Fugue State: stories

Fugue State

I had, Bentham claimed, fallen into a sort of fugue state, in which the world moved past me more and more rapidly, a kind of blur englobing me at every instant. And yet he had never, so he confided to Arnaud, felt either disoriented or confused. Yes, admittedly, during this period he had no clear idea of his own name, yet despite this he felt he understood things clearly for the first time. He perceived the world in a different way, at a speed that allowed him to ignore the nonessential — such as names or, rather, such as his own name — and to perceive things he could never before have even imagined.

Arnaud listened carefully. Fugue state, he recorded, then removed his eyeglasses and placed them on the desk in front of him. He looked up, squinting.

“And do you remember your name now?” he asked.

At first, Bentham did not answer. Arnaud remained patient. He watched Bentham’s blurred image glance about itself, searching for some clue.

“Yes,” said Bentham finally. “Of course I do.”

“Will you please tell it to me?” asked Arnaud.

“Why do you need to know?”

Arnaud rubbed his eyes. Subject does not know own name, he recorded.

“Will you please describe the room you’re in?” he asked. Bentham instead tried to sit up, was prevented by the straps. Subject unaware of surroundings, Arnaud noted. “Will you describe your room, please?” asked Arnaud again.

“I don’t see the point,” said Bentham, his voice rising. “You’re here. You’re in it. You can see it just as well as I can.”

Arnaud leaned forward until his lips were nearly touching the microphone. “But that’s just it, Bentham,” he said softly. “I’m not in the room with you at all.”

It was shortly after this that Bentham began to bleed from the eyes. This was not a response Arnaud had been trained to expect. Indeed, at first, his glasses still on the desk before him, Arnaud was convinced it was a trick of the light, an oddly cast shadow. He polished his glasses against his shirtfront and hooked them back over his ears, and only then was he certain that each of Bentham’s sockets was pooling with blood. Startled, he must have exclaimed, for Bentham turned his head slightly in the direction of the intercom speaker. The blood in one eye slopped against the bridge of his nose. The blood in the other spilled down his cheek, gathering in the whorl of his ear.

6:13, Arnaud wrote. Subject has begun to bleed from eyes.

“Bentham,” Arnaud asked, “how do you feel?”

“Fine,” said Bentham. “I feel fine. Why?”

6:14, Arnaud recorded. Subject feels fine. Then added, Is bleeding from eyes.

Picking up the telephone, he depressed the call button.

“I need an outside line,” said Arnaud when the operator picked up.

“You know the rules,” said the operator. “No outside line during session with subject.”

Blood, too, Arnaud noticed, had started to drip from Bentham’s nose. Perhaps it was coming from his ears as well. Though with Bentham’s visible ear already puddled with the blood from his eye, it was difficult to be certain.

“The subject appears to be dying,” said Arnaud.

“Dying?” said the operator. “Of what?”

“Of bleeding,” said Arnaud.

“I see,” said the operator. “Please hold the line.”

The operator exchanged himself with a low and staticky Muzak. Arnaud, holding the receiver against his ear, watched Bentham. It was a song he felt he should recognize but he could not quite grasp what it was. Bentham tried to sit up again, straining against the straps as if unaware of them, without any hint of panic. In general he seemed unaware of what was happening to him. A bloody flux was spilling out of his mouth now as well, Arnaud noticed. He groped for a pen to record this, but could not find one.

Bentham shook his head quickly as if to clear it, spattering blood onto the glass between them. Then he bared his teeth. This was, Arnaud felt, a terrible thing to watch.

The Muzak clicked off.

“Accounting,” said a flat, implacable voice.

“Excuse me?” said Arnaud.

“Accounting division.”

“I don’t understand,” said Arnaud. “The subject assigned to me is dying.”

The man on the other end did not respond. Bentham, Arnaud saw through the glass, had stopped moving.

“I think he may have just died,” said Arnaud.

“Not my jurisdiction, sir,” said the voice, still flat, and the line went dead.

It was hard for him to be certain that Bentham was no longer alive. Several times, as Arnaud prepared to record a time of death, Bentham offered a weak movement that dissuaded him, the curling or uncurling of a finger, the parting of his lips. He was not certain whether these were actual movements or whether the corpse was simply ridding itself of its remaining vitality. For accuracy’s sake, he felt, he should unlock the adjoining door between the two rooms and go through, to manually check Bentham’s pulse with his fingers. Or, rather, to make certain there was no pulse to check. But the strangeness of Bentham’s condition made him feel that it might be better to leave the adjoining door closed.

As to leaving his own room, he had no choice but to wait until the session had officially expired and a guard came to unlock the door. He waited, watching Bentham dead or dying. He watched the blood dry between them, on the window. When his ear began to ache, he realized he was still pushing the dead receiver against his face, and hung up.

He stood and looked under his desk until he found his pen, then wrote in his notebook: 6:26. Patient dead?

The remainder of the session he spent, pen poised over the notebook, watching Bentham for any signs of life. He watched the skin on Bentham’s face change character, losing its elasticity, seeming to settle more tightly around the bone. The nose became more and more accentuated, the cheeks growing hollow. The frightful perfection of the skull glowed dully through the skin. Even when the guard opened the door behind Arnaud, it was very hard for him to look away.

“Ready?” the guard asked. “Session’s over.”

“I think he’s dead,” said Arnaud.

“How’s that?” said the guard. “Come again?”

The guard came and stood next to Arnaud, stared into Bentham’s room. Arnaud looked too.

When he looked back up, he saw that the guard was looking at him with frightened eyes.

“What is it?” Arnaud asked.

But at first the guard did not answer, just kept looking at Arnaud. Why? Arnaud wondered, and waited.

“What,” the guard finally asked, “exactly did you do to him?”

It was not until that moment that Arnaud realized how wrong things could go for him.

The guard became businesslike and efficient, hustling Arnaud out of the observation room and down the hall.

“Where are we going?” Arnaud asked.

“Just down here,” said the guard, keeping a firm grip on Arnaud’s arm, pushing him forward.

They passed down one flight of stairs, and through another hall. They went down a short flight, Arnaud nearly tripping, and then immediately up three brief steps and through a door that read “Conference Rooms.” The door opened onto a short hallway with three doors on either side and one at the end.

The guard walked him down to the final door, coaxed him inside. “Wait here,” the guard said.

“For what?” Arnaud asked.

But the guard, already gone, did not answer.

Arnaud tried the door he had come through; it was locked. He tried the door at the far end of the room; this was locked as well.

He sat down at the table and stared at the wall.

After a while, he began to read from his notebook. Fugue state, he read. Had he done anything wrong? he wondered. Was he to blame? Was anything in fact his fault? 6:13, he read. Subject has begun to bleed from eyes. Even if it were not his fault, would he somehow be held responsible? Subject feels fine, he read. Is bleeding from eyes.

Oh no, he thought.

He got up and tried both doors again.

He sat down again, but found it difficult to sit still. Perhaps he was in very serious trouble, he thought. He was not to blame for whatever had happened to Bentham. But someone had to be blamed, didn’t they? And thus he was to blame.

Or was he? Perhaps he was becoming hysterical.

He opened the notebook again and began to read from it. The words were the same as they had been before. They seemed all right to him now, mostly. Perhaps the guard was simply following routine procedure in the case of an unusual death.

No, he began to worry a few moments later, something was wrong. Subjects did not customarily bleed from the eyes, for a start. He closed the notebook, leaving it facedown on the table.

On the far side of the room, affixed to the wall, he noticed a telephone. He stood up and went to it.

“Operator,” a voice said.

“Outside line, please,” he said.

“Right away, sir,” the operator said. “What number?”

He gave the number. The dial tone changed to a thrumming, punctured by intervals of silence.

Nobody was answering.

After a time the thrumming stopped and a recorded voice came on, the tape so distorted he could barely make the words out. It was a man’s voice. Not the right number, he thought, and started to hang up, and then thought, no, he might not have a chance to dial out again. Hapler, the distorted voice identified itself as, or perhaps Handler, or Hapner. Nobody he knew. But Handler or Hapler would have to do.

“Hello?” he said. “Mr. Hapner? Is that in fact the correct name? My name is Arnaud. I’m afraid I’ve been given your number in error.”

He swallowed, then began choosing his words carefully.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” he said. “I have every hope it will be quickly resolved, everyone’s heart is in the right place. But, Mr. Hapner, could I trouble you to contact my wife? Would you ask her, assuming that I am not safe and sound by the time you reach her, to do what she can to find out what has become of me? It would mean a great deal to both of us.” He stopped, thought. “She might,” he finally added, “begin with Bentham.”

Immediately after he hung up, the phone began to ring. Almost reflexively, he picked it up.

“Hello?” he said.

“Who is this?” a voice asked.

Arnaud hesitated. “Why,” he asked slowly, “do you want to know?”

“Mr. Arnaud,” said the voice. “Why are you answering the telephone?”

He didn’t know what to say. He held the receiver, looked out the window.

“You made a call a few moments ago,” the voice said. “What was the purpose of this call?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Arnaud.

“How are you acquainted with—” he heard a rustling through the receiver “—this Mr. Hapner?”

“I—” said Arnaud.

“—and what, in your opinion, is the nature of the so-called … misunderstanding.”

Not knowing what else to say, Arnaud hung up the telephone.

By the time he was sitting down again, a guard had appeared in the room. A new guard, not the same one. He stood just inside one of the doors, watching Arnaud nervously.

“Hello,” said Arnaud, just as nervously.

The guard nodded.

“What’s this all about?” asked Arnaud.

“I’m not allowed to converse with you,” the guard said.

“Why not?” asked Arnaud.

The guard did not answer.

Arnaud thumbed through his notebook again. His eyes for some reason were having a hard time focusing on his handwriting, which appeared furry, blurred. No, he thought, he had followed procedure. He was not to blame. Unless they blamed him for the phone call. But couldn’t he explain that away? Nobody had told him he wasn’t allowed to telephone. There was really nothing to worry about, he told himself. Bentham’s death could not be attributed to his negligence.

The original guard came back in. The two guards stood together just inside the door, whispering, looking at him, one of them frequently scratching the skin behind his ear. Eventually the original guard went to the telephone and disconnected it from the wall. Telephone under his arm, he came over to Arnaud and took his notebook away. Then he went out again.

Arnaud swiveled his chair around to face the remaining guard. He spread his arms wide.

“What harm could it possibly do to talk to me?”

The guard pointed a finger at him, shook it. “You’ve been warned,” he said.

He stood up and went to the window. Outside, past the doubled fence, dim shapes wandered about beneath a mottled sky.

He heard the door open. When he turned, both guards, edges blurring, were present again, conversing, watching him. They seemed to be speaking to each other very rapidly, in a steady drone. He had to concentrate to understand them.

“He’s been standing there,” one of them was saying, “just like that, hours now.”

But no, he had been there for only a few moments, hadn’t he? Something was wrong with them.

One of them suddenly darted over and stood next to him.

“Come with us,” the guard said.

“No use resisting,” the same guard said.

Arnaud nodded and stepped forward, and then felt himself suddenly swept forward. Each guard, he realized, had taken hold of one of his arms and was dragging him.

The conference room was replaced by a stretch of hall.

“Malingerer, eh?” said one of the guards, only the words didn’t seem to correspond with the quivering movement of his lips, seemed instead to be coming at a distance, from the hall behind him.

No, Arnaud suddenly realized, amazed, something isn’t wrong with them. Something is wrong with me.

They rushed him through the hall and into an observation booth. His observation booth, he realized, the one he had used to interview Bentham. Perhaps he was being allowed to return to work. Who would his next subject be? Bentham, he saw on the other side of the glass, was gone, though pinkish streaks of diluted blood were still visible on the glass.

He started toward his chair, but the guards were still holding him. Gently he tried to free himself, but they wouldn’t let go. Then he realized that he was being dragged toward the adjoining door, toward the subject chamber.

“No,” he said, “but I, I’m not a subject.”

“Of course not,” a guard soothed, his face more a splotch of color than a face. “Who claimed you were?”

“But—” he said.

He grabbed hold of the doorframe on the way through. He held on. Something hard was pushing into his back, just below the blade of his shoulder. Something ground his fingers against the metal of the doorframe, his hand growing numb. Then his grip gave and he was through the door, being strapped to Bentham’s bed. A fourth person in the room, a technician, was snapping on latex gloves.

“I’m not a subject,” Arnaud claimed again.

The technician just smiled. Arnaud watched the smile smear across her face, consume it. Something was wrong with his vision. He could no longer see the technician clearly, she was just a blur, but from having watched subjects through the glass he could derive what she surely must be doing: an ampoule, a hypodermic, the body of the first emptying, the chamber of the second filling.

The blur shifted, was shot through with light.

“This may sting just a little,” the technician said. But Arnaud felt nothing. What’s wrong? he wondered. “Not so bad, is it?” the technician asked, coming briefly into focus again. And then she stepped away and was swallowed up by the wall.

“Hello?” Arnaud said.

Nobody answered.

“Is anybody there?” he asked.

Where had they gone? How much time had passed? He looked about him but couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Everything seemed reduced to two dimensions, shadow and light becoming replacements for objects rather than something in which they bathed. He lifted his head and looked down at his body but could not recognize it, could not even perceive it as a body, despite being almost certain it was there.

Fugue state, he thought, idly. And then thought, Oh, God. I’ve caught it, too.

“Hello?” said a voice. It was smooth, quiet. It struck him as familiar. “Arnaud?” it said.

He turned, saw no one, just a flat, black square. Speaker, he thought. Then he remembered the observation booth, turned instead to where, though he couldn’t quite make it out, he thought it must be.

“Yes?” he said. “Hello?”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine,” he claimed.

He heard a vague rustling, was not certain if it was coming from somewhere in his room or from the observation booth.

“Hello?” he said.

“Yes?” said the voice. “What’s wrong, please?”

Arnaud waited, listened. There it was again, a rustling. He swiveled his ear toward it.

“I apologize for these precautions,” said the voice, “but we had to assure ourselves that you were not a … liability, didn’t we? For your own … safety as well as ours.”

Arnaud did not answer.

“Arnaud, did you understand what I said?”

“Yes,” said Arnaud. He tried to get up, and thought he had, but then realized he was still lying down. What was happening, exactly?

“Good,” said the voice. “Shall we move straight to the point? Did you murder Bentham?”

Bentham? he wondered. Who was Bentham again? He blinked, tried to focus. “No,” he said.

“What happened to Bentham?”

“I don’t know,” said Arnaud.

“Arnaud, seven days ago, you interviewed Bentham. During that session he died.”

“Yes,” said Arnaud, remembering. “He died. But it wasn’t seven days ago. It was just a few hours ago.”

“Are you sure, Arnaud? Are you certain?”

“Yes,” said Arnaud. “I’m certain.”

The rustling seemed gone now. He found that if he tilted his head and squinted he could make the plane of glass between his room and the observation booth rise from the flat surface of the wall, hovering like a ghost just above it. The glass was flat as well, depthless. Bentham’s blood, the dull, nearly faded swathes of it, drifted like another flattened ghost on its surface. But somehow he could not see through blood or glass to the other side.

“Who is Mr. Hapner?” the voice asked.

Arnaud hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said, perplexed.

“You don’t know,” the voice said. “And yet after Bentham’s death you placed a telephone call to a Mr. Hapner. How do you explain this?”

“I’m afraid I have no explanation,” said Arnaud. “I don’t even remember doing it.”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the room seemed to have shifted, flattening out like a piece of paper. It was still a room, he tried to convince himself, only less so.

For an instant, the room grew clearer.

“—case,” the voice was saying. “How did he die?”

He tried to remember. “He began to bleed,” he said. “From the eyes,” he said.

“Yes,” said the voice. “So you wrote. What made this happen, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Arnaud. “How should I know?”

“Think carefully. Did it have anything to do with you?”

He kept looking at the plane of glass, trying to worm his vision through. The voice kept at him, asking him the same questions in slightly different ways, repeating, following procedure. Arnaud kept answering as best he could.

“About this record of your interview,” said the voice. “Is it, to the best of your knowledge, accurate?”

“Of course,” claimed Arnaud. And then, “What record?”

The voice started to speak, fell silent. Arnaud waited, listened. There it was again, a rustling.

“What does the word term fugue state mean to you?” asked the voice. But now it sounded harsher, less encouraging, almost like a different voice.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Arnaud.

“And yet you wrote it. What exactly did you mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Arnaud. “I just wrote it.”

“Do you see, Arnaud? Right here? Fugue state?”

He turned his face toward the black square and then, remembering, toward the glass, saw nothing.

“Well?” said the voice.

“Well what?” asked Arnaud.

“And yet,” said the voice.

But then it interrupted itself, argued with itself in two different tones and cadences about what question should be asked next.

But how could a single voice do this? Arnaud wondered.

“How many of the one of you are there?” he asked. “Two?”

He waited. The voice did not answer. Perhaps he had said it wrong. Perhaps he had not said what he meant. He was preparing to repeat the question when the voice answered, in its harsher tone.

“How many of us do there appear to you to be?”

He opened his mouth to respond, closed it. He must have said something wrong, he realized, but he was no longer sure what.

“Do you remember your name?” said a voice slowly.

“Yes,” said Arnaud. “Of course I do.” But then realized no, he did not.

“Will you please tell it to me?” the voice said.

Arnaud hesitated. What was it? It was there, almost on the tip of his tongue. “Why?” he asked. “Why exactly do you need to know?”

A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, what do you see?”

A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, what is happening to you?”

A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, how do you feel?”

“Fine,” said Arnaud. “I feel fine.”

He waited. “Why do you ask?” he finally said.

His face felt wet. Was he in the rain? No, he was indoors. There couldn’t be rain. He could no longer see through his eyes.

He knew, from the tone of the voice, or voices, that someone thought something was wrong with him. But he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out what that could possibly be.

There was a series of days he could not remember, how many days he was never certain, days in which, he temporarily deduced, he must have lain comatose and bleeding from the eyes on the floor of a kitchen, next to a woman he assumed, but no longer was certain, must be his wife. And all the days before those, which he could not remember either. By the time he managed to open his eyes and felt as though the world around him were moving at a rate his senses could comfortably apprehend, the woman, whoever she was, was dead. Thus his first memory, quickly coming apart, was of lying next to her, staring at her gaunt face, at the lips constricted back to show the tips of her canines.

Who is she? he wondered.

And myself, he wondered, who exactly am I?

Near his face was a puddle of water. He did not recognize the reflection that quivered along its surface. He rolled his head down into the water, lapped some up with his tongue.

After a while he worked up enough strength to crawl across the kitchen floor, tracing the water to its source, and to duck his head under a skirt below the sink. There, an overflowing metal bowl rested beneath the leaking elbow of a pipe.

The water in the bowl was filthy, covered with a thin layer of scum. He brushed this gently apart with his stubbled chin, then tried to lap up the cleaner water below.

It was musty, but helped. He lay still for a while, his cheek against the damp, rotting wood of the cabinet floor, one temple applied to the cold metal of the bowl.

Later he managed to pull himself up and stagger to a cabinet. Inside, he found some stale crackers and sucked on these, then sat in a kitchen chair, his mouth dry. His eyes hurt. So did his ears and the lining of his mouth.

He got up and ate some more crackers, then stared into the refrigerator. The food inside was rotting. He scavenged the heel of a loaf of bread, scraped off the mold and ate.

After the better part of the day had waned, he began to feel more human. He searched the pockets of the woman on the floor. They contained a few coins and a wallet stuffed with cards. Something, he discovered, was wrong with his eyes. He knew what the cards were by their shape and appearance — credit card, identification card, cash card, library pass — but was puzzled to find he could not read them. The characters on them, what he assumed were characters, meant nothing. He stared at them for some time and then slid them into his pocket. Later, he covered the woman’s body with a sheet.

In the bathroom mirror, he did not recognize himself. The face staring back at him had blood crusted about its eyes, above its lips, and to either side of its chin, the center of the chin now covered with a diluted slurry of blood and water. His eyes were bloodshot, oddly scored and pitted. His vision, he realized, was dim, as if he were slowly going blind. Perhaps his pupils had always been that way.

He washed the face, scrubbing the blood from the wrinkles around the eyes with soap and with a toothbrush he had found in the cabinet above the sink. When he was done, he shaved carefully.

He regarded himself in the mirror. Who am I? he wondered. But that was not what he meant exactly. Only that he had no name to put with what he knew himself to be.

When he tried to open the door, he found it locked. He unlocked the deadbolt, tried to open it again, but the door still wouldn’t open. He wandered from room to room. The windows were barred from the outside, the street lying far below. The sheet was still in the kitchen, the woman still dead under it. Yes, he thought, that’s right, he remembered. It was in a way reassuring to know she had not been imagined, though in another way not reassuring at all.

What was her name? He didn’t know. Nothing leaped to mind. Nothing sounded quite right. And what about him? Nothing sounded quite right, nor quite wrong, either.

In the back of one of the closets he found a small prybar and a hammer. He used them to knock the pins from the door hinges, then tried to pry the door open from its hinged side. It creaked, but still didn’t come.

Using the prybar as a chisel, he slowly splintered a hole through the center of the door at eye level. There was, he discovered, something just beyond the door, made of plywood. He slowly broke a hole through this as well until, at last, he had a fist-sized opening that debouched onto an ordinary hall.

“Hello?” he called out. “Anyone there?”

When there was no answer, he went into the kitchen, stepping over the sheet. He started opening drawers. There was a drawer containing a series of utensils, stacked very carefully into slots, a drawer containing stray keys and books of stamps and a rubber-band ball, a drawer containing nested measuring cups and spatulas and turkey basters and pie shields. Then, above them, a shelf holding a jumble of pots and pans, a cabinet scattered with ascending stacks of dishes and nested hard-plastic drinking cups. He worked two of the rubber bands off the ball, then slid the rest of the drawers closed.

In the bathroom, he took a last look at himself and then struck the mirror with the prybar. Cracks shot through. The silvered glass tipped off in shards, which broke further on the floor.

His hand, he saw, was blood-soaked, a flap of skin hanging open and folded over on its back. He was surprised to find it didn’t hurt.

He pushed the flap back in place, found gauze in the cabinet, wrapped his hand in it.

He picked out a smaller, more regular square of glass. After scraping each of its edges against the tile floor to dull it, he used the rubber bands to fasten it to the hooked end of the prybar. At the door, he worked the mirror-end of the prybar through the hole he had made, then slid the prybar through as far as he could without letting go of it.

It was hard to see past his knuckles and past the bar itself, harder still to hold the bar steady enough at one end to make sense of what he was seeing in the shard on the other: a wavering square of light and color. But there it was, he slowly could make it out, despite the wavering image: a large panel of raw wood, plywood, larger, it seemed than his door, studded with black pocks at regular intervals around its edge. The same black pocks in two lines up the middle of the panel as well. Stretching from the bottom corners to top corners of the panel were two strips of yellow plastic tape, covered in black characters that he could not read.

But something must have been awry with his thinking. He remained slightly crouched, holding the prybar, trying to keep it steady, concentrating, looking past his knuckles into the reflection, and it was all he could do, really, just to see the flittered bits and pieces and make some cohesive image out of them in his head. It was too much to force that image into actually meaning something as well. Even after his difficulty in trying to open the door, even after seeing the image in the shaky shard of mirror, after seeing the black pocks around the edge of the plywood, it took him some moments of just staring and thinking to realize he had been deliberately boarded in.

But when he did realize, the shock came all at once. His fingers let go of the prybar, and, overbalanced, it started to slide out of the hole and away from him. He just caught it. He pulled it back through and, shaking, sat down with his back to the door.

Why? he wondered.

He couldn’t say. Perhaps, he thought, they hadn’t known he and his wife were there. Assuming, he corrected himself, that she was his wife. Perhaps they had thought the apartment unoccupied.

But who, he wondered, were they?

There was the phone, he thought after a while. He could telephone someone to come get him out.

But whom did he know? He couldn’t remember having known anyone.

On the answering machine beside the phone a light was blinking. Why hadn’t he noticed it before?

He got up and pressed the button beneath the light.

Hello? A voice said. Mr. Hafner? Is that in fact the correct name? My name is Arnaud. I’m afraid I’ve been given your number in error.

Hapner, he thought, my name’s Hapner. Probably. Or something close to that. Unless he’s talking to somebody else.

There’s been a misunderstanding, the voice continued, Arnaud’s voice continued. What sort of misunderstanding? Hapner wondered. He was, Hapner was, to contact Arnaud’s wife. He was to ask her to do what she could to find out what had happened to Arnaud. He might, he was told, begin with Bentham. What a strange message, Arnaud thought. Or wait, the man thought, I’m not Arnaud, that’s not my name, my name is something else. What was it?

After listening to the tape several dozen times, he was almost certain he could remember his name. Hapner. Every few minutes he brought the name to his lips, whispered it. It would, he hoped, stay with him, on his tongue if not in his brain. And now, he thought, I have something to do. Bentham, he thought, Arnaud.

With the hammer and the prybar he began to widen the hole, first cracking and splintering away his own door and then slowly hammering the flattened, flanged end of the prybar through the plywood.

He was weak; his arms quickly grew sore and tired and the light he had at first been able to see coming through the windows had long faded. The hall outside, however, remained brightly lit.

The plywood broke loose in odd, thatched fragments, splitting within the body of a layer of wood rather than between layers. In the end he had a splintery and furzed channel wide enough to squeeze through. He drank some more water, ate some more crackers, and then sat on a chair in the kitchen, gathering his strength. His gaze caught on the sheet on the floor and he stooped to uncover the woman’s face. He regarded her closely, but no, he still did not recognize her.

Perhaps, he thought, I never knew her.

But then why, he wondered, was she here with me? Or, if you prefer, why was I here with her?

He went into the bedroom, looked through the closets. One was full of a woman’s clothing, the other of clothing belonging to a man. He tried on a sport coat. It was too small, and musty.

He tried on some of the other clothes, all too small.

Puzzled, he returned to the kitchen, stared again into the dead woman’s face.

It’s her home, he thought, not mine. And somebody else’s. I’m probably not even Hafner. Or Hapner.

He sat staring at her. The corpse was changing shape, becoming even less human. Soon it would start to smell. He couldn’t stay there, whether he was Hafner or no. And if he wanted to be anyone, he had to be Hafner, at least for now.

Hapner rummaged a shoulder bag from a closet and dropped the hammer and the prybar into it. After unplugging the answering machine, he put it in as well, then pushed the bag through the door’s hole.

It was tighter than he’d thought. He had to work one shoulder through and then turn sideways to get the other past. The ragged edges of the hole scraped raw the underflesh of one arm as well as the skin over his ribs. Halfway through, he thought he was stuck, and grew desperate and maddened, scratching and wriggling until he had worn the skin covering his hipbones bloody and until he fell on his neck and shoulders out onto the floor.

The other doors too had been sealed off, he saw. Along the length of the wall, where he would have expected doors to be, were sheets of plywood fastened to door and wall with ratchet-headed black screws.

He went down the hall and down the stairs. Doors on the floor below were sealed too, but not all of them, and he knocked on the three that weren’t. Nobody answered any of them. He tried to open them but found them all locked.

The next floor down was the same, doors mostly boarded over, no one answering the few still unsealed. He chose one at random and worked at it with the prybar and the hammer until he cracked the latch out through the frame of the door and the door swung open.

The layout of the apartment was identical to that of the apartment he had been in, except reversed.

“Hello?” he called.

No answer came. The windows were slightly ajar. A thin layer of dust covered everything. Not quite dust, he realized: stickier. What exactly, he couldn’t say. On the table a sheet of paper was held down by a burnished brass paperweight. There was something written on it, but he couldn’t read it. He picked it up and folded it, slid it into his back pocket.

In the closet were two smeared, bloody handprints. Under one of the beds was what seemed to be a human ear. He sat on his knees a long time, squinting at it, wondering if he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing, but in the end left it where it was without touching it. In the oven he found the tightly curved body of a cat, long dead, dry as a plate. When he touched it, its hair crackled away.

He closed the oven door and hurriedly left.

Two floors down, he knocked on an unsealed door and heard behind it some transient living sound, cut off nearly as quickly as it had begun.

“Hello?” he called.

He knocked again, but heard nothing. He pressed his ear to the door, thought he could hear, vaguely, just barely, something pressed to the other side, breathing. Was that possible, to hear something breathing, through a door? Perhaps it was his own breathing, he thought, and this made him feel as if he were on both sides of the door at once, and made him wonder why he wouldn’t open up for himself.

“I don’t mean any harm,” he said. No response. “I’m just a neighbor,” he said. “I just want to talk.” Still no response.

“Shall I break down the door?” he asked. “If I do that, anybody can get in.”

He waited a few minutes, then got out his prybar and his hammer. Aligning the prybar in the gap between door and wall, he struck the end with the hammer, started to drive it in.

He was a little startled when the voice that rang out from behind the door was not his own.

“All right,” it said. “All right.”

He worked the prybar free of the crack, then stepped back. The dead-bolt clicked. The door handle shivered, and the door drew open.

Behind it was a small man, scarcely bigger than a child, wearing a moth-eaten sweater. Though not old, he seemed to be hairless, the skin hanging sallow on his face. His mouth and his nose were hidden behind a surgical mask that he had doubled over to make fit. He stood mostly hidden, hand and head visible, a pistol in the former.

“Well?” the small man said. “What is it?”

“I’m your neighbor,” Hapner said.

“I suppose you want to borrow a cup of sugar.”

“No,” said Hapner. “To talk.”

“All right,” said the man. “You’re here. Talk.”

“Can’t I come in?”

“Why do you need to come in?” the man asked, a little surprised. “There’s no reason to come in. It’s not safe.”

Hapner shrugged.

The man looked at him for a long while. His eyes, protruding and damp, seemed slightly filmed. He opened the door farther, shifted the pistol to his other hand.

“What floor?”

Hapner counted in his head. “Five floors up,” he said.

“Eighth floor,” said the man. “Why didn’t you just say eighth? I thought all the eighth was boarded off.”

“Almost all,” lied Hapner. “Every door but one.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not ill, are you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Hapner. With what? he wondered.

“O.K.,” said the man. “O. K. Prove it. Tell me your name.”

“My name?” said Hapner.

It started with a letter midway through the alphabet, he knew, one he could almost remember. It was there, nearly on the tip of his tongue, but what exactly was it?

“Well?” the man said. “Either you know your name or you don’t.”

“Mind if I use your bathroom?” asked Hapner.

“The bathroom?” said the man, surprised. “I, but I—”

“Thank you,” said Hapner, and, hands raised above his head, eased his way carefully past the small man without touching the pistol, toward where he suspected the bathroom must be.

“Wait,” the man said. But Hapner kept walking, slowly, as if under water. He gritted his teeth, waiting for the man to shoot him in the back, following each slow step with another slow step until he reached the bathroom. He opened the door and slipped quickly inside, locking it behind him.

What now? he wondered.

He regarded his face in the mirror, his frightened eyes, then opened his bag and removed the answering machine. Having unplugged the man’s electric razor, he plugged his answering machine in and dialed the volume down. He held the machine pressed against his ear and depressed the button.

“Hello?” a voice said into his ear. “Mr. Hapner? Is that in fact the correct name?”

Is it? Hapner wondered. The voice kept on. There were other names mentioned, but Hapner struck him as the only viable one. Arnaud. He, Hapner, was looking for Arnaud, he discovered, and for Bentham as a way to reach Arnaud. The answering machine made it all perfectly clear. Hapner, he made his lips mime. He rewound the tape and listened to his name again, then again, until he was certain he could remember it. At least for a few minutes.

The small man was knocking on the bathroom door, urging him to come out or be killed.

“I’m coming,” Hapner said. He quickly packed the answering machine away and opened the door. The small man was there, face red, pistol aimed at Hapner’s waist.

“Hapner,” he said. “My name’s Hapner.”

The pistol wavered slightly, a strange expression passing across the man’s eyes. “I know a Hafner on the eighth floor,” he said, “or ninth. Can’t remember. But you’re not him.”

“No,” said Hapner quickly. “I’m Hapner, not Hafner. Eighth floor as well. Strange coincidence, no?”

The man looked at him a long time, then took a few steps back, gun still poised. “Tell me what you want again?” he asked.

“That depends,” said Hapner. “Are you Arnaud?”

“No,” said the small man. “Who?”

“What about Bentham?”

“I’m Roeg.”

“Do you know either an Arnaud or a Bentham?”

“Do they live in this building?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t think so,” said the small man. “These are strange questions to ask. If they do live here, I don’t know them.”

“Then I don’t want anything,” Hafner said, and started to go.

“I thought you wanted to talk,” said Roeg.

Hapner turned, saw Roeg had let his body sag. The small man went and sat down on the couch. He sat there, eyes looking exhausted, finally motioning Hapner into the chair next to him. “It’s been long time,” he said. “Let’s talk.” But it was not an us who talked, for Hapner spoke hardly at all. Roeg hadn’t left the house in several weeks, he claimed, ever since the plague had begun. Plague? Hapner wondered, but just nodded. Roeg’s wife had gone out and never come back. She was, Roeg figured, probably dead.

“But maybe she just left,” said Roeg.

Roeg took the surgeon’s mask off his face and laid it on the coffee table, smoothed it out with the palm of his hand. His mouth, Hapner saw, was delicately formed, the lips nearly translucent.

“Maybe,” said Hapner. “I’m sorry.”

Then, Roeg said, someone had arrived wearing protective suits. Each apartment had been opened. If anyone was found with indications, they were boarded in. No doubt it had been the same on Hapner’s floor.

“No doubt,” said Hapner.

“Eventually they stopped coming,” said Roeg.

“Probably dead themselves,” said Hapner.

“Probably,” said Roeg, and lapsed into silence, staring at the tabletop.

“And what now?” asked Hapner.

“Now?” said Roeg. “How should I know?”

Almost as quickly as the information was given to him, Hapner felt it begin to slip away, the details wavering and eroding, only a large, vague sense of contagion remained. The knowledge itself was being simplified, made brutish within his head. He wondered how much of even this he would remember, and for how long?

There were other things Roeg was telling him, he realized, but even as the small man was saying them, Hapner felt them going. The authorities, he did remember Roeg saying, were silent. As for the silence, either Roeg didn’t know its cause or Hapner had somehow missed it or was already forgetting it. Perhaps it was simply ongoing silence, unexplained.

As Roeg spoke on, Hapner became more and more confused. When he realized, from Roeg’s puzzled look, that he must have asked a nearly identical question twice, he began to be concerned.

And then Roeg acquired a panicked look. “Why are you speaking so quickly?” he asked. “Slow down.”

“I’m not speaking quickly,” Hapner said.

As Roeg tried to continue, it became clear to Hapner that something was wrong. Roeg became prone to long, reptilian fits of silence and would stop speaking to peer nervously around him.

“Roeg?” said Hapner. “Roeg?” But the small man wasn’t answering, wasn’t paying attention. Filled with doubt, Hapner asked, “That’s your name, no?”

“My name?” said Roeg, suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”

And then Roeg groped his pistol off the couch cushion and began to jab it into the air. He pointed not at Hapner but at where Hapner had been a few moments before, for Hapner had stood and taken a few steps so as to get a closer look at Roeg.

“You had it?” Roeg shouted. “But why aren’t you dead?”

Roeg fired the pistol into the couch across from him. He moved the pistol a little to the left, fired into the credenza, left again, into the wall — just behind the spot Hapner had been just a few seconds before. Reaching out, Hapner wrenched the gun out of Roeg’s hand and dropped it to the floor. But it was as if Roeg didn’t realize the gun was gone, for his curled hand was still aiming, his finger flexing, over and over, and he was, desperately, asking Hapner why he wouldn’t die.

He spoke softly and carefully into Roeg’s ear, stroking and rubbing the small man’s hand until it loosened its grip on the absent gun. He persuaded him into lying down on the couch, then went into the kitchen and got a damp cloth, and carefully wiped away the blood already seeping up through the man’s eye sockets.

“How do you feel, Roeg?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Roeg. “I feel fine. Why do you ask?”

And indeed, thought Hapner, the fellow seemed to believe this, despite the blood.

“You shouldn’t feel bad,” said Hapner. “You might come out of it all right.”

“Come out of what?”

Blood began to leak from the man’s mouth and nose and ears. Slowly he lapsed into unconsciousness. Hapner was at a loss to know what else he could do.

He let his eyes drift about the room until they found the telephone, then the answering machine. He held the latter’s button down until it beeped, and then began to speak.

“Your name is Roeg,” he said into it. “You are a small man. This is your house. I’m very sorry for all that’s happened to you. My name is—” and there he stopped. What was his name again? Could he remember? No.

He turned off the answering machine and left the apartment.

There was a name he had been using, just on the tip of his tongue. He could almost remember it. But, he wondered, was it his name? Even once he remembered it, how would he know for certain it belonged to him?

He wouldn’t know.

He made it to the end of the hall and started down the stairs to the next floor. What floor was it? He had kept track, had been keeping track, but was not quite certain. He would go down the stairs and then look for a door leading to the street. If there wasn’t one, he would try to find another set of stairs and go down them.

What had the name been? He had been found, had found himself, he could still trouble himself to dimly remember, lying beside a corpse. A woman, he was almost certain. Who, alive, had she been to him? His wife, his lover, a relative, a colleague, a stranger? Who could say?

Before he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could see a man in the hallway, first only his feet and then, with each step down, a subsequent portion of his body, all the way up to a shaved head. The man was standing beside a door, a large crowbar ending in a fanlike flange in one meaty hand. Leaning against the wall behind him was a sheet of plywood, apparently prized off the door. A large duffel bag, empty or nearly so, was swung over the man’s back. He had begun on the door itself, Hapner could see, the door’s frame splintered and gouged.

Hapner stopped a little way down the hall. The man too had stopped working and was watching him.

“Hello,” Hapner finally said.

“Hello,” the man said.

“What exactly—”

“—this your house?” asked the man. “Your door, I mean? I’m not stepping into a delicate situation, am I?”

Hapner shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not my door. Are you breaking in?”

“Some neighbor’s?” asked the thief. “Some friend’s then? Anything to get touchy about?”

Hapner shook his head.

“Any objections then? No? Then I’ll proceed.”

The man turned partly away, still trying to keep track of Hapner out of the corner of his eye, which made his attempts at opening the door awkward, blunted. But the door was slowly giving way.

“Aren’t you afraid?” asked Hapner.

“What?” said the thief. “Of catching it? Was at first but then everybody around me went under and I never did. I don’t think I will. What’s the word? Invulnerable?” He worked the flanged end of the prybar back in, and then one twist of his torso cracked the door open. “No,” he said, “immune. “ And then added, “After a while you feel invincible too.”

He pushed open the door, bights of a brass chain tightening at eye level inside the apartment. The man fed his crowbar into the gap, broke the chain’s latch off the doorframe.

“Well,” he said. “Coming?”

Hapner took a half-step forward, stopped.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Come on in,” said the man. “Where’s the problem? You didn’t have any objections last I checked. Besides, I haven’t had anyone to talk to for a while. They all keep dying on me. You’re not going to die on me, are you?” The man started through the door. “I’ll let you have some of whatever we find, maybe.”

Hapner hesitated, followed him in.

“What about you?” said the man in front of him.

The apartment inside was windowless and extremely dark; it was difficult to see anything. The man grew gray and then was reduced to a series of fluttering movements. Then he vanished entirely. Hapner stepped after him.

“What about me?” Hapner asked.

“Aren’t you afraid? You’re in a quarantined apartment now. Doesn’t it worry you?”

The man struck a match and Hapner saw his face spring from the darkness, in a kitchenette area. He was not where Hapner had thought he would be. He was holding the match in one hand, rapidly opening and closing cupboard and cabinet doors with the other.

The match guttered and went out and the room was swallowed in the darkness, save for the dull-red bead of the match head, and then this was gone too, replaced by the smell of the burnt-up match. A sharp scratch and another match fluttered alight. Hapner watched the man’s hand reach into a drawer, come out with a curious silver cylinder that he manipulated, transformed into a flashlight.

“That’s better,” the man said, and shined the flashlight’s beam into Hapner’s face.

“Now,” he said, his voice changing in a way Hapner didn’t understand. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t say,” said Hapner. “What’s yours?”

“What’s that in the bag?” the man asked.

“My bag?” said Hapner. “Not much,” he said.

“Open it up,” said the thief. “Let’s have a look.”

Hapner put the bag on the counter between them, unzipped it. He took out the answering machine, set it beside the bag, then the short prybar, the hammer.

“That’s it?” asked the thief.

“That’s it,” said Hapner.

“You don’t have much,” said the thief.

“I’m not like you,” said Hapner. “I’m not a thief.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Looking for someone,” he said. “A … Mr. Arnaud, I think. Is that you?”

“What, you just have a name?” said the voice behind the flashbeam.

Hapner nodded.

The man was silent for a moment. “All right,” he finally said, “you can go.”

Hapner nodded to himself. He reached out, began to put his possessions back into the bag. The thief’s crowbar cut through the flashbeam and struck the counter between his hands.

“Leave it,” said the man. “It’s mine now.”

“But—”

“This is my building,” the man said. “Whatever’s here belongs to me.”

“But there’s nothing I have that’s worth—”

“It’s a matter of principle,” the thief said, his voice rising. “Now get out.”

He kept staring at the answering machine. Arnaud, he thought, Bentham. Hapler. Or no, that wasn’t it exactly, he was already forgetting. He squinted into the light. Where was the flashlight exactly? How far away? He could make it out, mostly. He could see the man behind it, a dim form wavered at the edges.

He turned as if to leave and took half a step and then whirled and crouched, battered at where he thought the flashlight would be. The thief cried out, Hapner’s hand striking the casing of the flashlight hard. His fingers were instantly numb, the flashlight flicking away end over end and going out.

The crowbar passed moaning over his head, ruffling his hair, then smashed into the wall. The thief cursed. Hapner groped about, touched the man’s shirt but, unable to find the crowbar, dropped to his knees and crouched under the lip of the counter.

The crowbar crashed into the counter above him, rattling the walls.

“Where are you?” the man said.

Hapner said nothing.

“I’ll find you eventually,” said the thief. “You belong to me.”

Hapner stayed still, listening to the dim birds of the man’s feet, the scrape of the crowbar as it met floor or wall. He reached carefully up and touched the counter above him, his fingers feeling slowly along it.

There was a groove the crowbar had dug in the surface, the countertop splintered and cracked to either side of it. Hapner’s hands felt past it until they found his hammer.

“But maybe I already killed you?” the thief said.

The voice was right there, almost beside him. In one motion he swung the hammer up and forward. It struck something firm but not as hard as the wall.

The thief screamed and swooned toward him, striking the counter, stumbling over Hapner’s legs. Hapner struck him hard and repeatedly with the hammer. Something struck his shoulder and it suddenly became a numb, useless thing and he heard the crowbar splintering the wood behind him. He groped with his good hand for the dropped hammer. He heard the thief stutter-step and then, groaning, fall.

He moved toward the body, pounding along the floor in front of him until the hammer struck flesh. He fell on the other man and lost his hammer and felt the man’s face into existence and then fumbled up the hammer again and then, as the man still struggled his way out of shock, struck at his skull again and again until it sounded like he was hitting a wet sack.

He felt around the floor one-handed until he found the flashlight. He stood up and flicked its switch but no light came from it, so he dropped it again.

On his way back to the counter, he stepped on what must have been the thief’s hand and then, as he moved quickly off it, stepped into something damp and squishy, perhaps the thief’s gore, perhaps his own, and almost fell. One arm ached badly and swung loose, battering against his side like the trussed body of a shot bird. Moving it created little flashes of light behind his eyes.

He fumbled around on the counter until he found the answering machine, picked it up. There was something wrong with it, he could tell: its surface was no longer smooth.

The room seemed with each moment less and less familiar to him.

He managed to stumble out of the dark and back into the hall. His arm, he saw, in the light, seemed mostly dead, oddly lumped and turning black in two places. He tried again to move it but could not.

The answering machine was shattered in the back, and the slatted casing covering the speaker was destroyed, the speaker itself and the transformer beside it mangled. Why had he wanted to keep it anyway? He couldn’t remember.

He dropped the machine and, crouching beside it, worked the cassette free with one hand. One of its corners was crushed but the tape itself was still intact, could be listened to on another machine. Where had he seen one?

The hallway, he saw, was slowly going out around him, flattening out, the door he had come through now just an odd square of black, a vertical panel, two-dimensional, rather than an entrance. The whole world, he thought fleetingly, was like that for him, there was nothing he could hold on to but this hall and perhaps a few other halls above that and an answering machine he might or might not have seen, somewhere above him. But what did above mean? What’s wrong with it? he wondered of the hall. It all struck him as vaguely familiar, as if he had lived through it before, in another life.

He turned and looked where he was almost certain stairs had been, and found that it too had gone strange, a flat black rectangle scored with lighter lines. He stumbled toward it and, closing his eyes, pushed into it. The pain in his shoulder, too, he realized, seemed to be fading, was all but gone. He hit against something and pulled himself up, kept moving forward, kept stumbling, and when he opened his eyes saw that the stairs were stairs again, more or less, and that he could navigate them. He pushed through the yellow wall at their end and found himself in a hall, or what seemed like a movie set for a hall, everything slightly false. He reached up to touch his face and, when his hand came away, saw it was not a hand exactly, though a reasonable facsimile. There, floating above it, was a strange crimson cloud, the color of blood.

An anxiety began rising in him that he had a hard time placing.

By strength of will he managed to transform a brown rectangle into a door and push his way through. Inside, the cardboard cutout of a tiny man, hardly bigger than a child, was lying prone on what stood in for a couch, a crimson cloud hovering over his face. He took a deep breath and tried to relax and there, momentarily, saw a real, flesh-and-blood man on an actual couch, his face stained from blood that had seeped from his eyes. He felt, almost, that he recognized him. But then, suddenly, he was only a child in a crimson cloud again.

There was a blinking light near him, not far away, very quick, not blinking so much as strobing. He moved toward it slowly and stood near it and in a little while began to imagine that it was an actual manmade object, an answering machine. He found a button and pressed it.

A voice came out, speaking too rapidly. It sounded familiar to him, perhaps a voice he had heard before, but where?

Your name is Roeg, the voice said. You are a small man. This is your home. I’m very sorry for all that’s happened to you. My name is—

And then it stopped. Roeg, he thought. Is that my name?

What is my name? he wondered.

My name? he wondered. Why do I want to know?

There was, he managed to trouble himself to remember, something in his hand, something important, but why or what, he couldn’t remember. He tried to raise his hand but it wouldn’t move. What was wrong with it? The other hand he tried to move and it came, and there, clutched in it, he saw a small black rectangle that just for a moment he found himself mistaking for an open doorway. But no, it was not that, it was smaller than his hand and pierced through with two toothed circles: a cassette.

He shook his head to clear it. It did not clear. He managed, after some effort, to raise the lid of the answering machine and pop the cassette out and get his own cassette in. He pressed the play button and then stumbled away toward where he hoped a chair would find him.

There was a crackle and a beep and the voice began to speak.

Hello, it said. Mr. Hapner? Is that in fact the correct name? My name is Arnaud…

Did it all come flooding back to him? Not exactly, no. It went on from there but he was no longer listening. Hapner, his mind was saying, Arnaud. He tried to sit down, crashed to the floor. He lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to hold on to the two names, to keep them at least. But they were already slipping away.

He awoke to find himself lying on a couch, prone. Across from him, collapsed on the floor, was an abnormally large man with his shirt and hands smeared with blood, blood crusted around his eyes as well. The man’s arm was clearly broken, turned out from the body at a senseless angle, a pinkish lump of bone protruding just above the wrist.

He sat up, feeling weak. His mouth was dry. When he tried to stand, he grew weak and quickly sat down again. He sat there on the couch, gathering his breath, waiting, staring at the man on the floor.

Did he know him? Surely he must know him or why else would they both be there?

“Hello?” he said to the man.

The man didn’t move, dead probably.

But where was here? he wondered. Was this his apartment? It didn’t look familiar exactly, but he couldn’t bring another apartment to mind either. But if this was his, why wouldn’t he know it?

He stood, and stumbled across the room and toward the kitchen, passing the man on the way. Up close he could see the man was clearly dead, his face the color of scraped bone, a smell coming off him.

In the kitchen he looked into the fridge, found it empty. The pantry was full of cans. He couldn’t read any of the labels. What’s wrong with me? he wondered. He opened a can and drank the contents cold — some kind of soup, glassy with oil on the top. After a while, he felt a little better.

When he went back into the living room, he saw the blinking light. It took him a moment to figure out what it meant, what it belonged to.

He had to stand on a foot ladder to reach it. The casing of the machine, he saw, was streaked with blood. He depressed the button.

Hello, a voice said. Mr. Hapner? Is that in fact the correct name?

Hapner, he thought, the name sizzling vaguely in his head and then beginning to fade. Unless it was not his house, unless the name belonged to the man dead on the floor. But no, it must be his name, it sounded right enough, and the foot ladder, the dead man wouldn’t have needed a foot ladder to step on. Ergo, his house. Ergo, Hapner. If that is in fact the correct name?

There had been, the voice told him, Mr. Arnaud told him, a misunderstanding. Everyone’s heart was in the right place. But he, Hapner, was being asked to contact Arnaud’s wife, to pass on information, to find out what had become of him.

I must be a private detective, thought the small man, thought Hapner.

He went into the bathroom and looked at his face. He too, like the dead man, was wearing a mask of blood, the blood thickest around his eyes. They shared that at least. The face — small, pudgy — was unfamiliar. But it must be my own face, he thought. Nevertheless he couldn’t help but reach out and touch the mirror, assure himself that it was solid, flat glass.

In the bedroom, he changed his clothes. The new clothes fit. Thus, this was his house. Ergo. Thus, he was Bentham. Or not Bentham exactly, Bentham was whom he was looking for. What had the name been exactly? It started with an h, he thought, or some similar letter. Similar in what way? He went back into the living room, skirting a dead body — had he seen it before? yes, he had, but who was it? — and depressed the answering-machine button again. Ah, yes. Hapner. That was him. And it was Arnaud he was looking for, not Bentham.

He got out a pen and a piece of paper and wrote it down, but found he could make no sense of the marks on the paper. What’s wrong? he wondered, what’s wrong? He would, he supposed, somehow just have to remember.

He started out the door—Arnaud, he was saying in his head, Hapner, I’m Hapner, I’m looking for Arnaud—and stopped dead. The other doors around his own had been barricaded over with sheets of plywood. But why? he wondered, and then wondered, Why not my door?

He went down the stairs and then down a hall whose walls were smeared with blood, then down another set of stairs that opened onto a lobby, two shattered glass doors leading out into the street. He pushed one open, felt a pricking on his hands and looked to see them glittery with powdered glass, minute cuts all over them. He used his shoe to open the door the rest of the way, stepped out into the street.

The street was deserted, a car overturned and burnt to a husk a dozen feet from where he stood, another car in the middle of the street, both doors open, clumps of paper eddying about it, garbage, a fine rain of ash. The building across the street from him, a large complex of some sort, was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, another similar fence a half-dozen feet inside it and parallel to it, the gates of both fences twisted off their hinges. The building was set off from the road, and between him and it were scores of abnormally large men in white protective suits, sprawled about, no marks on them, suits intact, all probably dead. Good Christ, he thought. For just an instant, the scene wavered, flattening out in front of him, everything fading away or coming all too close. But then he blinked, and blinked again, and it all seemed all right again, though somehow the sun had moved and the sky had gone darker.

He crossed the street and passed through the gate and approached one of the prone men. The glass shield over the man’s face was obscured by blood. He looked at another. It was the same. He stopped looking.

What am I doing? he wondered. What am I looking for?

He couldn’t remember exactly. He was looking for something or someone, it started with, he could almost remember, it was a letter that he … perhaps r? But what did that tell him? It didn’t tell him anything at all.

He turned around and looked over his shoulder at the building across the street. It was an apartment complex, ten or twelve stories tall, its door shattered.

He stood staring at it for a long time. Something about it struck him as significant. Familiar? What, he wondered again, was he looking for, and who was he exactly, again? What was the name?

He kept staring, feeling a slow panic welling through him.

He took a step forward without looking, almost fell over one of the bodies. He kicked it softly, then stepped around it.

I am looking for something, he tried to tell himself, or someone. Probably, he tried to tell himself, I’ll know it when I find it.

He looked back again at the building across the street, then turned toward it.

Probably as good a place to start as any, he thought. He crossed the street, opened the door to the building. Who knows what I will find? he thought.

Another instant and he was gone.