'Howland' edit

Howland

Some thousand kilometers to the west, indelibly west of the Phoenix Islands, Akira had decided Japan was irredeemable. It was not that she was no longer his home- this fact was rooted in the sort of immutable ancestry even the most rebellious youth knew not to question. Nor was he a young man, he thought to himself, feeling the sharp graying stubble spread across his chin, the way it felt so authentic on flesh made soft and complacent by decades of office toil. The wind was fresh, insistent, a sort co-conspirator in his private obsession with reaching Howland. ‘Howland Island’…he mouthed to the vast blue nothingness, a lone petrel eyeing him suspiciously off the starboard bow. It was so pedantic, so thoroughly American a name, he thought- an oceanic mystery robbed of its wild vitality in the name of manifest destiny, of ‘international security’; whatever the fuck that meant.

He would never forgive them. Even today, some seven decades after the bright light of Hiroshima and the terrifying artillery rounds lobbed over Iwo Jima had faded into bronze plaques and school curriculums, he knew some transgressions were ‘forever’, as his father would have said. He knew though that not all Americans were like this, infused with the zealously blockheaded, square-shouldered evangelism of finance capital, of stale democracy, of festering suburbia. The trip across the sea was absolution, he’d told himself; like his hero Amelia Earhart before her fateful trip around the globe, he just needed to do it, to be the first. July 2^nd, 1937- ‘’I am quite aware of the hazards’, she’d told the press before leaving the sloping rectangle of uneven asphalt on Lae Atoll, the little plane curving over the earth’s own unevenness towards Howland Island. Akira could remember quite specifically when he first learned her name in preparatory school history class, the inspiration her story had given him amidst the quite madness of the postwar years, the reparations, the shame, the national identity swirled into a global economic blender.

Japan was strong- she was his, then and always, but things had begun to change. The well-paying job with Nashiko Securities up on the 53^rd floor of the World Economic Forum building in the heart of Shinjuku had seemed like the fulfillment of the state-sponsored dream, the aspirations of humble farmers tilling black volcanic soil in the shadows of Mount Fuji. The real reasons of his employment had bared themselves in the following decades though- his unwitting placement into the great scheme of half-assed corporate integrity and ruthless capitalism, which shredded the human individual into soft little slices of ‘net economic contribution.’ That his coworkers and superiors in the dull fluorescent aisles of the 53^rd floor actually spoke like this was subordinate to the terrifying earnestness with which they pursued such rhetoric- the belief that you mattered, Akira thought.

When he told Seika he was buying a boat, she was not surprised. He loved her- this was sincere and had not faded with time into the marriages of convenience and social stature he saw so many of his friends suffer under. Their independence from each other seemed to follow this love, to solidify its earnestness rather than degrade it, as people around him seemed to think. After Kenji and Yukio left for university it was only natural that he begin to drift silently towards his own passions, smothered for so many years. The boat was adequate- he’d made it clear to Seiko from the start of this maritime lust that he didn’t want or need some excessive fiberglass yacht with flatscreen TV’s and little gaudy LED’s illuminating the foredeck, the type of monstrosities the Yakuza sharks motored a few languid kilometers into Tokyo Bay on summer weekends to snarf toro and coke off half-naked geisha girls. No, his boat was to respect the aspirations of a man never allowed to be humble, to fail, to see the shortsightedness of man across the great equalizer of the Pacific Ocean. He’d told Seika it would only be a month, and hated himself when he felt his hand rise subconsciously out of his waistcoat pocket for a moment, wanting to slap the subordinate inquiry of her giant pupils. Her face was perfect and pale, the skin held tight across balanced features that knew the pain of mindless discipline. They had met at the University in Osaka, at that particular time of year when the cherry blossoms fester in all their tactless beauty and he almost envied the American’s lack of kawaii, or obsession with all things ‘cute.’ Seika was cute though, he reminded himself as the dawn broke in unspectacular evenness to the east. No- she was beautiful. Beautiful enough to come back to, to glimpse Howland Island in all its surreal barrenness, perhaps even touch the ghost of the indelible Ms. Earhart, yet know that she was merely an apparition, a boyhood fantasy compared to his lovely wife who waited for him with delicious patience in their home under the wealthy eaves of Nagatacho ward, beyond the mesmerizing glass and steel chasms of Shinjuku.

The island would reveal itself only at the last minute, this he knew, yet somehow he still felt unprepared for its reality, to be greeted by a scarce two square kilometers of fallow white guano and stubborn grass perched on the cusp of the international date line. He liked to imagine the mysterious bathymetry beneath him, the boat gliding unwittingly over subterranean canyons and icy black depths where life struggled in anoxic tedium. Part of the appeal of course was that Howland was so thoroughly unlikable an isle- devoid of the fleshy, jovial Polynesians and neon palms that symbolized the equatorial Pacific to most people. He saw flashes of downtown in his dreams now- the hordes of faceless tourists clustered around the Imperial Palace, the effervescent rich girls shopping in Ginza, their material charade masking deep insecurities. He wanted all of it to be rigid and permanent, to make it available to his memory out here on the even blue plane, but he knew if and when he returned, things would be different.

Perhaps he would finally understand why his father did it, why the note about society’s hopeless naiveté failed to stick in his mind as much as the lingering warmth of the .44 magnum, the way his mother hadn’t taken it from his hand immediately. He’d always been private about the war- it was Akira’s duty as a son to honor his paternal lineage, yet he also was tired of walking the thin line between honor and insanity. Things built, they coalesced out of the haze of modern superpower Japan, and the absolution of the sea was so much more appealing to him that the cruel geometry of a handgun. He still saw his mother frequently- she presided over the noble prewar townhouse perched overlooking nearby Akasaka, the memories of her husband and the war like the thin specters of smog and morning drizzle that drifted in most days from Minato. She had encouraged him more than anyone in pursuing the boat- at his mere mention of it her eyes had lit with a fire he hadn’t seen since he introduced her to Seika or announced in restrained tones he was moving into the corner suite on the 53^rd floor. He wanted to escape for her, for the little girl playing in the ruins of ammunition bunkers and ancient temples in 1940’s Nagasaki, for the pushy smile Ms. Earhart always presented to reporters and other non-believers, the grin that said ‘follow me…if you can.’

The next day the western breeze presided again, and shortly before nightfall he saw it clearly through the brass spotting scope for the first time. It was so unimpressive and low that at first he assumed it was another fata morgana apparition of the oceanic twilight hours, the pairing of strange optics with desperation for terra firma. When he looked again though, it was still there- firm and vaguely malevolent across some 15 kilometers of now teal water. The edges of a submerged Mount Fuji rose to meet the surface, presenting a humble, dead caldera on which seabirds could shit for eternity. He saw Earhart Light- the squat, battered column on concrete meant to serve as some sort of primitive marker. He saw how the pockmarks of WWII ammunition shone in the receding light, how they failed to honor the memory of a woman brighter than the aspirations of war or conquest. He lowered the sea anchor from its seaweed and barnacle-choked compartment with mindless efficiency and brought down the sails in preparation for sleep, yet the effort was pointless. He tossed and turned in the little aft bunk with the indecisive elation of a small child on Christmas Eve.

The next morning, it was still there- closer even, so he knew it was not just the recession of his mind amongst the blinding palate of the open sea. When he anchored the boat on solid bottom some hundred yards off the isle, he could scarcely take his eyes away from its dead, raucous shoreline long enough to ready the little dingy for the trip ashore. It was awful. Stubborn grasses, sharp and calloused, hid between low, thorny bushes, flattened in places by the sheer volume of guano, which shone opalescent in the sun. He walked cautiously towards Earhart light. It enjoyed a commanding position atop the almost comically humble summit of the isle, a mound of phosphate rising some ten meters from the waves. Howland was transient, this he knew- the sea would consume it as it already was, each wave lapping slightly higher. Catalyzed by the blocky gray power plant he could see from his home, the belching of an industrial world.

He tries to make himself aware of distances- 1,640 kilometers to the dead battlefields of Samoa, 3,030 kilometers to Hawaii’s beaches choked with fleshy American tourists, 1,780 kilometers to the hedonistic atolls of Pukapuka where the illustrious American escapist Robert Dean Frisbie eked out a tropical paradise. None of it means particularly much though, and he relished this, the illusion or perhaps reality of solitude. It is almost noon accordingly to the comically out of place Rolex oyster glinting in metallic obscenity across his wrist, and the sun eyes his acutely. It is now directly overhead and he feels his world is a barren fishbowl, the center of which he now stands in, unaware of the curving glass. An albatross clucks and caws nearby but it is not in alarm- rather he feels he is welcomed, commended for being able to stand the terrifying immediacy of the isle. He smiles and takes a seat beside the concrete column of the light, and hears Ms. Earhart’s voice in the light breeze coming from the east, from the fateful trajectory of her flight. ‘July 5^th, 1937. Last known contact- ‘Please know that I am aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. The more one does and says and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of the fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.’ The ocean is silent.