Bell

She caught a glimpse of her eyes on the screen and felt they held the fact that she’d finally found the very thing the internet had been invented for, like she had arrived, and this was it. But it wasn’t; it was just that her eyes were wide from losing focus and watery from wear. When she regained focus, she was able to read the caption below an image of a mountain made black by a setting sun behind it. The text said, Cono De Arita, Argentina: The Most Perfect Natural Cone in the World.

How had she ended up here?

She read on.

The mountain was actually the tip of a volcano that had lacked the strength to ever erupt. She could relate. It was surrounded by salt flats and also mystery, an ancient ceremonial site for the Incas as well as a place where people often reported seeing UFOs.

She remembered what had brought her to the mountain, this site. It was the project she wasn’t supposed to be working on until she finished the work she had to do for her job.

But it was so easy to wander the internet. And also where she felt most at home—both roaming and online. She’d heard it referred to as being a digital native.

She had never known a time when she didn’t have the internet. She moved with ease across web pages and social media sites, through articles and videos, picking up things along the way, gathering, scavenging. She felt less like a vulture and more like a magpie—attracted to the prettiest trash.

The song she was listening to was seventeen minutes long and droned in waves with a low synth bass and other wavering, soft synths that were hypnotizing in a way she briefly thought of as hospitalizing. She had convinced herself that the music made her focus better, though often while listening, she was only better at focusing on the music. There was a repeating clip embedded in the song of a field recording—the sound of bugs and birds and water and static—that took on an unnatural sound after enough repetition and began to sound electronic.

On her phone, notifications were never on for texts, but she kept the sound that sounded to her like tinkling bells for when people called because when people called, she wanted to know, didn’t want to miss that someone was trying to call even if she rarely picked up.

First, her mom was trying to call, and then her dad was trying to call, and she’d just gotten high, so she didn’t want to talk to anyone and hated what they were doing to her high by calling.

She was in her closet in an old brownstone apartment outside downtown Oakland, just two short blocks from a shallow body of water, only a lake in name, but which was actaully the Pacific Ocean coming inland, old marshland, still tied to its tides, and the birds for their fish came and made sounds that made her feel as if the ocean was near, which it always was in the Bay, especially this close to Lake Merritt, where the faint, wet, salt-dank smell came through her open window and under the crack of her closet door, which she didn’t really notice—the smell drifting in—but felt the coolness moving over her sockless feet, which tapped to the offbeat of her steady editing.

She was working on a video for a nonprofit promoting community wellness. This was what she did for work. This was her day job. But there was more she wanted to do.

For instance, she had convinced an arts organization to give her money through a painstaking application she had suffered through sufficiently enough that when she was awarded the money, when she picked up the check and deposited it, it felt entirely earned, and even gave her a sense that her project was a job she was being paid to do. The project was about American land and its landscapes, about what it looked and felt like to be on, and it was about being Native American in the most modern sense she could muster portraying while focusing her project on the land and its landscapes, rurality and wilderness, which always looked as old as day on the surface. She would try to capture natural images that looked manmade and manmade images that looked natural.

She listened to the messages her mom and dad left and found them to be clicks, hang ups after the beep to leave a message, which felt like a message. If it was serious enough, they would have said something. She would call them in the morning.

Her editing room was just this deepish closet with a desk pushed all the way into it, and on her overcrowded desk sat her twenty-seven-inch iMac, pulling footage from an oversized external hard drive that whirred and hummed with activity in a way that felt satisfying to hear, because it sounded like the thing was really working. Her over-ear, noise-canceling headphones made the space its own, with the closet door closed behind her so the room stayed dark as any editing room she’d ever imagined would be, having never set foot in one. The light of captured footage alone colored her face.

And then her mom called again. Not her dad this time. She waited until her mom had time to leave a message, then looked for it and saw there was one that lasted twenty-nine seconds. She listened to it:

“There’s a lot happening right now. Have you talked to your father? I hope you haven’t talked to your father—or at least that you haven’t chosen to talk to your father instead of me, as I have the real story and he’s only reacting to what he has done, trying for damage control. Call me. When you can but sooner than later and definitely sooner than your father if you haven’t talked to him yet. Please.”

She hated that her mom’s message ended with please. And that she was already taking control of whatever narrative battle they were having. They’d been fighting her whole life. It was for the most part abstract, or philosophical, to the point of being comical; these academics, the way they fought was so unsophisticated while trying to retain some kind of intellectual integrity through unnecessary use of theory and vocabulary, and it would have been funny to her were she anyone other than her parents’ child.

That she kept thinking she should call her mom didn’t mean that she would actually call her mom. She would keep working. To keep working was the best way to not become broke. And she needed to finish this latest video in order to do the work she wanted to do, what she’d been awarded a grant to do, which would be the first time she was paid to make art.

She was dexterous on the keyboard, cutting and pasting, nudging and fading—cross and to-black—zooming in and out, clicking and dragging, thumbing the spacebar to play and to stop playing, scrubbing the playhead back to just the right edit point.

How long had she been editing video, shuffling the layered stream of visual information, displayed as colored blocks on the screen? She didn’t know exactly, but her eyes itched and were red and she rubbed them incessantly, which made them itch more and turn more red. Still, she stared, blinking through the blur, studying the digital moments of light and sound strewn across her project’s timeline.

She rubbed her eyes again. She’d had eczema her whole life. Getting it in the eyes from looking at a screen was the worst because it made her feel she was allergic to the screen. The thing about having itches is you can’t not scratch—it was this whole schema about desire and addiction and want and need and the pain that seemed for some reason required as part of having a body, being a human.

It felt like such a risk to try to make a film. Sometimes, she liked that she had this other work she had no passion for.

Not everyone would take a risk in an industry so unfair, so unkind to women, but most women were already taking risks working in their industries because most industries were made for and to favor men. There was old Bigelow—she always thought of her that way: old Bigelow—and there was Greta Gerwig, and Ava DuVernay, Chloé Zhao, and Sofia Coppola, all those giants. But who could count the men? No one would ever list or count them.

One difficult thing about making a film was first giving it its eyes, but before the hours in the editing room became possible, one needed to go out and shoot things, interviews, B-roll, establishing shots, full-blown scenes. Enough footage but not so much that it created an impossible amount of editing work was ideal but never realistic; there was always too much or not enough, or both—too much of the not needed, not enough of the needed.

She would have procrastinated longer had her mom and dad not started calling her with their shit—she didn’t even know what yet. It did seem worse than usual, though. Something new, in that bad way. Still, she didn’t answer their calls or call them back. And they kept trying. But they kept not leaving messages.

She finished the project she’d been working on and sent the file with an email describing what the timeline for feedback would be so that she would have time to do what she wanted to do next.

It was her parents, sadly, that made her get up one morning after finishing what she needed to finish for work so she could focus on this thing she’d been awarded a grant for.

She wanted to get as far away from them physically as she could, so she got into her car and just started driving.

She brought her camera, of course, but it was her phone—she would shoot it all on her phone—you could get away with that now; it was an aesthetic choice but also a practical one. She also brought a bag of clothes, weed in the form of gummies and flower, a little one-hitter, and an army-green, forty-ounce Hydro Flask.

At the outset of her project to film western landscapes of the American countryside, she was most worried about gas money and cheap-but-not-sickening places to eat along the way. Was there a lot she should have been worried about that she wasn’t worried about when she first set out on her trip? Yes. She should have been worried about traveling alone as a woman out in the middle of these western nowheres in America that she planned to capture—places where she herself could be captured, for example.

But she was young. And with hope or optimism like a chip on her shoulder. And she should have been more worried about what her parents were calling about. But she did not call them. She used their urgency about whatever shit they felt they needed to talk to her about to drive her as far away from them as possible, while also fulfilling the objectives of her project.

On the way out of town, she saw someone had tagged brain on the side of a brick building, which reminded her of the tag name an ex-boyfriend used to use. Brane was her ex’s tag name. She used to think it was so smart to spell brain wrong—what it did to your brain when you saw it spelled wrong. His name was Brian, and his mom was from Scotland, and when she said his name it sounded like brain, or Brane. She used to wish she would have tagged herself but could never think of a tag name good enough to commit to. She could have just tagged her actual first name—it would have been a good tag.

That her first name was Bell came from her parents, as most first names do, but it came from the writer bell hooks, whose work her parents loved and taught to their students like it was the gospel. bell hooks de-capitalized her pen name to draw attention away from the importance of the author, in order to focus on the work.

This Bell did capitalize her first name, and she had no hooks. But her parents had insisted she de-emphasize herself as if decapitalizing herself, emphasizing what she did in the world and not her ego, and while this idea of de-emphasizing herself had always annoyed her, it had given her a solid work ethic. She had tried to do, instead of say.

So she was Bell. Somewhere underneath the spell of the deep song bell hooks had cast on her parents, and on paper, legally, she was Bell Bullcoming. Bullcoming came from her father.

Her parents met at SF State, where they both taught in the Ethnic Studies department. At the time, her mother was already pregnant but not yet showing. Her mother had not told her father that Bell was not his real daughter. Nor had she told Bell that her father was not her real father. Bell did not know this was what her parents were calling about.

Bell had been enrolled in her not-real-father’s tribe, but she was not actually Native American. Or if she was, it was unknown. Bell’s real father was a one-night stand. The man had been brown but had never indicated tribal affiliation. Bell’s mom, who was white, had been sitting on this information. Squashing it. Suffocating it as if to kill it.

There were nations that went by something called jus sanguinis, where blood was necessary for citizenship. And there were those that went by jus soli, which was the soil you were born on. Bell did not know yet that she belonged to her tribe neither by blood nor by being born in the nation that was the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, but by a lie.

Her mom kept calling her and she kept not answering. And her father kept calling and she kept not answering.

Bell was out of Oakland before she knew it. She followed the 80 all the way to Salt Lake City, where she tried and failed to fall asleep in the parking lot of a Burger King after eating two Whoppers. She’d captured the salt flats under moonlight and was amazed at how bright the white was at night. There was a long piece of scrap metal someone had left out there, which she found particularly interesting because at a certain angle it looked just like a rock—a white rock, bright under the moon, a sharp image she knew she would use but didn’t know yet how.

At one point, she found herself staring at the side panel of a truck with the word Navajo written in orange on it. Underneath the word was what seemed to her like a white woman in an Indian costume. The woman had flat blue eyes that seemed pretty dead. Bell was by then too tired to sleep. She’d been driving for fourteen hours straight, only stopping for gas.

Bell closed her eyes for a long time, still seeing the eyes of the white woman, and fell asleep and dreamed of a great female-mannequin uprising in malls across the country, which she thought held some deep significance about the war against women and the emptiness of capitalism when she first woke up but then didn’t like how obvious the apparent message was and decided to forget the dream just after entering Ute territory in Fort Duchesne.

At the edge of Utah, where it became Colorado, she saw the shadows of dinosaurs. She shot footage of these. They were backlit and life-size—or as large as she’d imagined the dinosaurs would have been when they were once here, ruling the world with their claws and teeth and possible feathers, eating and roaring and laying eggs in America so long ago it was even before history.

She had the thought then that everyone is Indigenous to the planet earth, in the end. She thought about aliens coming and seeing our cities and not thinking of them as processed or synthetic or fake or manmade, but rising straight out of the earth, made by all these earthlings running around. And to Martians, all humans would be Indigenous, like how humans think of the Na’vi in Avatar, which she knew James Cameron had modeled after Native Americans, but also he’d said something really shitty about Natives in an interview before the second Avatar movie, something about if only they’d fought harder.

And she felt like there was something in these fake dinosaurs, trying to recreate the feeling of real dinosaurs in America, not where we usually imagined they were. Something about the natural and the unnatural happening in the shots she was getting of the shadows.

She went as far as Wichita and then headed south. Talk radio emptied out into the car as if a foreign language. It was a needed noise, it kept her going. Disallowed thoughts. These men believed what they were saying the way the vomiter is committed to what must come out coming out immediately and with force.

She entered Oklahoma during a sunrise she vaguely registered as being green. She got footage of that, too. Sunsets, she decided, all the gradients of sunsets. That was a pan-Indian pattern—the gradient. She shot it for some time, and it turned purple and then paled and then yellowed before it went blue-white. The sun pulled from behind it clouds that looked like sea foam. She went back west when she got to Norman, and she got through Texas without realizing she’d even entered it, and then all of a sudden looked up and there was a sign that said, You are now entering the State of New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. Beneath the word “enchantment,” someone had graffitied the word “entrapment.”

In Roswell, where she hadn’t wanted to stop but where she’d had to stop because otherwise she would have run out of gas, a guy came up and asked her for a cigarette. Bell said she didn’t smoke cigarettes, being pointlessly specific about the fact that she did smoke, just not cigarettes. The guy looked just like Chuck Norris. Without meaning to, Bell found herself remembering a Walker, Texas Ranger clip she’d seen on Conan O’Brien, where Adam Beach finds a dead old Indian man, thinks he died peacefully, but then finds behind his leather vest a bloody bullet hole and screams up at the sky comically. Bell thought Adam Beach too often overdid the role, overacted, in a way that screamed This is acting! Bell thought she remembered finding out that Chuck Norris was part Cherokee and went to look it up on her phone and found that it was true of him and Steven Seagal, too.

In Albuquerque, she stopped at a Best Buy to walk around and stretch her legs. The place was packed with anxious, desperate-looking people. She pretended she wasn’t one of them. She watched an old man who kept asking other customers for help and kept getting polite apologies for the fact of not working there. Everything was flattened underneath bright, thin light. TVs flickered, crisp, high resolution screens showing footage of hummingbirds in slow motion, of lions chasing down gazelles, of bees pollinating. She thought of her mini project to make something she was calling the All-Trailer, which blended together trailers from all movies over time, even the upcoming ones, to make it all seem like they belonged to the same movie, in one trailer, as one reality. Which it already was, but it was impossible to see that. She wanted to work on the All-Trailer as a possible pitch to Best Buy, thought they might use it in one of the loops on the TVs they were selling. Bell wondered about who that was. Who chose the footage?

The whole Best Buy scene, to her, seemed taken from a dream. A retail dream on a loop. She bought nothing and left.

She took the call from her mom in the parking lot of the Best Buy just before leaving.

“Hey,” Bell said, intentionally already sounding fed up.

“You’re not gonna like any of this,” her mom said.

“Honestly, if you two are divorcing, it’s bad news, but it’s also kind of bad news if you’re not.”

“It’s much worse than that.”

“For me? I’m fucking grown, Mom. I don’t need you two to be together anymore.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“What could this possibly be about that’s bad for me?”

“I almost didn’t want to tell you. Ever.”

“Almost didn’t? Ever? What is this—you’re scaring me now.”

“Your father is not your real father.”

“What?”

“Do you want me to say it again?”

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you being for real?”

“That’s a bad question.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a bad answer.”

“It was just a random night. And then I met your father. I know it sounds like a movie we’ve watched together.”

“So the chance meeting between a random night and my father means I ended up being alive in this world. Which feels, I guess, reductive?”

“I don’t know what reductive means.”

“Why are you telling me now?”

“Because I found out your father cheated on me.”

“You’re sure?”

“With a man. Which made it feel like twice cheating.”

“Twice why?”

“That he wanted to do that with men, but kept it a secret from me, and then for doing that with a man.”

“Who was it?”

“Just this old guy. That was a weird part I couldn’t understand.”

“You saying ‘just this old guy’ may have just ruined my entire life.”

“That’s not even the part I need to tell you about.”

“What?”

“It’s that your father is not your real father.”

“What does that—what does that even mean?”

“I got pregnant with another guy. Then I met your dad. Never told him it wasn’t his.”

“It? Really?”

“The pregnancy. Not you. Sorry. Shit. I’m sorry—should I not have told you?”

“No. You shouldn’t not have told me before now more.”

“Now more.”

“Now more?”

“There’s no reason anyone needs to know you’re not really Native since you’re enrolled and citizenship shouldn’t have to mean blood anyway, right? This doesn’t need to mean too much?”

In Flagstaff, Bell pulled into a Denny’s parking lot. She packed three bowls from the one-hitter and hit it way more than one time. She stared at a giant window sticker, a breakfast picture advertisement thing, two pancakes, two eggs, two sausages, and hypothetically infinite coffee. It was the Grand Slam, with $6.99 writ large on top of an orange-red graphic of a comic explosion. She thought about eating, and about the fact that she would probably sleep easier if she got full, but not two Whoppers full. Then, remembering the sick feeling of two Whoppers, she decided against breakfast. She grabbed a sweatshirt from the back seat and rolled it up to use as a pillow. She tried to sleep but couldn’t.

She thought about what her mom had told her.

Bell thought about cameras, how they allowed people to play things back, to be able to watch some form of themselves that was born and died through the passing of time, but of which they were then still a part, having been recorded—old selves like the other old selves not recorded, the hidden aspects of their personalities that were revealed in moments left unrecorded, that secretly informed their lives.

She thought about her dad.

She thought about memory and how sometimes you couldn’t force it not to come, just as you sometimes couldn’t conjure it when you most wanted it to return.

She thought about her not actually being Native American.

She thought about what it meant that everyone was always watching one another, and themselves, on screens. She thought about how most of everyone’s time was spent watching a screen, which might have been a kind of lens for some bigger eye—seeing what, for whom? She thought about dispossession and displacement, the adding of the layer of the screen to feel seen and to at least seem to belong there. She thought about the incomplete understanding of present time, which everyone impotently called now and then later, when the new came along like a blinding flash.

Bell thought about the footage she’d captured for the film she was making that had absolutely everything to do with her being an actual Native American person.

She thought about the haunting effect of rotting smells and colonial paintings. She thought about her back teeth, her molars, how they hurt every time she bit into something too cold or hot. Had her fillings fallen out? She thought about genetics and blood and veins and why a heart keeps beating until it can’t anymore.

She thought about killing herself.

She thought about how things really could and already do die and never come back. She thought about what the film would be—what it could not be—what it now couldn’t be?

She thought about how her mom said no one else needed to know.

She thought about the secret behind every secret, behind everything kept unknowable, how this belonged to everyone. She was enrolled. The tribal citizen of a nation. Surely there were Spaniards without blood or soil-born relationships to their Spanish citizenship. And her dad didn’t know. So what did she have to hide, if she didn’t have anything to hide?