I stayed leaning against the rail, fixed, watching the fellow come. He came only slowly, but still was almost upon us. The sun would soon set, I knew, and if our movement yesterday had been any indication, with the fading of the light the captain would weigh anchor and the boat would depart. Would the swimmer arrive before that?
And yet, I told myself, it was impossible, all of it. It was impossible that we had been pursued for the last two days by the same swimmer, impossible even if we had for his sake maintained a pace that would allow him to catch the ship. It was equally impossible for there to have been two different men in open ocean swimming after us on two successive days. What I was seeing, I told myself, was not in fact present; it was an absence, a nothingness, a trick of the light on the horizon, the movement of a blood vessel within my eye, a hallucination caused by lack of food and water.
But as the figure came closer, it became more and more difficult for me to maintain the idea of its nonexistence. It was impossible, it was a nothingness, but it was palpable, it was there. I could make out now the movement of the arms as the swimmer propelled himself forward. I caught sight of his head, a small bead, as it surged up for air and then returned to skim just below the surface again.
I watched him come, judging his speed, his distance, my apprehension growing. He would, I judged, reach the ship before the sun disappeared. I shouted for the crew but there was no response, the deck still deserted. I stayed, watching. He came on farther, and faster, and now I could see that he appeared fully dressed, his arms and back covered by what looked like a waterlogged overcoat. Why hadn’t he wriggled his way out of it? How had he managed to keeping swimming despite it? Another impossibility, I thought, and my apprehension deepened.
He kept coming. And then, almost as if time had torn, he was suddenly arrived, just below me, his hands on the ladder far below. He stayed there an instant, floating, facedown in the water, resting, just holding to the ladder, and then pulled his body forward and looked up at me, revealing his face.
I took a step back, staggered, feeling the deck spin out from under me as I went down. For the face I saw was both the last face I had expected to see and the only face I knew I must see: the face of Alfons Kuylers.
When I regained consciousness, it was to find myself in a heap on the deck, my head aching, darkness gathered save for the glow of a few scattered lanterns. There, across the deck, was the crew, crowded now around a blanket-draped man whose gaze I could not bring myself to meet.
I gathered myself and tried, slowly, to make my way belowdecks, whether to retrieve the captain’s pistol or simply to hide myself I wasn’t sure. I gave a wide berth to the crowd of sailors and the man they surrounded, but before I had set my feet on the treads of the stairs, the captain hailed me.
I stopped, waited. He came forward slowly, his eternal lantern held before him.
“Kuylers,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“That man there,” he said, flashing the light behind him, “claims you are not Kuylers after all.”
“There is some mistake,” I said.
“Yes,” said the captain. “He insists that it is he who is Kuylers. But who, then, are you?”
“No,” I said, not looking him in the face. “I am Kuylers.”
“You insist you are Kuylers?” asked the captain.
“I am Kuylers,” I said again, and turned to start down the stairs.
“So be it,” said the captain. “As you wish.”
I started to descend, but before I had wound even halfway down, I found myself roughly seized from above and below and dragged back up, a man on each arm and each leg. They hauled me despite my protests back onto the deck and from there across the deck, then dumped me into one of the lifeboats. When I tried to clamber out, I was struck on the side of the skull with a belaying pin. I fell back. I tried again, but after a second blow, this one striking my forearm in such manner as to render my whole arm numb, I desisted, lying instead along the curve of the bottom of the boat while the boat was slowly winched free of its cradle and swung out to hang over the waves. Slowly my descent began. From above shone the captain’s lantern, light and shadow aswirl around me with each rock and sway of the lifeboat suspended in the air. Behind him was gathered the crew, faces dim behind the lantern’s glare.
“Have pity!” I called to them.
But they merely continued to ratchet the lifeboat down toward the waves. I could see now, there beside the captain, the swimmer, still wrapped in his blanket, still resembling for good and all Alfons Kuylers, but his face behind the lantern oddly transformed. And then the release was sprung and the lifeboat crashed into the waves and I was swept back and forth and, finally, away.
How many hours I floated solitary and alone in that lifeboat I cannot say. I hid from the sun as I could, crouching low in the boat, drawing my coat up to shield my head. I watched from beneath my coat the shadows shiver about in the bottom of the boat as we shook and spun with the waves, and then the shadows thickened, and then the light would vanish entirely and I would be left only to that dizzy, rolling darkness of the waves, to a motion that never stopped. I had no food, no water. How many nights did I lie there huddled against the cold, counting each swell, waiting for morning to come until I could not even do that but lay dying along the bottom of the boat, unable to move? And then my former shipmates came to me and I could see their faces clearly for the first time, as gaunt and drawn as my own, and they gathered around me and spoke in quiet whispers as if waiting for me to die. And then, of a sudden, they were gone and Alfons Kuylers came alone, striding slowly over the weary waves like some dead, mad Christ and clambered into the boat and sat there beside me to continue my philosophical and theological instruction, as if death had whetted Kuylers’s appetite for paradox rather than quelled it. And then, when he realized I was almost too weak to take in his words, he leaned in close over me and I could see the way his skull had been broken by the lacquered walking stick and the way the blood had spilled out to darken the side of his face, and he whispered, “Wasn’t it sufficient to murder me? Did you have to steal my name as well?”
When I awoke, it was on a large vessel. Delirious at first, I thought myself back on the ship where I had begun, and had I the strength, I would have thrown myself overboard. But no, it was a ship like any other, bustling with men by day and night, and once they realized I was coherent they brought me a few thimblefuls of water and the smallest crust of bread. I must eat slowly, they told me, and not much; after my ordeal I must slowly and gradually learn to eat again.
They gave me a little more each day, and slowly I began to recover, to feel more and more human. Soon, I was told, I would be able to leave my bed. It was amazing, claimed the captain, a man without a lantern in his hand or even within reach, that I had survived, a man of my age. Of my age? I wondered, and then took the tin cup that the captain held out to me and drank it slowly dry. The captain, a man of ruddy complexion and questionable accent, stayed at my bedside, watching me.
“There is only one thing,” he said, hesitantly.
“I am happy to pay for my passage,” I said quickly, thinking of the ring I had had from killing Kuylers, the ring he would have gladly given me and had offered me many times before.
“No,” he said, ducking his head, “a man adrift, he does not pay. It is not this.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“This boat,” he said. “Where did you find it?”
“The boat?”
“This lifeboat,” he said. “This is registered to a ship that fell to the winds and went down many years past.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again, not knowing how to respond. Nor did I know how to respond to the questions that followed, nor how to think about the ship I had found myself, under false pretenses, aboard for several days. And, as over the next few weeks the questions kept coming, I felt increasingly the necessity to leave them unanswered, to do what I could to avoid the yawning space they opened up befo
re me.
But what I could not avoid came on my first day afoot, as I abandoned my bed and stumbled my way down the passage, razor in hand, to shave myself for the first time in many days, and found myself seeing, in the burnished zinc panel that served as a mirror, not my own reflection but that of Alfons Kuylers. Was it any surprise that seeing this I would opt to use the razor not to strip away the beard and thus reveal Kuylers all the more but rather instead to open Kuylers’s wrists?
It is only now, still days from port, wrists bandaged, restrained in my bed, fighting madness, avoided by the crew, days after attempting what was not so much suicide as an attempt, responding to the look on his face, to kill Kuylers yet again, that I begin to understand what a fitting fate this is, how it springs naturally from the philosophico-religious discussions I shared with my mentor both while he was alive and, once in a lifeboat, after his death. What, I have asked myself again and again, remains for me if not to become Kuylers wholeheartedly, to return to my former city, to resume my trade in imported goods, to continue to read, to study? Until the day when a young student appears and begs me to serve as his mentor and I teach him slowly, preparing him carefully for the moment when he will see astonishment mingled with fear in my face and know he has been condemned to kill me. And by so doing he will enter into the trap that will strip him of his own name and leave him bereft and adrift. It is a fate neither of us can avoid.
But isn’t this simply, Kuylers suggests later, trying to console me or provoke me, the trap everyone falls into sooner or later? And understanding this, shouldn’t we simply accept our fate?
But I do not respond. Instead, I test yet again the strength of my restraints. Surely they cannot be strong enough to hold me forever.
Fugue State
—for Arnaud and Claro
I.
I had, Bentham claimed, fallen into a sort of fugue state, in which the world moved past me more and more rapidly, a kind of blur englobing me at every instant. And yet he had never, so he confided to Arnaud, felt either disoriented or confused. Yes, admittedly, during this period he had no clear idea of his own name, yet despite this he felt he understood things clearly for the first time. He perceived the world in a different way, at a speed that allowed him to ignore the nonessential—such as names or, rather, such as his own name—and to perceive things he could never before have even imagined.
Arnaud listened carefully. Fugue state, he recorded, then removed his eyeglasses and placed them on the desk in front of him. He looked up, squinting.
“And do you remember your name now?” he asked.
At first, Bentham did not answer. Arnaud remained patient. He watched Bentham’s blurred image glance about itself, searching for some clue.
“Yes,” said Bentham finally. “Of course I do.”
“Will you please tell it to me?” asked Arnaud.
“Why do you need to know?”
Arnaud rubbed his eyes. Subject does not know own name, he recorded.
“Will you please describe the room you’re in?” he asked. Bentham instead tried to sit up, was prevented by the straps. Subject unaware of surroundings, Arnaud noted. “Will you describe your room, please?” asked Arnaud again.
“I don’t see the point,” said Bentham, his voice rising. “You’re here. You’re in it. You can see it just as well as I can.”
Arnaud leaned forward until his lips were nearly touching the microphone. “But that’s just it, Bentham,” he said softly. “I’m not in the room with you at all.”
It was shortly after this that Bentham began to bleed from the eyes. This was not a response Arnaud had been trained to expect. Indeed, at first, his glasses still on the desk before him, Arnaud was convinced it was a trick of the light, an oddly cast shadow. He polished his glasses against his shirtfront and hooked them back over his ears, and only then was he certain that each of Bentham’s sockets was pooling with blood. Startled, he must have exclaimed, for Bentham turned his head slightly in the direction of the intercom speaker. The blood in one eye slopped against the bridge of his nose. The blood in the other spilled down his cheek, gathering in the whorl of his ear.
6:13, Arnaud wrote. Subject has begun to bleed from eyes.
“Bentham,” Arnaud asked, “how do you feel?”
“Fine,” said Bentham. “I feel fine. Why?”
6:14, Arnaud recorded. Subject feels fine. Then added, Is bleeding from eyes.
Picking up the telephone, he depressed the call button.
“I need an outside line,” said Arnaud when the operator picked up.
“You know the rules,” said the operator. “No outside line during session with subject.”
Blood, too, Arnaud noticed, had started to drip from Bentham’s nose. Perhaps it was coming from his ears as well. Though with Bentham’s visible ear already puddled with the blood from his eye, it was difficult to be certain.
“The subject appears to be dying,” said Arnaud.
“Dying?” said the operator. “Of what?”
“Of bleeding,” said Arnaud.
“I see,” said the operator. “Please hold the line.”
The operator exchanged himself with a low and staticky Muzak. Arnaud, holding the receiver against his ear, watched Bentham. It was a song he felt he should recognize but he could not quite grasp what it was. Bentham tried to sit up again, straining against the straps as if unaware of them, without any hint of panic. In general he seemed unaware of what was happening to him. A bloody flux was spilling out of his mouth now as well, Arnaud noticed. He groped for a pen to record this, but could not find one.
Bentham shook his head quickly as if to clear it, spattering blood onto the glass between them. Then he bared his teeth. This was, Arnaud felt, a terrible thing to watch.
The Muzak clicked off.
“Accounting,” said a flat, implacable voice.
“Excuse me?” said Arnaud.
“Accounting division.”
“I don’t understand,” said Arnaud. “The subject assigned to me is dying.”
The man on the other end did not respond. Bentham, Arnaud saw through the glass, had stopped moving.
“I think he may have just died,” said Arnaud.
“Not my jurisdiction, sir,” said the voice, still flat, and the line went dead.
It was hard for him to be certain that Bentham was no longer alive. Several times, as Arnaud prepared to record a time of death, Bentham offered a weak movement that dissuaded him, the curling or uncurling of a finger, the parting of his lips. He was not certain whether these were actual movements or whether the corpse was simply ridding itself of its remaining vitality. For accuracy’s sake, he felt, he should unlock the adjoining door between the two rooms and go through, to manually check Bentham’s pulse with his fingers. Or, rather, to make certain there was no pulse to check. But the strangeness of Bentham’s condition made him feel that it might be better to leave the adjoining door closed.
As to leaving his own room, he had no choice but to wait until the session had officially expired and a guard came to unlock the door. He waited, watching Bentham dead or dying. He watched the blood dry between them, on the window. When his ear began to ache, he realized he was still pushing the dead receiver against his face, and hung up.
He stood and looked under his desk until he found his pen, then wrote in his notebook: 6:26. Patient dead?
The remainder of the session he spent, pen poised over the notebook, watching Bentham for any signs of life. He watched the skin on Bentham’s face change character, losing its elasticity, seeming to settle more tightly around the bone. The nose became more and more accentuated, the cheeks growing hollow. The frightful perfection of the skull glowed dully through the skin. Even when the guard opened the door behind Arnaud, it was very hard for him to look away.
“Ready?” the guard asked. “Session’s over.”
“I think he’s dead,” said Arnaud.
“How’s that?” said the guard. “Come again?”
>
The guard came and stood next to Arnaud, stared into Bentham’s room. Arnaud looked too.
When he looked back up, he saw that the guard was looking at him with frightened eyes.
“What is it?” Arnaud asked.
But at first the guard did not answer, just kept looking at Arnaud. Why? Arnaud wondered, and waited.
“What,” the guard finally asked, “exactly did you do to him?”
It was not until that moment that Arnaud realized how wrong things could go for him.
II.
The guard became businesslike and efficient, hustling Arnaud out of the observation room and down the hall.
“Where are we going?” Arnaud asked.
“Just down here,” said the guard, keeping a firm grip on Arnaud’s arm, pushing him forward.
They passed down one flight of stairs, and through another hall. They went down a short flight, Arnaud nearly tripping, and then immediately up three brief steps and through a door that read “Conference Rooms.” The door opened onto a short hallway with three doors on either side and one at the end.
The guard walked him down to the final door, coaxed him inside. “Wait here,” the guard said.
“For what?” Arnaud asked.
But the guard, already gone, did not answer.
Arnaud tried the door he had come through; it was locked. He tried the door at the far end of the room; this was locked as well.
He sat down at the table and stared at the wall.
After a while, he began to read from his notebook. Fugue state, he read. Had he done anything wrong? he wondered. Was he to blame? Was anything in fact his fault? 6:13, he read. Subject has begun to bleed from eyes. Even if it were not his fault, would he somehow be held responsible? Subject feels fine, he read. Is bleeding from eyes.
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