Fugue State: stories

The Adjudicator

We have been for some time putting our community back into a semblance of body and shape, and longer still sifting the living from the dead. There are so many who seem as alive as you and I (if I may be so bold as to number you, with myself, among the living) but who already are all but dead. Much has been done that would not be done in better times, and I too in desperation have committed what I ought not have, and indeed may well do so again.

I have become too accustomed to the signs and tokens of death. I meet them both in the faces of the living and in the remnants I have encountered in my daily round: the blackened arm my plough turned up and which I just as quickly turned back under again; the bloody marks smeared deep into the grain of the wood of my door and which I have not the fortitude to scrub away; the man who lies dying in the ditch between my farm and my neighbor’s, and who, long dying, somehow still is not altogether dead.

Shall I start at the beginning? No, the end. Here am I, waiting for this same beditched man to either die or lurch to his feet and return to claw again at my door. I have no crops, my entire harvest having been pilfered or razed because of all I have witnessed and done and refused to do. If I am to make it alive to the next harvest, I must carefully pace the consumption of my few remaining stores. I must catch and eat what maggots and voles and vermin I can, glean and forage a little, beg mercy of my neighbors if any are still wont to deliver mercy to the likes of me. And then, if I am lucky, I shall sit here and starve for months, but perhaps not enough to die.

No, let us have the beginning after all: the end is too much with me, its breath already warm and damp on the nape of my neck.

At first there are wars and rumors of wars, then comes a light so bright that it shines through flesh and bone. Then a conflagration, the landscape peeled off and away, and nearly everyone dies. Those who do not die directly find themselves subject to suddenly erupting into pustules and bleeding from every pore and then falling dead. Most of the remainder are subject to a slow madness, their brains softened so as to slosh within their skulls. All but dead, these set about killing those who remain alive.

The few who survive unscathed are those in shelters underground or swaddled deep within a strong house. Or, simply, those who, like myself, seem not to have been afflicted for reasons no one can explain. Everything slides into nothingness and collapse, and for several years we all live like animals or worse, and then slowly we find our footing again. Soon some of us, maybe a few dozen, have banded together into this new order despite the disorder still raging in all quarters. We appoint a leader, a man named Rasmus. We begin to grow our scraggled crops. We form a pact to defend one another unto death.

At times I was approached by those who, having heard that I had been left unscathed in the midst of conflagration, believed I might provide some dark help to them. Others were more wary, keeping their distance as if from one cursed. Most, however, felt neither one thing nor the other, but saw me merely as a member of their community, a comrade-in-arms.

This, then, the fluid state of the world when, of a sudden, everything changed for me in the form of a delegation of men approaching my house. From a distance, I watched them come. The severed arm, having surged up under the sharp prow of the plough, was lying there, its palm open in appeal. Uncertain how they would feel about it, I quickly worked to have it buried again before they arrived.

I watched them come. One of them hallooed me when he saw me watching, and I waved back, then simply stood watching them come. I had grown somberly philosophical by this time, and was not distant enough from the conflagration ever to feel at ease. I still in fact carried a hatchet with me everywhere I went, and even slept with it beside me on the pillow. And it was upon this hatchet that Rasmus’s eyes first alighted once the delegation had approached close enough to form a half-circle about me, and upon the way my hand rested steady on the haft.

“No need for that,” he said. “Today will not be the day you hack me to bits.”

This remark, perhaps lighthearted enough, based no doubt on the rumors of my past and meaning nothing, or at least little, drew my thoughts to the arm buried beneath my feet. I was glad, indeed, that I had again inhumed it.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “to what do I owe this pleasure?” and I opened my pouch to them and offered them of my tobacco.

For a moment we were all of us engaged in stuffing and lighting our pipes, and then sucking them slowly down to ash, Rasmus keeping one finger raised to hold my question in abeyance. When he finished, he knocked the pipe out against the heel of his boot and turned fully toward me.

“We have an assignment for you,” he said.

“The hell you have,” I said.

Or at least wanted to say.

I do not know how to tell a story, a real one, or at least tell it well. Reading back over these pages, I see I have done nothing to give a sense of how it felt to have these determined men looming over me, their eyes strangely steady. Nor of Rasmus, with his wispy beard and red-pocked face. Why did we choose him as a leader? Because he was little good for anything else?

So, a large man, ruddy, looming over me, stabbing the air between us with a thick finger, nail yellow and cracking. Minions to either side of him.

What I said was not The hell you have, but “And it takes six of you to tell me?” Perhaps not, in retrospect, the wisest utterance, and certainly not taken exceptionally well. Not, to be blunt, in the proper community spirit. But once I was started down this path, I had difficulty arresting my career.

He tightened his lips and drew himself up a little, stiff now.

“What,” he asked, “was your profession?”

“I have always been a farmer,” I said. “As you yourself know.”

“No,” he said. “Before the conflagration, I mean.”

“You know very well what I was before the conflagration,” I said.

“I want to hear you say it,” he said.

But I would not say it. Instead, I filled my pipe again as they regarded me. Then lit and smoked it. And he, for whatever reason, did not push his point.

“There are rumors about you,” he claimed. “Are they true?”

“For the purposes of this conversation,” I said, not knowing what he was talking about, which rumors, “you should assume they are all true.”

“Paper,” he said, and one of the others came forward, held out a folded sheet of paper. I stared at it a long time, finally took it.

“We have an understanding then,” said Rasmus, and, before I could answer, started off. Soon, he and his company were lost to me.

After they had gone, I dug the arm up again and examined it, trying to determine how long it had been rotting and whether I had been the one to lop it free. In the end, I found myself no closer to an answer than in the beginning. Finally I could think to do nothing but plough it back under again.

The matter of my former profession amounts to this: I had no former profession. I was dissolute, poisonous to myself in any and all ways. At a certain moment, I reached the point where I would have done anything at all to have what I wanted, and indeed I often did. Many of the particulars have faded or vanished from my memory or been pushed deeper down until they can no longer be felt. There was one person, someone I was, in my own way, deeply in love with, whom I betrayed. Someone else, of a different gender, whose self I stripped away nerve by nerve.

When the conflagration came, it was nearly sweet relief for me. And, to be honest, what I did to survive, largely with the hatchet I still carry, is little worse, and perhaps better, than what I had done beforehand.

But for Rasmus, before the conflagration I had been a jack-of-all-trades, someone with little enough regard to take on any business, no matter how raucous or how bloody.

How much easier, I think now, had I just raised my hatchet then and there with Rasmus and his crew and started laying into them. And then simply sewed their bits wide about my field and ploughed them in deep.

There are other things I should tell, and perhaps still others forgotten that I shall never work my way back to. There are the rumors he had mentioned, asking if they were true. I cannot say one way or the other what he thought they were. Some people, as I have said, believe me charmed because of my aboveground survival, others believe me cursed. I am, I probably should have said before, completely devoid of hair — the only long-term consequence I suffered from the conflagration — and as such look to some homuncular, although as though not fully formed. I also heal, I have found, much faster than most, and it is, fortunately, somewhat difficult to inflict permanent damage upon me. It could be this that Rasmus had been referring to, which has become a rumor that I cannot die: a rumor that may well be disproved this winter. Or perhaps it was something else, something involving the past I have just elucidated above, or something touching on my deadly skill with the hatchet with which I live affectionately, as if it were a spouse. Who can say? Certainly not I.

The piece of paper, once unfolded and spread flat, read as follows:

In two days’ time a man will approach your door. You will invite him in and greet him. You will share with him of your tobacco. You will converse with him. And then, when he stands to leave, you will lay into him with your hatchet until he is dead. This is the wish of the community, and we call upon you as a man of the community and one who has often proved himself capable.

There was, as one would have expected, no signature. The words themselves were simple and blocky, anonymous. I screwed the note into a twist and then lit one end of it, used it to ignite my pipe, discarded it in the fire, watched it become its own incandescent ghost and then flinder and flake away into nothingness.

How much shall I tell you about myself? Do I have anything to fear from you? How much can I tell you before I lose hope of holding, by whatever tenuous grasp, your sympathy? Or have I already gone too far?

I have no strong moral objection to murder pure and simple, nor, for that matter, to anything else. Why this is so, I cannot say. And yet I derive no pleasure from murder, have no taste for it. I was as content — and perhaps more content — being a simple farmer as I had ever been in my earlier, dissolute life. I felt as if most of my old self had been slowly torn free of the rest of me, and I was not eager to have it pressed back against me again.

True, I had, on the occasions when our community had been afflicted by swarms of the dead or dying, done my part and done it well. After a particular effort, standing blood-spattered over the remains of one of the afflicted who had refused to stop moving, I had sometimes seen the fear in the eyes of those who had observed my deeds. But I did not like Rasmus’s quick slide from witnessing my having dispatched the dead to his assuming I would do the same without reluctance to the living. Not, again, that I had any reservations about the act of murder, only that I did not care to be taken for granted. And I knew from my past that, having been asked once, I would be asked again and again.

Still, there are sacrifices to be made when one has the privilege of living in a community. I could see no way around making this particular one, even if I was not, technically speaking, the one being sacrificed.

I spent the rest of the day at work on my house, replacing the shingling of the room where the wood had grown gaunt and had been bleached by wind and sun. The next day it was back to the fields, with ploughing and planting to finish and the ditch to be diverted until the near field was a soppy patch that glimmered in the sunset. A pipe at evening as always, and early the next morning a walk two farms away for some more tobacco, trading for it a few handfuls of dried corn from the dwindling stores of the previous year’s harvest. Then a careful survey of the property, the dark, loamy earth of the still damp fields.

He came late in the day, just before sunset. Had I not known he was coming, I might well have been reluctant to swing wide the door, or at least would have opened it with hatchet raised and cocked back for the swing. He was a large man in broad-brimmed hat and long coat, wearing what once would have been called driving gloves.

“I have been sent to you,” he said. “They claimed perhaps you could help me.”

And so I ushered him in. I gestured to a chair near the fire. I placed my tobacco pipe and pouch within easy reach. I invited him to remove his gloves, his coat, his hat.

To this point there had been a certain inexorability to the proceedings, each moment a tiny and inevitable step toward the time when I would, without either fear or rage, raise my hatchet and make an end of the fellow.

And yet, when he was freed of hat and coat and gloves and I saw the bare flesh of his hands, his arms, his face, I suddenly found everything grown complex. What I had seen as a simple deathbound progression now became a sequence of events whose ending I could not foresee, one in which, from instant to instant, I could not begin to divine what would happen next.

What was it that had thrown me into such uncertainty? Had I, as in the dead art of a dead past, glimpsed in the lines and the contours of his visage the face of a long-lost brother? A long-lost lover? No, nothing as simple or as clever as that. Rather, it was the fact that his hands and arms, his face and skull, had been completely epilated. Like me, he had lost all his hair. Had he been a brother or a lover, it would not have been enough to confuse me. But this, somehow, was.

He came in, he sat. His hat and coat I hung from a hook beside my door. His gloves he paired and smoothed and laid gently over his knee once he had sat. His name was Halber, he claimed.

“And who was it sent you?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

Your leader, he claimed. Who had said that I would adjudicate for him.

“Adjudicate?” I said.

Yes, he claimed, since that was my role in the community or so he had been told by Rasmus.

I nodded for him to go on.

The story he unraveled was one of the utmost wrongheadedness. He had once, it seemed, so he claimed, owned all of this property, but when the conflagration had come he had traveled quickly and hurriedly to try to throw his body in the path of his parents’ death. He had of course mis-thrown himself; they had died despite him, his mother going mad so that in the end he had had to be the one to kill her, and his father simply having his skin slough off until the bone was showing. Upon which he thought to return, but the world being as it was, he had spent many months just keeping alive, and only now had he begun to manage.

What he wanted, he stated, was not to reclaim his land. He understood well enough the degree to which everything had transformed. All he wanted was to be given a small plot of land and be allowed to farm it, so he could be back in a place that he knew, and to be accepted into the community. He had said this to Rasmus and the council, and they had deliberated for three days as he awaited their decision. At last they had sent him to me, the adjudicator.

Adjudicator, I thought. Well, that’s one name for it.

I thought, too, with sudden insight, Normally they would kill him themselves, and perhaps have done so with others in times past. But because, like me, he is hairless, they have sent him to me. They are frightened.

And this made me think, too, of what they must have thought of me, and why they had chosen to admit me into the community. And I could not but think it was out of fear or because I was already there, and perhaps it was only because there were those among them who believed I was charmed or cursed and could not die. And perhaps soon, once I had done away with Halber and proved that a man like myself could be killed, they would see no reason not to do away with me as well.

“Please tell them,” I said, “that I have thought carefully and have adjudicated in your favor. You shall join us.”

He stood and awkwardly embraced me, an operation I suffered only with great reluctance. And then after gathering his things he left, leaving me to ponder why I had done what I had done, and what would be its dark consequence.

I was not to wonder long. Late that night I heard shouts and, as I roused myself, a banging had begun at my door. “It’s Halber!” a man was screaming, his screams enough to curdle the blood. “It’s Halb! Let me in!”

And indeed I almost did. I might well have, had I not heard the other voices and sounds that followed, the grunts and indifferent, dull sounds of metal slipping into flesh, and heard the pounding suddenly stop. I climbed onto the bed and looked down through the high window. In the pale moonlight I saw him, dying and staring, being dragged away by the legs. Had it been only a pack of the dead and the dying, I would have perhaps opened the door and commenced to lay about me with my hatchet, as I had done in the past when the dead came for the living. But as it was, seeing that the faces were those of the living, Rasmus’s face among them, I hesitated just long enough to feel that it was too late.

And perhaps it is there that the story should have ended. Perhaps, had I said nothing, done nothing, kept to my house, then my reputation, the myths surrounding me, would have been enough for Rasmus and his council to decide to let me be. Perhaps they would have grudgingly levied a fine, remembered my usefulness in other ways, and life would have gone much as usual, if anything can be described as usual in these days. But we both of us made mistakes that made this impossible.

The mistake I made was in not staying to my house for a few days, deciding instead to tend to my crops, to go about the business that needed to be attended to on my farm. This, under most circumstances, would not be considered a dire mistake. Or, to be frank, in most conditions, even a mistake at all.

Their mistakes were more severe. Tired of dragging the body, they abandoned it in a ditch halfway between my and my neighbor’s farms. And instead of tearing the head free of the corpse and incinerating it, they left the hairless Halber lacerated but more or less intact.

With every disaster, I have come to believe for my own personal reasons, comes a compensation, a certain balancing of the accounts — not spread evenly about but clumped here and there, of benefit to very few. I heal, as I said, very quickly — or at least I do now; before the conflagration I did not. There are rumors I cannot die. Not having died, I can neither confirm nor deny these rumors, nor am I curious enough to uncover the truth that I feel compelled to slit my own throat. But from what I have seen of what is happening to Halber, I fear these rumors might well be true, and hardly in the way one would hope.

So, we have reached the day after Halber was hauled away, my door clawed and scratched on the outside, the bloody marks of his dying smeared there and on the threshold. I stare at the door a moment, checking to see whether my hatchet is with me. Outside, there are always things to attend to, things to do to keep the farm going. I do them, wondering all the while when, if ever, the little poultry and livestock remaining in the area will start to breed again and if I will ever be able to afford my own chickens. I irrigate my fields again, just enough, then sit on a stone near the border of the field, and smoke.

That is when I begin to hear it, a slow and distant whistle, a soft wind. At first I think nothing of it. But when it persists, I become afflicted with the disease of curiosity.

I stand, trying to ascertain where it is coming from. I follow it in one direction, then another. It slowly becomes louder, just a little louder, just a little louder, a moan now.

It is some time still before I make my way out to the road and follow it a little distance down and find him there, Halber, bloody in the ditch, grievously wounded — by all rights he should be dead.

What do I do? One look is enough to tell me he should be dead. I have dealt often enough with the living turned dead to be leery, but he struck me as something different, as a new thing.

He was in any case too hurt to be moved. I went back to the house, brought back a blanket and some water. I wrapped him in the former and dribbled the latter into his mouth. He was delirious and hardly conscious. He would, it seemed to me, soon be dead.

And so I stayed there beside him, waiting for him to die.

Only he did not die. His body seemed unable to let go but also unable to heal itself, and so he struggled there between life and death. I thought for a moment to kill him, but what if he did heal himself? I wondered. Was he not like me? Would he not eventually heal himself?

In the end I left him and went home to sleep.

That night I dreamt of him, lying there in his ditch, slowly dying but never dead, breathing in his shallow way but breathing despite everything, never stopping. And then, his breathing no less shallow, he managed over the course of long, painful moments to make it to his feet and shuffle forward, like the walking dead. I watched him coming. Later, much later in my head, I heard a knocking and a dim, inarticulate cry and knew him — suddenly and with, for once, a certain measure of terror — to be knocking on my door.

When I came back the next morning, I found my blanket was gone, stolen. Some creature had eaten most of one of his hands and the finer portion of his face. But he was still, somehow, alive. And so I slit his throat and watched the blood gurgle out, and then went back to get on with my work.

This seemed to me sufficient, and I must confess that I did not think about him through the course of my day. There were fences to be attended to, wood to be chopped, brush to be cleared. A corner of the field had become too soggy and I found myself cutting a makeshift drainage channel, thinking up its course as I went. By the end of the day I was mud-spattered, my bones and muscles aching.

And still, as the sun set, I found my thoughts returning to Halber. I could not stop myself from going to see him.

There are strange things that happen that I cannot explain, and this is one of them. He was as I had left him, but still alive. His throat, I saw, had filmed over, the veins not reconnecting exactly but blood moving there, pulsing back and forth within the film in a kind of delicate bag of blood and nascent tissue, pus-like. I watched it beat red, then beat pale, in the gap where his throat had been. At that sight I nearly severed his head from his shoulders, but I was too terrified of what would happen inside of me if I removed his head, and somehow, despite this, he still refused to die.

So instead I went home and sharpened my hatchet.

What can I say about the night that followed, when I chose to become the one who would judge who lived and who died? I have no apologies for what I did, nor any justification, either. I did it simply because I could think of nothing else to do. I am neither proud of my actions nor regretful.

I sharpened the hatchet until it had a fine and impossible edge, and then in the dark I set out. Perhaps if I had met some of the dying and the afflicted, some of those made vicious and deranged by the conflagration, I would have been satisfied. But the only one I met in my path was Halber, and I gave the fellow a wide berth.

What need is there to pursue in detail what followed next? I did unto Rasmus as might be expected. A single blow of the hatchet and I was through his door. I caught him on his way out of bed as he moved down the hall and went after his gun, the hatchet cutting through his back and ribs and puncturing one lung so that it hissed. He went down in a heap, groaning and breathing out a mist of blood, and I severed first one forearm, then the other, and, as his eyes rolled back, lopped off his head. His wife arose screaming from the bed and rushed to the window and tried to hurl herself through. I struck her on the back of the skull with the cronge of the handle, meaning only to silence her screams, but it was clear from the way she fell and the puddle of blood that soon spread from her head that perhaps I had struck too hard. Then I approached Rasmus again and very delicately, with the sharpest part of the blade, peeled off his face.

The other five who had earlier come with him to see me now suffered the same fate, though I killed them more swiftly, with a single blow, and did not disjoint or decorticate them as I had their leader. There is no need to say more than that, I suppose. In the end, I was sodden with blood and gore, and made my way back to my farmhouse, past the still dying Halber, and slept the sleep of the truly dead.

I awoke to the smell of burning, saw when I burst open the door that they had set my fences afire. My fields, too, had been trampled apart, then the ditch redirected and trenches dug to wash away the topsoil. Had my house not been stone, they would have burnt that, too. I stared at the flames a moment and then, not knowing what else to do, went back to bed.

It was a week before I could bring myself to leave the house. Finally I stripped off my gory clothing, the blood now gone black, and burnt it in the fireplace. Then I took water from the irrigation canal and washed in it and dressed myself in my town clothes and set off for my neighbor’s farm.

I do not know what I expected. At the very least I expected, I suppose, for Halber to be dead. But he was still alive, still feebly dying in the ditch. I chose not to get close to him.

My neighbor was at his farm, his crops just starting to sprout. When he saw me coming, he rushed inside, came out with his rifle.

“Not another step,” he said.

I stopped. “Do you think your gun can stop me?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but if you come any closer we shall find out.”

“I have no grudge against you,” I said. “I only want those who destroyed my crops.”

“Then you want me,” he said. “You want all of us, the community.”

“But why?”

“Can you possibly ask?”

And I suppose in good conscience I could not, though I thought my neighbor had at least a right to know why I had done what I had done. So I sat on the ground and kept my hand far away from the hatchet and, rifle trained on me, recounted to him, just as I have recounted to you, all that had occurred.

When I was finished, he shook his head. “We have all been through much,” he said, “and you have made us go through more. None of us are perfect men, but you are less perfect than most.”

Then he gestured with his gun. “Come with me,” he said.

He led me back to the road and toward my farm, to the place in the ditch where the dying man was to be found.

“Is this the man you meant?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Halber.”

“But you can see for yourself that he has been long dead,” he said. “And that when he was alive he was not hairless but in fact replete with hair. Please,” he said, “go away and do not come back.”

But I could not see it. Indeed, to me he still appeared as hairless as a baby and, though dying, still alive. I wondered to myself what my neighbor was trying to do to me. Had he not had his gun trained upon me, I would have turned upon him and laid into him with my hatchet. Instead, I simply turned away from him and returned to my house.

Where I have been ever since. I do not know if what is wrong is wrong with me or wrong with the world. Perhaps there is a little of both. I find it difficult to face the man dying in the ditch, and it is clear that my neighbors and I no longer live in altogether the same worlds.

It seems strange to think that after all this, after my years of dissolution and then the hard years after the conflagration, I might die here alone, might slowly starve to death. Assuming it is true that I can in fact die.

I will make do as long as I can and then when my straits are indeed dire I shall leave my house and beg mercy from my neighbors. Perhaps they will show mercy, even if only out of fear, or perhaps they will kill me. Either way, it cannot be but a relief.

As for now, though, I shall sit here and write and very slowly starve, waiting part in anticipation and part in fear for the moment when the dying man who so greatly resembles me shall drag himself to his feet and leave his ditch and come again to knock at my door.

This time I shall be ready for him. This time I shall know what to do.

Fugue State was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Garamond.

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