Set Me Free (42 page)

Once upon a time, there was a boy who became a man but was still a boy, except for on the outside. This boy did as the father
said. This boy went east to boarding school. He did the father proud. He got the highest marks in every class. He learned
the rules of all the games that the other boys knew
—
lacrosse, tennis, crew
—
and all the invisible games as well
—
girls, money, drugs. By the time he finished boarding school, he had been admitted to the most prestigious university in the
land. The father was very proud. He sent the boy a generous monthly check in off white, watermarked linen envelopes, with
the father’s name and address hand-pressed on the back. The boy earned the nickname “the Indian Prince.”

As the father had advised, the boy forgot his grandmother. He forgot his mother. Until the day he thought he saw his mother
again, looking like a hobo, begging men for food. That was when he knew he had forgotten how to love.

This matter of what love was, and whether or not the boy could do it, had already come to haunt his life. He thought he’d
fallen in love with a girl, the girl who was with him on the day he thought he saw his mother. But the girl turned out to
be terrible. When the boy discovered she was terrible, he thought that would mean he didn’t love her anymore. But what it
really meant was that he started to love her in earnest. This real love was selfish, and cold, and unkind. So perhaps he had
not fully forgotten how to love. Perhaps he had only forgotten how to love well.

Let it be noted that as the boy pleased the father and did exactly what the father said, the boy also thought he fell in love
with Poetry and Prose. He found salvation in words, with the lingering sigh of sentences, with deft,
squat punctuation, with prosody, with scansion, with rhymes across the caesura. He fell in love with the idea of telling people
“I am a writer.” He fell in love with the idea of receiving an advanced degree in the esoteric. The boy told the father about
this. “I will never be a lawyer. I will never be a doctor, or an astronaut, or a senator, or a scientist. “The father stopped
sending checks.

Anger had been building a house around the boy for some time now. Everywhere the boy walked, he was slapped with either the
sweet figlike memory of the girl, or with the stark white silence of his own inevitable anger, and the combination of these
two loveless things made a tight, hard knot inside of him. He began to think of the knot as the Dread. The Dread glinted at
him in café windows. It reflected back at him every time he passed a mirror. It clanged down on his head each time the bell
tower struck the hour. The Dread was what reminded the boy that he had no home. That he had no friends. That he had no way
to love no one.

He found himself at the airport. The blond woman behind the counter examined him with scientific fascination. “It’ll cost
you three thousand dollars to get on the next flight. “

The boy slapped a thick stack of bills on the gray-flecked ticket counter, and the Dread flicked her a slick smile.

It was night when the boy got to the house of the father. The house was dark, and the boy believed that no one was home. But
the father was waiting in a chair, in the dark, when the boy came in the door. It was as if he had a sixth sense for estranged,
deranged, enraged offspring. “You’re no writer,” the father said.

Words like that fed the Dread. It coursed and cursed through the boy’s veins. He said, “And what would you know about it?”

“Writers sit at home and write.”

The boy wanted the chance to get physical. But the father was sitting still, perched in an armchair, with a sincere smile
on his face. The boy held his luggage tight in each hand. “I don’t care what you think.”

“Of course you do. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

The boy would not be confused. “You’re an asshole,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“I need to know something.”

The father nodded as if the boy were asking him permission.

“Why did my grandmother make you come get me? I know she didn’t like you. But she did something to make sure you’d take me
in after she died. I need to know what it was.”

A smile slunk across the father’s face. “She made me promise.”

“I know,” said the boy. The Dread was whirling out the top of the boy’s head, like a tornado tightening the room. It was a
mighty Dread. “I need to know about that promise.”

“She made me promise I would stay away from you.”

The boy’s grandmother came back in a flood of sound and smell: her tobacco breath, her froglike crackle, her cough rattling
him awake. All this time he had done it because of her. Even if he’d forgotten why, at the root of him, she had been the reason
he’d obeyed this father, done exactly what was expected. It all came together: the father was the reason the boy had become
the Dread. The father was the reason the boy could not love.

“You lied to me,” the boy said, and spat upon the freshly polished floor.

“Of course I did. You are my son.”

“Stay away from me.”

“You’re not a writer,” the father called to the boy’s departing back. “You care too much. You’re meant to tell our stories,
but not to a blank page. To our people. You’re just like me. That’s why you came back to me. Your grandmother kept us apart.
But I knew I could teach you to be a great man. To lead our people.”

“You should have left me,” the boy said over his shoulder. “I didn’t want this. You lied to a dying woman.” It was the last
time the boy saw the father alive.

The father died that very morning. The boy was out on the highway by then. When he got to his grandmother’s home, where his
people lived, the news met him there. “He’s been sick for months,” the people told him. “Didn’t you know?”

That the father had died only made him more of a hero. The boy didn’t wish to speak of the words he’d cast against the father.
He did not wish to
tell that story. It was no one’s business. But that story was the story every person wanted to know. Yes, the father had been
ailing. Perhaps he had not told the son that he was ailing, but wasn’t it a miracle that the son had somehow known? Everyone
wanted to know: what loving words had been said to bring the people’s hero to the land of peace?

It was not until much later that the boy saw his curse: he could never tell the story of what had happened that night. Not
a soul could know. But it was the only story the boy had. And the father had been right: the boy had been born to tell stories.
People wanted him to tell them. They wanted him to begin with the story of that night.

It was then that the boy saw how right the father was. If the boy told the people anything
—
of the Dread, of the girl, of the grandmother, of the love he could not feel
—
they would listen to him. They would follow him. That would make him just like the father.

So the boy shut his mouth with drink. He brawled and yawned and shat. He wasn’t good for much else. He had to spend all his
energy focused on keeping the stories inside. Sometimes they were too much for him to bear. But he was not going to let them
out. He was not going to become what the father had stolen him to make.

That first night, before the boy knew the father was dead, he left the father’s house and the city the father had made his
own. The boy walked down to the highway and stuck out his thumb. The highway led to his grandmother’s house. He stood for
hours in the brittle darkness, waiting for his ride. Dawn came as a bloody line across the sky, as if a knife had been drawn
across the bruised throat of night. Day began to startle. Across the city, the father drew his last breath. The boy shivered.
“I will not lead them,” he thought. “But I will go home.”

[OR]

O Brave New World, That Has Such People In’t

A
MELIA

Stolen, Oregon
Monday, May 12, 1997

A
melia went into the wilderness. She did this twice: once, on the night that her father was burned on over 85 percent of his
body, and again, nearly a week later. The first time she was gone for only a few minutes. The second time she was gone for
twenty-four hours.

She stepped away from the party, and then the barn, to get away from Victor and Wes. It took the police a long time to reconstruct
what had happened at the party, and as is always the case, not every story matched up, so we’ll never know for sure. But this
is approximately what occurred: Amelia, distraught by the fight between Victor and Wes, ran toward the ancient barn at the
edge of Where-We-Have-the-Parties. Victor caught up with her, but she was inconsolable and ran into the barn alone. Victor
followed her in, but when he called her name, she did not answer, and it was too dark and full of cobwebs and debris for him
to go on. He was cautious and sorry. Amelia, on the other hand, fueled by her frustration, was oblivious to the spiders, to
the rusty nails, to even Victor’s voice pleading for her, so she decided to slip through a hole in the far side of the barn.
“Let them fight,” she thought. “I’ll be gone.”

Victor was still searching for her when he heard Wes calling for Amelia outside. Wes had a torch in his hand, and Victor was
to say
later that it looked like the end of
Frankenstein,
when the townspeople have come for the monster. It was hard for him to see the faces of his friends in the shadows, and everyone
was talking over one another, so it was confusing. Wes was there to help Victor look for Amelia, but Victor said he didn’t
need any help, and soon another fight had begun, this one with words. Wes lunged for Victor, Victor dodged, and Wes and his
torch launched into the side of the barn, all brittle wood and dry beam. Soon the fire had begun.

“Amelia!” Victor called, but by this time she was a hill beyond them, heading east. She sat down and looked up at the stars.
She needed some peace and quiet. Her back was toward Where-We-Have-the-Parties, or she would have seen the orange glow from
the blaze much earlier.

Immediately, Victor and Wes and the other children lost track of which side they’d been on. They sobered up and took turns
running into the doorway of the barn and calling Amelia’s name. Soon the whole structure was engulfed in flames. It was awe-inspiring,
the speed and heat with which the fire licked the old barn. The children stepped back. They mentioned forest fires. Victor
was the only one running close to the building now, and some of the other boys tried to hold him back, but he fought them
off.

Then Elliot arrived. It was good to see an adult who knew how to solve problems. Elliot gathered, from the jumble of words
flying toward him, that Amelia was trapped inside, in the fire. They had tried to save her, especially Victor, but the barn
was not a barn anymore, it was a fire, and there was no way to step inside it.

All the children tell it like this: Elliot didn’t stop to think. He didn’t say a word. He just ran into the flames. Faster
than they knew how to stop him.

Out in the wilderness, Amelia began to hear something strange. Pops and groans from behind her. She stood and turned and saw
a glow so bright she thought it was the headlights of cars driving up the hill after her. But then she smelled the smoke,
and then she was running back up the hill, and then she was standing in sight of the
blaze. She ran around it, beginning to make out people in the shimmer of the heat. A girl saw her and called her name, and
one by one, the others fell back at the sight of her. One of them told her that her father was in there, trying to find her,
trying to save her, and Amelia didn’t understand. It took six or seven others saying the same thing for her to believe it.
Lydia found her in the middle of the crowd and wrapped her in her arms, and then the police arrived, and soon after, Helen
and I were upon her, and then came the firemen, and the water, and sometime in there, her father was found, but she was not
watching because she could not bear to see.

T
HE REST OF
the night and into the morning, there were the hospital and the police and the statements to be made. We were all exhausted.
We were all sad. But Amelia was particularly functional, offering to make us peanut-butter sandwiches and cups of tea. She
stayed responsible and together for days. I knew we were in trouble.

Each day Helen drove her back from the hospital in the early afternoon, while I kept a vigil at Elliot’s bedside. When they
got back to the Bugle House, Amelia would always take a nap. “Feel free to lie down with me,” she added. But Helen had phone
calls to make and food to prepare. Seven days later, Amelia convinced her to lie down beside her. Helen watched as the girl
drifted into a long, still sleep. Only then did Helen close her eyes too, with the girl safe beside her.