Fugue State: stories

Alfons Kuylers

On the night of 12 October, I was compelled for reasons I still find quite difficult to explain to kill one Alfons Kuylers, esteemed dealer in imported goods of a specialty nature, my mentor, my master in the art of philosophical paradox, my tutor in all things theological. I gained nothing from this crime save for a ring he had offered me many times before, and a long letter he had apparently intended to give me, in which he urged me to leave the country immediately. This was the final piece of advice I would have from him, and also one of the few which, perhaps impulsively, perhaps sentimentally, I ever followed.

It was well past midnight by the time I left Kuylers’s apartment. The night was gusty and dismal; with the curfew still in effect, I had to take great care in journeying through the streets. I had burnt Kuylers’ letter after reading it, believing as I did that it would be better, if I were questioned, not to have it on my person. Other than his ring, I carried nothing of real value — a few loose coins, the clothing I wore, an overcoat with a crumpled handkerchief in the pocket, and the lacquered walking stick I had used first to knock Alfons Kuylers off his feet and then deliver the fatal blow. This object, stained with blood and brains, was rapidly washed clean in the rain.

By way of alleys and backstreets I progressed toward the waterfront. There was, traveling always with me, sometimes closer and sometimes farther, the memory, surprisingly vivid, of Kuylers’s face changing as he realized what was going to happen to him. Until I saw it in his face, I did not know that I would kill him, but from that moment forward it felt as if the matter were entirely out of my hands. My steps were at first confident and unhurried, but as this memory continued to plague me, the sounds of my own footsteps seemed to my own ears increasingly erratic. Soon I heard at a little distance the sound of a scuffle, followed quickly by a shot and an anguished cry, after which my composure abandoned me altogether, so that by the time I arrived at the docks I was harried and utterly out of breath.

Not utterly out of breath, I thought at the docks, smoothing back my hair, trying again to calm myself. For I had seen earlier that evening a man who was, being dead, utterly out of breath: one Alfons Kuylers. No, the problem, I realized, was — as Alfons Kuylers had said in so many of our philosophical sessions together—the opposite and the inverse, not that I was too out of breath, but that I was, as it were, too alive, living too many lives at once, as if I were breathing for many men. In retrospect, this realization seems far from cogent, simply another layer of ontological mystification, but at the time it seemed akin to revelation.

It was in such a state, slightly feverish perhaps from the rain or from the fatal events that had transpired earlier, that I began my search. At this hour most vessels were inaccessible, gangplanks raised, ramps blocked off. I moved from ship to ship, trying to find one that would grant me a berth. I hailed several from the docks without receiving a reply. The one reply I did finally have suggested that surely nothing was to be done in the dead of night, particularly considering the unrest in the city: I should return in the morning.

But morning, I feared, would be too late for me. I persisted, moving slowly from ship to ship, crying out, trying my luck with vessels large and small, albeit with little hope. It would be better, I counseled myself, to turn yourself in, for your crime was pointless and worthy only of regret. And yet I kept on, calling out, asking for passage, proclaiming that, though a scholar rather than a sailor, I was eager and willing to learn.

Near the end of the wharf, I came upon a small freighter, manged with rust, older than the other vessels, but seaworthy nonetheless. A light on its deck shone uncomfortably into my eyes. I thought this light at first to be stationary, until it swung slowly away and I saw it held by a human hand.

“Who is it?” a voice asked.

I explained again my plight. I said I asked for no favors, only the privilege of working for my passage. I was, I said, willing to learn.

“Do you not care where we are bound?”

It was, I claimed, a matter of complete indifference to me. I wanted only to leave. I cited the unrest in the city, and wanderlust, saying nothing to hint at the fatal events that had taken place earlier.

“Shall we have your name then?” the sailor asked.

“My name?” I said, and, not caring to give myself away, said, “My name is Alfons Kuylers.”

“Ah,” the sailor said. “We’ve been expecting you, Kuylers. Come aboard.”

I should have gathered something from this odd reply and indeed might have, had I not been so rattled, and so pleased to have gained a berth. At the time, I simply forced the words from my mind — or rather pushed them below the surface, where they would remain in the murk, before slowly, like a corpse, rising again. Later, when I was unable to dismiss the sailor’s words so easily, I turned them over and over in my head. I had misheard, I told myself, my guilt substituting an impossibility for what had actually been said. When this ceased to satisfy, I began to think that perhaps Kuylers had meant to depart with me, that he had in fact forewarned the captain of the freighter of our joint arrival. This made me fear that I had killed my mentor for no reason.

But in the instant, such thoughts had been quickly pressed down unexamined and had long to wait before bloating and slowly surfacing again. For the moment, I simply placed one foot before the other, ascended the gangplank, and came aboard. When, on deck, I approached the lantern, looking for the sailor who had hailed me, I found that he had hung his lantern on the loop of a guideline and had disappeared. Thus when I moved toward what I thought to be him, I found no one at all.

Almost immediately, the vessel started to sway and move. I had seen no other figures on the deck, but perhaps they had been there all along, near their posts, veiled in darkness, only awaiting the arrival of one Alfons Kuylers. I caught myself on the rail and steadied myself, and then, as an afterthought, turned and looked back at the city. I was not sorry to see it go. I thought how, had I not been forewarned by Alfons Kuylers, the city might well have become my grave.

And it was in that moment, thinking of my mentor with a certain melancholy fondness but with something akin to hysteria and hatred bubbling just beneath, that I thought I saw, on the pier, motionless, a figure possessed of the same stooped posture as Kuylers. He stood there, unmoving. I watched him, and was unable to look away, until he faded into the darkness and, along with the pier he stood upon, was lost.

I felt my way forward until my fingers found the wall of the deckhouse, and then I followed the wall of the deckhouse to a small stooped entrance, which I passed through, and then found myself on a narrow set of stairs that I descended into darkness. I felt my way down a dark passage and came finally, after three locked doors, to a fourth door, which was cracked open slightly, a faint glow seeping through the crack. I pushed my way in, found myself in a narrow cabin, two berths on either side, one above the other. In between, a candle glimmered on a cask that had been turned on one end to serve as a makeshift table.

I had begun to crawl into a berth before realizing it contained another man, his skin, which I touched in my fumbling, oddly chill.

“Kuylers?” he asked.

I assented.

“Your berth is above,” he said. “But blow out the candle first.”

I apologized and, after blowing out the candle, clambered up and into the upper berth. The room was still a shade away from sheer darkness, lit now by the lesser dark of the night shining through the porthole. My eyes, already accustomed to the dim candle, quickly adjusted.

Even so, only once I’d been there for some time did I start to realize that the sailor below me was not the only other man in the room, that the other bunks were occupied as well. Why I had not seen this before in the light of the candle, I couldn’t say, but I saw the men now — first the faint gleam of their eyes, turned as I could tell toward me, and then, after more time, just a slight variance from the shadow of the berth itself, the hint of their large bodies.

“Hello,” I said.

There were vague rumblings in reply, the gleams of the eyes shifting or disappearing.

“My name is Kuylers,” I said. “Can you tell me yours?” I asked.

One of the men chuckled, but none offered their names.

“What is the name of this ship?” I persisted. “And what is our cargo?”

At this they all laughed. “Ah, Kuylers,” one of the men said, “go to sleep.”

Such responses being curious enough, I was reluctant to inquire further. I lay in the bunk wondering what I had got myself into, but exhaustion quickly caught up with me. Before I knew it, I was asleep.

I was awoken by sunlight streaming through the porthole. My companions, I saw, were already up and departed, bunks neatly made. I clambered down and arranged my own bunk as well, then made my way slowly out and onto the deck, the clean, cold salt air sharp in my lungs. I looked around for my cabinmates, but the deck itself seemed deserted, the deckhouse as well, and the ship itself stood still, as if becalmed. I made my way from stem to stern and back again, but found nobody there.

Once belowdecks, I found my own cabin just as I had left it, the three doors I had previously examined still locked. Following the passage back farther, I found it to lead past two other doors, also locked. An iron stairwell descended to the hold and to the engine room, both of which seemed deserted. I went on deck and found another stairway, at the bottom of which was another series of locked doors. The final door at the passage’s end, according to a bronze plaque, was the captain’s cabin. I opened this and found it deserted as well, bunk neatly made.

Not knowing what else to do, I knocked on each of the locked doors in turn, but had no reply. Uncertain of what to think of this, I spent the day wandering the vessel, examining it, doing what I could to occupy myself. In the captain’s cabin I found several books, including one on knots and their uses, and I spent the last part of my day trying to replicate the knots therein described, growing hungrier all the time.

I searched the ship for food, but could find nothing. Perhaps the galley was behind one of the locked doors where the crew, for reasons that were beyond me, had chosen to sequester themselves away from me.

It was like that throughout the day, the vessel motionless, becalmed, my hunger growing. In the captain’s cabin I found a hook and a coil of fishing line, but there was nothing with which to bait the hook. Still, I let the hook dangle over the side in hopes of catching something, coiling it in from time to time and regarding the empty, dripping curve of metal at its end before paying it out again.

Near evening, leaning over the side, a twist of fishing line around one wrist, I thought I saw something at a little distance. At first I took it for another vessel, but as it drew closer it seemed too small to be a boat. As it came closer still, it proved too animate to be anything not alive. I squinted against the fading light, becoming more and more convinced that the figure in the water was human.

Where had the fellow appeared from? How long had he been swimming? It was growing too dark to see clearly. I looked about for a line that I could cast to him, but he was still too far away for that. Perhaps, I thought, he would make it to the ladder on his own. But he was swimming awkwardly now, as if on the verge of exhaustion, as if ready to go under.

And then suddenly with a lurch the ship began to move, slowly at first and then with increasing speed. I watched the swimming man stop mid-stroke, staring after us, and then he sank below the waves and was gone.

I rushed about the ship, crying out until I found the captain again, standing just where he had stood before, on the night I had first met him, holding the same lantern.

“Ah, Kuylers,” he said. “Relishing the journey so far?”

I explained, shielding my eyes from the glare of the lantern, what I had seen, the man swimming, making doggedly for us, then stopping and sinking beneath the waves.

“A shame,” said the captain.

“But we must go back,” I said.

The captain shook his head. “If he is to catch up with us, he’ll catch up with us tomorrow. If not, it’s not meant to be.”

“He won’t be alive tomorrow,” I said.

“He’ll travel all the faster then,” said the captain. “Besides, who’s to go, Kuylers? We have a full ship: who is to go?”

I told him he was callous. There was room aboard, I said, plenty of it. What kind of men have I thrown my lot in with? I wondered aloud. He just laughed, turned away.

I spent my early evening wandering the deck, finding as I could crew members who, busy though they were with their various tasks, deigned to listen to me as they worked. It was a matter of a human life, I told them, we must go back. Most listened in silence. They paused just a moment as I concluded and then shook their heads and went on with their tasks. One asked me, in a soft, whispering voice, what the captain himself had had to say about it, and when I explained what the captain had said, the fellow nodded and declared the captain to be quite right.

“But what does he mean, ‘Who’s to go?’” I asked. “Surely we can take a man as far as the next port.”

The man shook his head. “The captain’s right,” he said, and would say no more.

Soon my hunger, forgotten in the excitement due the swimmer, returned and I made another circuit of the deck, inquiring of my shipmates when I might expect a meal. They ogled me as if I were mad, and refused to respond. As I backed away from them, I found them whispering among themselves, their heads inclined toward one another against the lesser dark of the night sky. There was something wrong, I started to feel, with my having posed this question, some breach of etiquette, as if I had crossed a boundary of taste without knowing. I was not a sailor; perhaps there was something I should know but did not. And yet, could they not make allowances for my ignorance and let me know both how I had mistepped and also what I must do to be fed?

I withdrew, then sat alone up near the prow, watching the waves. I stayed there staring out into the darkness, the breeze chill against my flesh, trying to ignore the way my stomach pounded like an unbattened shutter in the wind. It had been a mistake, I told myself, to leave the city as precipitously as I had, a mistake, too, to kill Kuylers. All of it a mistake. And yet here I was, I reminded myself. I must make the best of it.

In the end, after hours of waiting, my stomach convinced me. Surely it could not hurt, it told me, to speak with the captain about food. He at the very least had to acknowledge me. If I were in fact breaking etiquette, I had breached it already, and the captain, who knew something of my circumstances coming aboard, of my lack of experience at sea, might at least prove sympathetic.

The captain was to be found where I had seen him before, lantern still in his hand.

“Yes?” he said gruffly. “What is it now?”

It was only, I said, that I had perhaps somehow missed the bells that called the crew to meals. Surely my fault but, you see, I hadn’t had anything to eat since boarding the ship last night, and little, to be honest, to eat the day prior. If it wasn’t too much trouble, a few scraps, just something to line my stomach with, the smallest thing—

“What?” he asked, as if amazed. “You want to eat?”

Well, yes, I said, just a few scraps …

He swung the lantern toward me. “Are you really who you claim to be?” he asked. “Are you Alfons Kuylers?”

“What does my being Kuylers have to do with it?” I asked. But when he kept regarding me without responding, I saw no choice but to repeat my lie. Yes, I claimed, I was Alfons Kuylers, hadn’t I told him as much from the first?

With this, his brow relaxed slightly and he turned away, mumbling that perhaps there was still something in the hold, that I should help myself to anything I could find.

And indeed, after a good moment of scrabbling through the hold, I found, at the bottom of an overturned barrel, some old hardtack and, in a bottle rolling loose among the debris, a good measure of third-rate whiskey. It will be enough, I told myself, soaking the hardtack in whiskey so as to choke it down. It will keep me until morning, when I can find out more about regular meals and learn where to get water.

Yet in the morning I awoke alone again in my bunk, the ship no longer moving, the bunks around me neatly made as if never having been slept in. I made my own bunk in the same fashion, then made my way up abovedecks. I could see no anchor dropped and yet the ship remained as motionless as if it were encased in stone. The deck, too, as on the day before, was deserted, the deckhouse as well, and my investigations of the spaces belowdecks led to the same locked doors, the same absence of personnel. I pounded on these locked doors and demanded admittance, without response.

My throat, deprived of water for a day and a half now, was parched and dry. After much searching, I found in the corner of the hold, strewn with garbage, a few mouthfuls of brackish water that at first I gathered in my palm, and then, once it was nearly gone, I crouched to lap the rest up like a dog.

In the captain’s cabin, in a small lacquered chest, I found a short crowbar, alongside a loaded pistol. I took both. The crowbar I used on one of the locked doors, knocking first and, when there was no response, slowly prying the lock out of the frame. Behind it was the galley, but the room itself was empty, no foodstuffs or staples of any kind. I managed to undo the pipe under the sink and drank the fusty water that had gathered in its angle. But there was nothing to eat.

I went from locked door to locked door, bellowing, and then, when I received no response, forcing my way in with the crowbar. I had, I realized, crossed over some sort of line that I was not likely to be able to cross back over again. With the opening of each new door and the revelation of yet another room, I felt a little more unhinged myself, a little madder, the lack of food, too, acting oddly upon me so that I felt as though my skin were being eaten by insects. What were they playing at? I wanted to know, increasingly furious, Why would they hide from me? When I found them, I told myself, I would hold a pistol to the captain’s head and demand he tell me what was going on.

But what was I to do when, cracking open the last door, the door behind which the captain and crew by default had to be gathered, I found the room as impossibly empty as all the rest?

My memories of the next few hours are tenuous at best. I recall a kind of vague stumbling belowdecks, panic alternating with fury. I entered each room again to assure myself my shipmates were not there, then entered yet again. I held the pistol to my temple and tried to persuade myself to pull the trigger, but could not. With the crowbar, I broke what I could in the captain’s cabin and then remained there among the wreckage, listless. At some point I lost the gun, abandoned it somewhere belowdecks, and when I ran out of things to break, I let the crowbar trail from one hand and scrape along the floor until that too slipped from my fingers and was gone.

In the end, unwilling and unable to understand where they might have gone, I made my slow way up onto the deck. It was late afternoon, almost evening, the sun starting to blister the horizon. The deck was unoccupied. It was impossible, they were nowhere; it was impossible. I must leave the ship, I couldn’t help thinking, and once I’d thought it, the idea became intense and urgent, unavoidable. I must leave the ship, my mind kept telling me, I must leave the ship, and I might well have thrown myself overboard — for indeed I moved aft to do just that — had I not seen as I mounted the rail, at a little distance, a figure, human, swimming, slowly drawing closer to the boat.

I stayed leaning against the rail, fixed, watching the fellow come. He came only slowly, but still was almost upon us. The sun would soon set, I knew, and if our movement yesterday had been any indication, with the fading of the light the captain would weigh anchor and the boat would depart. Would the swimmer arrive before that?

And yet, I told myself, it was impossible, all of it. It was impossible that we had been pursued for the last two days by the same swimmer, impossible even if we had for his sake maintained a pace that would allow him to catch the ship. It was equally impossible for there to have been two different men in open ocean swimming after us on two successive days. What I was seeing, I told myself, was not in fact present; it was an absence, a nothingness, a trick of the light on the horizon, the movement of a blood vessel within my eye, a hallucination caused by lack of food and water.

But as the figure came closer, it became more and more difficult for me to maintain the idea of its nonexistence. It was impossible, it was a nothingness, but it was palpable, it was there. I could make out now the movement of the arms as the swimmer propelled himself forward. I caught sight of his head, a small bead, as it surged up for air and then returned to skim just below the surface again.

I watched him come, judging his speed, his distance, my apprehension growing. He would, I judged, reach the ship before the sun disappeared. I shouted for the crew but there was no response, the deck still deserted. I stayed, watching. He came on farther, and faster, and now I could see that he appeared fully dressed, his arms and back covered by what looked like a waterlogged overcoat. Why hadn’t he wriggled his way out of it? How had he managed to keeping swimming despite it? Another impossibility, I thought, and my apprehension deepened.

He kept coming. And then, almost as if time had torn, he was suddenly arrived, just below me, his hands on the ladder far below. He stayed there an instant, floating, facedown in the water, resting, just holding to the ladder, and then pulled his body forward and looked up at me, revealing his face.

I took a step back, staggered, feeling the deck spin out from under me as I went down. For the face I saw was both the last face I had expected to see and the only face I knew I must see: the face of Alfons Kuylers.

When I regained consciousness, it was to find myself in a heap on the deck, my head aching, darkness gathered save for the glow of a few scattered lanterns. There, across the deck, was the crew, crowded now around a blanket-draped man whose gaze I could not bring myself to meet.

I gathered myself and tried, slowly, to make my way belowdecks, whether to retrieve the captain’s pistol or simply to hide myself I wasn’t sure. I gave a wide berth to the crowd of sailors and the man they surrounded, but before I had set my feet on the treads of the stairs, the captain hailed me.

I stopped, waited. He came forward slowly, his eternal lantern held before him.

“Kuylers,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“That man there,” he said, flashing the light behind him, “claims you are not Kuylers after all.”

“There is some mistake,” I said.

“Yes,” said the captain. “He insists that it is he who is Kuylers. But who, then, are you?”

“No,” I said, not looking him in the face. “I am Kuylers.”

“You insist you are Kuylers?” asked the captain.

“I am Kuylers,” I said again, and turned to start down the stairs.

“So be it,” said the captain. “As you wish.”

I started to descend, but before I had wound even halfway down, I found myself roughly seized from above and below and dragged back up, a man on each arm and each leg. They hauled me despite my protests back onto the deck and from there across the deck, then dumped me into one of the lifeboats. When I tried to clamber out, I was struck on the side of the skull with a belaying pin. I fell back. I tried again, but after a second blow, this one striking my forearm in such manner as to render my whole arm numb, I desisted, lying instead along the curve of the bottom of the boat while the boat was slowly winched free of its cradle and swung out to hang over the waves. Slowly my descent began. From above shone the captain’s lantern, light and shadow aswirl around me with each rock and sway of the lifeboat suspended in the air. Behind him was gathered the crew, faces dim behind the lantern’s glare.

“Have pity!” I called to them.

But they merely continued to ratchet the lifeboat down toward the waves. I could see now, there beside the captain, the swimmer, still wrapped in his blanket, still resembling for good and all Alfons Kuylers, but his face behind the lantern oddly transformed. And then the release was sprung and the lifeboat crashed into the waves and I was swept back and forth and, finally, away.

How many hours I floated solitary and alone in that lifeboat I cannot say. I hid from the sun as I could, crouching low in the boat, drawing my coat up to shield my head. I watched from beneath my coat the shadows shiver about in the bottom of the boat as we shook and spun with the waves, and then the shadows thickened, and then the light would vanish entirely and I would be left only to that dizzy, rolling darkness of the waves, to a motion that never stopped. I had no food, no water. How many nights did I lie there huddled against the cold, counting each swell, waiting for morning to come until I could not even do that but lay dying along the bottom of the boat, unable to move? And then my former shipmates came to me and I could see their faces clearly for the first time, as gaunt and drawn as my own, and they gathered around me and spoke in quiet whispers as if waiting for me to die. And then, of a sudden, they were gone and Alfons Kuylers came alone, striding slowly over the weary waves like some dead, mad Christ and clambered into the boat and sat there beside me to continue my philosophical and theological instruction, as if death had whetted Kuylers’s appetite for paradox rather than quelled it. And then, when he realized I was almost too weak to take in his words, he leaned in close over me and I could see the way his skull had been broken by the lacquered walking stick and the way the blood had spilled out to darken the side of his face, and he whispered, “Wasn’t it sufficient to murder me? Did you have to steal my name as well?”

When I awoke, it was on a large vessel. Delirious at first, I thought myself back on the ship where I had begun, and had I the strength, I would have thrown myself overboard. But no, it was a ship like any other, bustling with men by day and night, and once they realized I was coherent they brought me a few thimblefuls of water and the smallest crust of bread. I must eat slowly, they told me, and not much; after my ordeal I must slowly and gradually learn to eat again.

They gave me a little more each day, and slowly I began to recover, to feel more and more human. Soon, I was told, I would be able to leave my bed. It was amazing, claimed the captain, a man without a lantern in his hand or even within reach, that I had survived, a man of my age. Of my age? I wondered, and then took the tin cup that the captain held out to me and drank it slowly dry. The captain, a man of ruddy complexion and questionable accent, stayed at my bedside, watching me.

“There is only one thing,” he said, hesitantly.

“I am happy to pay for my passage,” I said quickly, thinking of the ring I had had from killing Kuylers, the ring he would have gladly given me and had offered me many times before.

“No,” he said, ducking his head, “a man adrift, he does not pay. It is not this.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“This boat,” he said. “Where did you find it?”

“The boat?”

“This lifeboat,” he said. “This is registered to a ship that fell to the winds and went down many years past.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again, not knowing how to respond. Nor did I know how to respond to the questions that followed, nor how to think about the ship I had found myself, under false pretenses, aboard for several days. And, as over the next few weeks the questions kept coming, I felt increasingly the necessity to leave them unanswered, to do what I could to avoid the yawning space they opened up before me.

But what I could not avoid came on my first day afoot, as I abandoned my bed and stumbled my way down the passage, razor in hand, to shave myself for the first time in many days, and found myself seeing, in the burnished zinc panel that served as a mirror, not my own reflection but that of Alfons Kuylers. Was it any surprise that seeing this I would opt to use the razor not to strip away the beard and thus reveal Kuylers all the more but rather instead to open Kuylers’s wrists?

It is only now, still days from port, wrists bandaged, restrained in my bed, fighting madness, avoided by the crew, days after attempting what was not so much suicide as an attempt, responding to the look on his face, to kill Kuylers yet again, that I begin to understand what a fitting fate this is, how it springs naturally from the philosophico-religious discussions I shared with my mentor both while he was alive and, once in a lifeboat, after his death. What, I have asked myself again and again, remains for me if not to become Kuylers wholeheartedly, to return to my former city, to resume my trade in imported goods, to continue to read, to study? Until the day when a young student appears and begs me to serve as his mentor and I teach him slowly, preparing him carefully for the moment when he will see astonishment mingled with fear in my face and know he has been condemned to kill me. And by so doing he will enter into the trap that will strip him of his own name and leave him bereft and adrift. It is a fate neither of us can avoid.

But isn’t this simply, Kuylers suggests later, trying to console me or provoke me, the trap everyone falls into sooner or later? And understanding this, shouldn’t we simply accept our fate?

But I do not respond. Instead, I test yet again the strength of my restraints. Surely they cannot be strong enough to hold me forever.