There There

by Tommy Orange

In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times. —BERTOLT BRECHT

you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay—which

The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.

But what we are is what our ancestors did. How they survived. We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.

We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread—which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t traditional, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed.

Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.

Karen told me I don’t have to worry about what they try to tell me about intelligence. She said people with FAS are on a spectrum, have a wide range of intelligences, that the intelligence test is biased, and that I got strong intuition and street smarts, that I’m smart where it counts, which I already knew, but when she told me it felt good, like I didn’t really know it until she said it like that.

Doom was the only music on there. I knew I liked him when I heard the line “Got more soul than a sock with a hole.” What I liked is that I understood all the meanings to it right away, like instantly. It meant soul, like having a hole in a sock gives the sock character, means it’s worn through, gives it a soul, and also like the bottom of your foot showing through, to the sole of your foot. It was a small thing, but it made me feel like I’m not stupid. Not slow. Not bottom rung.

But who doesn’t fucking want money? It’s about why you want money, how you get it, then what you do with it that matters. Money didn’t never do shit to no one. That’s people.

Maxine makes me read her Indian stuff that I don’t always get. I like it, though, because when I do get it, I get it way down at that place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn’t feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and like it’s not gonna hurt as much anymore.

One of the first things Dene learned when he first started taking the bus in Oakland was that you don’t stare, you don’t even glance, but you don’t totally not look either. Out of respect you acknowledge. You look and don’t look. Anything to avoid the question: Whatchyoulookingat? There is no good answer for this question. Being asked this question means you already fucked up.

Self-loathing hits you fast sometimes. He doesn’t know for a second if he might jump, get down there on the tracks, wait for that fast weight to come get rid of him. He’d probably jump late, bounce off the side of the train, and just fuck up his face.

“There There,” by Radiohead. The hook is “Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.” Before

He looked off, out the living-room window, across the street, or farther, off to where the sun had set, or past that, back at his life maybe, and then he got this look in his eyes, it was something Dene had seen in his mom’s eyes, something that looked like remembering and dreading at once.

“We don’t have time, Nephew, time has us. It holds us in its mouth like an owl holds a field mouse. We shiver. We struggle for release, and then it pecks out our eyes and intestines for sustenance and we die the death of field mice.”

she just smiled and watched the long gray Oakland streets stream by the bus window like it was an old movie she liked but had seen too many times to notice anymore.

“He was hunting bear one time, but then found this real scraggly old hungry bear, and he refused to shoot it. Then in the newspapers, there was a comic about that hunting story that made it seem like Mr. Roosevelt was merciful, a real nature lover, that kinda thing. Then they made the little stuffed bear and named it Teddy’s Bear. Teddy’s Bear became teddy bear. What they didn’t say was that he slit that old bear’s throat. It’s that kind of mercy they don’t want you to know about.”

Us bears, you Indians, we been through a lot. They tried to kill us. But then when you hear them tell it, they make history seem like one big heroic adventure across an empty forest. There were bears and Indians all over the place. Sister, they slit all our throats.”

The trouble with believing is you have to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief.

This Edwin Black, me here on the toilet, can’t get there, on the internet, because yesterday I dropped my phone in the toilet, and my computer froze, same fucking day it just stopped, not even the mouse cursor moved, no spinning wheels of promised load. No reboot after unplug, just a sudden and mute black screen—my face reflected in it, staring first in horror at the computer dying, then at my face reacting to seeing my face react to the computer dying. A little part of me died then, seeing my face, thinking about this sick addiction, all this time I’ve spent doing almost nothing.

There’s something about seeing Johnny Depp fail so badly that gives me strength.

I type “the brain and constipation” and hit Enter. I click on several links, scroll through several pages. I read a lot and come away with nothing. This is how time skips. Links just lead to links that can lead you all the way back to the twelfth century.

The internet is like a brain trying to figure out a brain. I depend on the internet for recall now. There’s no reason to remember when it’s always just right there, like the way everyone used to know phone numbers by heart and now can’t even remember their own. Remembering itself is becoming old-fashioned.

Does what we try most to avoid come after us because we paid too much attention to it with our worry?

I say, and feel a pull from a limb gone loose. While I was talking something in me reached back to remember all that I’d once hoped I’d be, and placed it next to the feeling of being who I am now. “I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup,” I say. And I don’t want to but I really mean it.

I settle myself on the floor and weakly attempt some push-ups. I roll over and try a sit-up. My top half won’t budge. I think about my college days. About how long ago that was and how hopeful I’d been. How impossible my current life would have seemed to me then.

Karen tells him to stay positive. But you have to achieve positivity in order to maintain it.

This world is a mean curveball thrown by an overly excited, steroid-fueled kid pitcher, who no more cares about the integrity of the game than he does about the Costa Ricans who painstakingly stitch the balls together by hand.

He read and kept his head down. Let the years dissolve the way they could when you were somewhere else inside them, in a book, on the block, in a dream.

Being bipolar is like having an ax to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of.

For how many years had there been federally funded programs trying to prevent suicide with billboards and hotlines? It was no wonder it was getting worse. You can’t sell life is okay when it’s not.

Jacquie had never known what to do with a compliment.

Jacquie’s latest relapse had not left burn holes in her life. She didn’t lose her job, and she hadn’t wrecked her car. She was sober again, and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.

Jacquie kneeled in front of the minifridge. In her head she heard her mom say, “The spider’s web is a home and a trap.” And even though she never really knew what her mom meant by it, she’d been making it make sense over the years, giving it more meaning than her mom probably ever intended. In this case Jacquie was the spider, and the minifridge was the web. Home was to drink. To drink was the trap.

What she really wanted was that cigarette after six beers. She wanted sleep to come easy like it could when she drank.

The room was a mess of fluorescent buzzing, a smallish conference room with a whiteboard on the wall in front, off-whitish light, which encased them all in its flatness—which made everything feel like it was happening a decade ago on TV.

My daughter died, left her three sons behind, but I left them too. I’m trying to make my way back, but like I said, eleven days. It’s just, it’s that you get stuck, and then the more stuck you get, the more stuck you get.”

“We all been through a lot we don’t understand in a world made to either break us or make us so hard we can’t break even when it’s what we need most to do.”

“Getting fucked up seems like the only thing left to do,” Harvey went on. “It’s not the alcohol. There’s not some special relationship between Indians and alcohol. It’s just what’s cheap, available, legal. It’s what we have to go to when it seems like we have nothing else left. I did it too. For a long time. But I stopped telling the story I’d been telling myself, about how that was the only way, because of how hard I had it, and how hard I was, that story about self-medicating against the disease that was my life, my bad lot, history. When we see that the story is the way we live our lives, only then can we start to change, a day at a time. We try to help people like us, try to make the world around us a little better. It’s then that the story begins. I want to say here that I’m sorry for who I was.”

Then, without even thinking about it, she got up and went to the minifridge. She opened it. It was full of shots, beer, little bottles of wine. At first this made her happy. The idea of feeling good and comfortable, safe, and all the first few, the first six could do, and then the inevitable home stretch to twelve, sixteen, because the web stuck to you everywhere you reached once you were trapped, once you started.

She walked back to the empty pool, climbed in, and stayed under until it hurt. Every time she came up, she checked on the towel bundle. There’s an ache when you keep yourself from breathing. A relief when you come up for air. It was the same when you drank after telling yourself you wouldn’t. Both broke at a point. Both gave and took. Jacquie went under and swam back and forth taking breaths when she needed them.

“Lony,” Loother says in that way an older brother can take you down by just saying your name.

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters. —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?

If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.

We are Little Cloud, Littleman, Loneman, Bull Coming, Madbull, Bad Heart Bull, Jumping Bull, Bird, Birdshead, Kingbird, Magpie, Eagle, Turtle, Crow, Beaver, Youngblood, Tallman, Eastman, Hoffman, Flying Out, Has No Horse, Broken Leg, Fingernail, Left Hand, Elk Shoulder, White Eagle, Black Horse, Two Rivers, Goldtooth, Goodblanket, Goodbear, Bear Shield, Yellow Man, Blindman, Roanhorse, Bellymule, Ballard, Begay, Yazzie. We are Dixon, Livingston, Tsosie, Nelson, Oxendene, Harjo, Armstrong, Mills, Tallchief, Banks, Rogers, Bitsilly, Bellecourt, Means, Good Feather, Bad Feather, Little Feather, Red Feather.

We won’t have come expecting gunfire. A shooter. As many times as it happens, as we see it happen on our screens, we still walk around in our lives thinking: No, not us, that happens to them, the people on the other side of the screen, the victims, their families, we don’t know those people, we don’t even know people who know those people, we’re once and twice removed from most of what we see on the other side of the screen, especially that awful man, always a man, we watch and feel the horror, the unbelievable act, for a day, for two whole days, for a week, we post and click links and like and don’t like and repost and then, and then it’s like it didn’t happen, we move on, the next thing comes. We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything.

We’ve expected the shooter to appear in our lives in the same way we know death is and always has been coming for us, with its decisive scythe, its permanent cut.

Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.

Calvin sits down next to the big guy and gives him a slight, general whatsup-type head nod. The guy lifts his hand and waves, then seems to immediately regret the wave because he puts his hand back down as fast as it went up and gets out his phone like everyone does now when they want to leave without leaving.