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."

opal

from there there by tommy orange

"opal is on her route. same old same old one. but she's paying attention to where she steps. opal doesn't step on cracks when she walks. she walks carefully because she's always had the sense that there are holes everywhere, cracks you can slip between -- the world, after all, is porous. 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. opal drops mail in slots and in boxes trying to remember which spoon she'd eaten with earlier. she has lucky and unlucky spoons. in order for the lucky ones to work, you have to keep the unlucky ones with them, and you can't look to see what you're getting when you pull one out of the drawer. her luckiest spoon is one with a floral pattern that runs up the handle to the neck.

she knocks on wood to cancel out something she's said she wants or doesn't want to happen, or even if she just thinks it, she'll find wood and knock on it twice. opal likes numbers. numbers are consistent. you can count on them. but for opal, certain numbers are good and others are bad. even numbers are generally better than odd ones, and numbers that have some kind of mathematical relationship are good too. 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 buys scratchers and lottery tickets when the jackpot gets high enough. her superstition is one she would never call superstition for fear it would lose its power.

opal is done with the odd side of the street. when she crosses, a car stops for her - the woman inside impatiently waves opal across like she's doing all of humanity a favor. opal wants to lift her arm, lift a single finger as she crosses, but instead she slow jogs across in answer to the woman's impatience and feigned generosity. opal hates herself for the jog. for the smile that came to her face before she could stop it, turn it upside down, straighten it out before it was too late.

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 she can't move. 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. . .

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. it's to prepare them for a world made for native people not to live but to die in, shrink, disappear. she needs to push them harder because it will take more for them to succeed than someone who is not native. it's because she failed to do anything more than disappear herself."

that thing we want to name but can't

from there there by tommy orange

"dene walks to the next train car. he stands at the doors and looks out the window. the train floats alongside the freeway next to cars. each of their speeds is different: the speed of the cars is short, disconnected, sporadic. dene and the train slither along the tracks as one movement and speed. there's something cinematic about their variable speeds, like a moment in a movie that makes you feel something for reasons you can't explain. something too big to feel, underneath, and inside, too familiar to recognize, right there in front of you at all times. dene puts his headphones on, shuffles the music on his phone, skips several songs and stays on 'there there,' by radiohead. the hook is 'just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there.'"

"the trouble with believing is you have to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief. i've scraped out the little bowl of faith i keep by the open window my mind has become ever since the internet got inside it, made me a part of it. i'm not joking. i feel as if i am going through withdrawal. i've read about residential internet rehab facilities in pennsylvania. they have digital-detox retreats and underground desert compounds in arizona. my problem hasn't just been with gambling. or gambling. or incessantly scrolling down and refreshing my social media pages. or the endless search to find good new music. it's all of it. . .

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. four years of sitting, staring into my computer at the internet. i guess if you don't count sleep, it's three, if you don't count the dreaming, but i dream of the internet, of keyword search phrases that make complete sense in the dream, are the key to the dream's meaning, but which make no sense in the morning, like all the dreams i've ever had."

"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. this is how it can all of a sudden be six in the morning, with my mom knocking on the door before she goes to work at the indian center -- where she keeps trying to get me to apply for a job. . .

lately i've become a little obsessed with the brain. with trying to find explanations for everything as it relates to the brain and its parts. there's almost too much information out there. 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."

"for how many years had i been dying to find out what the other half of me was? how many tribes had i made up when asked in the meantime? i'd gotten through four years as a native american studies major. dissecting tribal histories, looking for signs, something that might resemble me, something that felt familiar. i'd made it through two years of grad school, studying comparative literature with an emphasis on native american literature. i wrote my thesis on the inevitable influence of blood quantum policies on modern native identity and the literature written by mixed-blood native authors that influenced identity in native cultures. all without knowing my tribe. always defending myself. like i'm not native enough. i'm as native as obama is black. it's different though. for natives. i know. i don't know how to be. every possible way i think that it might look for me to say i'm native seems wrong."

"'what i'm here to talk about is how our whole approach since day one has been like this: kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. and we think the problem is that they're jumping. this is what we've done: we've tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. we've boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. they're making the decision that it's better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they've inherited. and we're either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths, just like i did with my brother, or we're absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up. i'm in suicide prevention now. i've had fifteen relatives commit suicide over the course of my life, not counting my brother. i had one community i was working with recently in south dakota tell me they were grieved out. that was after experiencing seventeen suicides in their community in just eight months. but how do we instill in our children the will to live? at these conferences. and in the offices. in the emails and at the community events, there has to be an urgency, a do-whatever-at-any-cost sort of spirit behind what we do. or fuck the programs, maybe we should send the money to the families themselves, who need it and know what to do with it, since we all know what that money goes toward, salaries and conferences like this one. i'm sorry. i get paid outta that shit too, and actually, shit, i'm not sorry, this issue shouldn't be met with politeness or formality. we can't get lost in the career advancements and grant objectives, the day-to-day grind, as if we have to do what we do. we choose what we do, and in that choice comes the community. we are choosing for them. all the time. that's what these kids are feeling. they have no control. guess what kinda control they do have? we need to be about what we're always saying we're about. and if we can't, and we're really just about ourselves, we need to step aside, let somebody else from the community who really cares, who'll really do something, let them come in and help. fuck all the rest.'"

"'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. . . i get that shame too. the kind that's made of more years than you know you have left to live. that shame that makes you wanna say fuck it and just go back to drinking as a means to an end. i'm sorry to all the people i hurt all that time i was too fucked up to see what i was doing. there's no excuse. apologies don't even mean as much as just. . . just acknowledging that you fucked up, hurt people, and that you don't wanna do that anymore. not to yourself either. that's sometimes the hardest part.'"

"we are indians and native americans, american indians and native american indians, north american indians, natives, ndns and ind'ins, status indians and non-status indians, first nations indians and indians so indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all. we are urban indians and indigenous indians, rez indians and indians from mexico and central and south america. we are alaskan native indians, native hawaiians, and european expatriate indians, indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized indian kinds of indians. we are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. we are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. undoable math. insignificant remainders."

 "dene convinced blue to let calvin do his interview for the storytelling project during work hours. calvin keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs and pulling at his hat by the bill. dene thinks calvin is nervous, but then dene is nervous, he is always nervous, so maybe it's projection. but projection as a concept is a slippery slope because everything could be projection. he is regularly subject to solipsism's recursive, drowning affect."

*                                *                                  *

"'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.' fina flipped on her blinker and switched lanes to pass a slow truck in the right lane. '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's 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.'

i turned my head. looked down at the gray streak of road. it hit me somewhere in the middle of my chest. all that she'd said was true. it hit me in the middle, where it all comes together like a knot. . .

'so? we all fuck up. it's how we come back from it that matters.'

'i don't know what the fuck i'm supposed to do then. i can't get him back, i can't get them back. i don't know what the fuck any of this is about.'

'you're not supposed to,' she said. 'you're not ever supposed to know. not all the way. that's what makes the whole thing work the way it does. we can't know. that's what makes us keep going.'"

everywhere or nowhere

from there there by tommy orange

"in 1621, colonists invited massasoit, the chief of the wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. massasoit came with ninety of his men. that meal is why we still eat a meal together in november. celebrate it as a nation. but that wasn't a thanksgiving meal. it was a land-deal meal. two years later there was another, similar meal meant to symbolize eternal friendship. two hundred indians dropped dead that night from an unknown poison. . .

in 1637, anywhere from four to seven hundred pequot gathered for their annual green corn dance. colonists surrounded their village, set it on fire, and shot any pequot who tried to escape. the next day the massachusetts bay colony had a feast in celebration, and the governor declared it a day of thanksgiving. thanksgivings like these happened everywhere, whenever there were what we have to call 'successful massacres.' at one such celebration in manhattan, people were said to have celebrated by kicking the heads of pequot people through the streets like soccer balls."

"getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. but the city made us new, and we made it ours. we didn't get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. we found one another, started up indian centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork. we bought and rented homes, slept on the streets, under freeways; we went to school, joined the armed forces, populated indian bars in the fruitvale in oakland and in the mission in san francisco. we lived in boxcar villages in richmond. we made art and we made babies and we made way for our people to go back and forth between reservation and city. we did not move to cities to die. the sidewalks and streets, the concrete, absorbed our heaviness. the glass, metal, rubber, and wires, the speed, the hurtling masses -- the city took us in. we were not urban indians then. this was part of the indian relocation act, which was part of the indian termination policy, which was and is exactly what it sounds like. make them look and act like us. become us. and so disappear. but it wasn't just like that. plenty of us came by choice, to start over, to make money, or for a new experience. some of us came to cities to escape the reservation. we stayed after fighting in the second world war. after vietnam too. we stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can't leave a war once you've been, you can only keep it at bay -- which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets. 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.

plenty of us are urban now. if not because we live in cities, then because we live on the internet. inside the high-rise of multiple browser windows. they used to call us sidewalk indians. called us citified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees, apples."

"urban indians were the generation born in the city. we've been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. an urban indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. all our relations. the process that brings anything to its current form - chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise - doesn't make the product not a product of the living earth. buildings, freeways, care -- are those not of the earth? were they shipped in from mars, the moon? is it because they're processed, manufactured, or that we handle them? are we so different? were we at one time not something else entirely, homo sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable pre-bang quantum theory? cities form in the same way as galaxies. urban indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. we came to know the downtown oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest. 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. we ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. being indian has never been about returning to the land. the land is everywhere or nowhere."

"'how can i not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when i am least expecting it?' - javier marías"

"one time she used the word devastating after i finished reading a passage from her favorite author - louise erdrich. it was something about how life will break you. how that's the reason we're here, and to go sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples fall and pile around you, wasting all that sweetness."