The One Inside

by Sam Shepard

Off we went to Phoenix, across the desert floor, in Lila’s Honda with my nose packed and oxygen tanks clanking around in the back seat. We passed Bernalillo, where Coronado had butchered all the locals and my dad had been run over, near the Sage Café—where they serve great green chili and eggs. Albuquerque seemed more boring than ever and it was hard to believe it is now the U.S. capital of MURDER. Probably because there is nothing else to do.

  We stopped at the Continental Divide to get gas and there was a sun-bleached covered wagon there with “Elevation—7360 feet” written on the side of it. We got Subway sandwiches at a Phillips 66 station. Mine was a six-inch BMT with green peppers, onion, mayo, and mustard. I forget what Lila got but it looked green and healthy.

  We drove on past ancient meteor craters, Navajo trading posts, dinosaur skeletons, buffalo petting zoos, rattlesnake purses, knife emporiums, concrete tepees, abandoned frontier forts, authentic Zuni bracelets, Apache casinos, adult superstores, Catholic crucifixion stores, agate bookends, Aztec blankets, Elvis Presley T-shirts, Sitting Bull coffee mugs. At Flagstaff we swapped driving and I went on to Phoenix while Lila focused on her green sandwich. Flagstaff was high and cold. Time we hit the desert floor it was 120 degrees. People were imprisoned by air conditioning. There was tremendous Phoenix traffic, which I guess is now expected in every major metropolis across America at around 5:00 p.m.

  We checked into the hospital and they were expecting us. A room overlooking saguaro cacti and heat waves. Many people we passed seemed much worse off than me: bandaged heads, suspended legs and arms, muffled weeping of family members, horrible hacking from the chest, limping down the aisles on aluminum walkers. There was a bevy of nurses at each station—moving in very efficient order with clipboards and thermometers and stethoscopes—all dressed in dark, navy-blue scrubs. Moving like a little army of ants. There were the usual forms and insurance claims to fill out—also living wills, so if you were to suddenly turn into a vegetable they wouldn’t keep you going indefinitely on life support. I often wondered what would happen if you were very much alive but looked dead, seemed dead, and were surrounded by the living who also believed you were dead but you had no way or means to communicate you weren’t dead. Very much like life as it is right now. A nurse came in and gave elaborate directions, all written down, on how Lila should get to her hotel. Again I had to explain that she wasn’t my wife. Again I tried to signal to the outside world that I was marooned, that I had no idea what I was doing, where I was going, who these people were all around me. Again no one listened or pretended they understood when they didn’t. When they had no idea. At first they tried very hard to figure out why I was there to begin with. I told them exactly what had happened to me. That I woke up in a pool of my own blood. That I tracked it down to a nosebleed. That the nosebleed wouldn’t stop. That I had to awaken my friend Lila (who wasn’t my wife). That she took me to the ER in New Mexico and that the next thing I knew I was there in the hospital. They asked me about family. I told them I had none. My parents were dead. My sisters were far away. My children were scattered. I told them I shouldn’t even be there, taking up a hospital bed—that there were many others more deserving. They said they understood. They realized there was something wrong with me even if they didn’t know how to describe it. I asked them to try. One nurse said that the minute I came into the building she knew. I said, “What?” Knew what? She said there was something about me that was catastrophic. That’s the word she used—“catastrophic.” She had no idea why I was there, who I was, or where I’d come from. She just knew my condition was “catastrophic” and that I’d always remain that way. “What way?” I asked her. She didn’t explain. She was very cute. Diné, or at least half. She had one of those faces that curl up around the edges when she smiled, causing her eyes to squint shut and almost disappear. She wore a hairnet but it never seemed out of place or gave the impression of someone who might work in a delicatessen. She was very athletic and moved with extreme ease. Nothing daunted her somehow. She could accomplish any task. Her name tag said “Anna Tumbo.”

  That night, after a dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, me and Lila watched A Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone with Clint Eastwood when he was very young. Early sixties. Terribly, unabashedly corny with the worst soundtrack I’ve ever heard. The lead woman who was supposed to be Mexican was obviously a green-eyed gringo. The bad brothers were painted so “bad” that you began to like them. Lila sat very still in a gray office chair. She never moved. She never laughed. She never said a word. I lay, propped up, in the bed with an IV. Anna Tumbo came in and took my blood pressure.

  Boots with Red Flowers

  I told Felicity she had to stop coming around like this—why was she always coming around when she knew my dad was at work? I mean, why was she always coming around? She’d just stare at me and smile. She moved the little black purse on her knees. This time she was wearing cutoff blue jeans and boots with red flowers and pistols carved into them. Very Western. She asked me if there was something against the law about her coming by my place and paying me a visit. She just wanted to see the dogs, anyway. She said. Maybe pick some oranges. Run through the sprinklers. I told her there was nothing against the law, it just seemed weird, that’s all. “Weird?” she said. “There’s nothing weird about us being friends.” She considered us friends. I thought that was great, but at the same time I wondered if that’s the way my dad would see it. “Friends”? I mean, what did that mean to her? Did that mean that when I looked at her purse moving around on her knees, that was all I was looking at?

  There were times back then when I thought I’d never get out of there alive. I’d have to become a famous golfer or a veterinarian or something like that. I’d have to escape completely. I’d have to take a different name, different haircut, wear clothes from a different era. Start listening to music by Tommy Dorsey. I don’t know. What if Felicity decided to track me down? What if my father found out? What if he decided to do me in or have me arrested or something? What if he went completely crazy? Insanity ran in the family, don’t forget. There was some great-great-something—an uncle or a cousin or something—who ran off to live with the Indians back then, had many wives, many children, stopped speaking English altogether, took up astrology, had Cherokee slaves. I don’t know. I didn’t want to wind up like that, that’s for sure. I had to find a way out of there. Completely.

  Could it be that I just couldn’t see? All those years of hot rods, winning. Tijuana. False ID. Prostitution. Donkey fucking. Breaking the Talc. Race. Sex. Sock hops. Mescal in silver bottles. Tacos. Parking lots. Radios. Benzedrine. Cherry Coke. Brigitte Bardot. Chino state prison. Rock and roll. Hitchhike to Oklahoma City.

  I go back, following avenues with the same name, same buildings, but nothing’s the same. Nothing’s there now but a “community garden.” Vegetables. Fruit trees. They must’ve leveled the whole six floors with a wrecking ball. Little kids watching from rusty fire escapes. Old fat Polish ladies leaning on mops.

  Back then it was white chicks with black needles hanging off their skinny bare arms. Sprawled out in the empty bathtub unconscious. A guy at the door in jodhpurs and a riding crop asking for “Benny,” as though I’d tell him. His trumpet in a paper sack. Wicker rockers full of junkies. Curly says it’s just like Mississippi in here. All that’s missing is the slapping screen doors and redbone coonhounds. That’s what he tells me. Me—I grew up out west where the eye never stops. All we had for heat was a gas stove. When that ran out we froze. Not that it ever did.

  See—she was right here. I’m not kidding. Right here with me in that yellow chair, drinking iced tea. Staring at orioles. Remarking. This place is a virtual crossroads of migration. All kinds of shit flies over. Sandhill cranes, great blue herons, cedar waxwings. You name it. All we have to do is sit and wait. Sip our tea. See—she was right here. Here are her underpants to prove it. Red with white bows. She wore those. Must’ve left them here on purpose, just to get a rise out of me. I was never sure just what she w
as after. Maybe nothing. Could be. What was she doing here, anyway?

  One particular night, though, one night we had a bottle of red and just parked in front of the fence line where the horses were. She crossed her long legs on the dashboard and we had the radio tuned to some Memphis station—Jerry Lee, Al Perkins, somebody like that. Her blouse was a creamy pink silk and she had on a man’s pinstriped jacket with lapels. She always talked with that thick accent of hers from the faraway mountain country where Rousseau used to hide out in that weird getup of his. She’d spit wisps of long blond hair between half sentences, then laugh and sneer like a pirate so that the skin crinkled above her high cheekbones and, at the same time, moisture gathered, mixing with little dots of blue mascara. The headlights made a stripe on the black fence and we could see horses’ legs between the lower rails. Above, their eyes gleamed green and yellow, ears twitching, trying to hear the sounds of us humans laughing. At what, I don’t know. She found most things silly. Most human things. I remember trying to teach her how to shoot my .410 single-shot. Made in Brazil, of all places. Simple gun. One shell at a time. She couldn’t hit a Coke bottle at fifteen feet. She’d blink, close her eyes, and then jump when the gun went off. I told her she’d never hit a thing like that. She just laughed. Drove my Gator straight up the hill with the parking break on—screaming her head off. Mud slung us in the face.

  Her idea about America was that it was some kind of playground. A series of disconnected zones that made sense only in the experimental mode. You could go to Los Angeles and live in the midst of a movie—black-and-white or color, made no difference where you were from, whether you were intending to “be” dumb. It made no difference. You really and truly could “blow in the wind.” Was it the same in Europe? In that high country she came from where Mozart burst on the scene as a fourteen-year-old, his old man prodding him with a stick. Was it true anywhere else in the world? Weren’t American ideas like “education,” “trade,” “earning a living” still indelibly implanted in the psyche somewhere? Was being born having to be enlisting in a destiny?

  Boy Who Fell Asleep in the Shower

  He must have changed costumes as least seven times. At least. An osprey flew back and forth across the screened square of window in his trailer. Searing. The black-and-white “one-liner” was folded back to day 42. A breakfast sandwich of scrambled egg, cheese, and bacon lay half-eaten and wet on a crumpled sheet of tinfoil. The coffee had gone cold. They couldn’t seem to make up their minds about the sequence. It was a toss-up between scene 68 or scene 77. Random recall crossed his mind. His youngest son, who loved the sensation of sneezing. He remembered. The boy who fell asleep in the shower. He remembered. Curled up naked on white tiles with hot water pelting down. Asleep. His skin turned red by hot water. He remembered that. What was he dreaming?

  For scene 68 he wore essentially the same thing he was supposed to wear for scene 77 except the colors were slightly different. This meant changing the entire ensemble. Scene 68 required a raspberry-sherbet-colored linen shirt, khaki pants, alligator belt, blue canvas shoes with no socks and the heels folded in against the insoles, like bedroom slippers. For 77 he was supposed to have on a mango-colored shirt. Navy-blue slacks and coffee-brown tennis shoes with white sweat socks. The alligator belt remained the same. What they seemed to fail to understand was that he, himself, would go unchanged. He would remain always the same.

  I get back and she’s gone. Back door’s wide open. How many times has this happened? Disappearance—empty rooms—fans slowly turning in silence. No note. Sound of a distant leaf blower. The Unspoken—louder than screaming. Her agonized orgasms. Like a slaughtered lamb. Ecstasy was never supposed to be like this. Her deep shudder that goes through the walls and out into tropical trees—iguanas—green parrots—hairless dogs quivering. She told me last night, with a lavender toothbrush hanging from her lips, that her hair had turned completely white at age eleven. Abruptly. Overnight. Just wham like that. Not gray but white. Pure. Not out of fear or despair but white as milk. She immediately went to dying it pitch black. She dyes it now. “Nobody knows,” she says. “I’m the only one. And you now.” I can see her somewhere running, as a little girl. White hair streaming. As though running away from it. As though her hair’s on fire.

  I told her I wouldn’t be messed with, which now sounds pompous and ridiculous, when you get right down to it.

  Now what?? For me? Stuck here in some imitation sugar plantation with hired clean-cut white people running around it in electric golf carts, lime T-shirts with name tags, and potted palms. The pool’s so new there’s no scum mark where the water laps against the tile. A kid in a flat top and goggles squirts a plastic water gun high above magnolia trees. The spray reaches the deep end. His mother, in a tiger-striped bikini, cautions him that there is now an adult in the pool with him. That’s me (the “adult”). I do a crippled version of the Australian crawl and barely accomplish a lap, then prop both elbows in the green drain, panting like a scalded dog. What is this? Adrift. Adrift between lives? Is this the same turquoise sea where we once had ceviche and BBQ shrimp? What happened in between? Where have you gone?

  Shrinkage

  You seem to be diminishing. Bit by bit. I don’t know—maybe I’m losing my mind. Maybe it is me. Like that guy when he got back to his super-domestic life in the suburbs after having encountered a mysterious cloud on the bow of his yacht. Remember? He checks the notches in his belt. Suddenly, his khaki slacks are several sizes too big. He’s swimming in his shoes. He’s shorter than his wife, when he’s always been taller. (This is a movie with absolutely no sense of humor, by the way.) His wife is extremely sympathetic. She’s very straight with hair like Doris Day. She watches him grow smaller and smaller. She sets him up in a dollhouse. A dollhouse the man fashioned for his daughter when he was a normal-sized man. The daughter’s now gone off to college; we never see her. She has grown up and achieved the size of a normal American woman and left her dollhouse behind. The man lives his daily life inside the dollhouse, getting smaller and smaller, day by day. The wife brings him miniature meals, miniature cups of tea, she makes him miniature clothing—pajamas, for instance, and miniature shirts and pants. She tells no one what is happening to her husband. She never sees neighbors or friends. She gets more and more distressed but keeps it to herself. (This is the fifties, remember.) She keeps making up excuses about her husband’s whereabouts. The neighbors become suspicious. The man continues to shrink. The woman becomes emotionally shaky.

  One day, the family cat attacks the man, taking him for an insect or a tiny rodent of some kind. Something to eat. The wife gives the man a needle to protect himself. She puts the cat in a separate room but the cat gets out and attacks the man again. This time the man uses the needle and stabs the cat in the ass. The cat becomes wary of the man, now knowing he has a stinger. Remember all this? It’s important.

  Slowly, the man realizes he is going to just disappear. His shrinking is relentless, inexorable. He does not want his wife to continue to suffer responsibility. He sneaks out the back door with the huge needle over his shoulder, barely able to lift it. It’s night and the bright porch light reflects the waving blades of grass in the backyard. They look like silver duck tongues. He descends the stairs of the porch using thread from his wife’s sewing kit to rappel his way down the sheer vertical face of the steps. He finally enters the lawn, dashing into the cover of the towering blades waving in the night breeze. He keeps running with the needle and thread, colliding into snails, ants, and beetles. Spiders travel noiselessly over the top of him like galactic robots. Owls and bats track his panicked zigzag progress. He’s now getting so small that the needle and thread seem to be suspended in their own levitation. Then he simply vanishes. (This is a movie with absolutely no sense of humor.) You must remember this?

  You are now traveling. Your future is frozen. Rapidly, you are jettisoned from the blank unknown to the bright clear world. “Day out of days.” “Call sheets.” Dumped off in front of y
our white box of a trailer that’s been hauled across the country from Burbank for the thousandth time, the name of your character taped on the door in bold black letters. Surrounded suddenly by everyone you’ve never met before. All of them effusively nice and asking what you might need. Bottled water from Burma? Caramel-coated pretzels? Organic jasmine tea? “Do you have any exotic food allergies?” Captured suddenly in the land of unimagined luxury where everyone seems to know you from a long-dead motion picture forty years ago. How can you begin to explain that you’re not that person?

  Black Hole

  They’ve rented us a country house for the duration of the shoot in an extremely rural area called Whippoorwill, Oklahoma. (The bird in medieval mythology that was always present as the harbinger of death.) The house is big enough that the Blackmail Girl can have her own room and study upstairs. She’s up there now, bent over a thick book called Chaos and Where It’s Going. I can see her. She might as well be alone. The house is owned by a famous veterinarian who once pampered the hunting falcons of Arabian sheiks. (I should’ve stuck with animal medicine.) Evidently, this doctor has gone away for a wedding and left us to rent the house. I’m lying on my back, fully clothed, on the veterinarian’s king-sized bed, watching dusk slowly fade to night. I’m thinking about this Girl upstairs, but it does me no good. I might as well be alone. All the accoutrements of falconry hang on the pine-paneled walls, silently awaiting the hunter’s return: simulated quail lures intricately woven out of colorful nylon, partridge and duck, shoulder baskets and leather pouches for dead game, bait, walking staves with brass handles in the shape of hawk heads, greyhounds, hoods and blinkers, blinders with leather latigo tethers, round stands of synthetic grass for the birds to perch on when they’re doing nothing, spiked rods, thick mule-skin gloves and knee-high leggings, antennae and transmitters for tracking lost birds. On the wall above the mahogany headboard is a colored mural of Kublai Khan and his vast, opulent hunting party: four white elephants at the very center of the conflagration, supporting a massive rectangular throne/platform for the warrior chieftain. Green and orange banners stream from every corner of the canopied roof; plush tiger pelts provide shade for the royal party. Fierce mounted battalions of Mongolian hunters, bows and quivers lashed to their backs. Salukis scour the steppes, flushing hare and small rodents. Dromedaries carry leopards in steel cages. Chained cheetahs cringe on the backs of painted ponies. Eagles and owls are tied to green bamboo rods. Sleek peregrines explode into mallards, sending clouds of feathers cascading down on everyone’s heads. This is all happening while I daydream. A kind of “day in the life” of Kublai Khan. Some mind invention woven to capture the imagination down through time. As though time were a spiral. As though the ancient past could be conveniently held in your hand. All at once.