'Howland'

Howland

Some thousand kilometers to the west, indelibly west of the Phoenix Islands, Akira decided that 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 inauthentic 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 in English 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 quiet 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. It was the realization of his parent’s aspirations; humble farmers tilling black volcanic soil in the shadows of Mount Fuji, he’d thought. 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 ‘yearly performance review.’ His coworkers and superiors in the dull fluorescent aisles of the 53^rd floor pursued such rhetoric with terrifying earnestness. We all want to believe that we matter, Akira thought, the petrel now gone and the yacht running at a brisk 12 knots on a steady southwesterly wind.

When he’d told Seika he was buying a boat, she was not surprised. He remembered the way the magnolia blossoms looked outside the off-yellow glass window that day, the way her smile has mirrored that faded yellowness. 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 though, 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 under family life. The boat was adequate- he’d made it clear to Seiko from the start of this island obsession 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 boats the Yakuza sharks motored a few languid kilometers into Tokyo Bay on summer weekends to snarf toro and coke off half-naked geisha-styled 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 look of betrayal out of her giant pupils. Her face was perfect and pale; the skin held tight across balanced features that knew what mindless discipline was like, but also love and happiness. 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 Japan’s obsession with all things ‘cute.’ Seika was cute though, he reminded himself as the dawn broke in unspectacular evenness over the East Pacific. No- she was beautiful. Beautiful enough to come back to, to glimpse Howland Island in all its surreal barrenness, perhaps even feel 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 endless patience in their home. Their home; sitting under the wealthy eaves of Nagatacho ward, beyond the mesmerizing glass and steel chasms of Shinjuku. It all seemed now like the moon.

Akira knew the tiny island would reveal itself only at the last minute, 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 as he sailed, 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 Tokyo in his dreams now- the hordes of faceless tourists clustered around the Imperial Palace, the effervescent rich girls shopping in Ginza, the ‘heavy hitter’ businessmen in their pressed suits and polished sense of importance. He wanted all these dreams to be rigid and permanent, but nothing stuck, the endless blue plane of the Pacific like a magnet passed over his mind’s hard drive. He knew if and when he returned, things would be different.

Perhaps he would finally understand why his father did it, why the scribbled note about how to access his finances and why the war couldn’t be forgotten failed to stick in ten year old Arika’s 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 still presided over the prewar townhouse perched on a hill overlooking nearby Akasaka, the memories of her husband and the war like the thin specters of smog and morning drizzle that drifted into the hills from Minato. She’d 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. She understood why he was going. He wanted to escape for her, for the little girl playing in the ruins of ammunition bunkers and ancient temples in 1940’s Nagasaki. He thought of the pushy smile Ms. Earhart always presented to reporters, the grin that said ‘follow me…if you can.’

The next day the southwestern breeze presided again, and shortly before nightfall he saw Howland 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 strong optics with desperation for terra firma. When he looked again though, it was still there- firm and vaguely intimidating across some 15 kilometers of now increasingly teal water. Arika knew from his research that beneath him, the edges of a submerged Mount Fuji rose to meet the surface. What broke the water was a humble, dead caldera on which seabirds could shit for eternity. He saw the remains of ‘Earhart Light’- the squat, battered column of concrete; now a warning for approaching ships. He saw how the pockmarks of WWII ammunition in the concrete 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 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 nervous anticipation 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. The boat must have drifted a bit in the night, the magnetism of the island pulling him in. When he finally anchored the boat on solid bottom some hundred yards offshore, he could scarcely take his eyes away from Howland’s seemingly dead, bleached shoreline long enough to ready the little dingy for the trip ashore.

He rowed in strong, even strokes, the last one propelling him onto shore with a satisfying ‘woosh’ and the sound of dead coral being crushed anticlimactically. His first step was actually a tumble down onto his hands and knees; a predictable event after 2 weeks of uninterrupted sea-legs. He cut his hand slightly on a sharp piece of coral, which looked like animal bone, and took a moment to admire the red, viscous blood on stone- the mixing of the worlds of the dead and the living.

 It was an awful place. 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, which enjoyed a commanding position atop the comically humble summit of the isle. It was 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 belchings 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 had eked out a tropical paradise. None of it meant particularly much though, and he relished this, the illusion or perhaps reality of irrelevance. 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. He takes off the watch and throws it down the slope, where it lands with a metallic ‘ching.’ Within minutes, inquisitive gulls have pecked it to pieces. The sun is now directly overhead and Akira 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, complimented perhaps for being able to stand the terrifying nothingness 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, 07:42: 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.