It's true, damn it, I feel like insisting. I've smoked pot exactly three times in my life, the first two times here on O`ahu with my graduate school buddy Mike. The first person to offer me a toke was Phil—in his office, the day we met. A shocked newlywed from rural Oklahoma, I declined. “I didn't come all the way to Hawai`i for that,” I explained to Mary that same evening. After all, we'd come here to start a life together. And what a start we'd had: a four thousand mile champagne jumbo jet ride to an island in the middle of the blue Pacific. And not just for a honeymoon, for two full years of graduate school. But we were insensitive as well as young: amused by local residents' pidgin English, slow to learn how to get along. In fact, we did not learn. Not that first trip, anyway. I didn't begin to learn such things until I'd dropped out of the M.A. program here and moved back to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to finish grad school in a more familiar environment . . .
        No.
        Not true. That wasn't the reason we left Hawai`i, because we didn't fit in over here. We retreated to familiar territory because we didn't fit each other.
        If I'd danced with you, Mary, would things have been different?
        How does anyone learn how to learn? In Stillwater, surrounded once again by the twangy Okie voices of my youth, I began to listen to Hawai`i. Though the life Mary and I started there had expired, the voices of the islands continued to speak to me. Their rhythms echoed in my head until at last they drove me to the university library, where I read O. A. Bushnell, Milton Murayama, Susan Nunes, Darrell Lum, and others who taught me how to listen. By the time Mary and I finally returned to Hawai`i, the night of the Elephant Gang, I was ready.
        But to truly learn, one has to do more than listen. Even lying side-by-side with a blanket over our heads, our wrists tied behind our backs, Mary and I still didn't fit.
        I've always told people I'd never written about that night because beneath its surface the whole incident was uninteresting, its lessons obvious, like the dull ironies of an action/adventure movie. But maybe I've been looking beneath the wrong surfaces . . .

        In darkness, the side of my face pressed against a floor that is either soft or hard, I listen to Ella croon, her elegant voice muffled by the blanket covering my head. In the background I can hear the gunmen move about the apartment, searching, overturning things, spilling others. The noise of their destruction grows fainter as they move into adjoining rooms. Although there's no need, I close my eyes as I consider the possibilities:
        A. The gunmen find no pot, loot the house, then leave.
        B. The gunmen find no pot, grow angry, take revenge.
        C. One of us does something unimaginable.

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