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. *

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. Just, if you say this to anybody, you kill that Crazy Horse you’re hiding inside. So, you walk around with this knowledge that he’s there if you ever need him. But, also, you try not to need him.

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

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.

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.

I think this is where a lot of Indian stories usually end, with the moon or a deer or a star coming down, making everything whole again. Those stories were all a long time ago, though. That was before we all grew up.