Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie Read Free Book Online Page A

out of the recovery hallway and made my way through various doorways and other hallways, peering into the rooms, looking at the patients and their families, looking for a particular kind of patient and family.
    I walked through the ER, cancer, heart and vascular, neurology, orthopedic, women’s health, pediatrics, and surgical services. Nobody stopped me. My expression and posture were that of a man with a sick father and so I belonged.
    And then I saw him, another Native man, leaning against a wall near the gift shop. Well, maybe he was Asian; lots of those in Seattle. He was a small man, pale brown, with muscular arms and a soft belly. Maybe he was Mexican, which is really a kind of Indian, too, but not the kind that I needed. It was hard to tell sometimes what people were. Even brown people guessed at the identity of other brown people.
    “Hey,” I said.
    “Hey,” the other man said.
    “You Indian?” I asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “What tribe?”
    “Lummi.”
    “I’m Spokane.”
    “My first wife was Spokane. I hated her.”
    “My first wife was Lummi. She hated me.”
    We laughed at the new jokes that instantly sounded old.
    “Why are you in here?” I asked.
    “My sister is having a baby,” he said. “But don’t worry, it’s not mine.”
    “Ayyyyyy,” I said—another Indian idiom—and laughed.
    “I don’t even want to be here,” the other Indian said. “But my dad started, like, this new Indian tradition. He says it’s a thousand years old. But that’s bullshit. He just made it up to impress himself. And the whole family just goes along, even when we know it’s bullshit. He’s in the delivery room waving eagle feathers around. Jesus.”
    “What’s the tradition?”
    “Oh, he does a naming ceremony right in the hospital. Like, it’s supposed to protect the baby from all the technology and shit. Like hospitals are the big problem. You know how many babies died before we had good hospitals?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Most of them. Well, shit, a lot of them, at least.”
    This guy was talking out of his ass. I liked him immediately.
    “I mean,” the guy said. “You should see my dad right now. He’s pretending to go into this, like, fucking trance and is dancing around my sister’s bed, and he says he’s trying to, you know, see into her womb, to see who the baby is, to see its true nature, so he can give it a name—a protective name—before it’s born.”
    The guy laughed and threw his head back and banged it on the wall.
    “I mean, come on, I’m a loser,” he said and rubbed his sore skull. “My whole family is filled with losers.”
    The Indian world is filled with charlatans, men and women who pretended—hell, who might have come to believe—that they were holy. Last year, I had gone to a lecture at the University of Washington. An elderly Indian woman, a Sioux writer and scholar and charlatan, had come to orate on Indian sovereignty and literature. She kept arguing for some kind of separate indigenous literary identity, which was ironic considering that she was speaking English to a room full of white professors. But I wasn’t angry with the woman, or even bored. No, I felt sorry for her. I realized that she was dying of nostalgia. She had taken nostalgia as her false idol—her thin blanket—and it was murdering her.
    “Nostalgia,” I said to the other Indian man in the hospital.
    “What?”
    “Your dad, he sounds like he’s got a bad case of nostalgia.”
    “Yeah, I hear you catch that from fucking old high school girlfriends,” the man said. “What the hell you doing here anyway?”
    “My dad just got his feet cut off,” I said.
    “Diabetes?”
    “And vodka.”
    “Vodka straight up or with a nostalgia chaser?”
    “Both.”
    “Natural causes for an Indian.”
    “Yep.”
    There wasn’t much to say after that.
    “Well, I better get back,” the man said. “Otherwise, my dad might wave an eagle feather and change my name.”
    “Hey, wait,” I