Fugue State

by Brian Evenson

  Using the prybar as a chisel, he slowly splintered a hole through the center of the door at eye level. There was, he discovered, something just beyond the door, made of plywood. He slowly broke a hole through this as well until, at last, he had a fist-sized opening that debouched onto an ordinary hall.

  “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone there?”

  When there was no answer, he went into the kitchen, stepping over the sheet. He started opening drawers. There was a drawer containing a series of utensils, stacked very carefully into slots, a drawer containing stray keys and books of stamps and a rubber-band ball, a drawer containing nested measuring cups and spatulas and turkey basters and pie shields. Then, above them, a shelf holding a jumble of pots and pans, a cabinet scattered with ascending stacks of dishes and nested hard-plastic drinking cups. He worked two of the rubber bands off the ball, then slid the rest of the drawers closed.

  In the bathroom, he took a last look at himself and then struck the mirror with the prybar. Cracks shot through. The silvered glass tipped off in shards, which broke further on the floor.

  His hand, he saw, was blood-soaked, a flap of skin hanging open and folded over on its back. He was surprised to find it didn’t hurt.

  He pushed the flap back in place, found gauze in the cabinet, wrapped his hand in it.

  He picked out a smaller, more regular square of glass. After scraping each of its edges against the tile floor to dull it, he used the rubber bands to fasten it to the hooked end of the prybar. At the door, he worked the mirror-end of the prybar through the hole he had made, then slid the prybar through as far as he could without letting go of it.

  It was hard to see past his knuckles and past the bar itself, harder still to hold the bar steady enough at one end to make sense of what he was seeing in the shard on the other: a wavering square of light and color. But there it was, he slowly could make it out, despite the wavering image: a large panel of raw wood, plywood, larger, it seemed than his door, studded with black pocks at regular intervals around its edge. The same black pocks in two lines up the middle of the panel as well. Stretching from the bottom corners to top corners of the panel were two strips of yellow plastic tape, covered in black characters that he could not read.

  But something must have been awry with his thinking. He remained slightly crouched, holding the prybar, trying to keep it steady, concentrating, looking past his knuckles into the reflection, and it was all he could do, really, just to see the flittered bits and pieces and make some cohesive image out of them in his head. It was too much to force that image into actually meaning something as well. Even after his difficulty in trying to open the door, even after seeing the image in the shaky shard of mirror, after seeing the black pocks around the edge of the plywood, it took him some moments of just staring and thinking to realize he had been deliberately boarded in.

  But when he did realize, the shock came all at once. His fingers let go of the prybar, and, overbalanced, it started to slide out of the hole and away from him. He just caught it. He pulled it back through and, shaking, sat down with his back to the door.

  Why? he wondered.

  He couldn’t say. Perhaps, he thought, they hadn’t known he and his wife were there. Assuming, he corrected himself, that she was his wife. Perhaps they had thought the apartment unoccupied.

  But who, he wondered, were they?

  •

  There was the phone, he thought after a while. He could telephone someone to come get him out.

  But whom did he know? He couldn’t remember having known anyone.

  On the answering machine beside the phone a light was blinking. Why hadn’t he noticed it before?

  He got up and pressed the button beneath the light.

  Hello? A voice said. Mr. Hafner? Is that in fact the correct name? My name is Arnaud. I’m afraid I’ve been given your number in error.

  Hapner, he thought, my name’s Hapner. Probably. Or something close to that. Unless he’s talking to somebody else.

  There’s been a misunderstanding, the voice continued, Arnaud’s voice continued. What sort of misunderstanding? Hapner wondered. He was, Hapner was, to contact Arnaud’s wife. He was to ask her to do what she could to find out what had happened to Arnaud. He might, he was told, begin with Bentham. What a strange message, Arnaud thought. Or wait, the man thought, I’m not Arnaud, that’s not my name, my name is something else. What was it?

  After listening to the tape several dozen times, he was almost certain he could remember his name. Hapner. Every few minutes he brought the name to his lips, whispered it. It would, he hoped, stay with him, on his tongue if not in his brain. And now, he thought, I have something to do. Bentham, he thought, Arnaud.

  With the hammer and the prybar he began to widen the hole, first cracking and splintering away his own door and then slowly hammering the flattened, flanged end of the prybar through the plywood.

  He was weak; his arms quickly grew sore and tired and the light he had at first been able to see coming through the windows had long faded. The hall outside, however, remained brightly lit.

  The plywood broke loose in odd, thatched fragments, splitting within the body of a layer of wood rather than between layers. In the end he had a splintery and furzed channel wide enough to squeeze through. He drank some more water, ate some more crackers, and then sat on a chair in the kitchen, gathering his strength. His gaze caught on the sheet on the floor and he stooped to uncover the woman’s face. He regarded her closely, but no, he still did not recognize her.

  Perhaps, he thought, I never knew her.

  But then why, he wondered, was she here with me? Or, if you prefer, why was I here with her?

  He went into the bedroom, looked through the closets. One was full of a woman’s clothing, the other of clothing belonging to a man. He tried on a sport coat. It was too small, and musty.

  He tried on some of the other clothes, all too small.

  Puzzled, he returned to the kitchen, stared again into the dead woman’s face.

  It’s her home, he thought, not mine. And somebody else’s. I’m probably not even Hafner. Or Hapner.

  He sat staring at her. The corpse was changing shape, becoming even less human. Soon it would start to smell. He couldn’t stay there, whether he was Hafner or no. And if he wanted to be anyone, he had to be Hafner, at least for now.

  IV.

  Hapner rummaged a shoulder bag from a closet and dropped the hammer and the prybar into it. After unplugging the answering machine, he put it in as well, then pushed the bag through the door’s hole.

  It was tighter than he’d thought. He had to work one shoulder through and then turn sideways to get the other past. The ragged edges of the hole scraped raw the underflesh of one arm as well as the skin over his ribs. Halfway through, he thought he was stuck, and grew desperate and maddened, scratching and wriggling until he had worn the skin covering his hipbones bloody and until he fell on his neck and shoulders out onto the floor.

  The other doors too had been sealed off, he saw. Along the length of the wall, where he would have expected doors to be, were sheets of plywood fastened to door and wall with ratchet-headed black screws.

  He went down the hall and down the stairs. Doors on the floor below were sealed too, but not all of them, and he knocked on the three that weren’t. Nobody answered any of them. He tried to open them but found them all locked.

  The next floor down was the same, doors mostly boarded over, no one answering the few still unsealed. He chose one at random and worked at it with the prybar and the hammer until he cracked the latch out through the frame of the door and the door swung open.

  The layout of the apartment was identical to that of the apartment he had been in, except reversed.

  “Hello?” he called.

  No answer came. The windows were slightly ajar. A thin layer of dust covered everything. Not quite dust, he realized: stickier. What exactly, he couldn’t say. On the table a sheet of paper was held down by a burnished brass pape
rweight. There was something written on it, but he couldn’t read it. He picked it up and folded it, slid it into his back pocket.

  In the closet were two smeared, bloody handprints. Under one of the beds was what seemed to be a human ear. He sat on his knees a long time, squinting at it, wondering if he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing, but in the end left it where it was without touching it. In the oven he found the tightly curved body of a cat, long dead, dry as a plate. When he touched it, its hair crackled away.

  He closed the oven door and hurriedly left.

  Two floors down, he knocked on an unsealed door and heard behind it some transient living sound, cut off nearly as quickly as it had begun.

  “Hello?” he called.

  He knocked again, but heard nothing. He pressed his ear to the door, thought he could hear, vaguely, just barely, something pressed to the other side, breathing. Was that possible, to hear something breathing, through a door? Perhaps it was his own breathing, he thought, and this made him feel as if he were on both sides of the door at once, and made him wonder why he wouldn’t open up for himself.

  “I don’t mean any harm,” he said. No response. “I’m just a neighbor,” he said. “I just want to talk.” Still no response.

  “Shall I break down the door?” he asked. “If I do that, anybody can get in.”

  He waited a few minutes, then got out his prybar and his hammer. Aligning the prybar in the gap between door and wall, he struck the end with the hammer, started to drive it in.

  He was a little startled when the voice that rang out from behind the door was not his own.

  “All right,” it said. “All right.”

  He worked the prybar free of the crack, then stepped back. The dead-bolt clicked. The door handle shivered, and the door drew open.

  Behind it was a small man, scarcely bigger than a child, wearing a moth-eaten sweater. Though not old, he seemed to be hairless, the skin hanging sallow on his face. His mouth and his nose were hidden behind a surgical mask that he had doubled over to make fit. He stood mostly hidden, hand and head visible, a pistol in the former.

  “Well?” the small man said. “What is it?”

  “I’m your neighbor,” Hapner said.

  “I suppose you want to borrow a cup of sugar.”

  “No,” said Hapner. “To talk.”

  “All right,” said the man. “You’re here. Talk.”

  “Can’t I come in?”

  “Why do you need to come in?” the man asked, a little surprised. “There’s no reason to come in. It’s not safe.”

  Hapner shrugged.

  The man looked at him for a long while. His eyes, protruding and damp, seemed slightly filmed. He opened the door farther, shifted the pistol to his other hand.

  “What floor?”

  Hapner counted in his head. “Five floors up,” he said.

  “Eighth floor,” said the man. “Why didn’t you just say eighth? I thought all the eighth was boarded off.”

  “Almost all,” lied Hapner. “Every door but one.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not ill, are you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Hapner. With what? he wondered.

  “O.K.,” said the man. “O.K. Prove it. Tell me your name.”

  “My name?” said Hapner.

  It started with a letter midway through the alphabet, he knew, one he could almost remember. It was there, nearly on the tip of his tongue, but what exactly was it?

  “Well?” the man said. “Either you know your name or you don’t.”

  “Mind if I use your bathroom?” asked Hapner.

  “The bathroom?” said the man, surprised. “I, but I—”

  “Thank you,” said Hapner, and, hands raised above his head, eased his way carefully past the small man without touching the pistol, toward where he suspected the bathroom must be.

  “Wait,” the man said. But Hapner kept walking, slowly, as if under water. He gritted his teeth, waiting for the man to shoot him in the back, following each slow step with another slow step until he reached the bathroom. He opened the door and slipped quickly inside, locking it behind him.

  What now? he wondered.

  He regarded his face in the mirror, his frightened eyes, then opened his bag and removed the answering machine. Having unplugged the man’s electric razor, he plugged his answering machine in and dialed the volume down. He held the machine pressed against his ear and depressed the button.

  “Hello?” a voice said into his ear. “Mr. Hapner? Is that in fact the correct name?”

  Is it? Hapner wondered. The voice kept on. There were other names mentioned, but Hapner struck him as the only viable one. Arnaud. He, Hapner, was looking for Arnaud, he discovered, and for Bentham as a way to reach Arnaud. The answering machine made it all perfectly clear. Hapner, he made his lips mime. He rewound the tape and listened to his name again, then again, until he was certain he could remember it. At least for a few minutes.

  The small man was knocking on the bathroom door, urging him to come out or be killed.

  “I’m coming,” Hapner said. He quickly packed the answering machine away and opened the door. The small man was there, face red, pistol aimed at Hapner’s waist.

  “Hapner,” he said. “My name’s Hapner.”

  The pistol wavered slightly, a strange expression passing across the man’s eyes. “I know a Hafner on the eighth floor,” he said, “or ninth. Can’t remember. But you’re not him.”

  “No,” said Hapner quickly. “I’m Hapner, not Hafner. Eighth floor as well. Strange coincidence, no?”

  The man looked at him a long time, then took a few steps back, gun still poised. “Tell me what you want again?” he asked.

  “That depends,” said Hapner. “Are you Arnaud?”

  “No,” said the small man. “Who?”

  “What about Bentham?”

  “I’m Roeg.”

  “Do you know either an Arnaud or a Bentham?”

  “Do they live in this building?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the small man. “These are strange questions to ask. If they do live here, I don’t know them.”

  “Then I don’t want anything,” Hafner said, and started to go.

  “I thought you wanted to talk,” said Roeg.

  Hapner turned, saw Roeg had let his body sag. The small man went and sat down on the couch. He sat there, eyes looking exhausted, finally motioning Hapner into the chair next to him. “It’s been long time,” he said. “Let’s talk.” But it was not an us who talked, for Hapner spoke hardly at all. Roeg hadn’t left the house in several weeks, he claimed, ever since the plague had begun. Plague? Hapner wondered, but just nodded. Roeg’s wife had gone out and never come back. She was, Roeg figured, probably dead.

  “But maybe she just left,” said Roeg.

  Roeg took the surgeon’s mask off his face and laid it on the coffee table, smoothed it out with the palm of his hand. His mouth, Hapner saw, was delicately formed, the lips nearly translucent.

  “Maybe,” said Hapner. “I’m sorry.”

  Then, Roeg said, someone had arrived wearing protective suits. Each apartment had been opened. If anyone was found with indications, they were boarded in. No doubt it had been the same on Hapner’s floor.

  “No doubt,” said Hapner.

  “Eventually they stopped coming,” said Roeg.

  “Probably dead themselves,” said Hapner.

  “Probably,” said Roeg, and lapsed into silence, staring at the tabletop.

  “And what now?” asked Hapner.

  “Now?” said Roeg. “How should I know?”

  Almost as quickly as the information was given to him, Hapner felt it begin to slip away, the details wavering and eroding, only a large, vague sense of contagion remained. The knowledge itself was being simplified, made brutish within his head. He wondered how much of even this he would remember, and for how long?

  There were o
ther things Roeg was telling him, he realized, but even as the small man was saying them, Hapner felt them going. The authorities, he did remember Roeg saying, were silent. As for the silence, either Roeg didn’t know its cause or Hapner had somehow missed it or was already forgetting it. Perhaps it was simply ongoing silence, unexplained.

  As Roeg spoke on, Hapner became more and more confused. When he realized, from Roeg’s puzzled look, that he must have asked a nearly identical question twice, he began to be concerned.

  And then Roeg acquired a panicked look. “Why are you speaking so quickly?” he asked. “Slow down.”

  “I’m not speaking quickly,” Hapner said.

  As Roeg tried to continue, it became clear to Hapner that something was wrong. Roeg became prone to long, reptilian fits of silence and would stop speaking to peer nervously around him.

  “Roeg?” said Hapner. “Roeg?” But the small man wasn’t answering, wasn’t paying attention. Filled with doubt, Hapner asked, “That’s your name, no?”

  “My name?” said Roeg, suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”

  And then Roeg groped his pistol off the couch cushion and began to jab it into the air. He pointed not at Hapner but at where Hapner had been a few moments before, for Hapner had stood and taken a few steps so as to get a closer look at Roeg.

  “You had it?” Roeg shouted. “But why aren’t you dead?”

  Roeg fired the pistol into the couch across from him. He moved the pistol a little to the left, fired into the credenza, left again, into the wall—just behind the spot Hapner had been just a few seconds before. Reaching out, Hapner wrenched the gun out of Roeg’s hand and dropped it to the floor. But it was as if Roeg didn’t realize the gun was gone, for his curled hand was still aiming, his finger flexing, over and over, and he was, desperately, asking Hapner why he wouldn’t die.

  He spoke softly and carefully into Roeg’s ear, stroking and rubbing the small man’s hand until it loosened its grip on the absent gun. He persuaded him into lying down on the couch, then went into the kitchen and got a damp cloth, and carefully wiped away the blood already seeping up through the man’s eye sockets.