Noopiming
Page 6
Sabe
Sabe needs to find Ninaatig, but Ninaatig isn’t in their usual place in Mark S. Burnham Park in Nogojiwanong. It’s proving more difficult than normal. It’s easier to track humans and animals. Way easier. Ninaatig leaves very little behind, very little to go on.
Sabe is ready to admit they are struggling, maybe . . . and need help. At least in the dead of night they are ready to make that admission. Most times by morning the rhythm of daylight lulls them into some other kind of coping.
What Sabe needs is Ninaatig to hold them while they sleep. It is the only way they can sleep more than two hours in a row. Ninaatig holds and sucks the hurt, the pain, the broken right out of them. They’ve been doing it for centuries.
Sabe believes that they should be able to self-soothe and self-heal themselves, so they imagine holding themselves all through the night. This doesn’t bring on sleep. It brings on a kind of calm that is better than no calm, but it doesn’t fix the dull ache in their lower back or the desperation in their throat.
Sabe
Sabe goes outside and peeks under the tarp with the 250-ml water bottles. After tomorrow morning’s run, they will have enough to build another shelter. At first, Sabe planned to sew the noses of six bottles together into a star formation like the first one, and then sew all the stars together into a domed lodge for their buds on the east side of Rosedale Valley Road. A tarp over that would make a fine lodge. Now, they are reconsidering. The star formation looks pretty, for sure, but they could make many more structures by simply making curved poles out of the water bottles, more like the saplings you’d use to make a sweat. The star design seems more meaningful, on account of the stars — though six-pointed stars don’t carry a lot of weight in Nishnaabeg cosmology and Sabe wonders if the water bottles in this dense a formation will be hot and if they will off-gas as they decompose and they know it is always okay to sacrifice meaning for functionality, except of course when meaning brings forth Nishnaabeg joy.
Sabe wonders what they have gotten themselves into. Their building skills are fine for the bush, but adapting to new materials on the fly without research suddenly feels stupid, like they could be doing something more useful with their time.
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh is one of my parents and when they are not nervous, they say only five to ten words per day, but when they are nervous, they just talk and talk and talk and it doesn’t matter if you listen or pay attention or respond or talk to them back. I didn’t realize the extent of this until I was in the lake. Right now they are talking about sleeping in cars because they are scared of bears and it wouldn’t be the first time and it won’t be the last time. They are talking about babysitting three grandbabies and feeding and changing them and getting it all organized in an assembly line so no one is crying. They are talking about Numbnuts and at first I forget who he is, but as they go on I remember and he better hope they never run into him again.
They are talking about cooking roasts and turkeys for the feast in eight different slow cookers in the basement apartment where they stay and they hope they don’t blow a fuse because then how will they cook the turkeys and the roasts for the shelter? They are talking about fans from the dollar store. They are talking about saving $100 worth of petunias from their neighbour’s garden.
When I was a kid, my younger sister pored over the Sears catalogue every night for three months, picking out the exactly right plastic white doll Santa Claus was going to bring them. Their final choice was one with a soother, which they called a “dody plug,” a mop of blonde psycho hair and a soft cloth body for hugging. By March, the white plastic head had been loved right off, and Mindimooyenh was having none of it. The doll was expensive, even though Santa and their elves had made it in their workshop at the North Pole and it had been delivered by deer-sled. The doll was getting sent back to Mattel in the original box and they were going to fix it for Santa and send the doll back to us. Fixed. This posed a challenge, because the original box had been more fun to play with than the original doll, and in its morphing from box to time machine to Easy-Bake Oven to mailbox to hat, it had fallen apart. No worries. The grocery store has free boxes. Don’t be so stupid. But there are no lids. Don’t be so stupid. We will just wallpaper her in there with the extra wallpaper from when we made the front room fancy for the bridge club ladies by pasting over our grubbiness. And so this is how I found my seven-year-old self facing the mean post office lady with a headless dead doll in a wallpapered no-lid box coffin. She examined the box. She poked the box. She queried. And then she threw the box across the post office until it hit the wall and the doll’s head flew out through the wallpaper. “There,” she said, “you can’t send that.”
I took the box home, unsure if Mindimooyenh would believe my story of the projectile package. They did. And they took that box and wallpapered it and wallpapered it and wallpapered it, and then they packed everyone into the red plastic toboggan and we stormed back to the post office and Mindimooyenh demanded to see Canada Post’s policy on wallpaper which the mean lady could not produce, and off the box went to the North Pole, never to be seen again.
On our way out, the mean post office lady yelled that Mindimooyenh could no longer just Scotch tape the correct amount of change to their letters and mail them, that they had to buy stamps like everyone else.
As if Mindimooyenh will ever buy stamps like everyone else.
Mashkawaji
I go over and over the last time I saw Sabe. I was in the city in a hotel and Sabe was with me.
Mashkawaji
Sabe tells me from the bed to just call down to the lobby and find out when the first shuttle bus goes to the airport, but I insist on taking the elevator down to the front desk and reading the sign so I won’t have to talk to anyone because what could possibly go wrong. I was thinking I could “rehydrate” at the fancy lemon water station beside the stuffed dead black bear on my way back up to the room instead of drinking the exact same sink water out of the bathroom, and this would count as self-care for the day.
I’m reading the sign and letting the 4:45 a.m. departure time sink in, sipping the lemon water in the shitty plastic cup, when he approaches me with all the confidence the trifecta of obliviousness and delusion and patriarchy can provide.
We talk about things, but not really, because I can’t remember who he is.
He tells me he’s the director general of Indian Affairs and sometimes I have a poker face and sometimes I just have a face.
He is so clean and shiny. I’m in flannel plaid pyjama pants with a not-matching plaid flannel shirt because who gives a fuck. He has a bureaucratic overcoat and adult shoes that require regular neoliberal maintenance. I’m in bare feet. He looks like he’s lived in Ottawa for too long. I look like I’ve lived in Peterborough for too long.
I remind myself to try not to give up completely, at least not all the time.
He says sentences like “we are making good progress” and he means it.
I laugh at the “we” and the “progress” and I mean it too.
I think of flying over Chi’Nibish and the feeling I get when I look down. The flat blue going off in all directions hiding the poison that is not its own in the sediments that cradle its very being.
Then I remember the speech his dad gave at his wedding in Oshawa, after he married a white girl in Niagara Falls. I remember his dad called him “bucko” when he was little. I remember him rubbing my lower back in his parents’ basement in 1994 in Prince George and the moment I decided not to turn it into something. I remember him telling me to be careful because the cab driver that picked him up from my apartment thought I was hot and had a knife under the passenger seat.
I remember when his baby died.
I remember last Christmas, when I paid $5 and filed a Freedom of Information request to see how much data CSIS and Indian Affairs had on me, and how when the package came it was small, because there wa
s so much they had to burn it onto a CD-ROM. I put a red ribbon through the hole in the CD-ROM and hung it on the tree beside the Tears for Fears CD.
Here we are on the cold tile floor of the lobby. Just the three of us. Him, me, the barbed wire.
Him in charge of the line between getting fucked and getting fucked over. Me in charge of yelling down an empty hall.
He thinks this is a nice, chance encounter, but that’s not what I’m thinking. He thinks we are on the same side, reconciliation and all that.
I’m thinking of the lake again. And how government scientists use a contraption to collect sediments from the bottom of a lake called an Ekman grab. It is a metal box on a string, with claws on the end. You trip it and the claws close, taking a sample of the bottom. The scientists put the samples in Ziploc bags and use Sharpies to write coordinates on the front. The scientists send them to the lab. The results always come back the same: they were right and there is nothing to be done because because.
There is an important difference between testing and caring.
It’s in these moments that I know I’m still so, so hurt.
You can fall into toxic sediments at the bottom of your heart and not come out for months.
I go back to my room with the nausea of betrayal in my gut and together we dwell on why I misjudged him or how I misjudged him. Sabe and I pore over the archives for missed red flags, evidence that was overlooked, missed interventions. On why this particular knife hurts. On how it is that in 1978, he was an Asian kid getting beat up and I was an NDN kid getting beat up and now all there is is just this.
Sabe says, “Don’t go to the lobby in your bare feet,” and we both laugh. Sabe makes a campfire about it and they order Domino’s pizza, even though we could have done better, and we watch episode after episode of white people renovating their houses on my laptop.
I think about how the lake is more beautiful holding your hurt, and how I’ll drink the lake any day, because light is better than no light.
I think about how the last thing we did in that lobby was hug goodbye, but it wasn’t like a chair massage, it was like an email you don’t return, it was like releasing the claws of the Ekman that grab, like letting the collected sediments fall back into the lake, because we already know the results.
Mashkawaji
There is nothing Ninaatig hates more than coming to visit me. Frozen is a panic attack for them. They hate being on water and on ice and they’ve only made the trip once so far and I love them to pieces for trying. By the time they get here with the damn shopping cart, they are so upset all they can do is two strokes of a back rub and then they have to get off the water and back onto dry land.
Mashkawaji
Adik comes to visit one time too in the spring, but they are quiet and mostly don’t talk. I notice Adik has a new fancy backpack, though. It was nice to be close to them. They recorded the sound of the ice cracking and melting and then they packed up their backpack and wandered off.
Lucy
Sabe comes running when they hear the sound.
“It never rains, it pours,” Sabe says, looking at the deer, Lucy and Asin. Sabe gets out their knife and tells Lucy and Asin to pay attention.
While Lucy, Asin and Adik watch Sabe fix Waawaashkeshi, Mindimooyenh stomps by and takes the finished blanket from Asin.
“Miigwech, not as bad as I was thinking. Nice tarp work,” they say as they turn and stomp away.
Lucy
As Sabe makes the first cut, Waawaashkeshi whispers to Lucy, “Your real name is Biidaaban.”
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh says: “Wiindaawaso a’aw Akiwenzii.”
Lucy
Akiwenzii whispers to Lucy:
Gidizhinikaaz Biidaaban.
Gidizhinikaaz Biidaaban.
Gidizhinikaaz Biidaaban.
Gidizhinikaaz Biidaaban.
Akiwenzii
When Akiwenzii finishes the carving they are dead tired. They lie down in their usual place, on their side, using their arm as a pillow and pulling their knees to their chest. Ninaatig gently rubs their back. Adik walks around the rock, over and over. Sabe returns from Lucky’s hunt, breaks the fire ban and lights a fire outside the building on the walkway.
They take their last breath.
Lucy starts removing the hair.
Asin sings all of the bird songs, starting with the song of the boreal owl.
SEVEN
LIFT
Sabe
Sabe heads down to the road allowance where Mindimooyenh has parked their “boat.” The Jayco trailer still has the wheels on and is sitting beside the water with no plan of how to get it onto the actual floating platform.
Sabe shakes their head and goes inside the trailer. It’s way nice in there. Yes it is. The curtains and upholstery are fresh from the 1970s in various shades of green and with shapes that Sabe only knows as rectangles with U-shapes in various sizes all over them. There is fake-wood panelling. There are two tables that magically convert into double beds to augment the two double beds on each of the wings. Sabe chooses one of the wings to lie down on, scanning the fridge, the sink and the propane stove. Their idea was to give Mindimooyenh the lodge made out of plastic water bottles for the houseboat. But now, that seems cheap.
After a short nap, Sabe walks outside. Lifts the Jayco up over their head and gently lowers it onto the floating platform. They attach it as best they can with spruce roots and luck and mount the Evinrude to the back of the platform.
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh arrives minutes later. “I guess that old one is paying better attention than I thought,” they say to themselves.
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh has a few more modifications to make before they are ready, the most important of which are attaching the feathers to the wings of the trailer and attaching the head. The code has to be exactly right for Binesiyag to recognize the structure as a scaffolding to inhabit — and while Mindimooyenh cares more about caring for others than protocol, this is one time where if they don’t get the markings right, it’s a pass/fail situation.
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh steps off the land onto their houseboat. They undo the rope at the front and then the rope by the motor, and take one last look for Adik. It’s not like them to be late. It’s not like them to just ghost Mindimooyenh.
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh turns the motor on, pleased they got the button kind with the steering wheel instead of the lawnmower kind that you have to pull and pull and pray to get started. They wonder if those assholes are going to show up at all, or if they should just leave without them, which seems to defeat the whole purpose.
The edge of the sun touches the horizon.
Mindimooyenh sees Sabe and the plastic water bottle sculpture out of the corner of their eye.
“What is that damn thing?”
“It might be useful.”
“It is not useful and it is not coming.”
“I’ll just tie a rope to it and we’ll pull it from behind. It floats. You never can tell when you might need a pre-fabricated plastic water bottle lodge on a trip like this.”
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh smiles.
Akiwenzii
Adik and Ninaatig step on board with Akiwenzii wrapped in the Starblanket Lucy and Asin stitched.
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh thinks: It looks like they sewed that thing with their elbows, and the colour choice is a dog’s breakfast.
They put that in their do-not-say bin.
Sabe
Sabe smiles.
Mindimooyenh
Mindimooyenh switches the Chi-Jiimaan into gear and angles it out into the canal and they head towards the lake. After the tourists and the locks are gone, they glide through the mouth of everything, and Mindimooyenh and their floating beacons do no
t turn right towards the city with all the other boats. Instead, they continue straight south, towards the zone where the two shades of blue meet.
Sabe protests because the southern doorway is by all accounts the wrong way, but Mindimooyenh is steadfast.
“We have one more errand to do before the doorway. We need to pick up Mashkawaji. They are getting too cold.”
The geese fly overhead singing songs of encouragement in the sheer grace of a carefully angled formation designed to take them elsewhere.
EIGHT
MASHKAWAJI’S THEORY OF ICE
the failure of melting
the frozen sighed
and gave up
the lake wrote
their letter of resignation
with the useful
uselessness
of despair
july 15
30 cubic metres
five storeys
your finger is
tracing nothing on my arm
as if we are the only ones here
i bring you coffee
a blanket