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.

In death, he had become what he never could in life. And now he was back. Or, he had been for a few steps. 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.

“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.

It was the worst thing ever. It was my dad. I was killing him again, wasn’t I?

He’d clawed and fought his way back to us, and he’d come back better, he’d come back in the regalia he’d been supposed to wear, before everything else found him.

Just, if that rope breaks and the ball rolls under the house, through that gap the wind blew in the skirt, let’s wait until tomorrow to get it back, maybe? I don’t want to be under there when it’s dark. Not anymore. Dark places like that, they’re where we end up confronting ourselves. Give me the daylight, please, where I can be oblivious to whatever’s roiling and writhing in my chest, in my thoughts. And in this little book, I suppose.