Fugue State

by Brian Evenson

  Thus, I slowly began to acknowledge a connection to my ersatz relation, in bits and pieces at first, but slowly with more and more force. I claimed to hope that these assertions would pass as long-denied memories slowly bubbling to the surface. I was asked questions about my ersatz relative, which I answered to the best of my ability, my answers largely gleaned from what I had heard him say to me over the previous few hours. When I had to make guesses—names of other family members, specifics regarding various family successes and tragedies—I turned out to be unaccountably lucky.

  I used this same phrase, unaccountably lucky, in my first report. I expect it is one of the aspects of that report that the administration expects me to elucidate further in this, my second report. Unfortunately, I cannot elucidate it further. I want to emphasize again that I never for a moment believed in the charade I was performing. I simply guessed correctly. I cannot explain it myself, and this, above all, is something that continues to trouble me.

  In short, I performed well enough to be released into the custody of my ersatz relation. He promised to take me to his home, wash me, clothe me, feed me, care for me. I would, I thought, stay with him for a few days and then, once his suspicions were lulled, make my escape.

  What followed was a static period as far as my administrative responsibilities were concerned. True, I remained with my ersatz relation not for the two or three days I had intended, but for several months. This can be partly blamed on me: it had been some time since I had slept in a soft bed or eaten a decent meal. These pleasures I was reluctant to surrender. It also had something to do with the pleasure that my presence gave my ersatz relation.

  Yet neither of these would have been enough in and of itself to keep me there. Had it not been for the presence of a third factor, I wouldn’t have hesitated to leave.

  The third factor: my ersatz relation occupied a house identical to the house in which the subject of my first observation had lived. At first, I wrote this off as mere coincidence, as an odd feeling of déjà vu, but as I continued to inhabit the house, the feeling grew rather than diminished. The proximity of the house to a nearby park was the same as well, and the park itself offered the same round of benches. It had to be the same house. But how was this possible?

  I asked my ersatz relation how long he had lived in the house. Ever patient with my gaps of memory, he explained that the house had been in the family for nearly twenty years. I asked him if he had had a relation shot and killed in the adjacent park. True, he claimed, a man had been shot and killed in the park several years ago—a slow and painful death due to a bullet in the belly—but it had not been anyone he knew. And, he claimed, I—or B, rather—had disappeared shortly after this incident.

  Troubled, I stayed on. I did not understand what this could mean. It exhilarated me and unsettled me. By day, I took a slow stroll through the park, moving from bench to bench, observing those around me. Was I myself, I wondered, being observed? By night I lay in my room with the lights extinguished, peering out from between the slats of the blinds.

  What, I wondered, was the administration’s role in any of this?

  I couldn’t say.

  I observed my ersatz relation, looking for any sign that he was more, or less, than he seemed. But he seemed neither more nor less, only himself. I began to record his movements in a notebook to see if any pattern developed. No pattern developed.

  Where would it all lead?, I wondered, as I followed my slow round from bench to bench. Was this the administration’s way of punishing me for some failure in re my task as an observer? Would I, too, eventually shoot myself in the belly with a low-caliber handgun? What did the administration hope to gain by torturing me, if in fact they were behind whatever there was to be behind?

  The days that followed were nervous ones, involving a slow acceleration of doubt and fear. I made the circuit of the park benches faster and faster. I stopped sleeping. I was increasingly less myself. My ersatz relation regarded me with concern. Or perhaps suspicion. Or perhaps his regard was tainted by some third factor.

  This lasted until the day when, on my rounds through the park, I sat next to a man wearing a narrow tie and a pinstriped suit. He was eating a sandwich wrapped in brown paper. When he was done, he licked his fingers. He crumpled the paper up and placed it on the bench between us.

  As soon as he was gone, I picked up the paper and opened it. The mayonnaise, I saw, had leaked out to form a wavery line, hooked at the bottom like a shepherd’s crook. I turned the paper in my hands and saw the mark for what it was: a message: a question mark.

  •

  I stayed for a long time regarding the paper, the message written on it. I smoothed it flat on the bench, folded it, and secured it in my pocket. Instead of continuing my round by drifting to the next bench, I cut across the park and walked several blocks to the designated street corner. There I found an older make of car, nondescript save for the heavily tinted glass of its windows, a familiar set of digits on its license plate. A torn piece of paper fluttered between windshield wiper and windshield. I tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it and stepped inside:

  The car smelled of new leather, beneath which a stale, musty smell was only partly buried. A man wearing a tan raincoat and faun driving gloves, fedora tugged down low to shade his eyes, was sitting at the wheel, staring out the front windshield. He pressed a button and the door locks snapped down. He pressed another button and the engine started. Only then did he turn to look at me. He was, I saw, missing an eye.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well, what?” I asked.

  He nodded slightly. Turning away, he began to drive.

  We drove for some hours. I slept briefly, flickering in and out of consciousness. The man beside me drove with great precision, slipping smoothly through the busy traffic. We pushed out of the city and onto the open road, and then in and out of another city, and then through a third.

  At last we arrived at a city I recognized. We drove to the center of town, stopping before a dilapidated theater. He pressed a button. The door locks snapped open.

  An elderly but not unattractive woman was in the box office. I attempted to buy a ticket, but, pushing my money back at me, she waved me in.

  I waited for my eyes to adjust to the stuttering light. I could make out four other heads. I sat beside one and waited. When nothing happened, I stood and moved to sit beside another, who immediately moved. The third, however, turned slightly toward me, and I recognized on him the face of my second supervisor. He smiled slightly, just enough to show the brief and unexpected glint of a gold tooth.

  I was given a photograph and an address. I was to find the individual in question and pursue him. I was to report on his movements, on his meetings with his associates, on anything I found unusual. I was to keep a record of everything.

  A question was mounting in my throat. I tried to swallow it down.

  Did I understand? my supervisor asked.

  Yes, I understood.

  Did I have any questions?

  Only one: Where was I to find my supervisor when I needed him?

  He seemed to stiffen in the dark.

  “You didn’t understand,” he said. He was silent for a moment and then stood and left the theater.

  I went to the address I had been given, only to discover it to be that of the house I had already observed. The picture too was the same picture I had previously been given. I tried to convince myself I was grateful for a second chance.

  I climbed up into the fork of a tree and settled in to wait.

  I watched people come and go from the house, comparing each new face to the face captured in the photograph. None of the people corresponded to the face in the photograph. When I saw the park employee, I moved higher into the tree and remained hidden until he had passed.

  Near evening, I climbed down long enough to buy a bag of bread and several liters of water, then climbed back into the tree immediately after.

  For the next six days I remained i
n the tree, observing.

  The man in the photograph did not appear.

  Doubts began to assail me. Perhaps this is a bad likeness, etc.

  On the seventh day, I approached the house and kicked in the door. In the living room was a baby in a playpen who seemed not at all displeased to see me. The young woman in the kitchen, however, I was forced to strike once, very hard, to stop her from screaming. No one else was in the house, nor was there any sign that anyone else was living there. On the way out, I straightened the woman’s body on the kitchen floor, checking to make sure that she was still breathing. I considered taking the jovial baby with me but could see no way of justifying this to the administration.

  •

  Inside the movie theater, I solicited man after man until I found my supervisor. I filed my report, having mentioned the actions of the baby in a favorable light and the nonpresence of the subject in an unfavorable light. After I finished, my supervisor asked me to clarify a few small matters. Then he informed me I was to continue my observation.

  I told him there was no point in continuing the observation. The subject in question was not to be found at the address in question.

  Without acknowledging my words, he repeated that I was to continue my observation.

  At this juncture, I resigned.

  It proved not to be easy to resign from the administration. I was told to return to the theater the next day, where I found, in my administrator’s seat, a pile of forms. These I took with me to my tree in the park. I cautiously sorted through them, discarding those that seemed irrelevant to my case. The rest I filled out and left the following day on the same seat.

  From that moment on, I considered my connection to the administration severed. I found myself alone and adrift. I wandered from park to park, avoiding human contact except for moments when, crouched on my knees, hands miming prayer, I sat on the sidewalk with my hat in front of me, begging whatever meager coins I could. As I begged, I wondered what would happen next. Would I return to my city of origin and again see my family, assuming I could discover them again after so long? Would I return to my ersatz relation and piece together a substitute, ersatz life? Or would I simply continue forward, writing in notebooks not for the administration’s pleasure but for my own?

  I might have continued thus forever, drifting, slowly pondering the array of possibilities always open before me without ever definitively choosing one, had it not been for the appearance, two days past in my hat, among the worn, discarded coins of strangers, of a crumpled scrap of brown paper. Having been hurriedly balled up, it slowly expanded as I watched it. On it was traced in grease a notational siglum indicating, I realized, that the administration was not satisfied with my report, with my resignation.

  What more can I say? This second, supplemental report I hope will answer whatever questions remain. When I have finished it, I will once again find the theater. I will leave this, the last of my notebooks, on what seems to me the proper seat, and will flee. Where I will go, I don’t know, nor can I say what will become of me.

  I have, if I am to be honest with myself, felt myself observed for some time. Nothing I can place my finger on, just a deep, uneasy feeling: a ghost of movement, a flicker. Perhaps over time this will fade. Perhaps not.

  Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?

  Bauer in the Tyrol

  I.

  Late in the year, during a trip to the Tyrol, the sky so gray throughout the day that he felt himself to be living in a perpetual twilight, Bauer lost confidence in his ability to work with plaster. Stuck a dozen kilometers outside of Imst, his wife ill and watching him from her bed in the mountain inn, he spread newspapers over the parquet floor between the bed and the wall. Sitting on the bed, his back turned to her, his knees nearly touching the wall, he began mixing the plaster in a bucket stolen from behind the inn, bending the armature wire into slender standing figures which he set upon the windowsill. He could feel his wife’s eyes on his back, never for a moment did not feel them, and perhaps it was this, he told himself at first, which was causing him to lose confidence. He could feel her eyes and hear her cough, and could hear as well, when she was not coughing and even sometimes hidden within the cough itself, the way the air caught in her throat as she breathed. Through the window, past the stiff wire figures, he could see a sky as dull as a pewter plate, fog, scraggled pine swags. If he opened the window, he could hear the awful torrent of the river and the screeching of unfamiliar birds—sounds that dampened out, at least for an instant, the air catching in his wife’s throat. But sounds that proved in the end at least as irritating. He would reach into the bucket and scoop up plaster in his hand, smearing and clomping it onto first one armature and then another until there was an array of lumpy figures glistening on the sill. They were, at that moment, not bad, even bearable—standing figures, barely human, each no taller than a pencil and nearly as thin, as if seen from a great distance, hands to sides—but nothing special either, nothing he had not done before, no progress, a standstill. He would sit watching them as long as he could bear, a sheen condensing on the surface of the wet plaster—the air is wrong here, he told himself, it is not me, but a problem with the air. But soon, he took each figure up again, prodded it with his fingers or his pocketknife or a wire, gouged it down to nothing or pushed more plaster onto it until he had thoroughly ruined it. Then, stripping each figure down to bare armature, he would begin again, working from the gray of the morning sky to the gray of the evening sky without success, until plaster made his fingers too thick, until plaster was daubed all over the curtains and on the sill and on his legs too, the wire figures destroyed and cast aside.

  Lighting the wick, he lay on the bed beside his wife, trying not to touch her. He lay there regarding the ceiling, listening to the air catch in his wife’s throat. The quality of the air, he told himself again, was wrong, thus the failure of his figures in plaster, thus the way said air caught in his wife’s throat. She wanted nothing, would eat nothing. If he brought her food, she softly refused to eat it; water she sipped at once or twice and then pushed the tumbler away. Once or twice in the evenings, in the first evenings of their unexpected and sudden residence in the mountain inn, she would stop breathing for a moment, just long enough to gather her breath and open her mouth to speak. He should go out, she would suggest, he was not needed, he should get some fresh air. He hardly bothered to answer, just lay on the bed beside her, tightening his jaw slightly. Soon she stopped talking altogether, and when he looked over, her eyes were closed, her breath still catching in her throat in that terrible way that made him wish she were dead.

  He lay there until the candle guttered and went out, and some nights he kept lying there still, in the dark, his eyes open. One night, he stuffed bits of paper into his ears and covered them over with semihard plaster from the bucket. Then, he could not hear her, but he could still feel her beside him, the fevered heat steaming off her, her body turning there and there, and he could hear the sound of his own blood too loud in his ears, and that was as bad to him as his wife’s breathing, perhaps worse. The bed, too, he felt was too narrow, and to keep from touching his wife, her damp flesh, he found himself at the very edge of it, one shoulder hanging off. He would stay there and after a time either fall into a terrible, fitful state adjacent to sleep or lie there until he was certain he could not sleep, then get up, leave the room, go down the hall to the common bathroom, where he would sit all night, carving at a cake of soap with his pocketknife. The soap, too, frittered away, growing slowly smaller and smaller until he was working with a brittle splinter of it hardly bigger than his thumbnail, a tiny, vanishing human figure, hardly human at all. And soon he would cut once too deeply and it would crumble to nothing in his hands.

  The air, he had been told, was invigorating. When he and his wife had arranged to make this trip to the Tyrol, they
had been perpetually told, by everyone they met, that Tyrolean air was invigorating. He had not found it so, had found precisely the contrary: that the air was exvigorating, if such a thing could be said, there was something wrong with the air, a problem with the air. He would breathe it in, but each time he breathed out, it would take something from him. He would breathe sitting against the bathtub, his knife still in his hands, crumbs of soap over his hands and legs. He would breathe and then each time he exhaled he would think, there a little something, there a little something, and feel himself to be less and less. But, he would tell himself, it has not yet reached the point where there is little enough of me that that little something catches in my throat when it goes. He would close his eyes, thinking, there a little something, there a little something, and then for a few hours, on the bathroom floor, he would fitfully sleep.

  II.

  In the mornings, particularly, it was clear to him that his wife was dying, and each day it was clearer still. He knew he was waiting in this inn for her to be dead, that in the bed beside her he was waiting, knowing that each time he climbed into bed beside her again, a little more of her was dead. One day the breath would catch in her throat and stay caught, and then she would be dead for good. There was, he argued with himself in the morning, looking at his wife sprawled in the bed, no real moment between dead and not dead for the body, for the body was changing, always changing, but even as he said it he wondered if it were not a lie.

  And then, as the day progressed: plaster again, his back to his wife, the windowsill. No cough now, cough gone a few days back, a lessening, only the sound of air catching in her throat, and the body no longer so moist, harder to sense now with his back to it, closer in its dryness to bone. The catch in her throat still hard to hear, but in a different way now, like a clock. As he worked, as he destroyed the slender plaster figures one after the other, then built them up again, then destroyed them again, he found himself turning to look at her, her closed eyes, her face. The structure of her face seemed to have changed, he thought, the skin wrinkling differently, and it was hard to think of her in the same way, as the same woman, which made him, above all, a little less disgusted, a little more curious.