In The Key of Indigo, Part 1: A Tale of the Arts Department

This novella will conclude with next week's prompt, Start or end your story with someone looking out a car or train window.

—

He was the last of them, and, he knew, close to death. His weak, rough laughter echoed toward the mauga, the daunting peak shrouded in mists. It was a grim joke, but it momentarily revived his numbed and bloody limbs.

Though this land was of another world, it was the world he’d come seeking. The mountains were the dwelling place of spirits and gods, and this was the home of those most supreme, most powerful. Tagaloa, creator of the stars, the heavens, the land, the seas that nurtured humanity. He would meet him soon, meet the ancestors, all who had perished by fire, by water, by spear and club and bone-shattering totokia.

It was a gray land of hellish cold and inhuman winds. Winds and ice that guarded the realm of the gods. It was a land of Death, and in that knowledge, he no longer feared.

He was Va’a’elua, the skilled navigator, else he would never have completed this journey. He glanced back at the wreckage of the wa’a kaulua on the blinding shoreline, slapped his hands violently against his torso, and hauled his burden – his gift – toward Pulotu…  

**

The last time Wei Zhao had seen Ioane Fa’alele, he was wielding a flaming, double-bladed siva afi in a wraparound ie lavalava and woven-leaf headband. American had temporarily displaced the knockoff Dolce & Gabbana-ish carry-on she nearly wrestled the air steward for, and she had sported a “Hang Loose” tee and gaudy floral beach shorts from the ABC Store closest to the conference hotel.

Now, she was struggling to pull Will away from Ioane. The Midwest entomologist and the Samoan-American marine biologist had found common ground in the Order Isopoda, and after the first round of village mai-tais, the divergent evolution of pillbug and sea slater pleopods was on the table along with the second half-eaten platter of Spam musubi and Kalua pork sliders. Wei’s sole contribution to the cause had been to negotiate a conversational shift from “wood lice” and “rock lice” to Latin names or at least marginally more palatable common identifiers at the resort dinner table. Professor Zhang, Director, Asian Arts Program, was simultaneously empathetic and annoyed being in Professor Kalish’s Puma field shoes for a change.

“Compare Bathynomus giganteus’ rami with the Armadillidium pseudotrachea—” Ioane began.

“Or don’t,” Wei suggested with a pleasant smile. The scientists glanced up, registered her presence, and regarded the University’s youngest tenured prof like a Great White who’d appeared tableside. The pair grinned contritely as one, and Wei again weighed whether she relished or resented a soulmate who’d bro-bonded with a former near-fling with a Jason Momoa-adjacent bod straining at his Scripps Institute of Oceanography tee. Scientific Rationality 1, Artistic Passion 0. She consulted her Lava Flow to cleanse the mental palate.

“When did you transfer to UC-San Diego?”

“Sophomore year,” Iaone said, selecting a musubi and inserting the seaweed-wrapped Spam/rice roll into his bearded jaws. Roughly a decade after Wei and Iaone had met as respective Northwestern student tourist and Brigham Young-Hawaii student performer at Oahu’s Polynesian Cultural Center, Assistant Professor Fa’alele was a published malacologist with the Scripps Institute who’d cameoed in a couple of National Geographics streamers seemingly piggybacking on the popularity of the documentary My Octopus Teacher. Will was more intrigued by terrestrial crustacean roly-polys, and the cephalopodan bio merely whetted Wei’s jones for late-night calamari nearly impossible to acquire in Millington, Illinois.

“I know the shit-talk about the Mormons running the Center, but Brigham Young-Hawaii was the only way I was going to afford college,” he continued. “Then, I got a Ventana Ocean Conservation Scholarship along with some Asian Pacific Fund help, moved to the mainland, and got my masters with a Marine Technology Society scholarship. I’d interned with Scripps, and they took me on full-time after graduation. That’s how I wound up on the North Aleutians expedition. With climate shifts, we’ve seen a few cephalopod species pop up in new regions or even emerge from the deeper abyssal plains. I losing you yet?”

“Hell no,” Will said.

“Maybe just a teeny…” Wei murmured.

“Well, the thrust is, with rising sea levels and temps and oceanic acidification, marine species may migrate from their normal range to other regions, and that’s how we’ve found new species. That’s not to mention lost coral reefs, mangrove ecosystems, and other shit that’s driven ‘em into the open – well, the oceanic open, anyway. And that’s kinda why I called my tuafafine.” Given the lightly tactile nature of their fleeting relationship, Wei questioned if the designation “sister” was quite on point. “Heard about the awesome work you did landing the Hamamura collection and saving that missing Du Fu. That’s pretty impressive for, ah…”

“Some podunk Midwesht univershity?” Will teased through a mouthful of slider.

“Well,” Ioane grinned. “I knew you were registered for the conference, and I figured you gotta have some pretty major contacts in the Pacific arts world. I got a se mea tele, a big ask for you. You ever met Rex Masau?”

Wei leaned back and sipped delicately at her Lava Flow. “The tech guy?” Professor Kalish squeaked. Cybersecurity, cloud management, that home genetics kit that can tell you how what village your grandpa came from in Upper Slovenia and your chances of getting Upper Slovenian Parkinson’s?”

“Biohana,” Ioane smirked. “Yeah, he’s a real fa’afafine, wannabe tagata moni. Born here, but he grew up in Southern California and hung mostly with the Silicon Valley crowd in the ‘90s. Lotta tech’s come out here in the last 20 years causa the startup support and Pacific Rim networking, and Masau’s tried to position himself as some kind of green tech god – sustainable energy, fisheries preservation and stewardship, all that. And he’s tried to carve out a niche in marine wildlife preservation, especially cephalopods. I think he’s like a Musk or Bezos, except with bathyspheres instead of rockets and a little Hirohito complex thrown in.”

Now, Wei looked puzzled.

“In addition to his royal duties, Emperor Hirohito was a dedicated marine biologist,” Professor Kalish explained, amused eyes on Ioane. “He published a ton of papers on hydrozoans, starfish, crabs, ascidians – sea squirts. Despite his role in World War II, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1971. Gawd, it’s great meeting another invertebratologist.” Ioane bumped fists, and Wei took a bigger swig.

“So, thing is, he helped fund the Institute’s 2022 expedition to catalogue marine species and populations in the Aleutian and Kuril Islands – I was along. On Segula, on the Aleutian Rat Islands archipelago, bunch of us went on a hike up the inactive Segula stratovolcano, and made a pretty cool find near the summit. An intact Lapita pottery jar, complete with a sealed lid.”

Wei bolted upright. “Talk about burying the lead! What?”

Ioane beamed with satisfaction. “This is more your area of expertise, but it was yay-big (his meaty palms defined a vessel roughly four feet by 24 inches, with a face carved into it. A demon’s face.” Ioane’s own face solidified into a stolid mask. “And the one thing I knew was, it was Samoan, and just hella-old.”

“In the Aleutians? The Arctic? From the sound of it, a Samoan burial jar?” Wei whispered.

The mask shattered into a delighted grin. “Now I got you, hah?”

Professor Zhao leaned over the tablecloth as a nearby family gawped. “Could you describe the carving—?” she demanded, but Ioane displayed his iPhone screen, an inch from her nose. Wei snatched the device from the biologist and studied the cracked but relatively pristine unglazed urn before looking up like a kid on Christmas morning who’d received a baby Kraken.

“Pulotu.”

“Pulotu,” Ioane nodded. “The Abode of the Gods.”

“Aloha!” The trio jumped as the server materialized behind Will. “So you guys ready to order some entrees?”

“Ahi poke bowl,” Ioane announced.

Forsaking the Polynesian underworld, Professor Kalish again consulted the menu. “I’m thinking the Kahuku garlic shrimp. All that isopod talk got me worked up.”

“Yeah, one of those for me,” the Samoan oceanographer nodded. “Too.”

“Just the lomi salmon,” Wei muttered, raising her empty glass. “And another one of these. And have another one on deck.”

**   

The sun was sinking into the Waikiki surf with a coral-orange bloom as the waitress landed at a nearby two-top where an older couple was struggling to translate the menu in thick Brooklyn patois. There are no private beaches on the island, and the sand was teeming with lovers and bros and disconnected kids, card-table trinket merchants, glow-stick/toy peddlers who no doubt would ultimately contribute to the Pacific’s massive plastics dump, a unicycling ukelele artist, and a plump but agile island girl capering wildly with a flaming torch.

Wei rapped the table twice in front of Ioane as Will seemed to consider the final musubi.

“Yeah. So if that wasn’t freaky enough, you should have seen what was inside.”

“Tell me you didn’t break into it right there,” Wei growled.

“We took it back to the ship and me and the guys managed to get the lid off,” Ioane assured her, and Wei moaned loudly. “Carefully. Very carefully.”

“Just…just cut to the contents.”

“Tapa cloth, made from mulberry bark, shell necklaces, carved bowls and tools. Coconuts, turtle shells. And what appeared to have been kava, at some point.”

“Kava, the beverage?” Wei posed, brows rising. “But isn’t kava used in ceremonial rites, to honor ancestors and-- God.”

“Well-put. Oh, and I forgot. There was a mat. A ritual mat. An ie toga, made from finely woven pandanus leaves, fitted out with mother of pearl and pale fuiono – nautilus shell, and feathers. And it was black, or used to be – not like any I’d ever seen. And there was a squid pattern woven into the fabric – you know cephalopods are considered sacred creatures, powerful beings with senses beyond other marine species.”

“The eight arms extend to the farthest reaches of the Polynesian triangle – Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island,” Wei murmured, staring off to the sea. “The octopus is a symbol of navigation and exploration. So you think this was tribute? To the gods? To Pulotu?”

“I think maybe that was the destination. I think he – or a maybe a whole crew – got it into their heads to find Pulotu, maybe confront the gods. Look at the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in 2022, the massive ash plume, the tsunami it generated. Then think about the impact a volcanic eruption woulda had on the islands – the Taupo Eruption in 232 A.D., the most powerful eruption in the last 5,000 years. And war – Tongan warriors invaded Samoa around 950 A.D., Samoa and Fiji had their issues and power struggles over the centuries, and that doesn’t even touch the inter-tribal battles both on the island and with neighboring islands. The Southeast hurricanes, the wildfires in California and, Jesus, Lahaina, Musk and his buddies. You don’t think there are a few million folks out there who’d love a face-to-face with God. Maybe this was a divine fact-finding mission, Mohammed going to the mountain.”

Wei was acutely aware of the spiritual dimensions of Pan-Asian art, but liked to keep theological speculation out of her scholarship. “So how does Rex Masau come into this? For that matter, where does a marine biologist come into this?”

“Last question first. This cloak, this ie toga, is black, or originally was. Black, of course, symbolizing power, formality, the connection between our ancestors and the spiritual world.”

“Makes sense,” Will shrugged, swirling his new mai tai.

“Bruh. The ancestors used natural dyes, usually the soot of burnt candlenut kernels for black.”

“But picture a gift to the gods. Something special, something imbued with spiritual energy and power. Squid ink?”

“Squid ink. I could tell the minute I saw it – octopus ink tends to be flat black, cuttlefish brown, and squid ink blue-black. And, I’m hoping, a very special squid ink. Protected as the cloak was, in a sealed container, in the frigid, relatively dry Aleutian mountains, it was in amazing shape. The color was still vivid, if you can call black vivid. And if the color has lasted over the centuries, there’s an off-chance something else might have been preserved.”

“No fucking way,” Will breathed, belatedly glancing contritely to the millennial parents at the next table. “DNA?”

“Bruh.” Knuckles again collided. “Here’s the thing. You remember I said climate shifts are pushing ‘new’ species out of the depths and into open waters? Well, we’ve discovered a number of ‘new’ cephalopod species just over the last few years. The Promachoteuthis squid was caught on video for the first time near the Nazca Ridge, and we’re finding new varieties of pygmy squid on a regular basis.”

Wei’s eyes now glowed, and she finally speared a wad of salmon and tomato. “Major volcanic events, atmospheric ash, oceanic disruptions can have the same effect on species distribution. What if a rare, unknown squid species shows up in your net, on your spear, washed up onshore, just as you’re contemplating the wrath of the gods? What better tribute for the gods?”

Ioane swiped left, and displayed a photo of Will and a smaller, tanned woman displaying a fringed, faded indigo mat with only the customary geometrical patterns woven presumably with red collared lory feathers to confirm its Samoan origins. The biologist flipped through subsequent closeups of the artfully wrought blossoms and interlocking diamonds, the fine and even weave of the pandanus cloth, and the ie toga’s most striking distinction. It obviously was the product of a village weaving house, and likely a communal effort. The dyeing alone would have been a herculean task. The painstakingly wrought nightmare squid at the center of the mat first appeared abstractual, but there was something familiar about it, late-night YouTube-wise.

“Vampire squid,” Ioane supplied, as if he had developed a telepathic link with Wei. “Well, not exactly a squid – it belongs to its own order apart from other cephalopods, Vampyromorphida, because of two long retractile filaments located between the first two pairs of dorsal arms. Of course, you gotta take literary license and scale into account, but I think this is a wholly different species, maybe another survivor of the order, maybe a true squid. There are significant morphological differences. Here’s the deal, though – it would take more than 100 ‘squid’ – maybe 200 – to yield enough ink to dye an ’ie toga this size.”

“Look what the tsunami dragged in,” Will quipped. Bro bumping ensued.

“Or melting ice caps and current shifts,” Ioane added. “A local biologist contacted the Institute a month ago. A pair of previously unclassified specimens washed up along the Apolima Strait, and a fishing crew on Upolu snared a third. Anatomically different from Vampyromorphida – definitely in the suborder Decapodiformes with other squids. But an argument could be made that this is our logo toga squid.”

Wei felt her heartrate accelerate, then frowned. “That’s awesome. But why would one make that argument?”

“That, tuafafine, is where Rex Masau comes in. See, he helped pay the freight for the Aleutians expedition, and after a few greased palms, he wound up with one of the most biologically and culturally significant souvenirs ever.”

To be continued