I don’t know how long you’ve been away. I think it must be a very long time. Years. Maybe even a decade. But then I realize that, if that’s so, it means that I’ve been here, in this place, for years, maybe even a decade. And then I can hear myself beginning to moan, louder and louder, and thrash my arms and legs, and piss myself, and then I can hear the sound of people running toward me, and sometimes I hear them say my name: “Wika. Wika, you need to calm down. You need to calm down, Wika.” Wika: They only call me Wika. No one here calls me Mr. Bingham unless your grandmother is visiting. But that’s fine. It never felt right, being called Mr. Bingham.
But I can’t calm down, because now I’m thinking about how I’ll never get out of here, about how my life—my entire life—has been spent in places I can’t escape: Your grandmother’s house. Lipo-wao-nahele. And now here. This island. I could never really leave. But you did. You got away.
And so I keep making the sounds I can, slapping away their hands, wailing over their attempts to soothe me, and I keep doing it until I feel the medication entering my veins, warming my body, calming my heart, delivering me back to a state of forgetting.
* * *
—
I want to talk to you, my son, my Kawika, though I know you will never hear me, as I will never be able to say any of this aloud to you, not anymore. But I want to talk to you about everything that happened, and try to explain to you why I did what I did.
You have never visited me. I know this, and yet I also don’t. Sometimes I’m able to pretend that you have visited me, that I’m just confused. But I know you haven’t. I don’t know what your voice sounds like anymore; I don’t know what you smell like. The image I have of you is from when you were fifteen, and leaving me after one of our weekends together, and I didn’t know—maybe you didn’t, either, maybe you still loved me a little then, despite everything—that I would never see you again. Of course this makes me sad. Not just for my sake—but for yours as well. Because you have a father who is both alive and yet not, and yet you are still a young man, and a young man needs his father.
I can’t tell you exactly where I am, because I don’t know. Sometimes I imagine I must be on Tantalus, high up in the forest, because it’s cool and rainy and very quiet, but I could also be in Nu‘uanu, or even in Manoa. I do know I’m not at our house, because this place doesn’t smell like our house. For a long time I thought I was in a hospital, but it doesn’t smell like a hospital, either. But there are doctors and nurses and orderlies, and they all take care of me.
For a long time I didn’t leave my bed at all, and then they started making me. “C’mon, Wika,” a man’s voice would say. “C’mon, bruddah.” And I could feel a hand on my back, helping me sit, and then four hands on me, two wrapped around my waist, lifting me up and setting me down again. Then I was being pushed, and I could feel that we had left the building, I could feel the sun on my neck. One of the hands tipped my chin up; I closed my eyes. “That feels good, doesn’t it, Wika?” said the voice. But then he let go of my chin and my head flopped forward again. Now when they take me around the building or out to the garden, they strap something around my forehead so that my head stays in place. Sometimes a woman comes and moves my arms and legs and talks to me. She bends and straightens each limb, and then she rubs me before turning me onto my stomach and kneading my back. There would have been a time when that would have made me embarrassed, to be lying there without any clothes on and with a strange woman touching me, but now I don’t mind. Her name is Rosemary, and as she massages me, she talks about her day and her family: her husband, who’s an accountant; her son and daughter, who’re still in elementary school. Occasionally, she’ll say something that makes me realize how much time has passed, but then, later, I get confused because—once again—I don’t know if she actually said it or if I just made it up. Did the Berlin Wall fall, or did it not? Are there now colonies on Mars, or are there not? Did Edward triumph after all, and has the monarchy been restored, and I named king of the Hawaiian islands, and my mother the queen regent, or has it not? One time she said something about you, about my son, and I became agitated and she had to buzz for help, and since then she’s never mentioned you again.
Today I thought of you as they were feeding me my dinner. Everything I eat is soft, because sometimes I think too much about swallowing and then I start panicking and gagging, but if I don’t have to chew I think about it less. Dinner was congee with preserved egg and scallions, which is one of the dishes I used to have Jane make you when you were sick—one of the dishes she made me when I was a child. It was one of my father’s favorites as well, although he liked his with boiled chicken.
I think Jane is dead. Matthew, too. No one has told me this, but I know, because they used to come visit me and now they don’t. Don’t ask me how long ago, or how; I wouldn’t be able to tell you. But they were old—older than your grandmother. I once overheard her telling you that her father had given her Jane and Matthew as a wedding present: two servants from her father’s household that would help her run her own. But that isn’t true. Jane and Matthew were in the house well before your grandmother joined it. And besides, by that point her father didn’t have the money for a single servant, much less two, much less two he could give away. And if he had, it’s unlikely he would have given them to her, when legally she wasn’t even related to him by blood.
I never knew what to do when I heard your grandmother tell you things that weren’t true. I didn’t want to contradict her. I knew better. And I wanted you to trust her, and to love her—I wanted things to be easier for you than they were for me, and that meant having a good relationship with her. I worked hard to make that happen, and I think I succeeded, which means I didn’t completely fail you; I made sure your grandmother loved you. But now you are grown, grown and safe and living in New York, and I feel I can tell you the truth.
I will say this for your grandmother: She took nothing she had for granted. What she had she had fought for and earned, and her life was dedicated to ensuring it never slipped away from her. She raised me to feel the opposite, and yet there were times I think she felt resentful that I did, even though it had been her intention. She never resented my father for it, and yet she resented me, because I was partially hers, and I should therefore be aware of how precarious my position was, because then her own anxiety would feel less lonely. We often end up resenting our children when they achieve what we’ve wished for them—although this isn’t my way of saying that I resent you, even though my only wish was that you grow up and leave me behind.
About my father I have little to say that you don’t already know. I was already eight, almost nine, when he died, and yet I have few memories of him—he is a blurred, jovial presence, sporty and hearty, swinging me up in the air when he came home from work, dangling me upside down as I squealed, trying and failing to teach me how to hit a ball. I wasn’t like him, but he didn’t seem dissatisfied with me, the way I knew my mother to be from almost the time I had a sense of her opinions at all; I liked reading, and he would call me “Professor,” never sarcastically, even though what I liked to read were just comic books. “This is Wika, the reader in the family,” he’d introduce me to acquaintances, and I would feel embarrassed, because I knew that I was reading nothing important, that I didn’t really have the right to call myself a reader. But it hadn’t mattered to him; if I had ridden horses, I would have been the Rider, and if I had played tennis I would have been the Athlete, and it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had distinguished myself or not.