Fugue States

by Pasha Malla

‘That’s my boy.’ Matt thumped Ash’s back and returned to his breakfast. ‘And who knows?’ he said through a mouthful of cornflakes. ‘Maybe it’ll even inspire you.’

  —

  ON THEIR WAY TO THE LANDING PAD, as Matt told Dave-o about all the times he’d choppered over and into the Rockies and Klondikes, Ash wondered if he, too, had ever been in a helicopter before. But all he could picture was movies: presidential convoys and manhunts and criminal masterminds and Marine units lowering into some tropical heart of darkness. There seemed no place for a real person, let alone himself, in any of it.

  As if attuned to Ash’s thoughts, Matt added that, along with heli-skiing, he’d once played a paratrooper on a Second World War mini-series. ‘Gunned down before I hit the ground,’ he said. ‘But we still jumped from a real copter. Just not that high.’

  ‘Well get ready to get high today,’ said Dave-o with a grin. ‘Twenty-thousand feet and counting.’

  Sure enough, near the gondola on a shovelled-off patch of field sat an actual helicopter, its Indian pilot leaning on the tail boom in aviator shades. In his phlegmiest Schwarzenegger impression Matt screamed, ‘Get to the chopper!’ and broke into a stooped scuttle. With a nudge from Dave-o, Ash followed behind.

  The pilot, Govinder, a middle-aged Sikh with a terrific beard and military bearing, loaded their gear and outfitted his passengers with radios and helmets; Matt and Ash were stashed in the back with the supplies while Dave-o went up front. The engine coughed and the rotor thupped and the skids lifted up from the snow and, just like that, they were wobbling skyward. Matt smacked Ash’s knee. ‘Here we go, bro. Off to see the wizard—the wonderful wizard of cock.’

  Ash watched Gulmarg spread out below and shrink and vanish as they flew deeper into the Himalayas. It was cold amid the clouds. And oddly weightless inside the helicopter, as if the machine were dangled from above like a marionette. Ash found some blankets and bundled himself up in them and shivered. Across from him, Matt bore a sober expression of duty and service, the box of ashes cradled in his arms. Up front Dave-o chattered with the pilot, a garble of distortion in Ash’s headset, while the rotor deafened him in two registers: a low grumble and a high-pitched whine.

  Matt nodded at Ash as if in conspiracy. Ash nodded back. But Matt shook his head and mimed writing—forefinger and thumb pursed and scribbling the air. But Ash had never retrieved his manuscript from the lobby. For all he knew the concierge was reading it now, marking it up with edits. Maybe he’d even solve the riddle of the ending and publish it under his own name. Or, more likely, Ash thought, the cleaning staff had trashed it.

  The chopper banked hard into a valley and walls of ice and rock and pines veered up on either side. Outside the view was white and blinding, the mountains like the ruins of some lost civilization. Down they went. Ash’s breakfast sloshed starboard in his guts and puddled there. Then off came his helmet and he knelt before it, mouth gaping. After a minute he donned it again and looked up to Matt offering a thumbs-up.

  The pilot angled them toward a vast plain of whiteness. Matt watched their descent with a strange rapaciousness. Maybe the view was moving him to transcendent thoughts. Though he seemed to be enjoying the scenery less than willing it past. There was tenacity in his eyes. He gestured to Ash to switch channels on his headset.

  Ash flicked through feedback until Matt’s voice filled his ears: ‘Nearly there. Over.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ash.

  ‘Say over. Otherwise I don’t know if you’re done talking.’

  ‘Over, then.’

  ‘Roger. Though don’t say then at the end, it wrecks it.’ Matt pointed out the window. ‘Nearly at the ice cock. Over.’

  Ash looked: massive peaks crested up from the plateau. At the apex of one of them was their destination. ‘Are you going to walk all the way to the top? Over.’

  ‘We are, Dhar. Me and you. And my dad. Together. Over.’

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

  Over, Matt mouthed.

  ‘Over!’

  ‘It’s what he wanted, can’t let him down. Over.’

  The helicopter lowered, the rotor droned. Snow gusted up from below. And Matt turned sober again, bowing and holding the ashes to his forehead. Muttering followed, perhaps a prayer. Then, as the skids nudged the ground, he kissed the box and tucked it inside his jacket.

  ‘Time to make some memories, bro,’ said Matt, zipping up. ‘Over and out.’

  —

  FROM THE HELICOPTER’S OPEN DOOR Ash watched Matt strike a mountaineering pose in the snow: one leg up on a drift, ski poles planted at his sides. After a reverential moment he produced that grey box from his jacket and held it aloft, as if offering its contents to the gods—a blessing? a sacrifice? With competing feelings of embarrassment and respect, Ash ducked back inside the cabin. Dave-o was dealing cards to himself and the pilot.

  ‘You’re not coming?’ said Ash.

  ‘Nah, mate,’ said Dave-o. ‘Seems like a private thing for you two. We’ll give you a couple hours? Snow’s not too deep so the hike shouldn’t take you much longer there and back, strapping young lads that you are. Then we’ll boot back to Gulmarg and get in some runs before tea-time.’

  ‘You think Matt might want to go alone?’

  Dave-o began collating suits. ‘Wouldn’t you want your best mate along if that was your old man in the box?’

  Ash peeked outside. Matt was on his knees. He pressed his forehead to the box, then the snow. ‘Om,’ he moaned, rump in the air. ‘Om.’

  ‘Best to hurry up, though,’ said Dave-o. ‘Bit of a front coming in. Nothing catastrophic but snow could make the walk back down a little dire.’

  Ash filled a daypack with a thermos of tea and a tin of biscuits, smeared on some chapstick and headed out into the frosty alpine air. Matt was still in a crouch, swaying slightly, either sizing up or worshipping the mountain. His cheeks were roseate. Frost matted his eyelashes and beneath them his expression was forlorn. He looked like a missing child from the side of a milk carton, that same sad innocence ironized with doom. He stood, patted Ash on the shoulder and with the grey box gestured to the cluster of rocks at the top of the rise: the cave, the temple. The penis made of ice.

  ‘You ready to do this, bro?’ Ash was given no time to reply. ‘Good. Let’s go.’

  Matt led the way, sinking to his knees in the snow, while Ash goose-stepped through the hollows he left behind. It was slow going, cold on the face and hot through the polyester-clad body, and soon Ash was breathless. A single cloud drifted overhead like a party balloon batted from one side of the valley to the other.

  Twenty minutes later the helicopter had receded a hundred yards and several more clouds had settled above.

  ‘We’re barely getting anywhere,’ Ash gasped.

  ‘You’re the one who told me how holy the temple is,’ said Matt. ‘You’re the one who said we should bring my dad’s remains here.’

  ‘All the way to the top, though?’

  ‘Take this for me?’ Matt handed him the box and Ash felt its weight: a man was in there. ‘If you want to turn back, that’s fine. I can keep going on my own.’

  ‘No,’ said Ash, zippering the ashes into the pack and shouldering it. This plan, however inane, tethered him to some previous version of himself—a dedicated friend, someone trustworthy and certain. He would not let that surer Ash down. ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Matt, and he turned and resumed the climb.

  A breeze picked up, whistling and loosening the snow in whorls. Up top, the cave became visible, as big as a cathedral. But Ash could make out nothing inside, no lingam or anything else. Just gaping blackness, like the unhinged jaw of a monstrous fish trolling the ocean floor for prey.

  Toward it they trudged. And Ash was struck by a line from that novel he was writing, the one he’d possibly lost in the hotel: Up our hero went amid sunlight blazing like fire off copper. Except now the sun was vanishing, with clouds drawing in from all sides
with the look of suds sucked down a drain.

  ‘Dave-o said it might snow,’ Ash called ahead.

  Matt stopped, swivelled at the waist. ‘Bro, we’re in the mountains. And it’s January. Of course it might snow.’

  ‘No, but what about a whiteout like when we were skiing?’

  The comment was dismissed with a disappointed wag of the head; Matt turned and kept going. Back down the path the helicopter had the look of a toy on the plateau. Clouds lidded the valley. The wind was really singing. And as Ash watched Matt forging ahead the first few flakes of a snowfall twirled down from above.

  But Matt was relentless. He moved with predatory resolve. Watching him, Ash was struck by—was it?—a memory: Matt as a kid attacking a pinata in a blindfold; a smashed window, a hospital visit, sixteen stitches up his forearm. And then an admission that he’d been able to see the whole time.

  Had this happened? Was this real? Ash called out to Matt to stop, but he was out of earshot, hiking resolutely up the slope. The snow fell steadily now in great sheets of lace.

  Ash caught up at a concrete landing. A handrail protruded from the drifts.

  ‘Stairs,’ said Matt, toeing the first step. ‘Snow’s packed solid over them. It’ll be easygoing from here.’

  ‘Wait though,’ said Ash. ‘I remembered something. About you. I think?’

  Matt seemed not to hear him; his face pointed up the hill as if magnetized. Snowflakes lit in his eyebrows and clung there.

  ‘Did you hear me? I think my memory’s coming back.’

  ‘Good,’ said Matt. ‘Now let’s move.’

  The surface was glassy and slippery enough in spots to warrant a firm grip on the handrail and a careful, measured ascent from one step to the next. But even so the walking here was easier than that laborious plod through the drifts. Pursuing Matt up the path Ash replayed that pinata scene, trying to expand the memory and give it some context. But nothing preceded it; nothing came after. And where was he, himself, while Matt was careening blindly about? His viewpoint seemed so peripheral: an observer, a witness. The memory seemed more Matt’s than his own.

  Matt stopped to announce that they’d reached the homestretch: only another kilometre to go. How he knew this Ash wasn’t sure, and the temple was still just a lightless hollow barely visible through a snowfall as dense as video static.

  Ash grabbed Matt’s sleeve. ‘Did you ever go through a window at a birthday party, trying to hit a pinata?’

  ‘Bro, plenty of time to chat later. Gotta keep going.’

  And he was off again.

  ‘Wait,’ Ash cried. ‘Seriously, did that happen or not? When we were kids?’

  Without stopping Matt called over his shoulder: ‘I’m trying to bury my dad here, okay? Would you shut up about parties and just frigging help me already? Sheesh.’

  So Ash kept following, securing one foot then the next, clutching the railing to guide himself up. Behind them the plateau was lost in mist and swirling snow. The helicopter was no longer in view. Nor was anything more than twenty feet away.

  ‘We should hurry,’ said Matt, squinting up and down the slope.

  ‘We should go back. I can barely see anything.’

  ‘There’s goggles in that bag. Get them out.’

  Along with these Ash retrieved the thermos, which chugged steam when he opened it. The tea flowed hotly down his throat and through his chest. He offered it to Matt, who shook his head. Snow that had gathered on the upturned hood of his parka tumbled loose in a little avalanche. ‘We’re wasting time,’ he said.

  From below came two blasts on an air horn, and then two more.

  ‘They’re calling us back,’ said Ash, donning the goggles. ‘We should go back.’

  ‘It’s not far, maybe five hundred metres. Quit being such a pussy.’

  Two more blasts from below—urgent, a little frantic.

  ‘Hey, come on,’ said Ash. ‘We’ve got another day here. We can try again tomorrow.’

  Matt shook his head; his smile was mocking, almost pitying. ‘You can’t even see that I’m trying to help you, can you?’

  The goggles were fogging. Ash removed them, huffed breath on the lenses, scrubbed them with his sleeve: streaked, hopeless.

  When he looked up Matt had his hand out. ‘Just give me the ashes.’

  What else to do? Ash handed him the pack with that grey box inside. Wordlessly Matt shouldered it, turned, and continued climbing into that swarm of white hissing all around. His big body became a silhouette, fading as it moved up and away—and then it vanished, swallowed by snow.

  A single, long wail from the air horn echoed mournfully up the mountainside.

  Then silence. Stillness, save the churning blizzard.

  But the handrail was a lifeline into it, and it led to a footbridge under which in warmer seasons surely ran a creek. And here the fog cleared a little, providing a view, like a tunnel, all the way to the top. Matt grabbed a crag of rock and scrabbled atop an ice-encrusted boulder and stood there looking back down the path through the snow.

  And what did he see?

  Nothing, there was nothing to see.

  So he turned once again and headed further up the mountain.

  THE LAST TIME ASH SAW HIS FATHER was three months before Brij died, in the university town of Kingston. The medical school there had invited Brij to deliver the keynote at some conference and he’d emailed Ash a week beforehand: It is halfway between Montreal and Toronto. I have a hotel. You can stay and read there. Or work. We will have supper each night also. The email, sent from his McGill account, had been typical Doctor Dhar, brusque and factual, with the staccato cadence of a telegraph. Though Ash detected something lonely, and a little sad, about it too.

  Deal, Ash wrote back. But we’re also going to do something fun. My treat.

  Ash took the train. Brij was waiting for him at the station in his idling Volvo. He was exasperated; Ash was sixteen minutes late.

  ‘These bloody Pakistanis,’ said his father, performing a violent three-point through a fleet of taxis. ‘All hanging around jabber-jabbering.’

  Ash belted up. ‘The cab drivers? They’re just trying to do their job.’

  But Brij’s fury had been unleashed. ‘It’s Friday, shouldn’t they be at mosque?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ash. ‘Enough.’

  Wheeling out of the parking lot, Brij cut off a truck. The burly driver’s glare fell upon Ash: one day, he’d long been sure, he would end up taking a punch for his dad. And Brij was oblivious, shaking his fist at the next car in his way. He had no idea of the enemies he made, elbowing his way through the world.

  ‘I got jumped here, once,’ Ash told him. ‘Not a place to mess around.’

  His father switched lanes, failing to signal or check his blindspot. The driver of an inconvenienced station wagon laid on the horn, which Brij either ignored or was incapable of hearing.

  ‘On Princess Street,’ Ash continued. ‘I was visiting Chip when he was in teachers’ college. We were walking back to his place after the bar and this car full of guys pulled up and just started screaming at us. One of them had a baseball bat.’

  ‘What had you done?’

  ‘Done? Nothing. That’s the whole point. That’s what “getting jumped” means.’

  ‘You did nothing?’ Brij snorted. ‘That seems unlikely. You’re always saying things you shouldn’t. You always provoke. I’m sure you made some stupid comment, something to make your friend laugh.’

  ‘Would you listen to me? These guys came out of nowhere!’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Ugh, you’re impossible. This isn’t even the point of the story.’

  Up ahead, the right lane was closed, so Brij floored the gas, skipped the stalled traffic, and insinuated himself back in at the last minute.

  ‘This isn’t Calcutta,’ said Ash. ‘There are rules of the road.’

  ‘What “rules”? I’m supposed to slink about like we’re at a bloody funeral? This is why
these Canadians never accomplish anything. They’re such cowards, with their politeness and etiquette. They never seize the day!’

  ‘What’s Latin for “being an asshole”?’

  Brij swatted at his son. ‘Idiot, who’s the asshole?’

  Ash laughed, ducked. ‘Anyway. So these meatheads pile out of the car and swarm us. Six of them. And the one guy, their leader, steps forward, literally rolls up his sleeves, and—get this—says, “Which one of you faggot chinks is first?” ’

  ‘Chinks?’

  ‘Chip is Korean.’

  ‘But you—you’re not a chink.’

  ‘No. Nor gay. Neither is Chip. I don’t think?’

  ‘They thought you were a homosexual Chinese?’ Now Brij was chuckling.

  ‘Not sure how much cultural diversity they got those days in Kingston.’

  ‘The academics too,’ said Brij. ‘At this conference, when I arrived to sign in, the first thing they recommended was the best Indian restaurant in town.’

  ‘Naturally. I mean, where else would a brown man eat?’

  ‘As if I want to stuff my face with Bangladeshi slop.’ Brij thumped the wheel. ‘Oh, good-good, yes sahib, delicious butter chicken, birdie-birdie num-num.’

  ‘You should have dropped to the ground in the lotus position, right there, and told him you needed a moment with Vishnu.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Brij.

  There was more to Ash’s story about the attack: a moral, maybe, or at least a kind of punchline. But his dad had derailed things. Brij had never been much for stories or jokes; he couldn’t even recap a film in a coherent way. He seemed, like a child, more taken in by textures and tone: he loved James Bond, for example, but less for the twists of plot than the atmosphere, the style. His memory for films was accordingly terrible, and that night, when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came on TV in the hotel, Brij turned hostile. ‘This is the one with the monkey brains. Banned in India. These racist Americans!’

  ‘No,’ said Ash. ‘That was Temple of Doom. This is the one with Sean Connery.’

  ‘What? This is Indiana Jones!’

  ‘Yes. Part three of the trilogy.’