Fugue State

by Brian Evenson

  •

  The gestation of my current state of mind—a state of mind which led to my resignation—took place during my first assignment. I had been asked to note the movements of a silvery-haired gentleman who habitually sported a soiled trench coat. These movements consisted generally of a slow round from park bench to park bench. I had been noting his movements in a battered but sturdy notebook that fit snugly into the palm of my admittedly meaty hand. I wrote in a notational code devised by myself and my immediate supervisor—a code of such efficiency and concision that I needed less than a single page per day.

  This assignment lasted for the better part of a year. The subject was of regular habits and there was only slight variance in his movements. I arrived early in the morning to take the place of the night observer. I left in the early evening, when I was replaced by the same man. At the end of each day I walked to a designated street corner, there to find an older make of car, nondescript save for the heavily tinted glass of its windows. It was a different car each day but always had the same license plate. My instructions were to try the passenger-side door. If it was unlocked, I was to open said door and climb inside, delivering my report aloud to my immediate superior. If it was locked, I tore the day’s page free from the notebook and left it pinioned and fluttering between the windshield wiper and the windshield itself.

  This first assignment, it should be evident, was a simple one. The subject under observation made no effort to avoid me. Indeed, he seemed consistently unaware of my presence. As this attitude persisted for the full course of the observation, I became lulled into complacency. For this reason I was surprised and unprepared when the subject, between benches, removed a small-bore revolver from his pocket and shot himself in the belly.

  As my supervisor and I had developed no notational code for this behavior, I wasted valuable time rendering in longhand what I had seen. For the first time, I used more than a page, a fact which filled me with not inconsiderable distress. Once the event was recorded, it took me some time to decide what to do. In the end, thinking I might compromise my position were I to intervene directly, I called anonymously for an ambulance from a yellow call box enthicketed deep within the park. By the time this ambulance arrived, the subject had bled to death.

  The paramedics covered him with a sheet and loaded him into the ambulance, two facts I also recorded longhand in my notebook. After a failed attempt to pursue the ambulance on foot, I returned to the designated street corner to report. My subject had chosen to shoot himself well before the conclusion of my day’s observation; thus, no car was present, only a pair of orange cones banded with reflective tape.

  Returning to the park, I waited out the end of my observation period. I was not replaced at dusk by the night observer. After waiting for some time, I made my way back to the designated street corner and there found a car waiting. The passenger-side door was open. I climbed in.

  My supervisor sat silent while I began to read aloud from my report, his gloved hands resting delicately atop the steering wheel. When I reached my longhand description of the shooting, he lifted one hand slightly. I stopped speaking.

  “You did not employ our code,” he said.

  “The experience unfortunately was not such as to render itself into a coding with which I was familiar,” I said, somewhat uneasily.

  In a few instants he explained how one might elegantly extrapolate a relevant coding of the event in a way that was logical and immediately comprehensible. Why I had not seen it before, I couldn’t say.

  In letting his hand fall back to the steering wheel, he signaled for me to continue. He stopped me yet again when I explained my telephone call.

  “This,” he said, “constitutes a description not of his movements but of your own.”

  He raised similar objections to my failure to follow the ambulance.

  “These are hours,” he stated, “that shall remain forever outside of observation.”

  But, I explained, by this time the subject was dead.

  But by what authority, he wanted to know, had I determined that my observation should end with the subject’s death?

  For two days I stood outside a mortuary, at the end of which I was made to attend the graveside services and note the subject’s movements. These, as one might expect, were minimal at best. I watched his coffin being lowered into the open grave and listened impassively as a friend of the family spoke of an unknown assailant—obviously not realizing the subject had shot himself—and of the Good Samaritan who had called for the ambulance, which had come, alas, too late. He was followed by a parade of friends and relations eager to grieve, whose words rapidly reduced the man’s life to a half-smiling and impotent shambles. It disconcerted me to discover the ordinary banality of the fellow’s life, though I cannot say why.

  When I returned to the designated street corner after the funeral, I discovered a piece of paper fluttering between the windshield and the windshield wiper of the car in question, a paper which made clear that I was to report to another city, to another contact, to accept my second assignment.

  My new assignment was slightly more complicated than my previous one, which initially seemed to suggest that the administration had been pleased with how I had performed on my previous assignment—though I was at a loss to understand how exactly I might have pleased them. I was given a photograph and an address, told that I was to observe the individual in question and follow him, report on his movements, his associates. I was to keep a record but to meet with my supervisor only if I noted anything unusual.

  When I asked what exactly constituted unusual, my administrator, sitting beside me in the flickering half-light of the movie theater, made a vague gesture, hard to see in the dark. I was not, I was told, to wonder what I was looking for; when something was unusual, he assured me, I would know. Before I could inquire further, he softly squeezed my knee and stood, pushing past me and out of the theater.

  I went to the address I had been given, establishing a locus of observation among the branches of an oak tree in a park across the street from it. The house was small, the lot cut into the side of a hill. I watched people come and go, and compared each face to the picture I held in my hand. None of them were the subject. In the late afternoon I was discovered by a park employee, whom at first I ignored but who subsequently prodded me with a stick until I was forced to climb down. Shortly thereafter, he forced me to leave the park.

  In the three days that followed, I did my best to keep the house under observation, despite the continued harcelations of the park employee. I was tempted to kill him for the sake of the observation, and surely would have, had I not felt that his death was as likely to complicate my ability to use the park for observation as it was to facilitate it. I developed an elaborate series of maneuvers to avoid the fellow, quickly mastering the possible variants of his rounds and learning to anticipate his movements. He saw me at a distance once or twice, but by the time he came nearer, I had vanished.

  Despite these setbacks, my observation was rigorous. I could state with certainty that the man in the photograph did not enter the house, nor did he leave it.

  Perhaps, I thought, I have a bad likeness. But even considering the photograph a bad likeness, I still could not imagine that it represented anyone I had seen enter the house.

  Or perhaps, I thought, I had been given this assignment as a punishment.

  On the fourth day, not knowing what else to do, I approached the house and rapped on the door. A young woman—early twenties, baby slung on one hip, no resemblance to the man in the photograph—opened the door. I showed her the photograph, claiming I had found it fluttering on her front lawn. Had she or someone in her household dropped it? Did she recognize it? No, she said, it wasn’t hers. Did she recognize the man in the picture? Perhaps it was a neighbor of hers? I would, I claimed, gladly return the photograph to the rightful owner if only …

  She looked long and hard. No, she said, she was sorry, but she did not recognize the man.
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  I attempted to make contact with my supervisor by returning to the movie theater. I arrived early in the morning and waited outside until it opened. I went to the row where we had conversed before, and installed myself. There I remained until the theater closed, my sole encounter being not with my supervisor but with an elderly and uncircumcised man—the accuracy of this latter adjective made manifest to me through the fact that the fellow felt compelled to display for me his foreskin. I had neither encouraged nor discouraged him, simply remained staring straight ahead at the flickering images on the screen, waiting for my supervisor to arrive.

  I had, in my first meeting with my supervisor, paid no attention to the film. Indeed, all my energy had been focused on gathering the particulars of the job itself. Thus, I had no way of knowing if that particular film and the film I was now regarding on this, my second visit, were in fact the same. I can speak only to the particulars of the film I saw on this second visit and hope they cast some light on the film of the first visit. Or, rather, what I mean to say is that what I say about the film might have some significance to my understanding the purposes of the administration or it might not, might reveal only something about myself and my subsequent actions. And perhaps not even that.

  I was surprised to discover that I could make no sense of what I was seeing on the screen. There was occasionally an image that might have been a face, but it was so sunk within a general morass of light and sound that I could never fully apprehend it. There was a flux of what might have been bodies, but so abstracted as to have been equally likely scratches in an overexposed film stock. The images, if images they were, first entranced and then slowly unsettled me. At the moment when my distress had reached its height, the film flickered out and the houselights rose. The old man who had been beside me was gone; he had been kind enough to leave behind no sign of his presence. The few theatergoers—all men, curiously enough—filed out, save for me. A clubfooted employee armed with dustpan and broom swept the aisles and gathered garbage and then disappeared. A few minutes later the lights dimmed, a few dim men filed in, and the film began again.

  Or perhaps I should say, merely, a film began. I was unable to tell if I was watching the same film or a different one. I experienced the same deep play of color and light that at once threatened to dissolve into abstraction and cohere into discrete images without ever quite doing either one. But there was no particular moment I recognized. I had the odd sensation of both seeing something for the first time and seeing it again. This exhilarated me and then unsettled me. I watched the remaining showings without ever quite being at ease.

  Imagine me, then, seated, awaiting my superior, until the final showing of the evening came to an end and I was forced to leave the theater. I returned to the theater every day for a week, becoming more and more engrossed in the film or films, still unable to make sense of them. I kept to the same seat. My contact never appeared, though the uncircumcised man or someone not unlike him made several repeated forays down my aisle. On the eighth day, I found myself confronted not by the sort of film I had grown accustomed to but by a blaring and heaving image of a nude or nearly nude woman. Startled, I left.

  I searched my mind: was there something I was forgetting, some method of contacting my superior that I had neglected? No, I thought, there was not.

  •

  What followed was a slow and lost movement through the city as I considered what, if anything, I should do. I kept my eyes open for the man in the photograph, to no avail. I shuffled in and out of movie theaters throughout the city without finding anyone who resembled my superior. Having no subject whose movements I might record, I began to record my own movements, slowly developing my own notational code, a code, I will acknowledge, derived from that of my previous supervisor.

  I slept in the streets, plastered in newspapers. I became tattered, ungainly. I was awash, adrift, unadministrated.

  How long this period lasted, it is difficult to say. Perhaps several months, perhaps more than a year. There are whole months of which I have only the vaguest memories. Even in my notebooks, pages in which each of a day’s movements is carefully notated are followed by bursts of blank pages. I remember the act of notating certain days in the notebook but no longer recall the movements themselves: even as I was writing them, it was as if I were recording not my own movements but the movements of someone else.

  In a moment of lucidity, it came to me that it might be possible to regain contact with the administration through my previous administrator. I boarded the first bus. After a journey involving little or no sleep and the changing of buses on four or five separate occasions, I found myself back in the city in which I had fulfilled my first assignment. After a brief sleep within a green metal dumpster behind the bus station, I set off. I pursued a trajectory straight through the city along the main street until the surroundings began to strike me as familiar, at which point I began to wriggle my way about on side streets. By such means I stumbled onto a park not unlike the park in which my first subject of observation had shot himself. I discovered a house seemingly identical to the house he had occupied. I made my way through the park and down a side street, turned right, turned right once more, but at what should have been the designated corner I found no car.

  I sat on the curb and considered. Was it or was it not the designated corner? The name of the street was familiar, but for what reason it was impossible to say: perhaps it was merely a street I had often passed, or it bore the name of another street in another city. My notebooks, carefully coded, were of no help on this score—the relevant pages had all been long ago torn out and pinioned to windshields. What remained of my notebooks concerned only my abortive second assignment (also in a house near a park, but in a different city) and my period of self-observation. Is this or is this not the place? I wrote, and then held the pen poised above the paper to see what words might come next.

  Nothing came next.

  I am unable to say how much time had passed. At one moment, I was there on the curb, feet in the gutter, watching water swirling past the worn heels of my boots. The next, I was somehow in a park, conscious only of the fact that I had just heard, somewhere behind me, a voice.

  The voice spoke again, uttering, perhaps somewhat tentatively, a name. I removed my notebook and made a notation in it, a notation meant to represent the name that had just been uttered: B.

  I will be the first to admit that notation is not always enough. How much wiser it would have been had I recorded the name in full. But, having been scolded previously by my supervisor for moving from notation to longhand, I felt I had no choice.

  A hand touched my shoulder. “Is that you, B?” a voice asked, and uttered the name again. No, I said, not me, and tried to continue on my way. But the man attached to the voice kept tight hold of my shoulder and slowly turned me about until he was looking me in the face.

  “Ah,” he said. “It is you.”

  But no, let me state, for the record, that it wasn’t me. Or, rather, wasn’t him. B. Or I wasn’t him, I mean. I tried to state as much, but without real success. As I tried again to disengage myself, the man tightened his hold, speaking excitedly and quickly. I was to come with him, he told me. I must come with him. I began to feel very afraid, though even now I am hard-pressed to say why. I struck him once, hard, and turned and ran.

  I spent two days wandering the side streets, at night sequestering myself within a green metal dumpster. By the third day, I had convinced myself that I must flee the city. Perhaps, I told myself, if I returned to my second assignment, I would now understand what to do.

  I had seated myself in the proper bus when it was boarded by the man whom I had encountered in the park, accompanied by a policeman. There was nowhere for me to go. As I watched them come down the aisle toward me, I discreetly recorded their movements in my notebook.

  They stopped beside me, the man uttering the name again, like a greeting. I ignored him. This the man?, the policeman asked, and when the other man responded
in the affirmative, he asked me, You him? I did not answer. Both addressed me again, both were ignored. Eventually the policeman took my arm and tried to coax me from my seat, which caused me to wholeheartedly embrace the seat in front of me—much to the surprise and consternation of the man sitting in it. What followed, not necessarily in this order, were shouts, a rush and a sway, a torn shirt pocket, hands prying at fingers, a billy club, a terrified face. All of which culminated in my expulsion from the bus and my temporary sequestration within a police station. I had, I was told, a lot of explaining to do.

  I was asked for a name. As per administrative regulations, I did not surrender it. I was asked if I was not one B. No, I claimed, not he. Then what was my name? I chose not to answer. Did I know who I was? I remained mum. The other man, I was told, was my relation. I shrugged.

  The other man displayed a number of photographs—photographs of a man who, I was forced to admit, resembled me to no uncommon degree. Even his frozen gestures, at least as they were captured in the photographs, seemed to have been modeled after my own.

  I will insist again, as I did in my first report, that I was not for a moment convinced. I was not, and never had been, this B, was certain of that even though I have some small difficulty in assembling the details of my life prior to my employment by the administration. Yet, as my questioning continued, it became clear to me that the choice was not between acknowledging this ersatz relation and being released on my own recognizance; it was between acknowledging him and becoming award of the state. I could produce no fixed address, not having one, and I was unwilling to speak of my name or my admittedly obscure past. All of these things marked me as a danger and suggested I must be restrained. When this became clear to me, I reconsidered my strategies.