15
To live is like to love-all reason is against it. and all healthy instinct for it.
The Hawaiian night was calm, at peace, the wind a gentle, pulsating, cheek-caressing reminder to Jessica of the fragility of this tropical island world. Built upon volcanic rock, riddled with air pockets and underground rivers of lava, given birth by a cauldron in the boiling depths of the sea. The land mass was little more than a mighty coral reef created for the gods of Hawaiian legend whose sense of sport was often cruel.
She knew the truth, that the islands were a strange illusion created by an unruly, chaotic earth continually evolving, and that what was taken for granted here as terra firma was only as good as the faith people put in it, which might, faith and all, be gone with the next fiery eruption. She even imagined the river of fire come like a dragon to play out a billion-year-old game of hide-and-seek with life and death in the balance.
Hawaii was the ultimate land of illusion. Here even nature in all her lustrous, plush, enticing fantasy conspired in the deception, for while Hawaii purported to be paradise and perfection at every turn, Jessica had seen the seams, the pit viper in the garden, particularly here in Honolulu, where the darker aspects, the underbelly of the city, were as bleak and foul as anything she'd seen in D.C., Chicago or New York.
Here every illusion was forged by nature, save the sprawling city of Honolulu, yet nature conspired with the city to mask its meaner aspect. Honolulu stood a shimmering man-made Babel filled with the voices of every tongue, hugging an ocean that could destroy it at any time. The city acted as a modern jungle for such predators as the Trade Winds Killer. Nature's illusive calm and man's monuments, seemingly pleased to be in close proximity here in Oahu, left an unsettling insecurity in Jessica Coran, even as she looked past James Parry's muscular form to the lazy Pacific below.
Here was illusion, with the changing tide meeting the sky on the horizon; here the abundant cover of leaf and fruit, there light, a rainbow of shadow, lavender skies, where softly painted darkness, bird and arrow, water and drought, wind and calm, cloud and mountain, sun and rain, all mingled in a dance along a high wire of conflict and tension called life. Like the teeming sea itself, the land of the pineapple, guava, mango, papaya and sugarcane was rich in color and beauty with countless varieties of multicolored birds and flowers, some blossoms mimicking the appearance of birds. The land of the monkeypod tree, the flaming poinciana and the ancient Indian banyan represented for Jessica, and all who came under Hawaii's spell, a paradise that affirmed life's richest bounties over despair, decay and death. Yet it was an unforgiving land too, pitiless toward the foolish or uninitiated. It was a world where East and West clashed, one devouring the other. She'd seen the ambiguity of Hawaii in the single branch of a passion-fruit tree whose flowers, symbolizing Christ's passion, flourished even as its fruit went rotting on the bough, filling the air with an acrid and sour odor which mingled with the rotting overabundance of guavas and mangoes growing wild along ancient footpaths that'd become paved highways.
She'd witnessed the same contrasts on Maui, where beauty and death were enshrined atop Maui's Haleakala summit, where the rare silversword flourished amid an arid, lunar landscape. She now recalled for Jim her visit up the winding highway to Mount Haleakala, House of the Sun, where Maui-of-the-thousand-tricks, impatient with the gods, had fooled them into creating Maui from the sea by connecting two volcanoes, Puu and Kukui, into the spectacular gorges and valleys, giving Maui the name “Valley Isle.” Haleakala, at 10,023 feet, was home to the world's largest dormant caldera, twenty-one miles in circumference, and now it housed men and high-tech instruments in Science City, a collection of blockhouses and scanning devices to track NASA launches, satellites and the activity of the sun.
But the sun was far from Jim's or Jessica's mind tonight. With a near full moon, the sky over Oahu, as seen from the balcony of the Rainbow Tower overlooking Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head, was a deep, abiding cerulean, rivaling the blue sapphire of the Pacific itself.
“ Beautiful and enormous, isn't it?” she said to Parry, finding him in a thoughtful mood, staring out at eternity in the form of ocean and sky as it stretched before them.
“ Been a while since I've had a moment to really breathe it all in.”
She'd earlier left him to his own devices while she had showered and located an extra pillow and blanket for the sofa. He'd broken into the dry bar for wine, and now he held out a glass to her and she gratefully accepted. She had on a thick white terry-cloth robe compliments of the hotel, yet she clutched the extra bedclothes to herself.
He proposed a toast, lifting his glass. 'To all peaceful moments in paradise.”
She smiled in return and sipped the Zinfandel. It felt oddly intoxicating, pungent, telling her that maybe she'd better go easy on an empty stomach. “You hungry?” she asked him.
“ No problem,” he murmured, staring out once more at the deep colors of the evening over the pulsating sea. She bit her upper lip, tentatively stepped further out on the balcony and almost turned to leave when he wheeled, his hands reaching her shoulder, his eyes smiling at her blinking stare.
“ Your eyes, Jess.” He began to lift uncertain fingers to her cheek. “So pretty, alluring.”
She broke their stare, and while she hadn't resisted his touch, she stepped away now, her own wish to be held by him at odds with a nagging sense of duty and self-control that spoke of common sense.
She could think of nothing to say, but Jim filled in the silence. “You're as… as alluring as all of Hawaii and the ocean encircling us, Jess.”
“ Jim, we're not going to do this. It'd only lead to complications neither of us can afford right now.”
“ Complications.” He repeated the word as if it were an alien term. He stepped back, instantly hurt, turning his eyes away, nodding. He desperately sought to change the subject. “Bet you can't imagine what Oahu was like before we whites took over,” he said, setting aside his wine glass and taking pillow and blanket from her.
“ Unspoiled maybe?”
“ No concrete.” He said the word as if it were a curse.
“ No cars or exhaust,” she countered.
“ No liquor stores, pot or crack.”
“ No ice cream sundaes either,” she challenged.
“ There's little left of the old Hawaii. You find some of it around Hana in Maui, and of course there's Kahoolawe.”
She tried to repeat the melodic word. “Ka-whoo-law-we?” she asked, smiling, fascinated with all that he knew of the unknowable islands.
“ Ka-who-la-vee. Last of the old island tribal governments wants to rule there. It's forbidden to whites nowadays, returned to the people by the U.S., thanks to the PKO.”
“ PKO? What exactly does that stand for?”
“ Preserve Kahoolawe Ohana. You might liken them to American Indians out to redress wrongs. They've gotten good at working in the political arena, and they have hired some damn good lawyers. They're a lot like your dyed-in-the-wool wacko environmentalists.”
“ I see. So Kahoolawe is now a reserve?”
“ Yeah, now it is. U.S. Navy used the island for target practice with their big battleships since World War II, and this PKO group got them evacuated through legal means.”
“ I'm impressed, but why haven't I heard about this place?”
He shrugged, the pillow bobbing in front of him. “Nobody speaks of it much; certainly not the airlines or the brochures. Too unsettling, too political, for the tourist industry, you might say.”
He stepped inside, laid the pillow and blanket on a chair arm and located the usual stash of tourist information. He quickly found a map depicting all the islands of Hawaii. She followed him back inside and looked over his shoulder. In a moment. Parry was pointing out the smallest of the Hawaiian island chain.
“ That's Kahoolawe there. Only forty-five square miles across. No cars, no billboards, no hot-and-cold anything, no neon signs, football stadiums or shops. No one goes there and the islanders on Kahoolawe have shunned all Western ways, so historically there's been an understanding, but in the not-too-distant past, the U.S. made it officially off-limits to commercialization or development, and so off-limits to us, the white man.” He paused thoughtfully. “The Hawaiians are holding fast to their status there, feeling the encroachment of extinction on their
