by Sam Shepard
Also by Sam Shepard
A Particle of Dread
Heartless
Fifteen One-Act Plays
Day out of Days
Kicking a Dead Horse
Buried Child
Tooth of Crime (Second Dance)
The God of Hell
Great Dream of Heaven
The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, When the World Was Green
Cruising Paradise
Simpatico
States of Shock, Far North, Silent Tongue
A Lie of the Mind
The Unseen Hand and Other Plays
Fool for Love and Other Plays
Paris, Texas
Seven Plays
Motel Chronicles
Rolling Thunder Logbook
Hawk Moon
This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2017 by Sam Shepard
Foreword copyright © 2017 by Patti Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LCCN: 2016959851
ISBN 9780451494580 (hardcover) | 9780451494597 (ebook)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket photograph: Mujer Ángel (Angel Woman) by Graciela Iturbide 1979 © Graciela Iturbide
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
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Contents
Cover
Also by Sam Shepard
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
The One Inside
Tiny Man
Felicity
Purple as Blue
Castles in the Moonlight
Succubus
Blackmail Dialogue
Famous Golfer
Early Anthropology
Sheet of White Paper
Blackmail Dialogue #2
Other States
The Reason I’ve Come Back
BERLIN, November, 1811
Henriette Vogel
Sticky Rugs
Piebald
Strange Fans
Opposite Felicity
Mother Knows Best
Lanterns
Swollen Eye
Blackmail Girl Rumination
Blackmail Dialogue #3
Seen Me Seeing Her
Blackmail Girl on the Loose
Someone Else’s Life
Far-Off Banging Doors
Tiny Man in an Irish Pub
Blackmail Girl Monologue
Across the Desert Floor
Diné Kid
Son of a Just Man
Heading North to Shiprock
Felicity Close Up
Wafer-Thin Paper
Dirt Back Road
A Girl I Know
Blackmail Dialogue #4
Back Across the Desert Floor
Boots with Red Flowers
Boy Who Fell Asleep in the Shower
Shrinkage
Black Hole
Matching Purposes
Happenstance
Tiny Man at the Beach
Mounds of Their Own Dung
Tiny Man Again
A Grimace Is Not a Scream
Interrogation #1
Thirty Acres of Dust and Snakes
Interrogation #2
Burning Boats
Interrogation #3
Eye to Eye
A Note About the Author
For
Patti Lee
Roxanne and Sandy
Walker and Hannah
Jesse and Maura
Why does no one take you aside and tell you what is coming?
—David Foster Wallace
Foreword
There were four horses grazing beyond the fence, black butterflies alighting on the fallen pears. You could already feel the approach of autumn, a golden Kentucky afternoon. Sam was looking out the window. I was at the table reading his manuscript.
Glancing up at him, it occurred to me that everything I ever knew of Sam, and he of me, was still inside us. I thought of a photograph of the two of us in New York City, walking past an automat on Twenty-third Street, some forty years ago. It was shot from behind, but it was us, without question, about to embark on separate paths that would surely cross again.
The manuscript before me is a dark compass. All points proceed from its magnetic north—the interior landscape of the narrator. Unable to tear myself away I read straight through the afternoon, navigating a mosaic of echoing conversations, altered perspectives, lucid memory, and hallucinatory impressions.
The narrator awakes in the midst of a rude metamorphosis. Coordinates are shuffled, but the hand is familiar. He’s been an actor for most of his adult life, enabling a kind of travel that requires no passport, just a truck, script, and his dogs on the scent of nostalgia.
The smells of donuts, steam, waffles, and coffee spilled out across the busted-up yard and into the vast dark desert. Speechless men hauled huge heavy boxes on iron wheels across the gravel. Now and then, one of the forms would emit a nod or a groan, but the world remained enigmatic, shrouded, and unspeakable.
He has dreams of his father, the tiny man who was not so tiny. He describes the minutiae of these recurring dreams with haunting hilarity, reminiscent of Japanese manga comics. He attempts to run, separate himself from his father and all his indiscretions, but is condemned to repeat them. Time frames; the faces of women meld into one another. His father’s young lover, Felicity, and her mouthy mother in a pink coat. The too young, ambitious, and elusive Blackmail Girl. His wife of thirty years driving away. They come and go and return again. After a while you get to know them, their images intricately fabricated through fast-moving prose, liberal smatterings of poetry, monologue, and dialogue. The visceral language of flickering home movies.
He loves his wife but they just can’t get along. He’s beguiled by the Blackmail Girl who is something of himself, testing and weighing reactions. Circling back in time, he collides with his younger self, naively entwined with his father’s Felicity, a tragic character pulled like taffy, vacillating between innocence and desire.
Her mouth opened and I saw tiny animals escaping: tiny animals trapped inside her all this time. They flew out as though something might catch them and drag them back into imprisonment. I could feel them land on my face and crawl through my hair, searching for a hiding place. Each time she screamed the animals flew out in small clouds like tiny gnats: little dragons, flying fish, headless horses.
Throughout life he is captivated, confused, and amused by women, drawn toward them yet compelled to skip out. But in the end it’s not so much about the women as the shifting core of the narrator. We travel the coils of his prismatic mind, his weary heart, not through confession, but a potent honesty, a fascination for not caring. The truth is that he may be changing, yet he remains unchanged, the running boy, the empowered adolescent, the seething man whose muscles betray him.
He’s a loner who doesn’t want to be alone, grappling with the incubus, a rippling of nocturnal waters, the nausea of unending nights. There are troubling moments of prescience, as he intuits future fragmentation, stoically kicking his way through the shards. He’s just going to keep on living till he dies. Wh
ether he paints himself in a good or bad light is not the point. The point is to lay stuff out, smooth the curling edges.
I set down the manuscript. It’s him, sort of him, not him at all. It’s an entity trying to break out, make sense of things. A tapeworm slithering from the stomach, through the open mouth, down the bedsheets, straight into the bleak infinite.
You are now traveling. Your future is frozen. Rapidly, you are jettisoned from the blank unknown to the bright clear world.
I notice the light has changed, a burnished twilight that quickly ushers us into the night. I get up to examine an image that Sam had tacked, slightly askew, in a niche above the kitchen sink. A madman woman shaman with a boom box.
—Where was that taken?
—Somewhere in the Sonora desert.
—Is it real?
Maybe, he says, but who knows what is real anyway.
Reality is overrated. What remains are the words scrawled upon an unwinding panorama, vestiges of dusty stills peeled from memory, a threnody of gone voices drifting across the American plain. The One Inside is a coalescing atlas, marked by the boot heels of one who instinctively tramps, with open eyes, the stretches of its unearthly roads.
—Patti Smith
The One Inside
They’ve murdered something far off. Fighting over it. Yes. Screaming. Doing their mad cackle as they tear into its softness. He’s awake—5:05 a.m. Pitch black. Distant coyotes. Must’ve been. He’s awake, in any case. Staring at rafters. Adjusting to “place.” Awake, even after a full Xanax, in anticipation of small demons—horses with human heads. All small, as though life-size were too big to fathom. His dogs are on the muscle, howling from the kitchen in feral imitation. Vicious cold again. Blue snow biting at the windowsills: glowing in what’s left of the full moon. He throws the blankets back with a bullfighter’s flourish and swings both bony knees out into the raw air. He comes, almost immediately, to a straight-backed sitting position, both hands flat on his thighs. He tries to take in the ever-changing landscape of his body—where he resides? Which part? He peers down at his very thick, blue, thermal hiking socks, pilfered from some movie set. Piece of some costume—some character, long forgotten. They’ve come and gone, these characters, like brief, violent love affairs: trailers—honey wagons—morning burritos—craft service tents—phony limousines—hot towels—4 a.m. calls. Forty-some years of it. Too big. Hard to believe. Too vast. How did I get in here? His aluminum trailer rocks and sways in the howling Chinooks. His young face staring back at him through a cheap 4 x 4 mirror, surrounded by bare light bulbs. Outside, they’re shooting film of grasshoppers, falling in great swirling cones from the belly of a rented helicopter. They actually are. In the background—winter wheat, as big around as your thumb, blows in rolling waves.
Now, perched on the very edge of his firm mattress, staring down at his thick blue socks, white puffs of breath vaporizing in the morning dark, he knows it’s all come true. He just sits like that for a while—straight-backed. A great blue heron waiting for a frog to rise.
The house doesn’t creak; it’s made of concrete. Outside, the aspens moan. He doesn’t feel the cold now. It crosses his mind that it’s been over two years since the very sudden breakup with his last wife. A woman he’d been with for almost thirty years. Crosses his mind. Pictures. The source? “Am I whining now?” he asks himself, in the voice of a small boy. A boy he remembers, but not him. Not this one, now, quaking in blue thermal socks.
6:00 a.m.: Wind just now quit after furious blowing out of the south, for three days straight. Air still and much warmer. House even feels hot. Thought—today I’m exactly one year older than my father was when he died. Weird thought, as though it were some kind of achievement rather than raw chance. Rather than happenstance. Pull off black silk long-handles. Female. Electric-blue crackles of static. I see sparks shooting from my chest. Electricity is in me. Take the many pills prescribed by acupuncturist. Line them all up. Colors. Shapes. Sizes. Don’t even know what they’re for. Just do what you’re told. Somebody must know something. Do what you’re told. First light cracks through the piñons. Dogs, dead asleep on the kitchen floor, splayed out like they were caught suspended in a gallop. Make coffee in old stained pot. Dump yesterday’s grounds. Mice rustling in heat vents, searching for warmth. Thinking about Nabokov’s answer to why he writes—“aesthetic bliss”—that’s all—“aesthetic bliss.” Yes. Whatever that means.
Tiny Man
‘Early morning: They deliver my father’s corpse in the trunk of a ’49 Mercury coupe, dew still heavy on the taillights. His body is wrapped up tight in see-through plastic, head to toe. Flesh-colored rubber bands bind it at the neck, waist, and ankles—mummy style. He’s become very small in the course of things—maybe eight inches tall. In fact, I’m holding him now, in the palm of my hand. I ask them for permission to unwrap his tiny head, just to make sure he’s truly dead. They allow me to do this. They all stand aside, hands clasped behind their tailored backs, heads bowed in a kind of ashamed mourning but not something you would question them on. It’s smart to keep on their good side. Besides, they seem quite polite and stoic now.
The Mercury idles with a deep penetrating rumble I can feel through the soles of both shoes. I remove the rubber bands carefully and uncover his face, peeling the Saran Wrap away from his nose very slowly. It makes a sticky sound like linoleum coming free from its glue. His mouth opens involuntarily—some delayed response of the nervous system, no doubt, but I take it as a last gasp. I put my thumb inside and feel his rough gums. Little ripples where his teeth used to be. He had no teeth in life, either—the life I remember him in. I re-wrap his head in the plastic sheathing, replace the rubber bands, and hand him back over, thanking them all with a slight nod, trying to stay in keeping with the solemnity of things. They take him carefully from me and place him back in the dark trunk with the other miniatures. There are shrunken women wedged on either side of him retaining all their alluring features in perfect detail: high cheekbones, eyebrows plucked, lashes caked in blue mascara, hair washed and coifed, smelling like ripe cane sugar. His is the only tiny body that faces completely out toward a band of sunlight. When they close the trunk this band goes to black, as though a cloud has abruptly covered the sun.
They stand in a semicircle facing me now, hands clasped over their groins, casually yet formally. I can’t tell if they’re ex-Marines or mobsters. They seem a mixture of both. I salute each one, rotating counterclockwise. I have the impression that some even click their heels, fascist style, but I may be making this up. I don’t know if this rain just started or if it’s been going on for some time. I watch them drive off in a light drizzle.
That’s about all I can remember. Along with these smattered details is a strange morning grief, but of what, I can’t say.
Felicity
In another language, in another time, her name meant “happiness,” I guess. “Felicity,” I think it was—“Felicity”—yes, that was it. I’d never heard that name before—like from an English novel. Very young. Freckle faced. Red hair. Slightly plump. Adolescent. Always wearing simple cotton one-piece dresses that looked homemade. She’d scream like a trapped rabbit when she sat backward on my father’s cock. I’d never heard such ecstasy and horror, all at once. I’d listen from the next room, staring at the ceiling. Something smelled like eucalyptus and Vaseline. They never talked. I’d listen. But they never talked. I’d dare myself to go in there, just go in and appear and don’t say a thing. Just stare like some zombie child—a child who just shows up from out of nowhere. What could they do? Stare back. Kick me out? Put on clothes and kick me out? I knew what they were doing, I knew it felt good. I knew it must feel good to be inside another person. Deep inside like that.
I went in and there she was. My father’s girlfriend sitting ramrod straight—naked almost—as though she were riding a pony backward. Neither of them noticed me. They never turned to see me. She just kept on riding him and screaming recklessly, working her way up
and down in a frenzy. He was on his back on a table, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head, like he might be taking a siesta or listening to the radio. His lips were moving but nothing came out. I walked right up next to them but they never turned to see me. Her pink underwear were on the floor. They looked like they belonged to an older woman, maybe her mother.
There was a frantic knocking and banging at the door but neither of them paid any attention. Felicity just kept screaming and pumping away. Sometimes she would lean slightly forward, look down, and examine the penetration closely, without passion. Her mouth was open wide and her hair stuck to the sweat on her forehead. The knocking and banging went on. I went to the door and cracked it. I had my jockey shorts and T-shirt on. It was Mabel Hynes, the landlady, from down the hall. She stood there with a Mexican hairless in the folds of her flabby arms. The dog was silent but kept its ears pricked for each scream. When the scream came, the dog yapped.
“What’s going on in there? Sounds like someone’s getting murdered.”
“No, it’s just my dad.”
“Your dad? What’s he doing?”