Dodo Eraser

I came to Hawaii for the sunshine, seeking white-sand beaches and endless blue waves. I wanted a tan. I wanted to see whales. I wanted to lounge by the pool, drinking cocktails before brunch. At night, the air was warm, and the stars stole my breath. In the day, the cleaning lady stole my dignity—she dazzled, outshining the sky. Hawaii was amazing, but it was meeting Margarit that defined my vacation.

Margarit means “pearl” or “precious gem,” which fit her to a T. She was beautiful, of course, and at barely 5 feet tall, she made my 5’9 seem positively Norse. It felt good to feel big, even if it was merely an illusion.

Margarit took a few days off from work at my behest. I had planned to take her snorkeling, maybe whale watching.

“No,” she said, “that’s boring, tourist pap.”

“What’s pap?” I asked. “You mean poop?”

“No, not poop. Pap. Like stupid. Boring. Trash.”

Where I come from —Akron, Ohio— whale watching isn’t pap. It’s adventurous, bordering on miraculous. It’s a 10-hour drive to the Atlantic, a 35-hour drive to the Pacific. It’s an expensive flight and nine days in Hawaii. If Margarit thought whale watching was pap, I was interested to know what she thought was worth her time.

“Okay, Margarit. What do you want to do?”

“Let’s leave the beaches behind us,” she said. “Let’s escape the ocean, its constant waves and predictable tides.”

I’d never seen the ocean until I came on this trip. I’d seen Lake Erie, which appears to be as large as an ocean, but nothing like this, like Maui, the blue warm water and salt-fresh air, hibiscus and piña coladas infusing every inward breath.

“So where would we go?” I asked Margarit.

“Up the mountain.”

“Hawaii has mountains?”

Margarit laughed. “Hawaii, the whole archipelago, is a mountain chain.”

“Oh.”

“You want to know what pap is?” she asked. “I’ll tell you what pap is. It’s the shit between your ears. Stupid mainlander.”

I liked it when she talked down to me—me towering over her like some mythic brute, and her, so small, looking way, way up, telling me who’s boss. She read me like an open book, seeing straight into my soul that first time she came to collect my bed sheets. “You strip the bed, lazy boy. Good, now wipe the glass. Pick up that shit over there. Scrub harder. Sweep it like you mean it.”

I did what she asked. I cleaned every inch of the room. I stripped the bed, then got down on my knees. I lay down and let her walk all over me. Her little feet pummeled my ass and back. I was stripped of dignity, bruised in places, like the backs of my legs, hurting all over, so I can guarantee you I was feeling good. Then I was stripped of my clothes, face pressed against the pristine carpet, and there I stayed, patiently waiting for her to return, until the other rooms had been cleaned.

Margarit came back four hours later, and only then did she allow me to rise, to get comfortable on the bed—the same bed I had been made to clean. Then we fucked magnificently on brand new sheets. The sun was swollen, setting over the Pacific and invading the open window to paint us like two ripe blood oranges pressed together to make delicious sticky juice.

If I don’t remember Hawaii itself, I will remember Margarit. Her belly heaved, slick like an ocean pearl dredged up from the deep. I filled her with my longing, her navel teaming with pearly white. Darkness fell, and even the seagulls shut up, going completely quiet. There was nothing to hear but her gentle breathing, and the steady pendulum of waves.

“So where to,” I asked her again, “if not the beach?”

She checked her phone. “We still have time,” she said. “We can make it.”

“Time for what?”

“We are going to hike the mountain.”

I looked around, but only saw the beach and waves, a line of parasols and lawn chairs, a sapphire serpentine pool, pale tourists bathed in sunblock.

“What mountain?”

“We are going to Haleakalā,” Margarit told me, and I knew by the way she said it that I did not have a choice. “We are going to summit the mountain. Once there, we will enter the House of the Sun.”

I had questions, and I almost spoke out, but Margarit silenced me with a look that made me feel much smaller than her 4 foot 11. I reserved my words, looking down at her sandy toes. I assumed my role. I did not speak. I shrunk to the size of a papaya seed wedged under the heel of her delicious, tiny feet.

*

The round-trip journey to the summit of Haleakalā was an 11-mile hike that peaked at just over 10,000 feet. The mountain is an active volcano, Margarit informed me, and the House of the Sun, which was where we were headed, is the name given to its crater.

When I heard the word ‘crater,’ I saw lava in my mind, great molten pools burping and bubbling and flowing down the side of the mountain. I saw my agonizing death, but not my remains, which I assumed would be incinerated beyond materiality. As such, I felt compelled to express my concern to Margarit.

She ceased her tiny strides, facing me from uphill, yet I still looked down on her. She put her hands on her hips and laughed in my face. Her teeth were crooked but white as pearls. “You mainlanders have shit for brains? Do you know anything? Anything at all?”

I knew that I was large enough to pick her up and throw her off the side of Haleakalā, a place I did not want to be. I knew that Margarit was little enough that I could thump her on her tiny head, incapacitate her, drag her small body to the nearest large rock, wedge her cuteness into a neat, folded lump and cover her remains in volcanic sand. I knew I had the power to take control, but that’s what made Margarit so special.

How, I wondered, did she have such mastery over me? And why, I never knew, did it feel so good to be broken down, used, and trampled, like the soles of a cheap sandal?

“Are you even listening? You better be fucking listening.”

I wasn’t, but I nodded meekly, and she seemed pleased enough by my silence. She turned away and, walking up the slope of Haleakalā, I followed her, eating the dust of her tiny strides.

*

An hour into the journey, maybe two, I forgot I was in Hawaii. There was no jungle on this godforsaken mountain —this volcano— only red desert, Martian rock and barren plains. I didn’t even bring a hat, and my nose was no doubt badly burned, red, like the color of the landscape. I was sweating, breathing hard, exhausted in my clumsy hiking boots, wincing every step, my blisters torturing me, second only to my thirst.

“Can I have some water?” I asked Margarit. My own had run out.

“Soon,” she told me.

“How soon?” I snapped. I was fed up with our game. I was fucking dying here—at least that’s how it felt.

“You’re gruntling like a pig,” Margarit said, laughing. “It’s gross. It’s pathetic. It’s taking away the ambiance, the serenity of this moment.”

Ambiance? Serenity? This fucking mountain was hell, I was convinced of it. We were marching up into its fiery portal. The stinking asshole of Haleakalā.

“Can I have a fucking drink or not?”

Margarit stopped, looked over her suntanned shoulder, flicked her black braids, stared me down. “Soon,” she said, then quickened her pace up the mountain.

Behind her, I watched her short muscular legs, her compact, juicy ass, the sweat gathering in the small of her back where her tank top rode up to settle on her artful hips. I fixed my eyes on her water bottle, full to the brim, as it swung from a clip at her belt loop, like a bell tolling for freedom, for summons to service at church, the house of God, the House of the Sun.

*

We took a break at 8000 feet. I sat down on the rocks and threw back my head. Margarit guided my open mouth with a hand gripping my hair, jerking my chin to the side, expertly aiming a trickle of water to fall to the back of my throat. She stuck a finger inside, tickling one of my tonsils. I gagged and she laughed. Her smile was beautiful, each crooked tooth a precious gem.

No longer distracted by my desperate need for water, I became aware of the strange plants growing all around us. Some were very tall—phallic things that looked like strange, alien dicks trying to impregnate the sky. At the base, they unfurled 100 white slender fingers, sea anemone skirts on freakishly giant asparagus.

“What are these things?” I asked Margarit. “Cactus?”

“Silverswords,” she said. “Not cactus. Succulents. They are related to sunflowers.”

I was already bored with the weird flowers. I was admiring Margarit’s physique, miniature and magnificent. “Succulent,” I said.

“What’s that?” She asked.

“The flowers.”

She nodded. “Yes, they are.” Then added “They can grow over 6 feet tall.”

“Positivily Norse,” I said.

“Hawaiian,” she corrected.

I stared at her staring out across the red horizon, nothing but Martian dunes and bare rock, peppered by alien penises as bold and large as sunflowers. The silversword beside Margarit was half a foot taller than her. It was in bloom, with big, flat flower heads, each with a mane of magenta petals. Now that she mentioned it, they did look like sunflowers.

“The sun’s climbing fast. We better do the same.”

What Margarit says is law. I stood up and winced, the weight of my body crushing the new collection of blisters in my boots.

“Do you need more water?” She asked me.

“Yes, please,” I answered.

A cloud passed to veil the sun, and the red world around us bruised into mauve. “Soon,” Margarit said, turning and walking away. “Soon,” she called out, up the trail.

The cloud passed, and the relentless sun baked the volcanic slopes hotter than before. I looked up the final 2000 feet to the House of the Sun waiting for us high at the summit. I smiled, wincing every upward step.

2000 more feet, and I was already thirsty.

*

There was no lava at the top of the mountain, no fire or billowing ash. On the summit of Haleakalā, in the crater, the House of the Sun, there was a field of red-brown rock and sand, cinder cones and scrub. Against the sky, which was a deeper, cleaner blue than the ocean at the beaches of the resort, the horizon clashed in warring opposites that seemed destined to come together as one.

“Beautiful, is it not?”

“You are,” I did not say as I took her in, from ankle to five foot summit. And she was —very, very beautiful— and truly, so was this Martian landscape.

“Do you want some water?” She shook the bottle, trying to entice me with the swish of the substance that would keep me going, keep me alive.

“Yes, please. If that’s alright with you.”

She crossed the space between us, still wearing her fucking sandals, which I couldn’t believe. She took me in her tiny hands, laying me down, softly depositing my body across a carpet of sharp rocks. She brought the bottle to my lips and sang a sweet song, a gentle hum so quiet it was half lost in the mountain wind. I drank my fill, my head in Margarit’s lap. She sang to me, sweetly, in the maw of the mountain. Together, we lay as one, totally exposed, entwined amid the House of the Sun.

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James Callan lives and writes in Aotearoa (New Zealand). His fiction has appeared in Apocalypse Confidential, Burial Magazine, BULL, X-R-A-Y, Reckon Review, and elsewhere. His collection, Those Who Remain Quiet, is available from Anxiety Press.