Last Light

10 You Don’t Find Life by Fleeing from It

In the pricey coastal towns of Southern California, if the house was near the beach and the real-estate ads referred to it as a cottage, you needed to put ironic quotation marks around the word—“cottage”—for it would cost upward of a couple million dollars and be a cottage only by imitation of that style. The one that Pogo was house-sitting encompassed more than 3,500 square feet, large enough to contain five real cottages within its walls. But it had gingerbread millwork and beadboard wainscoting and selected-mahogany floors and enough quaint details to fill a coffee-table book with photographs to engender seething envy in those who cherished the style.

In the big eat-in kitchen, an old and tattered trade-paperback edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road lay on the table beside a mug of coffee.

Bob was on his back, on the floor, with a dog toy, a floppy blue bunny rabbit with squeakers in each foot. He held it between his front paws, chewing on one of its ears, breathing rapidly and squirming with delight. If he had raced to the kitchen to fetch the rabbit and bring it to Makani as a gift, he had become enthralled with it and had forgotten his original intention.

“You spoiled him with a new toy,” she said.

“I want him to love his uncle Pogo.”

He brought her a mug of coffee, black, as she liked it, and she settled in a chair across the table from him.

When Pogo sat down to his own coffee and pushed aside the book, Makani said, “The thing is, I’m a witch or something.”

“I’ll get you a new broom for your birthday.”

“I said ‘or something.’ I’m not into pointy black hats and cauldrons and cats. But there’s this witchy thing I can do.”

“You sure can,” he said.

She reached out to him. “Hold my hand.”

He did as she asked.

“This is embarrassing,” she said.

“What — is hand-holding risque in Hawaii?”

“In my experience, anyway, this is as close as you’ve ever come to having a secret, something you’d be reluctant to express. You’re thinking that…I’m lovely but somehow damaged, and you wish you could fix me.”

His eyes widened slightly, but he said, “I am not.”

“Yes, you are. It makes you sad, but you think I’m broken. And in a way, I am.”

“If you say so, but I don’t see broken.”

“I can’t read continuously. What I get, when I get anything at all, are flashes.” She let go of him and reached out with her other hand. “Try this one.”

“Maybe we can levitate the table later,” he said, as he took her left hand in his right.

Giving voice to his unspoken judgment of her, Makani said, “You’re spooked by what I’m doing, but you think I’m just expressing what I’ve long believed you feel about me. You think I’m pretending to see fragments of your thoughts, so I have an excuse to discuss our relationship this bluntly.”

He did not look away from her. He was the most direct, least evasive person she had ever known. But he let go of her hand, and in his electric-blue eyes she saw what she could no longer perceive by touch: He had begun to believe that, at least to some limited extent, she was able to read his mind.

By turning to him for help, by revealing her own darkest secret, she had put their friendship at risk. He might well be offended that she had read him since first touch and had not until now revealed her gift. Though she believed that he was sufficiently comfortable with himself and too generous a soul to retreat into anger or fear, she also knew there was truth in what Rainer Sparks had said about anyone with her power being seen as a freak and a threat.

Pogo pushed his chair back from the table, got to his feet, carried his mug to the kitchen sink, and poured out his coffee.

“Pogo?”

“I’m thinking,” he said.

He returned to the table, took her mug, and poured that coffee down the drain as well.

Having lost interest in the blue bunny, Bob came to Makani’s side and laid his head in her lap. He rolled his eyes, following Pogo from sink to refrigerator.

Pogo took two bottles of beer from the fridge, opened them, and said, “Come on, let’s get some real air, where we can hear the surf,” and he opened the back door for her and Bob.

From the patio, the softly lighted lawn sloped gently to a stainless-steel-post-and-glass-panel fence along the bluff. On the right, at the corner of the property, a gate led to stairs that switchbacked down to the beach.

Near the gate stood a small white gazebo with decorative wood details and a peaked roof. Inside were a table and four chairs. She and Pogo took the two chairs that most directly faced the sea and the beach below, where the black water cast foaming surf, as white as bridal lace, onto the paler sand.

Bob stood with his head between two balusters of the railing that formed the low wall of the gazebo, the twenty-four muscles in his nose working the air as the four muscles in the human nose could never do. The sea was a rich source of subtle scents, and any dog’s sense of smell was its best tool for observing and understanding the world.

“You can really do it,” Pogo said.

“Yes.”

“Just by a touch.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t see everything.”

“Just flashes. I see what, at that moment, the other person is most concentrating on, most obsessed about…and wouldn’t want known.”

He was silent for a while.

They both stared out to sea.

Makani was grateful for the beer. At first, gripped in one trembling hand, the bottle clicked against her teeth when she took a drink, but then not.

Eventually, he said, “It’s something you wish with all your heart you couldn’t do.”

“God, yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

She spoke of being sixteen and burdened with this wild talent. Of friends and family suddenly too well known. Of leaving Hawaii before she became irrevocably estranged from those she loved.

When she began, the recently risen moon was too far in the east to paint the sea. By the time she got to Rainer Sparks, Pogo went into the house to fetch two more beers. When she finished, they sat in silence again, gazing at the frost of moonlight on the crests of the breakers and the distorted reflection of the lunar face drawn long across the vast waters.

She could bear the silence less well than Pogo could. She spoke first. “I shouldn’t have dumped this on you. There’s nothing you can do. And there’s nothing I can do but run.”

Stroking Bob’s head, which was resting on his left knee, Pogo said, “Don’t go Kerouac on me, O’Brien.”

“Which means?”

“When you called, I was trying to read On the Road for like the thousandth time. I’m not going to try again.”

Pogo came from a family of achievers. His older brother and sister were driven and successful in their different professions, just as were their parents. He wanted none of that, only the sun and the sea and the surfing community. He avoided college by crafting an image of intellectual vacuity and by maintaining a perfect 2.0 grade average throughout his school years, which made him unwelcome at institutions of higher learning. His parents had great affection for him, but also pitied him for what they imagined were his limitations. They had never seen him with a book, though he was a voracious reader.

“It’s not Kerouac’s gonzo style that’s off-putting,” Pogo said. “It’s those beat-generation ideas of what’s important in life, all the posturing and the recklessness in relationships. You aren’t going on the run again, O’Brien. That’s Kerouac. You don’t find life by fleeing from it.”