To Paradise

But suppose they were forced to? Suppose the earth were to shift in space, only an inch or two but enough to redraw their world, their country, their city, themselves, entirely? What if Manhattan was a flooded island of rivers and canals, and people traveled in wooden longboats, and you yanked nets of oysters from the cloudy waters beneath your house, which was held aloft on stilts? Or what if they lived in a glittering, treeless metropolis rendered entirely in frost, in buildings made from stacked blocks of ice, and rode polar bears and kept seals as pets, against whose jiggling sides you’d press at night for warmth? Would they still recognize each other, passing each other in different boats, or crunching through the snow, hurrying home to their fires?

Or what if New York looked just as it did, but no one he knew was dying, no one was dead, and tonight’s party had been just another gathering of friends, and there was no pressure to say anything wise, anything conclusive, because they would have hundreds more dinners, thousands more nights, dozens more years, to figure out what they wanted to tell one another? Would they still be together in that world, where there was no need to cling together from fear, where their knowledge of pneumonia, of cancers, of fungal infections, of blindness, would be obscure, useless, ridiculous?

Or what if, in this planetary shift, they were knocked sideways, west and south, and returned to consciousness somewhere else entirely, in Hawai‘i, and in that Hawai‘i, that other Hawai‘i, there was no reason for Lipo-wao-nahele, that place to which his father had removed him so long ago, because what it had tried to conjure was in fact real? What if, in this Hawai‘i, the islands were still a kingdom, not part of America at all, and his father was the king, and he, David, was the crown prince? Would they still know each other? Would they still have fallen in love? Would David still have need for Charles? There, he would be the more powerful of the two—he would no longer be in need of another’s largesse, another’s protection, another’s education. Who would Charles be to him there? Would David still find something to love in him? And what of his father—who would he be? Would he be more confident, more self-assured, less scared, less lost? Would he still have had use for Edward? Or would Edward be a speck, a servant, a nameless functionary his father passed, unseeing, on his way to his study to sign documents and treaties, his handsome face aglow as he walked barefoot across the gleaming floors, the wood polished every morning with macadamia oil?

He would never know. For in the world in which they lived, he and his father, they were only who they were: two men, both of whom had sought succor from another man, one each hoped might save him from the smallness of his life. His father had chosen poorly. David had not. But in the end, they were both dependents, disappointed by their past and frightened by their present.