Ten Little Indians

by Sherman Alexie

  “Isn’t your family worried about you?”

  “They know I’m okay. My dad told me to stay here and lock the door. He said I’d be safer here than trying to get home by myself.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know. I’m scared. Do you think this is the start of World War Three?”

  The pizza boy sounded like he was eighteen or nineteen years old. How could he know how many teenagers around the world had already survived bombings, and lived with the daily threat of more bombings, and still found courage enough to dance, sing, curse, and make love in the tall grass beside this or that river?

  “Are you a cook or a driver?”

  “I’m both.”

  “Well, kid, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you start making pizzas? Make as many as you can and stack them high. A whole bunch of hungry people will be wandering the streets. Put a sign in the window that says, ‘Free Pizza for Rescue Workers!,’ and you’ll be a hero.”

  “I don’t think the corporate office will like that.”

  “Forget the corporate office.”

  Surely this young man was incapable of socialistic rebellion, no matter how smart or self-contained.

  “What did you say?” the pizza boy asked.

  “The city’s on fire. Make the pizzas. Forget the corporate office.”

  The young man thought about it.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Forget the corporate office.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Forget the corporate office.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Forget the corporate office.”

  “That sounds good, but your language, it’s not acceptable.”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “‘Forget’ is not a powerful verb.”

  “I don’t know about that, sir. I feel pretty bad when somebody forgets about me.”

  “You’re right. That’s a fairly wise thing to say. But there is a more powerful verb, a more powerful F-word.”

  “Oh, sir,” he said, “I can’t say that word. That’s cursing. And I’m a Christian.”

  He was a Christian working for an international conglomerate and worried about foul language?

  “All right, then, pizza man, you have your mission. Forget the other F-word and forget the corporate office. Make those free pizzas.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He hung up the phone, laughed at the ceiling, then looked down at the crazy woman lying on the floor. She stared back at him.

  “What did you just do?” she asked.

  “I think I started a pepperoni and double-cheese revolution,” he said.

  She laughed and winced. “Oh, man,” she said. “My head hurts.”

  “You had a seizure,” he said.

  “I know. I was sort of having it and watching me have it at the same time.”

  For years, she’d been living a binary life as participant and eyewitness. She’d been so bored and unhappy, and so objective about her boredom and unhappiness, that she’d been conducting social experiments on her family. Last July, she’d served dinner five minutes later than usual, an innocuous change in the family ceremony. But the next evening, she’d served dinner ten minutes later than usual, and then fifteen minutes later than usual the night after that, and so on and so on. By the end of the month, she was serving the meat and potatoes as the eleven o’clock SportsCenter was beginning. Her husband and sons had never once uttered a comment or complaint about the gradual and profound change in dinnertime. How could they be so compliant and disinterested? How could they be so dependent on her and so unaware of her blatant manipulations? As they’d eaten and cursed at the football and hockey highlights, she’d studied the man and two boys, her personal space aliens, and couldn’t believe all three of them had spent significant time in her womb.

  Now she lay on the floor of a stranger’s apartment, ambivalent about her life. Maybe she could lie on that floor forever. Maybe she could ossify or fossilize. Maybe she could change into a bizarre coffee table. As a piece of furniture, she might feel valued and useful. She closed her eyes and wondered if the other furniture would come to accept and love her.

  “Wake up!” he shouted at her.

  “I’m very tired,” she said.

  “I bet you have a concussion or something,” he said. “We should get you to the doctor. But the thing is, I’m going to have to take you there. The phones aren’t working. I can order a pizza, but I can’t order an ambulance.”

  “I don’t think I’d be able to walk very far. Not for a while. I need to rest first.”

  “Okay, but if you seize again, I’m going to pick you up and carry you there, okay? It’s about a mile up to Harborview. I’ll drag you there if I have to.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to seize again.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen again.”

  “You’re the one lying on the floor. I don’t think that says much for your psychic ability.”

  “Have you always been funny?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. His sense of humor had destroyed his marriage. With each joke, he’d punched a hole in his ex-wife’s heart. But he couldn’t help it. His entire family was hilarious and inappropriate. During his wedding, as his soon-to-be wife walked up the aisle toward him, his little brother had loudly told an AIDS joke. How grotesque was that? If his wife had been smarter and less in love, she would have turned around and fled the church. But she’d believed her soon-to-be husband was better than his homophobic and racist and wildly stupid brother, and when her husband proved to be kinder and more progressive but just as wildly stupid, she’d felt cheated.

  On the night his wife had signed their divorce papers, she called him up and cursed him. She was drunk and lonely and enraged.

  “All right, Mr. Funny!” she had yelled. “Let’s see how long you can go without telling a joke! How long! How long, Mr. Funny?”

  “About seven seconds,” he’d said after seven seconds of silence.

  She’d cried and cursed him again and hung up the phone. He’d sat alone in the dark and wondered how he could so easily hurt a woman he loved. Why was it more necessary for him to tell a joke than to acknowledge her pain?

  And now, two years after his divorce, he stared down at the strange woman lying on his floor and wondered if she’d been delivered to him as punishment for his sins. Maybe God hated jokesters. Or maybe she was a test. Maybe he could prove his worth by helping her, by saving her. Maybe God was giving him a chance to be serious and reverential.

  “My ex-wife used to call me Mr. Funny,” he said.

  “That’s a cute name,” she said.

  “It wasn’t meant as a compliment.”

  “All right, Mr. Funny, let me rest here for a little while, and then you can take me to the hospital.”

  “It’s a deal. But I’m not going to let you sleep. You’re going to stay awake. So you better start talking.”

  “What should I talk about?”

  “Tell me about your husband and kids.”

  “I hate them.”

  “You already told me that. Tell me why you hate them.”

  She didn’t talk for a few moments. He nudged her with his foot. “Talk,” he said.

  “Where were you on September eleventh?” she asked.

  “On September eleventh, when I was seventeen, I lost my virginity to a girl named Atlanta.”

  “Always the wise guy. You know what day I’m talking about.”

  “On that September eleventh, I was working.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I design computer games.”

  “If you design computer games, why don’t you have a computer in your apartment?”

  “What are you, a detective?”

  “I’m good with details.”

  “It’s a boundary thing. I want my work life and my home life to be separate.”
/>   “How’s that going for you?”

  “I’m never here.”

  “That must be fun.”

  “It was until the eleventh. I was working on the final stages of a terrorist game. A first-person shooter.”

  “What’s a first-person shooter?”

  “You see through the eyes of the gunman.”

  “You get to shoot terrorists? Must have been a big seller.”

  “In our game, you play a terrorist who shoots civilians. You can attack a shopping mall, an Ivy League college, or the World Trade Center.”

  “Oh, God, that’s disgusting.”

  “We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and manufacture it. Even before the eleventh, we figured that kind of game would be controversial. We figured it would get tons of press, and every dumb-ass rebel teenager would have to own it. We were looking forward to the censorship and the lawsuits. We were manufacturing units based on how much negative publicity we estimated we’d receive.”

  “How could you live with yourself?”

  “We redesigned the game after the eleventh. Now you play a cop who hunts terrorists in a shopping mall or a college. We dropped the World Trade Center completely.”

  “And that’s supposed to make it all better?”

  “We’ve presold ten million copies. I’m going to be very rich.”

  “It’s blood money.”

  “All money is blood money.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?”

  “For a few days after the eleventh, I thought about suiciding. I thought about going up to the top of the Space Needle and jumping off. I figured it would be appropriate for me to die that way.”

  “There’s a bunch of people who would have helped you jump.”

  “Yeah, but it was all about self-pity. I mean, I’m alive, right? Think about how many people died in the World Trade Center. It took Giuliani how many hours to read all the names?”

  “There were about twenty-five hundred of them.”

  “Yeah, twenty-five hundred innocent people dead, and me, a living, breathing coward.”

  “A millionaire coward,” she said.

  On September 11, she’d been collating files in the law firm’s library when the first plane hit the first tower. When the second plane hit the second tower, she’d been watching it on the conference room television along with the entire firm, forty-five white-collar professionals who watched with equal parts revulsion and excitement. She remembered how, when the first tower collapsed, she’d closed her eyes and listened to her colleagues’ anguished moans and wondered why they sounded so erotic. We’re so used to sex on TV that everything on TV becomes sexy, she thought. Their law offices were on the sixtieth floor of the Columbia Center. From the conference room windows, all of the lawyers and staff had at one point or another looked south and watched airplanes arrive and depart from Boeing Airfield and Sea-Tac Airport. After the tower collapsed, she’d looked out the window after somebody screamed the fearsome question they’d all been asking themselves—What if they hit us?—and she’d almost seen a passenger jet cutting through the sky. Everybody else in the conference room must have seen their own illusory jets, because they’d all panicked as a group and run screaming out of the room, down sixty flights of stairs and onto the streets below. She’d stayed in the conference room. She’d walked to the window and waited for her airplane to come. She’d wondered if she would be able to see the pilot’s face, and perhaps recognize him, before he destroyed her. And she’d wondered, as she waited to die, if some other unhappy woman or man had stood in a World Trade Center window that morning and committed suicide by inertia.

  “You know,” she said, “I don’t think everybody who died in the towers was innocent.”

  “Who are you?” he asked. “Osama’s press agent?”

  “Those towers were filled with bankers and stockbrokers and lawyers. How honest do you think they were?”

  “They didn’t deserve to die.”

  “Think about it. Maybe they did deserve to die. Open your mind.”

  “It’s tough to be open-minded about this stuff.”

  “But you’ve got to be. You can let any event have one meaning, right? Your games don’t have one meaning, do they?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then, maybe September eleventh means things nobody has thought of yet.”

  “You’ve thought of other meanings, right?”

  “Yes, I have. So listen to this. Let’s say twelve hundred men died that day. How many of those guys were cheating on their wives? A few hundred, probably. How many of them were beating their kids? One hundred more, right? Don’t you think one of those bastards was raping his kids? Don’t you think, somewhere in the towers, there was an evil bastard who sneaked into his daughter’s bedroom at night and raped her in the ass?”

  He couldn’t believe she was doing this math, this moral addition and subtraction, this terrible algebra. He wondered if God would kill thousands of good people in order to destroy one monster. He wondered if he was a monster, making the games he made and earning the money he earned. Ha, ha, he thought, but I’m Mr. Funny. I’m the highlight of every party. I’m the best dinner guest in the history of the world. I can make any woman fall in love with me in under five minutes and alienate her five minutes later.

  “I’m not some wimpy liberal or anything,” he said. “I believe in capital punishment. I believe in the necessity of war. But I don’t think anybody deserves to die.”

  “You’re contradicting yourself.”

  “Fine, then I’m a contradiction, but at least I admit that. You’re talking about these things like you know more than the rest of us. Like you’re absolutely right.”

  “Somebody has to be right,” she said and tried to sit up but could only fall back and close her eyes against the nausea.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, happy she was quiet for a moment. How could she say the things she was saying? Wasn’t she afraid of God?

  “I’m just dizzy,” she said. “If I keep my eyes open, I’m going to vomit.”

  “You’ve got a concussion, I told you. I’m sure of it. We’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

  “No, you wanted to talk, and we’re going to talk. I’m going to tell you everything, and you’re going to listen, and then you’re going to take me to the hospital.”

  “I don’t want to hear the things you’re saying.”

  “That’s the problem. Nobody wants to hear these things, but I’m thinking them, and I have to say them.”

  He stood and walked around the room. He wondered if he was supposed to ignore this woman. Maybe that was the lesson he was supposed to learn. Words were dangerous. His nouns and verbs had destroyed his marriage and created a game that mocked the dead. Her story seemed more potentially destructive than any bomb or game he could create or imagine.

  “Are you going to listen to me?” she asked.

  “Talk,” he said.

  “All right, all right,” she said. “Didn’t you get sick of all the news about the Trade Center? Didn’t you get exhausted by all the stories and TV shows and sad faces and politicians and memorials and books? It was awful and obscene, all of it, it was grief porn.”

  “I got so tired of it, I picked up my TV, carried it down the stairs, and threw it in the Dumpster.”

  “That’s exactly what you should have done. I wished I could do it. But my husband and my sons—they’re twins, they’re both sixteen—watched that garbage every day. My husband put U.S. flags in every window of our house. What kind of Indians put twenty-two flags in their windows?”

  Her husband had been a champion powwow fancydancer when she’d met him, a skinny, beautiful, feminine boy who moved in bright-feathered circles, but he’d become a tired grunting old man. And a patriot! He’d already talked the twins into joining the marines when they graduated from high school.

  “Hey, Ma,” they’d said in their dual grating voices. “The marines
will pay for college. Isn’t that great?”

  Jesus, she was raising two wanna-be marines. How could any Indian put on a U.S. military uniform and not die of toxic irony? Hell, she hadn’t let her boys play with toy guns when they were little, and now her husband took them on three hunting trips a year. She lived in a house with deer antlers mounted on the walls. Antlers and flags! Antlers and flags! Antlers and flags! Men have walked on the moon and written Hamlet and painted the Sistine Chapel and played the piano like Glenn Gould, she thought, and other men still have the need to hang antlers and flags on their walls. She wondered why anybody was surprised when men crashed jets into buildings.

  “Nobody is innocent, right?” she said. “Isn’t that what all of the holy books say? We’re all sinners? But after the Trade Center, it was all about the innocent victims, all the innocent victims, and I kept thinking—I knew one of those guys in the towers was raping his daughter. Raping her. Maybe he was raping his son, too. And beating his wife. I think about that morning, and I wonder if the bastard was smiling when he hopped on a train for work. I think about his daughter and son sitting in some generic and heartless suburban classroom, just sad and broken and dying inside. And his wife sitting at home dying inside. That bastard gets off his train and walks up to his office on the hundred and seventh floor or something, and everybody loves him there. He’s a hero at work. And Mr. Hero is sitting at his desk, smiling and being heroic, when that airplane flies straight into his office. Flies right through the window and obliterates him, completely disappears him. And the news travels, right? The wife turns on the television and sees the towers burning, and the teachers wheel televisions into the classrooms, and the son and daughter watch the towers burning. The wife and kids count the floors, right? They count all the way up to the hundred and seventh floor, and they see it burning, and they’re happy, right? They’re hopeful, right? Aren’t they hopeful? Then the first tower comes down. Both towers come down. And the wife is jumping up and down at home. She’s celebrating. But the kids have to stay calm, because they’re in public, you know, but inside they’re jumping up and down like their mom. They run home, and all three of them sit in the living room together and watch the news, and they wait. Yeah, they wait for him to come home. The news is talking about the survivors, right? About the people who made it out. And the wife and kids are praying to God he died. That he burned to death or jumped out a window or was running down the stairs when the tower fell. They sit in the living room for three days, waiting for him to come home, and then they wait for three more days, waiting for him to come home, and on the seventh day, they realize he isn’t coming home. He’s dead and they’re happy. The monster is gone and they’re celebrating. They dance around the living room and sing songs and dance dances and they’re happy. Don’t you think all of this is possible? Don’t you think there was at least one man in the towers who deserved to die? Don’t you think there’s a wife and kids who are happy he died? Don’t you think there’s some daughter walking around who whispers Osama’s name with tenderness and affection? Don’t you think there’s a wife out there who thanks God or Allah or the devil for Osama’s rage?”