a kind of flight

from there there by tommy orange

"you know what's funny? i'm all, like, street and shit in real life. but online i don't talk like that, like i am now, so it feels weird to. online i try to sound smarter than i am. i mean i choose what i type carefully, cuz that's all people know about me. what i type, what i post. it's pretty weird on there. here. the way you don't know who people are. you just get their avatar names. some profile picture. but if you post cool shit, say cool shit, people like you. did i tell you about the community i got into? the name of the place, the online community is: vunderkode. it's fucking norwegian. you probably don't know what code is. i got way into it after you died. i didn't feel like going out or going to school or nothing.

when you spend enough time online, if you're looking, you can find some cool shit. i don't see it as that much different from what you did. figuring out a way around a big fucking bully system that only gives those that came from money or power the means to make it."

"'do you know how many indian women go missing every year? geraldine says.
'do you?' i say.
'no, but i heard a high number once and the real number's probably even higher.'
'i saw something too, someone posted about women up in canada.'
'it's not just canada, it's all over. there's a secret war on women going on in the world. secret even to us. secret even though we know it,' geraldine says. she rolls down her window and lights a smoke. i light one too.
'every single place we get stuck out on the road,' she says. 'they take us, then leave us out here, leave us to dim to bone, then get all the way forgotten.' she flicks her cigarette out the window. she only likes a cigarette for the first few drags.
'i always think of the men who do that kinda thing like, i know they're out there somewhere --'
'and paul,' she says.
'you know what he's going through. he's not who we're talking about.'
'you're not wrong. but the difference between the men doing it and your average violent drunk is not as big as you think. then you've got the sick pigs in high places who pay for our bodies on the black market with bitcoin, someone way up at the top who gets off on listening to the recorded screams of women like us being ripped apart, knocked against the cement floors in hidden rooms --'
'jesus,' i say.
'what? you don't think it's real? the people who run this shit are real-life monsters. the people you never see. what they want is more and more, and when that isn't enough, they want what can't be gotten easily, the recorded screams of dying indian women, maybe even a taxidermied torso, a collection of indian women's heads, there's probably some floating in tanks with blue lights behind them in a secret office on the top floor of an office building in midtown manhattan.'
'you've given this some thought,' i say.
'i meet with a lotta women,' she says. 'trapped by violence. they have kids to think about. they can't just leave, with the kids, no money, no relatives. i have to talk to these women about options. i have to talk them into going to shelters. i have to hear about when the men accidentally go too far. so no, i'm not telling you that you should go back. i'm taking you to the bus station. but i'm saying you shouldn't be out here on the side of the highway at night. i'm saying you should have texted me, asked me for a ride.'"

"your dad hardly ever talked about any of it, being indian or growing up on the rez, or even what he felt like now that he's a certifiable urban indian. except sometimes. when he felt like it. out of nowhere.

you'd be riding in his red ford truck to blockbuster to rent a movie. you'd be listening to your dad's peyote tapes. the tape-staticky gourd-rattle and kettle-drum boom. he liked to play it loud. you couldn't stand how noticeable the sound was. how noticeably indian your dad was. you'd ask if you could turn it off. you'd make him turn off his tapes. you'd put on 106 kmel - rap or r&b. but then he'd try to dance to that. he'd stick his big indian lips out to embarrass you, stick one flat hand out and stab at the air in rhythm just to mess with you. that's when you'd turn the music off altogether. and that was when you might hear a story from your dad about his childhood. about how he used to pick cotton with his grandparents for a dime a day or the time an owl threw rocks at him and his friends from a tree or the time his great-grandma split a tornado in two with a prayer.

the chip you carry has to do with being born and raised in oakland. a concrete chip, a slab really, heavy on one side, the half side, the side not white. as for your mom's side, as for your whiteness, there's too much and not enough there to know what to do with. you're from a people who took and took and took and took. and from a people taken. you were both and neither. when you took baths, you'd stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub. . .

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 wouldn'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."

"'now you young men in here, listen up. don't get too excited out there. that dance is your prayer. so don't rush it, and don't dance how you practice. there's only one way for an indian man to express himself. it's that dance that comes from all the way back there. all the way over there. you learn that dance to keep it, to use it. whatever you got going on in your life, you don't leave it all in here, like them players do when they go out on that field, you bring it with you, you dance it. any other way you try to say what you really mean, it's just gonna make you cry. don't act like you don't cry. that's what we do. indian men. we're crybabies. you know it. but not out there,' he says, and points to the door of the locker room.

a couple of the older guys make this low huh sound, then another couple of guys say aho in unison. orvil looks around the room, and he sees all these men dressed up like him. they all needed to dress up to look indian too. there's something like the shaking of feathers he felt somewhere between his heart and his stomach. he knows what the guy said is true. to cry is to waste the feeling. he needs to dance with it. crying is for when there's nothing else left to do. this is a good day, this is a good feeling, something he needs, to dance the way he needs to dance to win the prize. but no. not the money. to dance for the first time like he learned, from the screen but also from practice. from the dancing came the dancing.

there are hundreds of dancers in front of him. behind him. to his left and right. he's surrounded by the variegation of color and pattern specific to indianness, gradients from one color to the next, geometrically sequenced sequined shapes on shiny and leathered fabrics, the quill, bead, ribbon, plume, feathers from magpies, hawks, crows, eagles. there are crowns and gourds and bells and drumsticks, metal cones, sticked and arrowed flickers, shag anklets, and hairpipe bandoliers, barrettes and bracelets, and bustles that fan out in perfect circles. he watches people point out each other's regalia. 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. to get to that feeling, to get to that prayer, you have to trick yourself out of thinking altogether. out of acting. out of everything. to dance as if time only mattered insofar as you could keep a beat to it, in order to dance in such a way that time itself discontinued, disappeared, ran out, or into the feeling of nothingness under your feet when you jumped, when you dipped your shoulders like you were trying to dodge the very air you were suspended in, your feathers a flutter of echoes centuries old, your whole being a kind of flight."