In War Times (39 page)

“That’s from England. The British Broadcasting Corporation.”

Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “How can people be so mean to each other?”

“Nobody really knows.”

“I’m going to find out and fix it.”

“I hope so, Jill. That would be just wonderful.” He brushed back the hair from her head.

“Can I keep the radio longer until I fall asleep?”

“Are you going to listen to the BBC?”

She shook her head. “No. I want to hear music.”

She wanted to fix it.

Maybe he needed to turn his mind back to fixing it, as well.

The postwar lull, here in the States, was just that: only a lull. People were more prosperous, on the whole; many more could afford a home than ever before. Organized labor had provided a good living wage for factory workers, and for years, they’d produced all the food for Europe.

Economic improvement had not done away with human violence, though, and it had not done away with war.

In two minutes of radio news, Jill was getting only the slightest, distanced glimpse of what he had actually seen, what he had experienced, during the war. If, as Hadntz so fervently postulated, her device was going to change the ways in which people regarded one another, wasn’t it time to start doing something with it?

He decided, then: Whatever it was, he would distribute it across the Pacific.

Sam flew to Kwajalein and to Guam, inspecting Navy satellite tracking stations.

That a space program was under way was not known to many in 1957; it was a government secret, one among a legion of secrets.

Sam lived in a separate world on these trips. And a separate world within that one: He took with him his cigarettes of HD4 and planted one at each locale.

Now, he was on his way to South Point, on the Big Island. The highway passed through jungle, high above the sea, and the land rolled below clothed in swaths of glittering palm heads, shining green coffee plantations, and ranches. The towns were casual collections of wooden buildings with a general store and a barbershop, but usually little else. Pickup trucks full of mangoes and sugar cane passed him now and then, impatient with his slow, savoring pace, leaving him in the dust, for the road had turned to dirt not too far out of town.

South Point was dry and stunning. Rolling hills held few houses. The dish reared up before him, outlined against the sky, a new, unnatural object in this wilderness. Waves smashed against the headland, shimmering across the lava rocks after a tall rush of foam that might leap thirty feet before subsiding into the next blue wave. Three fishing craft lay half a mile off the point, cabled to iron rings set in the volcanic rock. The current here was fierce.

Sam parked the jeep and followed a path through tall grass flattened in random circles by gusts of wind. He fished in his pocket and found the key that unlocked the metal door of the graffitied control bunker.

Inside, after he closed the door behind him, it was quiet. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling,
DON
’
T FORGET TO TURN OFF THE LIGHT
! read a sign next to the switch.

He pulled a flashlight from his bag. He spent two hours inspecting the wiring, making sure it had been done right. He performed tests on the computer, printed out test results on a chattering machine. The place was air-conditioned, completely sealed, but still there were signs of corrosion and he made a list of parts that needed replacement. He tested the tracking mechanism, the radio, the radar. Finally he climbed up the ladder, opened the hatch, and crawled out onto the top of the tower. Buffeted by wind, he ascended the ladder that brought him into the dish.

Once there, he took from his rucksack a package he’d stowed in the bottom. He carefully unwrapped it, took out a cylinder of HD4, and pressed it onto the dish. It was warm and malleable.
What am I doing
? he asked himself as usual.
Spreading peace? Or complete devastation
?

And if it
was
an active, evolving material that actually did something, was he doing the right thing to distribute it as he did, scattering its beams throughout the Pacific in tandem with their war beams disingenuously named “peacekeepers,” and the beams aimed into space? Would he be doing the right thing if he did not? Did it do a damned thing? He often hoped it didn’t, that the past was just a trick of his imagination.

But something had happened, and he was left with this responsibility, with only Wink’s vision to guide him. In Wink’s place there was no cold war. In Wink’s world technologies were used for good. In Wink’s world, the Soviet Union and the United States were working together to put a man on the moon.

He went over his checklist and descended to the top of the bunker. There he sat and watched the ocean until the fisherman pulled his boat back to the cliff, unhooked his rope, and headed home.

B
ETTE STARTED GOING
to the Zen Buddhist temple with Patrice, their Japanese neighbor. Patrice was breezy, friendly, helpful. She taught Bette how to cook rice and talked her into going to the temple over on Kamehameha Highway at an ungodly hour of the morning. They’d leave at four and be back at five thirty, and Bette still had half an hour to fix breakfast before she got the kids up. This was perfect for Bette, who was an insomniac. “It’s a lot more interesting than lying in bed awake,” she said.

Bette explained to Sam that Zen wasn’t a religion. “It’s a practice. It’s something that you do, not something that you think about, or profess to believe.”

“So what do you do at the temple? How can the kids
eat
this stuff?” He tossed the handful of Cocoa Puffs he’d grabbed from the box into the garbage.

“We sit.”

“Sit? That’s all?”

“Yeah. Look.” In the living room she pulled a thick, round, black pillow from behind the couch. “Behold, the zabuton. We sit on it. Like this.” She settled her butt on it and easily twisted her legs into the lotus position.

“So, now you’re sitting. Do you close your eyes?”

“No. You kind of lower your eyelids.”

“Do you think of anything?”

“Of course I do. A huge gushing engorged stream of stuff. It’s amazing. The point is to ignore that.”

“How do you ignore what you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know how yet. It takes practice.”

“And then what happens?”

“Who knows?”

“Well, sounds like fun.”

“It’s not really fun,” she said, pausing to think. “It’s…refreshing.”

Their home was becoming more Asian. Shoes were to be removed at the door. The kids wore tabis—Japanese socks with a slit between the big toe and the rest of the toes like a hand mitten, which fastened at the ankle with a metal hook. Bette placed breathtakingly simple Japanese bowls she found at yard sales along an upper window ledge. She began to talk about building a koi pond.

She was different here. The tropical ease of the place drew her out. She laughed more, throwing her head back. She was brown and strong.

One Saturday afternoon the kids rushed into the house giggling and snorting and rolling their eyes at one another. Sam was sitting at the kitchen table and put down the comics page of the
Honolulu Advertiser
. “What?”

Then Bette walked in, with a mischievous smile, carrying a bag of groceries. Her hair was purple. The kids let loose screams of laughter.

“There was a lady at the International Market Place—”

“Heloise!”

“And she was spraying all the ladies’ hair weird colors—”

“At first nobody wanted to do it but then Mom said she would!”

“I wanted green,” said Brian.

“I wanted red,” said Jill.

“But I have always
longed
for purple hair,” said Bette, sliding the bag of groceries from the GEM store onto the table. “It is
so
satisfying to fulfill one’s dreams.”

“I never knew, honey. Gee, you look great! It’ll go good with that purple muu-muu.”

“And a red plumeria behind her ear,” insisted Jill.

Brian grumbled, “I wanted stripes, but she wouldn’t let me. She said you’d be mad.”

“Nah,” said Sam. “I wouldn’t have been mad. We could all just get a job at the circus.”

“Well then can I have a crew cut?”

He looked at Bette. She’d been keeping his hair long and curly. Her quirky smile combined resignation and a message: It’s time.

“Sure, kid.” Sam pushed back his chair. “I need one too. Let’s head on down to the barbershop and let Mrs. Chang do her thing.”

Bette itched to move out of Navy housing. Sam initially found it amusing that the MP’s could not ticket him for storing his packed barrels on the porch, but the fun had worn off quickly as it moved toward the harassment end of the scale.

She found a houseboat on the Ala Wai Canal for sale. It belonged to a Navy guy who was now stationed in Norfolk.

They were enchanted. It was surprisingly spacious. Megan ran across the deck, flinging out her arms and
aaack-aaack
ing like a seabird. Jill took the wheel. Brian climbed ladders with alarming alacrity. Sam and Bette talked it over while the agent indulged in a panic attack about the kids and followed them around so they would not fall in the water and drown.

“The price is right,” said Sam.

“We could walk to the beach.”

“Wouldn’t want to take it out in the ocean.”

“We could ride over to Honolulu Harbor, anyway. Nice sunset cruise past Ala Moana with martinis. Just off Waikiki the water’s pretty tame.”

“I’m mainly worried about the school,” said Bette. “The kids have friends there. It doesn’t seem quite fair—they just left their other friends in Washington…if they stay at Nimitz, there’s no bus. It’s a long drive.” Bette folded her arms, thinking. “But it seems so perfect.”

“You have to go past her school to take me to work anyway.”

“Yeah, but she gets out of school a lot earlier than you get out of work.”

Bette drifted away to examine the kitchen. Sam tried out a deck chair and sat looking at the canal.

It was a calm day, so boats and palms were reflected with exquisite clarity in the perfect mirror of the canal. Then a little catamaran passed by, setting up a pattern of ripples.

The visual surface of the water was fractured into a series of teardrop-shaped reflections. The palm trees were still complete, with trunk and coconuts and bushy fronds, but were now divided by intervals of turbulence into perfect, but separate, segments. Between smooth shards of sky and cloud, a school of wrasses flashed red.

Sam stared, startled by a thought:
What if all we see is just a reflection
? What if, somehow, that reflection was shattered by an eddy from some unknown source, so that we might live through days of mirrors and then suddenly see beyond, like blue sky vanishing at night, revealing stars. What if just inside, just beyond, just on the other side of
this
reality was another, or an infinite number of them. As close as the Ala Wai Canal on which this houseboat floated. Was that how it worked?

Maybe, he thought, the HD
had
affected him.

The vision was shattered by a huge splash as Brian cannonballed off the port side, narrowly missing the boat docked next to them. As the real estate agent shrieked, he sank down for the full effect of appearing to drown. Sam didn’t even get out of his chair. Bette started to laugh.

“He’s so little!” shrieked the agent. “He can’t swim!”

“Time he learned,” said Bette, then he popped up, dog-paddling, and grinned. “Man, it would be
great
to live here.”

Sam searched his mind and came up with: “You know better than to go swimming in your clothes, young man.”

“I’m not sure the canal is all that clean,” said Bette. “Get out. The ladder’s at the back.”

“No!” he said, and his little rear came out of the water as he kicked back under.

“I think I just changed my mind,” said Bette.

“We can make rules.”

“Really, it’s the school,” she said. “And I’m not sure I want Jill to be riding her bike in city traffic.”

“It might get a little cramped,” said Sam.

“The salt air smells
so
nice.”

Sam pulled Brian up with one arm as he reached up from the ladder, and set him on the polished teak deck.

He turned to face the panorama of the Koolaus, intensely green mountains that were Honolulu’s backdrop, shaded by dynamic clouds, white, black, gray. As he watched, some were drawn swiftly into the steep creases of valleys, where rainbows arced through misted distance. To their left was Punchbowl’s volcanic crater, with its neat long rows of crosses, all for servicemen who died in the Pacific. To their right was Diamond Head, whose cauldron held a Navy tracking installation he’d just inspected.

What might be inside or beyond this bright, shimmering façade? More war? A different family? Elsinore and Keenan, restored? A billion combinations of uncounted times and possibilities, each fully lived, with their own glimpse of Other; perhaps, of
this
?

What was it, then?

Teeming life, expanding to fill the vacuum, pulled into the medium of time and present rainbows. Death, destruction, misery; stupidity and grace.

Bette put her arm around him. Megan tugged on his hand. “Daddy, are you okay?”

“What say we head over to Ala Moana and think about it.”

“Did I ever tell you about the morning we got here and that guy brought us over here?”

“What about it?”

They sat next to each other on bamboo mats. Bette was lazily smoking a cigarette and watching the kids playing in the shallows. The beach was wide and full of families. Behind them were naupaka-bordered showers, cool stone dressing rooms, green lawns shaded by broad boa trees with many scattered picnic tables beneath, all of them full midday on Saturday.

“We were the only ones here. It was so peaceful. The wind wasn’t stirring at all. It was so…delicate. These tropical trees, the air, that white edge of waves out on the reef. I let the kids take off their shoes and socks and go wading. They seemed like…flamingoes, the way they lifted their feet so deliberately, all the way out of the water, and set them back down without disturbing anything. They were amazed. They
stared
down into the water. They were reflected in every detail, even the looks on their faces. I don’t know. It was just…so utterly
perfect
.”