Walking in Two Worlds

by Wab Kinew

  “Nah. What you mean?” the Behemoth grunted.

  “I’m leaving China.”

  “Really?” Feng’s friend Joe asked.

  “Yeah,” Feng replied. “I’m on the plane right now. In-flight Wi-Fi is kind of bunk. That’s the only reason you got a round on me, Behemoth.”

  “Yeah, right.” His training partner chuckled.

  “Where you moving to?” Joe asked.

  “Your mom’s.” The Behemoth giggled.

  “Shut up.” Joe threw a boxing glove at the offending clanmate. “So what happened, Feng? Seemed like you were such a stan for China, always talking about the evils of ‘the West.’ ” Joe air-quoted the last two words for full emphasis.

  “Oh, I still think you guys are lazy.” Feng laughed. “And I still love China.” Feng bit his lip. “Just maybe not the party that runs it.” He scratched the back of his neck.

  “What happened?” asked Joe.

  Feng swallowed. He leaned closer to the pair huddled beside him. “Alright, but you guys can’t tell anyone. Promise?”

  Joe and the Behemoth nodded quickly.

  “So…,” Feng began, scanning the room as though he might yet decide not to spill his guts, “I left because my family thinks I’ll be disappeared.”

  “What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” asked the Behemoth.

  “Bro!” exclaimed Joe. “I saw this in a forum. It means abducted by the government. Like kidnapped. That right, Feng?”

  Feng nodded.

  “What for?”

  “For being part of Clan:LESS, I guess.”

  “No way.” Joe’s face matched that of a child opening the world’s greatest Christmas present. “Abducted by the government for being part of Clan:LESS. That’s so awesome!”

  Feng looked around the dojo, worried Joe’s excitement would attract eavesdroppers. “Relax, buddy. It’s not cool at all.”

  “So what happened?” Joe asked breathlessly.

  “I got a visit from neighborhood officials with the party.” Feng scanned his friends and judged their reactions as underwhelming. “They made me sign this.” He opened a screenshot in midair, showing a statement with his signature visible at the bottom. “It says I won’t do a bunch of things, including visit the Floraverse anymore, and it lists all my failings.”

  “Must be a long list.” The Behemoth giggled. “Let me see.” He screenshotted the document and pinch-zoomed to view it closely. “A long list of failings for real: subversive activities, terrorist sympathizer, terrible at grappling…”

  “What?” Feng asked, surprised.

  “…still sleeps with the nightlight on…”

  “Shut up.”

  “So you left China for us,” Joe exclaimed. “You’re a soldier for real.”

  “Didn’t have much choice. Next step would’ve meant waking up in a strange room handcuffed to a bed and forced to learn songs praising the party…” Feng sighed. “Uncle didn’t want that, so next thing you know I’m on a plane to Turkey, changed planes there and now I’m on one headed across the Atlantic.”

  “Well, you know what Alpha always says—N.C.B.U.—nothing comes between us,” the Behemoth said. “And ‘bros first.’ So, let us know if you need any help.”

  “No doubt,” Joe added.

  “I also don’t have any doubts.” Feng’s automatic translator had a rare trip-up on this phrase. Of course, it escaped Feng’s notice, because his phone presented the entire conversation to him in his native Mandarin. But the translator snapped back to fluid North American slang for his clanmates before Feng spoke again. “Clan:LESS for life. You guys always had my back. Even when no one else did, not even my parents.”

  “That’s right, man. Brothers for life,” the Behemoth said as they all fist-bumped. “Now let’s go again.” He rolled onto his back like a dog waiting for a belly rub.

  Feng stood and cartwheeled over his outstretched legs. They were off sparring again.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bugz and Waawaate were sprawled out on a couch in their parents’ living room. They shared the warmth of a Pendleton blanket as they scrolled through their phones, TV droning on in the background, neglected. Their house, though bigger than most, shared the same linoleum flooring as most others on the Rez. It smelled of cedar and home cooking. Braised meat, in particular.

  Bugz’s dad shouted from the kitchen, where he examined a moose roast bathing in a slow cooker. “You guys get off those things. Supper’s almost ready.”

  Bugz and Waawaate exchanged glances, silently agreeing to ignore their father. After scrolling for another five minutes, their mother appeared in the living room.

  “C’mon, kids, don’t be like that. Your dad said supper’s ready.” Their mom did her best to look serious.

  “You don’t be like that!” Waawaate mocked in a high-pitched voice, waving his finger with exaggeration to provoke his mother. Bugz giggled.

  Their mom cracked a smile. “Seriously, though, let’s eat.”

  “Can we just bring it in here?” Waawaate stood stiffly. Bugz noticed him stutter-step as though he’d stubbed his toe. She thought of his hip and the pow-wow.

  “No, your dad worked hard on this dinner. He got the animal himself, but we’re going to eat it together,” their mom responded.

  “Correction,” Waawaate smiled. “The animal gave himself to us. That’s what the Elders say. All Dad did was show up in the right place at the right time.”

  Their dad laughed genuinely. “Come in the bush with me next time and we’ll see how easy you say it is after that.”

  “Must be. You did it.” Waawaate grinned back at his father and threw his arm around his shoulder.

  “Get the bowls, Survivor Man,” their dad responded.

  Bugz, with bowls already in hand, stepped closer to her father and brother. She basked in the family love as her dad ladled out the stew. Steam rose and clouded the glass surface of the phone she’d pulled from her pocket.

  “Jeez, Buggy, can you put that thing away for two seconds?” her mother asked from the kitchen table.

  “Sorry, Mom.” Bugz slid the device into her pocket and placed a bowl on the table, nudging it toward her mother. She placed the second in front of herself and sat.

  “Anama’edaa,” her father said.

  Bugz’s mom said a quick prayer in Ojibwe, thanking the Spirits, Mother Earth, and the Creator for the meal—and, yes, the animal for giving his life to sustain theirs. As she finished, the family tore into their dinner.

  “How’s it going with the new school, babe?” Bugz’s father asked her mother.

  “Not bad, but we’re hitting a snag with the government. They want us to do another needs assessment.” Bugz chewed the tender meat and savored it as she listened to her mother speak. She loved moose, the finest of all wild meats as far as she knew. Her mother continued. “It doesn’t make sense. Practically all the kids live on the Rez, and yet Bugz and Waawaate have to take the bus to the school in town.”

  “Same old story,” Frank grunted. “It’s not like they teach Anishinaabe kids what they need to know in school anyway.”

  “Well, that’s the goal. Have a school that works for us.”

  “I don’t know why we have to go to school anyways,” Waawaate piped up. “We do most of our homework online.”

  “Correction,” Frank said between bites. “You’re supposed to do most of your school work online. Last I checked, you hadn’t done anything.” Everyone at the table smiled at the joke.

  “I did some.” Waawaate drew out his answer for laughs.

  “Waawaate’s right, though,” Bugz said after she stopped giggling. “The only thing we really do together is first period, homeroom. The rest of the time we’re just on our own, submitting assignments online and watching tutorials o
n our phones.”

  “It didn’t used to be like that, you know.” Frank rose and cleaned his bowl. “When your mom and I were kids, we were in big classes all the time with all the other students. All day. Every day. Then when we were in twelfth grade, bam, they canceled our school year. Can you imagine that? We never had a graduation.”

  “We had a grad,” Summer said.

  “Yeah, a virtual grad. But you know what I mean. We didn’t get to go party with our friends, or walk across a real stage,” Frank responded. “Anyways, that first pandemic changed things. The next two after that even more so.”

  “Thanks for the history lesson, Dad.” Waawaate grinned. “And everything cost less than a dollar too, right?”

  “School is basically just a warehouse for kids,” Bugz said. “There aren’t enough teachers to actually teach us. They’re just trying to keep us off the streets and out of our houses so our parents can work.”

  “There’s more to school than that,” Summer spoke up, suddenly serious. “There’s the social side too. You kids don’t get away from your phones enough or out in the community. The school’s good for that, at least. You go to town, you meet some of the kids who live there. You see something different.”

  “The difference is the kids from town all go home after homeroom and do their work from there, but us Rez kids, who don’t live within walking distance, have to stick around the library or the hallways to do ours,” Bugz said.

  “There’s things you share in common with those kids too.” Frank smiled, thinking he’d spawned a PSA-worthy moment.

  “Yeah, we’re all bored and stare at our phones for fourteen hours a day,” Waawaate griped good-naturedly.

  “Waawaate,” Summer said sternly.

  “Sorry.” Waawaate sat up straight. “Fourteen hours a day, except for Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have basketball. It’s thirteen hours on those days.”

  Bugz couldn’t help but laugh. Her older brother had always been her favorite form of entertainment.

  After dinner, she dragged her school bag to the front door, stepped outside, and dove into the Floraverse.

  CHAPTER 12

  Bugz sat in the center of a ring of stones, a spot not far from her home on the Rez, though to anyone else it could’ve seemed like another planet and another time. This sacred space occupied a clearing hidden in dense woods. The lichen and moss testified to the generations over which these stones had sat in this place. The rocks varied in size, but the ones forming the core of the ring were bigger than large suitcases. Smaller rocks piled around them softened the edges of the petroform.

  Bugz imagined her Ancestors who’d built this monument. When she was a child, her parents taught her to put tobacco down before a thunderstorm to give thanks to the Thunderbirds. Later, they brought her to this Thunderbird’s Nest to pay homage to the thunder-beings protecting their homelands.

  Bugz peered off into the tree line circling the edge of the clearing. Her fingers gently tapped the moss around her, her eyes completely engrossed with the images her headset put before them. The device held her phone to her eyes like a VR helmet, but it also scanned her brain, translating her real-world thoughts into action inside the Spirit World of the Floraverse.

  At the moment, her ’Versona was swimming deep in Lake of the Torches. As she thought about picking up speed, her avatar kicked powerfully in the virtual depths of the moonlit water. As she thought of a mermaid, her ’Versona pressed her legs together and thrust herself forward like a dolphin, adding speed again. Most players could only power simple moves like walking or running through their neural links, but Bugz, ever the virtuoso, knew how to shorten the distance between thinking and acting—at least in the Floraverse.

  As her virtual self descended farther into the dark reaches of the lake, she could see it take shape—a giant simulated stone circle similar to the Thunderbird’s Nest on which she sat in the real world. But the ’Verse’s ring of fallen obelisks housed a different supernatural creature. As Bugz expelled a flurry of bubbles that floated toward the surface of the lake, an enormous pair of red eyes blinked to life. The scaly mouth beneath them broke into a grin. Suddenly, Mishi-pizhiw’s dark form darted backward like a crayfish and swam around in a circle before meeting her.

  “Hello, beautiful,” Bugz said. She gripped the back of Mishi-pizhiw’s horns and held on as he pulled her toward the petroform. Letting go, Bugz drifted smoothly toward the center of the virtual stone circle. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she entered a trance. The state intensified the closer she moved to the center. Soon, settling into the lake bed, electricity coursed through her body and behind her glazed eyes.

  The lake bed in the center of the stone ring undulated and disappeared suddenly, leaving in its place a nexus to the real world. If Bugz hadn’t been alone, an observer in the Floraverse could’ve seen her sitting in the center of Mishi-pizhiw’s nest, her real-world self and the Thunderbird’s Nest mirrored beneath her in the portal. The two worlds, now connected, revealed two sides of the same coin. Bugz felt tremendous power. Not power as she imagined presidents or rich people felt, but power like she felt in the Sundance ceremony—something bigger than any one person.

  Bugz shook her head, amazed again that an ancient Anishinaabe spiritual site shared a counterpart in the virtual world of artificial intelligence and blockchain. She remembered her first time here, and how she’d discovered she could respawn her virtual self directly into the Spirit World, bypassing the grind of having to earn her way back from AR mode.

  Bugz picked up a handful of clay from the lake floor. She blew on it, causing water to whip up the tiny virtual sand particles. This miniature whirlpool spun quickly and became a hatchet, an ax, and finally a giant tomahawk. Bugz inspected the weapon and lowered her head. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning crashed from the sky and through the depths of the lake. It struck the tomahawk, leaving it glowing silver-blue with a newly imbued energy.

  “Just like Thor,” Bugz whispered to herself. She double-checked that her video and audio feeds were off. She always disabled her livestream when she came here. It was important to keep this secret. If others found her path to success in the Floraverse, Bugz knew they’d try to copy it—and water down the power of this place in the process.

  Bugz tossed the tomahawk to the lake floor and made another. Years earlier, she’d created Mishi-pizhiw and many of her other allies the same way. Manufacturing weapons didn’t make her heart sing the same way it did when she breathed life into those creatures—that work brought the Anishinaabe worldview back from the dead, after all—but it did pay the bills. After an hour, she gathered a few dozen of the giant axes in a net and swam back to the surface.

  CHAPTER 13

  A sleek black SUV kicked up a cloud of red dust down an old dirt road, its ocher tones made deeper by the warm sunlight of the beautiful summer day. A thin brick-colored film gathered across the vehicle’s surface.

  The air conditioner hummed gently as Feng rode with his aunt in silence. The colorful scenery blew by outside, muted by tinted windows. Farmers’ fields, still green, gave way to more indigenous terrain: bush, creeks, swamps. After a two-hour-plus drive from the airport, they neared the Rez. Feng furrowed his brow at his phone.

  “You know you’re kind of like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Liumei cracked a smile as she interrupted the silence.

  “What?” Feng remained focused on the pane of glass in his hand.

  “Well, he got in some trouble and his fam got scared and sent him to live with his auntie in a town called Bel-Air…”

  Feng betrayed absolutely no hint of recognition. He suspected his automatic translator was lagging again. He felt annoyed his aunt spoke to him in English.

  “That’s the theme song to a show. Will Smith rapped it.”

  Nothing.

  “Will Smith? Heard of him?”

  “Th
e president? Yeah, I heard of him.” Feng finally looked up from the screen. “I thought people only knew him from memes.”

  His aunt laughed.

  Feng chuckled and held his phone up to the moonroof. He stared at the “user location not found” error message on the screen and scrunched his forehead up in bewilderment. “Where are you taking me?”

  “I told you. The Rez is called Biiwaabik,” his aunt said. “It means ‘metal’ in the local language, because of the iron in the soil. Pretty smart, don’t you think?”

  Feng nodded through a forced smile and swiped at his glowing phone.

  “Hey, put that thing down and talk to me for a bit.”

  “Okay.” Feng tapped his leg on the floor of the vehicle.

  “I know it’s a pretty big change for you to come here…”

  Feng’s face settled into a faint scowl.

  “But I told Uncle I’d take care of you. And besides, I think you’ll like it here. The land is beautiful, and…”—Feng could see his aunt searching for a way to land the second half of her sentence diplomatically—“…it’ll give you a chance to think things over.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Just that there was some…trouble.”

  “Trouble?” Feng felt a fire kindle inside. He stared at his aunt. She bit her bottom lip and stared straight ahead. Feng knew she wanted to avoid his gaze, but he didn’t look away. The SUV rolled on for a few hundred yards before she continued. “You said some hurtful things about our people.”

  Feng looked to the road ahead. “Not my fault some people can’t let go of the past.”

  “Does that mean your mom and dad too?”

  The fire flared up. “At least I got to go to school…outside of a mosque, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry, Feng.” Liumei shook her head. Feng could see she was weighing different responses. Finally, she spoke. “You weren’t taken to a school—that was a re-education center. They brainwashed you.”