The monk looked up from his bed to the bright ring of light that shone through the heavy plastic cover on the fluorescent overhead in his hospital room. The light had a rough metallic texture, its weight pushed on his eyelids. He was very weak and he was not sure whether his eyes were open or closed, or how opened they were if he was actually seeing what he was seeing. He tried to blink, but remained unsure that he had succeeded. The ring of light darkened for an instant and then it seemed to be closer, stronger, brighter. He did not have time to think about why the light had gotten brighter when a cool dark shadow cut a dark wedge into the circle that had been his frame of vision. It was the head and shoulders of a person, the hair curly and thick could have been a man’s or woman’s. The skull was wide around the crown but thin at the chin. The person bent closer to him, and the monk saw clearly that the muscles in the shoulders were definitely a man’s, ropes of muscles, higher on one side than the other from hard use. So the new visitor was a man. But who? He could not distinguish the features clearly because of the back light. Now the face grew, came close. As it filled the monk’s range of vision a new light came from below and illuminated the face plain as day, not the hard light of the fluorescents but a rich and soft light like the light of a reading lamp.

The face was brown, the hair the same length, two soft silver-dollar curls, all the way around the head, which was wide at the crown. Deep indentations at the temples set off a prominent ridge of brow. Over one eye the brow had been sliced in a deep diagonal by a scar. The nose was long and thin at the bridge, straight, and hooked a little and the end. The nose was not typical and made the man resemble his maternal grandfather, Tanoa, and so he was called Tanoa also. It is a spiritual name in Samoa. It denotes the wooden bowl in which kava is mixed. The monk knew all this clearly but he did not know how.

The man, the young man, the brown face. Thin lips stretched wide across his face in a horizontal that dipped downward at the right side, giving the mouth the look that it had been gashed into a piece of wood. The cheekbones were set high. The bones made round peaks that stretched the skin tight just to the side and below each eye. The eyes were dark, black, shiny. They flashed at the least movement of his head. The jaw hung off-center in the same direction as the mouth, slacker to one side than the other. The mouth seemed therefore to always hang open in a wry smile. The chin was thin, not pointed but squared off at the bottom, marked by a straight horizontal scar at the bone where the flesh had been split wide open sometime. It was a large scar and it was like a white bone the way it cut across. The face had the aspect of kindness, but also of a child’s energy, pushing too hard, questioning everything. Faces like this bring pain on themselves first and eventually on those who love them, the monk thought automatically.
The monk struggled to place the man in his past. He was at the mercy of these visitors now. They came and went and, as they did so, they brought him in and out of consciousness, beings with the power to give him awareness. He was a fish at the bottom of a pond. They sprinkled food on the surface to bring him up. He worked hard to place the face, the name, the story. The brow of the brown man wrinkled, the lips pushed out, the eyes questioned. He began to say something. His mouth opened and closed in a succession of movements and then settled again. A smile broke on the man’s face as if he had been relieved by the answer of a question or by a comment from somewhere else in the room. The monk could not understand any of the words the man spoke. He strained to move his good ear, his left, closer to the mouth but the weight of his head was too much. He could not lift the head or turn it. The effort made him tired and he could not focus on the face anymore. It receded and stayed in his presence only as a warm shadow at the periphery of his vision. The monk fell to searching his memory for the face. It was familiar. A face he knew well but he could not place it exactly. A young man. A Samoan man. When had he been to Samoa? Or was it in San Francisco somewhere? Or Washington, D.C. or Boston? Chicago perhaps. But why? More likely Seattle. Yes, Seattle. But where? He strained in the way he had taught himself. To push the dissipate light into the middle of the black like a window frame and then search his memory through it. The images sometimes came clearly this way. Sometimes with stories, whole vignettes that came from his memory but which he saw for the first time ever, learning and relearning the lessons of his life. It had been long. His life. His ankles and knees hurt badly. He could make that out now, his joints were bursting apart inside of him. He breathed in the pain and watched the back of his eyelids for some sign.

He sat in a canoe, the large kind used for outside the reef to bring in the big fish. There were four of them in a row and he sat in the rear middle position, his paddle housed snuggly between his left knee and the gunwale. He was nervous. It was the first time he had been with the men on the day the big schools of fish returned. The women had sung the fish in the night before under a full moon that was so large it looked like it would fall into the ocean from its own weight. The prayers and offerings had been made in the water. They had chummed the inner reef for two days and a smell of salt, blood, and decay blew into the village on the shore wind. The traps had been woven and set in advance. The canoe rocked steeply as the waves passed under. Tanoa looked to his right and to his left at the long line of canoes. They were aligned in a great arc a half mile or so from the break in the reef. Out in front of them the water boiled as the millions of small fish beating the surface into froth. The sea birds hovered, swooped, dove, screeched. Tanoa felt the anticipation of the ages. How could it happen the same way every year? But the steady expectation of the other men in the canoe was proof. It would not be long now. He could make out in the distance the crowd gathered on the beach along the edge of the water. He imagined he could see Kina with her fish paddle and her net. His father in law, Mafatu, sat behind him. He was a grey giant and his weight seemed to steady the canoe.
“I used to be excited to hunt. Now I only think about the feast,” Mafatu laughed.
His brother, Tanoa’s uncle now by marriage, seated middle front, spoke in return.
“All the boys hunt to try to fill thy stomach but it only grows.”
“I fill my wife’s stomach when it grows,” he bellowed, and they all laughed.
Seamlessly, as the laughter in the canoe quieted, the older man began a song. It started in his belly, rumbled deep through his lungs, vibrated his neck and throat, and finished clean from the nose and mouth at once.
“We sing and the fish come in. We pray and the fish come in. We have always done it this way. Thank you Ocean. Thank you Moon.”
The lyrics were simple, but the phrasing of the song brought chills to all of them. They sang it low, their voices quavering together at the changes. They had not sung long before Tanoa felt a change in the water, the welling up from below of a great power, like a wave when it first touches the floor of the ocean and pushes up, long before it crashes down on the reef. His stomach dropped. He saw the first of the big fish, a few feet beneath the surface of the water, shoot past like a missile. And then they were as thick as arrows moving under him by the thousand. The men stiffened and let the song trail off in the middle of a verse. Tanoa gripped his paddle. There was a long still moment and then the shell horn blew loud and clear.