anything was possible. This was always evident, even when I’d met him the first time, when we were younger, and the second time, at the airport. He said people walk around most days without feeling alive; people go every moment without paying attention to the quiet life—the life that matters—the voice that can direct a person’s destiny away from a world of shame and guilt to a world of meaning and realization. According to Go, the way to live was to listen to your heart. Intentionality, he called it. Something about how you’ve already sketched out your life—joys, sorrows, mistakes, accomplishments—before birth, and it is your conscience that reveals how to live your intended life. The goal is to experience multiple lives, experience everything.
Go drives us out of the hills and back into town, and I start lying again. I say, “Did you know Los Angeles is the religious capital of the world?”
“No,” he says. “How?”
The gravel road runs straight downhill and all we see in every direction is miles of open tundra and water. It’s strange how small the village seems compared to everything else. I’ve never been to a city that is so dominated by empty space all around, like a strong wind or wave could just wipe it away.
“LA has the most religions, or is the most religious, or something.”
Go parks his car in the middle of the concrete bridge again. This time we are facing the village.
He says, “When I think of LA, I think of Hollywood. And Hollywood projects this America where everything is a product for sale, everything is buyable material—most importantly, identity. Even spiritual identity has gone public. And man, the more we rely on external identity the more detached we become, because the only things of value are earned, and there is never enough to go around, and the travesty is that the valuable and sacred aren’t inherent. There’s no image of God. No creativity. Only image of image, only replications of replicas.”
We watch a lady in a fishing boat pull up to the shore, throw out her front and back anchors, and then hop onto the sand and walk away.
“I’ve never been to Hollywood,” I say, lying.
“LA. New York. Doesn’t matter, man. Rural is the new city.”
It’s my second day here, but it feels like I’ve already lived in Alaska for too long.
“So this is the only concrete in town?”
Go says, “No, there’s the basketball court.”
I picture every kid hogged onto that slab, shoulder to shoulder, dribbling basketballs, tre-flipping skateboards, even hopping on pogo sticks. Everyone pushing and shoving for their fair share. And the other kids who aren’t into sports sit on benches and watch.
“In the village,” Go says, “time is way less important than purpose.”
For a minute we see no vehicles. No people are out walking along the roads. No dogs are testing the lengths of their chains. No airplanes are delivering or loading supplies or people. It’s as if the village is unpopulated. I never would’ve imagined something like this being possible in the middle of the day, here or in LA or anywhere. For a minute nothing happens.
Then Go says, “I’ve got it. I’ve got the bet.”
“It won’t even matter.”
“If you stay here longer than a year, you have to change your first name.”
“Change it?”
“To your Eskimo name,” Go says.
“But I don’t want an Eskimo name.”
“You don’t have one?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t want one.”
“Man, I’ll give you an Eskimo name.”
Go-boy starts thinking, and I wonder if Eskimo names can be given to non-Eskimos—this is the first I’ve ever heard of them. I wonder if they are the kind of thing that Go can just hand out without talking to anyone. It seems like something parents should decide, like something Mom should come up with. But I doubt she’s thinking about that on her second day home after twenty years. I can’t imagine what she’s thinking about. And I can’t imagine having something like this—an Eskimo name—without Wicho or Pop having one too. A name is such a permanent thing. A name makes the person almost as much as the person makes the name. And as we sit in Go’s car on the bridge, I think about how even though I don’t like the name Cesar, it was given to me by Pop, and so I accept it and can’t fathom changing it.
He says, “Sure always takes long time to find the right Eskimo name.”
Go-boy sits behind the steering wheel of his AMC Eagle for what seems like forever, moving his lips every few seconds and thinking about possible names. And Go keeps on like this—in his car on the bridge . . . and back at his house later that day . . . and even later that summer.
A work truck rolls onto the bridge, maybe heading out of town to the new jail. The guy looks like an engineer from Anchorage. He pulls alongside us, slow, trying to pass, then stops. There are just a few inches between our vehicles. The guy folds in his side mirror. He rolls down his window, and Go, seeing this, rolls down his.
“You got trouble?”
Go-boy says, “No, we’re just waiting.”
The guy looks up and down the slough for signs of something to wait for. I look with him. He glances around the open fields in front of his truck, then he turns in his seat and looks back at the village. There is nothing happening anywhere. He asks, “For what?”
I am wondering the same thing. Go stares through the windshield, straight down the road and back into town, maybe running through a list of possible names to give me, maybe not. A kid on a bike rolls across the gravel where it curves between two homes. On the left side is a row of dogs who’ve appeared, sitting on top of their little plywood houses, ugly dogs, watching us.
Go turns back to the guy in his truck, says, “We’re waiting to find out.”
BUNNY BOOTS
I told myself that as long as I was living way the hell up here in Alaska, I would have some fun. I would be with this girl—Kiana.
It was her face. She was beautiful, attractive, sexy, all those things, but those weren’t what did it. What got me, what hooked me from across the room that night—from the other side of the party—through the beats in the speakers, the smoke in the air, the fight about a crashed four-wheeler, the screams for them to shut the fuck up, the hole punched through a wall—what turned me away from the door and my next shift on the fish-counting tower was Kiana’s compelling face. She was mixing rum and diet soda in the kitchen, and instead of leaving I walked over to her.
She was Go-boy’s stepsister. She was my stepcousin. I knew I should’ve forgotten about her and gone back upriver to work my graveyard shift. I knew she had already forgotten about me moving here. But none of that mattered. She had the air. She had the look. I couldn’t stop myself. I was walking across the room.
I said, “Kiana?”
Her
