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ISBN 978-0-316-27076-2
E3-20170503_DA_NF
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. Forty Knives
2. Sacred Heart
3. The Call
4. Good Hair
5. Soda Can
6. Prayer Animals
7. Benediction
8. My Sister’s Waltz
9. End of Life
10. Valediction
11. Some Prophecies Are More Obvious than Others
12. Terminal Velocity
13. Who Died on the First of July?
14. Drive, She Said
15. The Viewing
16. Everything Costs
17. Reviewing
18. Scatological
19. The Procession
20. Nonfiction
21. Blood
22. Needle & Thread
23. How to Be an Atheist at a Spokane Indian Christian Funeral
24. Brother Man
25. Silence
26. Your Multiverse or Mine?
27. Clotheshorse
28. Eulogize Rhymes with Disguise
29. The Undertaking
30. The Urban Indian Boy Sings a Death Song
31. Downtown
32. Dear Dylan Thomas, Dear Dr. Extreme, Dear Rage
33. Lasting Rites
34. Equine
35. Feast
36. Utensil
37. Sibling Rivalry
38. Eulogy
39. Drum
40. Rebel Without a Clause
41. Unsaved
42. God Damn, God Dam
43. I Turn My Mother Into a Salmon, I Turn Salmon Into My Mother
44. Communion
45. Storm
46. C Is for Clan
47. Apocalypse
48. Creation Story
49. The Loss Extends in All Directions
50. Revision
51. Bullet Point
52. The Quilting
53. Three Days
54. Navigation
55. Sedated
56. At the Diabetic River
57. Reunion
58. The Spokane Indian Manual of Style
59. Testimony
60. Pack Behavior
61. Prophecy
62. Welcome to the Middle-Aged Orphans Club
63. Performance
64. Electrolux
65. Love Parade
66. The Urban Indian Boy Enjoys Good Health Insurance
67. The Raid
68. Ursine
69. Persistence
70. Ode in Reverse
71. Construction
72. Freedom
73. Chronology
74. Unsaved
75. Skin
76. Missionary Position
77. Shush
78. Harvest
79. The Game
80. I Am My Own Parasite
81. Tribal Ties
82. Want List
83. The Staging
84. Assimilation
85. Litmus Test
86. Standardized Achievement
87. Everything You Need to Know About Being Indigenous in America
88. Fire
89. Love Story
90. Genocide
91. Greek Chorus
92. Roller Ball
93. Law & Order
94. The Lillian Alexie Review of Books
95. Painkiller
96. Cultural Identity
97. Motherland
98. Glacial Pace
99. Next Door to Near-Death
100. The Only Time
101. Scanned
102. Brain Surgery Ping-Pong
103. Clarification
104. Words
105. Therapy
106. How Does My Highly Indigenous Family Relate to My Literary Fame?
107. Will the Big Seattle Earthquake Trigger a Tsunami the Size of God?
108. How Are You?
109. Where the Creek Becomes River
110. Kind
111. Tribalism
112. Security Clearance
113. Ode to Gray
114. Tyrannosaurus Rez
115. Objectify
116. My Mother as Wolf
117. All My Relations
118. How to Argue with a Colonialist
119. Dear Native Critics, Dear Native Detractors
120. Slight
121. Psalm of Myself
122. Hunger Games
123. Communal
124. Your Theology or Mine?
125. Review, Reprise, Revision
126. The Widow’s Son’s Lament
127. Physics
128. Spring Cleaning
129. Discourse
130. Self-Exam
131. The No
132. Jungian
133. Side Effects
134. Hydrotherapy
135. My Food Channel
136. Triangle of Needs
137. Artist Statement
138. Sonnet, with Fabric Softener
139. Complications
140. Photograph
141. Dear Mother
142. The Urban Indian Boy Dreams of the Hunt
143. Dialogue
144. Tantrums
145. The End of a Half-Assed Basketball Career
146. When I Die
147. Filtered Ways
148. Epigraphs for My Tombstone
149. After Brain Surgery
150. Fluent
151. Thursday Is a Good Day to Find an Empty Church Where You Can Be Alone
152. Pine
153. Ancestry
154. Things I Never Said to My Mother
155. Tattoo
156. Scrabble
157. Public Art
158. What I Have Learned
159. Like a Bird
160. Flight Hours
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sherman Alexie
Newsletter
For Arnold, Kim, Arlene, and James
1.
Forty Knives
IN 1972 OR 1973, or maybe in 1974, my mother and father hos
ted a dangerous New Year’s Eve party at our home in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
We lived in a two-story house—the first floor was a doorless daylight basement while the elevated second floor had front and back doors accessible by fourteen-step staircases. The house was constructed by our tribe using grant money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more tersely known as HUD. Our family HUD house was new but only half finished when we moved in and remains unfinished, and illogically designed, over forty years later. It was worth $25,000 when it was built, and I think it’s probably worth about the same now. I don’t speak my tribal language, but I’m positive there are no Spokane Indian words for real estate appreciation.
The top floor of our HUD house contains a tiny bathroom with an unusually narrow door and a small windowless kitchen, both included as afterthoughts in deadline sketches hurriedly drawn by a tribal secretary who had no architectural education.
I didn’t grow up in a dream house. I lived in a wooden improvisation.
On the top floor with the kitchen and bathroom, there is also a minuscule bedroom that was shared by my little sisters, identical twins, during childhood. My sisters, Kim and Arlene, never married and nearly fifty years old now, have never lived more than one mile apart, so perhaps they cannot escape their twinly proximity.
Also on the top floor of our HUD house is the master bedroom, where my late father slept alone, and a disproportionately large living room, where my late mother slept on a couch.
My late father, Sherman Alexie, Sr., was a Coeur d’Alene Indian. He was physically graceful and strong, adept at ballroom waltzes, powwow dancing, and basketball. And always smelled of the smoke of one good cigar intermingled with dozens of cheap stogies. As a teenager, he began to resemble the actor Charles Bronson, and that resemblance only increased with age. Introverted, depressed, he spent most of his time solving crossword puzzles while watching TV.
My late mother, Lillian Alexie, crafted legendary quilts and was one of the last fluent speakers of our tribal language. She was small, just under five feet tall when she died. And she was so beautiful and verbose and brilliant she could have played a fictional version of herself in a screwball Hollywood comedy if Hollywood had ever bothered to cast real Indians as fictional Indians.
I don’t know if my parents romantically loved each other. I am positive they platonically loved each other very much.
My mother and father slept separately from the time we moved into that HUD house in the early 1970s until his death from alcoholic kidney failure, in 2003. And then my mother continued to sleep alone on a living room couch—on a series of living room couches—until her death, in 2015. My parents were not a physically affectionate couple. I never saw, heard, or sensed any evidence—other than the existence of us children—that my mother and father had sex at any point during their marriage. If forced to guess at the number of times my parents had been naked and damp together, I would probably say, “Well, they conceived four children together, so let’s say they had sex three times for keeps—the twins only count for one—and four times for kicks.”
My big brother, Arnold, and I each had our own mostly finished basement bedrooms. But he spent much of his time living and traveling with a family of cousins like they were surrogates for his parents and siblings. I love my brother, but he sometimes felt like a stranger in those early years, and I imagine he might say the same about me in our later years. Never married, but in a decade-long relationship with a white woman, he is loud and hilarious and universally beloved in our tribe.
The furnace and laundry rooms, also in the basement, are cement-floored with bare wood stud walls. Dug five feet into the ground, our basement flooded with every serious rainstorm and has smelled of mold, and subsequent disinfectant fluids, from the beginning of time.
My little brother, James, who is also our second cousin, was adopted by my parents when he was a toddler. Fifteen years younger than me, he would eventually take over my bedroom after I went away to college. He was so starved when we got him that he would devour any food or drink in his vicinity, including other people’s meals. While we were distracted, he once drank my father’s sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp of Diet Pepsi in one long pull. He was only three years old. We thought it was funny. We didn’t ponder why a kid would come to us so very thirsty.
James was only five years old when I moved away from the reservation. So I think I have been more like his absent uncle than his big brother.
Smart and handsome and thin and also married to a white woman, James has a master’s degree in business.
Ah, my little brother is my favorite capitalist.
But that inexpertly constructed HUD house was still a spectacular and vital mansion compared to the nineteenth-century one-bedroom house where I spent most of the first seven years of my life. That ancient reservation house didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity when my parents, siblings, and I first moved in, along with an ever-changing group of friends, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
I most vividly remember my half sister, Mary. She was thirteen years older than me and seemed more like a maternal figure than a sibling. Even more beautiful than our gorgeous mother, Mary was a charming and random presence in my life. She was profane and silly and dressed like a hippie white girl mimicking a radical Indian. In later years, I would learn that Mary’s randomness and charm—and her eventual death in a house fire—were fueled by her drug and alcohol addictions. I didn’t yet know that romantic heroes—famous and not—are usually aimless nomads in disguise. Mary’s father lived in Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, so she sometimes lived with him and sometimes lived with us and sometimes shacked up with Indian men who reeked of marijuana and beer or with white men who looked like roadies for Led Zeppelin. A mother at fifteen, Mary gave her baby, my niece, to our aunt Inez to raise. My niece is only a few years younger than me, and I still don’t understand why my mother didn’t take her into our home. My parents raised one of our cousins as a son, and my sisters would eventually raise another cousin as a daughter. So why didn’t our niece become our sister? I never asked my parents those questions. But, in writing the first draft of this very paragraph, I realized for the first time that my father, so passive in nearly all ways, might have said no to raising a granddaughter who was not his biological relative. I feel terrible for considering this possibility. Could my father have done such a thing? Could he have been such an alpha lion? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not. So why didn’t my mother raise her granddaughter? I doubt that I’ll ever be able to answer that question. There are family mysteries I cannot solve. There are family mysteries I am unwilling to solve.
Before her death, my mother told me that she liked to sleep alone on a couch in her later years because she’d only slept in crowded beds and bedrooms for most of her younger life. I never would have thought of a lumpy couch as a luxury, but my mother certainly did. Sometimes, when I was little and afraid and screaming from yet another nightmare, I would fitfully sleep on a smaller couch in the HUD house living room near my mother’s larger couch.
Born hydrocephalic, with abnormal amounts of cerebral spinal fluid crushing my brain, I had surgery at five months to insert a shunt and then had it removed when I was two. I suffered seizures until I was seven years old, so I was a kindergartner on phenobarbital. I have alternated between insomnia and hypersomnia my whole life. I begin dreaming immediately upon falling asleep, a condition called shortened REM latency that can be a precursor, indicator, cause, and result of depression. I have always been haunted by nightmares. By ghosts, real or imagined. I have always heard voices, familiar and strange. I was officially diagnosed as bipolar in 2010, but I think my first symptoms appeared when I was a child.
For Christmas in 1976, when I was ten, I received a plastic Guns of Navarone battle play set with Allied and Nazi soldiers, cannon, tanks, and planes. I added my own Indian and U.S. Cavalry toy soldiers and manically played war fo
r twenty-two hours straight. My parents didn’t stop me. They didn’t tell me to go to bed. My mania was accepted. In the context of my family, I wasn’t being odd. Rather, I was behaving like my mother, who would often work on her quilts for even longer sleepless stretches.
I often stayed awake all night reading books and writing stories and playing the board games I invented. If I was especially agitated and lucky, I would have a new graph-paper notebook and I would carefully color in thousands of squares, one by one, until I was calm enough to sleep.
I think I inherited my bipolar disorder from my mother. I believe she was haunted by ghosts, too. I also believe she has become a ghost, either as a supernatural being or as a hallucination caused by my various mental illnesses and medications or as the most current and vivid product of my imagination.
Thing is, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I see them all the time.
“You slept on that living room couch for years,” my mother’s ghost said to me while I was writing this memoir. “You never used your basement bedroom until you were eleven or twelve. I had you sleep close to me because you had those seizures. And I had to keep you safe. And I had to give you medicine in the middle of the night. And because you were always scared.”
“That’s not how I remember sleeping,” I said. “I remember moving into the basement bedroom on my first night.”
“You used to wet your bed,” my mother’s ghost said. “You wet the couch until you were thirteen, I think.”
“I stopped wetting the bed long before that,” I said.
“Do you remember that I would lay down a shower curtain on the couch and then lay down your sheets and blanket?” my mother’s ghost asked.
“That was only in the old house,” I said. “Never in the HUD house.”
“It was in both places,” she said. “You had bladder issues even when you were awake. Do you remember when you drove to Spokane with your cousins for a birthday party? But you were too nervous to go into a house filled with city Indians you didn’t know? So you stayed outside in the car and peed your pants because you were too scared to go to the bathroom in a stranger’s house?”
I lied and said, “I don’t remember that happening.”
“I think you forget things on purpose,” my mother’s ghost said.
I do remember when the white men in gray overalls installed the first indoor toilet in our ancient nineteenth-century house, but I can’t recall when the place was wired for electricity and the first lightbulb was switched on.