There There(8)

“I’m actually working on something right now that hardly takes any money to make. Last summer I was up here doing interviews. I was able to edit some of them, and I’m up here again to try to get a few more. It’s about Indians coming to Oakland. Living in Oakland. I just asked these Indian people I met through a friend of mine who knows a lot of Indians, she’s kind of your auntie, I think, Indian way. I’m not sure if you’ve met her though. Do you know Opal, the Bear Shields?”

“Maybe,” Dene said.

“Anyway, I asked some Indian people who’ve lived in Oakland for a while and some that just got here not too long ago a two-part question, actually it’s not a question, I tried to get them to tell me a story. I asked them to tell me a story about how they ended up in Oakland, or if they were born here, then I asked what it’s been like living in Oakland. I told them the question is meant to be answered in story form, whatever that means to them is okay, then I left the room. I decided to do it confessional style so it’s almost like they’re telling the story to themselves, or to anyone and everyone behind the lens. I don’t wanna get in the way in there. I can do all the editing myself. I just need the budget to pay my own salary, which is basically nothing.”

After Lucas said this he took a big breath in and sort of coughed, cleared his throat, then pulled from a flask he got out of the inner pocket of his jacket. He looked off, out the living-room window, across the street, or farther, off to where the sun had set, or past that, back at his life maybe, and then he got this look in his eyes, it was something Dene had seen in his mom’s eyes, something that looked like remembering and dreading at once. Lucas got up and walked out to the front porch for a cigarette, and on the way said, “Better get to your homework, Nephew. Me and your mom have some stuff to talk about.”



* * *



—

    Dene only realizes he’s been stuck underground between stations for ten minutes after ten minutes of being stuck underground between stations. He breaks a sweat at the top of his forehead thinking about being late or missing the panel. He didn’t submit a sample work. So he would have to waste the little time he does have to explain why. How it was originally his uncle’s idea, how it’s really his project, and how a lot of what he’s proposing is based on what his uncle told him in the short time they had together. And then the weirdest part, the part he can’t present, because he doesn’t totally understand it, is that each of the interviews, the interviews his uncle actually conducted, came with scripts. Not transcriptions but scripts. So had his uncle written the scripts to be performed? Or had he transcribed actual interviews and then turned them into script form? Or had he interviewed someone, and then based on the interview, made a script that he would rework, and then had someone else perform the reworked script? There was no way to know. The train starts up, moves for a beat, then stops again. A staticky voice from above drones incomprehensibly.



* * *



—

Back at school Dene wrote Lens everywhere he could. Each place he tagged would be like a place he could look out from, imagine people looking at his tag; he could see them seeing, above their lockers, on the back of the bathroom stall doors, on the tops of desks. In the bathroom stall tagging the back of the door, Dene thought about how sad it was to want everyone to see a name that wasn’t his, a name written to no one, to everyone, and to imagine them looking into it like it was a camera lens. It was no wonder he hadn’t made a single friend in middle school yet.

    When he got home, his uncle wasn’t there. His mom was in the kitchen.

“Where’s Lucas?” Dene said.

“They’re keeping him overnight.”

“Keeping him where overnight?”

“The hospital.”

“For what?”

“Your uncle’s dying.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, honey. I wanted to tell you. I didn’t think it would happen like this. I thought it could be a nice visit, and then he’d go and—”

“Dying of what?”

“He’s been drinking too much for too long. His body, his liver’s going.”

“Going? But he just got here,” Dene said, and he saw that this made his mom cry, but only for a second.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her arm and said, “There’s nothing we can do at this point, honey.”

“But why wasn’t something done when it could have been done?”

“There are some things we can’t control, some people we can’t help.”

“He’s your brother.”

    “What was I supposed to do, Dene? There was nothing I could have done. He’s been doing this most of his life.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. Please,” Norma said. She lost hold of the plate she’d been drying. They both stared at the pieces of it on the floor between them.



* * *



—

At the Twelfth Street Station Dene runs up the stairs but then looks at his phone and sees that he’s not actually gonna be late. When he gets to street level, he slows to a walk. He looks up and sees the Tribune Tower. It’s a faded pink glow that seems like it should be red but lost its steam somewhere along the way. Aside from the plain, average-height, checkered twin buildings that are the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building complex just before I-980 on the way into West Oakland, the Oakland skyline lacks distinction, and is unevenly scattered, so that even when the newspaper moved down to Nineteenth, and even though the paper doesn’t exist anymore, they keep the Tribune light aglow.