by Tommy Orange
* * *
—
When Blue pulls into Highland, Edwin is passed out. She’d been telling him, yelling at him, screaming at him to stay awake. There was probably a closer hospital, but she knew Highland. She keeps her hand on the horn, to try to wake Edwin up and to get someone to come out to help. She reaches her hand over and slaps Edwin a few times on the cheek. Edwin shakes his head a little.
“You gotta wake up, Ed,” Blue says. “We’re here.”
He doesn’t respond.
Blue runs inside to get someone with a stretcher to come out and help.
When she comes out through the emergency room automatic double doors, she sees a Ford Bronco pull up. All the doors open at once. She sees Harvey. And Jacquie. Jacquie’s holding a boy, a teenager in regalia. As Jacquie passes Blue, two nurses come out with a stretcher for Edwin. Blue knows right away there will be confusion. Should she allow Jacquie and the boy to go in Edwin’s place? It doesn’t matter what Blue has or hasn’t decided. She watches the nurses load the boy and take him away on the stretcher. Harvey walks up to Blue and looks at Edwin in the car. He nods his head sideways at Edwin like: Let’s pick him up.
Harvey slaps Edwin a few times on the cheek and he rustles a little but can’t pick his head up. Harvey yells some incomprehensible thing about getting someone out here to help, then gets Edwin halfway out of the car and puts Edwin’s arm around him. Blue squeezes between the car and Edwin and takes his other arm and puts it around her shoulder.
* * *
—
Two orderlies settle Edwin on the gurney. Blue and Harvey run alongside as they roll him through the halls, and then he’s through the swinging doors.
* * *
—
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. Blue wants to say something to Jacquie. But what? Blue looks at Harvey. He really does look like Edwin. And if Harvey and Jacquie are together, then does that mean…? No. Blue doesn’t allow that thought to finish. She looks across from her. There are two younger boys and a woman who looks a little like Jacquie, but bigger. The woman looks at Blue and Blue averts her eyes. She wants to ask the woman why she’s here. She knows it has to do with the powwow, the shooting. But there’s nothing to say. There’s nothing to do but wait.
Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield
OPAL KNOWS Orvil’s gonna make it. She’s telling herself that in her head. She would scream the thought if you could scream thoughts. Maybe you can. Maybe that’s what she’s doing to make herself believe there’s reason to hope despite there maybe being no reason to hope. Opal wants Jacquie and the boys to see it on her face too, this belief despite everything, which is maybe what faith is. Jacquie doesn’t look okay. She looks like if Orvil doesn’t make it, she won’t either. Opal thinks she’s right. None of them will make it back from this if he doesn’t. Nothing will be okay.
Opal looks around the room and sees that everyone in the waiting room, everyone’s head is down. Loother and Lony aren’t even on their phones. This makes Opal sad. She almost wants them to be on their phones.
But Opal knows this is the time, if there ever was one, to believe, to pray, to ask for help, even though she’d abandoned all hope for outside help on a prison island back when she was eleven. She tries her best to keep quiet and close her eyes. She hears something coming from a place she thought she’d closed off forever a long time ago. The place where her old teddy bear, Two Shoes, used to speak from. The place she used to think and imagine from when she was too young to think she shouldn’t. The voice was hers and not hers. But hers, finally. It can’t come from anywhere else. There is only Opal. Opal has to ask. Before she can even think to pray, she has to believe she can believe. She’s making it come but also letting it come. The voice pushes through and she thinks: Please. Get up, she says, this time out loud. She’s talking to Orvil. She’s trying to get her thoughts, her voice, into that room with him. Stay, Opal says. Please. She says it all out loud. Stay. She recognizes that there is power in saying the prayer out loud. She cries with her eyes shut tight. Don’t go, she says. You can’t.
A doctor comes out. Just one doctor. Opal thinks that might be good, they probably report death in pairs, for moral support. 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. Before she can think to do it, Opal is counting the swings of the double doors. Every swing in counts as one. The doctor is saying something. But she can’t look up yet, or listen. She has to wait and see what the number of swings will say. The doors come to a rest on the number eight, and Opal breathes in deep, then lets out a sigh and looks up to see what the doctor has to say.
Tony Loneman
TONY TURNS AROUND at the sound of gunfire, thinking they might be shooting at him. He sees a kid in regalia get shot behind Charles, sees him go down. Tony lifts his gun and moves toward them—unsure of who to aim at. Tony watches Carlos shoot Octavio in the back, then a drone lands on Carlos’s head. Tony’s gun works long enough for him to hit Carlos two or three times, enough times that he stops moving. Tony knows Charles is firing at him, but he hasn’t felt anything yet. The trigger’s stuck. The gun is too hot to hold, so Tony drops it. As he does the first bullet hits him. The bullet feels fast and hot in his leg even though he knows the bullet can’t be moving anymore. Charles keeps shooting at him and missing. Tony knows this means he might be hitting other people behind him, and his face gets hot. A kind of hardening is happening all over his body. Tony knows this feeling. He sees black in his periphery. Some part of him is trying to leave, into the dark cloud he’s only ever emerged from later. But Tony means to stay, and he does. His vision brightens. He builds up to a run. Charles is about thirty feet away. Tony can feel all his fringes and ties flapping behind him. He knows what he’s running into, without a gun, but he feels harder than anything that might come at him, speed, heat, metal, distance, even time.
When the second bullet hits him in his leg, he stumbles but doesn’t lose speed. He’s twenty feet away, then ten. Another hits his arm. A couple get him in his stomach. He feels them and he doesn’t. Tony charges, ducks his head into it. The hot heavy weight and speed of the bullets do their best to push him back, pull him down, but he can’t be stopped, not now.
When he’s a few feet away from Charles, Tony notices something so quiet and still inside him it feels like it’s emanating out into the world, quieting everything down to nothing—molten silence. Tony means to sink through anything that gets in his way. He’s making a sound. It starts in his stomach, then comes out through his nose and mouth. A roar and rumble of blood. Tony drops a little lower just before he reaches Charles, then dives into him.
Tony lands hard on top of Charles with the last of his strength. Charles reaches up for Tony’s throat. He grips it. Tony sees darkness creeping in around his vision again. He’s pushing up against Charles’s face. He gets a thumb in his eye and pushes. He sees Charles’s gun on the ground next to his head. With all he has left in him, Tony shifts his weight and falls sideways, then grabs the gun. Before Charles can look over, or reach back out toward Tony’s neck, Tony fires a shot into the side of Charles’s head, then watches it drop and his body go lifeless.
Tony rolls onto his back and right away he’s sinking. Quicksand slow. The sky darkens, or his vision darkens, or he’s just sinking deeper and deeper in, headed for the center of the earth, where he might join the magma or water or metal or whatever is there to stop him, hold him, keep him down there forever.
But the sinking stops. He can’t see. He hears something that sounds like waves, then he hears Maxi
ne’s voice somewhere in the distance. Her voice is echoey, like it used to sound when she was in the kitchen and he was nearby, under the table or slapping magnets on the fridge. Tony wonders if he’s dead. If Maxine’s kitchen is where he’d end up after. But Maxine’s not even dead. It’s definitely her voice. She’s singing an old Cheyenne hymn she used to sing when she did the dishes.
Tony realizes he can open his eyes again, but he keeps them closed. He knows he’s full of holes. He can feel each one of those bullets trying to pull him down. He watches himself go up, out of himself, then he watches himself from above, looks at his body and remembers that it was never actually really him. He was never Tony just like he was never the Drome. Both were masks.
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? She doesn’t answer.
Tony dips his hand back into the sink of bubbles and dishes and blows them at her again. She has some on the side of her face and she doesn’t wipe them off, just keeps a straight face and keeps on washing. Tony thinks this is the funniest thing he’s ever seen. And he doesn’t know if she knows this is happening, or if they’re really not there. He doesn’t know that he’s not there, because he’s right there, in that moment which he can’t remember as having happened because it’s happening to him now. He’s there with her in the kitchen blowing sink bubbles.
Finally, after catching his breath and containing his laughter, Tony says, “Grandma, you know. You know they’re there.”
“What’s that?” Maxine says.
“Grandma, you’re playing,” Tony says.
“Playing what?” Maxine says.
“They’re right there, Grandma, I see them with my own eyes.”
“You go play now and let me finish these in peace,” Maxine says, and smiles a smile that tells him she knows about the bubbles.
Tony plays with his Transformers on the floor of his bedroom. He makes them fight in slow motion. He gets lost in the story he works out for them. It’s always the same. There is a battle, then a betrayal, then a sacrifice. The good guys end up winning, but one of them dies, like Optimus Prime had to in Transformers, which Maxine let him watch on that old VHS machine, even though she said she thought he was too young. When they watched it together, at the moment they realized Optimus had died, they looked over to each other and saw they were both crying, which then made them laugh for a few seconds, for just that singular moment, both of them together in the dark of Maxine’s bedroom, laughing and crying at the exact same time.
As Tony has them walk away from the battle, they talk about how they wish it didn’t have to be that way. They wish they could all have made it. Tony has Optimus Prime say, “We’re made of metal, made hard, able to take it. We were made to transform. So if you get a chance to die, to save someone else, you take it. Every time. That’s what Autobots were put here for.”
* * *
—
Tony is back on the field. Every hole is a burn and a pull. Now he feels as if he might not float up but instead fall inside of something underneath him. There is an anchor, something he’s been rooted to all this time, as if in each hole there is a hook attached to a line pulling him down. A wind from the bay sweeps through the stadium, moves through him. Tony hears a bird. Not outside. From where he’s anchored, to the bottom of the bottom, the middle of the middle of him. The center’s center. 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.
Acknowledgments
To my wife, Kateri, my first (best) reader/listener, who believed in me and the book from the very beginning, and to my son, Felix, for all the ways he helps and inspires me to be a better human and writer; to them both, for whom I’d give my own heart’s blood. I couldn’t have done it without them.
There were many people and organizations that helped get this book out into the world. I’d like to thank from the innermost reaches of my heart all of the following: The MacDowell Colony, for supporting my work long before it came to be what it is now. Denise Pate at the Oakland Cultural Arts Fund, for funding a storytelling project that never came to fruition except for in fiction—i.e., in a chapter of this novel. Pam Houston, for all she’s taught me, and for being the first person to believe in this book enough to send it out herself. Jon Davis, for all the ways he’s supported me and the MFA (Institute of American Indian Arts) program I graduated from in 2016, for all the copyediting help, and for believing in me from the get-go. Sherman Alexie, for how he helped this become a better novel, and for all the unbelievable support he’s given me once the book was bought. Terese Mailhot, for the all she’s done to make it so our lives as writers have paralleled each other, and for all the support and encouragement she’s always given me, for being the unbelievably amazing writer she is. The Yaddo Corporation, for the time and space to finish this book before it got sent out. Writing By Writers and the fellowship they gave me in 2016. Claire Vaye Watkins, for hearing me read and believing in the book enough to send it to her agent. Derek Palacio, for helping guide the manuscript, and for all the advice and support he gave me post-graduation. All the many writers and teachers at IAIA, who taught me a tremendous amount. My brother, Mario, and his wife, Jenny, for letting me sleep on their couch whenever I came into town, and for their love and support. My mom and dad for always believing in me no matter what I tried to do. Carrie and Ladonna. Christina. For all that we’ve been through and how we’ve always helped each other along the way. Mamie and Lou, Teresa, Bella, and Sequoia, for helping to make our family what it is. For helping to give me the time I needed to write. For being sweet, caring, and loving to my son during those times when I was away to write. My uncle Tom and aunt Barb, for all the ways they help and love everyone in our family. Soob and Casey. My uncle Jonathan. Martha, Geri, and Jeffrey, for being there for my family when we needed them most. My editor Jordan, for loving and believing in the book, and helping me to make it as good as it could possibly be. My agent Nicole Aragi, for reading the manuscript too late one night, or too early one morning, when it seemed the world was falling apart, for everything she’s done for me and the book since. Everyone at Knopf for all their undying support. The Native community in Oakland. My living Cheyenne relatives, and my ancestors who made it through unimaginable hardship, who prayed hard for us next ones here now, doing our best to pray and work hard for those to come.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOMMY ORANGE was born and raised in Oakland, California. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program. Tommy currently lives in Angels Camp, California, with his wife and son.
An A. A. Knopf Reading Group Guide
There There by Tommy Orange
Discussion Questions
The prologue of There There provides a historical overview of how Native populations were systematically stripped of their identity, th
eir rights, their land, and, in some cases, their very existence by colonialist forces in America. How did reading this section make you feel? How does the prologue set the tone for the reader? Discuss the use of the Indian head as iconography. How does this relate to the erasure of Native identity in American culture?
Discuss the development of the “Urban Indian” identity and ownership of that label. How does it relate to the push for assimilation by the United States government? How do the characters in There There navigate this modern form of identity alongside their ancestral roots?
Consider the following statement from this page: “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.” In what ways does the historical precedent for violent removal of Native populations filter into the modern era? How does violence—both internal and external—appear throughout the narrative?
On this page, Orange states: “We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people.” Discuss this statement in relation to how Native populations have been defined in popular culture. How do the characters in There There resist the simplification and flattening of their cultural identity? Relate the idea of preserving cultural identity to Dene Oxendene’s storytelling mission.
Tony Loneman’s perspective both opens and closes There There. Why do you think Orange made this choice for the narrative? What does Loneman’s perspective reveal about the “Urban Indian” identity? About the landscape of Oakland?
