At first I had excellent company in my isolation on the farm. I had my two personalities!
I've read that people with dual personalities often go through stages in which the personalities strike many radically different arrangements of body sharing, as if looking for the best way to manage the problem. That was my experience.
In Hawaii it was like this: If we're home, I'm usually Kona. If we're away from home by ourselves, I'm Alaka'i. If we're away from home with our parents, we wing it.
At the House in Shirley, Kona and Alaka'i had conversations. It seemed to me that whenever I was one, the other was behind me and could step forward, and the first would go back behind. We had conversations like this where we took turns speaking for long periods of time.
Once my Mother was in the hall upstairs and overheard me doing this while I was in the playroom by myself. She walked in and asked me who I was talking to, knowing full-well the correct realistic answer had to be "myself', since no one else was there. My answer was "Alaka'i." She had never heard that name before, and she had trouble getting the pronunciation right. So she said, "how about I call him Alex, instead?"
Alex was fine, I said. For all I knew at the time, maybe Alex was English for Alaka'i. If you think Alex comes from Alexander the Great, a case could be made that the connotation is the same, even if the root meaning is entirely different.
After that my Mother eavesdropped on our conversations regularly. When I was outside we would be talking and I'd catch her peering out the kitchen window at me.
The conversations outside would be conducted almost as if in a trance. Just south of our house was a house sized rectangular hole in the ground with concrete walls where another house had been. Near it were other holes where there may have been a shed or an outhouse. I developed a route that took me around those ruins in a figure eight, and just followed it over and over again like a caged bear at the zoo, carrying on my dual person conversation. We mostly talked about how much we missed Hawaii and Lani and Lono. Sometimes Alaka'i would sing a Hawaiian chant and then explain it to Kona.
Soon after we moved in my parents were lucky that the farmer who rented to us agreed to babysit for them so they could have some time out by themselves.
The first time I was turned over to the old man my parents drove me there and dropped me and the dog off in his back yard. The farmer's house was at the foot of a steep slope and rested on a gentle rise up from the highway. There were long stairs up to the porch. It seemed like too many stairs for such an old man.
I vaguely recall the old man's name was Bob. Let's say I'm right. Bob talked with my parents for about ten minutes, then they drove off to have some fun on base. Maybe they were going to a party, or maybe to have dinner at the Officer's Club. As they drove off, the old man sat on a hammock in his yard that was strung between two trees. His wife worked in a garden near the stairs to the house, in the distance behind him. Just twenty feet away an old disk harrow was rusting in overgrown grass.
Once my parents were gone, there was a long period of awkwardness. I had learned to be afraid of Americans. Whether relatives or total strangers, I'd come to think of them as either feeble or treacherous. I didn't think any good could come of talking to this old man.
As it happened, there was just then a beautiful vivid rainbow in the sky to the east. I'd seen countless rainbows in Hawaii. They have many words for the different kinds. Some are called uakoko, literally meaning blood rain, or bloody rain. I thought of it as meaning the rain bleeds.
Bob didn't know I was familiar with rainbows. From the way I was gawking at it he got the false impression that I'd never seen one before. After several minutes, he said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me what it is? Don't you want to know what makes it and what it's called?"
If I was curious about it I certainly wouldn't have asked him, given the lack of trust. But I also wasn't go to say, "No, I don't trust you." I didn't want to get in any trouble. I was sure that anything I said that could be seen as impolite would be reported in detail to my parents. So I didn't say anything.
Then he said something amazing. He said, loud and angry, "Who did this to you? It's that Father of yours, isn't it? This new generation, they're all alike. 'We saved America from tyranny! We preserved freedom in the world!' But they don't know what freedom is! What does he do when you ask him a question? Does he yell at you?"
It was one of the most transforming moments of my life. All it took was for him to realize what was going on and put it in words. I didn't need to be rescued. I couldn't be rescued in that day and age. But he could help me see the leash better, so I could learn to resist it on my own.
After a good cry, I admitted to him he was right, and we got along well. The conversation remained our secret, and I had finally found an American I could trust.
[Below: Shiny polished disk harrow, lovingly maintained in a museum.]
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