Austin Aslan - The Islands at the End of the World

I can’t shake the image of Mom talking with no sound; of me, sprinting to catch my family.

“I’ll get home. Nothing will stop me,” I say aloud.

I escape to the chancellor’s study, where I pore over shelves of books like I’m Kai in a candy store. A good book will distract me. After I redo my nails—I’m getting bored with spearmint, but oh well—I settle into reading a novel that I started at home, hunched over a quivering candle flame. The hours melt away, just like in the olden days, when candles were things you only used for nice dinners and fragrance.

Before dawn we eat a breakfast of crackers and waxed Brie. Dad shaves his feral beard. With just enough light to see by, we switch all of our food and the potassium iodide into the backpacks and put everything else in the suitcases. The packs also hold a few changes of clothes, our two-person tent, and essentials like my medicine.

I pop my morning pill. Twenty-nine left.

The packs are incredibly heavy, but if we have to ditch the suitcases, we won’t lose the food.

We pore over a large map of Hawai`i and examine the terrain between us and our family. I can’t believe that we flew here from Hilo in forty minutes while I listened to music with my eyes closed.

Dad says, “Looks like Moloka`i is about thirty miles away from Kailua Beach Park. The park is only an hour’s walk from here. Moloka`i should always be visible once we’re on the water.”

“And then Moloka`i to Maui. Ten miles? A cinch.”

“I hope so. Then we have to get through Maui. Launch for the Big Island from Hana. Another thirty miles on the water. But first, Hana. Don’t forget: eastern Maui is a ten-thousand-foot-high volcano. Better to skirt the coast on a boat.”

As Dad is talking and pointing at the map, I rub my eyes. It sounds like we’re planning an old British expedition to discover the mouth of the Nile, or something.

An urgent knocking at the door. We share an uncertain glance. The knocking continues. We’ve shuttered all the front windows, but I can see a pair of eyes through the remaining gaps. They know we’re in here.

“You’re not safe here. They’re coming!” a man shouts. “Please, John, hurry.”

Dad moves to stand flat against the door but doesn’t open it. He holds the gun tightly in his hand. “Who’s coming? Who are you?”

“It’s Haku. I saw you in the garden last night. They’re sweeping the block. If they find you, they kill you.”

Dad unlocks the door and holds it open just far enough to peer out. “Which way are they going?”

“Who are you?” Haku asks, startled. He takes a step back. He’s an older fellow—Hawaiian—with wire-frame glasses and gray hair.

“John’s in Hilo. I’m a professor at the U. We were just leaving. Which way?”

“Go out the back,” he says, looking over Dad’s shoulder at me. It’s clear he’s risking a lot by rushing over to our porch. “Go right—makai. I gotta go.”

“ Who’s after us?” Dad says.

“The Filipinos, and some others, are after whites.” Haku darts down the driveway.

“Come on,” Dad says.

I snatch the road atlas, roll it, and stuff it into my backpack. We yank our possessions through the dark brambles. Dad pushes our gear over a wooden fence and we scramble after it, emerging on a winding residential street. I realize that I’ve been trying to hold my breath, and I take in a lungful of air. We rush along the dim sidewalk, finally able to roll our suitcases. I’m terrified, but what else are we supposed to do? A Jeep rumbles down the nearest cross street, and we dive into someone’s yard. But who was in the Jeep? I’m not even sure who we’re running from. They can’t be everywhere, can they?

I feel like a ghost lingering among the living—or maybe it’s the other way around. I imagine the eyes of wary monsters watching us from the shadows of every window. I’m just as frightening to them as they are to me.

No one belongs anywhere anymore.

It’s only a matter of time before somebody decides they have more of a right to our things than we do.

Dad often rests his hand on the grip of his pistol, as if it brings him comfort. It just makes me more anxious.

I look at a map of Kailua. A canal runs the entire length of the neighborhood, splitting in two about three miles from here. One branch curves south into a large pond beside hundreds of homes. The other branch darts north and dumps into Kailua Bay. If we can find someone with a boat along the canal or the pond, we can avoid boating past the Marine Corps Base before looping right toward Moloka`i.

And if none of that pans out, we look for an outrigger canoe.

We turn right onto the nearest canal access path, leaving the houses and their invisible spying eyes behind. We’re in a strip of unkempt grass that separates the houses from the canal. The banks of the waterway are lined with tall trees and bushes that offer more cover. Dad and I take turns darting into the bushes to steal a glimpse of the canal. Not even a kayak.

Our prospects for escaping O`ahu are probably worse than ever. We’re twenty-three days out from the president’s severed speech, we’re on foot, and the marinas along this coast have suffered the wrath of a tsunami. Who cares if we have iodide to barter? Everyone who wanted to leave O`ahu and had a way to do it is long gone.

There was a widower in Hilo who lost his wedding ring in the Wailuku River. He returned to the pool where it had slipped off his finger every afternoon for ten years, diving, swimming, sifting, endlessly turning over stones. He breathed his last one fall afternoon, suffering from pneumonia, and was buried next to his wife without the ring. I couldn’t understand his compulsion then. Now I do. There are some things you never give up on, no matter the odds.

“Dad!” I call. It’s my turn to peek through the underbrush while Dad babysits the suitcases. A rickety pier juts out from a cobbled bar along the near bank of the canal. Moored to it is a fifteen-foot, center-console fishing boat with a sunshade and an outboard motor. The sort of boat tourists charter when they want to go deep-sea fishing for a couple of hours—it looks quite capable of a run between the islands. And I can see three large, red tanks of gasoline stored under the canopy beside the wheel. It’s idling, motor in the water.

Dad appears and gasps. “This is our boat.”

After shuffling onto the decrepit dock, we stand dumbfounded, as if we’ve just discovered a living, breathing dodo bird.

Dad jolts into motion, tossing his suitcase into the boat. “Give me your bags.”

“Dad,” I whisper. “We’re just going to take it?”

“Do you want to go home, Lei? This is it. Now or never. Quick.”

I hand him my suitcase. I can’t believe our luck; I can’t believe we’re five minutes away from being in the open ocean, when I was just despairing.

But I pause.

This is someone else’s boat. Someone nearby. They have their own plans for it. They’ve made preparations. What if they’re trying to escape from O`ahu , too, and they’ve spent days gathering the gasoline?

“Lei, now!”

“Maybe we can all go together.”

Dad stiffens and leaps back onto the deck, squeezes me tightly against his left shoulder and faces the trees. I freeze. A thirty-ish haole man watches us from the shadows of the trees on the far side of the dock. He steps forward hesitantly, eyes on the gun on Dad’s hip.

I flashback to the boat thief’s head exploding against the white sail.

“What’re you doin’?” He’s muscular and tall. He runs a hand over the top of his sunburnt head. His T-shirt says