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.

My heart pounded in my chest with what I wanted to call fear but what I know now was actually hope.

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.

They’re questions a nine-year-old would ask, I know, not a sixth-grader, but I think when you’re talking about your dad, you kind of go back in years—the more you become a kid, the more he gets to be the dad, right?

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.

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.

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.

It’s hard to know where to start, exactly. Each thing has one thing before it, so I can go all the way back to when I was twelve again, easy.

Once, years ago, in the old-time Indian days, a father died, but then he came back. He was different when he came back, he was hungry, he was selfish, but that’s just because he already had all that inside him when he died, I know. It’s because he carried it with him into the lake that night.

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.