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Outside, John describes for Bernard everything he can remember—Linda singing strange rhymes to him and lying with him in the big bed, until he was kicked out by a man who came. There were a lot of men, but one of them, Popé, came often, bringing gourds of mescal, which Linda said ought to be called soma, except mescal made you feel sick in the morning. One time, a group of women held Linda down and whipped her. When he tried to intervene, the women whipped him, too. Later, he tried to comfort her, but Linda called him a savage and said she wouldn't be his mother. She started to beat him, but then stopped to put her arms around him and kiss him. Some days, Linda didn't get up at all, and often there was nothing to eat but cold tortillas. Linda told him that in the Other Place you could fly whenever you wanted and there was music that came out of a box and lots of nice games to play and delicious things to eat and drink. Everyone belonged to everyone else and everyone was happy, and never sad or angry. Everything was clean and people were never lonely. On the reservation, John has always been lonely. The others call Linda bad names and point fingers at him. But Linda taught him to read, and this knowledge made him feel better when the others teased him. Popé brought an old book that was lying in one of the chests in the Antelope Kiva. It was called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. John didn't understand the stories, but the words were strange and wondrous, like music. John hated Popé having his mother, and the book helped him identify Popé as a remorseless, lecherous villain. John only half-knew what the words meant, but he was filled with hatred. One day, he came in from playing and found Popé stretched out in bed beside his mother. The magic of the words gave him orders, and he got a knife and went back in and stabbed Popé in the shoulder. But Popé grabbed his hand and, amazingly, began to laugh. He told John to go and called him brave. When he was fifteen, the old Indian Mitsima tried to teach him how to work the clay. When he was sixteen, he watched the girl he loved marry someone else. In the Antelope Kiva, they wouldn't let John participate in the ceremonies. Boys went down and came up men, but when John tried to join, they threw stones at him. He ran to the edge of a precipice, where he looked down at the shadow of death. The blood from his cuts fell into the dead light. On his own, John discovered Time and Death and God. Bernard admits he's also alone, which surprises John. He says that Linda told him no one was ever alone in the Other Place. But Bernard says he's different. John agrees that when one is different, one is bound to be lonely. Bernard, who has already begun to formulate a plan, asks John how he'd like to come to the Other Place. John is thrilled with the idea. He quotes from Shakespeare: "How beauteous mankind is…O brave new world that has such people in it." Raised in the pre-modern world of the Savage Reservation, John has nevertheless been influenced by his mother, a Beta from "Civilization." The conflicts between his mother, Linda, and the people on the Savage Reservation foreshadow the conflicts to come and have created for John both confusion and isolation as he tries to reconcile two strongly conflicting value systems. On the Reservation, Linda and John are outsiders—different by virtue of their pale skin as well as Linda's Other World values. Linda has painted pretty pictures of the Other World, so John readily agrees to leave the Reservation. His reference to the "brave new world" is a quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which Miranda, alone on an island except for her father and his slave, sees other people for the first time and is struck by their beauty. John, raised by his mother's story of a perfect world where everyone is happy, sees the Other World as a means of escaping the pain of the Reservation. However, it's obvious that John, whose values are primarily a product of the pre-modern influences of the Reservation, won't belong in the Brave New World, either. John's most striking quality is his passion, which has led him from thoughts of suicide to rage and violence.
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