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Starry Night



Nick

When I stepped out of the woods after doing my business, I could only just see Kat’s silhouette, way off across the sand, dancing in ankle-deep ocean water that gently licked the shore in the moonlight. Her cornflower hair was silver - like diamond silver - in the pale moonlight, seeming to shimmer as she twirled about, her cargo pants ankles rolled over her knees. I walked across the sand slowly, kicking off my shoes after a few feet and rolling up my own ankles. I found Kat’s shoes at the edge of the where the wet sand met the dry and I deposited my own shoes there before approaching her. She was humming a song, some tune I’d never heard before, her toes sending water up in little spark-like splashes.

“You look like you’re having a good time,” I said, smirking.

She turned to look at me and held out her hands, “C’mon. Dance with me.”

I didn’t really feel like dancing. I shook my head, “I’m okay. You have fun. I’m good here.” The water was just barely reaching my toes. She stared at me, one eyebrow raised, as though she didn’t believe me. “Really -” I said, “Go on. Have fun.”

Kat wrinkled her nose, then lunged forward and grabbed my hand, “I’ll only have fun if you dance, too,” she argued. She pulled me along behind her and I stumbled through the sand into the tidal pools she was dancing through, the water cool against the skin of my ankles. She laughed and said, “C’mon.” She swayed, swinging my hands with hers as she spun herself around until her back was pressed to my chest and then back out in a funny little pirouette.

Slowly, I started to let my guard down; after all, it’s not as though there was anyone around to see us. There was nobody to tell me how ridiculous I looked except Kat herself, who looked just as silly as I did as we started splashing about, dancing about, the water flying around us as we spun, Kat’s humming the only music besides the rolling of the tide. As we moved, laughing every now and then at the absurdity of what we were doing, Kat changed her tune to one I recognized - Sweetest Thing by U2.

With a smirk, I started to sing along quietly. “I wanted to run but she made me crawl… oh the sweetest thing… eternal fire, she turned me to straw… I know I have black eyes, but they burn so brightly for her… this is a blind kind of love…”

Kat laughed and started singing, too, and just like that, there we were in ankle deep ocean water, laughing and singing all crazy and purposely off-key to the imaginary tune in our minds. “Blue-eyed boy meets a brown-eyed girl,” she sang loudly, spinning and spinning as she sang, “You can sew it up but you’ll still see the tear…”

She’d gotten quite a ways away, and I ran along after her. As we moved along, past the make-shift pier, my eyes roved over the fallen plants and the washed up remains of old homes and seaweed and I saw that broken down old motorboat for which Taji’s brother had died. I stopped running, even as Kat continued on, and I walked up to the boat, running my hand over the curve of the bow as I walked along, my palm pressed to the side of it, running along the smooth body.

Suddenly Kat was at my side. “They traded a lot of livestock to get the boat,” she explained, “Five good oxen and twenty goats. It was very expensive. Losing the boat would have been a very great tragedy… You can get to Lamu in half the time by motor boat. When someone is in critical condition, it’s very important. Tamal had been worried about Nanny. It was especially important to Tamal and Taji, in case something should happen to Nanny. That’s why Tamal had considered it worth risking his life.”

I stared at it. “Was it working okay before?”

“As far as I know,” Kat answered.

“Could be the engine flooded,” I suggested.

“I mean we looked at it as best we could, but there aren’t exactly any mechanics in the village,” she explained. “I haven’t been able to get someone from WHO over here yet to examine it.”

I pulled myself up into the boat. The floor inside had obviously been flooded in the tsunami, too. It was heavily tethered to a couple of trees. It was a miracle that the trees had stayed standing, given the state that some of their neighbors were in. But the Lord smiled on the fate of the boat, I guess; perhaps because it had been Tamal’s final act. I reached out my hand and pulled Kat up into the boat with me. She stood there, watching, as I walked to the nose and climbed up to have a look under the hood, sitting with my back to the windshield. She leaned against the body of the boat as I stared into the engine, which had indeed been flooded. There were bits of seaweed tangled up into some of the cogs and gears and there was a few parts damaged, but as far as I could see by the moonlight, there didn’t seem to be anything irreparable. My boat in Key West had been way worse off when I’d repaired that with the help of some of my buddies. But I’d had tools and access to parts and the internet to help out with the fixing.

“Think you can do anything?” Kat asked.

“Probably,” I answered. “I can try anyways.” I shrugged and poked about at the pieces I was looking at, making a mental checklist of what I’d need to do to get the boat running again. “It’s hard to see for sure without any light,” I added.

“It would be a blessing if you could,” Kat said.

“I’ll do my best,” I promised, and I realized that I really meant it. There was something about the idea that Tamal had stood and faced a tsunami in the name of rescuing the boat that had been the only hope of his family. I pictured him standing on the bow, staring up at the wall of water, knowing he’d done all he could… it stirred something inside me, something deep down in the very pits of me.

Kat smiled, “Thank you,” she said. She was looking at me funny.

“What?” I asked.

Kat shook her head, “Nothing.”





Kat

After Nick had finished his appraisal on the boat, we sat on the beach in the dark and listened to the waves moving and a gentle breeze moving the trees behind us. It was peaceful out there. I could hear nature existing and Nick’s soft breathing and I swear that I could feel the earth moving through space. It was one of the things I loved most about the quiet of a late Kenyan night; the stillness of the night was so consuming that you could really feel the smallness of the planet and the bigness of the universe. In the sky, the stars were bright and steadily growing brighter, too. Colors were popping all over the place, brilliant hues that seemed to snake and curl around the stars.

"Is that -- is it like the Northern Lights or something?" Nick asked.

I shook my head, not looking away from the colors. "No… it’s stardust, on fire."

"Stardust?" he repeated.

"Yeah, like what you see in NASA photos. It's just so dark and so unpolluted here that you can actually see it."

I could barely breathe for how beautiful it was.

“Rangi,” I said.

Nick looked over at me. “Rangi?”

“Color in Swahili,” I replied. I looked back at him. “So what made you wanna come to Kenya anyways?” I asked.

Nick was leaning back on his elbows and he turned back to look up at the sky again. “Dunno,” he replied.

“There’s gotta be a reason,” I said. “People don’t just come to Kiwayuu for the hell of it. Especially after the devastation that’s gone on here. Most people would never come here.”

Nick gnawed his lower lip for a moment, then, finally, he said, “I just wanted to see it. To know where my money was going. To help in more… more tangible ways…” he was squinting up at the rangi in the sky. “Just wanted to see it, really.” He looked back at me after a long pause. “What made you come to Kiwayuu?”

“I fell in love with the people here,” I explained. “I stumbled on them. I was in Lamu once a long time ago, when I was a kid. My dad was in the military and we were stationed in Durban for a couple years and we traveled north once and stayed in Lamu on a vacation. It was just so lovely there, and the vacation was really important to my mum…” I stopped speaking for a moment, my throat closing up, pausing, remembering. I could still see her in my mind. She’d danced in the surf the same way as I had just earlier that evening, spinning through the tide in a beautiful yellow sundress, a pink parasol clutched in her palms… We’d held hands, as I’d done to Nick, and danced through the wet sand. “The first chance I got, I came back.”

Nick was staring at me still, transfixed again by the story.

“I was a part of a clean water mission with the peace corp the first time we came to Kenya. I signed up for it because of that trip to Lamu; I learned of Kiwayuu then. I just… left my heart here, I suppose, when I was a kid. The moment I arrived, I knew it was home. It meant everything to me to bring hope to these people.”

“You do a good job of it,” he said.

I shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder who brings hope to who. Honestly, it’s not always me bringing it to them. It’s usually them bringing hope to me.” I smiled.

Nick looked back up at the stars again. “So why do they call you Paka?” he asked.

“It’s cat in their language,” I laughed, “Like the animal. Taji called me Paka first, translating the word cat, not realizing it was my name and… it just stuck.”

“That’s funny,” Nick laughed.

I nodded, “It’s a pretty catchy nickname, really. I could’ve done worse.”

“It’s cute,” he agreed. “It kinda fits you, too. It sounds happy and you seem happy, like you’re full of light… like the stars or something. You’re just so selfless and giving.”

“I wasn’t always,” I answered with a shrug.

Nick raised an eyebrow.

“I was a very selfish person once,” I explained, “Somewhere along the way I lost myself among the stories I heard and the love I saw and… I dunno. My selfish self wasn’t a happy person, I’d lost a lot of feeling inside, and when I opened up the fists I held so tight… I just… I was a lot happier.”

“I can’t imagine you selfish,” he whispered.

“I was,” I whispered back, “I am. We all are. Selfishness is human nature. We’re not all Ghandi. We’re everyday people, living everyday lives, on a piece of rock flying through the universe and all we can do is pray that we’ll learn how to just love with all our might and fight for the happiness that we’re all entitled to as human people.”

We were just staring at each other now, our eyes searching through each other’s faces. His stare was so deep, so full of emotions. My heart raced and I felt as though the largeness of the universe I’d just been marvelling at had been swallowed up by the butterflies in my stomach as I looked into Nick’s eyes… everything seemed to spin around me, like time was frozen and I was looking out of eyes that were stuck on some sort of long exposure camera setting.

The things I was feeling… I could see them stirring in his eyes, too, could see them flickering on his face. He was leaning closer… so close I could feel his aura nearly touching mine and his breath grazed my forehead.
He looked away suddenly, leaning back into his own space.

I was breathless.

“We probably should get back to the camp,” he said finally, and he stood up and dusted off the bottom of his pants, “Don’t you think?”

The sun was starting to come up over the horizon. “Yeah,” I replied. “You’re right, we should.”

He walked over and scooped up both our shoes and waited as I got up and dusted off my pants. I joined him and he handed me my shoes and at the edge of the path through the forest, I ran my feet over a stone to get the sand and water off and pulled on the shoes, Nick mimicking me. We set off into the dark of the empty trees once more, the sunlight following along behind us as the morning came.