Go-boy told me the whole story when he was in the hospital for a second time, five months after he tried to hang himself. It was the middle of April. Spring wasn’t here yet, not even close—still snowing, still freezing. Go hadn’t attempted suicide this time but he said he almost had, and that was why he had checked himself in. I visited him in the Anchorage psych ward and he told me everything that had happened over the past year.
The story of Go and Valerie had started just before I’d moved to Unalakleet, and it unfolded all around me, all summer and fall, but I knew hardly any of it. Go said he needed to tell someone, to release his guilt, but I think the story transported him away from the hospital and the therapists, away from the heartbreaks he couldn’t seem to separate himself from, and back to Unk and Valerie. The story went like this—
It was the worst time for Go and Valerie to fall in love. It had started exactly a year earlier, in April, more than a month before I would move to Alaska, during an early, atypical west coast Alaskan spring that only stuck around for about a week. It started when Go-boy entered a contest. He placed his bet at the Unalakleet Native Corporation, and there she was—Valerie—a girl who smiled like she’d been waiting for him.
The town had a contest every spring. People would bet on the exact day and hour and minute that the ice in the river would break up and float out to sea. They’d set a tripod on the frozen water near the mouth of the river, with a long cable running from the top to a digital timer set on shore, recording when everything finally started to inch its way out to the ocean. I’d never seen anything like it. But people said sometimes the breakup could be phenomenal—the deep cracking of ice that had been frozen for seven months, thundering through town, resisting the push of the water underneath and the warmer air above. Many times the enormous plates backed up on themselves, like a rush-hour jam, and could pile over the banks and rip out trees and buildings that lined the shores. Other times it would break up quietly and flow to the ocean without much of a stir, sometimes while everyone slept.
Go-boy and Valerie had both grown up in villages around the Norton Sound, mostly Unalakleet through their teenaged years. Go-boy graduated from high school when Valerie was only a sophomore. He was off to a Bible college in Anchorage, studying and doing whatever else he spent his time doing, before he could even pay attention to Valerie. It wasn’t until April—when Go turned twenty-two and placed his bet—that he really noticed her.
He bought only one ticket and guessed the ice would go out on April eighteenth at seven forty-two in the evening, earlier than usual. Valerie entered his info and took his twenty dollars. She was wearing an old t-shirt inside out, the print underneath giving the shirt texture, like a scar.
He said, “Hi, Val.”
“Only one ticket? Go-boy’s feeling lucky this year, ah?” Valerie laughed.
He smiled nervously.
Go had always been confident around girls, but according to him, that had changed after he’d moved to Anchorage and gone to college. Something switched during those years. Maybe the conservative school instilled guilt in him. Maybe he already had guilt and it didn’t wake up until he left home. Maybe it was the intimidation of the big city. Either way, standing there with Valerie, he knew he’d stumbled onto something great.
He said, “I’ve never won before. Not yet anyway.”
Nobody knew Go-boy had just been kicked out of Bible college. According to his adviser, he had too many incomplete grades, but Go told me they kicked him out because he was a threat to the sterilized Christian bubble they had created for themselves. Go-boy had unordinary theories and beliefs. He constantly questioned his professors’ doctrines and ideologies. That year he had incited a renaissance on campus. Some scholars called his angle Universalism theology, but Go simply called it real spirituality. He claimed that everyone was saved—every person on earth—and that the concept of eternal damnation was hyperbole, along with the idea of hell. His evidence was biblical. Students around him began catching on to these ideas. When Go-boy accumulated enough incompletes, the school kicked him out, even though there were plenty of students with as many incompletes or more. Go told his adviser that Jesus was treated the same way by the Pharisees.
Go asked, “So what you been up to these days?”
Valerie told him about her job.
“I’m working upriver at the fish tower this summer,” he said. “Whenever kings start running.”
Valerie told him she would be going to the University of Alaska Anchorage in the fall on a scholarship. She was a year out of high school and would be starting college as a freshman after having spent the previous year taking care of her gram.
He said, “Real champ, Val.”
She smiled.
Go told her he was taking a break from college.
It wasn’t necessarily Valerie’s appearance that had Go hooked that afternoon. When I first saw her, I thought she looked a little too rounded and her short hair was too mannish. But she had the type of beauty that grew on you, and regardless, it was something else that Go-boy latched on to, something else that would intrigue him and keep him awake late almost every night that week, and many nights the rest of the year. He just explained it by saying they were same-same.
Go said, “We should try-take a ride.”
“Okay.”
“A boat ride to Blueberry. I got potential gas money right here,” he said, waving his ticket.
Valerie was excited because she was feeling the same as Go. The temp wasn’t even forty. The river was still frozen. The slough was still frozen. And the ocean still had ice that stretched out a couple hundred feet. But Go said he would tow his boat with a snowmachine to the edge of the open water. Uncle Stanley and others had already gone out to the ocean this way, seal hunting, so Valerie didn’t even think twice when they made plans to meet in two days. Although two days didn’t feel soon enough for either of them.
Go said, “See you then,” and left the building, already contemplating the possibility of going back to school in Anchorage that fall to be near her.
They met two days later at Go-boy’s boat just below the Kuuk Bridge in the slough.
Go had spent the morning getting everything ready. He’d charged the battery. Shot lithium grease in all the right places. Turned the engine over to check if it would fire. Topped off the red jerry cans. Shoveled out the slush behind the steering wheel console and drained the standing water. Go busied himself. He was nervous.
When Valerie got there, the first thing she said was, “I made you this,” and handed Go a sealskin wallet. She’d been impatient to give it to him.
Go said, “Man.” And that was it. He loved her.
Valerie had lunch in her backpack. She was unsure what Go liked, so she brought some Eskimo food—black meat, Yukon king strips, and herring eggs on kelp—along with simple stuff—peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and Doritos. She was packing the traditional food that day to impress Go-boy. She could sense that he was attracted to modern women who were grounded in old-fashioned ways. How? She didn’t know. But she was right.
Go only brought a six-pack of pop.
Valerie sat in the boat as Go dragged it behind his snowmachine. She was wearing her parka, sunglasses, and a smile. Go had brought a rifle just in case they saw an ugruk. It was warm in the sunshine and there were large drifts still unthawed on the other side of the slough, lining the snow fences.
When they got to the open ocean water, Valerie stayed in the boat as Go pushed it off the ice. She was always nervous in the sea—ice or no ice. She said, “Iisragii, Go-boy. Be careful.” He laughed and fired the engine.
“Can I drive?” Valerie asked.
Go said okay. He liked a girl who went straight at her fears.
They motored out past a few large ice floes, looking for seals. They each were wearing bunny boots, parka, fur malaghai, and sunglasses. The cold wind cut at their exposed faces. As Valerie handled the boat north, parallel to the distant coast, driving like she did this every day, overcoming her fear of the ocean in front of Go, they didn’t talk but just shared glances back and forth, smiling.
This was Go-boy’s ideal date. Something simple. Outdoors. Without the distraction of a movie or a crowded restaurant. There weren’t even theaters or cafés in Unk to take her to, and that was good because Go was a guy who liked to jump right into the heavy conversations. It was almost a requirement for him in order to move to a deeper level with a girl. And that was what he wanted—riding along the coast, watching Valerie weaving around random icebergs and shielding her exposed face—was the deepest of possible connections.
Can you hear this?” Valerie said, holding out her hand and moving her thumb after the boat had stopped just west of Blueberry Hill. Her joint clicked like a loud clock. “Fishing accident.”
Go laughed, said, “Real Native, man. You always been get seal finger too?”
Go was definitely in love. Valerie knew she soon would be.
The ocean was calm so they didn’t anchor up to any ice but stayed floating that afternoon, drinking pop and eating most of the food from Valerie’s backpack. Go-boy had been talking about school and his decision to leave, and about his most recent beliefs regarding heaven and salvation and everything surrounding those theologies. He felt the modern Christian church was misrepresenting Jesus.
“I’m not sure if I believe in heaven,” Valerie said, tearing the skin from an oily salmon strip. “Or God.”
They had been talking so freely that afternoon, agreeing about everything, even finishing some of each other’s thoughts, that Go-boy just assumed she believed as he did.
“I know you have your faith,” she said, “but I haven’t figured it out yet. For myself.” She explained her skepticism of a god who would let suffering and pain happen so regularly and freely. She doubted why a god would want so much worship and attention, as if he were an insecure teenager.
“She,” Go-boy said, speaking of God, “is the sum of us all, and of everything.” But that was the most he said about it. He didn’t explain to her that the problem about pain and suffering wasn’t all that difficult. To Go-boy it was simple—in order for humans to experience any real life, with real choices and real celebrations, God had to limit her own power. If God protected any ounce of the natural world from pain, or limited creation in a way that removed suffering, then no person could ever know the sweetness of true salvation and true awareness, true enlightenment. And no person could ever be free. Go-boy didn’t say these things to Valerie that afternoon in the boat, and didn’t say anything else about spirituality, but their difference in worldview deflated him. He doubted he could date a girl who didn’t believe as he did. But sitting there, talking and laughing past suppertime and into the night, Go-boy knew he was already in love anyway.
Valerie and Go kept dating after the ice in the river went out. Go-boy didn’t win the contest—he was only six minutes off, but the winner was within three. They watched the ice flow out to the ocean. This year was one of those loud, destructive years, where the seawall was left mangled and wooden fish racks were broken into piles of kindling. To Go-boy, seeing it with Valerie was worth more than any cash prize.
They fished trout and went goose-hunting together in May. In June they fished king salmon in North River. Valerie filleted and stripped each fish with an ulu that Go-boy’s dad had made. They delivered food to the seniors in town as part of an Elders’ Lunch Program. Valerie even agreed to sometimes attend the church with him, although her beliefs hadn’t changed, and because of it Go-boy still doubted the relationship’s future. But Valerie was now in love with Go. She hadn’t said that—neither of them had—but they were both very much in love. And even though there was plenty of sexual attraction, they hadn’t had sex, or even kissed. They did everything together and their relationship darted to levels deeper than many married couples ever experience, but neither of them minded that the sex part was slow—it was what they both needed.
This was when I moved to town, in the middle of June. Go-boy and me started working together at the fish tower, counting fish, but I didn’t know that he and Valerie were so close already, not while all of this was happening. They were shy about their relationship. The only way Go publicly showed Valerie affection was by calling in to the radio program Open Line and wishing all of his love to Ripper—Valerie’s obscure nickname. I suppose that’s the way to do things in such a small town, where everybody always knows everything. But I didn’t find out about most of their relationship until it was over, until Go was in the Anchorage hospital, telling me everything that had happened, and more.
For the town’s Fourth of July celebration, Go and Valerie entered the raft race on North River. Contestants started at the bridge and floated a few miles to Main River, using only homemade rafts. Go and Valerie weren’t interested in winning, so they found an abandoned Volkswagen, stripped everything, leaving only the body and floor pan, attached a few long pieces of driftwood to the bottom, and entered the race. They set lawn chairs where the driver and passenger seats had been. They brought a cooler full of pop and snacks. The water was ice-cold, always was. They mounted their raft and floated alongside about fifteen other contestants.
North River was about as wide as a downtown city street. It had a swift current and turned itself over and back many times. Evergreens hung over the eroding banks, showing signs of the river’s own reshaping, and the water ran clear like thick glass.
From the start of the race it was obvious Go and Valerie would lose. The old Volkswagen’s body, although feather-light for a car, was too heavy. At the starting line, people laughed and cheered them on. But a few bends into the race, with all the other teams far ahead, it was apparent that the VW was sinking. Not only was it too heavy to keep pace with the others, it was too heavy for the driftwood it floated on. They surrendered after a mile and banked the raft onto a sandbar somewhere between the North River Bridge and the river’s mouth.
And the Volkswagen stayed there all year. At first people were surprised to see it along the river, but by the end of summer it had become a part of North River’s scenery. High school kids camped out and had bonfires on the same sandbar, some tagged it with graffiti. Families beached their boats and picnicked beside the VW, some even stretching ratty chunks of burlap across the hood and using it as a table for cutting fish. And the VW would stay there all winter, until the following spring, when the ice would break up and scrape out everything along the river, cleansing itself, and people would see a VW bug floating past town in a frozen flow.
Valerie and Go laughed when they beached onto shore that Fourth of July, pleased with themselves. To them, this signified their love—their willingness to lose the race, or more so, lose themselves, for each other.
Three months of their relationship had passed when Valerie left a note on Go’s pillow. She had written a list—TEN THINGS I LIKE ABOUT GO-BOY—on a page torn from the Bible. Go received the letter on the same day we went to the funeral potluck at the bowling alley for his friend Trilogy. He showed it to me then. The note was funny and cute, with simple reasons. I didn’t read the whole thing. I didn’t read what Valerie had written at the bottom of the letter—I want to kiss you tonight. She wrote that she had wanted to kiss him on their first date, right when they had passed through the mouth of the frozen river. She wanted them to ride out to that spot that night, and float, and kiss for the first time.
They met at Go’s boat around eleven, both a little nervous—Valerie because she wanted everything to be perfect, Go because he didn’t think the relationship could last. Go brought two cans of soda and a box of Otter Pop popsicles.
As Go drove the boat from the slough into the river, a sudden hesitation passed over him. It was a moment when he lost all confidence, and every uncertainty and fear made Go-boy’s eyes lose focus. He felt like he was watching himself crash—leading this girl on. He felt like every teacher and pastor and parent was watching this accident. This was something he’d always struggled with—this self-doubt—and at that moment, he hated everything about himself.
As they neared the mouth of the river where it opened to the ocean, Go turned the key off so the boat died and floated to a stop, its wake pushing up from behind and disappearing. They were short of their planned destination.
“What’s wrong? We gas-siaq?”
Go thought for a moment. The sun still hung above the horizon, out over the ocean, and wouldn’t drop till after midnight. And later that night, millions of humpies would crowd the river in search of their spawning grounds.
“I think the fuel pump is bad.”
Valerie walked to the back of the boat. She traced fuel lines from a red gas tank into a coffee-can-sized filter. Go was facing the ocean, unable to do anything, wondering what he should say, feeling stupid, feeling lost. That was when Valerie pulled a screwdriver and pliers from Go-boy’s tackle box and drained water from the fuel filter. As she worked, she said, “I think I’ve always believed in God. Not the church’s God, but some type of unity in all of us.” She said, “There’s something there, I think.”
Go-boy turned and watched how Valerie’s young fingers moved through the pieces of the fuel lines and filter with confidence. She had the engine cover off and was checking each of the three carburetors for water contamination. Go then knew this was no longer an accident—this was meant to be. He watched her bite her lip as she scraped gunk with her fingernails and removed and reattached pieces of his boat that Go knew nothing about.
Go later said this was the moment he realized he could no longer live his life by social codes, by what others expected of him. He said it was then he saw the importance of individual strength and the ability to not care about what others thought but to follow his own heart. He said that Valerie, by being herself and fixing his fuel pump because she wanted to kiss him, gave Go-boy the confidence and inspiration to truly be enlightened, to truly be himself and live from his heart. Even if it was ridiculous.
That was when Go knelt down on one knee and said, “Valerie, will you marry me?”
She turned from reinstalling the filter, her fingernails framed with gunk and smelling like gas, a red Popsicle stain on her upper lip. She laughed. She didn’t think he was serious.
“What?” she said, smiling. “Yeah, okay, maybe someday.”
Go-boy said he was serious, now. He said he wanted to marry her as soon as they could. “I love you.”
“Let’s try-turn the motor,” Valerie said, her smile relaxing as she moved past him and spun the key of the boat, firing the engine.
He said, “I know we’ll get married someday. Why wait?”
Valerie’s expression slipped into concern. Her shoulders dropped. It was like Go-boy had just slapped her. She couldn’t believe this, not then or even later. “Araa! I’m only nineteen,” she said.
“I’m only twenty-two.”
“Let’s not ruin this,” she said. “Everything’s perfect. Don’t ruin this.”
But by the look on Go-boy’s face, Valerie could see he’d already ruined it. He was serious. His face sparked with excitement and he couldn’t hear her disagreements or her concerns. She hoped this would pass, so she slid behind the steering wheel and turned them back to the slough. She beached the boat and jumped out before Go could say anything else, before they could have their first kiss.
That night Go-boy started his list—101 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT VALERIE. But he didn’t finish it then. This was when he and I saw his dad put Sean in a coma, that next morning. It was the same morning all the humpies swam into the river. Valerie’s rejection and his dad’s outburst pooled together, creating some type of guilt and self-hatred for Go-boy, and he vanished for a month.
While he was in the hospital, this was where his story would start for counseling sessions. This was the start of his summer-long mania, according to his therapist. Although he had experienced many ups and downs before this, they had never seemed like anything but puberty and identity-searching. But this summer was noticeably different. His therapist would tell him it was a common beginning of a mania—drastic emotions, the desire to change everything by tomorrow, the feeling that life had suddenly become lucid.
Nobody knew where Go went that month. There were plenty of rumors. Plenty of search-and-rescue missions. Some stories in the Alaska papers and even on the six o’clock news. But after a week the media lost interest, and the State of Alaska called it quits on the search. His family kept looking, though, for the whole month, hoping for the best and bracing for the worst. Every weekend Uncle Stanley and a few others would load up their boats with extra gas and drive up the river for hours and hours until they couldn’t get any farther. Bush-pilot friends altered their flight patterns and flew lower, looking for anything suspicious. And I was looking too. And just like everyone else, I grew pessimistic when the days without clues piled on top of one another. There was so much empty land—the nearest villages to the north and south were forty miles, and to the east about eighty miles, and in between there was nothing. And when Go told me this whole story about his relationship with Valerie, he still left out most of the details about what he did while he was gone. Earlier he’d told me about his drunken week in Nome, but when I asked about the other three weeks, he said he didn’t want to talk about it. He said at the time it felt like something phenomenal, but now his therapist was telling him it was all just a mania, nothing real, so he had to forget about it.
Valerie had been hired to work on the fish tower to fill in for Go and me after we were fired. During this month that Go-boy was gone, Valerie and I got to know each other. She’d call me, checking to see if Go had resurfaced. She was nervous, almost hysterical, feeling like she was the reason he’d disappeared. She’d cry over the phone, and in person. It was awkward for me at first, but anytime people cry in front of each other they either become friends or ignore each other. We became friends. She would stop by my mom’s house and show me the things Go had made for her. One time she showed me the ulu with the glass handle. “It doesn’t work very well,” Valerie said. “The glass is too slippery to hold.” The handle was made of gillies melted together. It was lumpy, but all the layers of different-colored glass added a vibrant depth, like individual worlds inside and around and connected to each other. “It’s beautiful,” Valerie said, on the verge of tears, again. She was a mess. She had stopped combing her hair and always wore the same red sweatshirt and paint-stained jeans.
“Here,” I said, and handed her a black ball cap.
She laughed. “I look that bad, ah?”
“You can keep it.”
Then Go-boy returned with no explanation of where he’d been, and even more hopped up than when he’d proposed. Valerie was elated when he reappeared—relieved he was alive and that she wasn’t responsible for something terrible—relieved that there was a chance to do everything over again—relieved that Go might be back to normal. But her excitement wore off in a day or two. Go was acting, it seemed to Valerie, as if the marriage proposal had never happened, or even sometimes like she’d said yes. He avoided talking about it. He only wanted to act like they were in love, like they were married, and like their futures were the same.
“I can’t do this,” she told him. “It’s still too fast.”
Go reacted as if this were a challenge he not only could rise to but had already conquered. He never left her alone. He called several times a day. He drove by her house. He left notes. He called Open Line and on live radio revealed embarrassing facts about his love for Valerie—I want to touch your soul more than your body. . . . I want to kiss your lips because of what you say and how you say it. It was annoying, yet still flattering to Valerie.
She tried to explain to him that a lot had been changing in her life. Go had prompted some of these changes—she was thinking about spirituality and God like never before, especially when he’d disappeared, but probably not in the ways he’d hoped. She was merely accepting the possibility. She was open to someday, if nothing else, teaching her kids to believe in God.
Go told her, “Our kids will know God in ways we can’t even comprehend.”
But Valerie knew she would never believe the way Go-boy did and wondered if anyone actually could. He was always bothering her, talking about their perfect love and his theories for how they would change the world together. It was making Valerie lose interest.
And then, just after I’d moved in with Go-boy, Valerie’s dad died. It was the middle of summer and I had started playing the drums. Valerie’s dad was checking his nets in the ocean, and on his way home he had a heart attack. He was alone and he passed out behind the wheel of the boat, driving right by town at forty mph and ending up a half mile down the coast before the whole thing ramped onto shore, throwing him from the boat and mangling his face and neck. Afterward people hoped he’d been dead before the boat hit the shore. But nobody found out for sure.
Funerals in the village were an all-day event, open to everyone. The church service was around two hours long, with the first half led by the pastor reading through scripture and giving a sermon; the second half was like a wake, with silence and open-mic time for people to share their stories and memories of the person who died. Afterward the coffin was loaded into a family member’s truck and driven down Main Road a mile to the cemetery, which in rural Alaska was usually set right next to the airport runway. The coffin was always made by friends or family. The hole in the ground was dug ahead of time by a backhoe. The coffin lowered by ropes. The ground shoveled in by all the men. Many times songs and prayers broke out at the burial, sometimes in Iñupiaq. The younger the deceased, the longer everything took. At night there was a potluck in the community center or gymnasium. Tables were lined up, thirty feet long, stacked with every kind of Eskimo food and modern dish you could think of. People sat around on folding chairs, talking, sometimes watching a video, looking at pictures, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. Kids were always running around. And usually this lasted hours.
The church was packed for the funeral. I wasn’t there, but Mom and Kiana were. Valerie looked around the sanctuary, hoping Go-boy wouldn’t show. But he was already in the building somewhere. He was waiting for his moment. He knew the town was in need of a prophet and that the timing was perfect for him to emerge. He knew this would both shine light into the town’s pockets of darkness and win Valerie’s heart.
The funeral lasted just over an hour. Valerie’s dad had been in the church choir, so there was an emotional time where all the members stood around his coffin and sang a hymn translated into Iñupiaq.
After the sermon the pastor opened the microphone to anyone who wanted to share memories of Valerie’s dad. Her uncle spoke—a best friend of her dad’s, followed by a woman who was a member of the choir and coworker, followed by Valerie’s mom, who could hardly get out halves of sentences at first. Her mom told a story of when they were just married and living in Koyuk, and it had been a bad year for fishing and hunting and she was pregnant with Valerie. She was offered a job at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but she decided she didn’t want to take it; she wanted to stay home that year with her firstborn, stay in Koyuk. So Valerie’s dad, struggling to feed himself and his wife and struggling to pay rent, began carving miniature fish and ulus and whales from small pieces of petrified wood, and made them into earrings with fishing-lure leads, and started selling them to tourist shops in Anchorage. She said, “Real Native art, I guess,” joking, and the people in church laughed. But the earrings helped get them through that year, and became a popular tourist purchase, and ended up getting them through a few more years after. As she told the story, she brushed her fingers past her ears—she was wearing the first pair he’d ever made—little seals. Valerie had on a pair too.
There was a long pause after Valerie’s mom spoke. A collected breath of air. Cheeks were starting to relax after being sore from the exhausted laughing, and the tears that had followed the story were starting to dry.
This was when Go-boy came to the podium from a side room.
He said, “As some of you may know, I asked Valerie to marry me over a month ago. I was serious, and I would do it again. I am doing it again, right now.”
At this point there was some uneasy shifting in the church. One person laughed.
“She’s an amazing woman, and it’s a testament to her parents. To her mom, who shows such strength and compassion, who shows us that God must be a woman, and to her dad—a man who no doubt had problems, who hurt, who struggled, who even stole some gas from Garage one time. We remember that. Man, we’ve all stolen gas from Garage. And we’ve all given gas, or fish, or kuupiaq to someone who needed it too. And we’ve seen today, in this dead man, how a person can turn from stealing gas to near perfection—before death, before the afterlife, right here on this planet.
“So today we honor a man who was prepared to make heaven a reality. Let us learn from him. Let us release the things that keep us in the past, the things that keep us silent, the things that hold us back from becoming what our hearts want us to be. Today we shall all become exactly who we want to be. I want to be Unalakleet’s youngest mayor. This day, right now, it’s official—vote for Go-boy—Go-boy for mayor.”
There was a silent shock throughout the room, followed by anxious mumbling.
“When I’m mayor we will all find heaven, here and now. It will be new and beautiful! In this new day the whole village will live without judgment, and we will be free to express ourselves. We will never forget that the moment is all there is, and we will see that we are true. Time is our tool to watch perfection unfold—and Unalakleet will become perfect. I’ll act as the most transparent leader and I will bring the New Consciousness to politics. There will be no more poverty or crime, and we will turn the new jail into a rural Alaska college for the perpetual study of awe and wonderment. The town will operate as a cooperative, and everything—from milk to airfare to postage—will be based on a sliding-scale fee. I will appoint a poet laureate to inspire our senses, and students will be paid to attend school, and every seven years we will redistribute all the wealth throughout the co-op—”
The pastor finally walked to the podium and cut Go-boy off, leading him out to the side room. A couple people laughed, but none were from Valerie’s family. And Valerie was devastated. She was angry. Go had turned her father’s funeral into a showcase for his beliefs. Most importantly, he’d turned the attention on himself. She knew she would never again believe the things Go-boy wanted her to believe—much less love him again. At that moment she was sure of it.
Valerie moved to Anchorage two weeks after her dad’s funeral. It wasn’t to attend the university but to get away from Go-boy. He’d been relentless and she couldn’t hide from him in the small village.
Her last week in Unk was when forest fires blanketed the whole town with that yellowish-gray haze of smoke. She was scheduled to fly out at the start of the week, but each day the flights were canceled, and Go kept up his relentless pursuit—posting his reasons for love all over town and knocking on every relative’s and friend’s door looking for her. So Valerie’s mom called the police and Go was issued a restraining order. And although Go had never gotten forceful, or even disrespectful, and everyone who knew about the situation mostly just thought it was cute, Valerie was scared.
Go-boy made one last attempt to save Valerie. At least, that was how he saw it. He was convinced she wasn’t listening to her heart. That by some kind of trauma, some kind of deep wound, she wasn’t setting herself free. So after she moved, Go found out where Valerie was living. This was when he snuck onto a cargo plane, intending to eventually fly to New York City to meet Yoko Ono. In Anchorage Go-boy broke into Valerie’s uncle’s house. Go found Valerie’s room and left a note that was attached to a gill-net buoy. It said, I KNOW YOUR DAD MOLESTED YOU. He was convinced not only that she had been hiding this shameful secret but that this miracle of him knowing would be the key to her healing and the key to reinstating their awesome love for one another.
He was absolutely wrong in all these assumptions. Valerie was crushed.
Valerie wanted to forget about Go-boy, so she convinced herself to fall for someone else. After a month in Anchorage she began dating an engineer from Montana, a short guy who was eight years older than her. He made decent money working for an oil and gas company and spent his weekends playing hacky sack on sidewalks along Fourth Avenue and his nights drinking in the bars on that same street. He loved to pick fights when he was drunk and would often come back to his apartment sweaty and bruised and out of breath. Valerie started drinking as well. This new boyfriend supplied her with a fake ID.
Soon after, Valerie’s uncle told her if she didn’t stop getting wasted she’d have to move out. So Valerie did, and moved in with Montana. At first the arrangement was temporary because she had no desire to live with him, or any guy, so soon, while she was so young. But another month passed, and plans were forgotten.
I think I’ll go to school,” Valerie told Montana. At this point the deadline for spring semester was nearing and she was still unemployed. She knew he would tell her to forget about it. She knew he’d say what he always said, that she didn’t have to worry about a career because he made enough money for both of them. He would say this, thinking it was nice, thinking he was a better man for offering. But Valerie was dating him as a fling. That was all. She and Montana had already been together two months—two-thirds as long as she and Go-boy—but Valerie felt more like a roommate to Montana than a lover, like they’d been arbitrarily paired up for a set amount of time. After the intense start and then sharp fall with Go-boy, this was all she needed—something mindless—something simple—a fling.
But this time, instead of talking about the money he made, Montana only said, “Why do you always wear t-shirts inside out? You look like you’re poor.” He was making a joke, but Valerie didn’t find it funny.
She thought about Go-boy, remembering the list he wrote for her, the reason spray-painted on the Kuuk Bridge—YOU WEAR T-SHIRTS INSIDE OUT.
Valerie went into the bedroom and put on a different t-shirt, a solid navy shirt, right side out.
The Unalakleet River had finally frozen. Just as spring had been unusually early, fall had been unusually late—a long summer altogether. It would still be a month before the ice was thick enough for snowmachines. This was just after the unknown woman came to town; at least, she was unknown for a few days until she was flown to a Nome hospital. There she was identified, and according to the rumors, she was healed in a week and was back to her normal, domestic life. But I still didn’t know how she had gotten to Unk. No body did. And it seemed nobody ever would—it was a mystery that only this small town would ever ponder.
Go had been detached that week, emotionless, all the while tormented by his own compulsions. Yet, a few times, when I was close to confronting him about his uncharacteristic sadness and detachment, Go would have brief moments of normalcy. During those times he would show a fleeting interest in his family, in me, and in the unknown woman. It was enough to keep me confused and unsure. At times he was fun. During one of these breaks Go tried to theorize about how the unknown woman had landed in town.
“She could’ve floated on an ice floe from Point Hope,” Go said. “It started the size of a parking lot but melted real slow, and when it reached our beach it was the size of a pillow, and gone by morning.”
“She was frozen in permafrost a hundred years ago,” I said. “And when the forest fires came, she thawed and came to life.”
“Permafrost!” Go said. “Nice. But how would a family claim her?”
“They were lying.”
“Maybe they were thawed by the forest fires too!”
Not more than a week after this I found Go trying to tie a rope around his neck.
Valerie heard about Go-boy’s attempted suicide three days after it happened. He was still in Nome at the hospital, so she tried to do what she’d been thinking about doing anyway—call him. But Go-boy wasn’t taking calls, not from Valerie or anyone. He was only talking to me and Kiana, and that was because we were there at the hospital. Even then I couldn’t get many words out of him. He fake-listened every time I tried to ask questions or give him encouragement. I tried to tell him about how everyone in Unk had torn down the old jail. How the kids had started smashing the ruined building. How it sounded phenomenal. And Kiana told him about Sean, how he beat the doctors at the memory game and how that was his new nickname—Memory. But Go didn’t react. His brain was busy, ruminating over something. He led the doctors on, letting them hear the right types of responses in the right order. And by the time they let him leave, Go hadn’t changed much. He was drugged now, but Kiana and I could tell he was still denying his condition.
For weeks after, Go was unstable. He was accepting of his disease but unhopeful about his situation and future. And he and I would have variations of the same conversation over and over—
“You can hold on to all of the good things from the summer,” I’d say. “Take the accomplishments and forget about the rest.”
“I hurt so many people,” he’d say, meaning Valerie.
“People bounce back. We can take it.”
“Man, I can’t even trust myself.”
“You know more about yourself now, though. You can learn.”
“It was the best year of my life, and it was all a lie.”
Go-boy’s therapist had told him he couldn’t live like he had been. That it wasn’t normal. He’d been manic all year, and his brain chemicals were out of whack. The therapist told him all the things he’d believed were actually distortions created by his overactive, and very ill, brain. To Go this meant most people would in fact be sent to hell, and there would never be a heaven on earth, and his love for Valerie was a sickness. The therapist told him he was manic-depressive, and would always be, and that he would always need to be medicated. This frustrated me. I mean, I was no doctor, but the all-or-nothing approach just seemed stupid, especially for Go. He thrived on positivity.
I said, “What if you really were living on a higher level of consciousness? What if you really were enlightened?”
“Then I wouldn’t have tried to hang myself.”
I said, “That was just the crash, man, the rest of us bringing you back down. Don’t you think Jesus seemed a little fuckin’ manic too?”
But in his current medicated state, saying things like this was unreasonable. It wasn’t even funny to him. It couldn’t be. Go was now consumed with doing everything he could to stay focused on the simple, the immediate, the concrete. He arranged potato chips in order of size, then ate them largest to smallest. He organized his music collection from A to Z, then by year, then by genre. He separated change. He counted clouds. He took hours to do everything. When he wasn’t engaged in those chores, he slept.
One time, just before Christmas, we hopped in his AMC to go to the post office. We had to let the car warm up, so we sat in the driveway waiting, with Go behind the wheel, me sitting shotgun. Go blew into his bare hands, warming them. I adjusted the radio. After a while the car sounded ready to drive, but Go still waited. He waited ten minutes. Then fifteen. Then twenty. We were warm by that point but still not going anywhere. Go, behind the wheel, looked arrested by a thought that paralyzed him. It was disturbing.
“Hey, Go,” I said.
He didn’t respond.
“The post office is only open another two hours. We better hurry.”
He laughed a little, but it was more for show than anything. Then he said something I never thought I’d hear him say. He said, “What if this is it? What if this is the best we can do?” He motioned to the whole village, but I knew he was talking about the two of us. “What if God is just a sadist?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I could feel his despair, and I wanted to be quick and smart so I could reinstate his hope in life. I wanted to prove him wrong for his own sake. Right then I wanted to know impossibly more than I ever would. Yet I couldn’t respond. I’d start with, “But—” or “Think about—” and wouldn’t finish. I’d spend the holidays trying to remember what Go said, and then I’d try to answer his doubts and fears. And in a way that only Go could, he had me thinking about the purpose of life. He had me thinking about the role of perspective in our lives. He had me unlocking questions I never knew I had.
During Go-boy’s funk people were always stopping by our house, bringing cookies and sweetbread and smoked salmon strips. Most people were strangers to me, but they knew who I was, and it felt nice. It was even busier during Christmas. People were worried, and they wanted to visit with Go, but he wouldn’t allow it. So our kitchen counter became clogged with plastic bags full of food. Breads and salads and cookies and fish, and most of it would get moldy or stale.
With Sean home, Kiana and Mom had a new project—raising a kid. Mom put all her energy into Sean. She seemed rejuvenated by the responsibility of raising a boy in Unalakleet. And it suited her. Although she and Kiana were there for Go-boy when he needed them, they weren’t as aware of Go’s health as they had been before the suicide attempt.
For New Year’s Eve, over half the people in the village went to the bridge at the edge of town to watch a fireworks show. The sled-dog club hosted the celebration. It was a pitch-black night. Headlights from trucks cast long shadows over the snowy bridge and tundra all around. Bodies stumbled into each other, blinded and disoriented, waiting patiently. When the clocks finally hit midnight we could hear gunshots echoing throughout town—people firing off round after round from their .22 rifles and pistols. Then the pyrotechnics started and the sky lit up and you could finally see people—wrapped in fur parkas and fur hats—their faces lit up red and blue and orange below a low cloud of truck exhaust and frozen breath. I wove between trucks and four-wheelers and through the people, wondering where Go-boy was. I wondered how long his funk would last. I wondered if he needed to have his medications adjusted or if maybe this was the real Go-boy, the Go who’d existed before I’d moved to town, the Go who would struggle to raise a smile the rest of his prescription-filled days. He was not only depressed like he had been right before and right after his suicide attempt, but he was now frustrated with all the medical stuff—the diagnosis, the drugs, the therapy. He blamed the medication for many things. He said it made him foggy all day. He said he could no longer read books—not being able to focus his eyes. He said some of his favorite foods and drinks, like pop, tasted horrible. Through all of this, Go kept himself locked up inside our house. He kept the curtains shut and the lights dim. There was never music in his room anymore. Kids stopped by from time to time, but Go wasn’t visiting with anyone.
The church was openly praying for Go-boy during worship services. They operated a prayer chain—members phoning each other, passing along a prayer request for Go over the phone. The pastor stopped by our house weekly. There were times when Go-boy refused the pastor—didn’t even let her in the house—and other times when they sat together, drinking coffee and watching daytime TV. But Go had stopped going to church, stopped talking about God. He even told me he no longer believed in Christianity.
A couple months passed, and in my weakest moments, when I would see Go still depressed and imprisoned to his own distorted emotions, I wondered if it would have been better if I’d never caught him trying to kill himself, if he might have been better off. Like Valerie, I was undecided about what came after death, but living with Go while he hated every ounce of himself and his life—hidden behind the curtains and walls of our house, avoiding people at all costs—made me feel like there had to be something better waiting for us, all of us, if not in this life, then after. Maybe death really would’ve been okay for Go-boy, to avoid this spot he was stuck in.
But we still had a lot of living ahead of us. And maybe that was the reason Go never tried suicide again—despite the worst of it. Maybe he was open to the idea that hope could someday come back to him.
Around March Go-boy started to rejoin the community. He worked part-time shifts at the airport. He played in the Iditarod basketball tournament, helping his team get third place, receiving his own All-Tourney trophy and sweatpants. Go-boy had been learning to read his moods—he called them phases—and kept a journal dedicated to tracking his patterns and changes. He watched what he ate, reducing his sugar and caffeine intake. He still didn’t trust the mental health industry, but he stayed on his medications, adjusting the dosage to his own liking—low enough so he still had energy and could read books, yet high enough to regulate the extreme ups and downs. It was a struggle. It took lots of work. In late March he felt a rapid change again—like the year before—and talked to his doctor, getting the okay for a higher dosage for a couple weeks, for safety. It seemed, Go-boy was learning, that he had a straightforward annual manic episode—one long mania for most of the year, and one long, dark depression starting sometime in late winter.
By April Go-boy was ready to call Valerie. It was around the time people were guessing when the ice would break up. Some were thinking the end of May, others even theorized as late as June. It seemed spring would never come. Always cloudy. Always cold. I’d been in Unk for almost a year at this point, and half of it had been during this winter, during the never-ending blizzards and nonstop wind, through day after day of layering winter clothes for school and trips to the grocery store, with the occasional basketball or wrestling tournament in the school gym. Kiana and I spent all our time together. We’d make out and watch movies in Go-boy’s living room, ignoring the poorly patched hole in the floor and trying to get Go to play board games with us.
Go-boy talked to me about calling Valerie. He asked if I thought it was a good idea. Then he ran through his monologue a few times, and it sounded good—safe—so with me sitting in the room, he called and left a message.
“Hey, Valerie. It’s Go. I . . . wanted to call and say hello. I guess a lot has happened this past year that I haven’t apologized for. . . . I know you know. . . . So I won’t even try-say anything. I just wanted to maybe be friends again. Either way, I understand. At least, I’m starting to. Okay, see you.”
By the time he hung up the phone he was already worrying.
I told him she probably wouldn’t call for a while. A month, to be fair. She was a smart girl and would need time to think things over. She had loved him and had gotten hurt, and that wasn’t something to just bounce back from.
But after hearing the message, Valerie knew she would call Go. Everybody did. She wanted to forgive him. Hearing his voice was what she needed. She had been missing Unk more than anything, and the sound of Go’s voice reminded her of boat rides upriver, and family picnics on sandbars, and aunties sitting around for hours with coffee and little kids, laughing and talking about nothing. But she also wanted to wait before calling Go back, maybe a week or so, to not get him too excited. She wanted to show patience.
The next Go-boy heard about Valerie was from a stranger the following week. He was at the post office, checking his mail, when one of his former teachers told him.
She said, “How are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Go said, assuming the teacher was talking about his depression. He fingered through the Bushmailer newspaper—bulk-mail coupons for rural Alaska.
“She was too young.”
Go looked at the teacher, confused.
“Haven’t you heard?” she said.
Valerie had died in a car accident on the Seward Highway, heading south out of Anchorage with her boyfriend.
Some would theorize that Valerie had been trying to break up with Montana. Most of Valerie’s friends guessed that she was going to use their road trip that day to give him the news. She was that type of person. Thoughtful, but not always with the best timing. Those who held to this theory thought she had maybe already told him, before the accident. They thought maybe he deliberately crossed lanes and drove head-on into the logging truck. Afterward police found alcohol in Montana’s blood. He wasn’t drunk, and there weren’t any bottles in the car, but any alcohol in his blood was enough for Valerie’s friends and family to blame him. They had already been blaming him for Valerie’s drinking.
Of course Go-boy blamed himself. He left the post office, and by the time he got to the other side of town, to his house, that cloud—as he described it—had resettled over his life. He couldn’t take any more tragedies. His immediate thought was suicide. End everything. That was it. End it all. He was the reason Valerie had died, and he couldn’t live with that. He didn’t deserve to live.
Go blamed himself because of what he believed. He believed people planned out their lives before they were born, like reincarnation, in order to live a number of different times to experience everything, yet individuals and circumstances derailed those plans every day with free will. Go-boy believed in avoidable tragedy. And Go-boy believed he was the cause of Valerie’s tragedy.
By the time I heard the news, Go-boy was long gone. He disappeared like he had a habit of doing.
I searched through Go’s room, looking for clues to where he might have gone. I dug in his dresser drawers and pants pockets and backpacks. Among a stack of notebooks I found a journal. It was titled GO & VALERIE. On their first date, they had started this journal together, writing their feelings and emotions out, separately, in this little black book. They addressed each entry to one another—DEAR GO; DEAR VALERIE. I’m sure they passed it back and forth. There were many entries early on, sometimes two a day from each of them. Both Go and Valerie wrote about their love with an energy that now seemed ridiculous. About a quarter of the way through the journal, Valerie’s entries stopped, from the time Go had asked her to marry him. And about halfway through the book, there was nothing but blank pages. I guessed that to be around the time of Go’s attempted suicide. But as I flipped through, I found a recent entry, near the end of the journal, dated the same day Go had heard about her death. I read it start to finish, thinking it might reveal his whereabouts—
I remember so much, almost more than could have possibly happened. I remember the way you drove a boat up North River and how you stood up while steering. You said that it was in order to view the channel and any snags in the water, and I trusted you because you were a good driver. But I remember something else: sitting next to you, seeing you, and sensing how you savored the feeling of water rushing beneath your feet, how if you could’ve had the choice, there would’ve been no need for a boat at all. With the strong current against you at those times, you would’ve steered us upriver, around each bend and sandbar, through the deep spots, under the hanging trees, and I would’ve never doubted where we were traveling. I could’ve put my hand on your leg and held on, but it wouldn’t have mattered, and you wouldn’t have noticed, because at that moment we were already together.
Sometimes always a bend or two behind,
—Go-boy
I tracked Go down in Anchorage, at the psych ward of the Native Hospital. He’d checked himself in, feeling so unstable he couldn’t trust himself. I spent most of my remaining five hundred dollars—from the thousand Go had given me—on a plane ticket to see him. But since he’d checked himself in, he could refuse visitors, and he didn’t want to see anyone, not even Kiana. Not even me. He felt too guilty. So I explained the whole story to his nurses, and on my behalf they tried convincing him to let me visit, but it didn’t work. I was turned away to the sidewalks of Anchorage.
Standing there in front of the hospital, I looked up at the third floor, at the black windows reflecting sky. I wondered if Go was up there behind the tinted glass, looking down and seeing me on the sidewalk with no place to be. And I wondered—if he was watching, what did he see? Was I just another cousin who scoffed at his fanatical ideas? Was I just another jaded skeptic who didn’t pay attention to spirituality, who didn’t appreciate the hard questions about life? Was I just a phase for him, a passing memory, a time to look back and laugh about—the year his cousin from LA lived with him? How funny it was when this cousin couldn’t fit into the village scene. How this cousin talked a lot of shit about moving home and playing drums. How this cousin had a fling with his sister. How it would be nice to see this cousin again for old time’s sake, all the while knowing this cousin would never return to Unk, not even to visit.
This was what finally pushed me to change my name to Atausiq. I started the legal name-change process because of this—the idea of Go looking down on me from the psych ward and seeing someone who could never change, seeing a life that could never change, and from that, believing nothing or nobody ever got any better, that life would always be the same shitty way it always was.
So I became Atausiq. And when Go let me onto the third floor to visit, on his fifth day in there, and we played ping-pong in the activities room, I told him it was now official—I was becoming Atausiq.
He looked at me with part suspicion, part shock, before deflecting his stare to the wall behind me and scratching at the back of his neck.
I said, “Nothing is permanent, man. That’s why I did it.”
I told him it wasn’t because of our bet, but because I now believed nothing lasted forever.
I said, “It’s the never same-same conspiracy.”
He almost smiled right then, holding the paddle and ball, getting ready to serve. But he was far from okay. It took all of his energy to be around anybody, to be anywhere but alone in his room. If allowed, he would’ve sat on his window ledge all day, looking through the angled blinds and out the window, with the TV’s dialogue indiscernible somewhere behind him, down a distant hall. He’d look at the busy city—the office complexes and clusters of housing developments climbing the foothills—and he’d remember Valerie’s hands, how her slender thumbs were more wrinkled than her other fingers. How her nails seemed too thin. How alive he felt when those hands touched his. And Go would know that he’d never forget the way those hands looked while holding a pen, or a coffee mug, or an ulu, or resting idle on the arm of a chair, or even steering his boat upriver.
Go flipped the ping-pong paddle over and over in his hands. He said, “But that’s not same-same.”
I ended up spending over two weeks in the city while Go was in the hospital, learning this whole story, and learning about his past, and understanding that somehow, through it all, Go-boy’s fantastic weird year had become my story too.