An Island in Time

I want to record in words one of the strongest and strangest experiences of my life: my month-long ordeal of traveling to Hawaii on short notice to bring home my estranged son. Because of a disagreement about his dietary regimen, he had been shunning me for over a year before he disappeared. My wife and daughter withheld his whereabouts from me as if I were an abusive parent. In May 2021, he called me from Hawaii. He was weak to the point of semi-paralysis and isolated in a hovel in the wilds of the Big Island. The next day, I flew to Honolulu. I had hoped he would be able to rendezvous and fly home with me. Unfortunately, I underestimated his condition and the complications of a quarantine administered with military rigor.

After the nightmare of being trapped in a Honolulu hotel by a military quarantine while my son waited in desperation and isolation, I was at last able to fly to Hilo and take a taxi up into the wilds in order to reach him and seek accommodations and medical advice. His bones had been seriously weakened by osteoporosis. Before we could fly home, he broke a femur and had to undergo emergency surgery and twenty days of physical rehabilitation while I alternated between the hospital and my cheap shore hotels. All of this gave me a sense of unreality, as if I were outside of time. I don’t think I can convey the joy and horror of being reunited with my son only to see him suffer a painful fracture before my eyes.  Perhaps my recollections of everything that was strange and dreamlike about my Hawaiian interlude can outline the blank space for my indescribable emotions and inspire an interpolation to fill in the void. I was focused on the plight of Sander and the obstacles that kept me from bringing him home. An anguished mind seeks distractions, signs, and portents. My feelings are attached in my memory to the things I happened to see in distress.

Flying to the islands from Seattle to arrive on Tuesday at midnight in Honolulu, my cellphone skipped to Wednesday and then back to Tuesday, as if I were crossing some mysterious threshold. Approaching at night, the islands were like knotted strings of lights in the vast darkness that had swallowed up Sander. The juxtaposition of the human and the inhuman was embodied for me in the brutal interior architecture of Honolulu airport. I should have slept on the airport floor and flown on the next day: As  soon as I passed through the Covid control, I was trapped. Though I was vaccinated and tested, I didn’t have the required antigen test. I should have known better than to suppose that you could simply talk your way through by explaining things to someone in charge. No one is in charge. Everything runs mindlessly online.

On my second night stuck in the Honolulu hotel (The White Sands), I was brooding at the pool side. The lights in the courtyard had been dimmed. A Mexican mother waded into the dark pool with her two young children. While they played in the dark pool, she sang a Mexican folk song to herself, one of those Mexican lays that have what seems like an air of medieval gallantry. After so much desperate brooding, I was charmed by the sight and sound and was suddenly optimistic that I would break out of quarantine and fly to the Big Island to recover my poor son holding out in his hovel  in the tropical wilds. On my second day I heard about an online application for an exception. The formal appeal was a challenge in digital mastery which I only overcame after forty hours. Two Israeli women lent me their laptop and helped me navigate through it. Finally I could take a cab to the airport and fly to Hilo on the Big Island.

Driving up into the verdant emptiness, the flora and fauna of the Big Island were hardly enchanting. The rain forest on the southern half of the island looked scruffy and strange. Things were different, however, with the human environment. In Hilo General Hospital, the indigenous Hawaiians made up in kindness for everything odd or alarming in the natural environment, for the frequent earthquake tremors, the termite-infested hotel, and the insects that inhabit every vehicle. Here we were, I felt, isolated by the vast ocean, shaken by tremors that I imagined as heralds of tsunamis. The kindness of the people of Hawaii seemed like a defense of the heart against the brutality of nature.

I remember my settled routine of crisscrossing Hilo in my son’s insect-infested car, going for breakfast at a drive in restaurant with tables under its extended roof and then arriving at the hospital as soon as it welcomed visitors. In the afternoon I went back to the hotel to freshen up and eat my one full meal at a harbor café. I would drive across town to bring the smoothies and food he craved and then stay with him until visitors had to leave in the evening. Sometimes he would tell me stories about his life in Florida, Mexico, and Hawaii in the months when I knew nothing of his whereabouts. When I touched on my own experience during that time, he would cut me off and plead with me: not now! My presence was enough. Being there was what mattered. Finally, it was time to fly back to Illinois. The doctors, nurses, and physical therapists did everything in their power to ease transitioning from his hospital bed to the inevitable pain of flying, changing planes, sitting for interminable spells in an uncomfortable plane seat, and then deplaning and being driven three hours south to a temporary bed set up in our living room. His pain and inability to sleep were so exhausting that after three days at home he had to be hospitalized again for two weeks of rehabilitation. Bit by bit, he returned to normal. As he recovered, the old patterns were re-established in our household. I was of course angry that there had been no reflection in my wife or children, no interest in how I saw things, no softening or regret toward me, not a single admission of error on their part. I was expected to keep my mouth shut as my wife invented and then abandoned her “absolutely certain” explanations of the near catastrophe (a genetic defect, anything but the dietary taboos they shared). Off limits was any discussion of my experience during that time (or during my research stays in Paris that came later). It all became like islands outside of time, anguished dreams of love, death, and return. You can’t go through something like that and keep silent about it. Still, I regret very little of it. It convinced me that love can overcome great obstacles

Signed,

Andrew (Weeks)