Fugue State: stories

Desire with Digressions

In the end, suffering and not knowing what else to do, I left her abruptly and without warning, taking only the clothes on my back. She was out behind the isolated house, near the meadow, the creek just beginning to rise as it did every year, and I went out and looked at her a final time as she sat in the grass, looking at the creek, facing away from me.

Watching her, after all she had said to me, I felt that if her head were to turn toward me then I would see not her face but an unfeatured facelessness, as inhuman and smooth as a plate. And then, standing there, I realized I could not even imagine what her face looked like, nor recall ever having seen it at all, and this feeling grew until it became a form of panic. In the end, not knowing what else to do, not daring to risk seeing her face, I turned and walked back through the house and out the front door and was gone.

Do you love me? her voice was saying in my head as I walked up the dirt road and then up the gravel road and then down the paved road until I found a car I could steal. Do you love me? it was saying as I drove quickly away, not knowing where I was going. But even in my head I could not bring myself to answer her, and when, finally, to stop her voice from saying it, I finally said Yes, I could not even in imagination lift my eyes to meet her unimaginable face.

So began what proved to be days in orbit, with myself both afraid to go back and afraid to get too far away from her. I knew what I had felt about her face could not be natural, could not have anything to do with any reality connected to her. I could rationalize my fear away, and yet I still could not bring myself to return and look her in the face. I drove, I stole for food and gas, drove some more. Each time I seemed about to go far enough that I would no longer be able to think of going back, I found the car coaxed by my hands into a slow arc, an orbit with her at its center. Why not simply go back? I asked myself, at night, sleeping on the ground beside a guttering fire or sleeping curled in the car’s backseat. And I would tell myself, Yes, I will go back. But when morning came, the sun a blank and burning round such as I feared her face to be, I could only continue my dim and erratic orbit.

Until at last I was forced to abandon the car, engine smoking and radiator stuttering, at the height of a mountain pass and to continue forward alone and on foot, shivering my way over the summit and plodding down the other side. I tried to thumb a ride, but cars were few and none stopped, and in the slow and beautiful descent from mountain to valley I began, ignored again and again, to think of myself as a ghost. What was it she had said to me, that day before she had abandoned me to sit beside the creek and grow strange? And how had I responded? Why could I not recall?

Midway downslope into the high valley was a graveled pullout and a small tavern, little more than a shack, fallen into poor repair. The door was sticky at first, and I thought for a moment in forcing it that it was locked, but then suddenly it gave way and I tumbled in. It was a dim place, lit by little more than the evening light streaming through its single window. It seemed nearly as cold inside as outside, the wind whistling through the walls. There was a small bar, nothing behind it but two bottles of cheap scotch and a weathered keg of beer. A grizzled and poorly toothed barmaid merely stared at me as I approached.

“What you want?” she finally asked.

Nothing, I claimed, only to get out of the cold for a moment and warm up before—

“We got beer, whiskey,” she said. “Which suits?”

Both suited, I told her, but I was at the moment fallen in the cracks of life and a little short on funds.

“Got to drink to stay,” she said, and so I dug around in one pocket and came up with a few coins. She looked at them and counted them and then poured me just enough whiskey to wet the bottom of a shot glass. “Get on with you,” she said.

I carried the shot glass over to the table and sat down. The old woman at the bar kept her eyes on me. I tried to look at anything else but her.

Still, I had been there quite some time before my eyes adjusted sufficiently to make out, in one dark corner, another man. When he realized I had noticed him, he nodded slightly. I nodded back and lifted my shot glass to let the little that was in it trickle down my throat, licking the glass clean afterward. When I finally put it back down, I found him still watching me.

“What you want?” the barmaid barked, and it took me a moment to realize she was speaking to me.

I was fine, I told her, I didn’t want anything.

“Got to drink or split,” she said.

And so I stood up and made my way out. I moved down the road in the fading sunlight.

I had gone nearly a half-mile before I realized that I was not alone, that the man in the bar had followed me out and was now at a little distance behind. I stopped and turned to him. He stopped as well.

“What is it?” I asked.

He just shook his head and shyly smiled.

I turned and started down again. When I looked back he was still there, still following.

“What?” I said again, and this time took a few steps back, toward him.

“Nothing,” he said.

“What do you mean, nothing?” I asked.

“I’m still trying to decide if you’re the man.”

“The man for what?”

“There’s something,” he said, “needs getting down. One man can’t do it alone. It needs two. I’m trying to decide if you’re the second.”

“What’s in it for me?” I asked.

He smiled. “Maybe you are the man,” he said, and came closer.

I stayed as the light fell, and listened to him, watched the glints of his eyes, tried to read the dimming lines of his face. It would, he claimed, take only a day or so, a quick trip up into the mountains, and then we would come back down, our fortunes made. And what is it? I asked. But he merely shook his head. I would have to trust him, he said.

I shrugged. What, in fact, I wondered, did I have to lose? At the very least this was a distraction from my own life. And so I agreed.

He took me by the arm, began to tug me slowly off the road, into the slush and snow.

“Wait,” I said. “Let’s wait for the morning.”

But no, was I not the man after all? I had to trust him, we had to go now, there was not a moment to lose. And what, finally, did I care? Another day of shivering and cold? I would have it sooner or later, so why not sooner? So I allowed myself to be led off the road and away.

We trudged through the night, my hands gone blue with cold, my feet so numb I could hardly feel them. When he saw how I was suffering, he drew from around his shoulders an old blanket, which I wrapped around myself, and then felt at least slightly less cold.

We stopped near dawn and he cleared a spot of snow and ice and with a solitary match and pine needles started a small fire, slowly feeding it into a blaze. My feet, out of my wet shoes now, at first stayed numb and then felt as if they were being repeatedly stabbed. It was almost more than I could bear.

“Just a little more,” he said to himself. In the firelight I could see just how haggard his face really was. “Just a little more,” he said again.

And I looked at him and saw in his eyes a look closer to death than to mere exhaustion. A shadow had settled into his face and it lay there, just beneath the skin, blurring his features.

“Perhaps,” I said, “we should go back.”

He gave a little start, and then his eyes settled on me and he slowly smiled. “Just a little more,” he said again. “Just a little more.”

And so, just a little more. A slow tramp up into the mountains, the snow no longer slush but deep and powdery now, sticky, and the two of us tramping forward, he pushing a path through the snow and I following, the going slower as the sun slipped lower in the sky.

Until at last, past exhaustion, he seemed to glimpse what he was looking for, and we made for it.

It was a small miner’s shack. Inside, it was empty, not even wood for a fire. We were, both of us, too exhausted to trudge back out and go in search of dry timber, so instead we worked our way into a corner and huddled together, our bodies tight around each other, as the wind whistled around us.

I felt his face next to mine grow slowly cold, the heat draining out of him. And then I fell into a state between waking and sleeping and perhaps as well between death and life. In that state I saw myself again staring at her back, again afraid that she might turn around and reveal her face in a terrible way. But she did not turn around. It was as if she were frozen: she neither moved nor breathed. This made me even more afraid than if she were to turn around.

When the wind fell and morning light struck again, I opened my eyes to see my companion’s lips gone blue, his face turning blue as well. He could open his eyes and move them, but hardly more than that.

And now what? I asked him. He was in no condition to go on, I argued. Now that we were here, would he not tell me what it was we had come in search of?

He regarded me torpidly through half-closed eyes. Slowly his mouth opened itself, his lips pulling apart only reluctantly, as if his face were being slowly torn, but then, instead of speech, a dim, wracked sound issued from his throat, and he died.

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape. The void here — only one of several in what, from the wandering of love, my life had become — was this notion of some vague treasure awaiting me, something waiting to be taken, if only I could figure out what it was. I searched my companion’s pockets, my fingers trembling with cold, but found nothing to indicate what we had been looking for, nor anything to tell me who, exactly, my companion had been. I searched the shack itself, carefully, but found nothing to indicate the nature of what we had been searching for and no signs of a hiding place. I stripped him to see if he had any tattoos or hidden markings that might reconfigure my sense of the world, and found nothing. But rather than putting the clothes back on him, I put them on my own body, over my own clothing, so as to keep warm, so as to disguise myself.

Since I was in a miner’s shack, perhaps whatever it was I was meant to find was in the mine. But coming out of the shack, I could see no sign of a mine. I could, I thought, search until I found something, but I had no food, did not know what I was looking for. This was, I convinced myself, the hole that was opening into a void for me: a desire for some unknown riches, which I might not even recognize were I to see them, was coaxing me forward and into my own oblivion, offering to make me not rich but dead.

And it was with this realization that her face sprang up before me at last. In my head I saw her turn away from the creek and turn toward me and smile — her stark blue eyes, her high cheekbones, her beautiful, full lips, her slightly skewed teeth: I could piece together little of her beyond that — whole regions of her face and head remaining unrendered and incomplete — but it was enough to fill me with a desire to see her again, a desire that pulled me out of the void and saved my life.

I kept her image before me as I moved back down the mountain again, along the trail we had blazed through the snow during our ascent. The journey seemed quicker this time, the crust of the snow already broken, the path already there to follow, the downward slope urging me quickly forward. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, not stopping even after darkness fell. I kept plodding down, hardly conscious of anything around me until, unsure of how many hours I had traveled, how many steps I had taken, I found myself at last on the road.

What immediately followed I have assembled after the fact and by inference. The few bits and pieces that I do remember feel less lived than observed from a distance. I was found delirious and shivering and nearly dead, by some car that had stopped. I was taken to what seemed at first to me an asylum but which I have allowed myself over time to be convinced was a hospital. There, doctors in pale-blue coats lopped off the toes on one foot and removed most of the other foot. A few fingers were cut free as well, while a few others still continued to itch and buzz with pain. I was asked who I was, without result: in my addled state I hardly knew the answer myself at first and then I chose to keep to myself the answers slowly coming to me. Eventually they stopped asking.

All the while I kept her image before me: the movement of her lips as she asked me, Do you love me? and myself still unsure how or if I had responded, but knowing that now I would answer, Yes. And when, finally, I was coherent again, I lay in bed with my bandaged hands and stared at the ceiling and plotted how I would make my way back to her.

And then one day, abruptly and without warning, I simply climbed out of bed, slipped into my clothes, and left. I walked out the front door of the hospital and climbed into the first likely car I saw and not without difficulty hot-wired it and then, gripping the steering wheel with my bandaged hands, drove away. I could imagine her there, still by the creek, still waiting for me. I imagined how she would turn and face me and smile. Where have you been? I imagined her asking, and imagined myself shrugging and responding, Nowhere, though there was no place in my imagining for how her face might change once she saw my mangled hands and feet.

I drove through the night and I drove through the dawn, coming in from the west with the sun in my eyes. I left the car on the side of the paved road in place of the first car I had stolen, then walked the rest of the way up the paved road, down the gravel road, down the dirt road. The house looked just as I had left it, and I banged my way through the screen door and inside, calling her name, receiving no response.

The house was still, the floors and furniture dim with dust, and I wandered from room to room, confused. Finally I went out the back door and into the meadow.

I could instantly see her there, sitting just as I had left her, and I started quickly toward her, calling her name again.

But once I came a little farther I found myself slowing, stopping. For I could see that what I had thought was her arm was only the bones that had once structured the arm, the flesh mostly gone. And I saw that a part of her on the other side, too, was in the process of grimly disarticulating itself with the aid of vermin and time, and I remembered what, out of love or hate, had happened, and why I had left in the first place.

And then what choice was there but to turn about in my dead man’s clothes and leave, to go through the house and out the front door and get into the car again, to set off again, to fling myself free of her gravitation and, this time, never, never come back?