Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory(8)

Shortly after coming to live at Punalei Place, Superfly developed Ichthyophthirius multifiliis. Known as “ich” or “ick” in the aquarium trade, the parasite promises a slow aquatic death. White spots started spreading over Superfly’s scales. His once-playful swimming slowed to a pathetic float. One morning, after weeks of his color rinsing from brilliant gold to dull white, he ceased to swim at all. My mother awoke to find his tiny corpse floating in the tank. Not wanting to alarm me, she decided to put off her daughter’s first mortality conversation until returning home from work that afternoon.

Later my mother sat me down, solemnly grabbing my hand. “Sweetie, there’s something I have to tell you about Superfly.”

“Yes, Mother?”

I probably called her Mom or Mommy, but in my memories I’m a very polite British child with exquisite manners.

“Superfly got sick, which made him die. I saw this morning that he wasn’t alive anymore,” she said.

“No, Mother. That’s not right,” I insisted. “Superfly is fine.”

“Honey, I’m sorry. I wish he wasn’t dead, but he is.”

“Come look, you’re wrong!”

I led my mother over to Superfly’s tank, where a motionless white fish floated near the surface. “Look, Caitlin, I’m going to give him a poke, to show you what I mean, OK?” she said, lifting the top.

As she brought her finger down to touch the little carcass, Superfly shot forward, swimming across the tank to escape the jabbing human.

“Jesus Chri—!” she squealed, watching as he swam back and forth, very much alive.

This is when she heard my father laughing behind her.

“John, what did you do?” she said, clutching her chest.

What my father had done was wake up slightly later than my mother, drink his usual cup of coffee, and then unceremoniously dispose of Superfly in the toilet. He took me back to Koolau Pet Store to purchase a healthy white fish of exact Superfly dimensions. This new fish came home and plopped into the blue plastic tank, the sole purpose of its short fish life to give my mother a heart attack.

It worked. We named our new pet Superfly II and my first lesson in death was the possibility of cheating it.

Other than poor Superfly (and Superfly II, shortly thereafter), for most of my childhood I saw death only in cartoons and horror movies. I learned very early in life how to fast-forward videocassette tapes. With that skill I was able to skip the death scene of Bambi’s mother, the even more traumatic death scene of Little Foot’s mother in The Land Before Time, and the “off with her head” scene in Alice in Wonderland. Nothing snuck up on me. I was drunk with power, able to fast-forward through anything.

Then came the day that I lost my control over death. I was eight years old the evening of the Halloween costume contest at Windward Mall, only four blocks from my house. Intending to be a princess, I had found a blue sequined ball gown at a thrift store. When I realized that something as clichéd as “princess” was not going to win me any trophies, I decided, eyes on the prize, go scary or go home.

Out of the dress-up box came a long black wig, a prop I would later use for such vital artistic projects as a cringe-inducing rendition of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” filmed on my family’s 1980s videotape camcorder. On top of the wig sat a broken tiara. The finishing touch was fake blood—a few healthy squirts sealed it. I had transformed into a D.I.Y. dead prom queen.

When my turn came at the costume contest, I limped and shuffled down the atrium runway. The master of ceremonies asked me over the mall loudspeaker who I was supposed to be, and I answered in a zombie monotone, “He llleeefft me. Now he will paaayyy. I am the dead prom queen.” I think it was that voice that won the judges over. My prize money was $75—enough, I calculated, for an obscene amount of Pogs. If you were a third-grader living in Hawai’i in 1993, you structured your whole life around getting enough money for Pogs.

After taking off the sequined gown in a department store bathroom, I changed into a pair of neon-green leggings under a neon pink T-shirt (also very Hawai’i in 1993) and went to the mall’s haunted house with my friends. I wanted to find my father, hoping to charm him into giving me enough money for one of those giant pretzels. Like many malls, this one was two stories, with an open floor plan that allowed people on the higher floor to look down at the action below.

I spotted my father dozing on a bench at the food court. “Dad!” I yelled from the second story, “Pretzel, Dad! Pretzel!”

As I shouted and waved my arms, I saw out of the corner of my eye a little girl climb up to where the escalator met the second-story railing. As I watched, she tipped over the edge and fell thirty feet, landing face-first on a laminate counter with a sickening thud.

“My baby! No, my baby!” shrieked her mother, barreling down the escalator, violently shoving mall patrons aside as the crowd swarmed forward. To this day, I have never heard anything so otherworldly as that woman’s screams.

My knees buckled, and I looked down to where my father had been sitting, but he was gone with the surge of the crowd. Where he had been sitting there was only an empty bench.

That thud—that noise of the girl’s body hitting laminate—would repeat in my mind over and over, dull thud after dull thud. Today, the thuds might be called a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, but back then the noises were just the drumbeat of my childhood.