Flashback to my years in kindergarten, where I could read at a sixth-grade level. Can you imagine my teachers' wonder and fascination with me, a little Hawaiian boy whose only reason for reading at such an advanced level was so that I could spend time in the library reading everything that sat on the shelves in the Hawaiiana section? I'd find out years later that there was no such word as Hawaiiana. It was a Western construct. Couple that with my ability to tell the teachers and other faculty about their passed loved ones needing to say something specific to them. For instance, although qualified for the job, the principal enjoyed physically disciplining delinquent students more than doing the task he was hired for. He wasn't happy when I told him that as he sat in the cafeteria during lunch. Telling Ms. Tanaka and Ms. Chun that no matter how pretty they were, they would never be taken seriously enough to be given a raise. I was on time out for the rest of the afternoon. The straw on the camel's back was telling Mrs. Warren during English class that the reason she broke out in a rash so often was because of her hatred for all the brown-skinned kids like myself.
We had to move to Waimalu, and I was put in a school where there were more Japanese, Chinese, and Korean children and barely any Hawaiian or Polynesian kids. Even the half-caste ones were treated differently but slightly better than us darker-colored children. We were the bottom of the barrel. Still, many of my local Japanese teachers were those who survived the humiliation of the internment camps during World War two. They harbored an intense anger from those times, a kind of justified bitterness. I told them as much, saying I understood their feelings. Mrs. Nakasone lost her shit and screamed at me for saying something so ludicrous. She accused my parents of making me say that to her, but the truth came out. My parents had nothing to do with it.
"Then who did?" Principal Kajikawa asked.
"Her grandparents," I pointed behind Mrs. Nakasone. "The ones standing behind her. They said it was one thing to have been Japanese after December 7. But to get lumped in with them at an internment camp, and they find out you're Okinawan? It was worse,"
The compromise was Waipahu. There was a good mix of a balanced ethnicity—not too much of one thing, but a little bit of everything else. My parents told me to keep my mouth shut at school and not share anything anyone's deceased family members said to me about them. So, I did my best.
In my senior year, I developed feelings for a girl in our group of friends. But something extra about Priscilla made me want to ignore the future I saw for her. We could rewrite her future together if she'd be my girlfriend. I was too late when I got up the nerve to express my feelings. Chad Begonis had already regaled Priscilla with his poetry and roses. She fell for it, and he was head over heels. In three years, Chad would kill her with a gun at a family party on Lumikula Street, better known as Stoker Hill. The romance became toxic, and it would be too late by the time Priscilla realized Chad was woefully insecure and obsessive. That was my only attempt at changing the future; I never did it again.
~
That was the course of my life in all interactions with people. Of course, I couldn't become a hermit, but when I wasn't working, out at a club with friends, or catching a movie, I was at home by myself, doors locked, windows closed. Over time, it came to me that I didn't have to walk up to people I know or random people I don't know and just blurt out their future. I could word my precognitions to be perceived as sage advice. Surprise of all the surprises, it worked, and I became known as the office go-to person for that kind of thing. That was a whole lot of weight off my shoulders.
I lived in the Kina'u Street towers on the 18th floor, which overlooked the freeway heading in the Hawai'i Kai direction. That vista was my quiet place to take in whenever I sat on the lanai with a glass of wine or if I had amiable company over for the evening. On one of those evenings, I dozed off while sitting in my Indonesian cocoon chair. What I saw in my dream could have either been a vivid vision of a future event, or it could have been the wine that gave me a slight headache. Whatever the case, what I saw shook me to my core. In it, I was on the freeway that I overlooked every day and saw myself drive past my condo. In front of me, traffic slowed because of the merging of the Pi'ikoi on-ramp and the Punahou off-ramp. A car head was three large petroleum trucks taking up all the lanes from left to right. Raymond Alfred had been racing his friend Taylor Minatoya from Kahalu'u in their Nissan Skylines. Now, they sped down the Pali highway, taking that ramp that would bring them to merge past the Kina'u Street exit. They were nearly
95 pm when cutting around a vehicle that slowed at the Punahou off-ramp. It was too late when they saw the monstrous-sized petroleum trucks. Raymond and Taylor hit the trucks straight on, causing a massive spill. Coupled with the stifling humidity and the fact that a homeless person walking on the overpass was so scared by the sound of the crash that he dropped his cigarette on the freeway below, causing the fuel to ignite into a massive fireball, you have a horrible disaster.
I woke in a cold sweat. The next morning, I called off sick for a few days, packed everything I had, and bought a house sight/site unseen on Kaua'i. I quit my job and was moved in by the weekend, but not without consulting a physician first regarding headaches that cause me to hallucinate. Well, that's what I told them, but that wasn't the case. I didn't want to see the future anymore. I was prescribed very strong doses of anti-psychotic meds. The kind that made me sit on the edge of my bed and stare at everything in the room without seeing it.
We'd come from the airport, where my brother Cliff had his wife Serena pick us up. We were now heading to his home in Hawai'i Kai, where I was to live with the two of them from now on. It was close to three eighteen when I glanced out the passenger-side window, where I saw my old condo. Up ahead were the three petroleum trucks. Raymond Alfred and Taylor Minatoya were behind us, racing toward their fatal destiny.
"Cliff," I said while looking at him and Serena, who sat in the back seat. I wanted to tell the two of them that I could see the future and that in a few seconds, we'd be dead.
"That's the reason I moved away and put myself on antipsychotic meds, so that I couldn't foresee anything." I wanted to say that, but what came out was simple. Just something that would send them to their demise without any worry.
"I love you, Cliff, and you too, Serena. Thanks for coming to get me,"
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