Good News, Bad News

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened following my fourth birthday in 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Alaka'i returned two weeks after my 4th birthday. The head injury hadn't killed him, but had weakened him. He said he was there for the prolonged rape, but couldn't intervene because he was too weak.

Then the bad news: Alaka'i couldn't find the Hawaiian anymore. He could remember having spoken it, he could remember all the conversations with Lani and Lono, just as I've been relating them. But he couldn't remember the Hawaiian.

I didn't lose my ability to speak Hawaiian over years of disuse. I lost it in one day by an act of attempted murder. I say attempted murder, because Alaka'i could remember Hawaiian up until my Mother, in her frustration at not being able to force me to speak Hawaiian, attempted to smother me. It was the asphyxiation, not the concussion, that erased the memory, as far as Alaka'i could tell.

Or, maybe it was the trauma. Alaka'i could still sing the songs but he wasn't sure what they meant anymore. I like to think the loss of the language was psychological and reversible. I've been hoping for that for 54 years, so I'd say the evidence is feeble.

Another loss was the eidetic memory. Alaka'i thought it was a lifting of a curse. "Now we can finally forget some of this." There was an hour or two when I sat outside under some pine trees and Alaka'i arranged visual memories in my head as if moving photographs around on a table. Some of the photographs were place on top, some were buried below. Those were the ones to forget, for now anyway.

Then Alaka'i said goodbye to Kona. He said he was going to leave Kona in charge. He wasn't going to try to go away physically this time. He was just going to go to sleep. Maybe forever.

For the next couple of hours, as Kona, I had to come to grips with the new losses. Alaka'i was gone. The Hawaiian was gone. Only Alaka'i could sing the songs then, so even the songs were gone.

Then I had an "accident," and discovered a horrible new reality. Alaka'i had been in control of my excretory functions!

Next: Mother has to toilet train all over again, and she's not happy about it.