There There(9)

Dene crosses the street, toward city hall. He passes through a cloud of weed smoke from a gathering of men behind the bus stop on Fourteenth and Broadway. He’s never liked the smell except for when he’s smoking it himself. He shouldn’t have smoked last night. He’s sharper when he doesn’t. It’s just that if he has it around, he’s gonna smoke it. And he keeps on buying it from the guy across the hall. So there it is.



* * *



—

    When Dene came home from school the next day, he found his uncle there on the couch again. Dene sat down and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared at the ground waiting for his uncle to say something.

“You must think I’m pretty despicable, what with me turning into a zombie out here on the couch, killing myself with the drink, is that what she told you?” Lucas said.

“She hasn’t told me hardly anything. I mean, I know why you’re sick.”

“I’m not sick. I’m dying.”

“Yeah, but you’re sick.”

“I’m sick from dying.”

“How much time—”

“We don’t have time, Nephew, time has us. It holds us in its mouth like an owl holds a field mouse. We shiver. We struggle for release, and then it pecks out our eyes and intestines for sustenance and we die the death of field mice.”

Dene swallowed some spit and felt his heart beat fast like he was in an argument, though it didn’t have the tone or feel of an argument.

“Jesus, Uncle,” Dene said.

It was the first time he’d ever called his uncle “Uncle.” He hadn’t thought about doing it, it just came out. Lucas didn’t react.

“How long you known?” Dene said.

Lucas turned on the lamp between the two of them, and Dene felt a sick sad feeling in his stomach when he saw that where his uncle’s eyes should have been white they were yellow. Then he felt another pang when he saw his uncle get his flask out and take a pull from it.

“I’m sorry you gotta see it, Nephew, it’s the only thing that’s gonna make me feel better. I been drinking for a long time. It helps. Some people take pills to feel okay. Pills will kill you too over time. Some medicine is poison.”

    “I guess,” Dene said, and got that feeling in his stomach like when his uncle used to throw him up in the air.

“I’ll still be around for a while. Don’t worry. This stuff takes years to kill you. Listen, I’m gonna get some sleep now, but tomorrow when you get home from school, let’s you and me talk about making a movie together. I got a camera with a grip like a gun.” Lucas makes a gun with his hand and points it at Dene. “We’ll come up with a simple concept. Something we can knock out in a few days.”

“Sure, but, will you be feeling okay enough by tomorrow? Mom said—”

“I’ll be okay,” Lucas said, and put his hand out flat and swept it across his chest.



* * *



—

When Dene gets in the building, he checks the schedule on his phone and sees he has ten minutes. He takes off his undershirt without taking off his top layer in order to use it as a kind of rag to wipe what sweat he can before he goes in front of the panel. There’s a guy standing outside the door to the room he was told to go to. Dene hates who he thinks the guy is. Who he has to be. He’s the kind of bald that requires a daily shave. He wants it to look like he’s in control of his hair, like being bald is his personal choice, but the faintest hint of hair appears on the sides and not a trace at the crown. He’s got a sizable but neat light brown beard, which is clearly compensation for the lack of hair up there, plus a trend now, white hipsters everywhere trying to come off as confident, all the while hiding their entire faces behind big bushy beards and thick black-rimmed glasses. Dene wonders whether you have to be a person of color to get the grant. The guy’s probably working with kids on a garbage-art project. Dene pulls out his phone in an attempt to avoid conversation.

    “You going for the grant?” the guy says to Dene.

Dene nods and sticks his hand out for a shake. “Dene,” he says.

“Rob,” the guy says.

“Where you from?” Dene says.

“Actually I don’t have a place right now, but next month me and some friends are getting a place in West Oakland. It’s dirt cheap over there,” Rob says.

Dene clenches his jaw and blinks a slow blink at this: dirt cheap.

“D’you grow up here?” Dene says.

“I mean, no one’s really from here, right?” Rob says.

“What?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do know what you mean,” Dene says.

“You know what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland?” Rob says.

Dene shakes his head no but actually knows, actually googled quotes about Oakland when researching for his project. He knows exactly what the guy is about to say.

“There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile Dene wants to punch. Dene wants to tell him he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore. Dene wants to tell him it’s what happened to Native people, he wants to explain that they’re not the same, that Dene is Native, born and raised in Oakland, from Oakland. Rob probably didn’t look any further into the quote because he’d gotten what he wanted from it. He probably used the quote at dinner parties and made other people like him feel good about taking over neighborhoods they wouldn’t have had the guts to drive through ten years ago.