There was plaster on his hands and on the sheets, on the curtains and on his trousers and shirt. Each morning, when the maid came, she would, shaking her head, rub at the curtains with a damp cloth and change the sheets. As the day wore on, as night came, while glancing at his wife, while mangling the plaster figures, he continued to think of her, the maid, rubbing at the curtains, shaking her head. In the bed, he stared at the ceiling and waited for morning, and listened to his wife’s breath catch, and thought about the maid, rubbing and shaking, shaking and rubbing, and, suddenly, somehow, he was asleep, decently for the first time in many nights. He knew it only because just as suddenly he was awake and light was pouring into the room and the maid was shaking him, trying to shake him out of the bed so as to help her change the sheets. He had been awake, then awake again, with nothing in between, and no memory of anything, almost as if dead, he thought, and then thought, no, and then thought simply that there was no way to know, no as if when it came to being dead. The maid untucked the sheet and pushed it to the center of the bed and then put the new sheet on the half of the bed that was now bare, his half. The maid’s face, he saw, was the same as it had been yesterday, same as it had been the day before. Only his wife’s face was changing. Unless his own face were changing too. He had no mirror, not in the room; there was a mirror in the bathroom, but it was affixed to the wall, screwed into place, and what he needed was to see his face here, in the room, beside his wife. He put his hands under his wife and rolled her onto one shoulder and then over onto her stomach and then over onto the other shoulder, and then held her there while the maid got the old sheet all the way off and tugged the new sheet on. His wife’s breathing was fainter now. She hadn’t reacted to being rolled about on the bed. Bauer wondered if she would react if he kept rolling her, rolled her off the bed and around the room, perhaps even out into the hall and into the bathroom, where the mirror was, where he could look in the mirror. But no, that was a crazy thought, and he tried not to think it again as he went about rolling his wife back into her usual place.
III.
The air was wrong, he was still certain the air was wrong, but he was no longer certain it mattered. He mixed the plaster without scraping out the bucket first, and there were, as a result, in the plaster, hard clumps and bits of crust. He stared at his wife. Her face, he thought, was different than it had been a day prior, more settled. The fragile beauty of the skull, the tongs of the jawbones, the grooves of the teeth: all almost seemed to show through the skin, and he felt he should be somehow terrified, but he was not. There was a calm to the room, he realized, as he continued idly to mix the plaster with his hands, but he could not have said why. As he continued to feel it, the sense of calm, he wondered Have I changed? Am I wearing a different face? No, he thought, I have always had the same face. But did it finally really matter? Even if he had the same face, he had entered a new space, he thought: being with this woman who was dying had put him up against life in a different way, but perhaps muffled him, or perhaps simply revealed that what he had always seen as sharp and clear—what the eye saw—was hardly clear at all. It was, he told himself, the inauguration of a new aesthetic moment, a sign perhaps that his ability to work with plaster had returned. Yet when he began to work with the armature, the plaster went on clomped and crusted and would do no more for him than it had done before, and he knew that he would get no further, and he wondered if he would ever get any further. And it was in thinking these thoughts that he realized, with a start, that what he was hearing—or rather not hearing—was his wife’s breath no longer catching in her throat.
Uneasy, he turned away from the sill and put his hand on her neck. But no, he could still feel blood torpidly pulsing, and when he slid his hand between the sheet and her chest, he could feel that her heart, too, was beating as well.
He sat watching her. Did he love her?, he wondered. The question seemed somehow irrelevant, for it was now a question not of love but of both of them being in the same room together, the air bad, one of them with a face that was changing and continuing to change from instant to instant, the other with a face that changed not at all. It was the only relevant connection, if it was a connection at all. On her neck he could see the white daubs left by the plaster on his fingers, his white fingerprints like strangulation marks, and there were daubs of plaster on his clothing and on the drapes and on the sheets, too, and perhaps all over the room, and for a moment he thought that now what he should do was to spread plaster over her face and preserve it, not a death mask but a dying mask, but he knew that by the time the plaster hardened there would be an altogether different face underneath. He started for a moment to see if he could model the face in plaster, but he had lost his ability to work with plaster, plaster wouldn’t do, it was the wrong medium, and in the end he went down the hall and washed his hands in the bathroom sink. And when he came back, he took up pencil and paper and began to draw.
IV.
In an instant, almost immediately, he had captured her profile, almost too easily somehow, yet when he looked at her again he saw it was not the same face and he drew it again, on top of the first profile. He kept drawing, adding to the profile the rest of her and the bed, and he kept drawing, the lines multiplying. He watched the head of his wife being transformed, the nose becoming sharper, the cheeks growing more and more gaunt, the open, almost immobile mouth seeming to breathe less and less. He kept drawing. He had never really seen his wife, he realized, and he realized further something that unsettled him, that he wasn’t seeing her now. But there was nothing for it but to keep drawing. Toward evening, he was seized by a sudden panic in the face of her oncoming death, and looking down at the paper he realized, through the haze of lines, that every image was being destroyed but in that destruction something was arising unlike anything he had ever seen. A bed, a harrow of lines, the many ghosts of his wife, and all of them somehow, in their erasures and obscurements, beginning to add up to his wife herself. He kept drawing, trying to bring her out. But she was dead; there was no longer anything to bring out. He hesitated, trying not to look at her, looking instead at his own solitary and solid hand, afraid to let go of his pencil, wondering what line he could possibly bear to draw next.
Helpful
It was a freak accident, a wire snapping off the load and whipping back to slash across his face, breaking his nose, tearing open both his eyes. They took him jouncing in the back of a pickup truck to the hospital, where a doctor packed the nose with cotton and straightened it while another doctor removed first the right eye, then the left. Two days later, his wife came to get him and helped him out to the car, and drove him home.
Is there anything I can do? his wife kept asking him.
No, he would say each time, no.
His face ached. The nose that had been reset and packed with cotton ached. Every eight hours his wife came and removed the cotton by tugging it out with her fingernails and then packed the nose again. After awhile the bleeding stopped entirely. The outer rim of each orbit ached, despite the sedative, and he imagined if it weren’t covered in bandages and he still could see, he would see the flesh beside them bruised black.
Do you need anything, honey? his wife asked.
No, he said.
His eyelids felt strange to him with his eyeballs removed: deflated. With the bandages covering them, he could not tell if he was opening and closing them or trying and failing.
Honey? his wife said. Anything?
No, he said. No.
•
After a week, he climbed out of bed. His room, reduced only to touch, had gone strange around him; a dresser that he would have guessed was four steps from the bed was in fact two. When he was certain he was at the door leading out of the room, he was in fact at the closet door, so that as he passed into what he thought was the hall, he found himself suddenly muffled on both sides by what it took him a moment to figure out were coats.
Honey, his wife said, anything the problem?
No, he said, and
felt his way out of the closet, carefully shutting the door behind him.
But after a few more days, the place congealed for him, and a few days later became fully solid. He could walk from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the bathroom to the hall, from the hall to the living room and back again, without difficulty. He was beginning to sense things. He was becoming a different person.
He still seemed to see flashes of things, little crackling glimpses, as if the nerves in his sockets hadn’t yet realized his eyes were missing. Half-seen things, ephemerae, ghosts darting through a dark space. His wife, too, he could hear creeping about, a little like a ghost as well, staying out of his way but often waiting in abeyance, ready to ask what she could do, how she could help. It was a habit of speech she had gotten into and couldn’t seem to get out of.
Anything I can do?
How can I help?
What do you need, darling?
No, he would say. Can’t. Nothing.
They were living in the same house, but for him it was no longer the same house anymore. It was as if they were living in two different houses that overlapped the same space, himself and his wife knocking slightly against each other as they passed through two different places. She lived in a world made of the images of things. He lived in a subtler world where he could hear a whispering noise and know it was the sound of her thumb rubbing against her finger. How could anyone who was still human hear that? It was as if he and his wife weren’t even the same species anymore.
Sweetheart? she said. Anything I—
—no, he said.
He heard her suck in her breath. He waited for her to speak, but she did not, just stood there, silent. He wondered what sort of silence it was. Brooding? Hurt? Angry? Indifferent? If he could see her face, what would it look like? Would her lip be quivering? Her neck blotching? He started to turn his head toward where she was but halfway there he realized that, no, he wasn’t interested in giving her the impression he was looking at her; he wanted only to hear her perfectly. So he stayed there, halfway facing her and halfway not. He wondered what she must think of it.
When she finally did speak, it startled him. He flinched.
Why are you cutting me off? she asked.
I’m not, he said.
You’re ruining our relationship, she said. You’re closing yourself in.
I’m doing nothing of the kind.
Open up to me, she said. Come back into the world.
And then he heard sounds that he sensed were her moving, sliding toward him, lifting her arms. He started to raise his own arms and suddenly found himself in her embrace. He let her hold on to him, patted her softly on the back. It struck him as artificial. How could he feel anything but distance from her when they were both in the same space but living in that space differently, occupying different worlds? At least he could see that. She couldn’t even see it. Still, he should make an effort. He should let her be helpful to him. He kept patting her back.
But why, part of him wondered, do we have to have a relationship in your world? Why not in mine?
Three or four months later, when the relationship had improved not at all, when she was still asking him if she could help, what she could do, what he needed, wasn’t there anything, how could she be of service, could she lend him a hand, lend him her eyes or her arm, he decided it was time to take matters into his own hands.
When she went to work, he called a taxi, asked to be driven to the grocery store. The driver spoke with an accent he could not place, and smelled slightly of sweat. The driver seemed nervous to have a blind man in his cab and chattered at him nervously, aimlessly.
Once there, he had the taxi driver guide him inside, told him to wait for him. A clerk let him take her arm. She led him where he wanted to go.
Garbage bags and duct tape? she asked. That’s really all you want?
He nodded. They’re black bags, right? I need black.
Yes, she said. Black. But why do you care? You’re blind.
They’re not for me, he explained.
The clerk didn’t ask any more questions. He paid and then she helped him make his way out the door. He stood alone waiting just in front of the store, wondering if the taxi was still there somewhere. He was just about to go back in when he heard soft footsteps, a slight hint of stale sweat, felt a clammy hand on his arm.
I did not see you first, the driver said, and led him to the car.
In front of his house the driver named a sum. He handed the driver his wallet. Go ahead, he said.
How do you know I won’t take much?
More? he said. I don’t, he said.
What is to stop me?
Who knows? said the man. Try it and see.
He could hear the driver take some money out, sigh. There is some trick, the driver said, handing back the wallet. Some hiding camera. No, you will not fool me.
At last the driver was gone and he was alone in the house. How long would it be before his wife came home from work? He wasn’t certain. There was no certain way, blind, for him to tell.
He felt along the wall until he found a window. With his hand he carefully traced its outline. He took one garbage bag out of the pack and unfolded it, then took the duct tape, began to tape the garbage bag over the window. When he was done, he ran his fingers along the edges to make sure there were no gaps, then moved on to the next window frame.
When all the windows in the house were sealed, he took a chair from the kitchen and stood on it in what he thought was the center of each room, groping up above him until he found each light fixture. He unscrewed the lightbulbs and then carefully placed them on the floor a few steps from each doorway.
Then he sat on the couch and waited.
Eventually he heard his wife’s car turn in to the driveway. Rising from the couch, he made his way down the hall, deeper into the house.
He heard her open the door and then flick the light switch on and off.
Hello? she said. Anybody there?
He didn’t answer.
Honey? she said, her voice a little tremulous. What’s going on? What happened to the windows?
He heard her take a few steps, heard the sound of a lightbulb crushing beneath her shoe. She cried out.
Honey? she said, louder now. Where are you?
Down the hall, he waited without moving for her to approach. He would wait until she was near him, very near, and then would speak.
Do you need anything, honey? he would say, his voice just louder than a whisper. Is there anything I can do?
And then, suddenly, tables turned, she would understand, she would empathize, and they would embrace, talk about how foolish they had been and figure out how to be close again.
It would be an understatement to say that her reaction was not precisely what he had anticipated.
Life Without Father
I.
Life without father began some few weeks before he actually died, at the moment when he started encasing his head in orange plastic mesh held shut with twine. He did this because, so he claimed, it helped him. Helped him what or how, Elise never knew. It was, her father proclaimed that first day from within the mesh, the beginning of the most lucid period of his life. Yet whatever it was helping or helping with, it apparently didn’t help for long, for soon her father had replaced the mesh with a bag made of wire netting cut from a window screen. He threaded it closed around his neck, the screen’s raw stubble leaving a red band along his clavicle. Correction, the father stated. The orange plastic mesh had helped but not helped enough. The wire screen was in fact the real beginning of the only truly lucid period of his thought. He had not felt so good since before the mother had left, he told Elise, and probably not even then.
Elise wondered what, if anything, she should do. Early on, she suggested to her father that he should remove the netting from around his head, a suggestion that made him distraught. No, he said, didn’t she see? It was a great help to him. She tried to see, and though she could not understand why, s
he began to hope that, yes, it did seem to help him, maybe, somehow. Her father had not been exactly himself since the mother’s disappearance. He had been, at best, approximately himself and, at worst, not himself at all. With the wire encasing his head he was not exactly himself, either, but he was closer, and more stable in whatever he now was. So she decided that, yes, she was willing to go along with it. In any case, she apparently had no choice.
Yet, correction. This period too ground to a stop, the father’s stability wearing away again, to be followed by the last and shortest stage: a long weekend that was for her the worst to remember, involving a plastic shopping bag. He held the bag gathered at his neck, the force of his breathing making it swell and collapse around his features until it was he who collapsed. While he lay there, Elise loosened the bag enough to let a little fresh air in. He was, he told her each time he came conscious, finally truly lucid, this time he was certain. His voice, bag-muffled, buzzed against the plastic. Soon he was staggering about again, holding the bag tight and closed at his throat. When he fell again, Elise was again there to save him.
During the course of the single long weekend, she loosened the bag around his head eighty-four times. She kept track, even after she grew tired. At one point when she thought she might lose count, she opened her fifth-grade math book and kept track inside its back cover with a series of hash marks. She made four straight vertical marks and one diagonal mark through them and then moved slightly down the page. When not making marks, she was waiting patiently for her father to collapse again. When she closed her eyes to rest, all she could see was the bag swelling and deflating, her father’s features coming clear an instant then wavering away. When she opened her eyes, all she could see was her father lying on the floor, motionless save for his hands, which slowly curled or tightened as she loosened the bag. Until finally she closed her eyes and saw the bag swell and deflate in her head, and by the time she opened her eyes again, her father was dead.
Fugue State Page 16