He went down the stairs and then down a hall whose walls were smeared with blood, then down another set of stairs that opened onto a lobby, two shattered glass doors leading out into the street. He pushed one open, felt a pricking on his hands and looked to see them glittery with powdered glass, minute cuts all over them. He used his shoe to open the door the rest of the way, stepped out into the street.
The street was deserted, a car overturned and burnt to a husk a dozen feet from where he stood, another car in the middle of the street, both doors open, clumps of paper eddying about it, garbage, a fine rain of ash. The building across the street from him, a large complex of some sort, was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, another similar fence a half-dozen feet inside it and parallel to it, the gates of both fences twisted off their hinges. The building was set off from the road, and between him and it were scores of abnormally large men in white protective suits, sprawled about, no marks on them, suits intact, all probably dead. Good Christ, he thought. For just an instant, the scene wavered, flattening out in front of him, everything fading away or coming all too close. But then he blinked, and blinked again, and it all seemed all right again, though somehow the sun had moved and the sky had gone darker.
He crossed the street and passed through the gate and approached one of the prone men. The glass shield over the man’s face was obscured by blood. He looked at another. It was the same. He stopped looking.
What am I doing? he wondered. What am I looking for?
He couldn’t remember exactly. He was looking for something or someone, it started with, he could almost remember, it was a letter that he … perhaps r? But what did that tell him? It didn’t tell him anything at all.
He turned around and looked over his shoulder at the building across the street. It was an apartment complex, ten or twelve stories tall, its door shattered.
He stood staring at it for a long time. Something about it struck him as significant. Familiar? What, he wondered again, was he looking for, and who was he exactly, again? What was the name?
He kept staring, feeling a slow panic welling through him.
He took a step forward without looking, almost fell over one of the bodies. He kicked it softly, then stepped around it.
I am looking for something, he tried to tell himself, or someone. Probably, he tried to tell himself, I’ll know it when I find it.
He looked back again at the building across the street, then turned toward it.
Probably as good a place to start as any, he thought. He crossed the street, opened the door to the building. Who knows what I will find? he thought.
Another instant and he was gone.
Traub in the City
I.
Toward evening, well before Traub expected it, came a notable transformation in the face. The nose became more and more accentuated, like a blade, the cheeks grew hollow, the skin began to tighten. Traub continued trying to draw the profile, but the face was changing with such rapidity that he could capture it, when he captured it at all, only at several removes. He had the distinct impression that he was observing not one but several faces, coming one after another, quicker and quicker until finally, moments before death, the rush of faces was so rapid that it made Traub feel dizzy, and he forgot the paper, the pencil, and just watched, and in the vast shuffle of humanity nearly caught sight of himself.
II.
Days later, back in the city, having left the mountain inn, the body buried and left behind, Traub found himself shaken. He began to see heads in the emptiness, in all the space that surrounded them, isolated and remote. On the platform in the metro, surrounded by hundreds of people, he saw nothing but a series of heads, each suspended in a vast emptiness, each face in the crowd part and parcel of a single face that was changing with a rapidity he could no longer comprehend—as if a progression in time had been instead smeared out over space, all the faces of the city a record of one man’s death. No matter where he was, he had the distinct impression that there was only he, Traub, sitting beside a bed where a body was slowly giving way, through a desperate flurry of faces, to an implacable and faceless corpse.
III.
How many nights?, Traub wondered about himself, night after night, as in the darkness that one face broke into multitudes and spread all about the ceiling separating out until each face was surrounded by a terrifying silence. All around him in the light of the street, the light of the moon, the room was rendered harsh and was taking on at last its true character, its true face: no object, he realized, touched any other—the legs of the chair, weightless, no longer touching the floor; the table too, shimmering and discrete; the curtains not touching the window, but rather each panel riding remote and alone. Everything was its own solitary world, he realized; if he tried to touch something, he would touch nothing. He rode on his bed above a void, was suspended above a solitary world that was a bed in his own solitary world, all of it hanging in a void. He lay there, feeling faces tick across his flesh like a clock, slowly now, but a little faster every day. And who shall draw my profiles?, he wondered, no longer certain of who he was. And who shall render all my faces as I die?
The Adjudicator
—for Peter Straub
We have been for some time putting our community back into a semblance of body and shape, and longer still sifting the living from the dead. There are so many who seem as alive as you and I (if I may be so bold as to number you, with myself, among the living) but who already are all but dead. Much has been done that would not be done in better times, and I too in desperation have committed what I ought not have, and indeed may well do so again.
I have become too accustomed to the signs and tokens of death. I meet them both in the faces of the living and in the remnants I have encountered in my daily round: the blackened arm my plough turned up and which I just as quickly turned back under again; the bloody marks smeared deep into the grain of the wood of my door and which I have not the fortitude to scrub away; the man who lies dying in the ditch between my farm and my neighbor’s, and who, long dying, somehow still is not altogether dead.
Shall I start at the beginning? No, the end. Here am I, waiting for this same beditched man to either die or lurch to his feet and return to claw again at my door. I have no crops, my entire harvest having been pilfered or razed because of all I have witnessed and done and refused to do. If I am to make it alive to the next harvest, I must carefully pace the consumption of my few remaining stores. I must catch and eat what maggots and voles and vermin I can, glean and forage a little, beg mercy of my neighbors if any are still wont to deliver mercy to the likes of me. And then, if I am lucky, I shall sit here and starve for months, but perhaps not enough to die.
No, let us have the beginning after all: the end is too much with me, its breath already warm and damp on the nape of my neck.
At first there are wars and rumors of wars, then comes a light so bright that it shines through flesh and bone. Then a conflagration, the landscape peeled off and away, and nearly everyone dies. Those who do not die directly find themselves subject to suddenly erupting into pustules and bleeding from every pore and then falling dead. Most of the remainder are subject to a slow madness, their brains softened so as to slosh within their skulls. All but dead, these set about killing those who remain alive.
The few who survive unscathed are those in shelters underground or swaddled deep within a strong house. Or, simply, those who, like myself, seem not to have been afflicted for reasons no one can explain. Everything slides into nothingness and collapse, and for several years we all live like animals or worse, and then slowly we find our footing again. Soon some of us, maybe a few dozen, have banded together into this new order despite the disorder still raging in all quarters. We appoint a leader, a man named Rasmus. We begin to grow our scraggled crops. We form a pact to defend one another unto death.
At times I was approached by those who, having heard that I had been left unscathed in the midst of conflagration, bel
ieved I might provide some dark help to them. Others were more wary, keeping their distance as if from one cursed. Most, however, felt neither one thing nor the other, but saw me merely as a member of their community, a comrade-in-arms.
This, then, the fluid state of the world when, of a sudden, everything changed for me in the form of a delegation of men approaching my house. From a distance, I watched them come. The severed arm, having surged up under the sharp prow of the plough, was lying there, its palm open in appeal. Uncertain how they would feel about it, I quickly worked to have it buried again before they arrived.
I watched them come. One of them hallooed me when he saw me watching, and I waved back, then simply stood watching them come. I had grown somberly philosophical by this time, and was not distant enough from the conflagration ever to feel at ease. I still in fact carried a hatchet with me everywhere I went, and even slept with it beside me on the pillow. And it was upon this hatchet that Rasmus’s eyes first alighted once the delegation had approached close enough to form a half-circle about me, and upon the way my hand rested steady on the haft.
“No need for that,” he said. “Today will not be the day you hack me to bits.”
This remark, perhaps lighthearted enough, based no doubt on the rumors of my past and meaning nothing, or at least little, drew my thoughts to the arm buried beneath my feet. I was glad, indeed, that I had again inhumed it.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “to what do I owe this pleasure?” and I opened my pouch to them and offered them of my tobacco.
For a moment we were all of us engaged in stuffing and lighting our pipes, and then sucking them slowly down to ash, Rasmus keeping one finger raised to hold my question in abeyance. When he finished, he knocked the pipe out against the heel of his boot and turned fully toward me.
“We have an assignment for you,” he said.
“The hell you have,” I said.
Or at least wanted to say.
I do not know how to tell a story, a real one, or at least tell it well. Reading back over these pages, I see I have done nothing to give a sense of how it felt to have these determined men looming over me, their eyes strangely steady. Nor of Rasmus, with his wispy beard and red-pocked face. Why did we choose him as a leader? Because he was little good for anything else?
So, a large man, ruddy, looming over me, stabbing the air between us with a thick finger, nail yellow and cracking. Minions to either side of him.
What I said was not The hell you have, but “And it takes six of you to tell me?” Perhaps not, in retrospect, the wisest utterance, and certainly not taken exceptionally well. Not, to be blunt, in the proper community spirit. But once I was started down this path, I had difficulty arresting my career.
He tightened his lips and drew himself up a little, stiff now.
“What,” he asked, “was your profession?”
“I have always been a farmer,” I said. “As you yourself know.”
“No,” he said. “Before the conflagration, I mean.”
“You know very well what I was before the conflagration,” I said.
“I want to hear you say it,” he said.
But I would not say it. Instead, I filled my pipe again as they regarded me. Then lit and smoked it. And he, for whatever reason, did not push his point.
“There are rumors about you,” he claimed. “Are they true?”
“For the purposes of this conversation,” I said, not knowing what he was talking about, which rumors, “you should assume they are all true.”
“Paper,” he said, and one of the others came forward, held out a folded sheet of paper. I stared at it a long time, finally took it.
“We have an understanding then,” said Rasmus, and, before I could answer, started off. Soon, he and his company were lost to me.
After they had gone, I dug the arm up again and examined it, trying to determine how long it had been rotting and whether I had been the one to lop it free. In the end, I found myself no closer to an answer than in the beginning. Finally I could think to do nothing but plough it back under again.
The matter of my former profession amounts to this: I had no former profession. I was dissolute, poisonous to myself in any and all ways. At a certain moment, I reached the point where I would have done anything at all to have what I wanted, and indeed I often did. Many of the particulars have faded or vanished from my memory or been pushed deeper down until they can no longer be felt. There was one person, someone I was, in my own way, deeply in love with, whom I betrayed. Someone else, of a different gender, whose self I stripped away nerve by nerve.
When the conflagration came, it was nearly sweet relief for me. And, to be honest, what I did to survive, largely with the hatchet I still carry, is little worse, and perhaps better, than what I had done beforehand.
But for Rasmus, before the conflagration I had been a jack-of-all-trades, someone with little enough regard to take on any business, no matter how raucous or how bloody.
How much easier, I think now, had I just raised my hatchet then and there with Rasmus and his crew and started laying into them. And then simply sewed their bits wide about my field and ploughed them in deep.
There are other things I should tell, and perhaps still others forgotten that I shall never work my way back to. There are the rumors he had mentioned, asking if they were true. I cannot say one way or the other what he thought they were. Some people, as I have said, believe me charmed because of my aboveground survival, others believe me cursed. I am, I probably should have said before, completely devoid of hair—the only long-term consequence I suffered from the conflagration—and as such look to some homuncular, although as though not fully formed. I also heal, I have found, much faster than most, and it is, fortunately, somewhat difficult to inflict permanent damage upon me. It could be this that Rasmus had been referring to, which has become a rumor that I cannot die: a rumor that may well be disproved this winter. Or perhaps it was something else, something involving the past I have just elucidated above, or something touching on my deadly skill with the hatchet with which I live affectionately, as if it were a spouse. Who can say? Certainly not I.
The piece of paper, once unfolded and spread flat, read as follows:
In two days’ time a man will approach your door. You will invite him in and greet him. You will share with him of your tobacco. You will converse with him. And then, when he stands to leave, you will lay into him with your hatchet until he is dead. This is the wish of the community, and we call upon you as a man of the community and one who has often proved himself capable.
There was, as one would have expected, no signature. The words themselves were simple and blocky, anonymous. I screwed the note into a twist and then lit one end of it, used it to ignite my pipe, discarded it in the fire, watched it become its own incandescent ghost and then flinder and flake away into nothingness.
How much shall I tell you about myself? Do I have anything to fear from you? How much can I tell you before I lose hope of holding, by whatever tenuous grasp, your sympathy? Or have I already gone too far?
I have no strong moral objection to murder pure and simple, nor, for that matter, to anything else. Why this is so, I cannot say. And yet I derive no pleasure from murder, have no taste for it. I was as content—and perhaps more content—being a simple farmer as I had ever been in my earlier, dissolute life. I felt as if most of my old self had been slowly torn free of the rest of me, and I was not eager to have it pressed back against me again.
True, I had, on the occasions when our community had been afflicted by swarms of the dead or dying, done my part and done it well. After a particular effort, standing blood-spattered over the remains of one of the afflicted who had refused to stop moving, I had sometimes seen the fear in the eyes of those who had observed my deeds. But I did not like Rasmus’s quick slide from witnessing my having dispatched the dead to his assuming I would do the same without reluctance to the living. Not, again, that I had any reservations about the act of murder, on
ly that I did not care to be taken for granted. And I knew from my past that, having been asked once, I would be asked again and again.
Still, there are sacrifices to be made when one has the privilege of living in a community. I could see no way around making this particular one, even if I was not, technically speaking, the one being sacrificed.
I spent the rest of the day at work on my house, replacing the shingling of the room where the wood had grown gaunt and had been bleached by wind and sun. The next day it was back to the fields, with ploughing and planting to finish and the ditch to be diverted until the near field was a soppy patch that glimmered in the sunset. A pipe at evening as always, and early the next morning a walk two farms away for some more tobacco, trading for it a few handfuls of dried corn from the dwindling stores of the previous year’s harvest. Then a careful survey of the property, the dark, loamy earth of the still damp fields.
He came late in the day, just before sunset. Had I not known he was coming, I might well have been reluctant to swing wide the door, or at least would have opened it with hatchet raised and cocked back for the swing. He was a large man in broad-brimmed hat and long coat, wearing what once would have been called driving gloves.
“I have been sent to you,” he said. “They claimed perhaps you could help me.”
And so I ushered him in. I gestured to a chair near the fire. I placed my tobacco pipe and pouch within easy reach. I invited him to remove his gloves, his coat, his hat.
To this point there had been a certain inexorability to the proceedings, each moment a tiny and inevitable step toward the time when I would, without either fear or rage, raise my hatchet and make an end of the fellow.
Fugue State Page 23