I can’t remember a time before this kind of laughter. My brother and I cut our teeth at the dinner table. There is nothing like a sad mother to make a kid funny. I had often thought that every joke was still for her.
Amaia knew how to build a joke, how to twist words and couple them the way I did, the way that delighted me. How did you get so funny? she would ask me with that marveling gaze, as if I had been designed with her in mind.
One afternoon, from a nearby café table, a local told us a story about a train conductor who’d fallen in love and had his heart broken by a woman in town. Every time he passed through, he’d sound his train’s whistle all the way, borrowing its wail for his own so that the whole town could feel his busted heart hum in their chests, rattle their teeth, shake their skulls. And after that, every time a train passed and I heard that cry, I wondered if it was a warning or a wailing or a hallelujah. I thought of my own heart, how much I feared her breaking it. It would sound like that, I thought. It would be the only sound I ever heard again. It would be wrecking against the shore of one person for the rest of my life.
I feared it so much that I broke my own heart every day that I loved her. I felt it when I watched her reading in a café, absentmindedly scratching her head and twirling a pen with her long fingers. I felt it when we drove thirty miles to swim in a pool of water risen from deep underground, her skin warm and smooth as clay under my hands. On the way back we stopped at the “Largest Rattlesnake Exhibit on the Planet,” where we paid five dollars to two petrified men in a warehouse with a hand-painted sign, steeped in the rot-dirt stench of snake shit, and stood in front of a rattler yellow as a fingernail and thicker than her long leg leaned against me, and I whispered that I didn’t have any underwear on because I had swam in them, and she laughed and told me a lady should always wear underpants to visit the Largest Rattlesnake Exhibit on the Planet; I felt it. When I made love to her in that chair by the window, dawn glowing her body like a fruit split open to its wet center, I felt it—the way you feel a fall just looking over the edge of a roof.
Will you love me forever? she asked me. Yes, I said.
I couldn’t know, though. When that whistle spills over the desert, you can only hear the call of your own heart. When I looked at her, I wondered. Are you my wrecking shore? Are you my third rail? Or are you my hallelujah?
20
In 2009, I dreamt of King Philip’s War, of the woods behind my childhood home, and of a language whose sounds still moved in my mouth when I woke up in my Brooklyn apartment. I started writing. I bought books. For a month I thought about little else. I kept it to myself.
Months after the dream, I had lunch with my literary agent. This story, I said, is calling to me. I don’t know how to stop listening.
He was quiet. He stared at his salad. Readers, he told me, aren’t into Native Americans. Have you ever read a book about Native Americans?
Yes, I said. Even he had heard of Sherman Alexie.
Eh, he said. Dreams are boring. And historical fiction? He shrugged. You, he said, have just written a book about being a dominatrix. Why don’t you write something more urban, more edgy? Why don’t you write something more you.
I tried. I ignored the call of that story. But it would not go quiet. It took me five more years to listen. To understand that it was my own story calling. That no other person can say what rises to the surface, when it’s ready.
21
What does it mean to retain experience? Psychologists, philosophers, teachers, and anthropologists agree that retention comes vis-à-vis reception, acknowledgement, repetition, and application. Retention happens in memoriam.
The theory of historical trauma was developed as an effort to understand the contemporary plight of Native Americans. It posits, according to a 2014 article by Dr. Kathleen Brown-Rice, that present-day natives experience “historical loss symptoms (e.g. depression, substance dependence, diabetes, dysfunctional parenting, unemployment) as a result of the cross-generational transmission of trauma from historical losses (e.g. loss of population, land, and culture).” There is marked skepticism in the mental health profession as to the validity of such a theory.
To clarify: among native populations, the rates of sexual and physical abuse, addiction, chronic illness, mental illness, poverty, and suicide are sometimes more than three times that of the national average, and there is doubt about the causal relationship between this and the five hundred years of purposeful and systematic destruction of Native American people by Europeans.
Between 1492, when Columbus came to America, and the establishment of the United States, the population of Native Americans fell by 95 percent. Native children of four and five years old were removed from their homes by the U.S. government and placed in boarding schools. They were forbidden contact with their families and communities. They could not speak their language. They could not practice their spiritual and cultural customs. And they were subjected, in many cases, to extreme forms of abuse. Native peoples were prevented from engaging in mourning rituals and oral transmission of their culture, history, and language.
A 2014 study—“Intergenerational transmission of emotional trauma through amygdala-dependent mother-to-infant transfer of specific fear” shows that trauma and fear communicated hormonally from mother to child permanently alters the brain, and can be then transmitted across generations. Studies show that the incidence of suicide among adolescents corresponds to a disconnection from their cultural past, and suicide is the second leading cause of death for Native Americans from ten to thirty-four years of age (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2007). Native Americans are reported to have the highest poverty level of any group—minority or majority—in the United States (Denny, Holtzman, Goins, & Croft, 2005) and the lowest life expectancy of any population in the United States (CDC, 2010). A 2009 study (Kendell–Tackett) shows how trauma produces the hormones epinephrine and cortisol, which dramatically affect the body’s blood sugar among myriad other functions. Accordingly, study subjects with PTSD report a significantly larger number of current and lifetime medical conditions than those without, including anemia, arthritis, asthma, back pain, diabetes, eczema, kidney disease, lung disease, and ulcers (Schnurr & Green, 2004; Weisberg et al., 2003)—all afflictions that occur in native populations at often three times the national average.
It goes on and on and on.
According to Whitbeck’s Historical Loss Scale and Historical Loss Associated Symptoms Scale, 49 percent of surveyed natives have daily and “disturbing thoughts” about historical losses of language and culture. But only 22 percent of respondents indicated that they experienced discomfort with white people. One has to wonder where, then, a reaction is directed, if not toward the source of trauma. Our selves are sometimes the only things over which we wield power. And our means of expressing it are sometimes chosen for us.
22
After my parents found out, I stopped throwing up, but I didn’t stop being hungry. Despite its gravity, a bottomless pit is an empty space. Hunger can saw at a body, but itself has no corners; it is force without shape, muscle without matter.
All my adult life, whenever the subject of my adolescence has arisen, my parents’ faces go dark. The Captain has long referred to my twelfth through fourteenth years as the years You were possessed. When he says, You were possessed, I hear You were not my daughter. True, I stopped being good. With hairspray and curling irons, I transformed my soft baby hair into a shield—the crackle of it sounded so sweet to me. I never said no. I let men of eighteen and twenty and thirty years old trace the shape of my body. I stole liquor bottles and hid them in my dresser. I lied easily. My mother once cornered me in the hallway of our home and asked me if I was drunk. No, I told her. It was half true—no matter how much I drank, a part of me never slackened. You’re lying, she said. You’re lying to my face. She didn’t even look angry. What’s in you? she asked me.
Odd, that those years are the only years they consider me possessed. I
n the ones that followed, I became a junkie, a criminal—I took a new name and under that name I did things my parents’ daughter never would. At twelve years old, though, I was still theirs. There was little in the world that had more influence on me. My mother was a Buddhist—she knew that even Siddhartha’s parents could not protect him from suffering, from the world’s ails, from his own destiny. Still, like them, she tried. She discouraged television and sugar and Barbie Dolls. It didn’t matter—the thing that possessed me didn’t come from television, or any doll box—it was in me. And in those later years, I simply learned to hide it better.
23
Amaia read an interview I’d given in a magazine in which I’d made some flippant jokes about having been a dominatrix.
You don’t have to talk about yourself that way, she said. It’s crass. You are more than that, she said. You are, you are.
You are mine, she said. I don’t want people to see you that way. I hadn’t thought that people saw me that way, though I remembered the time when they had. It scared me that I might still appear that way; that she might see something in me that I did not.
Sometimes, as we ate at restaurants with other people, Amaia would tap my knee under the table. It meant that the man with whom I was making small talk was too glad to be small-talking with me. I ought to stop. It meant that my voice was too loud. I had made a joke she found crude. I was chewing with my mouth open. I had never felt so uncouth. Or rather, no one had ever shown me this version of myself. If a friend had described this kind of monitoring, I would have thought, never. But what if that version of me were a true one?
I would want you to tell me, Amaia said.
A few months in, my friends began to say, Where are you? They never saw me anymore. We talked less. When we did, I only talked about her.
I had been building muscles of self-examination my whole adult life. When I tried to apply them with Amaia, to us, she didn’t respond. It feels like you pull away whenever I ask for something, I said once, so nervous to point out the obvious. I just want to talk about when our situation might change.
You’re frustrated, she said. You have anger in you for me. I can’t imagine feeling that for you. She went quiet. I’m not what you need, she said. I don’t make you happy. Why don’t we talk tomorrow.
No, I said. You make me happy! Please don’t hang up.
You don’t talk about yourself anymore, a friend once pointed out. When she asked me how I felt, I speculated about Amaia’s feelings. When she asked me what I was going to do, I speculated about what Amaia would do, why she had done this or that.
It’s like a tic, said my friend. You never stop mapping her. A cognitive behavioral therapist she’d seen for a while had once suggested a tool for redirecting obsessive thoughts: keep a rubber band around your wrist and every time the thought pattern takes over, snap it. You should try it, she said. The next day, I found a rubber band and slid it around my wrist. I snapped it over and over. My wrist stayed red and smarting. By afternoon, I took off the rubber band. I couldn’t think straight with all that snapping.
Still, my friends understood. I was in love. I was going through something. They listened while I scrutinized our conversations, her actions, the way she never called me when she promised to, the way she planned trips for us and canceled them. The way she showered me with gifts. Every time she went quiet and the Nothing swept through me, I called Amit. You’re okay, Amit said. Just tell her what you need.
The time we did spend together was fraught. When my phone lit up, Amaia frowned. She didn’t understand why my friends needed me and why I felt obliged to them. She didn’t understand why being out of touch with them made me anxious. It’s weird, she said. Amit isn’t your girlfriend. I am. She said I needed to trust myself more. I shouldn’t put so much credence in what my friends thought. Real friends would understand that I was busy. That she came first.
One weekend, Amaia was giving a lecture at a college in Iowa. Come, she said. You can get some writing done. There are too many distractions in New York. I had always been a very disciplined writer, but I had not been writing. Not writing spread a layer of anxiety all through me. You’re too busy, Amaia said, though I was mostly busy with her.
It was the weekend of my mother’s birthday. My family had also begun to say, Where are you? I was on airplanes. I was on the phone with Amaia. I was waiting for Amaia to call me. I was scrutinizing our conversations.
I want you there, Amaia said.
I can’t go, I said, my heart beating fast. I was driving to teach a class. My hands were sweating, which had become normal.
She was quiet. Okay, she said. I understand.
My family misses me, I said, as I pulled over to fill up at a gas station. I just have to show up for some things. I heard myself pleading. I didn’t tell her that when I spoke to my mother, with whom I’d always been so close, it felt like a glass wall stood between us. My mother knocked on the wall. Are you okay? she kept asking. I’m fine, I’d say. I didn’t feel fine but my instinct was to hide this. I’m going through something, I kept saying, like it was a car wash, and in a few minutes I’d roll out the other side of it, gleaming. Okay, my mother said. My brother, whom I had always called regularly, had barely heard from me in months. When we did speak, he didn’t ask me what was wrong, but he didn’t have to. I suspect he knew that I would explain when I was able.
The problem with being known is that your people know when you are gone.
It’s fine, said Amaia. You don’t have to explain.
It wasn’t fine. By then, I was a master meteorologist of her moods. I unscrewed the gas cap and put it on the roof of the car, selected Regular. I’ll see you in another week, when you come here, I reminded her, my pulse accelerating.
Please stop, she said. I understand. This is hurting you. You are neglecting things.
No, I said, becoming frantic. It’s not that. It’s not that at all. The gas tank full, I got back in the car and drove off, the gas cap bouncing in the road behind me. I was becoming careless. I was neglecting things. It was hard to think about Amaia and anything else at the same time. I had always been a pathologically punctual person, but a few days earlier, I had stood up a friend, completely forgotten our dinner plans.
I have to go, Amaia said, her voice distant.
Wait! I said, but she was gone.
It’s all right, Amit said. She’s disappointed. Let her be disappointed. Let’s get dinner or something. Amit made it sound so easy, and I remembered thinking it could be easy, or at least tolerable, to disappoint someone. Now, I could not tolerate it. The night she flew to Iowa, I barely slept. I clutched the phone in my hand, and waited for some sign that she still loved me. I knew I should go to my mother’s birthday party. I wanted to go to my mother’s birthday party. But now I needed her permission, and it never came.
I bought a ticket to Iowa for the next morning. My mother was disappointed when I told her I wouldn’t make it, but she understood. I didn’t want to tell Amit, so I texted her from the airport. Are you sure? she wrote back. I didn’t answer. What could I have said? It didn’t feel like a choice.
I’m coming! I told Amaia.
My girl, she said. You are coming.
I love you, I said.
Now, why did you have to make that so hard? she said.
24
The Captain descends from jíbaros, indigenous Puerto Rican peasants who worked the colonial plantations. Like the Wampanoag, their ancestors were “discovered,” infected, enslaved by repartimiento, executed, and exiled. Yes, Columbus tested his blades on both of my fathers’ people. And alcohol eased those wounds, while making others. The Captain’s father, my abuelo, had almost been murdered by my bisabuelo, who tried to hang his seven-year-old son with an electrical cord. My abuelo had almost murdered my father, too, had pushed my abuela’s face through walls and thrown his sons like empty bottles against the kitchen floor. The Captain did not drink, as my abuelo and bisabuelo and Jon had drunk. Instead, he beca
me a captain.
One time, when I was fifteen, he brooded over dinner. We had just listened to a radio program on addiction. Why don’t they just stop? he said, and dropped his fork, which struck against his plate a furious note. He said it with the force of a man who has been robbed, as he had. The Captain never taught us Spanish because it was the language in which my abuelo had screamed.
I flinched as that note rang out from his plate, but kept quiet. I hadn’t found heroin yet, but I had already betrayed myself. I knew that to stop was not always an option. And that the longer you went, the harder it got. Self-knowledge didn’t save you, it only made it hurt more to watch yourself.
I suspect that anyone is capable of anything under the right circumstances. We don’t want to believe this. We want identity to be solid, but even science proves that it is reactive, changing all the time. We invent nothing. We are in constant collaboration with our contexts. We are more alike than we think. Not everyone has a bottomless pit, and not everyone will go to such lengths to fill it. Not everyone will use their body like a hammer, will hammer the body the way that I have. Not everyone needs to get so close to dying to find that they exist. I’m not the only one; I was just the only one at that table.
25
Amaia knew where she came from. She had been to the desert of Chile. She spoke the language of her grandparents. She still attended her childhood Catholic Church. Before meals, she prayed, and she knelt between my legs like it was another kind of prayer. What I mean is, she didn’t question what was hers.
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