You don’t want to know why I was waiting outside Castle Hospital’s emergency room at  six in the morning, but Uber had told me to expect a red Cadillac driven by a man named Willy. “Oh Detroit,” I thought happily, anticipating a conversation full of memories. And then Cadillac drove up.

It didn’t use the driveway; it, with Willy, waited for me on the other side of the parking lot. I hauled myself up from the hospital’s wheelchair, walked over to the redness, and opened the door. Inside was a sign counseling me to close it carefully, and in the driver’s seat Willy wasn’t what I thought he’d be. He was an elderly local man seated among several thermoses, and from his rear view mirror hung a rosary. Morning sun tinged its red crystal beads, and all of Cadillac’s windows were open, with a cool wind blowing through.

From the T intersection at Castle Junction it’s a short straight drive back to my house in Hawaii Kai, via Waimanalo. But Willy didn’t drive down the T; instead, he turned left and headed toward downtown Honolulu on Pali Highway. I didn’t ask him to correct our course, because it was coming to me that I was embarked on a farewell tour. Sites were showing themselves to me for probably the first time and possibly the last time since I had had to lift my hands from the wheel forever after. Past us once more they came: woods, then the steep climb up Pali Highway to the cliffs; then the tunnel and the peak and the way back down the other side into the city. Again, again, the memory things in their morning light: the Korean consulate; Temple Emanuel; a ramshackle fundamentalist school where Haesun had applied for a librarian’s job right after we moved to Hawaii; the upcurving roofs of the replica of the Byodo-In Temple. Then the Buddhist Center and the on-ramp curving down and east into the morning traffic on Interstate H-1.

After H-1 ends, its continuation on Kalanianaole Highway is contraflowed in the early morning, with four of the six lanes coned to direct traffic west. Cadillac and I were bound east, slow in the remaining two lanes. At our speed there was no longer much air blowing through Cadillac’s windows, so for the first time I could hear what Willy had been paying his attention to.

It was Republican talk radio. “Oh I never knew that!” gushed the straight girl, and after that the man with the voice used his basso to stimulate and arouse. Together, the man and the girl began taking turns admiring Bobby Kennedy Jr. Those . . . senators . . . tried to yell at him, sneered the basso, but he showed them. By now the hospital was on the other side of the island.

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From Africa has come Elon Musk: now the richest and most mobile man in the world but also known for his eleven or so current children conceived by artificial insemination.

Also from Africa there came Aurlus Mabélé (1953-2020). He died during what, post-Bobby Jr., we may wind up calling the First Covid Pandemic. But while he was among us he fathered thirteen children.

Without apparatus, let us think.