Chapter 13: Cultural Appropriation
Over the lip of a beaver dam the river before me had widened, and deepened, and I stood on the edge of a true lake that is not on any normal map. If you draw it on a map it will change. I have no idea what shape Lake Waposwa is, but I soon realized that it could take any shape, like the being who guards it.
I was not greeted at the threshold, or threatened. I was alone on the beaver dam, looking ahead for a while at small islands on the lake that were still, and yet not exactly the same when I looked away and looked back again. I heard a loon calling over the waters, which were calm and rippling gently. And I realized that the copper-smell of faint pollution in the streams was totally absent here. Overhead the moon was almost full but guarded from sight by marching clouds, which also did not persist when I looked away from them.
Maybe I was not worth talking to. Maybe I would be ignored as long as I didn’t make a mess.
Somewhat annoyed by the way the islands moved and changed, I stared ahead and blinked slowly and repeatedly until one was in position to leap to. As I sailed through the air I forced my eyes to stay open, and as I suspected it did not flick away or transform from barren rock to tree-covered as long as I was looking at it. I landed on solid rock, then looked back. The beaver damn at the lip of the lake was gone, replaced by new islands and rocks with no clear edge to the lake in sight. I was inside and committed now.
I sat down on the granite with crossed legs and arms, letting my annoyance fall away as each blink gave me at least one glaring change to the scenery, and then I lay back to look up. Where stars were visible between gaps of shifting cloud, even they did not hold position. This was some truly advanced mischief. This was everything the Bermuda Triangle was purported to be.
“Well, let’s see if the sun comes up,” I muttered, suddenly realizing that I was tired, though it felt so early, more than an hour before midnight. But my extra sense of night’s coming and going had dropped away entirely, and if I had had a watch on my wrist I would have fully expected the digits to change erratically, even to impossible values.
I was being screwed with.
I was tired, so suddenly, and maybe I had been lying here for a very long time, after I realized that I was no longer sitting but sprawled on the granite. I thought that if I tried to hunt an animal in this crazy place something out of a cartoon might happen; disjointedly I thought of Coyote chasing Road Runner in the old Looney Tunes, with physics always changing to smash or blow up or run over poor Coyote. There was no way to win.
The constellations overhead scrambled themselves mockingly into bears, scorpions, hydras, leopards. I was waiting like a gambler for the dice to stop rolling.
“C’mon, rabbit. C’mon, rabbit. C’mon-”
“EHHHH, WHAT’S UP?”
I started up in a panic, my head cranking around to find the speaker of that monstrous, gargantuan voice, and something kicked me. It kicked me hard, harder than Deer Woman’s blow to my throat, a blow to my ass that sent me skyward … as if I was in a cartoon. I smashed down on cold rock with my head half-flat and my limbs scrambled in the pose of a dead insect, with what felt like a glowing footprint on my backside. The island I was on seemed to be isolated in a black lake that went on forever, with no Moon or stars overhead now. If I made a run for it the scenery would probably loop to save on animation hours.
There was light like the sun, dawning and burning me, and it was in the shape of a thing that bounded about on two legs with fantastic speed, jittering around me to make a trail of fire that caught my eye. This searing sprite had two horns. If spiritual power had weight, and had sound, it was concentrating to get heavier and louder and brighter like a campfire swelling and crackling and rippling the air higher and higher, this huge thing shrinking but intensifying as it shrunk to human size, like a newborn star from a nebula. An orange silhouette made of sentient fire had kicked me and was racing in to continue its greeting, opening its fiery mouth as a burning hand picked me up by the scruff of my neck with enough strength to make me quiver like a ragdoll at once.
Under horns made of fire, with eyes that went down and down forever to the bottom of the universe, the apparition cackled and thundered at me, its most recent catch.
“WHAT’S UPPPPP DAWWWKKK?!”
The great shapeshifting spirit Nanabozho, co-creator of the Ojibwe universe, demiurge and brother to the likes of Loki and Anansi, had culturally appropriated from the Warner Bros. company. Now I understood why he had called me ‘doc’.
The searing energy was wrapped up in a opaque covering that grew like moss over the flaming being, forming a grey fur suit that had a zipper in its back, which the spirit pulled up with its free hand, completing the guise by next summoning a carrot to nibble on with the familiar nibbling sound to accompany the familiar voice in the Looney Tunes cartoons that had so delighted me as a child. There was now a chance that I was going to meet my end at the hands of Bugs Bunny.
Nanabozho winked, then flicked me away to stand against a tree. I obediently flew, hard enough to make the tree behind me groan.
“Monnn-sters are such eenn-teresting people,” he said merrily.
“Stop … it.” I found first the ground with my hands, looking down and shivering, and then considered getting off my knees to my feet. I got one knee down, and looked up.
I was in the palm of his hand, about as big as a sparrow. Oh, this was going terribly.
“Do … do you want me to leave your lake?” I asked, or tried to ask, but then I screamed because my voice was unintelligibly high-pitched and miniscule even to my own ear.
The giant rabbit laughed and laughed, and thundered down at me in a gross distortion of the familiar cartoon voice.
“I KNEW yah should’ve taken that left TOIN at Alba-”
“STOP IT!” I leap from his palm to try and sock that whiskered nose.
I was allowed to hit, now shrunken to the size of a flea. The pink nose now seemed as big as a tennis court, and below that the cleft of the two incisors was a canyon between two huge white rocks.
A gloved fingertip came in to flick me off.
As I flew from nose to ground, a distance that felt like many miles, I had a lot of time to come to terms with things, composing what I guessed could be called a mental, private will. Or perhaps my own obituary. Deer Woman had been right – I used jokes and stories to take nothing seriously, to escape anything too real and adult, so Nanabozho had beaten me to it. It was hard to take refuge in a pun or a passing reference when this was the form of my destructor, my Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
I realized that I was doing it again, throwing up a layer of fiction and humor to distract from the fact that I was going to die.
But that had always been true. I was always going to die. Nanabozho had simply narrowed down the uncertainty a little bit.
I should have …
So many things, so many regrets. Stop thinking of characters, scenarios, jokes, puns, and actually talk like a real person to the people around you. But I couldn’t now. There was a list of girl names as long as my arm, girls I had never talked to more than superficially, never working out how to be uncomfortably, maturely real with any of them. I didn’t want any of that serious, whiny poutiness, I didn’t want anything less than the highlights, the best stories. I just wanted to laugh and shrug things off forever, if I wanted a hug I’d laugh and say ‘grow up baby’ in the mirror, happy people didn’t care, why should I care …
I guess it was a toss-up, my karmic comeuppance, between getting smashed by Bugs Bunny or Alfred E. Neumann. ‘Don’t take life too seriously, you’ll never get out of it alive!’ or ‘What, me worry?’
But I should have taken on some worry, and I should have taken something seriously. I hadn’t planned anything, or wanted anything beyond daily comforts. No kids, no partner, I’ll catch up with a friend every few months or so and keep things light and fun, screw that drudgery of fat old people with their pills, in-laws, boring excursions to pointless fairs or sports games or charity walks for problems that will never go away, screw all that … so why was I so goddamn regretful and miserable at the end of my life if I had avoided so much bullshit? This was nothing like the fight with Jean-Claude – now I knew that I was dead, with no fighting chance.
I waited to land, to crash and die.
And I did hit ground … but it had been a fall of just a few feet, for now I was at my original size, lying on the cold granite with stars buzzing overhead.
“Eh?” When the thing dressed as a rabbit peered down at me, each movement was given a musical sound, like in the old cartoons.
“Ee heh-heh, aren’t you and I two stinkers?”
“Sure … give me all the damn puns,” I muttered, licking my lips. “I guess you’re just reading them from my mind.”
“Oh, heh-heh.” Nanabozho furrowed his brows in mock anger. “Of course you know this means war.”
This wasn’t any kind of conversation then. It was like I was alone out here, talking to myself in a drugged state. Maybe Nanabozho had just huffed some hallucinogens in my direction and I was still on that beaver dam, collapsed and tripping. Could I break the trip?
“My ass still hurts,” I realized aloud, more confused than anything else. My face and limbs had recovered from the rabbit’s dynamic entry by kicking, but the burning footprint on my backside remained. If it was a hallucination it might not heal.
Well … like so many myths … they ask ‘why is the beaver’s tail flat’ and they will say ‘because one day Nanabush stepped on a beaver’s tail’. I guess he can perma-wound, smack you so hard your great-grandchildren will feel it.
So this was God, or one of the sub-gods. I thought he was less boring than church god, or the Bible sub-god. I think he would just piss on me for holy water.
“Now you’re getting the hang of it.” Nanabozho’s form reached down between his legs to unzip.
But I was considering all these ridiculous things as a serious because they were serious. They were possible, life and death things … and ridiculous, at the same time. I was a vampire, silly enough, getting my ass handed to me by a cartoon character. Strike two against … well, my expectation of seriousness.
I was staring up into those eyes, those lightless pupils, which still went down and down past the bottom of the universe. But it was still just echoing, just taking and regurgitating whatever I thought
These were two strikes against fake adulthood, I suddenly realized. Being mature means being serious, stop laughing, sit up straight … and then fall out of your chair because some child pulled it out from under you, ha ha. And it was even funnier if you broke a bone on the way down, funnier if it was serious.
“Could you also appear as … I don’t know, George Carlin? Bill Hicks? Someone like that? Or was one of those guys you already?”
The buck teeth lifted and rolled back, and Bugs Bunny cackled, pointing down at me with a carrot still in hand. But the carrot was now a microphone, and the two rabbit ears had shrunk. That burning light appeared briefly again as a new suit of moss ate the old, and now Nanabozho looked more like some anthropomorphic goat, with a lecherous grin and a twinkle in his eyes, two curled horns making the head of a devil with the lower body of a satyr.
“Welcome to ‘no sympathy’ night,” he said, absolutely serious for a first. “Welcome to ‘you’re wrong’ night.”
And he blew in my face a thick cloud of tobacco smoke; a ferocious storm of tobacco, the aggregate concoction of ten thousand don’t-give-a-shits in ten thousand bars the world over. The pain was just plain amazing; it was like having a golf ball bounce off your head out of the blue.
I tried to scamper away from the goat-boy thing that quoted Hicks, touching water with my confused feet a moment later and feeling it thicken, feeling it rise up and grow colors and try to inhale me. I saw drug patterns, Haida patterns, living Nazca lines and hieroglyphics written in three dimensions on petals in a fractal flower that bloomed and bloomed …
Maybe I was fooling myself; maybe Nanabozho was the trip, and everyone’s trip. Drug trips were often varied and personalized, with parts comparable to the near-death experience, and so far I actually recognized everything from my past for all the scrambling. He didn’t bother with showing himself, because that would scramble your mind like an egg on a pan. You could only handle different kinds of mirror.
“That,” goat-boy-Hicks Nanabozho said, somewhere above and to my left, “was a heroic dose. Bring on the UFOs, whooo!”
“I can’t even talk to you like the others … even Deer Woman talked to me.”
No answer, just bewildering silence in my slow sink into psychedelic quicksand.
I had thought there would be some kind of decision, a trial, an up or down from Caesar’s thumb. What the hell was this? This was madness, this was reality, there was no cosmic applause or booing, just folly and laughing and more folly and it was all as serious as anything else and the quicksand was in my ears now and it was LOUD–
Drumming on my eardrums. I heard the opening notes of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and this was superficially like going through the stargate in 2001.
There was my old not-serious mind again, dressing things in fiction, but the dress was serious because the reality was silly everything was silly and serious and they were just words and even opposites like order and chaos were just words fake words perfect chaos makes a bell curve that’s symmetrical that order always appears gotta go into the math and calculate pi to the end and put all the stones back in the pyramids so they’ll come back and try another genetic thing on us help us humans out …
“Do or do not, there is no try, heh-heh.” Now Nanabozho was Yoda, and then he plucked out my right eye when I scowled at him because now he was a kung fu master and he was teaching me a one-inch punch.
“Wax on, wax off!”
And so on.
But it was just like what the judging was not it wasn’t a simple good evil up down he wasn’t training me because he wasn’t helping or hurting me and that added up to nothing which was another word something and everything looked the same white was every colour and no colour and so was black and yin had yang inside it and …
Chapter 14: Scaling Up
Image credits: D. Gordon E. Robertson, Nigel Howe, London Charivari, Angela Davis