by Tommy Orange
We drove for a while in silence, then Fina looked over at me. “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 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.
“Six have a box?” I said even though I knew.
“You know he does.”
“D’you help him make it?”
“That boy never let me help him make anything,” she said, her voice breaking. She wiped her eyes. “He thinks he can make it all up himself, but look where that got him.”
“I been meaning to tell you. I went over there to see him.”
“How did he seem?” Fina asked real quick like she’d been waiting for me to bring it up.
“He was all right. But we drank. And then he brought me to the basement, started talking about giving me some shit, lighting this plant in a shell, and then he blew some powder stuff in my face.”
“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.”
“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, and rolled down her window.
It was getting hot. I rolled mine down too.
“That’s the way this whole thing is set up,” 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.”
I wanted to say something but couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed both right and like the wrongest shit possible. I stayed quiet—the rest of the car ride and then for weeks after that. And she let me.
Daniel Gonzales
THE GUYS LOST their shit when I showed them the gun. Pushed each other and laughed like they hadn’t done since forever ago. Everything got so fucking serious after Manny died. Which it should have. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have. But he would have loved to see them like that. He would have loved the gun too. 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.
The gun only took three hours to print. My mom made tacos for the guys while they watched the Raiders game. I stayed downstairs and watched the gun spool out in layers. When they came down we watched the last of it get printed in silence. I knew they wouldn’t know what to think. That’s why I had a YouTube video pulled up to show them. A thirty-second time-lapse of a guy 3-D printing then firing a gun. Once they saw that, that’s when they all lost their shit. They yelled and pushed at each other like they were kids again. Like it used to be over simpler shit like video games, like when we used to have all-night Madden tournaments and someone would win at four in the morning and we’d be all loud and my dad would come down with that little metal bat he kept by his bed—it was the bat he taught us to hit with when we were younger, an aluminum bat—and he’d hit us with that shit too, that same bat we got for free at that A’s game where they were giving them away and we showed up early to be sure to get one.
* * *
—
Manny wouldn’t like that Octavio came over so much after he died. I mean, in a big way it was Octavio’s fault. But he’s our cousin. And him and Manny had become like brothers. All three of us had. It’s true, Octavio shouldn’t have run his mouth at that party. For a while I hated him for it. Blamed him too. But he kept coming back around. Making sure we were okay. Me and my mom. Then the more I got to thinking about it, it wasn’t all on him. Manny’s the one who fucked that kid up. It was on all of us really. We turned our heads. Looked the other way when Manny fucked that kid up so bad on the front lawn. The blood stained brown on the yellow grass there until I got the mower out and cut it. And then when it was good, when money came in, before Manny died, we didn’t ask where it was coming from. We took the TV and the random cash he left on the kitchen table in envelopes. We allowed the shit in and only wanted it out when it took him from us.
* * *
—
I knew they believed in the white gun for real when I picked it up and pointed it at them. They flinched, put their hands up. Not Octavio though. He told me to put it down. There were no bullets in the gun, but I hadn’t felt in control for so long. I know guns are stupid. But that doesn’t mean they don’t make you feel in control when you’re holding one. Octavio pulled the gun out of my hands. He looked down the barrel, pointed it at us. That’s when it was my turn to get scared. Octavio holding it made it even more real. Made the white of it creepy—like some plastic message from the future about shit getting into the wrong hands.
* * *
—
After the guys left that night, I decided to write my brother an email. I’d helped him set it up. A Gmail account. Manny barely used it, but sometimes he wrote me. And when he did he said shit he never would have said in real life. That’s what was cool about it.
I opened up my Gmail and replied to the last email my brother sent. No matter what happens you know I’ll always be here for you. He was talking about fights he was getting in with our mom. She kept threatening to kick him out after he beat that kid up. The cops had come. Way too late, but they’d come, asked questions. She could sense shit was getting more serious. A tension was building in him. I could feel it too but didn’t know what to say. It was like he’d been moving toward that bullet, toward the front yard, way before he got there.
I scrolled down to reply.
Hey brother. Damn. I know you’re not there. But writing you at your email, with that last message up there, it feels like you’re still here. Being around the guys feels like that too. You must be wondering what I’ve been up to. Maybe you see. Maybe you know. If you do, you must be like, what the fuck? 3-D printed gun? Shit. I felt the same way when I first saw it, just laughing like a crazy person when it came out. And I know you wouldn’t approve. I’m sorry but we need the money. Mom lost her job. After you died she just stayed in bed. I couldn’t get her out. I don’t know where rent’s coming from next month. We’ll get an extra month if we get evicted, but shit, we been in this house our whole lives. Your pictures are still up. I still have to see you everywhere in here. So we’re not just gonna go. We been here our whole lives. We don’t have
anywhere to go.
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: Vunderk0de. 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. I learned from YouTube how to code. Shit like JavaScript, Python, SQL, Ruby, C++, HTML, Java, PHP. Sounds like a different language, right? It is. And you get better by putting in the time and taking to heart what all the motherfuckers have to say about your abilities on the forums. You have to know how to tell the difference. Whose criticism to take and whose to ignore. Long story short, though, is that I got hooked into this community, and I realized I could get whatever I wanted. Not drugs and shit. I mean I could but that’s not what I want. The 3-D printer I got was itself printed by a 3-D printer. No shit, a 3-D printer printed by a 3-D printer. Octavio fronted me the money.
Part of what kills me about you being gone is that I never really said anything to you. Even when you emailed me. I didn’t even really know how much I wanted to say to you until the day you left. Until I felt that feeling of losing you on the lawn out there, right on that same spot where that boy’s blood stained the grass. But you showed me. I knew how much you loved me. You did shit like, like how you got me that expensive-ass Schwinn. Probably used to be some hipster’s bike, you probably stole it, but still, you stole it for me, and in some ways that’s even better than if you bought it. Especially if it was from one of those white boys trying to take Oakland over from the West. You should know they haven’t made it to the Deep East yet. Probably never will. Shit’s mean out here. But everything from High Street to West Oakland, that shit seems doomed to me. Anyway, I mostly see Oakland from online now. That’s where we’re all gonna be mostly eventually. Online. That’s what I think. We’re already kinda moving in that direction if you think about it. We’re already like fucking androids, thinking and seeing with our phones all the time.
You might wanna know more about some other shit, like, what’s going on with Mom. She gets out of bed more now. But she just moves to the TV. She looks out the window a lot too, peeks out the curtains like she’s still waiting for you to come home. I know I should be around her more, but she makes me feel hella sad. The other day she dropped a votive candle on the kitchen floor. Shit shattered, and she just left it there in pieces. Like shit’s broken but we can’t just leave it broken, all out there in the living room like your picture on the mantel, shit feels like it cuts me whenever I see it, how you graduated from high school and we all thought shit would be okay from then on because you did.
After you died I had this dream. It started off I was on an island. I could just barely see that there was another island across the way. There was hella fog in the way, but I knew I had to get over there, so I swam over. The water was warm and really blue, not gray or green like the bay. When I got over to the other side I found you in a cave. You had all these fucking pit bull puppies in a shopping cart. You were duplicating them in the cart. The pit bulls. You were handing me the puppies as they duplicated in your shopping cart. You were making all those pit bulls for me.
So when I first heard about this 3-D printer that could print a version of itself I thought of you and the pit bulls. The idea about the gun came later. I learned to be okay with Octavio. He started talking to me like I wasn’t just your little brother. He asked me if I needed work. I told him about Mom being in bed all the time and he cried. He wasn’t even drunk. I needed to figure out a way to support me and Mom. I know you wanted me to get an education. Go to college. Get a good job. But I wanna be able to help right now. Not in four years. Not owing hella money just to work in an office somewhere. So then I got to thinking about how I might help. I’d read about these guns you could print. I didn’t know then what they might be used for. I got the .cad file, the G-code. After I got the printer I printed a gun—first thing I printed. Then I made sure it would work. I rode my bike over near the Oakland airport. That spot you took me to one time where you can see the planes come down close. I figured I could fire one off there and no one would hear it. A big-ass Southwest 747 came down and I shot a bullet into the water. It hurt my hand, and the gun got a little hot, but it worked.
Now I’ve got six of these pieces. Octavio said he’d give me five thousand for all of them. He’s got something going. All my shit’s untraceable. So I’m not worried about the government coming after me. I am worried about what the guns will do. Where they’ll end up. Who they might hurt or kill. But we’re family. I know Octavio can be a mean motherfucker. So could you. But here it is. Manny, he said they’re gonna rob a fucking powwow. Crazy, right? Shit sounded fucking stupid to me at first. Then it had me fucked up cuz of Dad. You remember he used to always tell us we’re Indian. But we didn’t believe him. It was like we were waiting for him to prove it. Doesn’t matter. Cuz of what he did to Mom. To us. That piece of shit. Deserved what he got. He had it coming. Long time coming. He woulda killed Mom. Probably you too if you hadn’t beat his ass. I only wish I had a white gun to give you then. So let them rob a powwow. Whatever. Dad never taught us anything about being Indian. What’s that got to do with us? Octavio said they could make fifty thousand. Said he’d give me another five if they pulled it off.
As for me, I mostly spend my time online. I’m gonna graduate from high school. My grades are all right. I don’t really like anyone at school. My only friends are your old friends, but they don’t really care about me except that I can make them guns now. Except Octavio. I know how much it all messed him up. You gotta know that. You can’t think it didn’t fuck him up, right?
Anyway, I’ll keep writing you here. I’ll keep you updated. It’s anyone’s guess what’s gonna happen. For the first time in a long time I got a little hope in my chest. Not that it’s gonna get better. Just that it’s gonna change. Sometimes that’s all there is. Cuz that means there’s something going on, somewhere inside all of it, all that turning the world is always doing, that means it was never supposed to stay the same heat. Miss you.
Daniel
Octavio brought me the first five thousand the day after I showed them all the guns. I left three thousand of it on the kitchen table in a blank envelope like Manny used to do. With the other two thousand I bought a drone and a pair of virtual-reality goggles.
I’d been wanting a drone ever since I found out about the powwow. I knew Octavio wouldn’t let me go, but I wanted to see it. To make sure it went all right. Otherwise it was on me. And if shit went wrong, that was it. Octavio’s plan was all I had, with my mom like she was. Decent drones are affordable now. And I’d read that flying one with a camera and live feed, with VR goggles, felt like flying.
The drone I got had a three-mile range and could stay in the air for twenty-five minutes. The camera on it shot 4K resolution. The coliseum was only a mile away from our house on Seventy-Second. I flew it from my backyard. I didn’t want to waste any time so I went straight up, about fifty feet in the air, then straight over the BART station. The thing could really move. I was in it. My eyes. The VR goggles.
Out in the back of center field, I went straight up and saw a guy pointing at me from the bleachers. I flew closer to him. He was a maintenance worker—holding a trash-grabber and a trash bag. T
he old guy got his binoculars out. I went even closer. What could he do? Nothing. I flew almost all the way up to the guy’s face, and he tried to reach out to the drone. He got mad. I realized I was messing with him. I shouldn’t have. I pulled away and dropped back down to the field. I headed toward the right-field wall, then down the foul line back to the infield. At first base I noticed the drone had ten minutes of battery life left. I wasn’t about to lose a thousand dollars out there, but I wanted to finish at home plate. When I got there, just as I was about to turn the drone around, I saw the old guy from the bleachers coming for me. He was on the field and pissed, like he was gonna grab the drone and slam it to the ground—step on it. I backed up but forgot to rise. Luckily I’d been playing video games for long enough that my panicked brain was hardwired to perform well under pressure. But for a second I was close enough to count the wrinkles in the old guy’s face. He managed to hit it, which almost caused the drone to come down, but I rose, went straight up, quick, like twenty or forty feet in seconds. I cleared the walls and came straight home to my backyard.
At home I watched the video over and over. Especially the part at the end where the guy almost got me. Shit was exciting. Real. Like I’d been there. I was about to call Octavio to tell him about it when I heard a scream upstairs. My mom.
Ever since Manny got shot I’d felt in a constant state of worry, half expecting some bad shit to happen all the time. I ran up the stairs, and when I got to the top I opened the door and saw my mom holding the envelope, flipping through the cash with her finger. Did she think Manny left it? Like he made it back somehow, or like he was still here? Did she think this was a sign?
I was about to tell her it was me, and Octavio, when she came over and hugged me. She pulled my head into her chest. Just kept saying, “Sorry, I’m so sorry.” I thought she meant about how she’d been in bed. How she’d given up. But then as she kept saying it I took it to mean how everything had happened to us. How much we lost, how we’d once been together as a family, how good it’d once been. I tried to tell her it was okay. I kept repeating, “It’s okay, Mom”—one for each of her sorrys. But then pretty soon I found myself saying sorry back. And we both said sorry back and forth until we started to cry and shake.
