Tony looks down and watches the tracks fly by. He feels the train pull him back as it slows. He grips the metal handle, shifts his weight to the left, then rocks back to his right when the train comes to a complete stop. The woman behind him is saying something, but it can’t matter what. He steps off the train and when he gets to the stairs he takes off, skipping two steps the whole way down.
Blue
BLUE IS DRIVING to pick up Edwin. It’s that weird night-morning color, that deep blue-orange-white. The day she’s been anticipating for almost a year is just starting.
It feels good to be back in Oakland. All the way back. She’s been back a year. On a regular paycheck now, in her own studio apartment, with her own car again for the first time in five years. Blue tilts the rearview down and looks at herself. She sees a version of herself she thought was long gone, someone she’d left behind, ditched for her real Indian life on the rez. Crystal. From Oakland. She’s not gone. She’s somewhere behind Blue’s eyes in the rearview.
Blue’s favorite place to smoke a cigarette is in the car. She likes how the smoke escapes when all the windows are down. She lights one. She tries to at least say a little prayer every time she smokes. It makes her feel less guilty for smoking. She takes in a deep drag and holds it. She says thank you as she blows out the smoke.
She’d gone all that way to Oklahoma to find out where she came from and all she’d gotten for it was a color for a name. No one had heard of any Red Feather family. She’d asked around plenty. She wonders if maybe her birth mom made it up—maybe she didn’t know her own tribe either. Maybe she had been adopted too. Maybe Blue would end up having to make up her own name and tribe too, pass that on to her possible children.
Blue throws her cigarette out the window as she passes the Grand Lake Theatre. The theater meant many things to her over the years. Right now she’s thinking of the awkward, clearly stated non-date date she recently went on with Edwin. Edwin’s her intern, her assistant for the powwow event coordination for this past year. The movie 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.