Donald Carreira Ching
Aloha, from Elsewhere
N
ainoa hadn’t been home in thirty-five years. Everything was overgrowth now, an incestuous swamp of flora; green snaking up, over, and back into itself. From the tram he thought he could make out the bare, brown branches of a guava tree and below it, the picnic table his father had restored as a birthday present for Nainoa’s mother, but there was nothing to separate his family’s plot from the next. Everything was debris. “And if you look out to your right, you can still see the majestic peaks of the Koʻolau mountain range.” Nainoa heard a camera snap, then another. He didn’t have to look at the map displayed on the tram ceiling to know that this was once Kahaluʻu. The roads and rivers spidered down the mountains to meet the main highway, a single stretch of pavement that he traced on the plexi pane. Just above the smear he could make out the dirt road that led into the valley. A fleshy arm appeared near the front of the tram. “How does the plant life thrive?” She was an older woman, the back of her scalp folded into her neck, and she wore her hair like tentacles, black octopus curls. “I was waiting for that,” the tour guide, dressed in Hibiscus flowers and tan slacks, smiled, silver. The map above their heads disappeared and was replaced with graphs and charts, endless streams of blue text and mute news reports. “Now, it’s common knowledge that what was being developed was a supposed key to ending hunger. A new tool to eliminate invasive species, not just in Hawaiʻi, but around the world. Of course, it wasn’t until later that they realized it had become much more than a pesticide. Which is why scientists were so surprised when they arrived here a decade after the disaster. They expected something similar to what had happened in the Canadian farmlands, instead they found an island more alive than ever.” “Don’t look alive to me.” “Well, you’d be partly right,” the tour guide said, searching the seats for the speaker. “The gas was fatal to most mammals but, quite miraculously, much of the plant life survived. Cultural historians attribute this to the muna—.” “Mana,” Nainoa interrupted. 17 Rebirth Issue