Nemuel Island
TOMMY ORANGE
"I want to feel the
approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest."
―Fernando Pessoa, the
The Book of Disquiet
His name is Nemuel Island, and he is
convinced that this, the fact of his full name being what it is, permanently
damaged his life—as a burn victim might feel about their post-burn seen
face. To hear his own name has always meant he is alone. On an island. Ruined.
Half of him is Native American—Cheyenne if you're asking—but he
looks white. The simple chance of having less melanin distributed to
him—both his sisters are brown—and there you have it, a boy and
then a man struggling to understand what him being Native American and not
looking like it could possibly mean, and why fight for it?
Meanwhile
his name is Nemuel Island. Most people don't have to navigate or the negotiate
the fact of having an uncommon name. In fact most people, statistically
speaking, are Johns, Juans, Muhammads, etc. Nemuel is a name from the bible
which means: the sleeping of God.
Nemuel sits up in bed thinking all the
time because he can't sleep. Thinking does not bring sleep but sleeping isn't
not thinking either. Sometimes he dreams of not being able to
sleep—sitting up in bed worried and thinking. Everything feels impossible.
He believes everyone is happier and sadder, both hate and
love themselves more than we're comfortable admitting. Admission itself feels
impossible. Because we don't know what we aren't willing to admit to ourselves
just like we don't know what we don't know. All of which makes him both happier
and sadder than he'd like to admit.
He
got a phone call from his sister recently. When was that? They used to talk
more and now they don't. Time slips more often than it ticks or tocks or stops.
She tried to point back. At what happened to them. Meaning their childhood.
Let's say experience.
"Uh
huh. Yeah. No I get it," Nemuel had said, with the TV on some judge show. He
stepped outside for a smoke.
"Look
up historical trauma," she'd said. "All we been through doesn't come from
nothing," she said.
"That
was a long time ago. People think we're complaining," Nemuel said, as he walked
away from the open windows of the house.
He
normally doesn't smoke unless the sun's down. Now it was in his eyes so he
looked down at the broken ground there. Rootbusted, cracked bark, hungry
crimson streams of redbrown anttrails. Memory is quicksand when it catches you,
or you catch it. Him and his older sisters used to be afraid of the silver
reflection in their dad's glasses while he drove and didn't speak. Their mom
bent the silver light away from them when she turned around smiling, telling
them there wasn't far to go, but not saying how little left there was to go
after Nemuel had asked too many times. She looked away from that old Indian
sorrowrage—like he wasn't there anymore. Their dad could just say a few
words, even just one to make them all go quiet the whole way—wherever
they were going.
"No
you're right," Nemuel said to what his sister had said about how much it
matters, what happened to the people you come from. "But what can we do?" he
asked. He really didn't know what. He still doesn't.
He
didn't say bye on accident before hanging up. He drove to the store more to get
out of the heat than to shop. He wandered the aisles. Stopped here and there
not looking for anything. To stand still in a grocery store—or perhaps
anywhere—isn't allowed. Or would maybe be frowned upon. Regarded with
suspicion. Risks possible scorn. Loitering comes from a German word he can't
say that means: to make smaller. His eyes slid over the blur of random
colors—at his many boxed choices. At the deli window he kept thinking: It's okay—about what he didn't
know. He thought: There there.
There
were an unreasonable number of flies around the deli area as if some fresh dead
meat lay nearby. He swatted at the flies repeatedly but never made contact. He
wondered if there is some thing too big to see, comprehend, like what humans
are to flies, swatting at us all—annoyed at our buzzings and wanderings
in a room bigger than the world. In a deliverse we don't know about. Changing
our fates with their swatting influence—ending our lives over nothing. He
thought about how we ourselves are invisible. Too big to see. To comprehend.
And how we wander aisles and rooms we think are worlds, hoping hands too big to
see won't crush us.
†
Nemuel sits at his computer watching a
video of himself several years back when he was thinner, when there was more
brightness in his eyes. He hates something about his mouth, the way it moves
when he talks, when he sees it in videos. His mom just now emailed the video
without any note about why she'd sent this particular video. This makes him
watch it again and again like the secret to why she sent it is in there
somewhere. But he hates to see himself talk over and over. Still, he keeps
watching. He's talking to someone outside of the shot. He smiles like he knows
more than who he's talking to. Nemuel doesn't remember this moment, or who he
was talking to. Like was he talking to his mom or was she recording it? He was
thinner then, but his cheeks were so big. His eyes too small. And his crooked
bottom teeth jut out. He never should have stopped wearing his retainer. It was
that he couldn't keep it on at night, the version of himself he could barely
claim was him, that version of him who closes his eyes to the world nearly
every night, lies down—leaves. The etymology of the word when he looked
it up says Old English has it meaning: "Repose of Death." That dead or zombie
version of himself, sleeping Nemuel, he would pull his retainer out of his
mouth and throw it. Nemuel would find it the next morning in the corner of his
room—dry and with that sick spit smell all things get when spit dries on
them.
Nemuel
switches from watching the video of himself his mom sent him to watching the
news. Why he keeps watching the news is similar to why he kept watching the
video of himself his mom sent mysteriously. To find something there. Instead of
nothing, plus fear. Fear from an unknown place is maybe dread, and dread at
nothing is maybe the way it feels to live now in this year in
particular—or maybe every year for all of time? What Nemuel knows is that
he can't stop watching. He wants be wrong about them being wrong. He wants to
be told it's not fake, with fake news headlines, with a news report about a
news report from a disreputable station. He wants to read fake news about fake
news to get at what fake news is, how to avoid our need for the truth behind
its fakeness so bad we can't stop participating in it. He wants to be told he
hasn't known anything. All this time. He wants who tells him to say it with
blood in their eyes because they can't sleep either. He wants it to be—if
not right or true—than just okay, the actual way it is now. From the
left, right—from a mountain on the moon. Because what it looks like. What
it looks like it has to be, is the end.
Nemuel
grew up afraid of the end. Because of religion. Church people were all hoping
the end would come. To leave this old world behind. Get to a better one. Can
anyone blame them for that? When he grew up and stopped caring what church
people thought, what his parents thought, he noticed there were still religious
devotees everywhere. He was one himself. Rare moments he could feel it in his
pulse. Things getting bigger and smaller and keeping still for moments at just
the perfect size. The thing he was and is and has to be.
Nemuel
noticed there is another kind of sleep. That we all practice a private religion,
privately. Bow our heads to it. Bend like the air from sound—sight
unseen. Pray with our teeth. In how we chew. In how we stay hungry. In the why
of why we keep breathing without even meaning to.
He
believes in words. Language. He says this to himself out loud because he
believes in the power of saying things out loud: "Past-participle accelerator, help us go
from going to gone without the crushing kinds of pain."
†
Sometimes he walks at sunset to watch
the gradient color and light drop behind the mountains. After the sun sets he
gets that kind of sad related to feeling like you're not ever actually here enough to feel what it means to
actually be here. That feeling like you're gone already, or like you don't
belong, or like you've done something wrong.
He's grateful for gratitude when he feels it, and the presence
of mind that comes when he's trying to stay present. But he can't get around
this removed feeling. Like he once belonged somewhere, but was moved, removed,
and not told that he couldn't come back, but like things happened in such a way
that there was no place to go back to.
He's still just thinking and it's not doing anything. Or is he?
When we only think we're thinking, what else could we be doing, in such a world
as this, than dreaming.