The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping
by NasdijjBallantine, 324 pp., $22.95
Still grieving the early death of one adopted son, Nasdijj is fishing alone on a lake when a sick Navajo man and his young son Awee appear “exactly the way it had unfolded at least a thousand times in dreams.” Their request is one that Nasdijj initially refuses, asking himself, “Why would any sane man adopt a boy with AIDS?” But when Awee reappears at a booksigning, cold, hungry, and reeking of tobacco, Nasdijj answers this question, “because one comes to you, because you can,” and because in dreams begin responsibility.
Awee has lived his 10 years with AIDS and poor medical care on the reservation. When Nasdijj adopts him, the boy is already suffering from crippling bone degeneration and severe fungal infections. The new life of father and son is spent shuffling between towns hoping to alleviate Awee’s pain and offer him a life beyond battling the disease. As Awee’s pains grow long and great, so do the sacrifices that Nasdijj will make to allay his suffering. If that means buying heroin on the street, so be it.
Nasdijj writes that he is not a good father, but when he permits Awee to ride on the back of an older boy’s motorcycle alone and at night, his nail-chewing anxiety is the universal response of the loving, helpless guardian. There are many of these tender and comic moments to counterbalance Nasdijj’s terrible frustration and anger.
More than the inherent unfairness of life, Nasdijj is angry at man’s cruelty and a culture which fosters the abuse of the young. He writes in order to “take this fantasy that we have made of childhood, and look the thing clearly in the face,” so we may understand why we abuse boys for their beauty, intelligence, and sensuality and yet deny they possess those qualities.
The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping is a touching account of a father’s love for his son, but it is not an ordinary addition to the already crowded AIDS-memoir shelf. Nasdijj rough-hews the English language until it takes stunning forms. He dismisses narrative linearity because memory is “the exploded junk from hand grenades” and words become the most elemental stuff, crushed rock and flowers, to sift through his fingers with a disciplined intensity. The result is an account honest to the mysteries of memory and dead children. The book does not offer consolation, but it does provoke the reader into examining life in the full, pain and all.
In Navajo mythology, Changing Woman and her warrior sons rid the world of every evil save poverty, sickness, old age, and death. Nasdijj is a memoirist of devoted anger and deep compassion, who writes generously and evocatively of people who know these evils too well.
This article appears in February 14 • 2003.