Above the East China Sea: A Novel (5 page)

I make my way closer to the fire. A bonfire in August on a subtropical island makes the air feel chewable. But it’s necessary for keeping mosquitoes at bay and for giving us a focal point. Focal points are very important for bands of nomads like me and the Quasis, with our CGI ability to constantly splinter and then reconstitute on a spot halfway around the world.

“Hey, Kirby,” Wynn O’Dell yells. Wynn—one of those V-shaped guys who loves lifting weights a little too much and who you always suspect might have a Confederate flag hung in his bedroom—holds up a bottle of Cuervo Gold. “Look what I got for you, man.” Wynn waves the bottle around like it’s a piece of bacon and he’s calling a dog. Which is pretty much how Kirby reacts.

Lucky Charms bounds over and Wynn snatches it out of his reach. Kirby fakes going left and grabs the Cuervo away when Wynn falls for the feint. Kirby hoists his prize aloft and the bottle turns to a scepter of gold in the light from the fire. Standing there next to Jake and my other new Quasi-friends laughing at what a goof Kirby is, I almost think I can do this for a while longer. Maybe I could live on the beach, exist on crabs and seaweed, and never go home. Never have to see my mother again, and it would all be bearable.

“James!” Jacey Bosfeld, an all-American blue-eyed Barbie doll with shiny curtains of palomino blond hair hanging on either side of her face, who has about three more years of being cute before all her curves go convex, yells at me. “Get your ass over here, bitch.”

I hopscotch over the tangle of bodies. Jacey pats a spot on the sand next to her. I drop the small woven shoulder bag that carries my ID card onto it and sink down into the yummy chemical cloud of vanilla-musk lotion and coconut-mint conditioner Jace always exudes. Here on this sixty-mile-long island Jacey uses her artificially scarce, high-demand blond American-girl status for the benefit of all by sharing the tributes from her stream of well-provisioned boyfriends. Her current smooch nugget, Airman Basic Zavie Plutino, the Italian Shetland, a handsome,
if spectacularly short GI, hands me the crafty little vaporizer he cobbled together from a lightbulb, a bottle cap, and some rubber tubing. He heats up the crafty bit of herb within until ghostly trails of smoke dance around the bulb, begging me to Hoover them down. Which I do.

Jake watches me. We have one of our eye moments. He doesn’t seem to be mooning for the missing Christy Medoruma.

“All right!” Kirby throws his arms open wide and looks out at the waves, studying them like he’s Captain Jack Sparrow about to put a spyglass up to his eye. “This might be the night. Eee-yaaah, the shipment just might come in tonight.” He nods, waits for someone to ask him about “the shipment.”

When no one does, he gets all grumpy and barks at me, “Tiger Woods, you ought not be hogging that.” He means the vaporizer. Which I am not hogging. “Gonna be wishing you’d shared more with ol’ Cousin Kirb when the shipment comes in.”

Jacey holds her hand out for the vaporizer. “Kirby, you been talking shit about this mysterious ‘shipment’ every night for the past week.”

“Yeah, well, this night just might be different.” He nods in a way that’s supposed to be thoughtful but just makes him look like a sleepy turtle. “
Very
different.”

“How?” I ask. “Are you
not
gonna pass out and
not
wake up the next day covered with sand-flea bites?” I have to riff. It’s expected. It’s what I do.

“And
not
with a couple of all y’all bitches pregnant.
That’d
be different, yo.”

“Seriously, Kirby,” I say to possibly the
least
gangsta human on earth, “does this mean that you’ve actually found a girl who meets your exacting standards?”

Kirby nails me with a look that warns me not to go on. He really should know better.

“You know,” I finish, “female
and
has a pulse.”
Full of life.

DaQuane hoots and raises a fist for me to bump.

“When did he add female to the list of requirements?” Jake asks.

“Be that way.” Kirby pouts. “I’ll just take your comments to mean that you’re not interested in the shipment.”

Jake waves away the vaporizer Jacey holds out to him, shakes his head. “Lucky Charms, you talk more shit than Mexican radio.”

“Call me Lucky Charms one more time, Jackie Chan,” Kirby warns, “and you are definitely off the list.”

“Why?” I ask, just for something to say. “You’re always calling me Tiger Woods.”

“Uh,
gomen nasai,
Luz, that I referred to you as a megasuccessful champion billionaire, famous for having so many people want to hook up with you. Him,” he corrects himself.

I don’t really care whether Kirby wants to hook up with me or if he calls me Tiger Woods, any more than he really cares if I call him Lucky Charms. Or Jake cares if we call him Jackie Chan. Or, for that matter, than Jacey Bosfeld would care if I dubbed her Snow White. Her boyfriend, though, Zavie Plutino from somewhere back east in Rhode Island or New Jersey, one of those states with no air force bases, Zavie would no doubt be highly offended if I started calling him Guido.

Why? Because Zavie is not one of us. He’s not a military kid. Xavier Plutino enlisted at eighteen. Of course, it was my big sister, Codie, who explained that military kids enlisted at birth. This world, the United States military, is all we’ve ever known, and way more than almost any other, it is a color-blind world. Intriguing racial mixes, yummy caramel people like me and DaQuane and half the other kids out here, are the norm. Now, rank, that’s different. No one’s going to joke about rank. Codie maintained that rank is our race. That we’re not racists, but we
are
rankists.

And that’s why every single one of us knows that Wynn O’Dell’s dad is a full-bird colonel. And that Jacey Bosfeld and Kirby Kernshaw’s dads are both staff sergeants. That Jake’s father is a civilian but permanently attached to Kadena in a way no one is quite sure about, but that doesn’t really matter, since civilian is civilian and therefore outside of our visible color spectrum. And they all know that my mom is a master sergeant and, most pertinent of all, that she’s the new NCOIC of Dependent Security for the base police. That she works out of the Death Star, Security Forces HQ, and could get any of their families transferred with one OSI investigation. When the Quasis found out who my mom was, they were nervous until they realized that I only talk to her when absolutely necessary. Besides, since I do all the shit they do, there’s no chance I’d narc anyone out. But none of that matters. Not tonight. Not with the Cuervo and the bulb of dancing smoke
being passed around a beach fire spiraling golden sparks high up into a sky as dark as tar.

“Hey,” Kirby says, “I might have gotten the shipment today.” He’s been teasing us all summer with hints about a shipment of some new designer drug he was supposed to be getting, and we’re all burned out on hearing about it. When no one says anything, Kirby huddles around the bottle of Cuervo and collapses on the sand, where he goes into a sulk, all sad and deflated. Lying on the sand, his back to us, working on the Cuervo, he’s silent for a long time. Then he starts sighing. The fifth or sixth time he heaves a giant one, I crumble and ask, “Shipment of what, Kirby?”

He sits up. The backs of his bare arms are covered in sand. A dried piece of seaweed clings to his hair like a tribal decoration. “Oh just a little safe, totally legal, totally awesome high.”

Jacey unsuctions herself from Zavie’s face and demands, “What awesome high?”

“Oh,
now
you’re interested.
Now
you’re all, ‘Oh, Kirby, you’re so interesting. Oh, Kirby, tell me more.’ ”

Jacey shrugs. “No, I’m not. Don’t tell me. I don’t care.”

“Okay, bath salts. Everyone back in the world is doing it.”

Jake shakes his head like he can’t believe what he just heard. “Kernshaw, we talked about this. Okay, buddy? Remember what I said?”

“The shit’s legal, dude.”

“Maybe. Technically,” Jake says. “In a few states back in the world. But we ain’t in the world, are we, ‘dude’?”

“Hay-sus, Jackie Chan, who died and made you my CO?”

The Cuervo and the vaporizer make their way to me and I lose what little interest I had in Kirby’s babbling. Zavie torches the glass; I take a hit and wash it down with tequila. As the liquor and smoke unfreeze my insides enough that I can inhale most of a full breath, I dig my toes into the sand, burrowing them toward the cool damp below. Far out beyond the shallow waters ringing the cove where wading-pool waves lap at the shore, beyond the coral reef that encircles and protects the island with its underwater graveyard of antlers, fans, and brains, the big rollers crash and send plumes of mist rising high into the foggy moonlight.

Zavie leans over and blows smoke into Jacey’s mouth. She tips toward him until they form a cozy triangle of reciprocal lust.

Wynn starts a thumb war with Jake that quickly escalates until
they’re both up and exploding sharp percussive blasts of exhalations as they swing roundhouse kicks at each other. Muscle-bound Wynn is a clown show, a galumphing sheepdog of clueless goodwill. Jake, on the other hand, compact and explosive, moves with the coil-and-release lethality of a leopard. He knows how to deliver—or, more important, to pull—such surgically precise strikes that it’s obvious he could destroy poor Wynn if he wanted to. I’m so distracted that for a few seconds I forget and I’m just here, on the beach, laughing with friends at a couple of guys cuffing each other around like bear cubs.

Then a breeze whips in off the water, carrying the smell of the sea so strongly that I’m back in Hawaii that last time Codie and I were together, all happy and snorkeling and everything. To stop remembering what came after, I intercept the bottle of Cuervo and switch from swigs to chugs. Given a choice between remembering or passing out, I’ll pick passing out every time.

But the Cuervo fails to keep me rooted in the present and I’m hurtled back to the moment when the end began.

SIX

Mother, do you feel something?

Yes.

What is it? Is it the
kami?

It must be.

For the first time since we jumped, I feel a powerful vibration that grows stronger, then weakens, fading in and out like Father’s shortwave radio when he tried to tune in Tokyo for news about the war.

Mother, I’m frightened. Are the
kami
about to end our existence? Will we become nothing?

No, I will never allow that to happen.

Then what is it?
Anmā,
I’m scared. It hurts. I want it to stop. I want to be nothing again.

Stop! Never think that! We are being saved. The
kami
are just waking us up so we will be ready.

For what?

They’re sending one of the living to us.

How? None of the living can dive all the way down here.

The
kami
have their ways.

I know! They will finally turn us into
fiidama
so we can dance on the waves and steal the body of the one they send to us, won’t they?

How would I know?

Mother, the vibrations are fading. Have the
kami
forgotten us again?

No, but sometimes the living do not want to know what the
kami
desire of them.

But the
kami
are more powerful than the living, aren’t they?

Of course they are. Still, the living, they will try to drown out the
kami’
s message by dulling their senses. But they never succeed, because the
kami
have a secret weapon that the living can never escape.

What is that,
Anmā?

Memory.

SEVEN