THE BLIND CHUKA SOBA MASTER

Although by now I am a pretty well rounded and well known food writer, there was once a time when I drifted aimlessly, like a single scallion aswirl in a steaming soup broth. And if you asked me how I had come to find my profession, you would find I stumbled upon it just as aimlessly; that it had taken more than one lesson for me to take it seriously.

You see, for a long time, when it came to food, my taste and tolerance for heat had always been near nil. There were certain cuisines that I just couldn't... stand up to. And, I'd gotten used to this. I had accepted the fact that I would forever sweat uncontrollably, as if melting, upon entering any Indian restaurant. I would never be able spoon wasabi into soy sauce. I would never be able to dip a tortilla chip into salsa. Nor would I ever eat any type of curry, no matter how mild the mixture was claimed to be. Never. I had accepted that. I'd come to terms with it. Some people were allergic to peanuts. Others, like myself, were allergic to flavor.

It was a strange year, when this acuity of mine kicked into overdrive, thrusting all food fare into the realm of sheer allergen while at the same time increasing my craving for them. I don't know how it happened, but suddenly I was forced to insulate a hypersensitive sense of taste from the newly amplified heat of ordinary herbs and spices. I had become ten times for reactive to food than any supertaster.

I was dealing with a tongue as reactive to spice as a snail to salt. Even the slightest pinch or dash of black pepper would boil the sweat out from under my skin as if every pore was a roiling hot pot. With any given meal, my preferred ratio of protein to spice would be 6 ounces to a few grains. I had to forget my normal eating habits. Any dish that had been on my regular rotation suddenly betrayed me with a blast of nuclear heat. It was as if I were cramming handfuls of habernero peppers and ghost chilis into my mouth. Simple, throwaway meals that I normally scarfed down and forgot about a few minutes later – like an ordinary can of beef and barley soup – would last me weeks. It took an additional gallon of water to dilute it's flavor to meet acceptable flavor levels, leaving me with a large red, soup pot of leftovers.

For a while, I no longer enjoyed food. Eating on the go required too much portioning, and much of what I purchased at Foodland and Times and the Kokua market began piling up in my refrigerator and going to seed. I had never thought of a cup of rice as pungent and acidic, but when a simple bowl of brown rice began yielding a few unexpectedly piquant notes of its own, I admit I began warming up to the novelty of my condition. After all, it was an economical and healthy way to live. I drastically cut back on my sodium intake and I even lost 20 pounds after the first month. I could stretch items out over a span of weeks. Half a teaspoon of apple juice concentrate in a liter of water was enough for me to taste an entire orchard. I became aware of certain ghostly echoes in everything I prepared as if I were a culinary psychic who could never tune down those voices. I became haunted. I ate with my eyes closed, and counted every speck of pepper and every grain of salt. I was a spirit medium channeling a single grain of salt floating in blackness. I'd let the steam waft up through my palms, and it was as if I could see the world it came from.

* * *

The otolaryngologists could make nothing of it. They told me that everything was in order. All test results were exemplary of a healthy 30 year old male. Aside from being a complete food wimp, I was in perfect physical condition. Although there were individuals in the world that were called supertasters – those with anatomical variations such as a higher number of fungiform papillae on their tongues – acute episodes were not known. My condition, therefore, may have been more of a psychological tenure, as if a certain sustained tension had manifested itself in my mouth. "It could be stress. It could be your diet. It could all just be relative, and it's a matter of perception." said Doctor Shin. He had just examined my tongue with a pair of pincers. He continued, massaging the bridge of his nose. "Has there been any psychological trauma? Or there may be something that you aren't even aware of, mentally. I could recommend a few specialists for you, if you'd like. Or you could just wait this out."

I decided to wait it out, to see where this anomaly would take me. Every kid feels they are special, as they are told, but at some point they realize a certain skill or talent that sets them apart from the others. Some people feel they are attuned to something larger, that there was something in store for them. For a lot of folks, as they grow older, this feeling disappears. For me, it had all but gone away. This new development, strange and inconvenient as it was, was a welcome one.

* * *

There are new flavors that I enjoy. I can taste everything. I can even taste the difference between different brands of bottled water simply for the industrial echoes of their entire packaging process. Dasani tastes a bit more metallic than Evian. Smart water tastes the closest to rain, if it weren’t for it’s own particular tannins, no matter how gentle, that it owes to the brand of plastic its encased in. In some obscure brands I can taste the sand, gravel and crushed granite that filtered it in stages, and in others I can savor the all natural methods of filtration through the slight smokiness of charcoal and wood, and yet in others, those that utilize more modern methods such as reverse osmosis, I can taste the mechanics behind it.

Some call it superhuman, others see it as a sign of frailty and weakness. Some find it annoying while others claim it endearing.

One night, over dinner at a quiet, tucked away Thai Restaurant, my girlfriend and I watched a man take on the challenge of eating a nuclear concoction of curry. He had been sweating, and he had the same sheen as the golden Buddha statue that greeted us at the door. The challenge was simple. Finish the 18 chili curry and your postmortem photograph is placed on an alter, burst capillaries an all, for all future patrons to admire. The man of course had a tongue made of wood - it may as well had been a clothes pin. Meanwhile, I myself had a share of the mildest of yellow curry, just a teaspoon of it, to mix into a bowl of my basmatti rice - the equivalent of stirring a dash of curry powder into it. Its flavor sent fire trucks coursing through my veins, sirens blaring. Sweat pooled in the wells below my eye sockets. I asked for water and drunk it down while the waiter was still there, tasting the bitter citrus-scented dish soap the pitcher had been washed in.

My girl, Nat, embarrased more for me than for herself asked me “Why did you choose this place?”

I dabbed at the little rivulets of sweat off of my eyelids and told her that I was craving it. A moth to flame.

“That was too much? That teaspoon?" she asked. Although we had been living with this disorder, or gift, for some time, she always found it new, and always asked me what if questions.

“You could have been happy with a slice of bread and pat of lightly salted butter. What happens if you eat chocolate. Or something without any spice whatsoever? Like candy or a fruit? Something super sweet.”

“I taste it threefold. It’s super concentrated."

"Do you enjoy anything like any other normal person would? Soda crackers?"

"It's all about portioning. Recently, though, if it’s really good to begin with I sob uncontrollably. This just happened last week. This Thai chef brought some perfectly proportioned curry for me, and it was so good I began crying."

She arched her eyebrow. "Are you sure it was the food?"

"Yes. It was that good." I toyed with the votive on our table.

"It's food. How can it make you cry?" She asked again, brows knit together in concern. She leaned forward and patted my chin with a napkin.

"It's a different kind of emotion. The emotional uplift that makes you cry. It’s brought about by what you would perceive as incredible kindness. It’s called elevation.”

“Elevation?”

I nodded. “I see it as a form of extreme empathy. From one human being to another, something prepared and shared with only the pleasure of the recipient in mind. It’s as if someone understands the meaning of life altogether and they can only articulate it in a specific way.”

"And so you cried? Were you feeling sorry for yourself? About your condition?"

"No. It was just. That. Good." I smiled.

She shrugged. "Why the elevation? Why note it as kindness? They're making money off of it."

"Even if they are making money off it now, it wasn't always like that. Not in terms of humanity. These are echoes of tradition and culture. I suppose I'm beginning an increasingly emotional relationship with the food I eat. It's all very personal to me now. I suppose, now, more than before, I respect every ingredient. I root for each one. I know this sounds strange but, even my dreams have flavors. I even have anxiety dreams where certain foods taste wrong. I pick up my favorite fruit, a platter of strawberries, and they taste like bananas. Anyway... I guess it's the fact that someone could be this good. That they would think to do this in a certain way to, you know, elevate it. It's inspiring. "

“What if you kiss someone,” she asked. “Do you start sobbing? It’s an act of kindness. A gesture of love. Doesn’t that elevate you when you kiss me? Or do you just taste my meal?”

“I suppose that’s a little different.”

“I see. I guess I don’t move you as much do I?”

“It’s not that. I’ve seen you go through tissue packets at weepy romance movies. But I don't expect you to swoon over every gesture I make. It’s the same thing. It’s the conversion of elements at a precise moment in time set against each other in a precise way. And it gets at you.”

I fell silent. Nat dipped her fork into her curry.

“You should take advantage of this new found talent. Don't waste it.” she said. “Maybe we can do a video blog series. We’ll see if there is any chef in oahu that can prepare a dish that’s pitch perfect on your own terms. I’m sure it’ll all taste like oatmeal to everyone else, but that will be the challenge. If he can do it, he is a Master of Flavor.”

“What’s entertaining about that?”

She lifted her head and examined the mustard yellow wall. “Well, the chef could speak for a little while, show the viewer how little that he’s using. Then he’ll bring it out to you, and you taste it. If it elicits the response I just witnessed, you know, the tell tale signs of watery eyes and sweaty forehead, then he loses the challenge. You get a laugh. Then, having set the tone and premise of a low tolerance for heat, the chef brings out his spiciest concoction and you gorge on it.”

“Pretty self flagellating.”

"And funny, too.”

* * *

Of course we really went ahead with it! It seemed playful and funny. We posted a few poorly lit shots of me leaning my elbows onto a checkered table cloth, shoving forks of spicy garlic shrimp or mongolian spicy beef and coming up with a red alert. And of course sometimes I gagged and poured cold water down my throat and over my head for good effect. Nat could be heard laughing off camera and then she would set the camera down on the table and the frame would stop shaking. She’d come over and help me catch my breath. The part that failed with any viewers was the fact that they couldn’t really taste how mild the food really was. I had even dipped the slices of beef into a glass of water to cool it. It just seemed fake. It just ended up being another poorly conceived and poorly executed video on youtube.

Eventually we stopped doing those videos. They got more negative comments than any positive ones. "Stupid" and "Fake" being two of them. But we enjoyed watching them ourselves. We decided to do one more, and it was at a small yatai, or noodle house. We had heard about a remarkable chef there. He was a blind ramen chef. We had heard about his modest establishment in Liliha, and were curious about this blind cook. He was considered a master in Ebisu, his old neighborhood in Tokyo, where he owned a few yatais. He was the blind swordsman of noodles, only rarely did he make a minor error. Unfortunately, that night would be one of those nights. During the preparation of our meal, he used spicy miso and sesame oil instead of watered down pork broth for my noodles and I ended up having a small seizure on the floor. Someone called the chef as I convulsed between the legs of the table, and he stumbled out of his kitchen like a mummy stumbling out of an exhumed coffin. He held his hands out a and walked slowly, eyes blind as water chestnuts. A waitress led him to us. He bowed his head. To Nat, he was very apologetic about the entire ordeal and asked us to come back to dinner, on the house.

"Please," he said. "Forgive me. I am usually so careful with allergic foods."

Nat explained the situation to him; my hypersensitivity to certain flavors. He nodded as she spoke and then said “Not hyper sensitivity." He pointed to his ear. “Hyper sensitive is like how I hear. I hear better than most other. But hyper aware, that is how I taste and cook. He has honed a palette. It is a skill on the cusp. But it is there.”

Nat answered, “It’s a very weak palette.”

The chef nodded, “I understand. It doesn’t take a much. Please come back. I show you what I can do.”

I got up and waved it off to the crowd gathering outside of the establishment's door, which in retrospect was ridiculous thing to do.

* * *

When we returned a week later, the waitress remembered us to the chef. He kindly greeted us and he told me that he had been preparing a pitch perfect broth for weeks, just in case I came back. The broth was perfectly balanced with just enough spice for me to appreciate it’s flavor, yet the only thing I could see in it was the rippling square of the ceiling light reflected on its surface. To enhace the appearance of it, it was served to me in an austere white bowl without the usual japanese-inspired ornamentation. There was a hint of salty pork broth, subtle earthiness of bamboo shoots, the sweetness of shiitake mushrooms, as well as roasted sesame oil, wakame, konyaku, all a swirl in a crystal clear broth. To Nat it simply tasted like water. To me, it tasted like a bowl that had been transported from household in Kumamoto, Japan. I closed my eyes and I could taste exactly two grains of pepper, and a single speck of salt. How did he dissolve it so evenly in the noodles? It was like spreading a pat of butter perfectly over a basketball court. I started sobbing. Despite myself, I started weeping like a child.

We returned there three times a week. And each time, there was a new broth for me to try. Each invention was crystal clear, and he assured me that there were no additives. “No collagen in this whatsoever?” I asked once. The broth sat like a clear lens in my bowl. When I tasted it, it was thick and rich. To Nat, it tasted like water. “None,” the chef laughed. “Do you like?”

I did.

“It’s amazing,” Nat said softly. She delicately dipped my wooden spoon into the broth and sipped lightly. “I can’t taste a thing. But you say it's rich and smoky?”

"It is," I said.

“Do you like a yours?” the chef asked.

Nat brought her face down to her own bowl and took in the aroma of her Tonkatsu broth. “It’s perfect,” she said, dreamily.

* * *

Nat and I had only been together for 10 months But I knew that over the course of those meals, she had become more interested in the soups than I had been. She began asking more technical questions about the preparation of each. The last time we were there together, the ramen chef sat with us and began a soliloquy on the flavors of ramen broth and how they are all a part of one big symphony. He expounded on the tradition of it that was carried through his family, how it began in China 4000 years ago, how it made its way to Japan and how it had become a mainstay in Japan throughout the food shortages during the war. It was a single long noodle spanning through each generation of his family.

He told us about going blind as a cook, how it started in his thirties as dark spot in the center of his vision, as if someone were holding a mirror in front of him that reflected nothing but darkness. Still, he worked in his kitchen, occasionally knocking things over. When the doctors told him there was nothing they could do, he cooked faster, racing against the curtains. When his peripheral vision started to wane, he walked in to his kitchen early one morning before any work had begun and called out to his staff. "Stop! Let me take on last look at this and from this day on, nothing is to be put out of place. Everything now is where it belongs and is never to be misplaced. Understood?"

"Yes chef!" they all said. And for years, he cooked with the aid to two helpers guiding him around the kitchen. Herbs and spices, pot handles and cutlery, refrigerators and freezers were all labeled with braille. There were bad burns and deep cuts, but he continued cooking. He worked slowly and with aides on both sides. No matter how impractical and even hazardous this seemed, it was his was his kitchen, and he would never leave it.

If he thought navigating his workplace was difficult, he would come to know the nightmare of not seeing what he was tasting. Vision, playing such a large role in the sense of taste, had taken with it an entire lexicon for flavors. He had difficulty discerning the difference between chicken and pork. He couldn't tell the difference between kale and cabbage. He had to retrain himself to identify flavors and textures that he had taken for granted. He worked tirelessly. Eventually, his handicap had become his strength. Flavors became more pure. Without the distraction of sight and a visual bias toward foods he was able to cut to the bone of the matter, so to speak, and master flavors no other chef would have ever considered. Soon, he took to strictly composing dishes. He traveled and tasted the flavors of different cultures. And what he learned, he applied to his own creations. Every dish was leaner. More concentrated. They were like symphonies – no note out of place.

The chef waxed poetic about it until Nat’s eyes gleamed like portals to some distant noodle house. I knew the path we were on would offer up a fork in the road soon. She grew quieter and quieter at each meal. And she only brightened up when he appeared. Eventually, she began eating at the ramen shop alone.

One night - and this is the evening I always return to - I got home from work and found Nat in the tub. She was up to her neck in white bubbles. It had been a week since we shared any quiet time together.

"Mind if I join you?" I asked.

"No, not at all," she scooted up and I undressed and climbed in behind her. I massaged her shoulders, and herded bubbles along her arms.

"Do you know that painting by Vincent Van Gogh?" she asked. Her voice, soft, echoed off the tiles.

"Starry night?" So did mine.

"No. Um. Sunflowers."

"Maybe."

"It's a bright, manic painting of sunflowers."

"Ok. No."

"It's the story behind them I'm interested in."

"Tell me."

She sat up a little, forming rounded foam balls in her hands. "They say Van Gogh cut off his ear because he couldn't paint his self portrait right. He was clinically depressed. Maybe bi-polar. He was passionate about his art and he went through manic highs and lows in trying to get at that certain something. And there was Paul Gaugin, another painter who was frustrated as an artist, who longed to leave his home in Paris because he felt it was too corrupt and decadent. Dominated by the wealthy. I guess he wanted to go somewhere pure, where some human truth could be discovered."

"So this is about these two artists who meet and start a commune?" I asked. I let my foot sit on the ledge of the tub. With my other foot I hit the hot water knob and more bubbles and steam wafted up around us..

"Basically yeah," she continued. "They had seen each other's paintings and respected and admired each other's works. They exchanged self portraits. Paintings of nature. And eventually agreed to form a studio."

"Homeboys for life. Brohemians."

She laughed and splashed a few droplets of water in my face. A droplet landed on my lower lip and I could taste enchanted orchid bubbles, dead seas salts, her perfume, Happy, and all of her chemistry swirling together.

"Well," she went on, "Van Gogh proved to be a needy, clingy type of guy. They argued continuously about how they should paint. One argued to paint from nature while the other said to paint from the imagination and sometimes they would compromise. Gaugin, however, was a bit more laid back. A bit more level headed. Yeah, he had his convictions but they never became obsessions."

"But with Van Gogh..." I chimed in.

"It meant everything. And because they were friends, Van Gogh basically would not stop arguing his point. Because they were friends, he needed Gaugin to agree, to be like minded. And this ate him up because Gaugun had his own opinions and wouldn't follow suit. He went off on his own explorations and had his own ideas and this devastated Van Gogh."

"So he chopped off his own ear."

"I suppose at around that time, yeah. This was too much. Gaugin left the studio, and although he remained a distant friend, he never went back to work with Van Gogh again."

"Who would?"

"Van Gogh was admitted into an asylum. He was considered mentally unwell. And until his endgame, he painted. He painted his most famous works while in an insane asylum."

"And then?"

"What remains among his works is the sunflowers. A gift to Gaugin. A symbol of a friendship they could never return to. In a language that is undecipherable by anyone except the two artists involved. I can imagine it. To any other art critic, it's a work of a great artist. To Gaugin, within those strokes, the color choices, the lines and composition, is obsessiveness, stubborness, regret, love, a final appeal for understanding. An entirely different message."

She fell silent. The water beneath the cloud of bubbles lolled back and forth. She lifted her leg out of the water and a series of rivers, tides and waterfalls cascaded along her leg. Through the bubbles it was like a peak protuding through grey storm clouds.

"What are you trying to tell me?" I asked.

"I don't know. It's just been on my mind. Let's say you have a father who is deaf, and you grow up to become a famous opera singer? How do you reach him?"

"Wait. Now why an opera singer?"

"Painting, singing – what's the difference? My question is what language do you use when your primary one isn't enough? Van Gogh wasn't good with people, but he could pour his heart out in his paintings."

"I don't get it," I said. "So.... There's creation and perception, right? Which side would I stand on in this analogy?" I asked.

"Neither! God. None of them are about you. It's just... I'm trying to get at something here. I just don't know, you know?" She sat up.

"What don't you know?" I asked.

"I don't know what I don't know." And with that, she climbed out of the tub.

* * *

I knew what was coming. I deserved it. I was dense and insensitive, and I didn't really pay too much attention to what she was going through. Inevitably, she ended up exiting stage east with him. She couldn’t help it, she told me later. “I guess all the elements converged for me when we met him. I’m going to travel to Tokyo with him. I've been learning under him for some time. I supposed at around that time I started eating here alone. I know you noticed but never said anything. It started off casually enough, but then something clicked. He’ll teach me a thing or two, and he says I have a natural knack for this. I guess I understand the kind of elevation you feel sometimes now when it comes to food. Only, I’d rather be the one on the other side of the restaurant. I want to be in the kitchen, making food people could weep over. I've always wanted to master a language. An art. And I want it to speak for me so that I wouldn't have to say a word. I just never knew what that was. You understand? I can't let this go.”

Before they left a year later, I visited them one last time at the noodle shop. She was working in the kitchen, assisting him with each dish. She had prepared the same broth for me and told me that she was glad that I had come. It turned out that the process of preparing it involved a wood block filtration system. It took an entire week and involved "pulling" and "kneading" the broth. And she had prepared it without knowing if she would ever see me again.

She brought the bowl out to me herself and sat with me as I savored it. It was beautifully done and I swallowed my pride with each spoonful. With each tasting, it's flavor grew weaker and weaker, until it became as bland as water. My sense of taste had readjusted itself, finally. All the noise over my tastebuds quieted. The bowl of soup which started out vibrant ended up flavorless. After that, more flavors were lost to me. And no matter how much I yearned for my senses to reconfigure themselves, to revive their hyper acute state, they never did. Such is a quirk in the face of heartbreak. I was now tasking a bowl of water.

Nat's newfound talent had become considerable, and I had read about her here and there in culinary magazines. She had become a famous figure in her own right, an apprentice of the famous blind chuka soba master. I don't know what I don't know, she had told me. And by that she meant she didn't know where her talents lay. At what depths. At what potential.

The soup bowl sat cold and empty on the table. I looked up at Nat and smiled. She smiled back. "Well, that takes care of that," she said, surely meaning my own tasteology.

"Nicely done," I said. "I'm cured."

"Thank you." she let her hand rest on my shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. "Take care of yourself," she said, but when she did, she leaned down and whispered it into my ear. I closed my eyes and let her pick up the empty bowl. She walked away with it and never returned. I would never have another bowl like it again.

Nat had figured things out for herself, and in doing so, she had turned my world upside down. When I left, I shut myself in for a week. I kept my phone off. I rarely ate. For the first time ever, I felt not just adrift, but truly lost. What if I lacked the wherewithal to reinvent myself. What would my path be?

Then I recalled once there was a television channel called BookTV, and there was a small awards program – not unlike the oscars – one that any industry lavishes on it's first and foremost talents. Only in this case, an A-list actor was the master of ceremonies. There was an old woman, about eighty years old, who had dreamed all her life of being a writer. At eighty, she was published for the first time. At eighty, she had won a book award. I don't remember her name or the book she had written. Maybe it was a book on sunflowers. It doesn't matter. What it was about, or even the fact that it was a book is beside the point. When she stood at the podium, she smiled triumphantly and said — as only a woman after a life of hard dreaming and searching could ever say — "I am a prime example that it's never too late to bloom." And if it's true for her, it's true for everyone.

SASHIMI WEST

It was the first time in 5 years that I had spent New Years with my parents, and this was the year that the world said goodbye to Big-Eyed Tuna forever.

I had flown back to Kauai after a malnourished year in San Francisco. I was laid off from a small ad agency after they restructured their entire business. The company existed on the scraps of larger agencies, creating small press runs of direct mail pieces, posters, media kits and internal promotional materials. As work became scarce, the creative heads at Blow Up Creative decided to downsize, laying off 3 of their account executives, and myself, the sole project manager. I was on the job hunt for over a year, networking, attending mixers, chasing down leads. I was like a leopard losing rabbits down burrows. The leads vanished. There just weren't too many positions in the marketing industry, and with looming tax hikes, the industry was as lean as feral cat. My parents offered to buy me a ticket home, and with my rent holding fast at $1500 and my unemployment checks dwindling down to it's final weeks, I decided to sell everything I had and headed back to the home land.

To say that Kauai is beautiful is an understatement. The island exists under some protective dome in which time simply swirls around itself, and nothing changes. The plane skipped along the ether above the bay, jerking up and down as it windsurfed the trades, and then settled smoothly onto the pavement of the Lihue Airport. Beyond the terminal, I couldn't see a single building. There was nothing but a cool blue sky on all sides. I had heard the only new development under way was a second Safeway on the south side a few miles west. But that was news from my parents who hardly ventured out. Who knew what quiet mutations were under way?

My mother waited for me outside of the baggage claim, where a total of three cars awaited their arrivals. She left her Sentra running along the curb, and came out to greet me, a broad smile and freshly permed hair like the ribbons on Christmas gift. "You lost weight. Skinny like one stick fish."

"Thanks, ma," I said.

"Welcome home," She hugged me and we put my bags in the back seat and took off.

On the car ride home, we spoke very little. We had never been a family of words. We simply took comfort in each other's presence. I rolled down the window and took in the cool sweet blast of the green cane, sloping fields and mountains on both sides of the two lane highway. When we reached our home, I was immediately hit by the grandeur of a lush green mountain only 3 streets over from our street. It had always been there, but I was noticing the majesty of it just now. Clouds rolled like caravans over the hill in a way that seemed stage-managed just for me. I got out of my mother's car and peered down the street. It was quiet. You could hear the wind shiver. A car's whisper traveled down the freeway, snaked through the lawn and echoed off our neighbor's garage door. The leaves in the avocado tree rattled. A rooster crowed off in the distance.

Welcome home, it said.

I had arrived home at a time of crisis. A month ago, my father and gotten into a fist fight over the last Christmas tree in Koloa, and was getting sued. Last week, he got into another fight with the same man at a bar. In the living room, a plastic tree stood like a neglected child in the corner. There were round slices of bananas on a sheet of wax paper drying out on the kitchen table. My mother poured me a cup of tea and explained the situation on this island. There was a food shortage. Prices were going up. Most alarming for a small island was the lack of fish.

"No sashimi," she said. "No fish, no nothing."

I understood. Sashimi, slivers of raw, buttery big-eyed tuna was an integral part of ringing in the New Year. For other cultures, it was pork, or grapes, or beans, or noodles for long life, or leafy greens for good luck and prosperity. For us, it was fish. The portents had loomed for ages. Every year, there was a story about an impending sashimi shortage. And now, here it was.

"How about salmon?" I asked.

My mother cinched her eyes shut and pursed her lips. "Pshh. Forty bucks a pound for farmed salmon?"

"Farmed tilapia?"

"Don't joke around," she said.

I was well aware of the gross overfishing of the ocean, the lenient seasonal bans, the underground market and so forth. The grand, elliptical cycle of life held feebly in place by the Western and Pacific Fisheries was damaged beyond repair. Underwater, it was the apocalypse we had all deemed as a fable. A storm on the other side of the hemisphere we never thought would hit was upon us. The rising acidity of the water, the rising temperatures, the sudden boom in certain species and the sudden decline of others had ecosystems in flux. In Japan, the Nomura jellyfish invasion had reached peak levels, killing off record numbers of fish. The crown starfish was multiplying along all coral reefs. Smaller reef dwelling fish were disappearing, leading to diminishing numbers along the food chain. Big-Eyed Tuna was no legal fare but people fished anyway. With a dwindling food supply, low reproductive numbers, thousands of fishing vessels traversing the seas, stringing purse nets and drag lines with hundreds of baited hooks, snagging premature tuna as well as adults and females, hooking turtles and other by-catches only to lose them in the jaws of undiscerning sharks — the odds for their survival had been slim. The rising costs of oil had meant that each fishing boat would need to double its catch in order to maximize profits. Losing half of their take to sharks forced them quadruple their catch. So here it was now. The seas were depleted. There were no fish. A global food crisis was at hand.

This was a part of the reason why I had come home. I wanted to be with my family to look after them. My father had already bought a gun for protection, under my mother's urging. We had a stockpile of canned goods buried under the floor boards. We had a large garden in our back yard that I was supposed to tend to as well as guard with my life. Of course, this was a paranoid approach to a worst case scenario. My folks listened to too many pundits on the airwaves, warning them about the end of days, telling them to bolster themselves for the great fall. My goal was to keep them calm, to convince them that the Garden Island was a fertile island with a relatively small population. Imported goods would no doubt be marked up, but we could get everything we needed from within. If there were some societal breakdown, we'd simply raise our own chickens and cattle and live communally. At least, that was I thought.

I dropped my suitcases off into my old bedroom. I wish it could be said that it was just as I had left it, but it had been excavated. It was now where my father paid the bills and walked on his treadmill. My place for the next few weeks would be the sofa. But this was home, and it felt good.

My dad walked out of the bathroom and when he saw me, he walked over and gave me a punch on the shoulder. His left eye was bruised, and he had a weal under his lower lip in perfect cadence with his mustache. It was as if someone had torn off his flavor saver. He saw that I was about to ask him about it and waved it off. He reached into his pocket and pulled out $500. "For shibi," he said. "Port Allen. Go."

* * *

There were rumors of a 300 pound Yellowfin being chopped up and sold for a hundred dollars a pound at Port Allen in Hanapepe. I took the keys from my mother and headed out the door. "Get some more mochi rice from Big Save too," she said. She had already purchased 6 pounds of the stuff, thinking ahead to the future, when such items would no longer be available. My parents had pounded ten pounds at a mochitsuki over the holiday at a friend's house. Most of it was frozen in the industrial freezer in the garage. A few mochi balls sat as an offering to buddha on the butsudon along with a tangerine with a stem and a single leaf still attached in my parent's bedroom. A third of it was stuffed with azuki beans, another third was coated with kinako, and the other was left plain for zoni, a broth made up of shitake mushrooms, daikon, araimo and mizuna. In the garage sat long rows of red bomb fireworks, like strings of ammo. They were going all out this year, and I could see it in their eyes that they needed the fish. It was this year, or never again.

I walked out to the driveway full of purpose when I saw Josie Aki in her mother's yard peeling an orange. She had been my neighbor all throughout high school. It was a surprise to see her there, sitting on the wicker chair next to the tangerine tree.

"Josie," I called out over the fence.

She looked up, smiled and flicked her head back as if she were tossing me a quarter off the bridge of her nose. "Holy shit, Ryan. What the fuck are you doing here? Visiting?"

"Yups," I said. "How 'bout you?"

She answered with a shrug, which was no answer. That was that. "Cruising," she said. She went back to peeling her orange with her teeth. She was never really interested in me or my happenings. Part of a different world really. Back then, I'd try to bring up the news and all she was interested in were sports statistics — and her own — at that.

"You guys need Ahi for the New Year?" I asked.

She looked up, her eyes locked with mine. I had her interest now. "Why? You got? Fuck that!"

"Rumors from Hanapepe. 400 pound shibi chillin in a van being sold pound by pound black market style."

"How much?" she stood. She had long, pale legs, like a pair of fluorescent tubes with knees. I was shocked. She had gone slender. As a kid, she had always been a tomboy. She played Pop Warner football (boys team) and lifted weights well into high school. As a kid, I would see her parents pull up, unloading a phalanx of little football players in shoulder pads and jerseys, Josie among them. She was always just one of the guys, but now she looked good. She could have been a part of vogue's September Issue. No traces of the rough and tumble. None at all.

"100 bucks a pound. You wanna come? I'm heading over there right now."

"Lemme get my fuckin' purse!" she said cheerfully.

* * *

We wheeled along the road in silence and a sudden downpour of rain sprayed us like a fire hose, hissing like radio static and pounding like a thousand miniature taiko drummers on the rooftop. The rain came at us at an angle, and the world was veiled behind a grey scrim as the pick up truck in front of us sprayed mist from around its mud flaps. My wipers were on blast, barely swiping fast enough as raindrops the size of hailstones pelted the windshield.

Josie sat in the back seat leaning up against the door, laid out sideways, bare feet flat against the glass. She sat and watched the storm as if she were sitting at home, regarding it through a windowpane.

She grew up next to me, but attended Koloa when I went to Kalaheo, then Waimea when I went to Kauai High. When she graduated, she got her degree in nursing and then landed a job at Wilcox Memorial and worked for a few years before being laid off. For that time, I imagine she may have been be the most foul-mouthed nurse in the state. I couldn't imaging a tender side to her. Mostly, I had known her for her cold and abrupt persona. But then I hadn't spoken to her since I left.

Still, that odd familiarity was what pushed me to ask to her along. Although we hardly ever spoke, I was curious as to what she had become over the years. She had moved out to Kapaa five years ago and lived alone. She was still single and was very close to her mother, who had divorced her father when she was still in elementary school. She rarely dated, and didn't feel the need to date. Her routine consisted of a few one night stands a month, scoop-netted at Dukes on Kalapaki, usually with off duty firemen and lifeguards.

She told me she had been arguing with her mother before I showed up. Her mother had always expected her to marry early, and was worried that she would end up alone. I asked her if marriage was something that she pondered from time to time.

"Nah," she said. "Marriage is for pussies."

We drove by the mortuary in Lawai. The parking lot was full and families were rushing up the grassy lawn in their floral blacks and black Spooner prints as the rain continued its assault.

"You down?" Josie said holding her hand up, a sad little joint framed in the rear view.

"I thought you were a health nut."

"As long as it's lean and green," she said and lit up.

Slowing down in Kalaheo, I took note of all of the homes of my childhood friends. I wondered if they were in there now, visiting their folks. I imagined them all still in there, playing video games, frozen in time, and felt the pang of nostalgia. We passed the neighborhood center where we played basketball over the summer. We passed the trusty liquor store, the doctor's office, the steak house. And then the rain cleared, right at the Kauai Coffee sign at the beginning of McBride as usual. Rainfall rarely made it past this point. There was almost a discernible line that the rain never crossed. Most of it was sucked up by Mount Waialeale, what Guinness had labeled the wettest spot in the world, something like 11,000 milliliters of rain annually, 360 days a year.We had passed the southern most point and were now entering the west side. The sun was out again. The rampant green gave way to patches of dying grass and red dirt.

When I turned into the Ele'ele Shopping Center, I noticed right away that the McDonalds was closed. When I turned onto Waialo Road I knew why. Traffic was backed up to the freeway, heading all the way to the pier. People had left their cars parked in the middle of the street and were walking in droves toward the harbor.

"Damn! You think they all found out? Can't be all for the fish!"

"Whaat?" she said. "You sure only a hundred bucks a pound?"

I could see that whatever auction had been taking place was slowly escalating into a riot. Police officers watched wearily, no doubt they had all gotten a prime cut. There were a group of protesters opposing the sale. They wanted justice. They pleaded to the KPD but the cops ushered them back. I parked the car where it stood and ran out. I was pushed on both sides as I neared the harbor. The crowd surrounding a small barge was impenetrable. People screamed and fought for position. I could hear a girl crying. Was someone getting trammeled? A man was crying out "Stop! Stop!" but the crowd surged, contracting and expanding, as if multiplying from within.

God damn it, I could smell it – the fresh smell of blood and guts, and roe and gills all smeared into the asphault, mingling with the sea breeze, the promise of a poke platter sailing toward us from the deep blue. Give me a scale. All I wanted was a scale. Or a gill. I felt alive again. I was close the ocean again for the first time in years and the prospect of having fresh fish began to fan the flames of nostalgia.

"Ryan! Let's do!" Josie called after me. She plunged into the crowd, fearless, and plucked out a group of teenagers one by one like stuffed dolls off a shelf. She burrowed into the chaos and began elbowing her way deeper. She still had it.

I tried to climb over the crowd and attempted to gain footing on an older gentleman's head. He threw me down and punched me clean across the chin. I scrambled to my feet, cocked my arm, elbowing a woman in the back of her head (by accident) and then socked the fellow in the nose (rightfully). He folded in front of me and a small empty pocket opened around him before the crowd engulfed him live and wriggling.

I could see Josie crowd surfing over a group of girls, kicking them in their faces as she used their shoulders to keep her above the fray.

"1000 for the collar! 1000 for the eyeball!" A yokel yelled in my ear. He stiff-armed me in the jaw. In turn, I bit his wrist and he yowled. He punched me across the chin with a small fist and thin wrist. I gouged his eyes and kneed him in the groin. His entire body lifted off the ground and he collapsed and curled up against an onslaught of more knees. "Move! Move!" the people behind him yelled. They poured over him and he was swallowed whole.

And above it all an iwa bird sailed in circles overhead – it's wings held out steadily like a pair of black boomerangs – beautiful and mysterious. I boxed an old man in the gut and pushed forward. I looked up, the iwa was moving closer. I put a full nelson on a shorter man in front and threw him aside. The iwa sailed to within a foot over us, the closest I had ever seen one. Its wingspan measured about four feet and I felt like I could just grab on and hang glide across the crowd to the front. I had never seen one land but there it was, so close I could reach up and snag it.

A fire hose cleaned the pavement of us. The crowd fell back and rolled along the cement. "Sold out!" someone barked through a megaphone. Two men were blasting the crowd with a full stream. The police pulled up and began pushing us back. I could finally see the man with the giant cooler. A rich man. An opportunistic man. I could see that the ice was bloody, and there were puddles of it around him. He had failed to capitalize on everything.

I got to my feet and began running for it. "A hundred bucks for the ice!" I screamed. I just needed a little bit of ice, just to taste it. To commit it to memory. I hadn't realized how desperate I was for it, but I was. I was blasted in the face by the fire hose and fell back. "Have a heart!" I choked.

* * *

Josie and I walked back to the car, soaked and bruised. "That samoan guy yanked my head back, next time I see him, it's lights out for his future offspring." Cars filed out slowly, a few turning left at the intersection toward Waimea, other's back east. I gathered those from the east didn't fare well. This was not their turf.

When we hit the crosswalk, the same guy that had punched me in the face waved us through from his jeep. "Ho!" he yelled. "Sorry 'bout the uppercut!" he smiled.

I waved him off. "No worries," I laughed. "Sorry about the nose!"

"You got some?" he asked.

"Nope," I said.

"Happy New Year anyway." He waved and drove by with his wife and two kids and turned into the McDonald's drive thru.

Kauai. Good peoples.

* * *

I called my dad on my cell and when he answered he was in one of those wild, ecstatic throes of road rage. "Son of a fuck!" he shouted. "What the hell!" Go! Go!" He was driving, I could hear the radio. "Hello? God damn it! Sorry. Hello?" he said finally.

"Yo, pops. No fish. Ran out," I said. We were in the car waiting for the crowd and traffic to dissipate.

"What?"

Josie was in the passenger seat next to me now. She was watching me, awaiting our next course of action.

"There was a huge crowd. I dunno how they found out," I said.

"Aaah shit," said my father through the drumming of wind. "News is all over the radio. KONG 93.5. Go listen," he said, then screamed at another driver. "Come on!"

"So what? Where you at?" I asked.

"Kapaa. Heard get Akule somewhere."

"Aight. Go get em." I said.

"Shoot. See you at home," he hung up.

I turned on the radio and Ron Wiley leapt out at me as if he wanted to wring my neck. "No. Fish. Statewide." he was reiterating. "Once again folks, there is no more fish." He had been fielding calls since the morning, fueling speculation and rumors of a last yellowfin here, a frozen jack there. But now, he seemed resigned. "Ladies and gentlemen, New Years will go on. We'll miss the mounds of Sashimi. The poke with limu. The stuffed snapper. But we need to move on and be with our loved ones. There are tons of other foods to ring in the New Year with. What's important is family and safety. Be safe on the roads. Treat your neighbors with respect. What happened out there in Lihue, with the traffic and rioting outside of Kalena's, and just minutes ago at Port Allen, that's not right." Josie and I sat in the car as more families staggered by, shellshocked by the water hose, crestfallen and empty-handed. Ron brought on guests who spoke about larger, wider reaching implications. They spoke of the world's food supply. The economy. The food industry. How do cultures change? How could any culture change their dietary guidelines? Their aged traditions passed down from generation to generations? "Be safe, kids," Ron said. "Again, no fish out there. No point in racing out from one point to another, creating a dangerous situation for all on the road." He sounded desperate. "Stay in and enjoy the new year."

My phone rang. "Hello?" I answered.

It was my mother. "Hanapepe town. Big-eye. One cooler. $200 a pound. Go!" She commanded.

"What is it?" Asked Josie.

I studied her eyes, the small epicanthic folds, the long lashes, the slight crease and tuck under her brows. They were all mine at the moment.

"Ahi," I whispered as my mother spoke on the line.

"Where?" she mouthed.

I listened as my mother gave me the directions. "Hanapepe, along the cliff," I said and we were off.

* * *

We sped along the highway and swerved into Hanapepe Road without signaling, straight up. A freshly painted sign that read "Welcome to Hanapepe. Kauai's Biggest Little Town" stood quaintly at the beginning of the road.

Driving in I was taken through a portal of nostalgia. The buildings looked like saloons from the old west - half of which were deteriorating. A small dilapatated house stood under a banyan tree, it's wooden walls cracked and peeling, ready to topple. A sign on the door said, "taro chip factory" and I strained to see inside as I drove by. The town had been a bustling watering hole after WWII. There were bars and skating rinks, theaters and cafes. Most of it was designed by Asians like myself. This was when the river it was built around was still abundant with fish and crab.

By now, the town had been resurrected and rejuvenated as a cultural center, taken over by art galleries - most of them dealing in watercolor paintings of waterfalls, rainbows and mountains and hibiscus trees. All of them celebrating natural beauty.

"Never got art," said Josie.

"Yeah," I replied absently. "Too many other things to worry about."

"Creative types are so weird."

This had opened up a sore spot, having lost my job to those creative types. I tried to sound diplomatic and said "They're all children," but it came out sounding bitter regardless.

Josie looked at me and snorted.

They had painted the old theatre front with a new theatre front, and made it look like a store front selling li hing mui and pickled mangos. A painted poster of Flight of the Intruder hung next to the illusory steps that lead into the lobby. This reminded me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, in which Elmer Fudd would run flat into a painting of a tunnel.

There were auto shops and closed down liquor stores, one of which my uncle had owned. It seemed so much smaller than it was then. There were abandoned homes sliding down the slopes of hills right next to newer, freshly painted homes, as if the family had shed the old house like a hermit crab leaving it's shell, and moved into another right next door.

We turned onto Awawa Road, along the Hanapepe river, heading inland toward the mountains. To the left of us was a steep cliff, the wall had the texture of a block of chocolate broken in half. The river snaked right and wrapped around a wide uncultivated farmland. Several cows wandered the pastures, fenced in by barbed wire. Roosters and pheasants ran across the single lane road, disappearing into the thicket.

"You know where we going?" Josie asked.

"Just to the end."

"We not getting mugged in here, eh?"

To the left, we drove by a cave that looked as if it were created by some explosion on the side of the cliff. Red boulders had tumbled out and were now scattered all over. In the cave sat nine or ten goats at different levels up along the cliffside like target practice silhouettes. They came trotting down toward the wire mesh fence as we drove along.

"Wonder who's goats those were," I asked.

"The fish better not turn out to be raw goat meat," said Josie.

The road ended and we continued along a dirt trail. There were a few scattered houses on pastures, green as beer bottles with rattan roofs. Weeds were growing wild in every yard. A patch of banana trees closed off by wire mesh and black tar paper sat next to a warehouse with shattered windows. Property lines were unshaped and neglected. More goats wandered along the road. Tractors and pick up trucks and gutted cars on cinderblocks punctuated the greenery.

We were kicking up a lot of red dust, driving slowly, listening to the dirt and rocks crumble under the tires, and Ron Wiley telling us over and over again "No fish" and "be safe," lamenting the end of days. At the end of the road was a small house, uneven as a wet cardboard box. The rooftop was missing shingles, and a billowing translucent tarp was nailed into place over a good portion of them. A mud splattered truck with a boat rack attached to it sat in the grass. I parked the car and let the cloud of red dust over take us. All was silent but the trees and the hissing grass.

"Murabayashi!" I called out. My voice hung in place like stuffed mackerel on a wall. I walked up to the screen door and knocked on the trim. The pane of glass on the sliding window rattled. "Hello?" Murabayashi."

Josie walked out to back of the house. I went to the garage and snooped around. There was a quiver of old fishing poles, a stack of tackle boxes and lure. There were discarded reels and lead weights, nets and screens made out of window sills for drying out fish.

My mother said she had gotten a message on her answering machine. It had been there for an hour. The man, an old friend of my parents who had worked with my father at the Ace Hardware in Lihue for ten years had left a message saying that he had gone out for one last fishing trip – come what may – and lucked out.

"Murabayashi!" I called out again.

"Oh my god! Fuck! Ryan!" Josie called out from the backyard, if you could call it a backyard. The entire lot was surrounded by back yards gone wild. I ran out to the back, rounded the corner and nearly sprained my ankle in a hole covered by grass.

The backyard was overgrown. The grass had grown as high as my knees. Grasshoppers sprang out one by one as I split a trail and made my way to her. There was an old make-shift wooden sink — its faucet attached to a garden hose and the counter made of old splintered plywood — struggling to stay erect under the crushing weight of a 200 pound glistening big-eye tuna. Flies swarmed around its shimmering, silver body. It smelled fresh. It's eyes had yet to cloud over. How long had it been sitting there?

"Murabayashi!" I called out again, my voice trembling, my eyes near tears.

Josie was jumping up and down like someone who had just beat the buzzer and won a basketball game — the strength in her legs on full display.

I ran out front and knocked on the front door again. "Hey! You home?" I pushed the screen door open.

The floor was littered with old newspapers, pots and pans. An old jar of peanut butter had rolled across the floor to the doorway. In the next room, peaking out from around the doorway, on the tile floor was what I perceived to be a pair of bare feet. I stepped inside and quietly walked toward the kitchen. "Murabayashi?" I said.

The man, whom I had never met before but had heard about many times, was lying face down. I bent over to feel his feet. He was cold. As cold a dead fish.

* * *

Now what would you do in this situation? There would never be any fish in the world again. Yet here, incongruously, was a fresh ahi sitting on a wooden platform in the middle of a lush green valley among the cool, dreamlike swaying of the trees and wild birds needling their songs into the wind. And inside, there happened to be a dead body with no hint of foul play.

Josie and I sat on an ice chest next to the house, and reflected on the afternoon. She had guessed that Murabayashi had died during the morning. He had fallen and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table. There was a broken stool in the corner, and a mess of dishes and glasses shattered on the floor.

We had covered the fish with some fine netting to keep the flies off. Luckily the cool weather had been gentle as the sun's winter arc had spared the fish direct exposure. It had remained shaded most of the morning.

Josie mumbled something about the world we lived in, and I agreed with whatever it was she said — she was probably right. She let her forehead rest on my shoulder for a second then straightened. "What should we do?" she asked.

I rested my elbows on my knees and put my head down, closing my eyes and contemplated the drive home, the trunk of the car 200 pounds heavier, our consciences sunken to the lowest depths of the deep and vacant blue, alone in the vast emptiness with the implications of what we would do for just a few more platters of bright raw slivers of grade-A tuna resting on a bed shredded white daikon; of how low we could sink for just another fillet, or roe sack, or collar, or eyeball. I flashed forward to family and friends enjoying one last celebration, pretending that things would someday return to normal, committing every moment to memory. I could taste it.

"Pack it up," I said.

Plutocracy

I've never been one for social networking. In fact, I've never owned an Asian Avenue page, never logged onto friendster, avoided myspace, and dismissed Facebook. So while I was shocked to find out that all of my information was posted online on a website called The People's Market, what pissed me off more was the fact that I was for sale.

Along with my photo was a listing of all of my specs, — 5 foot 8", 160 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, single, Masters in English, one quarter Chinese, three quarters Portuguese, optimum health, and a "Hawaii Born" written in a starburst next to my name, Travis Guerra. I was going for $10,000. Not bad — I thought — for a high school English teacher. But I'll be damned if I get moved to the bargain bin. I clicked around and realized there was no way to register or sign up. The clientelle must have been pretty damn exclusive.

So I went to the FBI and reported the site. Inside that elaborate, concrete wedding cake, after an hour of waiting, an agent greeted me and sat me down at his desk. "The People's Market. Damnedest hypothetical," he shook his head and told me that they had been on it for a year, but that it was nearly impossible to track their activity. "One guy, I hear, sold for $1,000,000, and he hadn't seen a dime of it. He'd been sold and bought with no knowledge, and just went on with his normal life. Then one day, he gets a letter in the mail. It's from the president at Sony, wishing him a Happy Birthday. Then he goes inside and there's a new Sony Bravia in his living room. 2 weeks later, they renovated his house." The agent paused and offered me coffee, Kona Macadamia. I politely declined. He popped a donut hole into his mouth. "This other guy I know," he continued, "sold for about $3,000,000. As soon as he was bought, he had a new SUV delivered to his house with a message informing him that Mukesh Ambani was his new owner."

"Who?" I asked.

The agent tried to hide the fact that he was a bit ignorant on the matter himself. "Petro, I think. Anyway, he would check in, personally, via skype. He'd buy them all gifts for Christmas and birthdays, then just disappear."

I was having a difficult time believing this. "So who makes the money?" I asked.

"We'll, that's what we're trying to figure out. The buyers are really just the victims here. They buy you, and then they want to take care of you. They spend millions, sending money for home upgrades, physical trainers, dietitians, paying for your kid's college tuitions, doctor's bills. Then they find out it's a scam. Poor guy, when we got hold of him and told him, he nearly broke out in tears. He had really gotten close to that family."

I was having trouble sympathizing. The entire endeavor sounded downright philanthropic. It was like some sort of wired-in Robin Hood.

The agent tapped his pen on his desk. I think he knew what I was thinking. "Here's the dark side," he said, leaning forward. "Most buyers, they invest in you like property. They pay for new cars, home upgrades, they send you on trips, they take pride in your health, they pay for your physical trainers, they send you back to school, help you get started on a new career, they pay for cosmetic surgery or whatever personal enhancements you can think of, and then they just flip you," he clapped his hands. "They sell you for twice as much as what they bought you for. And on it goes," he said.

"So what can we do? Once, we're stuck in the current of being bought and sold?"

"The best you can do is decline all of their gifts. Discourage it," he paused and assessed me. "Some find it hard to do. I mean, if you get a check for a million dollars, you'd have to be a special breed to even think about turning it away. So, how much are you going for?" he asked.

"$10,000," I answered.

"Oh." He shrugged. "We'll, it goes to the highest bidder. Don't feel bad, maybe it'll go up."

"Maybe," I said, and walked out. I got in my Nissan, hoping maybe I'll be getting a new one soon from some mysterious benefactor overseas. When I got home, I rushed to my computer and checked my profile. Turn's out I was sold for $11,320 to Kelsey Grammar. He had sent an email. "Hey buddy," it began. "Just got you season tickets for UH football! Also, in the mail, you'll find the Season 1 DVD of Frasier. Enjoy!"

I was never a fan of the show, but I guess it's never too late to start. At least he wasn't asking for feedback.

Maynard and the Mynah

The mynah bird started talking at around noon on a Saturday. It was perched like a crow on the koa dining room chair, watching Maynard wash the dishes. "Maynard," it said. It's voice was a squawk, but it sounded strangely human — as if someone were talking through a walky talky — it's voice frayed with static around the edges. "Maynard... Maynard, you slut."

Maynard set a wet silver rimmed plate into the dish rack and turned down the water. He peered out of his window. The lawn was a radioactive green, baking under the sun's zenith. A red toyota hatchback drove by. The ti leaves rustled next to the window and Maynard ran out of the house to see if there was anyone there.

"Maaynard. Come in my face," said the mynah bird.

His wife, Sandy was out on a trip. She had flown out to Chicago to promote a fashion event. As an event promoter, she traveled frequently, sometimes spending only a few weeks at home in Kailua then flying back out for months. She had brought in the mynah when it was still an infant. "Found it out back," she said. "Must have fallen out of it's nest, or something."

Maynard had always liked mynah birds. As a photographer, he took many portraits of different birds on Hawaii, but the mynah bird was his favorite. Their dark plumage and their bright beaks and yellow rimmed eyes made them look like bandits. Regardless of their comical walk, they always seemed smarter and less flightier than the other birds. They were schemers. He would see them waddling around parking lots, stealing bits of food from the other doves and finches. He would often see them staring at him with indifference through intelligent, conspiring eyes. Smart, yes. But could they talk?

"Put in in my mouth," said the mynah. It's name was Keo, and lately, it had been spending more time outside of it's cage than within. It had figured out how to lift the cage door and let itself out. At first, this was a nuisance to Maynard and Sandy, but eventually, they had warmed up to the idea of a roaming mynah, exploring the home like a kitten. After all, aside from the occasional droppings, it did very little damage to its surroundings. It was a novelty after all, to have such an obedient little bird.

"Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Ohhhh!" screamed the mynah. "Harder Maynard!"

This was not good. How many times had the mynah let himself out of the cage, waddled out to the bedroom, and stood in the doorway? The first time he let Allison come over, they were having sex in the bedroom when Allison let her head hang upside down over the edge of the bed and exclaimed "There's a bird in the doorway. He's just watching us."

"Keo! Scat!" yelled Maynard, and the mynah skulked off.

"Keo! Scat!" said the mynah, now. "Oh yeah. Fuck me."

Allison was always a performer. That's what he liked about her. But now he had a problem.

Maynard sat on the chair next to the mynah, and it hopped down to the seat, jumped onto his lap, and started pecking at his zipper. "Mynahs don't talk, do they? Do you?" he asked, half expecting an answer.

"Oh, oh, oh... uh, uh, uh..." said the mynah, looking up at him. "Maynard, oh Maynard. Oh, Allison. Allison, I love yoooo."

Shit. This was a problem.

* * *

There were two friends he could call. There was Josh, who he was closer to. But there was also Alan. Josh, the more sensible of the two, would talk to him about his feelings of guilt, and would attempt to counsel him on his attitude toward his relationship with Sandy. Alan, on the other hand, would help him figure out how to avoid being discovered.

He called Alan.

"Yo," answered Alan. "May-nawd, what's up. What you been up to." It wasn't a question so much as a greeting.

"Alan. I'm in the shit here." Maynard explained the entire situation and Alan was cracking up on the other end of the line. "If I don't figure something out, Sandy's gonna find out all about me and Allison."

"No way. This is too rich. Okay. Buy the beers. I know what to do." said Alan. "I'll come over in ten minutes."

Maynard hung up and sat in front of the television. The mynah bird was perched on the arm rest, watching him curiously. The screen was off, and he could see his own reflection silhouetted against the picture window as the curtains billowed in and out like lungs. The bird began to speak. "Yo. I'm at May-nawd's house now. Yeah, he's gone at work. He's got a lap top and a camera, about 7 grand worth of stuff."

"Woah, woah. Play that last part again," said Maynard to the mynah.

The mynah bird bobbed its head up and down.

"Once more. Play it back," said Maynard.

"I'm at May-nawd's. How much you give me for a tool set?" said the mynah.

It was unmistakably Alan's voice. He was the only person who pronounced Maynard, May-nawd. When the house got robbed, there was very little sign of a break in. Aside from the broken lock, the house hadn't been ransacked. It was as if the burglar had known where to look all along.

* * *

When Alan showed up, he was carrying a crowbar and a pair of black gloves. "You got any beer?" he asked as he walked up the gravel driveway.

Maynard blocked the doorway, and Alan stepped back. He knit his bulbous brow and frowned for a split second before resuming his usual hyenna-like grin. "No worries!" said Alan. "You wanted to push the button on the bird right?"

Maynard folded his arms. "You spoke when you were going through my house, right?"

"What do you mean?" asked Alan, almost convincingly puzzled.

"When you took my laptop and my camera. You were talking on the phone," said Maynard, stepping forward. "You think the mynah bird recorded only my exploits?"

Alan let his head drop. He removed his gloves, "Oh shit," he said. "You gonna call the cops? I can pay you back for all that stuff. It was a tough period for me, remember?"

Maynard pointed to Alan's new Acura. "Yeah, hard times. Get the hell outta here. Don't ever call me again."

"What about the bird? We gotta destroy the evidence. No one is clean here," he said.

"Get off my lawn," shouted Maynard. "Before I push the button on you."

Alan turned and walked off.

* * *

When Maynard went back in, he saw that the mynah bird was perched high up on the bookshelf next to the television. Somehow, it had come to know that he had the goods on all of them, and took his perch elevated high above the living room. Perhaps it had already suspected that his life was in danger.

Maynard laid down on the sofa and began looking through his schedule. There was a shoot for at Ko'olina on Wednesday. And on Thursday, there was a shoot for Foodland. Other than that, his schedule was wide open.

He was about to fall alseep when the mynah began speaking again.

"Maynard's not coming home until late," it began. This time, it was Sandy's voice along with another woman's whom he didn't recognize. "Just, bare with me. Here are the first two account numbers. 40 in this one, and 9 grand in this one. Correct? I got three socials for these cards."

Maynard sat up and listened as the mynah bird recited the entire conversation verbatim. There were bank accounts, credit card numbers, social security numbers, names and addresses. When the mynah had stopped speaking, Maynard had it all put together. It was some sort of identity theft ring, and Sandy was one of the top members of the circle.

No one was clean.

* * *

When Sandy returned home the next Sunday morning, she dropped her bags to the floor, and sat down in the dining room chair. "Whew,"she said. "Mayn, you home?"

Maynard walked out from the bedroom with a cup of coffee. He folded up the Star Advertiser and dropped it onto the table. "How was the trip," he asked.

"Busy busy," she said. "The event was a success. We made a lot, I mean, a lot of good contacts. I think there might be something for me in New York, but we'll see. How was your week? What did you do?"

"Oh. A couple of shoots here and there," said Maynard. He sat down and propped both elbows onto the table, slowly turning the coffee mug in his hand. "Did you know," he said. "That mynah birds could talk?"

"Yeah, sure." Said Sandy. "They repeat words and stuff, but you need to be really patient and train them. I don't think Keo would be able to learn anything at this point. He's too old. You need to train them before they hit six months or so. Speaking of Keo, did you remember to feed him the apple cores?"

Maynard leaned back in his chair and set the coffee mug down. "He can speak. And I mean, really speak."

"Yeah?" asked Sandy, mildy surprised. "Let's hear it!" She looked around the living room. "Where is he?"

"I'm talking long monologues and soliloquys."

Sandy grew silent and waited for Maynard to continue.

"Long, really long telephone conversations were recited. Hour long conversations. All in pitch perfect imitation. There was never really any question of who he was imitating."

"Really," said Sandy. Her eyes were gleaming like cold stones. She stared icily at Maynard. "So, what did he say?"

"Oh, a lot. A whole lot. For example, my conversations with you. Two hours of it was repeated to me verbatim. Smart bird."

"Uh huh," Sandy strained to read him. Her eyes narrowed. "Where is he?"

"Oh, he was just. Too. Much." said Maynard. They stared at each other over the table like a pair of poker players. "I let him go," he explained. "Couldn't take another moment of his, constant. Meaningless. Babble."

"Well," whispered Sandy. "I'm sorry to hear that."

They sat in silence for a while.

"Trust me," said Maynard, finally, letting his hand rest on hers. "It was for the best."

"Yeah. No. I believe you. You're such a sound sleeper. You can sleep through anything. If he bothered you, then well. He really would have gotten under my skin."

* * *

When Maynard let the mynah bird go, it took flight immediately. It circled high overhead then returned to the lawn where it perched on the fence. It turned its head to regard the home with his left eye, then with the right, taking in one last look. In the sunlight, it's dark, oily slick plumage took on a new iridescence of blues and purples. Without sentiment, it stretched out its wings, let out a final squawk — "5441 4112 8458 7551!" — and flickered up over the rooftop, high into the blue sky.

Out in the world now, riding tradewinds over Oahu, sailing over the Pali, over rivers and reservoirs, over parking lots and forests, the mynah bird is at long last part of a flock.

Occasionally, mistaking a household as the home of his youth, it would land outside of a window and start speaking. And if the home owner were lucky, he would hear the bird recite love poems, strings of credit card numbers as well as some of the filthiest sexual commands anyone would ever want hear coming out of such a bird. Then the mynah would flit upward into the ether again, it's wings soaring so cleanly above it all you would have never known it was once mired in the dirt below.

A Good Man

Trace Sato was on the bus en route from Salt Lake to Honolulu, standing near the rear door, grasping onto the railing with a clammy hand when the first hint of trouble began. As a frequent bus passenger, he had spent many mornings meditating on the possible follies of his own short life, reveling in the foolishness of his own misanthropic adventures. Often these thoughts led to his own contained life as a bus passenger, from the loud and aggressive way in which he chatted up people at the bus stops, to his own quiet and secret crushes on fellow female passengers. As a young, aspiring comedian or – when considering his track record at onstage performances – an aspiring joke writer, it was important to stay attuned to everyday situations and elicit forced folly and interaction. It was where the gold was, he had once read. Comedy came from life. Harvesting it, however, came at a cost.

The weather outside was cold and grey, obscured by a heavy onslaught of rain, with the windows fogged on the inside and smeared over by the deluge on the outside. Trace had been surveying the passengers on the ride, taking note of their clothing, their tweed jackets, their yellow plastic bags, greasy hairstyles and rumpled collars, and was composing a comic litany of detail in his head. It was an industry tip, that in orchestrating long jokes, one must create an image in the audience's mind. This way, they would come along for the ride. And so he carried on cataloging every odd detail of his fellow passengers; their checkered shirts, plaids, pinstripes, polka dots, paisleys; from a woman's checkered scarf, to a man's checkered tattoo, to an older gentleman's Davy Crockett-style red fox tail hat — its tail so malnourished it looked like the tail of a stray cat. With these details in place he began crafting a kit for a story and punchline. This is where the trouble began.

It was a minor flutter — butterflies in his abdomen slowly migrating to his lower intestines. Somehow, some slow distant process had begun to unfold and an unknown variable was wreaking havoc in his digestive tract. The elliptical orbit disrupted by some unseen force was creating a crisis of gastroenterological proportions. Atmospheric pressure began to build. Trace gnashed his teeth and cursed himself. Entire civilizations were destroyed this way, by way of biochemical warfare. Dinosaurs perished when the universe dropped a bomb onto the earth's mantle. Somewhere deep within his lower regions, another astroid was approaching the irreversible gravitational field. His immediate world was at risk. He cleared his throat and kept his eyes on the bus driver, a man oblivious to his plight and telepathically begged him to keep his foot heavy on the pedal. What was the euphemism? He quizzed himself. Dropping the kids off the pool. Or leaving them on the bus.

Why hadn't he gone at home? What did he have for breakfast? Was the milk fresh? Why did he have to wake up so late, having to rush for his day job interview? On this particular day, his mother had taken the car to visit his late grandfather at the cemetery and had not gotten back in time to give him a ride. It was on this day that he had a scheduled his first job interview in months. Couldn't she have gone at another time? It was his mom's fault, then — this intestinal gurgling, this unexpected development, the need to drop a hoopsnake.

His job interview was at 10am at the Moilili Library. For the past year since graduating from college, he had lived at home with his mother, staying up late and watching Richard Pryor videos. It was she who had finally forced him to initiate his search for employment opportunities.

* * *

A millennial, he had heard himself called. A spoiled and entitled slacker who constantly held out for the perfect job regardless of experience. It was a label for a generation reluctant to leave the dock, who dropped a second reinforcement anchor in their parents livingrooms after graduation. According to his aunts, he was at an integral crossroad. He could get out, get a job and begin his adulthood, or become a permanent fixture of his mother's pea green sofa. He could be a precocial bird, or an altricial bird. "Kick him out, or he'll be dependent on you forever" his aunts Janet and Kim once said to his mother while eyeballing him. They would visit often over the weekends and scowl over coffee, picking at portuguese sausage and dried Akule, while watching disapprovingly whenever Trace migrated from the sofa to refrigerator.

It had been three days since their last visit. They came in through the front door without knocking, threw their purses onto the table and surveyed the living room for any hints of dishevelment; an empty coke bottle, a t-shirt strewn carelessly over an arm rest, all the tell-tale signs of a lay about. Trace had just set down a biography on Lenny Bruce, and had begun concocting his own "Aristocrats" joke, as it was common for most stand ups to have their own unique litany of vulgarity made up for it. It was an insider thing, and it gave the entire industry a mythic quality.

"Trace," his aunt Janet called out, taking a seat at the head of the dining room table. "How are you? You find a job yet?" she asked.

"He's trying," his mother said, emerging from the bedroom. "Hello Hello. How are you? Want some coffee?"

"Just a little," said Aunt Janet.

"None for me," answered aunt Kim.

"I've got some things going," Trace responded.

"Like what?" Asked his aunt Janet.

"Some gigs."

"Gigs?"

"Some shows. Some stand up bits."

"They pay you?"

"Open mic."

"What is this? This open mic?"

"He wants to become a stand up comedian, and open mic is how they cut their teeth," his mother explained to his aunts. "Which is fine as long as it's a hobby and he has a primary source of income." She shot Trace a look.

His aunts frowned, their mouths a pair bland colorless rainbows.

"A comedian? Is that what you went to school for?" Aunt Kim asked. "To waste all that money?"

"Actually," Trace stood up, "That was my minor..."

"I don't like comedians," said his aunt Kim. "So obnoxious."

"A waste of talent," continued his aunt Janet. "What good is your college degree pursuing a career like that? What are you gonna do? Make light of life? Be a class clown forever?"

"There's nobility in making people laugh," he said. "Not all people are as humorless and soulless as —"

"Trace!" his mother interjected.

Both aunts shifted disapprovingly in their chairs. They tilted their heads and looked at him askew. "Telling jokes," his aunt continued, picking at piece of fish with a pair of black chopsticks. "What good is that? You would think a grown man would want to be taken seriously. Do you want to be like your father? All jokes but no spine. Couldn't even look after his family. Now look...."

Trace threw a coke bottle across the room and knocked over a mustard vase holding an orchid, breaking it in half and spilling the water out onto the floor. "Aunt Janet, is that your face or is that a connect four board?" he said.

His mother began picking up the shards of glass scattered along the floor. "Trace. Leave right now. Before I lose my temper."

Trace stormed into his room leaned back into his desk chair, arms crossed and fumed quietly, surveying the gallery of smiling comedians he had pasted to his walls. There were tributes to the likes of Andy Kaufman, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Richard Prior, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, game changers as he had referred to them. Through the wall however, past the grainy montage of photographs, in the kitchen with the beige, plaid tablecloth and two cups of coffee, and three short and plump women sitting at the table, he could hear his mother admonishing her sisters. "That was uncalled for. You know better than to bring him up."

On the wall was a quotation by a the theorist Martin Armstrong, "For a few moments, under the spell of laughter, the whole man is completely and gloriously alive: body, mind and soul vibrate in unison... the mind flings opens its doors and windows, it's foul and secret places are ventilated and sweetened."

His father had been a natural when it came to wit and humor, using laughter as both weapon and shield. He disarmed skepticism and diffused tension with a simple handshake and a wry observation. If only he were still around. Trace had often found himself tongue-tied when confronted with certain situations, and he often wondered what his father would have come up with in the same circumstance. What would he have said back there to his two in-laws sitting at his table, stirring sugar cubes into their Folgiers and stuffing their faces with red been cakes? "You need to find the incongruity in things," he once said, and Trace struggled now in attaining the necessary perspective to pick out such incongruities. Now in his absence, he was painfully aware that there was an entire education on the matter that was lost to him forever.

* * *

Holy shhh... he thought. The pain was now extraordinary. I need a submarine hatch. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. The bus hit a bump on the road and his abdomen jumped, its contents shifting and gurgling. He was a walking well cap. In the front of the bus, where the seats faced each other, people were staring past each other into the passing world. There was a stop every five minutes, and a few people shuffled off as another handful waddled on. Watching this process was excruciating.

A Korean woman was talking on her cell phone. She wore a visor and her hair was pulled back. Her shirt was tight around her chest and she wore a fanny pack around her waist. At her feet was a paper bag, and in it — toilet paper.

A few days ago, the incessant storm had flooded the sewers near his home and brown water gushed along the streets carrying a torrent of toilet paper and tampons. In Kailua, raw sewage was was filling the ocean and warning signs were stapled to trees surropunding the beaches. Trace would need such signs here if the situation did not improve.

Another stop. An old woman took her time boarding the bus. She shook and collapsed her umbrella, stepped up to the yellow line and began searching blindly in her purse for a tattered bus pass. Meanwhile, a mountain was moving within Trace. He was pushing a mountain through a molehill. A planet was traveling through a wormhole. A bottleneck effect, was in effect.

The Korean woman stepped off at the next stop. Quickly, he slid into her seat, folding the garden hose inside, tying off the water balloon. He twisted and turned, trying to work things upward. Meanwhile his face remained as stolid as everyone else's.

The bus picked up speed and slowed down. It was a fact that stormy weather had always slowed the pulse of Oahu traffic. The windshield wipers screeched like manic violins. Outside, Trace could barely make out the road ahead. Three buses made their way down a sharp curve, came to a halt, and sat there like linked sausages. There was a clog at the intersection. He contemplated getting off right there. His eyelids began sweating. He blinked hard and bit his lower lip. He closed his eyes and the image of a turtle laying a hundred shiny eggs in a sand pit came to mind.

Breath. But not too deeply. Think, yoga. Think, tree pose. Think of ice melting. Imagine becoming air.

He began playing games with himself, observing the likeness of each passenger with that of a celebrity. There was Madonna's stunt double, if the stunt double was a male in his forties. There was a somber Gilbert Gottfried sitting next to slimmed down version of Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, who sat across from Don Rickles, if he were Samoan. The game lasted ten seconds before the pain reintroduced itself with guests. He felt like a balloon with genitals.

There was no other recourse, Trace decided. The only way to alleviate the agony and distract himself from the boulders rolling down his innards was to initiate a short comedy bit. Yes. It was genius. It would work. A conversation wouldn't be distracting enough. Only an adrenaline rush would do it and going live in front of an unsuspecting audience would provide it in bursts. He thought about telling his Aristocrat's joke but remembered that it contained too much of the same vulgar content. It would have been akin to staving off hunger by talking about food. No. Perhaps an improvisational audience participation bit would have been better. Maybe it would even reverse the entire painful process. All at once, he would to be careful not to get punched in the gut. It would be a delicate negotiation, but desperation prodded him forward.

"Hello everyone!" He said, rising up from his seat, grasping at a hanging handle bar. "Good to be here! Looks like we've got a nice audience today! Man! What a nice looking crowd." A few passengers regarded him wearily at him and returned to staring out the window. "It's stormy as hell today isn't it? I mean, between the AC and that hot seat over the rear tires, you we've got ourselves a low pressure weather system in here. That hot seat, it's like a hot spring isn't it? I man, you might as well giving up on the idea of having kids, sir, I feel bad for your lost future generations. I mean, you got on at Safeway. Your testes are probably cakes by now!" The bus hit a bump and the passengers all jumped in unison. Trace continued, "You know when you're really cold, and your genitals shrink up? Wouldn't it be great if they expanded in the heat? Say, you take a hot shower and you look down and your balls are the size of casaba melons. I'd take a date to the sauna and just let my towel accidentally drop off. Whoa, hey! Another added inch."

The passengers groaned. A few of them opened their mouth and rolled their eyes back, sighing in resignation.

"Great day isn't though?" Trace continued. "I love the bus. Da bus, as they say. I used to ride the bus everyday as a kid, going to school, parties, crack houses. We had a great bus system. I used to ride the bus and when we got to school the bus driver would carry my books and backpack out for me. Such a nice guy. Sometimes he'd wheel me out in a wheelchair and set me out curbside. I mean it really was handy. I guess that's why they called it the ... handy van."

More groans.

"One day I got home and I told my mom that everyone in my bus must have been the worst students ever. 'Why is that?' she asked me. I told her everyone on my bus must have been at least eighty years old. They must have been the oldest seniors in high school."

There were no reactions but Traced trudged on through his narrative. "She told me that I was riding the senior citizen van. Oh! I said. So that's why the classes consisted mainly of knitting and puzzle making. Still! That's the most female action I've had since the ninth grade! Made me wish there was a sauna there!"

"Shut up!" cried a man from the back.

"Ouch a heckler!," said Trace. "Well, lets get to know the audience a bit. Hi there, sir. What's your name?"

The man stuck his middle finger out.

"Great. How about you, with the face," Trace said to a small, middle-aged filipino man sitting across him. He had a head of thick curly hair with a circular patch of white hair just above his ear as if he had been tagged by a spray can. "Where are you headed on this fine day? You married? I hear your wife is so fat, you proposed to her with a hula hoop." Trace's delivery was flat and casual, but he realized that it was a rocky transition and it betrayed his lack of confidence.

The man jerked his head back, and turned to look at his neighbor, and turned to face him. Who me? he seemed to be asking. My wife? He smiled. It was working. His reaction was golden, and it finally relieved a ring of pressure around Trace's belt buckle.

"So big she has her own basement," Trace said, his voice low and controlled.

The man looked over at him. "Whass that again?"

Trace took a breath. A woman two rows up removed her old walkman earphones from her ears and turned around for a look. The air had gone electric, buzzing with possibility. Trace pressed on. "What's the matter, an I and a Q short an alphabet? You're so dumb you use cheat sheets for hearing tests." Instantly, another stone was lifted off his stomach. The pressure was liquifying and being reabsorbed into his body. At least it felt that way.

The man's eyebrows rose to within a half inch of his hairline. Three deep creases magically appeared as if he had been clawed by a tiger. Trace could see his jaws grinding his molars back and forth. The man maintained eye contact "You know me?" he asked.

"Nope," laughed Trace. "What, you think everyone knows you? Who do you think you are? Earth?" His heart rate picked up, bringing with it another awesome wave of relief. "Jeez you've got a big head. Your head is so big," he continued, rolling his head back and staring at the ceiling, "it shows up on radar." He held up both hands a foot apart for effect. "Your head is so big you don't have dreams, you have movies. Long three part documentaries... mailed to you... by Netflix."

No one laughed. A woman behind him yelled out "Oh, enough!"

"Nice," said Trace over his shoulder. "Another heckler. What, you don't like my jokes? I'm kidding." He held out his hand to the man he had been insulting, let it linger over the aisle and offered a handshake.

"Don't touch me," said the man. "Just get off the bus."

Trace smiled. He was starting feel like his normal, antagonistic self again.

The woman in the rear continued. "People like you make me sick."

Trace turned around, rolled his eyes and laughed. "You sure it wasn't the bucket of fried chicken you had for breakfast?"

Another disapproving moan came from the rear.

"Or the motion sickness?" Trace continued. "The bus is a little lopsided. Maybe you should sit more in the middle."

A cry of dismay came from the back. "Give it a rest asshole."

Trace clammed up, both above and below his waist. The gurgling continued. Last night, his mom had made one of those hormonally wayward roasted chickens, which was so large Trace could swear it had nipples on its breasts. She had served it up with broccoli, mashed potatoes, gravy — the works — and he had scarfed it all down.

The pressure returned. Trace looked down and studied his slacks.

The insulted man had been watching him the entire time. He leaned toward Trace and began nodding. "So you think you know me, funny man?" he asked again. He turned in his seat. "You know my life?"

Oh, great, he thought. I've messed with the wrong guy.

The bus made it's way down King Street. They passed the American Savings Bank and he knew they were almost there. Finally. This would be the last time he would be caught on a bus. What could have been a routine 10 minute drive had stretched out to an hour's worth. There was a rotting smell, a cross between a turning mango and a man's armpit. The stench pervaded his nose.

The man continued talking in a calm manner. "Hey," he whispered. "When you get off, I'll follow you," he said as if discussing the details of a surprise party. "We finish em up then. That cool with you?" he asked with quiet menace.

Trace shook his head and held his hands out, "Look," he confided, leaning across the aisle as a bubble of pain popped just inches from ground zero. "Look, man" he said quietly. "I just really need to take a shit. That's it. I'm fucking panicking here. That was the only thing I could think of to get my mind off it. I apologize."

"I can help you with that," the man offered. "I can beat it outta you," he said as if offering to replace a flat tire. "The shit. No worries."

Trace made a visible show of discomfort. He gritted his teeth and clutched his stomach.

The man went on, "Man, how stupid are you? With all the shit-cans in the world? You decide to take one on the bus. You insult my wife. Now I've gotta defend that swine's honor. Now that really pisses me off." The man wore a strange grin, giving him an ominous air.

There were a few chuckles throughout the entire bus as they passed Washington Park. Trace kept his eyes on the front of the bus, but he could see that the man hadn't turned away.

"Sorry," offered Trace. "I didn't mean any of that. For real. I mean, I just really gotta go man. Seriously."

"Oh. We're going. As soon as we get off the bus. Me and you," the man reassured him by giving him a few firm pats on the back.

* * *

The bus stopped in front of the McDonald's and Trace stumbled off. He began walking, hunched over like a zombie chewing on his own intestines. He quickened his pace, but kept his strides short, as if he were holding an egg between his thighs. When the bus took off, he saw that the passengers were all watching him. When he turned around, he saw that the man — wearing a tattered, ash grey shirt, tucked into dirty, faded denim jeans and high tops — had gotten off with him.

"So what? Tummy ache? Want me rub your stomach?" The man called out.

In the light, the man looked crazier. His left eye sported a burst capillary like blood splattered across a windshield. The letters PTOO was tattooed on his scabbed arm. Trace backed off. "Look, sorry again. I can't fight. I'm not a fighter. I just need to get to this job interview," he pointed to the Moilili Library. There was a homeless man leaning on the concrete pillar next to the entrance, and the steps leading up to it smelled of urine.

"Oh you like work there?" asked the man. "A smart kid?" He was a few inches shorter, but he was wider. His face was weathered and creased, and betrayed no emotion. He may as well have been talking about the traffic. "What, you read books? Harry Potter? You like Harry Potter?"

Trace turned and kept walking as if both his legs were broken. A sharp blade of pain shot through his gut. He felt bloated, as if a spiny puffer fish was expanding in his stomach.

The man kept up with him, stride by stride. "You like wizards? Do you know of a fuck-move called the twisted wizard? Teach your girlfriend. You got one?"

"Leave me alone, man. I got nothing for you," he said

"Full of shit, pussy. Come on!" yelled the man, his voice muffled by a passing moped.

"Sorry," said Trace and walked up the steps. He pulled open the library's glass doors, pushing his sweaty face into the cool air conditioning and the musk of old children's books.

"I'll be here," said the man from the steps. "I can wait."

* * *

When Trace finished his business in the rest room, a wave of relief and euphoria washed over him. Just ten minutes earlier, he had been on the verge of exploding, rendered mindless by gas. But now he could breath and mentally prepare for the interview.

As he zipped up he heard a voice come from the stall next to him. "Some shit. Not too bad. Not worth talking shit about. I was expecting Pele herself."

Trace's heart began beating rapidly, tinting the room red. Suddenly, he was filled with fear. "Oh man. Come on. I don't want any trouble," he said. Their voices echoed and hung close in the restroom.

"No trouble? Come on. You can scrap, I bet you can. The way you flick that sharp little pink tongue out."

Trace examined the tiles on the floor. He could see the shadow of a pair of legs standing outside of his stall. "I'll call the cops," he said. His hands here shaking.

"Cops? Nah. You don't wanna call the cops," said the man, tapping the wooden door lightly.

"I got a cell phone on me, I'm dialing," Trace said.

"Screw the cops. They frisk you, you know. You want that?" He filled the room with heavy breathing. Trace could hear the man's joints click as he walked away. A weak squeak echoed and suddenly the lights went out. Everything went black, leaving phantom shapes in the air. "Unless you wanna be frisked," said the man, tapping on the door again. "Got any jokes now?" he was breathing loudly, as if drawing air in through his mouth, over the tip of his tongue like a snake. "'Come on, tell me a joke." he hissed and began kicking at the door. The loud bangs filled the darkness and each kick seemed to emit a faint pulse of light. The man hissed and kicked. Trace dropped his iphone and fell against the toilet. His left hand went deep into the bowl and splashed around as he scrambled to his feet and began whimpering.

The lights went back on. "Fuckin, pussy" said the voice. "Act so full of beans, nuthin but gas. Next time, watch what you say. You dunno know what other people go through." The water faucet went on and off, and then all sound was blown over by the air dryer. When the machine whirred to a stop, the man spat and said "Fuckin' punk bitch." He kicked the trash can over and walked out, casually dragging his feet.

* * *

The job interview went well. The ordeal had left Trace rattled and neutered. The man who interviewed him was a young caucasian man with a large jar-shaped head. He had been scrolling through a Dungeons and Dragons website when Trace approached him. Normally, Trace would have felt superior to this sort of character and would have been more comfortable, allowing for his usual jokey demeanor. In his head, he would have been assembling a list of nicknames and references, stockpiling them for recitation to his friends later. This sort of cockiness would have worked against him. Instead, shaken and vulnerable, Trace answered every question subserviently.

The man warmed up to him immediately and hired him on the spot. "I think I've seen you around," he said. "Maybe at school. We both went to UH. You used to hang out with a bunch of punk rockers outside Manoa Gardens right?"

Normally, Trace would have made fun of his use of the term "punk rockers" as a descriptive device. Instead, he nodded. "Maybe. A few friends."

"Those types. I don't know about them, they always got something wise to say. An air of superiority. You don't seem like that type a guy though. You play Dungeons and Dragons?"

There was a long silence and the man stared at Trace, waiting for an answer. There was some incongruity this sitiuation. It was funny. Somehow, throughout the gastronomical accretion of it all — the bus ride, the scene in the restroom as something out of Deliverance, and the job interview — a comedy bit was forming.

"No," Trace answered. "But I've always wanted to learn D and D."

"Good man," said the interviewer. "When can you start?"