12 Hours In Paradise (11 page)

“Okay, I actually thought about this, and I would have to say that what I’ve thought about doing for a long time is traveling to Europe. Without my parents.”

“And why haven’t you done it yet?”

“Obviously because I’m too young. And I don’t have enough of my own money. And my parents would never give me the money to go without them. But one day I will. I really want to.”

“Why without your parents?”

“I’d like to explore on my own without my father planning the whole thing and micromanaging where we go, what we see, where we eat. I want an adventure. Or maybe I’d go with someone else. A…friend. But not my parents. Your turn.”

“The thing I’ve thought about doing for a long time is going to college. And fortunately that will be happening in the near future.”

“Do you know where you’re going yet?”

“I’ll be going to Stanford so I can stay close to my parents and help out my mother.”

“Wow. That’s great for you. I mean…congratulations, that’s an accomplishment. I imagined you somewhere on the East Coast or even overseas.”

“Does it make you happy?”

“Yes. I like thinking of you at Stanford. It seems very…appropriate for you.”

“This was too easy. Let’s see what the next question is.”

The beach was relatively deserted at that time of night. The brightest lights of the major hotels were behind us. A couple was walking in our direction.

“I saw these two earlier,” I whispered to Arash. “I remember the guy because he’s wearing a suit with, like, shorts instead of pants. Weird, huh?”

“European,” Arash said. “Guys in Europe wear capri-length pants. If I wore that here, I’d be laughed out of school. He’s actually quite fashionable.”

The woman in the tight black outfit with the steeply plunging neckline and massive boobs was no longer towering over her companion since she was carrying, instead of wearing, her five-inch heels. Now she was simply looming over him. He had his arm curled around her waist, and she wobbled awkwardly in the sand, her thighs straining against the formfitting dress.

“Arash, please don’t tell me you wore something like that when you lived in Switzerland. Please don’t tell me. It would ruin my image of you.”

“Would it?” He looked down at me with tender concern. “Then I’ll only say we had uniforms for school. I won’t reveal what I wore outside of school…if anything.”

By then the couple had come to the place where we were about to pass each other.

“Hello!” Arash greeted them.

They stopped and struggled for a friendly reply. Only the man could come up with one.

“Yes. Byooteeful night, no?”

The woman smiled broadly and nodded in agreement, although I’m not sure she understood what he was saying.

“Can’t you talk to them?” I nudged him. “French? German?” I wanted badly to hear him speak in a different language.

“
Parlez-vous francais?
” he asked in what seemed to me a pretty flawless freaking accent, but the guy just shook his head and the woman chuckled.

“
Sprechen Sie deutsche?
”

But again he was just met with amused expressions and palms held upward in the universal sign of helplessness.

“I think they’re Eastern European,” Arash explained, all the while grinning back at them.

“Roos…roosky,” the man said, and the woman nodded enthusiastically.

“I think they’re Russian,” Arash said.

“Russia. Yes,” the man said. He half turned his body and pointed down the beach in the direction we were heading. “Dog,” he said, making a snarling, tooth-baring face. “Ruff!” he barked in his best dog imitation.

“I think they must have encountered Buster and the zombies,” I said.

The lady rolled her eyes and made another universal sign…craziness. She twirled her finger in a circular motion next to her temple. They both burst out laughing, leaving me to wonder how their encounter with the zombie people had differed from ours.

“Buster and the Zombies! What a great name for my next rock band,” Arash said.

Our common ground, the joke that we all got, died a natural death with nothing new to replace it. We were completely out of shared experiences that could be expressed through universal sign language.

“Good-bye,” I said.

It was sad that language divided us. I wanted to hear them explain what this night meant to them and where life would take them once it was over. I wanted to tell them what it meant to me. What Arash meant to me. Of course they would understand. How could they not, sharing the magic of that night the way we all were? Sharing the adventure. How could they not help but realize it meant everything to me at that moment in time?

Everything.

“Bye! Bye-bye.” The lady seemed happy to contribute at least that much to our conversation.

For some reason it felt good to see them again. And melancholic to leave them behind. They were the closest thing to long-lost friends in the little world Arash and I created that night.

“Question fifteen?” I asked once we were all on our way again. Ships passing in the night. A Venn diagram with just the barest shadow of overlapping lives.

“This is a really hard one, so let’s both think about it for a minute before we answer. ‘What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?’”

***

The beach had narrowed with a grassy strip behind us. Beyond that were more stores, hotels, and restaurants. It’s clear to anyone that Honolulu’s a big city and Waikiki just a small piece of the pie. But it doesn’t seem like a big city, open to the ocean breezes the way it is. Like the infinite mazes of open-air shopping malls, Honolulu is an open-air city. There’s rarely a reason to take cover from nature in Waikiki, and if you have to—a sudden rainstorm—endless open doors will present themselves. So this alone made it seem quaint to me. Friendly. Welcoming. Nonthreatening. For all I knew, we were exposing ourselves to the worst kind of danger at that time of night.

But it didn’t feel like it.

Not for one minute.

We sat down on a bench just below the grassy strip. I could see people in sleeping bags snoozing on the grass behind us. I spotted Buster among them, curled up for the night, the zombie people bent over a tiny flame, their expressions serious and intent.

“Do you think it’s safe here?” I asked.

“I’m sure it’s fine. We
are
still in Waikiki, after all. Major tourist area. My hotel’s just a block away.”

“Well, that’s comforting. I’m sure the school wouldn’t place their darling students in a dangerous area.”

“Do you really think I’m darling?” Arash teased. He held a strand of my hair between his fingertips and ran the tip lightly over my cheek like a paintbrush. Across my nose. Down my other cheek. He placed it across my upper lip. “You’re very attractive with a moustache,” he said. “You should try growing one sometime.”

“Ha-ha.” I brushed his hand away. “Should I go first? Because I know what I’m going to say.”

“Then by all means…please.” He broke into a wide yawn, which he tried to cover with the back of his hand.

“Are you tired?”

“I’m getting my second wind.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s just so peaceful here, I got a little carried away. I guess seeing all those sleeping bags triggered my circadian rhythm.”

“Your eyes are so pretty when you take off your glasses. Can you see anything without them?”

“Nope. But I know I’m sitting next to a beautiful girl. I can
sense
that.”

He replaced his glasses, pushing them up against the bridge over his nose the way he always did.

“Okay, so the greatest accomplishment of my life is a school project I did last summer. I was supposed to take some living histories of World War II veterans for my U.S. History class. Videotaping them and logging the questions and answers online. I was only supposed to do two, but once I got started I couldn’t stop. It was so compelling, hearing their stories. Trying to imagine them as young people, just barely older than me. Thinking about the challenges people faced back then and how much easier our lives are now. Thinking about how I was helping to preserve a part of history. Wondering if the world could ever come to a place like that again.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I didn’t think so, but now I’m not so sure. It was unimaginable to me, and I really mean that in a literal sense. I read about it. I talked to people who lived through it. I tried to imagine it to the best of my ability. But I never really got there—do you know what I mean? And then sometimes I wondered if the people I was interviewing could get back to that place. Or were they just repeating words they’d said a million times before? Had it become just as unimaginable for them as it was for me? Or did they still feel it? And that’s when I realized what I was doing wrong.”

“What was that?” His voice was alive again and the sleepiness gone from his eyes.

“I was asking questions that demanded factual answers. The men and women—actually
one
woman. They were just feeding me facts because that’s all I was asking for. And I realized it was easy for them to give me facts because they’d become comfortable dealing with them. They could separate themselves from the facts we learned in school. And facts don’t have power, only people do. Once I figured that out, I started asking questions in a different way. More personal.”

“Like?”

“Like instead of asking what battle they fought in, I might ask them what went through their mind the first time someone shot at them. Who did they think about first thing in the morning…last thing at night? Did they admit to each other about being afraid, or did they try to act tough? Did they ever cry and, if so, why? Things like that.”

“And what kind of response did you get?”

“Some of them ignored those questions. They were comfortable just repeating the facts, but the personal questions made that reality imaginable for them again and they didn’t want to go back there. I couldn’t blame them. When that happened, I went back to the facts and finished the interview as best as I could.”

“And the others?”

“A few of them just got real quiet and maybe their eyes got moist. And then they’d say something like, ‘That was a long time ago. I can’t recall.’”

“No takers for your personal questions?”

“No, there were a few. The ones who wanted to talk about it. About what it felt like down to the tiniest detail. Those were the ones who could take you back with them, and they could make you understand how it could happen again. They could show you how times change but people don’t. How there will always be good and evil. Those were the ones I lived for. By the end of the summer, I’d completed and logged thirty-six interviews.”

“Thirty-six. Just like the number of our questions.”

“Oh yeah, wow. I didn’t think about that.”

“What is the single most powerful impression you have from last summer?”

“One of the men I interviewed died a few months later. He was ninety-two years old. I contacted his family and gave them a DVD copy of my interview, which they played at the reception following his memorial service. Later on, some of his family members emailed to thank me. They said they’d never heard those stories before. I felt like I’d done something significant. I kept someone alive in a way, or at least his story. I don’t know. I guess that’s my biggest accomplishment.”

“That’s an amazing story, Dorothy. Truly.”

I felt something wet push against my leg, and I jumped up, stifling a scream.

“Oh my God! Buster, you almost gave me a heart attack.”

Buster smiled up at me like we were long-lost friends.

Arash didn’t have anything clever to say like I thought he would. He just tilted his head back and laughed softly and easily. If he could be any sexier than he already was, laughing like that made him so. He even leaned forward and scratched Buster behind the ear.

“Buster!” came a nasally voice command I recognized as being from his owner. “Get over here, dude!”

Buster slunk sheepishly back to his spot on the grass.

A gas torch beside the bench tossed flame-lit shadows against the sand, lending an eerie quality to the night.

“Now what was
your
greatest accomplishment? I’m sure you’ll have a lot to pick from,” I only half joked.

“I don’t really,” he said. “But there is one in particular that stands out in my mind. I’ve only shared it with three other people before now.”

“I’m listening.”

“I told you about my school in Switzerland…”

“The one where you wore a cute little uniform…I imagine shorts and suspenders with knee-high socks, and a long-sleeved, puffy blouse. Like the kids in
Sound of Music
.”

“Lederhosen.”

“That’s it!”

“And you probably imagine me running through the Alps yodeling at the top of my lungs.”

“Definitely yodeling. In fact, could you yodel for me now?”