Set Me Free (10 page)

N
ICK, THE
F
IRST
Stage administrative assistant just out of NYU, was sitting behind the front desk, working on the computer. He looked surprised
when Helen pushed open the front door. “Hello, hello!” he exclaimed loudly.

“Hey,” she said, picking up a stack of mail. “How’s it going in there?”

He shrugged, opened his mouth, then stopped himself. “Fine,” he said.

“Very believable. Is she awful?”

“Not awful. No, I wouldn’t say awful.” Nick brought his voice down to a whisper. “She doesn’t have the personality for awful.”

They were talking about a sometime TV starlet whom Duncan had “discovered” on his most recent trip out to L.A. She was gracing
the stage for the first time as the passionate Miss Capulet. She was gorgeous, leggy, blond. Helen had decided not to examine
exactly why she felt it so necessary to look in on a rehearsal unannounced. Now that she was here, she said, “Well, I guess
I better see for myself.”

Nick looked terribly relieved when the phone rang.

Helen let herself in at the back of the theater. The room was dim, silent. Only a few lights were pointed at the set, which
was a jumble of half-painted flats and plywood platforms. This was Helen’s favorite moment in a production: when it was not
yet fully formed, not yet fully itself. There were still a thousand possible ways each line could be read; a thousand possible
actors could still play each part; a thousand possible costumes could still be constructed for each character. The whole act
of putting the play together, of making its world come alive, consisted of honing all these thousands upon thousands of possibilities
until you were left with one way, one actor, one costume, one philosophy. It was this alchemy, this electric combination of
people and costumes and words that had taken Helen from the political world of her youth, that of protest and demonstration,
and lifted her here. In this moment was when she was most alive, because it was here, in the space of the theater, where she
felt hope. There was always one way to be. That was what theater had given her. Safety. A singular perfection she could achieve,
if only on the stage.

Helen walked down the center aisle of her theater and listened for voices. She heard nothing. She softened her step and heard,
in the back of her mind, a voice saying, “You may discover something here. Are you ready for it?” She reached the stage and
walked beside it, running her hand along its soft wood surface, gathering sawdust. She did not call out. She did not warn
him. She simply ascended
the steps and walked swiftly, silently, into the dark wings. When she got there, she saw what she saw. In the past, in the
darkness of her own mind, imagining this moment, she’d expected to feel grief, loss and disgust. But what she felt was pity,
for him, and a kind of lifting, for herself. As if she were rising up and seeing, from above, the truth about these last twelve
years, in all their sweetness and cruelty, and this seeing set her free.

C
AL

Because Elliot did not talk about his past, and I did not talk about mine, a strange rift grew between us. I knew I was his
wingman. He named me assistant headmaster. I was given great responsibilities. Ponderosa Academy was Elliot’s vision, but
I was the man on the ground floor, putting his game into play. For a long time, I did not resent my position in his grand
scheme of making a school. That was what saved me, and I won’t deny that, even for a second. But time pressed on. Soon I was
no longer stinging from the death of love. Soon we were colleagues. Soon I began to believe that when we did not talk about
our pasts, we were also saying we would not speak about our futures. And that was where we found ourselves in trouble.

I sensed this trouble long before the words “Benson Country Day” left Elliot’s lips and careened into the black hole of my
eardrum. I felt it in the way Ponderosa Academy grew, amoebalike, under the watch of Elliot the dreamer. His plan for the
school was not neat, or cost-effective, or regimented. If asked, I would have told you that was all fine. But inside, where
the trouble brewed, I began to believe Elliot was arrogant, strong-headed, and blind to the fact that he was allowing the
school to grow recklessly, wildly, and without a plan. Meanwhile, the academy was becoming a more and more integral, necessary
part of the Neige Courante community. And it was all in one man’s hands. I tried to rein Elliot in and scale things down,
but he intimated that there was a
method to his madness. He kept me away from this method with phrases like “All in good time” and “We’ll see what happens.”
All the elders seemed unconcerned. They were happy to stay in “advisory” roles while Elliot made the big decisions. “You’re
there,” they said to me when I complained. “You’re keeping an eye on things.” They trusted me. I was Jasper Francoeur’s son.

I grew angry. I remembered that first day, when I met Elliot, when he told Amelia I had come to be their storyteller. I saw
that Elliot kept his methods, his secrets, close. So close that even I could not see them. And I thought, “That’s all he thinks
I am. A fucking storyteller. I keep the children occupied while he gains power.”

It was easy to jump to the next conclusion. To the difference between us. To the colors of our skin. He was white and in charge.
I was brown and helped him. I began to see the way he wanted me to be something he’d conjured from a storybook, the Indian
who tells tall tales. I’m not saying I never put this stereotype into play for my own uses; there’s something to be said about
playing up the silent-Indian type. Ladies love it. I learned this early. Give them a brooding brown man with long black braids
and a will to screw, and they’ll line up around the block and wait their turn until the sun goes down. I gladly pried open
the tops of their tight little jars and wooed them in soothing, pithy aubades, extolling the tenderness of the aureole and
denouncing the brutality of the middle class. I gave up explaining that the Neige Courante didn’t use bows and arrows, that
my father pulled me off the rez to send me to Phillips Exeter. I was an Indian man from west of the Mississippi, and I pretended
I lived in a tepee and hunted buffalo, because that’s what got me laid.

But that was my own danm business. That was my own damn birthright, and it had nothing to do with Elliot Barrow. He was a
fool if he thought I was going to play the cliché for him too, the adoring aboriginal who “kemosabes” and speaks in hushed
parables about Coyote.

I was not going to be his storyteller anymore. I was not going
to be his right-hand man, his wise adviser, his sidekick.“Fuck him,” I thought. “Sixteen years of backbreaking work, and the
thanks I get is more backbreaking work in his shadow? Enough. He has no idea what I’ve given.”

I was wrong.

Elliot wanted my blood. Elliot wanted my help. He wanted my mind, and he wanted my friendship. But he did not want my soul.
I was born to tell stories. When he told me that was what he wanted of me, he didn’t think he was asking a little; he knew
he was asking everything. But he did not want those stories for himself. He wanted them for me. Not because I was Indian.
Because I was his friend.

T
HIS STORY BEGINS
in so many places that there shouldn’t be words used to tell it. But that’s all we’ve got: letters on the page, tongues tapping
the roofs of our mouths. What I need you to remember is how much that matters. For I have known electric moments—the fleeting
seconds of a hard pink knee pressing against my soft brown thigh; the low red afternoon light of an Oregon evening, streaming
off an unmet Elliot Barrow’s head; the violet glow of the moon on the night of my father’s death; the acrid sting of a barn
burning in the darkness, and this, and this, and this—but I cannot simply let them be. I return to these moments. For better
or worse, they call to me in their vivid unwordness and ask me to build for them what they cannot build for themselves: phrases,
sentences, paragraphs. Houses of stories. It happens again and again. No matter how many times I say no. No matter that I
would rather walk across fire. We are each called to our own salvation. Mine’s here, in the telling.

Once upon a time, there was a tall man who lived alone. From the outside, it looked as though he had not lived that way for
long at all. He was not half as old as people who have lived alone for decades. He had not lived alone for one decade, not
half a decade, not half of a half of one. The time he had lived alone sounded unimpressive when spoken in years. Even in months,
it was a piddly number, and the days barely made an impression.

But from the inside, it was another story. From the inside, this lonely tall man was like a two-thousand-year-old man who’d
been sitting alone in a cold house for one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years.

Perhaps the tall man was exceptional. Perhaps he had a biological mutation whereby his heart got lonely much faster than the
hearts of most other people. Perhaps he was an unfortunate superhero, and this exponential growth of loneliness in relation
to linear time was his only superpower. Or perhaps it was simply this: that a few years before, back in a warm place where
the sun always hung in a bright blue sky, his life had been full of promise, of possibility, of the love of a woman who fluttered
like a bird in his heart. Now that promise was gone. The bird woman was gone. And the man didn’t know why. Perhaps that is,
most of all, why he was so lonely.

The tall man had brought the woman who was like a bird to this new place to make a life for her. Tliey had traveled thousands
of miles, from the sunny home where he had first beheld her, to where he waited now, the place with seasons and a heavy gray
sky, and a house he’d found for her to nest in and make her own. He believed this new home was where she would be happy. She
had been so unhappy in that sun-filled place, and he had come to believe that what she needed was seasons. He was a little
older than she,
but they were so young back in the sunny place and things were so bright that he could see deep into her eyes, and when he
saw into those two azure oceans, he saw she was asking something big of him, to always promise her things in this way: happiness
when there was no hope of happiness, promise when promise seemed out of reach. So he promised and he bought and he built and
he led. That was the way he thought he was supposed to love her.

But she left him alone in his house with the seasons. She left him soon. She told him, with tears in her eyes, that this was
a life she could not live. She was being called by the lure of the city, and he was not to look for her there, not ever, and
he was never to think it was his fault, because it was her fault that she could never be satisfied. He was to find some other
woman who was nothing like a bird, and this woman would love him in the way the bird woman never could.

She didn’t say whether she was coming back. But he knew that someday she would. He knew that all the kind words she’d said
to him in that sun-filled place had bound them together, no matter what she believed. So he sat. And he waited. Snow gathered
and melted and gathered again, and still the tall lonely man waited for the woman. He believed that if he waited long enough,
his wish could come true. His wish was simple: she would come back and stay. He believed this was the one thing that would
make him happy.

He got half his wish. He didn’t know what she’d been up to out there in the wide world until the winter night when he awoke
out of a stark sleep to a pounding on his door. It was cold in his house. So cold that he watched his breath move ahead down
the icy hallway as he padded toward the white wooden door.

He had been waiting so long that he was not surprised to see her. What surprised him had nothing to do with her. What surprised
him was how tall he was. He’d been alone for so long that he’d forgotten. He realized he’d underestimated the length of his
limbs, the distance between his head and the ceiling. It was in seeing her, and remembering how she had once fit against him,
remembering her smallness, her leanness, her bird body, that he could remember himself That he had a body to begin with. He
let her inside.

“You look terrible,” she said.

He offered her tea. She kept her coat on. She said, “I’m sorry.” He thought she was talking about having left him behind in
a lonely house. Now that she was back, he took a good look at her. He started to wonder if she would fit against him again.
Her face looked funny. He opened his mouth to speak, to tell her something small but kind, but then she started to cry. “If
I ask you to help me, do you promise you’ll keep it a secret?”

He shifted his weight from one long leg to the other. “Why?”

She turned to go. Her eyes had caught a wildness. “If I can’t trust you, then
—
“

“Wait,” he said. “I’ll help you. What do you need?”

“I need you to keep something for me. Promise. Not to tell a soul. “

“What is it?”

“Promise first.”

“Why?”

She turned to go again.

He promised.

She opened her coat and showed him.

[ OR ]

This Is a Strange Repose, to Be, Asleep with Eyes Wide Open

H
ELEN

Portland, Oregon
Saturday, October
5,
1996