There There

by Tommy Orange

Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn’t have a single drinking story she’d want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it. Something she always notices is how much confidence and lack of self-doubt people have. Take Harvey here. Telling this terrible story like it’s captivating. There are so many people she comes across who seem born with confidence and self-esteem. Jacquie can’t remember a day going by when at some point she hadn’t wished she could burn her life down.

Jacquie leans her head against the window. She watches the white highway line stream and waver. She watches the lines of telephone wires rise and fall in waves. Her thoughts wander, loosen, reach out aimlessly. She thinks about her back teeth, her molars, how they hurt every time she bites into something too cold or hot. She thinks about how long it’s been since she’s been to the dentist. She wonders about her mom’s teeth. She thinks about genetics and blood and veins and why a heart keeps beating. She looks at her head leaned against her head’s dark reflection in the window. She blinks an erratic pattern of blinks, which ends with her eyes closed. She falls asleep to the low drone of the road and the engine’s steady hum.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. —JAMES BALDWIN

She lives by a superstition she would never admit to. It’s a secret she holds so tight to her chest she never notices it. She lives by it, like breathing.

She reduces addresses to a single number by adding them together, then judges the neighbors based on their reduced number. Numbers don’t lie. Four and eight are her favorites. Three and six are no good. She delivers mail on the odd side first, always having believed it’s best to get the bad out of the way before getting to the good.

Bad luck or just bad shit happening to you in life can make you secretly superstitious, can make you want to take some control or take back some sense of control.

Opal is full of regrets, but not about things she’s done. That damn island, her mom, Ronald, and then the shuffling, stifling rooms and faces in foster care, in group homes after that. She regrets that they happened. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t cause them to happen. She figures she must deserve it in some way. But she couldn’t figure it out. So she bore those years, their weight, and the years bored a hole through the middle of her, where she tried to keep believing there was some reason to keep her love intact. Opal is stone solid, but there is troubled water that lives in her, that sometimes threatens to flood, to drown her—rise up to her eyes.

Sometimes it feels impossible to do anything. But that’s okay because she’s become quite good at getting lost in the doing of things. More than one thing at a time preferably. Like delivering mail and listening to an audiobook or music. The trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.

That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.

Opal regularly checks their phones while they sleep. She looks at what pictures and videos they take, their text messages, and their browser histories. None of them have shown signs of especially worrisome depravity yet. But it’s only a matter of time. Opal believes there is a dark curiosity alive in each of us. She believes we all do precisely what we think we can get away with. The way Opal sees it, privacy is for adults. You keep a close eye on your kids, you keep them in line.

“Go to sleep,” she said. The boys are afraid of Opal, like she was always afraid of her mom. Something about how brief and direct she is. Maybe hypercritical too, like her mom was hypercritical.

She’s no-nonsense with them because she believes life will do its best to get at you. Sneak up from behind and shatter you into tiny unrecognizable pieces. You have to be ready to pick everything up pragmatically, keep your head down and make it work. Death alone eludes hard work and hardheadedness. That and memory. But there’s no time and no good reason most of the time to look back. Leave them alone and memories blur into summary. Opal preferred to keep them there as just that.

But she’d met an Indian boy her age, and he made sense to Opal, he wasn’t weird or dark, or he was, but in the same ways Opal was.

A Cheyenne word: Veho. It means spider and trickster and white man.

There across the street from her is a brown-and-black tiger-striped pit bull baring its teeth and growling a growl so low she can feel it in her chest. The dog is collarless and time seems the same way here, time off its leash, ready to skip so fast she’ll be dead and gone before she knows it. A dog like this one has always been a possibility, just like death can show up anywhere, just like Oakland can bare its teeth suddenly and scare the shit out of you. But it’s not just poor old Opal anymore, it’s what would become of the boys if she were gone. Opal hears a man’s voice boom from down the street some name she can’t understand. The dog flinches at the sound of its name coming out of this man’s mouth. It cowers and turns around then scurries off toward the voice. The poor dog was probably just trying to spread the weight of its own abuse. There was no mistaking that flinch.

and it turns out that who you spend time with ends up mattering more than what you do with that time.

We both thought it was weird for someone we assumed was white to be smoking Newports. Neither one of us smoked cigarettes, but we smoked those, blasted the radio, and didn’t say a single word to each other the whole ride. There was something about that ride though. It was like we could put on someone else’s clothes, live in someone else’s house, drive their car, smoke their smokes—even if just for an hour or two. Once we made it deep enough east we knew we’d be fine. We parked it at the Coliseum BART Station parking lot and walked back to Manny’s house high on having gotten away with it so easily. The system scared you so you thought you had to follow the rules, but we were learning that that shit was fucking flimsy. You could do what you could get away with. That’s where it was at.

“Long time ago they didn’t have a name for the sun.” She pointed up to the sun, which was in front of us. “They couldn’t decide if it was a man or a woman or what. All the animals met about it, and a badger came out of a hole in the ground and called out the name, but as soon as he did, he ran. The other animals came after him. That badger went underground and stayed there. He was afraid they would punish him for naming it.”

“Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can’t, it’s like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it. The thing we most don’t want has a way of landing right on top of us. That badger medicine’s the only thing that stands a chance at helping. You gotta learn how to stay down there. Way deep down inside yourself, unafraid.”

“How do you feel?” “Like I wanna fucking kill him. For real.” “Why?” “What you mean why?” “He didn’t do any of it on purpose,” Fina said. “He’s lost.” “He fucked up.” “So did your brother.” “Six was part of that too.” “So? We all fuck up. It’s how we come back from it that matters.”

It was a real gun. As real as any gun. But it was white, and plastic, and I printed it from a 3-D printer in my room, which is the basement, which used to be Manny’s room. I still can’t think of him as gone. For now Manny’s not here or there. He’s in the middle of the middle, where you can only be when you can’t be anywhere.

didn’t even really know how much I wanted to say to you until the day you left.

Sadness came when the days got shorter at the end of summer. When the street got quiet without kids out anymore. In the color of that fleeting sky, sadness lurked. Sadness pounced, slid in between everything, anything it could find its way into, through sound, through you.

The drum group played on the first floor—in the community center. You walked into the room and, just as you did, they started singing. High-voiced wailing and howled harmonies that screamed through the boom of that big drum. Old songs that sang to the old sadness you always kept as close as skin without meaning to. The word triumph blipped in your head then. What was it doing there? You never used that word. This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song.

How you ended up getting fired was related to your drinking, which was related to your skin problems, which was related to your father, which was related to history.

Your dad was the kind of drunk who disappears weekends, lands himself in jail. He was the kind of drunk who had to stop completely. Who couldn’t have a drop. So you had it coming in a way. That need that won’t quit. That years-deep pit you were bound to dig, crawl into, struggle to get out of. Your parents maybe burned a too-deep, too-wide God hole through you. The hole was unfillable.

Coming out of your twenties you started to drink every night. There were many reasons for this. But you did it without a thought. Most addictions aren’t premeditated. You slept better. Drinking felt good.

But each and every bottle you bought was a medicine or a poison depending on whether you managed to keep them full enough. The method was unstable. Unsustainable. To drink enough but not too much for a drunk was like asking the evangelical not to say the name Jesus.

The throne you were building was made of moments, made of experiences in the State after excess drinking, made of leftover, unused drunkenness, kept overnight, dreamed, moon-soaked fumes you breathed into throne form, into a place you could sit. In the State you were just unhinged enough to not get in the way. The problem came from having to drink at all.

You feel a rush of sadness for your mom and her failed Christianity, for your failed family. How everyone lives in different states now. How you never see them. How you spend so much time alone. You want to cry and feel you might but know you can’t, that you shouldn’t. Crying ruins you. You gave it up long ago.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. —JEAN GENET

He is an old station wagon at a car show. He is a fraud. He tries to shake off the feeling of feeling like a fraud. He can’t allow himself to feel like a fraud because then he’ll probably act like one.

Blue’s favorite place to smoke a cigarette is in the car. She likes how the smoke escapes when all the windows are down. She lights one. She tries to at least say a little prayer every time she smokes. It makes her feel less guilty for smoking. She takes in a deep drag and holds it. She says thank you as she blows out the smoke.

Why did they stop going to games? Time only seems to have skipped, or to have sped by without you when you looked the other way. That’s what Opal had been doing. Closing her eyes and ears to the closing of her eyes and ears.

He doesn’t want to know what he knows but he knows. He feels the blood-warm wetness with his fingers when they reach for his stomach. He can’t move. He coughs and isn’t sure if what comes out of his mouth is blood or spit. He wants to hear the drum one more time. He wants to stand up, to fly away in all his bloodied feathers. He wants to take back everything he’s ever done. He wants to believe he knows how to dance a prayer and pray for a new world. He wants to keep breathing. He needs to keep breathing. He needs to remember that he needs to keep breathing.

Blue sits next to Jacquie, who’s looking down at that angle, at the ground, elbows to knees in that position you take when you’re waiting for death to leave the building, for your loved one to come out in a wheelchair with a broken smile, for a doctor with a sure step to come for you with good news.

But she doesn’t want to look up at the doctor’s face. She does and doesn’t want to know. She wants to stop time, have more time to pray, to prepare. But all time has ever done is to keep going. No matter what.

Tony hears Maxine singing in the kitchen again and then he’s there. He’s there and he’s four years old, the summer before going into kindergarten. He’s in the kitchen with Maxine. He’s not twenty-one-year-old Tony thinking about his four-year-old self—remembering. He’s just there again, all the way back to being four-year-old Tony. He’s on a chair helping her wash dishes. He’s dipping his hand into the sink and blowing bubbles at her out of the palm of his hand. She doesn’t think it’s funny but she doesn’t stop him. She keeps wiping the bubbles on the top of his head. He keeps asking her: What are we? Grandma, what are we?

There is a bird for every hole in him. Singing. Keeping him up. Keeping him from going. Tony remembers something his grandma said to him when she was teaching him how to dance. “You have to dance like birds sing in the morning,” she’d said, and showed him how light she could be on her feet. She bounced and her toes pointed in just the right way. Dancer’s feet. Dancer’s gravity. Tony needs to be light now. Let the wind sing through the holes in him, listen to the birds singing. Tony isn’t going anywhere. And somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he’ll always be, even now it is morning, and the birds, the birds are singing.