a bedpan.

But during clinical rotations, she found she was not drawn to cardiology, anesthesiology, obstetrics. Internal medicine only partially engaged her. Ward rounds were a bore. Mostly she came alive in the “pit,” the hospital’s Emergency Room, liking the pressure, the way doctors made split-second decisions, the way they relied on intuition. By her fourth year as a subintern, certain procedures came easily. She seemed to have a knack for finding veins, intubating, and inserting central IV lines. The one procedure she dreaded was giving an intracardiac injection: sticking a needle directly into another human’s heart.

The first time she attempted it, the chief resident bullied her. “Come on. You did it with cadavers.”

“This man is alive,” she whispered. “I can’t see his heart.”

“Doctor, this is ER. You hesitate, the patient dies. Aim blind, and do it.”

After a while she began approaching patients as if they were victims.
I am learning on your body. I will cause you pain. I may even harm you
. A woman went into seizures when she injected the wrong medicine.

“You have to hurt them,” the resident said. “That’s how you learn to do it right. Then somewhere down the line, you’ll save a life.”

In time, most procedures became second nature to her and Ana was able to step back, get a broader picture of the ER, a subculture with its own argot and cryptic codes. A place that sometimes seemed staffed by misfits, borderline personalities. The receiving room was a cross section of humans that only accidents, semi-suicides, or crimes of passion could provide. Hawaiians, Samoans, Filipinos, whites—all holding together their body parts, bullied by big, taciturn triage nurses slapping down junkies petitioning for drugs.

She began to understand that no professional who survived ER would be the same as they were before. Its madness was the alkaloid that transubstantiated them. One entered it a rube, an innocent, and came out a husk. Eyes on a stalk. In between fractures and infarcs, ODs and hemorrhages, patients were grossly misdiagnosed, even mislaid. And then, the real nightmares. A child attacked by a pit bull was missing half his face. What would his life be after this?

In that year, six people in her class dropped out. Each day Ana feared she had caught a different disease. Patients spat and bled on her. They vomited and urinated. She scrubbed her hands until they were red and cracked. She wore surgeon’s gloves, carrying her papers and books in plastic bags. Some days she wore surgical masks, seeing patients as the enemy. The thing to avoid, not heal.

“I feel no compassion at all. I’m becoming conscience deficient.”

“Get out of ER,” Rosie advised. “It sounds like a war zone.”

Yet, day after day, she watched fascinated as the chief resident performed CPR on a patient while simultaneously orchestrating the expertise of interns, residents, med students, clerks, nurses, even a priest. This was what she wanted. Not to play God, but to mobilize random professionals into a single healing machine.

———

B
Y HER SECOND YEAR OF INTERNSHIP
, A
NA HAD LEARNED TO REGARD
death as a nebulous thing. Sometimes they pronounced a patient dead who still had heart activity, electrical activity. She began to wonder,
When precisely does the last cell die, and is the soul intact till then? And when exactly does the soul depart and the body become just a container?

One night a team stood over the corpse of a man with a crushed chest. When they tried to get at his heart, blood sprayed on monitors, instrument trays, the walls. It poured out of the body so copiously it lay congealed on the floor in black lacquered clumps. After someone called time of death, and everyone cleared out, Ana pulled off her bloody gloves and mask, and gazed down at the body. She turned to a rubber-gloved man with bucket and mop who had entered the room.

“Juan. Do you believe humans have a soul?”

He was slender, quiet, and efficient. He paused in mopping up the carnage. “A soul? Yes, sure I do.”

“Well, when do you think it leaves the body?”

He looked down at his mop. “When I come in.”

Sometimes she couldn’t let the bodies go. Suppose Juan was wrong? She walked beside them as aides pushed them down the hall toward the morgue. On the down elevator, she chatted with the aide, but she was really talking to the corpse.

“Well, the crappy part is over. Now it’s just the long, long sleep.”

Still, she was not satisfied.
If we really possess a soul, how does it feel when the newly dead body is violated?

One night the EMS team brought in a suicide, a woman dead from overdose. As soon as the attending declared her dead, they physically ripped her apart. The resident sliced her chest open, using a vise to spread her ribs so students could practice heart massage.

Ana heard the ribs crack. She watched them toss around the heart. They performed half a dozen procedures, injecting her, intubating her, reintubating, over and over. All this on a woman so unhappy she had taken her own life. Wasn’t this violation a second death? How did a soul survive this?

Later she stood outside ER, smoking a cigarette. Another intern joined her.

“Brutal, huh? They couldn’t even wait till she was cold.”