SEPTEMBER 6
I TORTURED MYSELF OVER thoughts of the game Savage, wondering whether I would be captured or shot and killed. I wondered how many others had died in this place. Jackson and Lyle wanted me dead, I was convinced. I started to panic, then. I wore myself out imagining I was dodging bullets, running down alleyways, crouched between buildings. Bombs, explosions, pistols fired. I pictured myself near Devil’s Bridge, being exposed to radiation and covered in mud while men in gas masks questioned me about whatever they wanted to know.
For a while I felt the urge to vomit and sat over a wastebasket with a finger down my throat, gagging myself. But I wasn’t able to vomit, only dry heave, which made my eyes water. I tried to relax in my bed. I told myself to stay calm, stay civil. It had rained all night, a steady rain for a while. Outside the window I could see branches of the oak tree waving in the wind. The thunder woke me up a few times with flashes of lightning, and I was coughing, which made me worry about my health, so I didn’t sleep well. I thought about that projection of Ray-Ray. I looked out the window and saw puddles around the tree and in the road. I saw trees with low-hanging branches in the distance, white clapboard houses beyond a rickety fence. Everything appeared dreary, as usual, the world gray-blue in a darkening land. It rained hard for a while and then tapered off.
Time started to feel heavy. Lying there, I started to think about my mother and all the weight of her responsibilities, having to care for my dad. My thoughts turned to images. A memory of when I was six or seven years old, and she pretended to cry when I said I was going to run away but didn’t make it farther than the fence out back. I don’t remember why I made the threat or where I said I was going, only that I was running away from home, from her. I stood there for what felt like a long time, listening to her sniffles, her fake cries. I felt terrible about it. All these years later I still felt bad about it, threatening to run away, even though I knew she was only pretending to cry. I stayed in the backyard and played with our dog Jack, rolling around in the grass with him. We played tug-of-war with a twig until it snapped. I let him chase me around the yard, and eventually I forgot about running away. My mother must’ve watched the whole thing from the back door, because when I came near the back porch, she was pretending to cry again. “I don’t want you to run away,” she said, putting her face in her hands.
Jackson stepped into the room and said my days were numbered. I sat up in bed, and he walked out. I got up and followed him into the kitchen.
“What does that mean?” I said. “My days are numbered.”
His back was to me. He was stirring his coffee cup with a spoon. “I’ve been trying to create these augmented realities,” he said. “This whole place is an alternate reality. Just look how many pillheads live here. People coughing, sick from decayed lungs, craving an alternate state of mind. We all overdo it.”
“What are you talking about?”
He turned to me and took a sip of his coffee. “We’ve been using you to develop our gaming here. Now your days are numbered. It’s an expression.”
“I know the expression.”
“We’ve got images of you all around town, Chief. People filmed you last night at the warehouse. It’s a live shooting game.”
“Fuck you.”
His eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything. It felt good to lash out at him. I could feel myself wanting to go on and on. I couldn’t take him any longer.
“Another thing,” I said. “I saw Ray-Ray’s image last night in the projector downstairs. What the fuck are you doing?”
He waited for some time, thinking. “You saw whose image?”
“Cut the bullshit.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked at me and blinked slowly. “The machine projects images I feed it. I feed it images I get online all the time. I use Facebook photos or whatever, and I included photos of you and Ray-Ray and your sister.”
“You’re pathetic, Jackson. You deserve to be alone. I’m getting out of here.”
“I wouldn’t try to leave if I were you, Chief. You’re the star of another game I’ve been working on. It’s called Savage.”
“Yeah, I saw the manual, scumbag. Another dumb failure.”
“That’s what you think,” he said. “We’re beta-testing it now. People use real guns to shoot Indians. That’s why people act so weird around you. That’s why I took video of you.”
“What a cruel piece of shit you are. I can’t believe I felt sorry for you.”
“Maybe you should just leave,” he said. “When people in town see you, they might assume you’re a hologram and shoot. But you could take your chances, right? I think I’ll just kick you out.”
“Fuck off. I’d rather die out there than stay here with you.”
He set down his coffee mug and stared directly at me. It was a look that took time, an attempt at intimidation, but it wasn’t working. Jackson was deceptively strong, but not very tough. For as long as I knew him, he had never been tough but had always pretended to be. In school he was always getting into fights and never winning. I started to walk away, but he pushed me. I turned and struck him in the chest with the palm of my hand, and he grabbed my arm. We started to grapple right there in the kitchen. We wrestled like teenagers. Neither of us threw a punch, but we were telling each other off, wrestling. Finally I hit him on the side of his head, and he crouched down, crying out. I could see he was in pain. He held his head with one hand and started swinging blind with the other, but I moved back and went into my room and shut the door.
He didn’t come after me or try to open the door. I tried to catch my breath. My mouth went dry, making it hard to swallow. A moment later I heard him leave, so I opened the door and went to the living room window. I saw him drive away. Then I went back to my room and packed my bag. How quickly everything had changed. I decided I hated Jackson Andrews, hated the Darkening Land and everything about it. I headed straight for the bathroom and opened his cabinets, looking for anything else, I didn’t know what, anything he had hidden. There were bottles of pills, laxatives, mouthwash. There were Q-tips and creams, gels.
I left the bathroom, kicked open the door to his bedroom, and went through his dresser drawers, his closet, looked under his bed. I searched the whole house, going through everything I could find. Then I went downstairs and climbed the ladder to his projector. I ripped the lid off and threw it to the ground. Coughing, I kicked it against the wall, then stomped on it, but none of this made me feel any better.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER I TOOK my bag and left the rotting house for good, thinking Jackson might as well stay there forever, trapped in the darkness and unwilling to change. I walked away still angry, fueled by an intense desire to confront anyone who glanced at me or mentioned my being Native. I quickened my step as I walked away. I wanted to find my way to the train station. Surely I could get a ride. I thought of the apparition of the woman with the basket I had seen in the middle of the night. She had talked about a trail lined with cherry-blossom trees.
Bulbous clouds assumed strange shapes. The mist hanging above the grass was dense. I remembered a time growing up when my family took a walk around our house. We took lots of walks together, and it was a way for me to gather my thoughts, a type of meditation. On this particular walk, my dad told Sonja and me that our ancestors had hunted only for food, not sport, and that once an animal had been killed, we should ask for forgiveness and explain that we needed the animal for food. Animals were not to be exploited, my dad explained. Neither were people. This had to do with our fundamental concern for harmony, and should always be followed. As I walked in the Darkening Land, I thought about my anger and how important it was to try to keep peace within myself. I thought about Ray-Ray’s death and how I avoided talking about him with Rae and my family. How all anyone ever wanted to do was talk about him when he was alive, and that for some reason I despised him a little for getting the attention. I was no longer angry about that attention, I realized, and telling myself this made me feel better about myself. Spending time away from my family had helped me, I felt.
The road I walked seemed to open up into a new world, with a brilliant sunlight that appeared from behind a cloud. For the first time since I came there, the sky was very blue, the humidity stifling and causing me to sweat. I heard gunshots from somewhere, which frightened me. I followed the road as it wound around and downhill. I walked until I saw the road dead-ended ahead, past a park with a swing set, merry-go-round, and monkey bars, on which I saw children playing. Looking farther ahead, past where the road ended, I saw tall trees towering over the horizon. I walked toward the playground, past plum trees and peach trees and pink cherry trees. It was a land of enchantment. A boy on a bicycle rode past me, ringing his bicycle bell as he passed, and I watched him ride down the hill toward the playground. He climbed off his bicycle and ran to the others. There was a small pond and an old house at the end of the road beside the playground.
Once I got closer, I saw an older man working in his yard. He wore overalls and had long white hair. He was down on his knees, digging through a trash bag. When I passed him, he stood and looked at me.
“Siyo,” he said.
I gave a slight wave and kept walking.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Come over here.”
I turned and looked at him. He waved me over. He was holding up sheets of notebook paper. “These are all my writings,” he said.
I approached him, and he handed them to me. “I think these are for you,” he said.
There were scribblings in blue and black ink. “It’s Cherokee,” I said. “I recognize the symbols, but I can’t read them.”
“I’m Tsala,” he said. His eyes held an intensity, full of years of pain and abandonment. I was struck by how intense and mysterious he appeared. “Maybe you should read my writings?”
“What for?”
“For help. There’s the road with the pink cherry blossoms down yonder.” He pointed toward the woods, and I saw swelled pink cherry blossoms in the distance. I felt overjoyed by this. In the blue-gray world, it was the brightest color I had seen.
“I need to leave this place,” I said. “Where does the road lead?”
He paused a moment, then asked if I would join him for coffee. He was too old and frail to be dangerous, so I agreed, and we walked along a little trail to the back of his house. He invited me into his kitchen. The walls were covered with wallpaper with flowery designs, and darker ovals and rectangles where pictures used to hang. I saw dishes piled in the sink, spilled coffee, vials and prescription bottles on the counter. There was a small kitchen table with two chairs. He sat in one and pointed for me to sit in the other across from him.
He offered me coffee and poured a cup for himself as well. I drank it black from a red coffee mug. It wasn’t too bad. I imagined him living alone, going to bed at night with no one to talk to or lie down with. I thought of him getting no help cooking or cleaning or washing his clothes. Tsala, poor old man, enduring the pain and loneliness of his old age. Still, I sensed a calm spirit about him.
He chewed on sugar cane and spoke in a low, serious voice. “A long time ago I built this house for people to stay in. I hauled lumber and erected strong beams. I built a solid roof and laid good floors. I built it for all the travelers to stay here. I devoted my life to this house. After my wife followed the road lined with cherry blossoms, I’ve kept my writings with me all the time, so people can read our stories while they stay here. You can stay here, but you should leave. Your heart is in the right place, beloved.”
He brought his pipe, and we shared a smoke while I told him about my family. Oddly, the smoke wasn’t making me cough, and when I told him this, he merely smiled. I told him about Ray-Ray dying. I told him about Rae leaving me. And I told him about my dad’s forgetfulness in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. All this flowed out of me with the smoke, and Tsala listened quietly and with full attention. As he listened, I noticed one of his eyes was blue and the other gray.
“Keep talking,” he said, bringing the pipe to his lips.
“I feel guilty for not going home,” I told him. “My family is having a bonfire. I haven’t seen them since they tried to help me with my drug problem.”
He leaned in close and looked at me. “Drug problem?”
“Drug problem.” It felt awkward to say, but maybe I had not been able to admit there was a problem. My denial overwhelmed me with guilt. “My family came to Albuquerque to confront me about it, but I wouldn’t listen.”
He stared at me intensely. He was a good listener, I realized, and soon I found there were tears in my eyes.
“I feel terrible about it,” I said.
He got up and left the room for a few minutes. When he returned, he set a handful of stones on the table in front of me. He took a pencil and drew a triangle and placed stones within it. “These are the stones that represent the wisdom fire within you,” he said. “Look for the fire.”
I leaned in and studied the triangle and a stone within it. “This stone is a rose quartz,” Tsala said. “It’s for overcoming grief. I want you to take it and keep it with you. Go ahead, take it.”
I reached in and took the stone. I looked at it in my hand. It was rose-colored and smooth.
“Remember your ancestors,” he told me. “Remember they were removed from their homes, and then they had no homes. They walked the Trail, walked and crawled and died. They suffered. But you already know this. Come with me, I want to show you something.”
I followed him outside, and that was when I saw the red fowl strutting around the yard. “The fowl,” I called out, and stopped walking. I realized I hadn’t seen the fowl in some time—I had almost forgotten about it. The fowl saw us, and Tsala moved toward it. He reached down to pick it up. I saw the fowl trying to peck him, its wings fluttering like crazy. Tsala held it with both hands, wrestled it until it stopped moving and went limp. The fowl was dead. Then he took it over by his garden, where an ax was on the ground. He dropped the bird and lifted the ax, bringing it down hard, cutting the fowl’s head off. I could barely watch.
When I approached him, he showed me the bloody carcass. “For you,” he said. “This fowl is now dead. Do you understand?”
“What now?” I asked.
“We bury it.”
He set the carcass down and went inside his garage to get a shovel. I found myself staring at the dead fowl. I saw the severed head with its dark eye, staring at me. I saw the carcass lying dead in blood and soil. No matter how hard I tried, I could not stop looking. A moment later Tsala returned with a shovel and dug a small hole in the ground right where we stood. He used the shovel to toss the carcass and head into the ground. I crossed my arms and watched the whole thing. Each shovelful of dirt made a hard sound as it hit the carcass, and after a moment Tsala had buried it completely.
I was exhausted, but felt like a great burden had lifted from me. I looked at the cherry trees around me and felt somehow connected to each one. I wondered how many people Tsala had helped before me—maybe as many people as there were trees. Tsala then led me to the trail with the cherry blossoms. We heard voices approaching and, turning around, saw a group of men walking down the road toward Tsala’s house. They were wearing masks and headsets, talking loudly. In their hands they carried sticks, long clubs that looked like broom handles. They saw us and stopped walking.
Tsala shouted at them to leave. “Go!” he yelled. “Go away from here, cowards! Leave us alone!”
He made a shooting gesture with his hands for them to hurry away, and, miraculously, they did. I had been bracing myself for a fight, and I stood there stunned for a moment, shocked that they had obeyed Tsala.
“Go follow the trail lined with cherry blossoms,” he told me. “It is not a trail of tears, son. It is a trail leading westward, without sadness or sickness or death. It is a trail to your home.”
He shook my hand, and I told him goodbye. As I started to walk, I turned back to him and asked, “What are your writings? I never asked.”
He called out, “I’m writing the Cherokee stories, beloved. The stories about vengeance and forgiveness.”
I watched his body crumple, and he turned into a phoenix. He spread his wings and flew into the gray sky.
THEN I LEFT THE DARKENING LAND. I followed the trail lined with cherry blossoms, looking ahead to the distance, listening to the sounds of owls and frogs around me. I walked down this trail and wasn’t afraid. I knew I was walking west because I could see in the distance the setting sun. The sky was pink and yellow, and cherry blossoms spilled onto the trail ahead. Feathers were soon falling all around me, flooding the trail, as white as a fresh winter snow. The winding trail was beautiful. I saw my ancestors ahead, but they were not crawling and wailing, they were standing. Their bodies filled the distance. I walked to them and did not grow tired. The trail before me was blazing with light.