by Sam Shepard
“Oh my God.”
“Staring at me.”
“You’re in worse shape than I thought.”
“You can use my guest room again if you want it. I mean, you can continue to use it. I haven’t washed the towels.”
“I might stay the night.”
“What else are you going to do?”
She didn’t answer. I left the room. I couldn’t stand it. I listened for her movement, but there was none. Right then I wished I was still smoking. I would have had one or two. I stared at plastic medicine bottles on the stone counter of my bathroom. Heart stuff. Vitamins. Inhalers. Aftershave. Razors. I heard small leaves blow up against the screen in the window, clattering, as though they were talking. A neighbor, far off, calling to his son. She came in behind me and started running the bath. That was the first thing she did. Out of nowhere. The hot tap, full blast. She leaned across the porcelain and grabbed the box of epsom salts, as though she’d done all this before. She poured at least half the contents into the steaming water. She set the box down and began to softly talk to me as she took her clothes off. I could see all this in the medicine cabinet mirror, as though I had eyes in the back of my head.
“I made up my mind to come back right after I’d dropped the keys in the return box. I parked the Honda and dropped the keys and then hiked out to the highway again. I never even called my friend.”
“So you must’ve hitchhiked then, or hiked on your own little feet.”
“Both. I got one short ride with a Mexican hauling some wood.”
“Were you rehearsing the things you would say to me?”
She wore no bra. She had those kind of adolescent breasts with tight, erect nipples and hardly any cup to the breast itself. She slid off her black panties and tested the water. She was completely shaved down there except for one little tuft of black fur. I watched her slowly submerge: hands gripping the edge, mouth agape. Her lips never moved. She sat on the dissolving mound of epsom salts, mashing it down. No sound came out of her. She leaned her head way back against the tub and then sank entirely, eyes closed. Her hands slowly came together over her pussy and the hot water kept gushing, making its deep gurgle. I left before she had a chance to come back up to the surface and open her eyes. I went out to try the dogs again. Now that my lips had warmed up maybe my whistle would be improved.
Maybe she’s actually onto something. Something I’ve missed altogether. Something between the lines, fallen between the cracks. Maybe there’s an untold story being told in spite of us. In which case I should step aside in deference? And give her complete “authorship,” if that’s what she wants. Is that what she wants? Who knows? If I missed it—if I missed it, that’s something altogether different. That’s just plain “not seeing,” that’s what that is. These “conversations,” as she calls them—exchanges of ideas—thoughts—whatever—are just the groundwork for a whole tapestry of experience. My exchanges with hers, hers with mine, are, in fact, ways of investigation. How could I miss the most glaring truth? If that’s the way it actually was. If that’s the way it is then so be it, as they say in the King James Bible. “So be it.” If, however, it was just a way of “coming on” to her, attracting her attention, getting her interested in “me” and not so much in what I was talking about—what was I talking about? It had to do, as I remember, with her position on the edge of breakaway technology and mine, which was simply a twentieth-century infatuation with empirical existence. Both of us were talking out of our heads, at least I was. Getting nowhere fast, is what my uncle used to say. The remarkable thing is that she would have thought there was some value in it. I thought we were just getting to know each other. That’s all it was. Was it something more?
BERLIN, November, 1811
“They repaired to the Inn at Wilhelmstadt, between Berlin and Potsdam, on the border of the Sacred Lake. For one night and one day they were preparing themselves for death, by putting up prayers, singing, drinking a number of bottles of wine and rum, and last of all by taking about sixteen cups of coffee…………This done, they repaired to the banks of the Sacred Lake, where they sat down opposite each other. Heinrich von Kleist took a loaded pistol and shot Madame Henriette Vogel through the heart, who fell back dead; he then re-loaded the pistol and shot himself through the head.”
Henriette Vogel
I wonder what Henriette Vogel really looked like? That’s the first thought that hit me. Terminally ill with uterine cancer, she was not the first woman von Kleist asked to die with him, but she was the first to say yes. Was she cute? Curls? Black lace-up boots. Stacks of starched petticoats.
My whistle comes back. Sailing out over the juniper. I go crunching into frozen chaparral. I wonder if the “farewell letters” were saved? Each of them, Henriette and Heinrich, sitting across from each other in the creamy candlelight, writing with a goose quill. Would they have passed the letters back and forth? Passed the quill? How do you say good-bye to someone forever when they’re sitting right across from you? How do you write from the dead when you’re still alive? How did he get her to agree, is what I want to know. Of course, she was dying already, but—how was she so sure he’d blow his own brains out after she did the same to hers? Why wasn’t there a simultaneity contract of some kind? Both of them poised with pistols at their own temple or both of them poised with the pistols aimed at each other’s. What was to keep him from wiping his hands of the whole mess? Just standing bolt upright after he’d shot her and marching off to do some more living. After all, he was only thirty-four. Plenty of juice left. Why wouldn’t he have second thoughts once he felt her warm blood splatter across his face when he pulled the trigger? Once he saw her skull explode from the impact? Once he realized this event was now really taking place and that it was not just an idea; a philosophical point of view, a political act of thumbing one’s nose at society; just another perpetual rumination. How, indeed, did he talk her into it? Surely, it couldn’t have come on the first date. Maybe the idea only slowly occurred to him or maybe even the idea was hers. Maybe she wanted to die worse than he did. Maybe it’s what attracted them to each other in the first place. They were made for each other. It was fate.
Sticky Rugs
He’s standing now. Wobbly. Moving in a slight zigzag toward the dark bathroom. He wonders if he’ll make it. Wonders if he’ll make it all the way, or if they’ll find him in a heap on the Mexican tile. Lately, there’ve been spasms, clenchings at the calves and feet—strange little electric jolts around the neck. Could be nothing. What do they call it? “Functional pain”—that’s it. “Functional.” Means nothing. “Don’t turn any lights on, you know the way. You know this house. This one.” There was a morning when he mistook it for one of those motel rooms off Highway 40 West, outside Little Rock. One of those little rooms where you sleep in all your clothes because the sheets are slightly suspect. The rugs are sticky so you keep your thick blue socks on. Yellow neon somehow breaks through the paisley wallpaper. Faded prints of the Mayflower muscling gigantic Atlantic waves. A laminated desk that’s never been sat at with attention. Pocketknife graffiti. Traces of cheap wine spillage or vomit—can’t be sure. Stains. (These signs can often be misleading.) He props his hand against the rippled simulated adobe wall above the toilet and takes a leak. He lets it just run out of him slowly, leaning slightly forward, looking down into the water swirling in a clockwise vortex. His piss stinks for some reason. A high, rank vegetable smell like spoiled carrots. You’d think, not drinking, that wouldn’t be the case, but it is. Definite stink. Maybe the asparagus last night. Asparagus and pears. Could be. He shuffles in his blue thermal socks back out of the bathroom, down the hallway, into the kitchen, and turns both dogs out. Big, wiry dogs. Ugly, if you look at them in bad light. They charge out the door, growling and slipping on ice, crashing into each other like hockey players, and disappear into the dark junipers. They’re onto something. Something unseen. Maybe the morning light from another time. Coursing whippets, lurchers—jackrabbits plunging out of
wet thickets of marsh grass. Traffic in a low hum, far off—echoed through waterways preserved for mallards, white egrets, and sandhill cranes.
His family lies asleep. All of them in different positions. Dreaming. It’s still dark and foggy enough that the orange globes of light from the Golden Gate are glowing strong. Enough to believe that this time might live forever. The whole wide bay curls menacingly in its silent cross-currents. Just waiting. He’s a boy no longer.
Piebald
Dogs are running with the cattle. Weaving in and out. Noses close to the ground, stuck on a scent. Little random fires in open range. A very small colt—piebald with blue eyes—has picked me up in town and followed me out here. He came running over like he knew me. I’m very skinny, sunburned, bare feet, maybe thirteen. I’m stretching a T-shirt over my bony ribs. This little colt (he’s not a pony) is like a dog in his signs of affection. He looks right in my face with a mute query. Can’t tell if he’s hungry or not. It doesn’t seem to be food he’s after. He’s in good enough flesh. He’s light fawn with jagged white patches, like a pinto. Blistering hot already and the sun is barely up. Suddenly, there are people all around. They all seem full of energy and purpose—single-minded. They’re onto something. The girls all know me like I’m their brother. They’re all moving from fire to fire with bundles of clothing, as though packing for travel. Nobody’s sad. Nobody’s lamenting. (I usually get unaccountably sad when I pack.) Everyone’s young—under thirty. There’s no music. No talk. A tacit agreement I seem to be let out of. The surrounding hills are bleak and everything looks like middle South Dakota, out near Kadoka. No threat surrounds us. We’re on our own. Black cattle dot the landscape and keep moving through smoke, in and out of the fires. None of the calves are bawling. No fence. No wire. We’re all moving somewhere together. I feel as strong as I’ll ever be.
Strange Fans
What I can really remember is this: the old man, methodically picking the shrapnel scars at the back of his neck. A mesmerized glaze to his eyes. Far off. Perhaps the past. Perhaps the war. Perhaps. Him, with a tin cup of black coffee, standing in the middle of an avocado grove. The coffee steaming in the morning light. Irrigation. Smudge pots. Strange fans. Him, at breakfast with a hunk of toilet paper plastered to his chin where he’d cut himself shaving. A red dot weeping through. Him, silently reading García Lorca in Spanish. Cervantes. Lips slightly moving. Again. A trance. Him, playing his own kit of drums—drums he’d found in a pawn shop. Drums he’d created. Slingerland bass, stripped of its varnish. Him, playing Wilbur de Paris over and over on a vinyl 78. His pipes in a Bakelite circular holder, white teeth marks bit into all the black mouthpieces. Cartons of Old Golds. Six-pack of Hamm’s. Him, warming up the Kaiser-Frazer as though about to take off on reconnaissance.
It was the fifties—Eisenhower was building his highways. America was on a flashing new street. Electric! The Great War was over now. Men were coming home. Women all had their arms wide open.
Opposite Felicity
The thing about Felicity was how opposite she appeared to be in her pure white cotton dress and tan legs, black patent leather pumps and purse to match, how opposite to her naked screaming self I’d remembered that other morning, tossing her red hair. Abandonment. Now, here she was in a ponytail just standing, very straightforward, on our front porch with her arms crossed quaintly, purse dangling, asking if my father was home. I told her he was still at work at the feedlot but she could come in anyway and wait if she liked. So she did and I got more and more nervous and shaky as she sat on the edge of a straight-backed wicker chair while I got iced tea from the cooler and poured it in a Mason jar and brought it to her with the broken ice rattling around and the tea sloshing over the edge. (This was a different house than the boardinghouse. Way out in the country, but Felicity had found it somehow, tracked us down.) When I gave her the tea she put her little black purse on the floor and perched the Mason jar on her knees, then smiled at me with sudden elation.
I got so nervous I had to go outside and walk around for a while. The whole time I was out there I kept imagining her sitting in the wicker chair, all alone with the iced tea balanced on her knees and looking around at our strange new house—new, I mean, to us—different—different things on the wall that didn’t belong to us, cheap prints of muskellunge and logging camps and places that had nothing to do with the place in which we now found ourselves. I missed the black rotating fan in our kitchen while I wound my way through patches of bullthorns, side-stepping old bean cans. The friendliness of its counterclockwise rotation. The sun was really beating down by then and I kept seeing it all in my head: the little fan blowing wind on the back of Felicity’s neck, wisps of red hair standing straight out. I imagined her just sitting there with her back straight to me and the Mason jar shedding water down her legs, evaporation running in cold streams down her calves. I thought maybe what I should do is get up closer to the house and take a peek through the back window and see if she was still sitting there or if she’d maybe stood up and strolled around through the rooms (there were only three), trying to see if she recognized any of our stuff from the boardinghouse like Dad’s shaving bowl or my chipped accordion. When I got up close like that to the window I felt like a spy or someone sneaking around someone else’s house and peeking in to see if there was anything worth stealing. A Peeping Tom. I couldn’t see Felicity at all. The wicker chair was empty. The little black fan was rotating and blowing air through the empty room. I could almost feel the rushes of wind. I snuck around to the bedroom window and saw her bouncing up and down on my dad’s mattress, plunked flat on the floor. There were no sheets or covers on it, and its dark coffee stains were in sharp contrast to Felicity’s dress. She seemed happy—silently laughing, holding one arm straight up over her head, dripping the Mason jar, tea spilling out over her shoulders and onto the bare mattress. She turned the jar over completely and poured the tea all over her head. She kicked off her black pumps and jumped up and down, then threw the Mason jar at the wall. It didn’t break, just bounced off the sheetrock and rattled around in the corner. Spinning. She stopped laughing. She stopped jumping and just stood there, staring at the wall. The Mason jar twirled to a standstill. She didn’t move. I didn’t either. She had no idea I was staring at the back of her wet head.
Mother Knows Best
Don’t you understand? I don’t see why you don’t understand. You behave like that and you expect everything to be normal? With him, I mean. How can you do things like that? You go and buy makeup and you behave like that. Right in front of him. What do you expect?
Lanterns
I asked Felicity once about my dad. She was there again, waiting for him. Sitting in the wicker chair with her little black purse and her dust-coated pumps. This time in a frilly pink skirt. (I guess, to look more innocent.)
I asked her if she ever actually talked to him, and she told me he was mostly the silent type. That was one of the things she liked about him, his silence. “Did he ever talk? Or just move his lips?” I asked her. “Once,” she said. “He talked about disappearing—how everything was disappearing. How there used to be bonfires everywhere, people running with torches. Laughing. The night was full of sparks. Songs. Little children running and screaming with glee. People in love would jump across the snapping flames, hand in hand. Fires would shoot straight up to the stars.” “When was this?” I asked her. “The old days, he told me. Back in the old days, before electricity was pulled out of the earth, I suppose. Lanterns lit the unpaved roads.”
Something about her voice hypnotized me, even at that age. Something like a hand softly stroking the top of my head. I’d seen horses put to sleep that way by barely rubbing their eyes, their lashes. That’s how it’s done. I thought, What if my father knew what I was thinking? What was going on? What if he knew I had these feelings about her? I didn’t even know what they were yet. These feelings. They felt like warm water running down my back.
Swollen Eye
She is standing now in
a white satin dress that clings to her body. She wears nothing underneath. This dress has a pearl-white, almost bluish sheen to it. Shimmering. Luminescent. It falls to the ground and gathers around her feet like a Greek statue. Her body is young. Her face isn’t and never looks directly at me. She seems not to recognize me at all, although I know I’ve been around her for years. Her right eye is swollen red and wide open. It’s about three times the size of the other one. I’m standing opposite her in green boxer shorts, holding many soiled towels tightly to my chest in a bundle. I’m asking her where the laundry room is but she doesn’t seem to know. She seems lost and doesn’t understand why I would be asking this mundane question. She stands there rotating her head from side to side, scanning the space mechanically. As her head swings, the swollen eye passes and peers intensely, trying desperately to recognize me but failing each time.
Wind is kicking up over the mountains now. Sangre de Cristos. Styrofoam cups, dust, and jagged pieces of metal flying across the highway. The junipers and chamisa stand stoic but blowing around the edges as though ready to take off any second. Astroturf putting green has no clue about the coming wind. Little numbers on sticks of steel leading down to white plastic cups. People are going to church in this weather, holding on to their hats, helping the elderly out of cars, protecting their babies from the sun. “Please, dear Jesus, let this not last forever.”
Blackmail Girl Rumination
It could be that her intentions were entirely different when she started out. She simply wanted to make note of my inflections—where I put the accent—she had no ideas of plagiarism at all. Listening to the “voice,” she discovered the essence. She might have discovered something the speaker was unaware of, in which case she could viably call herself the “author”—the one who knows something more than the speaker himself. The one who tracks something through contrast and disharmony. The one who discovers the undiscovered writer underneath. Maybe that’s it. She thinks she knows something about me that I myself don’t know. She knows me better than I know myself. That’s possible. It’s very possible that she might have heard something. A rhyming cadence of some kind. Greek or—Mongolian—or something altogether foreign and unlikely. She became excited about it. It was her little secret. Welsh, maybe. Maybe Welsh. In any case, she felt she made this little discovery entirely on her own, and therefore she was entitled to some kind of authorship. Some kind of something.
