Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

To sleepwalk is to be inhabited, yes, but not by something else, so much. What you’re inhabited by, what’s kicking one foot in front of the other, it’s yourself. It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think it’s under any real compulsion to, finally. If anything, being inhabited by yourself like that, what it tells you is that there’s a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out. But it can only get that done when your defenses are down. When you’re sleeping.

That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.

You can leave the reservation, but your income level will still land you in a reservation house, won’t it? I’d heard my mom say this on the phone once, and it had stuck to the inside of my head in a way I knew I was going to be looking over at that part of the inside of my skull for the rest of my life, probably.

This is something all Indians think, I think: that, yeah, we got colonized, yeah, we got all our lands stolen, yeah yeah yeah, all that usual stuff. But still, inside us, hiding—no, hibernating, waiting, curled up, is some Crazy Horse kind of fighter. Some killer who’s smart and wily and wears a secret medicine shirt that actually works.

If you can delay pain, you delay it, don’t you? Even when it’s inevitable. Especially when there’s teeth involved.

“I’m all right,” I told her. This is the lie, when you’re twelve. And all the other years, too. You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.

Indians, we don’t have guardian angels—if we did, they’d have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it’s supposed to be an animal. Maybe when you need more, though, maybe then you get a person.

Standing there, I promised myself that if I ever had kids, I was going to be different. It’s a promise every Indian kid makes at some point. You mean it when you say it, though. You mean it so hard.

Every fourth person on our reservation, that’s their name, like the same stupid person is trying life after life until he gets it right at last.

This is what it’s like to kill your father. This is what it’s like to kill everything your father could have been, if only the world hadn’t found him, done its thing to him.

I’d never smoked—you need your lungs if you dance—but after that night, I kind of understood why Mom always had. It makes you feel like you have some control. You know it’s bad for you, but you’re doing it on purpose, too. You’re breathing that in of your own volition, because you want to.

When you don’t have control of anything else, when a car can just go cartwheeling off into the horizon, then to even have just a little bit of control, it can feel good. Especially if you hold that smoke in for a long time, only let it out bit by bit.

When I was twelve years old, I mapped the interior of our home. Now, sitting across from my little brother, I’m sketching out a map of the human heart, I guess. There’s more dark hallways than I knew. Rooms I thought I’d never have to enter. But I will. For him, for Collin, I’ll walk in and pull the door shut behind me, never come back out.