The One Inside

by Sam Shepard

  At Manny’s, I took a counter stool next to the turquoise wall at the very end of the row so at least I wouldn’t have anyone sitting to the immediate right of me. I like reading in public places, especially at breakfast. It’s a way of cutting myself off from having to make small talk and, at the same time, diving deeply into a world of fiction. It’s a way of cutting yourself off completely, in fact. I set down my copy of Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—a very rare edition. I think the Girl had ordered it for me through Amazon or eBay or something. Hardbound—full of Bruno’s own illustrations. His own drawings. Bruno was an odd little Polish Jew with a very large head, apparently, from the looks of his self-portraits. A schoolteacher who taught drawing and basic mathematics but also wrote extraordinary florid prose in his spare time—which he didn’t have much of, having to take care of his invalid brother during the Nazi occupation. One of the Gestapo officers had taken Bruno under his wing when he discovered Schulz’s talent for drawing. In exchange for protection he hired Schulz to sketch fanciful fairy-tale figures on the walls of his young son’s bedroom: races at Whitsuntide, harvest corn spirits, Easter bonfires—things like that. I guess this was a common practice among German officers, who would keep certain Jews as lackeys if they proved to be useful in some capacity: a tacit code of the “Master Race.” Competitive jealousies soon arose among the Germans about who kept the best Jew in tow. Bruno was shot through the head with a Luger by a rival officer while carrying a loaf of bread back to his helpless brother.

  I ordered a short stack of buckwheat flapjacks with extra wild blueberries, a side of bacon, and black coffee. I turned to the chapter called “Father’s Last Escape,” where Bruno describes his dead dad as having metamorphosed into a scorpion.

  “A new age began—empty, sober, and joyless, like a sheet of white paper.” (Schulz, after his sister had been lost at sea on a voyage to America.)

  Blackmail Dialogue #2

  “Should I pretend that I don’t even know you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Like I’m a stranger—just sitting there waiting?”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “Waiting for my life to begin?”

  “Don’t get—”

  “What?”

  “Don’t get esoteric and fancy.”

  “Fancy?”

  “Like you know more than you do.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Let’s keep it simple. It’s just a meeting.”

  “About what?”

  “These conversations—these recordings of yours.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I want to see them.”

  “To verify they took place?”

  “I know they took place. I just want to see which ones you chose.”

  “I chose the best.”

  “The best?”

  “The best of the best.”

  “Nothing’s that good.”

  “How good?”

  “Good enough for a book.”

  “They don’t all have to be like punch lines.”

  “I don’t mean that.”

  “I think it would be exciting if we pretended we didn’t know each other.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Well—as best we could.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Don’t keep saying that. You don’t know until you’ve tried.”

  “How do you ‘try’ to not recognize someone? Once you’ve recognized someone, it never leaves you. The hair—the contours of the face—mannerisms. It’s all instantly implanted.”

  “Maybe you can unlearn certain things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe—suddenly—it all looks new and different.”

  “How so? How could someone’s mannerisms look different?”

  “Maybe they’ve had a stroke or an accident of some kind.”

  “An accident?”

  “A car accident.”

  “No—the underlying person would remain the same.”

  “What if they’ve had plastic surgery?”

  “Plastic surgery?”

  “All bandaged up.”

  “Like The Man with the X-ray Eyes?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Ray Milland.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Never mind. Just a physical change in a person is not enough to believe it’s a completely different person than the one you know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Say, it’s simply aging. You haven’t seen someone for a very long time. Their teeth are all gone. Their hair. They’re all bent over. They walk with a limp. They shake. They can’t speak.”

  “They’re all fucked up.”

  “You still know who it is. It might take you a while, but you still know who it is, don’t you?”

  Other States

  Outside, in Manny’s wide sunny parking lot, groups of middle-aged women from other places, other states like Indiana or Iowa, are donning brightly colored rocket-shaped bicycle helmets with perfectly manicured flashing nails, adjusting toe clamps on their pedals, guzzling vitamin water from chartreuse plastic bottles. Everything sparkling and shiny. Older men, who seem to be outfitted in various versions of early Santa Fe caricatures—trappers, vaqueros, Comanche shamans, herbalistas, etc.—squeeze themselves into Porsche roadsters and Audi sports cars, adjusting wraparound shades and checking their gray, greasy sideburns in the rearview mirrors.

  I head down the gravel apron off the Old Taos Trail, where vendors are hawking everything from chainsaw sculptures to crow replicas fashioned from rusty barbed wire. A man who owns cedar firewood stacked neatly in the bed of his truck wants a hundred dollars for the load. He’s cut all the wood himself. We start grabbing the split logs and throwing them by the armful into the bed of my pickup. The cold air smells of fresh cedar and pine. The Sangre de Cristos. We work in silence. He wears heavy mule-skin gloves stained with oil and gasoline. A sweat-marked hoodie hides his face. I wonder if he’s silently cursing me in Spanish just for being a gringo. Our labored exhales cross paths above the red-veined wood.

  Dogs are both gone when I get back. Should’ve never left them roaming like that. Usually, after a good hard chase, they just hang around by the house panting, but this time they’re gone. I take the pickup around the motley neighborhood, whistling for hours with my load of cedar clunking in the back. I creep along at a burglar’s pace with the windows rolled down so they can hear me.

  It’s a shrill whistle. I start to feel it’s maybe me, alone—my whistle coming back—whistling for myself. It could be that. Wouldn’t that be weird? Pathetic. I hear it coming back, each time a little weaker through repetition. Cold, too—ungodly cold. Jaw and lips are freezing. Numb. I pull over, roll the windows up, crank the heater to eighty-five. Hot air blasts my face straight on. Can’t find the in-between of hot and cold on the ragged dials. While I’m fumbling, I look out to Los Alamos in the distant Jemez range, engine idling, patches of snow gleaming between the junipers.

  I see two men in an office of the White House; one tall and elegant with a dark fedora and a cheroot—the other short, common, and balding, in a three-piece suit. It’s some time after ’45. Maybe it is ’45. The bomb-bay doors of the Enola Gay have already opened and Little Boy has been silently released, never to be called back. The Nuclear Age comes to life in a blinding band of white light. My father and all his brothers, in full khaki uniforms, surround my Iroquois grandmother. It’s their last chance for a group photo. Beaming smiles—the heroics in the air fill all their hearts with buoyant American pride. Only my grandmother reveals a slightly melancholic twist to her lips. In the background, there’s an apple tree in full white bloom.

  The man in the fedora is pacing, smoking his cheroot, confessing to the little bald man sitting at the desk; a portrait hangs above him of Jefferson with the ancient future brightly ahead. The tall man is fully confident that the little bald man will coalesce and
understand his moral plight. He’s telling him he has “sin” on his hands, that he’s known “sin” firsthand. His lips are moving. I can see them. I can tell at this distance that it’s the word “sin” he’s using by the ignominious grin on his face. A Jewish New Yorker, raised in a school of ethics, married to a communist, dabbled in Buddhism, and here he’s using the word “sin,” plain as day. I can see it! The little man’s face turns crimson as he rises slowly up out of his plush leather seat. He calls the tall man a “pansy” and kicks him unceremoniously out of his office, with orders never to return.

  Now, a rumble goes through me. My father is flying at midnight under the Nazi radar in a gigantic B-17—the infamous Flying Fortress. His copilot sits beside him, stony-faced. A technician, belly gunner, and bombardier complete the crew. They’re all from the same little town of McHenry, where their fathers are busy raising winter wheat as big around as your thumb. They all wear the same leather jackets with the same fur collars turned up. Tiny replicas of bombs are cut into the sleeves with razors and stained red with iodine. Each little bomb represents a mission safely accomplished. There are eight rows of little red bombs. The B-17 maintains a suicidally low profile over Hitler’s Romanian oil fields. It’s pitch-black night. They begin blanket-bombing acres of fuel. Monster orange flames spring up behind them.

  I continue my search for the dogs, prowling through frozen back roads, past miserable ribby horses standing barefoot, hooves split on ice. My whistle is coming out like a faltering teakettle now.

  The Reason I’ve Come Back

  The Blackmail Girl was just sitting there. In the living room. Sitting on the edge of the leather couch. Legs tightly together. Back straight. Hands folded neatly in her lap, like a country girl waiting for a bus to the city. In fact, she was so still and poised I’d walked right past her several times without even knowing. That pacing you do when thoughts take over and the body’s abandoned to its own devices, its own nervous boredom. You don’t even know it’s your own house you’re walking through. When I first saw her and stopped like someone not sure of what they’re seeing—I said nothing. She spoke first. She spoke without looking at me. She was either looking down at her shoes or the floor in between. I forget which.

  “I want to talk to you,” she started. “The reason I’ve come back is because I want to ask you some things. I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want to scare you at all. What I want to know—well, first of all, first of all, the obvious.”

  “The obvious, what?”

  “The obvious is that you’re attracted to me. Isn’t that right? Now, whether that’s simply because I’m so much younger than you—or whether it’s because I’m young and female—or—”

  “Young and female—yes. That’s it—both—and smart.”

  “Smart?”

  “Well—not dull.”

  “Not dull. No. Never. But what was all this—”

  “What?”

  “This—drunkenness—this—this—show of bravado.”

  “Show of bravado? What?”

  “This bragging of suicide.”

  “It wasn’t bragging! You don’t brag about suicide. There’s nothing to brag about—”

  “Then what was it?”

  “I thought you simply might be interested.”

  “In what?”

  “The way two people, romantically inclined, might agree to—”

  “Romantically inclined?”

  “Yes.”

  “But we’re not—”

  “No—them. They were. Not us. The victims.”

  “What victims?”

  “We’ve never even taken our clothes off together. You’ve never even seen me naked.”

  “No!”

  “Never kissed. Never touched.”

  “No! Well—”

  “That once—”

  “Yes.”

  “But that was by accident.”

  “You wanted to see my—”

  “I did not!”

  “Well, let’s not get distracted by—”

  “It’s simply not true!”

  “The point is—”

  “What’s the point?”

  “The point is—”

  There was a pretense toward searching for the “point.” As though it might be flying around in the air, buzzing, and we were both waiting for it to land. Chunks of last night’s fire still glowed in the black corners of the fireplace.

  “The point is, I guess, that there’s never going to be a sexual culmination to this. Is there?” she said.

  “This, what?”

  “Whatever you want to call it. And if there was—if there were it would probably be disappointing to us both.”

  “Disappointing? In what way?”

  “Not in that way. I don’t mean—”

  “What?”

  “Sexually. I don’t mean sexually.”

  “You mean sexually disappointing.”

  “No. It wouldn’t be, I don’t suppose.”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t we try it then?”

  “No!” She stood fast and walked to the window overlooking dead cactus and an old bocce court with yellow weeds crowding the corners. She held her face in both hands. There was no going to her, touching her—trying to console—like some married person.

  “I came back in order to ask you something.”

  “All right—”

  “Do you think it might be possible—”

  “To what?”

  “To just have an—exchange?”

  “Isn’t that what we’re having?”

  “I don’t mean—”

  “What?”

  “I mean—ideas.”

  “Sure—”

  “I mean ideas that mean something. That lead somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know—” By this time her hands were down at her sides and then she crossed her arms on her chest and looked out the same window at nothing. It wasn’t that there was nothing out there. It was that her look was devoid of seeing. It also wasn’t that she was seeing inwardly, it was that she was not seeing at all. A kind of blindness with her eyes wide open.

  “Don’t you miss your wife?” she said abruptly. The question blindsided me, for sure. She was glad to get it off her chest, I guess, although she didn’t turn around to see my face. It took me a while. I sat on the leather couch where she’d already made a dark, warm pocket in the leather and I stared at one of the fading chunks of ember.

  “Of course I do.”

  “You never talk about her.”

  “No. What’s there to talk about?”

  “I mean—what happened? All those years and then suddenly—”

  “What about—what about this idea of yours—this exchange you’re talking about.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well—what’s it mean? What do you have in mind?”

  “It occurred to me that there must be this swimming of ideas between people. This sea, if you will. Ideas known and unknown. Both. Moving in and out of each other. Feeding off each other. The two of us. Fields, so to speak. Symbiosis, maybe.”

  “So what?”

  “They must be related.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re all human. The mind—space—imagination—you know.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  She turned to me. She looked shocked.

  “You look shocked.”

  “I am shocked—shocked that you might think I’m lying.”

  “Not lying. I didn’t say lying. I said ‘making stuff up.’ ”

  “Stuff?”

  “Things. Ideas. ‘Swimming ideas.’ ”

  “I’m not!”

  “You may not know it. I’m sure you don’t.”

  “Know what?”

  “The fabrications. Yourself. The weavings of your own imagination.”

  “Oh!” She shouted the “oh” as though the insult of it were beyond her comprehension. She
turned away from me again and the urge to run came strong and she had to catch herself and hold her ground. She wasn’t sure anymore what she was doing. Why she’d come back. What this whole thing was about. All “theme” seemed to have run dry.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here either.”

  “I thought I knew.”

  “You convinced yourself that you and I had something in common.”

  “Don’t we?”

  “What happened? Your friend drove you to the airport and then you had him turn around and return sixty-five miles? That makes a hundred-ten all together round trip. You went a hundred and ten miles out of your way just to come back and—what did he say? Did he ask why you’d changed your mind or if you’d had a change of heart or—what was going through his mind? What was going through yours?”

  “I was determined to get to the bottom of this.”

  “This what?”

  “Whatever it is—whatever it is that drew us together. I was not going to run away from it.”

  “Is that what it was? The ‘aunt in San Francisco’—running away. Is that what it was?”

  “No!” she shouted, and turned her back on me again. Silence boomed.

  “Look,” I said after a lot of time had elapsed. “Look—I don’t know what I’m doing here either. Things just happened—exploded. Now I’m seeing things.”

  “Seeing things?”

  “Yes, my father, for instance. I see my father in everything. He just pops up. In miniature sometimes. I see him in my walk—my whistle. I see him flying planes. Bombing villages. Fires far below. For no good reason.”

  “Fires?” she said, as though the word left ash in her eyes.

  “Isn’t it incredible, though—that we could both be in the same exact predicament and not know it?”

  “You mean, not know it collectively, or—”

  “Just—not know it.”

  “What else do you see?”

  “Things. Animals. Gargoyles, I guess. Slimy things.”

  “Demons?”

  “Sitting on my chest in the morning.”