Fugue State: stories

Bauer in the Tyrol

Late in the year, during a trip to the Tyrol, the sky so gray throughout the day that he felt himself to be living in a perpetual twilight, Bauer lost confidence in his ability to work with plaster. Stuck a dozen kilometers outside of Imst, his wife ill and watching him from her bed in the mountain inn, he spread newspapers over the parquet floor between the bed and the wall. Sitting on the bed, his back turned to her, his knees nearly touching the wall, he began mixing the plaster in a bucket stolen from behind the inn, bending the armature wire into slender standing figures which he set upon the windowsill. He could feel his wife’s eyes on his back, never for a moment did not feel them, and perhaps it was this, he told himself at first, which was causing him to lose confidence. He could feel her eyes and hear her cough, and could hear as well, when she was not coughing and even sometimes hidden within the cough itself, the way the air caught in her throat as she breathed. Through the window, past the stiff wire figures, he could see a sky as dull as a pewter plate, fog, scraggled pine swags. If he opened the window, he could hear the awful torrent of the river and the screeching of unfamiliar birds — sounds that dampened out, at least for an instant, the air catching in his wife’s throat. But sounds that proved in the end at least as irritating. He would reach into the bucket and scoop up plaster in his hand, smearing and clomping it onto first one armature and then another until there was an array of lumpy figures glistening on the sill. They were, at that moment, not bad, even bearable — standing figures, barely human, each no taller than a pencil and nearly as thin, as if seen from a great distance, hands to sides — but nothing special either, nothing he had not done before, no progress, a standstill. He would sit watching them as long as he could bear, a sheen condensing on the surface of the wet plaster — the air is wrong here, he told himself, it is not me, but a problem with the air. But soon, he took each figure up again, prodded it with his fingers or his pocketknife or a wire, gouged it down to nothing or pushed more plaster onto it until he had thoroughly ruined it. Then, stripping each figure down to bare armature, he would begin again, working from the gray of the morning sky to the gray of the evening sky without success, until plaster made his fingers too thick, until plaster was daubed all over the curtains and on the sill and on his legs too, the wire figures destroyed and cast aside.

Lighting the wick, he lay on the bed beside his wife, trying not to touch her. He lay there regarding the ceiling, listening to the air catch in his wife’s throat. The quality of the air, he told himself again, was wrong, thus the failure of his figures in plaster, thus the way said air caught in his wife’s throat. She wanted nothing, would eat nothing. If he brought her food, she softly refused to eat it; water she sipped at once or twice and then pushed the tumbler away. Once or twice in the evenings, in the first evenings of their unexpected and sudden residence in the mountain inn, she would stop breathing for a moment, just long enough to gather her breath and open her mouth to speak. He should go out, she would suggest, he was not needed, he should get some fresh air. He hardly bothered to answer, just lay on the bed beside her, tightening his jaw slightly. Soon she stopped talking altogether, and when he looked over, her eyes were closed, her breath still catching in her throat in that terrible way that made him wish she were dead.

He lay there until the candle guttered and went out, and some nights he kept lying there still, in the dark, his eyes open. One night, he stuffed bits of paper into his ears and covered them over with semihard plaster from the bucket. Then, he could not hear her, but he could still feel her beside him, the fevered heat steaming off her, her body turning there and there, and he could hear the sound of his own blood too loud in his ears, and that was as bad to him as his wife’s breathing, perhaps worse. The bed, too, he felt was too narrow, and to keep from touching his wife, her damp flesh, he found himself at the very edge of it, one shoulder hanging off. He would stay there and after a time either fall into a terrible, fitful state adjacent to sleep or lie there until he was certain he could not sleep, then get up, leave the room, go down the hall to the common bathroom, where he would sit all night, carving at a cake of soap with his pocketknife. The soap, too, frittered away, growing slowly smaller and smaller until he was working with a brittle splinter of it hardly bigger than his thumbnail, a tiny, vanishing human figure, hardly human at all. And soon he would cut once too deeply and it would crumble to nothing in his hands.

The air, he had been told, was invigorating. When he and his wife had arranged to make this trip to the Tyrol, they had been perpetually told, by everyone they met, that Tyrolean air was invigorating. He had not found it so, had found precisely the contrary: that the air was exvigorating, if such a thing could be said, there was something wrong with the air, a problem with the air. He would breathe it in, but each time he breathed out, it would take something from him. He would breathe sitting against the bathtub, his knife still in his hands, crumbs of soap over his hands and legs. He would breathe and then each time he exhaled he would think, there a little something, there a little something, and feel himself to be less and less. But, he would tell himself, it has not yet reached the point where there is little enough of me that that little something catches in my throat when it goes. He would close his eyes, thinking, there a little something, there a little something, and then for a few hours, on the bathroom floor, he would fitfully sleep.

In the mornings, particularly, it was clear to him that his wife was dying, and each day it was clearer still. He knew he was waiting in this inn for her to be dead, that in the bed beside her he was waiting, knowing that each time he climbed into bed beside her again, a little more of her was dead. One day the breath would catch in her throat and stay caught, and then she would be dead for good. There was, he argued with himself in the morning, looking at his wife sprawled in the bed, no real moment between dead and not dead for the body, for the body was changing, always changing, but even as he said it he wondered if it were not a lie.

And then, as the day progressed: plaster again, his back to his wife, the windowsill. No cough now, cough gone a few days back, a lessening, only the sound of air catching in her throat, and the body no longer so moist, harder to sense now with his back to it, closer in its dryness to bone. The catch in her throat still hard to hear, but in a different way now, like a clock. As he worked, as he destroyed the slender plaster figures one after the other, then built them up again, then destroyed them again, he found himself turning to look at her, her closed eyes, her face. The structure of her face seemed to have changed, he thought, the skin wrinkling differently, and it was hard to think of her in the same way, as the same woman, which made him, above all, a little less disgusted, a little more curious.

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.

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.

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.