There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,80
was sold out so they walked around the lake instead. The awkward silence that was the entire walk was intense. They both kept starting sentences and stopping them short, then saying “Never mind.” She liked Edwin. She likes him. There’s something about him that feels like family. Maybe because he has a similar background. In Edwin’s case, he hadn’t known his dad, who is Native, who happens to be the emcee at the powwow. So they had that in common, sort of, but not much else. She definitely does not like Edwin as anything more than a co-worker and possible future friend. She’d told him a thousand times with her eyes that there’s no way—in what her eyes didn’t do, in how they looked away when his tried to stay.
When Blue pulls up to his house, she calls him from her car. He doesn’t answer. She walks up and knocks on his door. She should have texted that she was outside the minute she left her house. The drive to West Oakland took about fifteen minutes without traffic. Why didn’t she make him take BART? Right, it’s too early. But the bus? No, he had a bad experience on the bus he won’t even tell her about. Does she baby him? Poor Edwin. He really does try. He really doesn’t know how he comes off to other people. He’s so painfully aware of his physical size. And he makes too many comments about himself, his weight. It makes people as uncomfortable as he appears to be most of the time.
Blue knocks again, hard to the point that it would have been rude except that Edwin was making her wait outside his door on this day they’d both been planning and working hard toward for so many months.
Blue looks at her phone for the time, then checks her email and texts. When nothing of interest comes up, she checks her Facebook. It’s a tired feed she’d read last night before going to bed. No new activity. Old comments and posts she’d already seen. She presses the Home button and for a second, just for a small moment, thinks she should open her other Facebook feed. On that other Facebook, she’d find the information and media she’d always been looking for. On that other Facebook feed, she’d find true connection. That is where she’d always wanted to be. Is what she’d always hoped Facebook would turn out to be. But there is nothing else to check, there is no other Facebook, so she clicks the screen off and puts the phone back in her pocket. Just as she’s about to knock again, Edwin’s big face appears before her. He’s holding two mugs.
“Coffee?” he says.
Dene Oxendene
DENE IS IN a makeshift storytelling booth he built to record stories. He aims the camera at his face and presses Record. He doesn’t smile or speak. He’s recording his face as if the image, the pattern of light and dark arranged there, might mean something on the other side of that lens. He’s using the camera his uncle gave to him before he died. The Bolex. One of Dene’s favorite directors, Darren Aronofsky, used a Bolex in his movies Pi and Requiem for a Dream—which Dene would say is one of his favorite movies, though it’s hard to call such a fucked-up movie a favorite. But that for Dene is what is so good about the movie, aesthetically it’s rich, so you enjoy the experience, but you don’t exactly come away from the film glad that you watched it, and yet you wouldn’t have it any other way. Dene believes this kind of realness is something his uncle would have appreciated. This unflinching stare into the void of addiction and depravity, this is the kind of thing only a camera can keep its eye wide open for.
Dene turns the camera off and sets it up on a tripod to point at the stool he has placed in the corner for the storytellers. He flips one switch on his cheap lighting gear for soft light behind the stool, then the other switch for the harder lighting he has behind him. He’ll ask everyone who comes into his booth why they’ve come to the powwow, what powwows mean to them. Where do they live? What does being Indian mean to them? He doesn’t need more stories for his project. He doesn’t even need to show a product at the end of the year for the grant money