Meredith Desha Enos

Waterways, Part Two

1.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper

I first read that phrase in ninth grade. I now know it’s part of a longer poem, but just that phrase was written on a piece of envelope and tucked into a bus seat, in the place between the seat and the window. I folded the paper back up and put it into the coin purse Grandma had given me, and I've had it ever since. That crumpled piece of paper has lasted longer than billions of humans; really, it's crazy to think about.

Or, I'm crazy to think about it. Recently, I've been wondering if I am losing my grip on reality. It's hard to tell. I would ask somebody, but nobody around here really knows me that well, so I don't think they would be able to judge properly. You know? What's interesting about this situation is that, in Hawaiʻi, people go out of their way to know everybody. The first thing people used to do when they met someone for the first time is try to figure out their common associations. And now, it seems like all the people left are strangers. How is it possible to not know anyone anymore? It almost feels personally exclusive.

But, I digress. Back to the poem: bangs and whimpers are man-made sounds一bang from a gun (made by mankind), and whimper from a voice box. See, I get it一I've been reading this particular piece often enough to deconstruct it ad nauseum. Nowadays, the wind can take the sound away from you, tearing it from your throat as you utter it. No bangs, no whimpers. When the wind is in a mood, the only way to have a conversation would be to go into an abandoned building or something, some high-rise apartment that used to have air conditioning and climate control, where it's completely sealed一the hallway, maybe一and talk there. But with no electricity and of course the fact that everyone around here is a stranger, I'm not going into any buildings with anyone. Consequently, I don't really talk to anyone, which of course then brings me back to how I am unable to ascertain whether or not I'm all right. I wonder if the circuitous nature of these thoughts is further proof, one way or the other.

The reason I kept that scrawled scrap for so many years was to remind me of two things: that day on the bus, and also that even someone who was considered one the greatest literary minds, ever, had such a failure of imagination to think the world only ends once.

2.
The May before my daughter had gotten sick, she won a music player from Fun Factory. I had taken her to the arcade because she had gotten all As and one B on her final report card of the school year. (When my mother had gone to elementary school, Fun Factory used to give kids ten game tokens for straight As and five tokens for all As and one B, and my parents had kept up the tradition of taking us to Fun Factory for good report cards, even after they stopped that promotion; I, in turn, also took Mina there for her good grades, even though arcades used swiped cards and not tokens. Such is tradition, I guess.) 

Her favorite games were always the crane games一you know, a bunch of prizes sit in a pile or on a shelf and you direct the crane to get the prize. These cranes have the weakest grips in the world, and it defies logic that they can't grab a silver watch but they can lift a baseball bat-sized stuffed animal shaped like a cross between a pencil and a bird, but maybe the metal tines are attracted to crap, like my daughter was. We had about six of these stupid bird/pencil things and she was trying for a seventh, but she ended up hooking the music player.

From the outside of the package, it looked like the latest Apple doodad–a small, blue stone that pins to your shirt or backpack. It came with wireless earbuds. Even after I realized it was a cheap knockoff and told Mina it wasn't a real Apple product and to stop bragging to her friends, she still wore it clipped to her shirt. It came loaded with a bunch of songs: some K-pop songs, a couple of what sounded like Bollywood hits, kid versions of some Broadway songs, and two songs each from Beyonce and Tiny Madeleine. She would wear the earbuds but have the volume all the way up, singing along soulfully in whatever language happened to be playing, her eyes closed as if to feel the music better.

She loved the irritating thing, even though I explained how deficient the music was: soul-sucking, manufactured pop music. But when it became clear she was not going to stop listening to that crap, Jerm made her craft a solar-powered USB port in an old Altoids tin. That way she could charge her MP3 player but remain off the grid about it; Jerm reasoned that upcycling materials and using solar power helped fill the void in her soul that was created when she listened to pop music.

These 20 songs are now the soundtrack of my life. They are the only music I have. My husband's four-figure, Korean, integrated smart home and sound system sit in our apartment living room several feet underwater; I also have no access to our carefully cultivated Pandora playlists. Before the battery died in the last unclaimed car around here, I used to sit in the back seat and listen to CDs on the stereo system. But now, it's just me and the ladies, singing our hearts out, all day, every day–because I sing while I do my chores, and chores last pretty much all day.

And of course as I listen to this crappy toy I keep pushing down a regret I can never correct: an arcade crane actually doesn't have the weakest grip in the world, not for getting a thing that makes your daughter happy. I wish I had something else to listen to–though I also feel like this is all I deserve to have.

3.
So, these are the ways the world ended: first there was a storm. Then, the tide rolled in and in and in. Also, recalls of contaminated fruit, meat, lettuce. There were small-scale wars on two continents. Then, the water was poisoned. Then came a pandemic. Then, the first fire. There was a drought. Then the economy started to tank. Weather instability led to supply chain disruptions and fewer shipping containers getting to their destinations. Then, some earthquakes. Monuments toppled. Then, a bunch of power stations, bridges, and airports blew up. Then, there was a pulse. Then, from what I can gather, more fires. An eruption. A melting of frozen things. A freezing of liquid things. And then, if that wasn’t enough, the world most recently ended with two years of rain that rotted away roads and mountainsides and left deep gulches between neighborhoods around the island, coupled with an unceasing roar of wind that carved sheared the paint off buildings, assembled and disassembled hills of garbage, and toppled trees and telephone poles and towers.

Recently, though, it hasn’t been that bad.

4.
I currently live in what used to be a church on the Pali Highway, just past where several multi-million dollar houses used to stand, but before the Old Pali Road一which is, incidentally, still creepy and full of ghosties, post-apocalypses. After it became clear that the tide wasn't going to stop creeping in anytime soon, we decided to look for higher ground. Jerm thought we needed to get to Mililani, but I was really opposed to that idea because of three reasons. One, back in the day, the Ewa plains used to flood. I couldn't remember how regularly, but the fact that, even with my feeble education in Hawaiian history and culture, I remembered that tidbit meant that it happened often enough that I didn't feel safe going toward that area. Also, so many people live over there. And third–it's Mililani. The streets confused me, the houses all looked the same, and I couldn’t find any of the stores with reliability. I didn’t want to spend possibly the rest of my life feeling unsure of my location.

My thought was that we should stay in town. Honolulu was the center of industry. People's records were housed in Honolulu. The seat of government was in Honolulu. I figured that Honolulu and its outlying areas would be the first to get back on their feet, when this thing was over. This weird thing with the weather and the economy. We were already living near the Neil Blaisdell Center; why move?

Jerm’s argument was about looting. He felt there would be more looting and ransacking in town, because like most people from rural areas, Jerm was convinced townies didn’t know how to act right. We thought maybe Tantalus or the back of Pālolo, but didn’t like that there was only one road in and out. Back and forth, we fought over a map of the island coated with color-coded sticky notes.

Of course, we both were wrong. Wrong about everything. It turns out that the hillsides in town are old and weathered. Much of these steep ridges simply sheared away after a year or so of constant rain and wind. Landslides and flash floods were common. The same went for the valleys of Mililani, Halawa, and ʻAiea Heights, I’m told. And the tiny tornados 一dust devils一 that used to come up in people’s yards on hot days in ʻEwa suddenly became huge, Wizard of Oz一 scale catastrophes from Barbers Point all the way Waipio and Mililani Mauka. Sometimes, I saw them touching down offshore, touching down on the water, and flinging fish and boats and even scuba divers around. “‘Let’s move to ʻEwa; we’ll be safe there,’” I scoffed, even when Jerm was no longer there to hear my derision.

5.

When I first explored the church, it had already been raided. The outside door was unlocked and not smashed in, but the office door had been kicked in. Someone had gone through the files. This is a Chinese Christian church, so I don’t know if they had, say, relics or cash reserves or anything, but if they did I’m pretty sure those were also taken, if not by a looter then by someone from the church, maybe hoping to save some documents for posterity. The church vans were gone.

Strategically, it’s ideal. The church is located midway up the highway but right on the Pali Highway and not anywhere near any kind of mountainside. This is good because I don’t want a landslide on my person in the middle of the night. Also, instead of facing the highway, like most of the structures on this street do, this building faces south, so I can still receive light (or really I should say “light” because some days the sunlight is so weak it's like 16 hours of dusk followed by night time) but not get rain or runoff into the church. The north side is partially dug out of the hillside, but most of the entire south facing wall is a two-story window. 

I can see all the way into what used to be Kakaʻako and Honolulu Harbor from the second-story windows. The roof has solar panels. These solar panels generate just enough electricity to run the water heater, a load of laundry, grow lights, and the electric stove – one at a time – on a semi-regular basis. I use the dryer the most, because it is very, very damp all the time. Already the upholstery is rotting a little and I have to be vigilant about mold. In some of the houses that I have “visited,” the bedding and the carpet are fluffy, black rugs that give off spores and water and smell.

Also, mostly people leave it alone, and I can only assume it’s either because it’s a church, it's Chinese and therefore foreign and strange, or a combination of the two. I've seen those missionary, end-of-days people walking around, chanting. They come near the church, read the sign, and then go away. I think the Chinese characters dissuade them. 

Finally, it’s a big church and I can do my exercises and artwork and projects and raise my plants and animals there. So, mostly I like living here.

The only unfortunate parts of living here are that I think some of the neighbors don’t care for me, but put up with me because I don’t cause trouble.

But the very worst part about the church is the basement.

6.

Here are a list of the foods I miss eating:

-steak
-cheese
-popcorn
-pizza
-ice cream
-chocolate
-polenta
-fresh peaches

7.

Here are a list of foods I am tired of eating but will continue to cultivate anyway:

-carrots
-microgreens
-beans
-eggs
-all the random vegetation around this property that I periodically cut, cook and eat just because I need to eat something.
-jackson chameleons. 

I will never, ever become accustomed to them, but a body needs protein. It just wouldn’t do to survive all the awful bullshit and then, what? Expire from squeamishness? I would rather eat earthworms and snails rather than a jackson chameleon. They are so... slow but also huge. Which makes them creepy. Nowadays, they get almost as big as a rabbit, which means their eyes are about the size of a silver dollar. That is way too much eyeball for a bug. 

I used to trade them as bait for fishermen, when I wanted fish or maybe to go on a boat ride and scavenge further afield than I usually do. One time, I gave a huge one to a fisherman so that I could dive for kōʻele. He gutted the chameleon and – I didn't know this, but I guess they give birth to live little lizards--and a gut full of babies popped out. Either that, or it found a bunch of slow, newborn jackson chameleons and cannibalized them. I promptly vomited when I saw all the bloody, gooey, and wriggly creatures – and then, when the fisherman shared the babies with his boat cat, I vomited some more. And he laughed. That was the last time I went fishing. 

8.

From the church’s second-story windows, I can see down the Pali Highway, all the way down into what was Kakaʻako and Honolulu Harbor. Well, it’s still Honolulu Harbor, I guess, it’s just expanded somewhat. Everything is underwater, from about Moanalua Freeway on down, and the water level fluctuates another six to twenty feet, depending on the weather. So all of downtown and Kakaʻako is wiped out, from the street level to halfway or more up most of the highrises. There used to be street signs near the ocean which marked tsunami zones. Those signs are now meters underwater.

There’s one building that came up right before the weather change, built in Kakaʻako as a part of a waterfront redevelopment project. It’s 167 feet high一70 stories or something. I can see it, the top fifteen floors or so, anyway.

Recently, at night, there have been lights on. Sometimes they blink. It must be a message, but I am currently without resources to interpret this message. It’s another one of those scratches I can’t itch.

9.

Today, I found a hidden room in the church, behind the industrial freezer. There were two naked, dead men, a note in Chinese, a bunch of canned food that had expired less than ten years ago (yes! Chef Boyardee!), and a small arsenal. And some really ugly clothes of varying sizes and for different ages and genders, united only by how ugly they were. I took all the food, clothes, and arms out, allowed myself one, really thorough look around the room, and then left. I know I could have just taken the bodies out and then had a storage room and perhaps a panic room that was significantly less moist than the rest of the place, but it seemed disrespectful.

I busied myself the rest of the day. I finished checking and putting away my new supplies. I picked back my soybeans and cleaned out the chicken pen. I unplugged the dryer and plugged the water heater. I cleaned the bathroom. I bathed. I ate a salad and cold beans.

You may think that I was trying to block out the horrifying scene I came upon. Perhaps I would have been, even three years ago. But since breaking and entering is now a regular part of my repertoire, I have come across all sorts of dead things. 

Sometimes, I come across a live thing and I have to kill it. Once, it was a bedridden woman whose Chihuahua had been slowly consuming her – I had to do both in. I entered the residence through the garage door, and found her, lying in bed beneath a huge quilt in the master bedroom. She screamed and pleaded with me to kill her. She kept looking to the adjoining bathroom, and I thought, Oh my God, there's someone behind me who is going to crack me in the back of the head with a shovel. I swiveled around quickly, but no one was there. Raising my gun, I walked slowly to the other room. In the bathroom lay a man, face down with the remains of a towel around his waist. 

Immediately, I thought, "Oh god! It's like Saw!" where the bad guy was there the whole time, supposedly dead but then he stands up at the end. So, I shot him, but the woman in the bedroom screamed, “You stupid bitch! Not him! The dog! The dog! Me! The dog!” Over and over. I ran back to her. She was waving her arms at me. I have never seen an old Chinese lady use language like that, or at that volume, or in a voice like that. And then she screamed, “He's here! Me! Me! Kill me now! Now!” Pointing her arms and flailing around. So I shot her, too. Twice, because she kept screaming and I was starting to fray around the edges. And then I turn to where she had pointed expecting a huge, wolf-like monster of a dog – but there was only this Chihuahua. This super fat Chihuahua. And it walked from the hallway I had just come down, through the bedroom, and into the bathroom, calm as you please, and started sniffing at the hole I had made in the guy's back 一and then nibbling in the cavity. I threw the alarm clock at it, and it didn't even yelp. It just licked its chops delicately, looked at me, and hopped up on the bed and went under the sheet. Knowing it was a bad idea, I grabbed a corner of the sheet and tugged – which, I noticed by then, was wriggling. Between what used to be the woman’s calves was a roost of Chihuahua puppies, rats, and the one fat Chihuahua.They were all nestled together, cuddling and taking the occasional bite from the woman’s leg.

That is, of course, when I really flipped out, shooting everything that moved, then setting fire to the house (I had started carrying matches and a flask of kerosene with me when I came across a huge nest of centipedes in a bathtub), starting with the bed. I ran out of the house, and used my machete on anything that crawled out. The smoke from the fire brought people – maybe a dozen total. One woman, a Japanese biker-looking chick who lived on a boat she moored near what used to be the Pali Highway off-ramp into downtown, touched my arm. I jumped back and raised the machete. “Eh!” she shouted. “Cool it!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Gimme a sec.” I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face. I took a drink from my water bottle. I wet the handkerchief with water from the bottle and wiped my face again. I looked at the woman. “Sorry,” I said again.

“Anyone inside?” she asked.

“Dead,” I answered.

“You?” she asked.

"She wanted me to," I said. "She did."

"Why?" she asked. I noticed she had changed her stance. I wondered how much of her body language was being communicated to the others, and if they were going to kill me because they thought I was a violent, pyromaniac murderer. They had formed a semi circle around me. People around me, fire at my back. This could be the end. Over what? I sighed, rubbed my face again.

"The dog –" I started. I sighed again. "Fat dog," I finally said.

A couple of them visibly slumped. The menace left the air immediately. "Fat pets are the worst," the woman said. She looked into the sky. "You're lucky the wind is low today."

"I know," I said. "I wasn't thinking. There was a-a nest. Rats."

"Huh," the woman grunted. She called out, "Kill anything else that comes out."

There were some puppies, rats, and a couple of cats. I had already gotten the fat dog, but felt wary all the same. At about mid-afternoon, the fire was dying and we had killed all the former pets that hadn't died of smoke inhalation. I watched the smoke spiral up; it met a dark cloud. It was safe to go where I was staying at the time; the storm was starting again and the fire wouldn't spread. Already people were dispersing. "Thanks," I called out.

"Laterz," I heard a couple voices yell, but the edges of the sound were already being carried away by the burgeoning wind.

10.

Mentally, I named her Doris:

Doris and her husband, Wilfred, lived their whole married life in Nuʻuanu, near the Chinese cemetery where their families had three generations of plots. They were retired. Doris had worked at the post office, selling stamps and processing packages. Wilfred had been a postman. His route was Hawaii Kai, the part where all the streets were named after fish – Ahi Place, Mahimahi Loop. Their children had gone to college on the mainland, and stayed there, visiting twice a year on a rotating basis because the two brothers couldn't stand each other's politics. Doris wished they all could visit together, at least once, so she could get a family photo taken by a real photographer, but didn't push. She saved her complaints for her husband.

When she was 73, she broke her hip, and was secretly happy because all her children and their families finally came to visit at the same time. She didn't mind that it was because they all thought she might die. They wheeled her outside to her husband's flower garden--the vegetable garden was in the back of the house一 and they took a family picture. Her newest grandson, Lawrence, sat on her lap. When it looked like she was going to pull through, everyone went home.

The rains started, and on some days the pain was so bad, she had to stay in bed. Wilfred refused to hire a nurse; he didn't want some stranger to roam around in their house. When the area was evacuated, they elected to stay, just in case their children somehow made it home; they wanted to be home to welcome them. At that point, it was really a "just in case" scenario, because once they abandoned the airport dredging project, travel to or from the islands was challenging. Doris and Wilbur never spoke about what if their kids didn't ever come home--instead they poured their energy into their last "baby," their Chihuahua, Benny.

Doris' legs started to go numb, but she didn't want to tell Wilbur. Wilbur had noticed the shelves were running out of food at the grocery store, but didn't want to tell Doris. He gave her large portions in bed, saying he had just eaten. She gave the food to the dog, so that she wouldn't need to go to the bathroom as often. Benny was a fat, spoiled dog (I understand my narrative is tainted by my repulsion for that damn dog).

One day, Benny was really anxious. He kept darting around the furniture and hopping on the bed. Doris had had an accident in the bed, and Wilbur had cleaned her up, then went to the bathroom to wash himself off. Through the half open door, Doris could see her husband as he performed his ablutions with the same care and fastidiousness as he had for forty years. She was ashamed that her body had failed her. She looked out the window at the incessant rain, wishing for things to be different.

A sudden yelp, a crash, a thud. And things suddenly were different. 

She called to her husband but got no response. Doris tried to pull herself off the bed, but she was too weak to manage it. She realized suddenly that she couldn't feel her legs at all. She had not truly been able to do so for a while now. She could only watch as, hours later, Benny emerged licking his chops and settled on the bed between her legs. 

Benny had the run of the house. A few days later, he went into the living room and came back. With friends. And then began the last, saddest bit of Doris' life, measured by rain and the wet sounds of nibbling, until the sound of a broken window and a stranger roaming through the house offered not fear or discomfort, but hope of relief.

11.

When I was young, I didn’t have words. I was spare in my speech and kept my mind clean from analysis. I didn’t look too deeply. Instead, I filled myself with my family.

It has now been about 12 years since I saw my daughter, my husband. 12 years and three weeks since I last held them or smelled their heads. Once there were no people to fill my days, the words came forth. They overflowed into questions, into articulating and endlessly analyzing memories, into stories.

All day long, I try to keep my hands busy. Nothing like having the boredom of the rest of your life stretch out before you, coupled with the erratic freneticism of an impending weather event, to keep you deliberate and thorough. “Clean hands” is my current motto–clean in what I put in my body, clean in how I treat others, clean in how I treat myself. The first seven or so years were metaphorically and literally dirty. My hands no longer shake, though, and I can sleep through the night now. Also, the rage is somewhat tamped down. All day, I work to make myself too exhausted to do anything at night but think of stories.

Doris’ story means something to me. I could be callous and say it's because I don't have a television, or the Internet, or because most of the magazines and books have rotted away (the Chinese prayer and hymn books that I can’t bring myself to toss out notwithstanding). 

I feel less alone with the stories. I populate my imagination with these people. I took Doris and Wilbur's family photo back with me--the one with the baby on Doris' lap一and remember how it was to be a part of a family. Not my family, per se, but I like thinking about families, about loved ones, in general. And I hope I remember these folks at least a little the way they were.

Making up the stories is really something I savor. It's like when I found a Jolly Rancher in the pocket of one of the jackets. I broke it up into pieces and let myself have a little bit--and believe me, after literally years without candy, a little goes a long way--and let myself savor it, exist in a Jolly Rancher-eating warp zone, get sugar drunk off of it. When I start a narrative I only let myself do it in parts. What did this person like to wear? Where did she work? How did she like her eggs cooked? Trying to answer each of these questions could last for days.

12.

When I lay down to bed, I decided the first thing I could do was review all the facts and the observations I had when I looked in the room.

The men were, of course, rotting. They were lying down on their sides, facing each other. Their clothes were nowhere to be found. I don't see any bits of brain or blood on the walls or ceiling, so I'm assuming they were not shot. There weren't any scratch marks by the door, so they weren't trapped in the panic room. They had reached the melting-into-the-floor stage of decomposition. The weird and/or interesting thing about that stage is that the insides seem to rot first (I guess because guts are very wet and do not receive a lot of light to begin with, and also because they process and hold a lot of waste) and the skin is one of the last things to go. At least, in the instances where bugs and vermin haven't gotten to the body一because after all, they are on the outside and have to work inward, so of course would start with the skin. Or orifices. Anyway, there are tons of variables, as you may guess, but the upshot of this particular scenario is that I could see that they had been men quite simply because I saw their penises. 

One had salt and pepper hair and the other was dyed this unnatural shade of reddish brown, like Jennifer Lopez or Beyonce. And I knew it was dyed because, well, let's just say that the curtains didn't match the carpet. They were holding hands, like how capoeira fighters clasp hands before starting to scrimmage? Duel? Dance? Tussle? Spar? I think spar is the word. (It's amazing to think there is almost no way I can look this up.) They were about the same size, the same build.

Was there anything else I saw that I can't remember? Naked, lying, two men, clasped hands, no sign of violence. It didn't smell as bad as I thought it should. And the light was on! I wonder if it had been on this whole time, or if it is like a refrigerator light, that only goes on when the door opens. I would hate to think it's on right now. What a damn waste. And that would mean the lights are either using energy off my power source, or they have their own energy source. 

There is something else about the corpses that bothers me一not because the corpses are troubling to me, but I know there’s a detail missing. Ugh. I hate that. I close my eyes to remember. One of the corpses had a watch on. The other had more jewelry, including a necklace and a thick bracelet made of silver. A hand made silver bracelet braided in a triple knot pattern. Which means the pendant was another braided triple knot. Only one person had that particular pendant and bracelet combination, unless he sold it.

Cho. Shit. Shit!

Cho. I cannot believe it. That is what I get for complaining that I didn’t know anyone.

Meredith Desha Enos is a Native Hawaiian creative multi-hyphenate who turns big ideas into real things and builds community through storytelling (with a side of sass). Born and raised on Oʻahu, she’s an award-winning writer, editor, and performer who’s tackled everything from plays and podcasts to improv and fiction. Her work uplifts Hawaiian voices and centers indigenous perspectives—because she believes moʻolelo should come with mana and a mic. Meredith’s also all about growing sustainable, ʻāina-rooted creative spaces. A proud mom of four future creatives, she spends her off-hours adventuring, manuscript-wrangling, and crafting like deadlines don’t exist.

Photo by staff