I HAVE A NAME.
It sits upon the tip of my tongue like the taste of something familiar. Something warm. Something that sends droplets of memory down my throat and warms my empty belly. Water on a hot day; the splash of coolness after the heat of the ever-present fluorescent lights that burn the rims of my eyelids raw, the merciless brightness that keeps sleep pressing from behind and underneath the burning of my eyes.
The lights are always on so my captors can watch me behind their veil of darkness, keeping me under their ever-watchful gaze so I cannot escape. Where can I go where there is no one watching me, pinned down by bright lights that never dim, never burn out? Chained by bonds to this hard, cold steel platform that serves as bed, table, chamber, prison? I am their prisoner. I have known nothing else, no light, no darkness, no night sky, no stars shining overhead to guide me home. I have no home. Only the one I go to in my dreams.
If I did dream.
I imagine instead, lying here on this cold, hard platform, what my dreams would be like. I see my mother there. We are on a cliff high above a large body of water that I suppose is the ocean. I have never been there, but in my waking dreams it feels very familiar, and so I go there to pass the time, the waiting for the stealing of my blood. I go there in my head and I can see my mother standing, her hands moving across the grasses as the ocean wind whirls around us. My mother’s voice is full of awe and joy as she tells me a story:
On the island of Limuw, there is a story of a beautiful young woman. She was so lovely they called her Pahe Pahe, or Flower of Limuw. She was the pride of her family, of her mother and father and sisters and brothers; and she grew up knowing each place for the stars, each ocean, each plant, each animal of the land; and she was a good girl because she understood her world as one would understand their world, through the stories and songs of her people.
One day, Pahe Pahe took her tomol, her canoe, out into the beautiful kelp beds surrounding her home. While out on the kelp beds, she became entranced by their beauty, by the way they waved to her, dancing underwater to the song she sang: “Beautiful place, beautiful home of mine, singer of stars and light, keep me safe on this journey to and from my beloved homeland….” The giant kelp swayed back and forth, graceful, loving Pahe Pahe’s song.
Old Man Coyote saw Pahe Pahe out in the water and he decided to trick her. He didn’t like water, but so great was his desire to trick Pahe Pahe that he swallowed up his pride and dove under the water, making himself look like a seal. Quietly, he crept up on Pahe Pahe’s tomol, pretending.
Slowly Old Man Coyote inched up the line of Pahe Pahe’s lure, and soon Pahe Pahe felt the tug on her line, and look! She pulled up and it was Old Man Coyote! Pahe Pahe laughed and laughed. “Old Man Coyote, what are you doing here on my line?”
So funny did Pahe Pahe think Old Man Coyote looked, all bedraggled and wet and smelling like two-day-old wet dog, that she dunked him back into the water. “Perhaps you need a bath to smell sweet again?” She laughed and dunked him once more. Old Man Coyote sputtered under the lash of the water and the moomat, growing angrier and angrier—and still Pahe Pahe laughed and dunked him three more times, until Old Man Coyote let go of the line and swam back to shore, old and bedraggled and wet and furious.
As she paddled on and on, Pahe Pahe became sorrowful, for in spite of his tricks and lies, Old Man Coyote was a respected elder among the people; and maybe, just maybe, Pahe Pahe had been disrespectful of him by teasing him the way she did. So despondent she became over her behavior that she just sat there as the birds came and took all of her fish, and she sat there all night even as the stars came out and twinkled their greetings to the Flower of Limuw. She returned her tomol to land, growing more and more unhappy as she did.
At sunrise, Pahe Pahe’s guilt got the better of her, so she climbed to the top of the cliffs above her on Limuw and swore that she would kill herself for her terrible transgression toward Old Man Coyote. As soon as the sun peeked up over the eastern mainland, she leapt off the cliff and into the water below. But the tide had receded, so she hit the bottom of the white foam and broke her legs from the fall.
Hatash, the Great Mother, took pity on Pahe Pahe because she was such a good and loyal and beautiful daughter, so that wherever the water touched Pahe Pahe’s broken body, scales the colors of abalone—pink, green, blue, lavender, all the colors of the flowers of Limuw—took shape on her legs. Fins that danced and waved like the giant kelp sprouted from these colors—and grateful for her gift of life, Pahe Pahe dove into the waters, swimming on the dawnlit sky reflected in the deep ocean. Her brothers and sisters came to swim with her—the dolphins, whom she loved, the seals, and all the beautiful fish jumped and dove with her in their joy. Pahe Pahe swam all morning, all afternoon, and when she grew tired, she found herself at Pimu Island, some seventy miles from Limuw.
As she went upon the rocks to sun and warm herself, a little boy who was helping his grandfather tie the nets together to fish saw her. “Grandfather!” cried the little boy. “Look! Look there!”
The grandfather and his grandson were so moved by Pahe Pahe’s beauty that there were tears sparkling in their eyes. “She was once the Flower of Limuw,” the grandfather said, “and now she is the Flower of the World.”
I stare into the sun, watching the light stream across the sky, hitting the ocean with sparkles like stars. My mother’s voice fades as the bright lights come into view once again.
Pahe Pahe is the name of the Flower of the World. This is the story of her name, and I remember this as I lie under the burning light, my eyes fixed ahead but also on the sea. I imagine myself as Pahe Pahe, not as “2231” or “it” or “dirty Indian.” Pahe Pahe would not allow herself to be poked and prodded by her enemies. She would sing them away.
My name, ever elusive, burns like a deep gnawing thirst that refuses to be quenched under these lights. They hide behind the lights, keeping their faces hidden from me. The illness that sets their blood on fire, bursting within their bodies, is not inside me. They think that by taking my blood from me they will be healed. Their skin grows sallow, pale, colorless under the lights. My skin, like their rage, grows darker and darker under the lights. This enrages them even more, so that their words lash out at me under their lights. They think their words hurt. Redskin. Whore. Bitch of the earthborn.
“2231,” they say, or “it.” “Thing.”
Sometimes, when the kinder ones come to stick my bruised, torn skin with their long, sharp needles of steel and other shiny metals, I am “her.” Upon the kind ones is the scent of impending death. This sickness in their blood makes them the same as the others. This disease doesn’t understand the difference. Their faces are covered by thick, clear plastic, so that all I can see of them is a reflection of the light that burns behind my eyes. I can see myself in their masks. The girl I see there is not who I picture in my mind….She is a dark-skinned wisp of a girl, with closely cropped black tufts of hair sticking out from her head, and bruises and curses where there should be kisses.
Perhaps they are kind because they sense their end is coming fast.
I remember when two long braids hung from either side of my head, skimming past the line of my shoulders to the middle of my back. Mama made sure my braids were smooth, shiny, and tied into even lengths, with red bows fastened at the ends. I wonder sometimes if whoever first shaved my head kept the bows as souvenirs.
The door opens and they come. The kindly ones. Their eyes are hidden, like the others, but I see through the shadows. I see the blood that is filling their eyes and blinding them. This is a disease of their own making, grown in a lab somewhere, much like the one where they are holding me. So much time has passed, yet they still think my blood can heal them. Six times a day they come into the bright, hotly lit chamber, approach the platform where I am tied by my arms and legs, and prod at the bruised, tender flesh of my arms with their sharp, pointed fingers. I have grown accustomed to their intent, their anger, their rage at the sight of the nerves and veins running in blue lines beneath the chalky brown outer layer of my skin. I try not to wince, to not give them the satisfaction of knowing how much it hurts, that pinch upon my skin, and the sharp, sharp pinprick. Sometimes the needles aren’t as sharp as they once were, but they say nothing as the blunt end of the needle punctures through the purple-and-black bruises all along my arms.
I turn and watch the liquid spurt into the long, clear glass cylinder. Their hopes rise with each filling of the specimen collector, each change that my blood undergoes as they try to craft their cure for this disease of their own making. My face is reflected in the glass syringe, and my lips purse and my eyes shimmer with tears I can no longer shed. The only liquid my body can conjure is my blood; and soon, I know, if they continue taking it from me against my will, there won’t be anything left inside of me to steal.
My mother had a beautiful laugh. I can still remember the sound, coming from dreams that pretend to follow the false sleep the lights keep me in. She was always laughing. She laughed when my father sang to her with his clapper sticks.
My dad’s hands always moved in perfect rhythm, pushing his song skyward. My mother’s laugh moved up and down the length of the sticks, and this is how I remember them. Laughing. Singing. But never speaking my name. Just singing into the thousand tiny pinpricks of light under the dark sky of home.
I remember watching her touch the tall grasses, singing to them as they drifted under her fingers. The image of the kelp beds dancing under Pahe Pahe’s song come to me, and I see that my mother, like Pahe Pahe, is singing to the grasses of the earth. Her song makes magic as she pulls certain grasses from the earth and begins to pass them through her teeth. “The grass needs to be softened before it can take the shape of the basket,” my mother says. Some grasses make the journey through her mouth, others remain undisturbed. “We save some for next year so that there will always be baskets for the coming seasons….” I can hear her voice so clearly, so sweetly, that even in my mind, after I have spent all this time locked away in a laboratory that keeps me alive for my blood, I feel her strength seep into my bones.
Her fingers shape the tough grasses, softened by her mouth, into a knot of a cross. “This is the heart, the beginning, of any basket,” she says. My fingers, tiny, follow hers, moving the softer pieces between the tougher ones, her patient and loving hands guiding mine. “Baskets hold water, seeds, grass, even babies. The baskets hold our hearts, keep us connected to the earth, to the sky, to the sea, to one another….” Her hands are gentle as she guides mine, and when I am finished, my basket is lopsided, uneven, filled with little holes. My mother laughs and holds it up to the sun. “This one is good for collecting acorns,” she says, her smile coloring her voice. “We’ll need those for good soup.”
When they came to take me away, my mother wasn’t laughing. She made no sound at all as the dark matte of blood oozed out from the wound in her head where they had shot her dead. It spilled onto the red dirt as it pooled in the setting light of the sun. My mother’s blood was weak, they said as they pulled me from her arms. Not enough Indian to make a cure, they said.
Get up, Mama, I screamed in our language. Get up and chase them down!
Her eyes were open and empty as they pulled me into a helicopter, the sound of the blades drowning out my screams.
My father does not come for me….Only his voice seeks me out in the darkness, in the crying-out voice that tears across my mouth. He is there, too, his body lying not far from my mother’s. He does not move. His blood is thin, weak; yet it is the same color as mine.
I lost my name that day. It was then I became “2231.” “It.” “Redskin.”
Dirty Indian.
My father’s voice is singing in my mind when I feel the kindly ones’ fear shift into something different.
Something is happening. I can taste the shift in their fear upon my tongue. I can taste their blood between my teeth as it pumps, diluted, through their veins in a failing attempt to graft my immunity to their weakness. Their fear tastes of metal, hard and cold, and the death stench is soon upon them.
Their fear fills my eyes, my nose, my lungs. Stronger than ever in my mouth. Time slips past, and their entrances into my chamber grow fewer and fewer. They are losing their war against this plague, and they curse my strength as their own death marches forward in the blackness of their blood. Inside me, gaining strength from my mother’s song, my blood pumps stronger and stronger. Their taking grows less frequent, and I feel the renewal of my blood bloom within.
The door opens and the bloom withers. They have come once again.
The air changes around me. I’ve not felt this one before.
A fresh anger moves in waves across the room, and I strain against my binds to see who this one is. Her scent is not of fear. She is not dying. Her blood is pure.
A woman comes to my side, and I see her clearly. No mask, no veil to hide behind. She is beautiful, her face dark against the harsh lights. Her eyes are black like mine, her hair is pulled back from her face, and beauty shines from her. I look up into her eyes, and in them I see a sea of night stars, an ocean of inky darkness, and she looks at me, hard.
Her mouth is moving, but I can hear nothing from her mouth, only my father’s song from a distant memory.
Oh my darling, how I love you so…
Am I dreaming? I have not been able to do so for as long as I can remember.
Stay right by your side forever, yah hey yah.
I’m too lost in the woman’s eyes to make out the pattern of her words that string along in my head.
I’m not so far away from you, ya hey yah. In your dreams I’ll sing how I love you so…
All I can see are the stars in a dark expanse of ocean and sky. I know the place of each of them in the night sky, the name for all the plants and animals. The name of the people.
So close your eyes and dream. I’ll see you on the other side. Hey yah ha, hey ya hah, ho!
My mouth opens and I try to speak, but nothing comes out. She reaches out, her hands resting upon my face, and the expanse of night sky swims in her eyes. I think she is crying when her words begin to form in my head.
“Sela.” She is saying, over and over. “Sela, Sela, Sela…”
Sela.
My name. My name is Sela.
IV.
“Sela. Your name is Sela.”
My grandmother’s words float over the wind and reach around me, comforting me in our language. I know my name.
She takes my face in her hands, those dark eyes with oceans of stars staring back at me, and my mind struggles to focus on her. We are outside, standing at the mouth of a dark cave in the homeland of our people, staring out at the shadow of Pimu Island in the setting sun. We have traveled far—that I can tell by the rising and setting of the sun three times. She’d gathered me into her arms, breaking the bonds that tied me down, and whispered over and over. “Your name is Sela.”
I had been speaking when she came in. “2231,” I was saying, over and over. The roll number they had given me when they stole me from my mother’s arms and brought me to that place. Where they took my blood, with the hope that they would one day find a cure for the disease that turned their own blood black and their skin into pustules and oozing death. “2231. 2231…”
I stand nearly as tall as my grandmother, maybe even taller, as I gaze into her eyes. I am weak from my captivity. She tells me they have held me for three years.
“How old am I?”
She doesn’t hesitate as she answers: Thirteen. She had been searching for me, and when she entered their facility, their compound, the war was nearly over. There was no one left to question her when she rode up to the lab in her black Army-issue Jeep Wrangler, dressed in black fatigues and a headband holding her braid back against her head. “Your name is Sela. You were named for me,” she says, speaking over and over, as if I can’t understand. “I’m Isabella. Your grandmother….”
She presses something into my hand. Something warm, soft to the touch, yet firm. Pliable. Grasses woven together in the shape of sticks crossed against one another, and bear grass woven between the spines. We are standing among the tall grasses, the breath of the ocean moving up the cliffs and through the swaying stalks. As she is speaking, my fingers begin to form a pattern in the strands, and I weave the strands through the spine into the beginning of a new basket.
Her words sing in my head as she tells me how she has searched for me all these three years, staying under the Army radar, posing as a doctor, pretending to search for a cure for this disease that my captors have let loose in the world. Blackpox, they call it. “It has killed them like it killed our ancestors, my own grandmother…and now our blood is our immunity. Our blood is what will survive this war.”
The sun drops down against the western sky, and all around me the sea foams and surges. In my dreams I stood at this very spot, against the caves in which our ancestors rode out the storms that tried to extinguish us before. I look into my grandmother’s eyes, and I can hear my father sing as she wraps me in her arms. The basket is in my hands, and tears form in my eyes as I see there are no holes, no crooked patterns in this thing I have created from the memories in my blood. Tears fall onto the pale grass and, like the kelp in the ocean, the grasses float upon the breath of our ancestors. I imagine I see Pahe Pahe’s tail glistening like the stars under the sea that surrounds us in this place that is now, always has been, and always will be our home.
Oh my darling, don’t you cry, my grandmother sings. Stay right by your side forever, yah hey yah…
Sela. My name is Sela. I am thirteen years old. I stand at the caves where my ancestors rode out the storm that once tried to take us down. It is here where we survived, and here where we will survive again.