The One Inside

by Sam Shepard

  The darkening light has now turned the mural to silhouette. I can’t hear the Blackmail Girl. Can’t hear her turning the pages. The oil jacks have gone silent outside. A lone cow bawls for her calf, but there’s no answer. No dog barks. No coyote. Some rustling of small birds in landscape bushes. Leaves tumble. Leaves across cold concrete. A turkey scratches. Gobbles. No frogs. The refrigerator clicks over to a colder setting, down the hall. I can hear her descending the stairs. I can hear her bare feet. I don’t move. She appears, just standing at the foot of the bed, materializing out of darkness. Silent. Standing there staring at me with her arms hanging limp. Like a prisoner who’s been arrested one too many times. I still don’t move. Maybe I’ve stopped breathing. She’s dressed in gray sweat pants, gray hoodie, her hair still wet from the shower. Dripping. She moves to the far side of the bed and stops. I follow her with my eyes. Can’t hear her breath. She climbs in under the quilted covers and turns her back to me again, without saying a word.

  We fall asleep like that. Silent. For once, I don’t dream.

  —

  She awoke in exactly the same position she’d fallen asleep in: knees tucked up almost to her chin, hands clasped around them, her back very deliberately turned toward me like a sharply curved little boulder. She stared out the picture window plastered with decals from security companies warning would-be intruders. She stared at the long prairie grass turning pink from encroaching morning light. She knew this wasn’t Wisconsin. Even though she wasn’t looking directly at me she knew I was awake. I could tell she knew. She began speaking softly without moving, as though to herself and me, at the same time. I stared up at the mural. Colors were shifting. The elephants seemed to be on the move. She spoke in a monotone:

  “I had this funny dream about a theme park. Down in Florida, I guess. Just like Disneyland but it wasn’t. It was called ‘The End of the World’ and we were on a ride called ‘The Black Hole.’ Everybody was screaming and scared. Not us, but everyone else. You couldn’t feel anything underneath you. No support—no gravity. The bottom had fallen out. Then we went through this tunnel called ‘Apocalypse Now.’ I never saw that movie. Did you?”

  “Yeah. Brando rubbed his bald head like it was a puppy dog and stared into the campfire. I had the feeling he was proud of the shape of his cranium.”

  “No one can help how their cranium’s shaped.”

  “True.”

  “Where were they?”

  “It was supposed to be Vietnam but they shot it in Honolulu, I think.”

  “From a nightmare to a holiday.”

  “What other rides did you go on in your dream?”

  “There was one called ‘The Butterfly Effect’ where we got separated.”

  “Did we ever find each other?”

  “Yes—in something called ‘Complex Games,’ where we tried to put ourselves back together.”

  “What happened?”

  “We’d become shattered into all these different pieces. We started handing each other parts of ourselves.”

  “Very symbolic.”

  “No, it just seemed like an ordinary event.”

  “I hate that stuff like Last Year at Marienbad and that Bergman flick where he plays chess with the devil.”

  “I never saw those.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “You must’ve grown up in a weird time.”

  “Wait a minute—who are ‘we’ supposed to be if we’re handing parts of ourselves to each other?”

  “I don’t know. We’re just doing it and getting it all wrong. I mean, my head on your shoulders, for instance. Your feet on my ankles.”

  “Really fucked up.”

  “Yeah—”

  “Is it supposed to mean something?”

  “Just a dream, or a nightmare, I guess.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “What?”

  “Between a dream and a nightmare?”

  “Fear. Isn’t a nightmare full of fear?”

  “And not a dream?”

  “No, a dream’s innocent, isn’t it? Light. There’s no fear in a dream.”

  “So when fear enters it becomes a nightmare?”

  “That must be it.”

  “Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.”

  “Yeah.” Still she didn’t move. I had an impulse to put my arm around her but I thought it would disturb something. Her train of thought, maybe. Her train of thought chugging down the track. I said something after a long stillness. “Maybe it was the posture you fell asleep in.”

  “What posture?”

  “That one you’re in now—knees tucked up—arms wrapped around them.” She immediately shifted position. Straightened her legs, pushed her hands deep into her pockets. She kept her back to me. “They say sometimes the position you fall asleep in can have a lot to do with your dreaming.”

  “You mean whether it’s a nightmare or a dream?”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  “You mean—before you fall asleep—just before—you calculate your posture—you calibrate it, so to speak, for either a nightmare or a dream?”

  “Well, I don’t know if it would work exactly like that—”

  “Who would want to intentionally create a nightmare, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe somebody who’s bored.”

  “Are you?” We fell silent again. I wondered if she felt the same remoteness as me at being thrown together in a stranger’s house. A stranger’s things all around us. People we never met. Everything indicative of a life being lived in this house but nobody’s present but us. Pictures framed of grandchildren in crisp clothes, hair neatly parted. A family cat with a scarf for a collar. Closets full of someone’s clothes, hanging like dead men from a tree. Plaids and foreign fabrics—things neither of us would ever wear. Shoes way too big. I sat up and swung my legs over, feet flat on the beige wall-to-wall carpet. I came, almost immediately, to a straight-backed position, turning intentionally away from her. She never moved.

  “I’m going to see if there’s coffee. They must have a coffee maker in the kitchen.” I stood.

  “I had another dream,” she said. “Right alongside the nightmare about the rides in the ‘End of the World’ park. Right in that same position too. Knees tucked up. Do you want to hear it?” I turned to her but couldn’t see her face.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll just make some coffee first.”

  “Your father was in it.”

  “My father?”

  “Yes. He told me he was your father, anyway.”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “I know that. The dead can still appear in dreams, can’t they?”

  “He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t speak anymore.”

  “He did in this dream.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to thank you for unwrapping his tiny head.”

  “He was already dead.”

  “He wanted to thank you anyway.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  “I thought so.”

  “What did he want to thank me for?”

  “For the breath of fresh air. It was the first time he’d felt real air for a long, long time.”

  “Real air?”

  “Air that moved. That came from somewhere else and visited.”

  “Where? Where did it come from? Did he say?”

  “High in the mountains. No people.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s all he told me.” I stood there a long time. Waiting for something more. I wanted to ask her why he’d become so small but I knew she couldn’t tell me. I wanted to ask her where they were taking him and all the others but I knew she couldn’t tell me. She never moved an inch.

  “I’m going to make some coffee.”

  Next morning, me and Blackmail Girl appear on the set. Everyone seems befuddled and judgmental now. Even in this era of liberal smugness it causes suspicion—an almost-seventy-year-old man with a twenty-year-old girl. Ta
boo! Not “age appropriate”! “We don’t appreciate your moral perspective.” She remains cool—barefoot with a thin silver ring around the next left toe in from the little one. Dark purple nail polish. Heavy blue overcoat that goes clear to her ankles, so no one gets a good look at her body. They don’t miss her lavender eye shadow, though, or the wry turn of her lips.

  We get inside the trailer and quickly slam the metal door. All the neon bulbs are blaring white. Two of them blink and go out. The thermostat is cranked up to ninety, for good measure. Sure enough, there’s a huge wicker basket full to overflowing with dried apricots, pink pears, Emergen-C. Cracker Jacks and a bottle of green salsa. This entire cornucopia nestles on a bed of Easter-yellow straw with a note from a long string of producers welcoming me to the club and wishing me “Bon voyage”—like a new ship about to embark on shining, silky waters with no inkling of possible doom. (Do all actors share an impending terror of this merger into “character”? Or is it just me?)

  She grabs a pear and clamps her teeth around it, then drops her long overcoat and sits with her knees propped up. She’s entirely naked except for the dark purple polish. She chomps into the pear and says it’s too hot for clothes. Juice runs down her neck. She opens the script and studies the yellow-highlighted pages. I start automatically going through my monologues out loud with no attempt at accent or “intention” (I’m not a method actor). She chomps her pear and corrects me each time I stumble.

  After she’s straightened the collar of my costume and thrown her overcoat back on, we cross over to the makeup trailer. I tell her I want her always by my side, no matter what. She doesn’t answer. Keeps her head down, collar up. Mute. Her purple toenails flash through the dead grass. Dusk is moving in. Moisture fills the air. I remember Bruno’s question: “What is a spring dusk?” but spring has gone. People all around this movie “location” are living their entire lives behind giant oaks. Tiny lights go on across the fields from hooded porches. I wonder what they make of us? Some glamorous fantasy? Maybe they believe they’re stuck and we’re the ones who are living the real life. Maybe they believe they’ll forever be exiled from a life of their dreams.

  Acorns fall in tight clumps. Black squirrels. Pit bulls lash out heedlessly at chain link fence. Security lights pop on in somebody’s driveway. Nobody’s there.

  After makeup we cross back over the dead lawn and enter the set—a clapboard farmhouse probably built in the thirties with a wraparound porch. It’s night. Dormer windows smile like little jack-o’-lanterns. Inside, the familiar smell of smoking gels and gaffer’s tape sealing the windows tight against any intruding light. The air gets thicker. The chaos of film crews rushing back and forth doing their chores. Pliers, clamps, flashlights, gloves, bounce boards, electrician’s tape, apple boxes, booms, earphones, walkie-talkies, high-hats, shutters, electronic clapboards, chalk marks, dolly track. Silent mania. Coded language bounces from wall to wall in hushed urgency. I take Blackmail Girl back to one of the little side rooms and introduce her to the director, who’s sitting with the script adviser behind two mounted monitors. I leave her there and go into the set. She can take care of herself.

  I’m playing the part of an aging alcoholic who’s interviewing an Osage girl for the job of overseeing his pillhead wife, diagnosed with cancer of the womb and needing, of course, to be driven round-trip to Tulsa for her chemotherapy treatments. The actress playing the part of the Osage girl is actually Blackfoot from northern Montana, but who knows Blackfoot from Osage in a mostly white audience at some megaplex theater in the anonymous corporate malls of America? And who cares? An Indian’s an Indian. The usual last-minute fussing with lights, props, costumes, hair, is going on fervently while I keep trying to digest the script. It’s well written—way better than most—but still difficult to absorb. The language holds the character, for me. Only through the varied repetition of saying words out loud does the character begin to appear like a negative in a chemical bath. The Blackfoot girl seems scared. She sits rigidly on the edge of her chair in her makeup and costume.

  I loosen her up a little through simple conversation. Just us two talking in the midst of swirling madness and chaos. I ask her if she knows a friend of mine named Dutch from up there in Browning near her rez, and she does. He’s half Irish, half Blackfoot—a stuntman I’d worked with years ago, whose father raised wild-ass bucking horses. They used to drive the whole herd each spring down into Cut Bank to the rodeo arena, right through the center of town. As we’re talking, prop masters are trying wedding rings on me, necklaces on her; makeup artists are powdering her face and hands; costume personnel are messing with our clothes; the hair department is combing, brushing, spraying. Everyone’s trying to do their job; we maintain eye contact as the business continues all around us, and I tell her an incident I recall with Dutch where he was doubling for a “Native American” woman, chasing a white wolf on foot. It was shot from behind so you couldn’t tell it was a man. He was wearing a long black wig and a double of her costume. The white wolf had been brought from LA by the peroxide-blond trainer in a special caged truck a week early so the wolf could have plenty of time to acclimate. The trainer brought special water, special meat, special blankets. This was a pampered wolf. Before we attempted to shoot the chase scene, the trainer gathered everyone together to explain in a hushed voice the very special conditions of working with a wolf. First of all, none of us, under any circumstance, was allowed to look at the wolf directly in its yellow eyes. If we did, then the trainer couldn’t be responsible for the outcome. Secondly, all women who were menstruating had to be banned from the set—no exceptions. Thirdly, no loud noises or sudden movements—if lights were to be suddenly popped on, he, the trainer, must be informed well in advance. No meat of any kind was to be eaten at the same time of shooting—hamburgers, hot dogs, tuna sandwiches, nothing. And lastly, he could only guarantee three takes of chasing, after three the wolf might get wise to the repetition and turn on the stunt man, or, worse, the steadicam operator—or, even worse, the whole bunch of us puny human beings would be torn to shreds. That said, we proceeded.

  Later, as me and the Blackmail Girl head for the huge catering service tent lit up like a circus tent in the night, she’s very excited by what she’s just witnessed on the monitor. I ask her about the scene—if it was at all plausible. “Yes,” she says, “but what were you and that Indian girl talking about before the camera was turned on and the scene began?”

  “Oh, I forget,” I say. “Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t sure if you were ‘acting’ or not.”

  —

  We plod on with the script while I start trying on pieces of costume: vests with gold-threaded embroidery around the pockets, period underwear buttons on the fly (nobody’s ever going to see the underwear, but I guess it’s a token toward authenticity), high-collared shirts, pearl cuff links. Suddenly I notice—as I’m trying to work the head of a pearl cuff link through the starched slit in the sleeve of the shirt—that the Girl’s back is covered in an almost invisible orange fuzz, like a young peach. The neon backlights it. I lick my finger and run it across the tiny hairs just to make sure I’m not seeing things. The hairs stand up. Her shoulders shudder slightly but she makes no sound, just keeps feeding me the lines. The monologues are gratuitously convoluted but interesting to speak—variations, I suppose, on a mannered academic T. S. Eliot voice. An Anglophile poet I was never enamored with—essential ideas redolent of stale gin and suicide. I ask Blackmail Girl to help me with the stiff collar. Little gold studs have to be inserted and attached somehow to make it stand up. She moves to the back of my neck. I can feel her perfect erect nipples brushing the linen of my shirt. I picture them as golden as the little brass studs. I can feel her breath behind me. I know she’s there, working away, the script tucked under her shaved armpit. Biting her bottom lip. Intent. Breathing vapor.

  Suddenly, the costume team bursts into the trailer hauling shirts on wire hangers over their shoulders. Blackmail Girl doesn’t even tu
rn toward them, just keeps working my collar with her tongue hanging out. The team stands there stunned by the nudity. One of them darts back outside. The other one remains stoically and says, “Sorry, I should’ve knocked.”

  “That’s all right. Just trying things on.”

  “Does any of it feel like the character to you?” she asks.

  “I don’t know who the character is yet. I just got here.”

  “Yes, I know—but, I mean your ‘vision’ of the character. How you ‘see’ him.”

  “I don’t have a vision of the character. I don’t see him at all. The character. Far as I know he could be a ghost. Someone you hope to encounter in broad daylight.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says softly as she backs out of the trailer, closing the door gently behind her with a metallic click.

  Matching Purposes

  She had a family, after all. Father. Mother. Sister. Brother. A place. A room she returned to day after day. Midwest. Me, I had my costume and two days’ growth of beard. I had to keep it that way for “matching” purposes. The beard. Not three days’ growth. Not two and a half. But precisely two. The camera caught the difference. One of those “micro-budget” films, they call them these days, where you have no trailer to speak of, no privacy at all, so you end up wandering from one room in this cheap-ass hotel to another, where your costume hangs limply, lifeless on wire hangers, and yet another room where your books and toiletries rest. Wandering down long, stained, carpeted hallways, strangers appearing very small in the distance, then growing larger and more wary as you approach them, when they suddenly see that you really do look very scary in your two days’ growth of beard and don’t realize that you are just playing a character or are in the process of playing one and they believe in their eyes as you pass them that you might actually be the real psychotic thing and might do them real harm without even intending to. Just by walking past them. It even gets to where you actually enjoy scaring the hell out of strangers on your way to breakfast. Getting closer and closer to them down the long, stained hallway and refusing to take your eyes away. Refusing to dodge them. Pinning them, in fact, between feeble attempts to smile cordially in the polite American morning manner or ignore you altogether as though you were just another cockroach in the system. It does no good to tell yourself that the whole grim event will only last three more weeks, like some kind of prison sentence where you cross off days on a makeshift calendar. Xs through numbers. Days clicking. A wall of rough concrete.