Fugue State: stories

Life Without Father

Life without father began some few weeks before he actually died, at the moment when he started encasing his head in orange plastic mesh held shut with twine. He did this because, so he claimed, it helped him. Helped him what or how, Elise never knew. It was, her father proclaimed that first day from within the mesh, the beginning of the most lucid period of his life. Yet whatever it was helping or helping with, it apparently didn’t help for long, for soon her father had replaced the mesh with a bag made of wire netting cut from a window screen. He threaded it closed around his neck, the screen’s raw stubble leaving a red band along his clavicle. Correction, the father stated. The orange plastic mesh had helped but not helped enough. The wire screen was in fact the real beginning of the only truly lucid period of his thought. He had not felt so good since before the mother had left, he told Elise, and probably not even then.

Elise wondered what, if anything, she should do. Early on, she suggested to her father that he should remove the netting from around his head, a suggestion that made him distraught. No, he said, didn’t she see? It was a great help to him. She tried to see, and though she could not understand why, she began to hope that, yes, it did seem to help him, maybe, somehow. Her father had not been exactly himself since the mother’s disappearance. He had been, at best, approximately himself and, at worst, not himself at all. With the wire encasing his head he was not exactly himself, either, but he was closer, and more stable in whatever he now was. So she decided that, yes, she was willing to go along with it. In any case, she apparently had no choice.

Yet, correction. This period too ground to a stop, the father’s stability wearing away again, to be followed by the last and shortest stage: a long weekend that was for her the worst to remember, involving a plastic shopping bag. He held the bag gathered at his neck, the force of his breathing making it swell and collapse around his features until it was he who collapsed. While he lay there, Elise loosened the bag enough to let a little fresh air in. He was, he told her each time he came conscious, finally truly lucid, this time he was certain. His voice, bag-muffled, buzzed against the plastic. Soon he was staggering about again, holding the bag tight and closed at his throat. When he fell again, Elise was again there to save him.

During the course of the single long weekend, she loosened the bag around his head eighty-four times. She kept track, even after she grew tired. At one point when she thought she might lose count, she opened her fifth-grade math book and kept track inside its back cover with a series of hash marks. She made four straight vertical marks and one diagonal mark through them and then moved slightly down the page. When not making marks, she was waiting patiently for her father to collapse again. When she closed her eyes to rest, all she could see was the bag swelling and deflating, her father’s features coming clear an instant then wavering away. When she opened her eyes, all she could see was her father lying on the floor, motionless save for his hands, which slowly curled or tightened as she loosened the bag. Until finally she closed her eyes and saw the bag swell and deflate in her head, and by the time she opened her eyes again, her father was dead.

It took her some while to realize her father was dead. Indeed, just as before, she loosened the bag until she could see his square chin, the gash of his lips, the blunt tip of his nose. She got up and made another hash mark in her math book, and then she closed her eyes and slept again. When she woke up, he was still lying there where she had left him, bag still loose, so she closed her eyes and slept further. She could not remember there being a moment when she realized he was dead: when she had gone back to sleep, she didn’t know, but when she awoke again, she knew already, there was no shock to it — in her sleep she had figured it out.

She wondered if she should erase the last hash mark in the math book, but in the end let it stand. Then she tallied them up by fives and came up with eighty and then added the last four strokes onto that. She had saved her father eighty-four times; how could she be blamed for failing on the eighty-fifth?

He was still lying there. All she could see of him were his hands, his chin, his lips, his nose, his clothes. She was not sure if clothes should count as part of someone. She wondered if she should take the bag off his head, and then decided no: on TV, they would leave it on until the police arrived. I will go back to sleep, she thought, and then I will call the police.

When she woke up, flies were turning circles on her father’s face. The color of the face had started to turn, the skin lying differently on what she could see of his chin and lower face. The lips seemed stretched, and had drawn back to reveal the tips of his teeth. A fly slid in and out of his mouth.

She went to get the telephone from the kitchen, brought it back with her so she could keep an eye on her father as she dialed 911.

“What’s your emergency?” asked a woman’s voice.

Emergency? she thought. It wasn’t exactly an emergency, since her father was already dead; there was nothing they could do except come get him.

“My father,” she started to say, and then stopped, not knowing what to say next.

The line stayed silent for a moment, then: “What about your father?” the woman asked, her voice slightly queer. “What has he been doing to you?”

Doing to me? No, thought Elise, she doesn’t understand.

“Darling,” said the woman’s voice. “Don’t be afraid to tell me.”

“I’m sorry, I have to go now,” said Elise, and hung up the telephone.

The police came anyway, two officers who rang the doorbell and then stood on the porch, looking bored. She watched them through the peephole. One had a thin mustache and had lost most of his hair. The other was behind him and harder to see. She waited as they rang again and then knocked. It wasn’t until the mustached one started talking into the transmitter affixed to the shoulder of his jacket that she opened the door a little.

The mustached one kept talking and listening to his shoulder, turning away from her slightly to look at the doorframe. Then the one behind came forward and she saw he had a mustache too.

“Hello,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Elise,” she said, watching him from around the edge of the door.

“Are your parents here?”

Elise thought about that a moment. “Sort of,” she finally said.

“Sort of?” said the officer. “What do you mean?”

The problem, Elise realized, staring at him, was knowing what to say. You could say what you thought was right, what would make sense to you, and nobody else really understood it. It was as if they were living in a different world than you, or as if you were speaking under water.

The policeman was still standing, waiting.

“Would you like to come in?” asked Elise.

She pulled the door wide. He took a step forward, smiling, and then through the doorway he caught a glimpse of her father lying on the floor. He stopped smiling and his hand felt back behind him, searching for his partner.

The two officers in uniform made her sit on the couch and stay there. Other people, not wearing uniforms, came and took pictures. She waited patiently, her feet crossed at the ankles. At one point a man wearing a brown jacket approached her, sat in the armchair across from her.

“Where’s your mother?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“When do you expect her home?”

When? she wondered. Her father had thought she might come home at any time, any day. In the days before he started to wrap his head up, he had said each morning, She might come home today, but she never had.

“She might come home today,” Elise said.

“What do you mean, might?” asked the man. “That also means might not.” They would have to arrange something, he was saying to a uniformed officer, somewhere for her to stay. Did she have any relatives nearby, anyone she could stay with?

“My aunt,” she said.

“Your aunt,” he said, and nodded. He went away and made some phone calls and then talked to the men who were loading the body into a zippered bag.

“Now,” said the man, coming back. “Are you O.K.? How do you feel?”

She didn’t know how to answer, so didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter.

“Can you talk?” he asked. Do you feel well enough to help us work through this?”

She nodded.

“It’s like this,” he said. “We need to know if your father did this to himself or if someone else did it to him. Can you tell me which?”

Did her father do this to himself? she wondered. Yes, he had put the bag on his head, but had he meant to die? No, she didn’t think so, he hadn’t been aware that he would die, didn’t seem to want to die. Had she done it to him? Yes, in a manner of speaking, by not loosening the bag the eighty-fifth time. But it wasn’t what she had done to him, but simply what she had not, finally, managed to do.

“He died,” she said.

“Yes,” said the man patiently, “but what did you see? Murder or suicide?”

It wasn’t exactly either, she thought, but a third thing she didn’t quite have a word for. She sat staring at her hands folded in her lap.

“Come on,” the man said, “either you know something or you don’t. You’re old enough to understand. Which is it?”

“He died,” she tried again.

The man shook his head. “We know he died,” he said. “We just want to know more about it. Are you afraid to tell me?”

“No,” she said immediately.

“There’s no reason to be afraid,” he said. “No harm will come to you.”

Harm? she thought, and only then did she begin to consider that some harm could possibly come. Was she to blame? Would they punish her?

“Were you in the house when he died?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“What did you see?” he asked.

“I saw,” she said, and then stopped. Was she to blame? She did not feel that she was to blame, hoped she wasn’t. Was her father to blame? She didn’t feel that he was, either.

“What did you see?”

“It just,” she said. “I mean, he just …”

“Calm down,” said the man. “No need to get excited.” But she wasn’t getting excited, was she? “I’m your friend. Can’t you see I’m your friend?”

She looked at him, his eyes glittering like the eyes of a doll. If he lay down, they would click back up into his head.

He put his hands, clasped together, on the coffee table between them, and leaned forward. It was an awkward position for him. His hands seemed huge and made of plaster.

“Let’s try another way,” he said.

“O.K.,” she said.

“Let’s just,” he said, then stopped. “Listen, did your mother have anything to do with this?”

“My mother?” she said.

He nodded.

Did she? Elise wondered. Her mother had left, her father was always talking about her. The mesh, the wire, the bag had all been, so he said, attempts to make him feel good again, as he had before the mother left. He always said that: before your mother left. Without the mother’s leaving them, none of it would have happened.

She nodded slightly.

“Yes?”

She nodded again.

“There,” he said, taking his hands off the table and settling them on his thighs. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

And thus began the period that Elise, had she been her own father, might have called the only truly lucid period of her life — though Elise, being only Elise and not her own dead father, did not know what lucid meant. It was a word she had heard only from the father, only three times, each time as an inauguration of what he saw as a new period of his existence, a step closer to his own death. Perhaps lucid had something to do with that.

Elise moved in with the aunt, her father’s sister, a large-boned and yeasty woman with a very red face. Elise liked her: she was a little like her father, but only in the best ways.

Each day the aunt drove her across town and to her school. Sometimes, instead of going straight into the school, she would instead hide just inside the doors and then go back out again. She would walk through the playground and the parking lot and down the street beyond until she reached her house, her father’s house. There was no one living there now. There was a yellow-plastic tape line over the door—Police Line Do Not Cross—and a plastic ball encasing the door handle. She would go up and stare in through the tall window next to the door, and then walk back to the school, go to class.

Her aunt fed her and took her places. They watched movies together. They went to the library and checked out books. Her aunt told her that she had always wanted a daughter and maybe if Elise’s mother didn’t come back she could adopt her? How would Elise like that?

Elise didn’t know what to say.

“But,” said her aunt, “even if she does come back she probably won’t get you after what she did to my brother. They’ll lock her away for it,” she said, nodding.

“For what?” asked Elise.

“You know,” said her aunt. “After all, it was you who told them.”

Me? thought Elise. What had she said? When she had said her mother had something to do with it, she hadn’t known they would be upset about it. She had meant something else, nothing specific, just something in general. They didn’t understand, nobody understood, it was better to keep quiet. They had phrased it all wrong, if they had asked her the right questions or if it had been someone else asking, then maybe, she thought. Someone like her aunt, she thought.

“They’d lock her up for leaving?” she asked.

“No, silly,” said the aunt. “For killing him.”

For killing him? “But she didn’t kill him,” Elise said.

The aunt came toward her, put her arm around her. “I’ve upset you,” she said. “Darling. I’m sorry. I can understand how you feel. She’s your mother, after all, but don’t forget about your father.”

“But,” said Elise.

“If it hadn’t been for your mother, darling,” said her aunt, “your father would still be alive today.”

She thought about it later, at night. Her aunt was right, she thought, but not exactly right. She shouldn’t have said anything to the detective, Elise felt, he hadn’t understood, nobody ever understood, her aunt didn’t understand either. Then she fell asleep.

In the morning she woke up and had oatmeal for breakfast. Her aunt drove her to her school and she went right in. All day long it was a good day and it wasn’t until late in the day, near the end of school, that she opened her math book and saw the hash marks inside the back cover and realized she had gone the whole day without once thinking of her father. In a manner of speaking, life without father was just beginning.

Ten days later, the man in the brown jacket was waiting at her aunt’s door when they arrived home from school. The aunt ushered him in, offered him a cup of coffee. Elise went up to her room to play.

While at her aunt’s house, she had learned to play at wild ponies. The aunt had two such ponies, both made of hard plastic but molded in such away that you could see the muscles on their flanks, the twists and curves of their manes. They had belonged to the aunt when she was a girl, and sometimes the aunt would play at them with her. She and the aunt liked to gallop them across the carpet, which was green and like grass, and the ponies would talk and sometimes go places together. Elise thought it was a game she was too young to be playing, but since the aunt played it, she was willing to play too.

The wild ponies had just galloped off across the sward, as her aunt called it, and were standing, blowing and nickering, on the edge of a stream, trying to decide whether to swim across it or stay put, when the door opened and her aunt came in.

“Honey,” the aunt said. “I don’t know if you’ll think it’s good news or bad. They found your mother.”

She just kept playing with the ponies.

Her aunt crawled beside her and ran her hand up and down Elise’s back.

“The man downstairs,” she said, “he wants to speak to you.”

Elise shook her head.

“Now, darling,” said the aunt, “don’t be like that. He’s not going to hurt you.”

Elise realized that one of the ponies was restless, swaying and nickering, and didn’t understand why, and then realized that she was holding it too tightly. She let her hand loosen up and the pony stopped. Then she felt someone else in the room and looked up and saw the man in the brown jacket.

“Elise?” he said. “Can I talk to you?”

Elise shook her head.

“She’s not usually like this,” said the aunt. “Not usually so stubborn.”

“No?” said the man. “Elise,” he said, “your mother is in custody. You’re safe now.”

Safe? thought Elise. Safe from what?

“I need,” said the man, leaning down and toward her, “I need you to tell me everything that you saw.”

Elise didn’t answer.

“Elise,” said the man, his voice stern. “This is important.”

“I want to see her,” said Elise.

“Now, Elise,” said her aunt. “Don’t you think—”

“I want to see my mother,” she said.

“All right,” said the man. “I can foresee that as an eventuality. But first, a few questions.”

“No,” said Elise. “Now.”

But by the time they were on the way to the jail, she felt drained, as if she had worked herself up by so thoroughly insisting on seeing her mother. The urgency to see her mother had left her. For once, they had listened and understood, but now that they had understood, she didn’t know if it was what she wanted anymore.

They got out of the car and went in through a door with an alarm bell on top of it, the alarm going off as they pushed through. They went down a white hall and into a room with a mirror the whole length of one wall. She sat down at a table and the man in the brown jacket sat next to her. The aunt had to wait outside.

Elise waited patiently, her hands in her lap, her head slightly bowed. How long had it been since she had seen her mother? She didn’t know. Would she recognize her mother? Yes, of course. But would her mother recognize her?

After a while the door opened and her mother was led in. She was wearing orange and had her hands in front of her in handcuffs. She was being punished, Elise realized. She smiled nervously at her daughter.

“Darling,” she said, “please, tell them I had nothing to do with it.”

There was something wrong, Elise suddenly realized, something truly wrong. It was as if her mother had been coached on what to say, as if she had practiced saying it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she was sure it was a trap.

And with that, Elise entered into what she felt at the time, and even for some years after, was the only truly lucid period of her life. Correction, she heard a part of her mind state. Do nothing, she thought. Say nothing. Watching her mother across the table, she closed her mouth and kept it closed. She steeled herself, at once terrified and elated over where it all was likely to lead.