Fugue State: stories

The Third Factor

Clearly the method of elucidation I employed in my report did not satisfy the administration, and thus I am at a loss as to know how to proceed. I beg to be forgiven here for stretching regulations, for deviating slightly but, I hope, productively from the standard report. Since I have already tendered my resignation, I will also say frankly that I see a supplemental report as superfluous. Or, rather, I would see it as such were I not aware that failure to answer the administration’s request might well result in my being subjected to a sustained process of observation — observation of the sort which I myself have been obliged to carry out in the past. Obviously I am assuming — hardly a safe assumption — that I am not already under observation.

Had I a copy of it, you would find appended to this notebook a completed copy of what I believe is grievance form 026/a, “Formal grievance, superiors, non-immediate, at hands of.” I would have shaded the box marked “Request, redundancy” and would have, as per requirements, bolstered the form with the requisite material: my initial report, my letter of resignation, and the administration’s latest request. Perhaps whichever administrator receives my materials will argue that, since I previously tendered my resignation, I am no longer considered an employee and thus not authorized to file a grievance. My inability, despite my best efforts, to obtain said form suggests as much. Yet if I do not de facto possess employee status, why am I being asked to supplement my original report?

The gestation of my current state of mind — a state of mind which led to my resignation — took place during my first assignment. I had been asked to note the movements of a silvery-haired gentleman who habitually sported a soiled trench coat. These movements consisted generally of a slow round from park bench to park bench. I had been noting his movements in a battered but sturdy notebook that fit snugly into the palm of my admittedly meaty hand. I wrote in a notational code devised by myself and my immediate supervisor — a code of such efficiency and concision that I needed less than a single page per day.

This assignment lasted for the better part of a year. The subject was of regular habits and there was only slight variance in his movements. I arrived early in the morning to take the place of the night observer. I left in the early evening, when I was replaced by the same man. At the end of each day I walked to a designated street corner, there to find an older make of car, nondescript save for the heavily tinted glass of its windows. It was a different car each day but always had the same license plate. My instructions were to try the passenger-side door. If it was unlocked, I was to open said door and climb inside, delivering my report aloud to my immediate superior. If it was locked, I tore the day’s page free from the notebook and left it pinioned and fluttering between the windshield wiper and the windshield itself.

This first assignment, it should be evident, was a simple one. The subject under observation made no effort to avoid me. Indeed, he seemed consistently unaware of my presence. As this attitude persisted for the full course of the observation, I became lulled into complacency. For this reason I was surprised and unprepared when the subject, between benches, removed a small-bore revolver from his pocket and shot himself in the belly.

As my supervisor and I had developed no notational code for this behavior, I wasted valuable time rendering in longhand what I had seen. For the first time, I used more than a page, a fact which filled me with not inconsiderable distress. Once the event was recorded, it took me some time to decide what to do. In the end, thinking I might compromise my position were I to intervene directly, I called anonymously for an ambulance from a yellow call box enthicketed deep within the park. By the time this ambulance arrived, the subject had bled to death.

The paramedics covered him with a sheet and loaded him into the ambulance, two facts I also recorded longhand in my notebook. After a failed attempt to pursue the ambulance on foot, I returned to the designated street corner to report. My subject had chosen to shoot himself well before the conclusion of my day’s observation; thus, no car was present, only a pair of orange cones banded with reflective tape.

Returning to the park, I waited out the end of my observation period. I was not replaced at dusk by the night observer. After waiting for some time, I made my way back to the designated street corner and there found a car waiting. The passenger-side door was open. I climbed in.

My supervisor sat silent while I began to read aloud from my report, his gloved hands resting delicately atop the steering wheel. When I reached my longhand description of the shooting, he lifted one hand slightly. I stopped speaking.

“You did not employ our code,” he said.

“The experience unfortunately was not such as to render itself into a coding with which I was familiar,” I said, somewhat uneasily.

In a few instants he explained how one might elegantly extrapolate a relevant coding of the event in a way that was logical and immediately comprehensible. Why I had not seen it before, I couldn’t say.

In letting his hand fall back to the steering wheel, he signaled for me to continue. He stopped me yet again when I explained my telephone call.

“This,” he said, “constitutes a description not of his movements but of your own.”

He raised similar objections to my failure to follow the ambulance.

“These are hours,” he stated, “that shall remain forever outside of observation.”

But, I explained, by this time the subject was dead.

But by what authority, he wanted to know, had I determined that my observation should end with the subject’s death?

For two days I stood outside a mortuary, at the end of which I was made to attend the graveside services and note the subject’s movements. These, as one might expect, were minimal at best. I watched his coffin being lowered into the open grave and listened impassively as a friend of the family spoke of an unknown assailant—obviously not realizing the subject had shot himself — and of the Good Samaritan who had called for the ambulance, which had come, alas, too late. He was followed by a parade of friends and relations eager to grieve, whose words rapidly reduced the man’s life to a half-smiling and impotent shambles. It disconcerted me to discover the ordinary banality of the fellow’s life, though I cannot say why.

When I returned to the designated street corner after the funeral, I discovered a piece of paper fluttering between the windshield and the windshield wiper of the car in question, a paper which made clear that I was to report to another city, to another contact, to accept my second assignment.

My new assignment was slightly more complicated than my previous one, which initially seemed to suggest that the administration had been pleased with how I had performed on my previous assignment — though I was at a loss to understand how exactly I might have pleased them. I was given a photograph and an address, told that I was to observe the individual in question and follow him, report on his movements, his associates. I was to keep a record but to meet with my supervisor only if I noted anything unusual.

When I asked what exactly constituted unusual, my administrator, sitting beside me in the flickering half-light of the movie theater, made a vague gesture, hard to see in the dark. I was not, I was told, to wonder what I was looking for; when something was unusual, he assured me, I would know. Before I could inquire further, he softly squeezed my knee and stood, pushing past me and out of the theater.

I went to the address I had been given, establishing a locus of observation among the branches of an oak tree in a park across the street from it. The house was small, the lot cut into the side of a hill. I watched people come and go, and compared each face to the picture I held in my hand. None of them were the subject. In the late afternoon I was discovered by a park employee, whom at first I ignored but who subsequently prodded me with a stick until I was forced to climb down. Shortly thereafter, he forced me to leave the park.

In the three days that followed, I did my best to keep the house under observation, despite the continued harcelations of the park employee. I was tempted to kill him for the sake of the observation, and surely would have, had I not felt that his death was as likely to complicate my ability to use the park for observation as it was to facilitate it. I developed an elaborate series of maneuvers to avoid the fellow, quickly mastering the possible variants of his rounds and learning to anticipate his movements. He saw me at a distance once or twice, but by the time he came nearer, I had vanished.

Despite these setbacks, my observation was rigorous. I could state with certainty that the man in the photograph did not enter the house, nor did he leave it.

Perhaps, I thought, I have a bad likeness. But even considering the photograph a bad likeness, I still could not imagine that it represented anyone I had seen enter the house.

Or perhaps, I thought, I had been given this assignment as a punishment.

On the fourth day, not knowing what else to do, I approached the house and rapped on the door. A young woman — early twenties, baby slung on one hip, no resemblance to the man in the photograph — opened the door. I showed her the photograph, claiming I had found it fluttering on her front lawn. Had she or someone in her household dropped it? Did she recognize it? No, she said, it wasn’t hers. Did she recognize the man in the picture? Perhaps it was a neighbor of hers? I would, I claimed, gladly return the photograph to the rightful owner if only …

She looked long and hard. No, she said, she was sorry, but she did not recognize the man.

I attempted to make contact with my supervisor by returning to the movie theater. I arrived early in the morning and waited outside until it opened. I went to the row where we had conversed before, and installed myself. There I remained until the theater closed, my sole encounter being not with my supervisor but with an elderly and uncircumcised man — the accuracy of this latter adjective made manifest to me through the fact that the fellow felt compelled to display for me his foreskin. I had neither encouraged nor discouraged him, simply remained staring straight ahead at the flickering images on the screen, waiting for my supervisor to arrive.

I had, in my first meeting with my supervisor, paid no attention to the film. Indeed, all my energy had been focused on gathering the particulars of the job itself. Thus, I had no way of knowing if that particular film and the film I was now regarding on this, my second visit, were in fact the same. I can speak only to the particulars of the film I saw on this second visit and hope they cast some light on the film of the first visit. Or, rather, what I mean to say is that what I say about the film might have some significance to my understanding the purposes of the administration or it might not, might reveal only something about myself and my subsequent actions. And perhaps not even that.

I was surprised to discover that I could make no sense of what I was seeing on the screen. There was occasionally an image that might have been a face, but it was so sunk within a general morass of light and sound that I could never fully apprehend it. There was a flux of what might have been bodies, but so abstracted as to have been equally likely scratches in an overexposed film stock. The images, if images they were, first entranced and then slowly unsettled me. At the moment when my distress had reached its height, the film flickered out and the houselights rose. The old man who had been beside me was gone; he had been kind enough to leave behind no sign of his presence. The few theatergoers — all men, curiously enough — filed out, save for me. A clubfooted employee armed with dustpan and broom swept the aisles and gathered garbage and then disappeared. A few minutes later the lights dimmed, a few dim men filed in, and the film began again.

Or perhaps I should say, merely, a film began. I was unable to tell if I was watching the same film or a different one. I experienced the same deep play of color and light that at once threatened to dissolve into abstraction and cohere into discrete images without ever quite doing either one. But there was no particular moment I recognized. I had the odd sensation of both seeing something for the first time and seeing it again. This exhilarated me and then unsettled me. I watched the remaining showings without ever quite being at ease.

Imagine me, then, seated, awaiting my superior, until the final showing of the evening came to an end and I was forced to leave the theater. I returned to the theater every day for a week, becoming more and more engrossed in the film or films, still unable to make sense of them. I kept to the same seat. My contact never appeared, though the uncircumcised man or someone not unlike him made several repeated forays down my aisle. On the eighth day, I found myself confronted not by the sort of film I had grown accustomed to but by a blaring and heaving image of a nude or nearly nude woman. Startled, I left.

I searched my mind: was there something I was forgetting, some method of contacting my superior that I had neglected? No, I thought, there was not.

What followed was a slow and lost movement through the city as I considered what, if anything, I should do. I kept my eyes open for the man in the photograph, to no avail. I shuffled in and out of movie theaters throughout the city without finding anyone who resembled my superior. Having no subject whose movements I might record, I began to record my own movements, slowly developing my own notational code, a code, I will acknowledge, derived from that of my previous supervisor.

I slept in the streets, plastered in newspapers. I became tattered, ungainly. I was awash, adrift, unadministrated.

How long this period lasted, it is difficult to say. Perhaps several months, perhaps more than a year. There are whole months of which I have only the vaguest memories. Even in my notebooks, pages in which each of a day’s movements is carefully notated are followed by bursts of blank pages. I remember the act of notating certain days in the notebook but no longer recall the movements themselves: even as I was writing them, it was as if I were recording not my own movements but the movements of someone else.

In a moment of lucidity, it came to me that it might be possible to regain contact with the administration through my previous administrator. I boarded the first bus. After a journey involving little or no sleep and the changing of buses on four or five separate occasions, I found myself back in the city in which I had fulfilled my first assignment. After a brief sleep within a green metal dumpster behind the bus station, I set off. I pursued a trajectory straight through the city along the main street until the surroundings began to strike me as familiar, at which point I began to wriggle my way about on side streets. By such means I stumbled onto a park not unlike the park in which my first subject of observation had shot himself. I discovered a house seemingly identical to the house he had occupied. I made my way through the park and down a side street, turned right, turned right once more, but at what should have been the designated corner I found no car.

I sat on the curb and considered. Was it or was it not the designated corner? The name of the street was familiar, but for what reason it was impossible to say: perhaps it was merely a street I had often passed, or it bore the name of another street in another city. My notebooks, carefully coded, were of no help on this score — the relevant pages had all been long ago torn out and pinioned to windshields. What remained of my notebooks concerned only my abortive second assignment (also in a house near a park, but in a different city) and my period of self-observation. Is this or is this not the place? I wrote, and then held the pen poised above the paper to see what words might come next.

Nothing came next.

I am unable to say how much time had passed. At one moment, I was there on the curb, feet in the gutter, watching water swirling past the worn heels of my boots. The next, I was somehow in a park, conscious only of the fact that I had just heard, somewhere behind me, a voice.

The voice spoke again, uttering, perhaps somewhat tentatively, a name. I removed my notebook and made a notation in it, a notation meant to represent the name that had just been uttered: B.

I will be the first to admit that notation is not always enough. How much wiser it would have been had I recorded the name in full. But, having been scolded previously by my supervisor for moving from notation to longhand, I felt I had no choice.

A hand touched my shoulder. “Is that you, B?” a voice asked, and uttered the name again. No, I said, not me, and tried to continue on my way. But the man attached to the voice kept tight hold of my shoulder and slowly turned me about until he was looking me in the face.

“Ah,” he said. “It is you.”

But no, let me state, for the record, that it wasn’t me. Or, rather, wasn’t him. B. Or I wasn’t him, I mean. I tried to state as much, but without real success. As I tried again to disengage myself, the man tightened his hold, speaking excitedly and quickly. I was to come with him, he told me. I must come with him. I began to feel very afraid, though even now I am hard-pressed to say why. I struck him once, hard, and turned and ran.

I spent two days wandering the side streets, at night sequestering myself within a green metal dumpster. By the third day, I had convinced myself that I must flee the city. Perhaps, I told myself, if I returned to my second assignment, I would now understand what to do.

I had seated myself in the proper bus when it was boarded by the man whom I had encountered in the park, accompanied by a policeman. There was nowhere for me to go. As I watched them come down the aisle toward me, I discreetly recorded their movements in my notebook.

They stopped beside me, the man uttering the name again, like a greeting. I ignored him. This the man? the policeman asked, and when the other man responded in the affirmative, he asked me, You him? I did not answer. Both addressed me again, both were ignored. Eventually the policeman took my arm and tried to coax me from my seat, which caused me to wholeheartedly embrace the seat in front of me — much to the surprise and consternation of the man sitting in it. What followed, not necessarily in this order, were shouts, a rush and a sway, a torn shirt pocket, hands prying at fingers, a billy club, a terrified face. All of which culminated in my expulsion from the bus and my temporary sequestration within a police station. I had, I was told, a lot of explaining to do.

I was asked for a name. As per administrative regulations, I did not surrender it. I was asked if I was not one B. No, I claimed, not he. Then what was my name? I chose not to answer. Did I know who I was? I remained mum. The other man, I was told, was my relation. I shrugged.

The other man displayed a number of photographs — photographs of a man who, I was forced to admit, resembled me to no uncommon degree. Even his frozen gestures, at least as they were captured in the photographs, seemed to have been modeled after my own.

I will insist again, as I did in my first report, that I was not for a moment convinced. I was not, and never had been, this B, was certain of that even though I have some small difficulty in assembling the details of my life prior to my employment by the administration. Yet, as my questioning continued, it became clear to me that the choice was not between acknowledging this ersatz relation and being released on my own recognizance; it was between acknowledging him and becoming award of the state. I could produce no fixed address, not having one, and I was unwilling to speak of my name or my admittedly obscure past. All of these things marked me as a danger and suggested I must be restrained. When this became clear to me, I reconsidered my strategies.

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 in 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?