Fugue State Read online

  FUGUE STATE

  Fugue State

  STORIES

  BRIAN EVENSON

  WITH ART BY ZAK SALLY

  COFFEE HOUSE PRESS

  MINNEAPOLIS

  2009

  COPYRIGHT © 2009 Brian Evenson

  COVER & BOOK DESIGN Linda S. Koutsky

  HAND-LETTERING & ILLUSTRATIONS © Zak Sally

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Denny Moers

  Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, www.cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: [email protected].

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  Good books are brewing at coffeehousepress.org

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Evenson, Brian, 1966—

  Fugue state: stories/Brian Evenson. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56689-225-4 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-56689-206-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-56689-267-4

  1. Psychological fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3555.V326F84 2009

  813’.54—DC22

  2008052722

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to the editors of the following publications for providing space for the stories collected in this volume: Conjunctions “Younger,” “Desire with Digressions,” and “Girls in Tents” • The Ninth Letter “A Pursuit” • McSweeney’s “Mudder Tongue” • Paraspheres “An Accounting” • Caketrain “Dread” • Mome “Dread” (illustrated version) • American Letters & Commentary “Wander” • New York Tyrant “Ninety Over Ninety” • Black Clock “Invisible Box” • Quarterly West “The Third Factor” • Fourteen Hills “Bauer in the Tyrol” • Bombay Gin “Helpful” • LIT “Life Without Father” • Columbia “Alfons Kuylers” • 3rd bed “Fugue State” • The Brooklyn Rail “Traub in the City” • “An Accounting” was reprinted in Best American Fantasy and in The Apocalypse Reader. “Fugue State” was reprinted in Text: UR. “Invisible Box” was reprinted in Awake! A Reader for the Sleepless and, in French translation, in Inculte. “Bauer in the Tyrol” was reprinted in the New Standards anthology, and “Traub in the City” in The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology. “Mudder Tongue” was chosen for the O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and was read by David Straitharn for Symphony Place’s Selected Shorts series.

  I would also like to thank the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Camargo Foundation for providing me invaluable space and time to work, Gary Lutz for his meticulous reading of the manuscript, my editor Chris Fischbach, my agent Matt McGowan. Most of all, thanks to Joanna, Valerie, Sarah, and Ruby for their love and support.

  Contents

  Younger

  A Pursuit

  Mudder Tongue

  An Accounting

  Desire with Digressions

  Dread, ILLUSTRATED BY ZAK SALLY

  Girls in Tents

  Wander

  In the Greenhouse

  Ninety Over Ninety

  Invisible Box

  The Third Factor

  Bauer in the Tyrol

  Helpful

  Life Without Father

  Alfons Kuylers

  Fugue State

  Traub in the City

  The Adjudicator

  FUGUE STATE

  The scroll of the night sky seemed to roll back, showing a huge blood-dusky presence looming enormous, stooping, looking down, awaiting its moment.

  —D. H. LAWRENCE, “The Border Line”

  Younger

  Years later, she was still calling her sister, trying to understand what exactly had happened. It still made no sense to her, but her sister, older, couldn’t help. Her sister had completely forgotten—or would have if the younger sister wasn’t always reminding her. The younger sister imagined, each time she talked to her sibling on the telephone, each time she brought the incident up, her older sister pressing her palm against her forehead as she waited for her to say what she had to say, so that she, the older sister, the only one of the sisters with a family of her own, could politely sidestep her inquiries and go back to living her life.

  Her older sister had always managed to do that, to nimbly sidestep anything that came her way so as to simply go on with her life. For years, the younger sister had envied this, watching from farther and farther behind as her older sister sashayed past those events that an instant later struck the younger sister head-on and almost destroyed her. The younger sister was always being almost destroyed by events, and then had to spend months desperately piecing herself together enough so that when once again she was struck head-on, she would only be almost destroyed rather than utterly and completely destroyed.

  As her mother had once suggested, the younger sister felt things more intensely than anyone else. At the time, very young, the younger sister had seen this as a mark of emotional superiority, but later she saw it for what it was: a serious defect that kept her from living her life. Indeed, as the younger sister reached first her teens and then her twenties, she came to realize that people who felt things as intensely as she were either institutionalized or dead.

  This realization was at least in part due to her father having belonged to the first category (institutionalized) and her mother to the second (dead by suicide)—two more facts that her older sister, gliding effortlessly and, quite frankly, mercilessly, through life, had also sidestepped. Indeed, while the younger sister was realizing to a more and more horrifying degree how she was inescapably both her mother’s and her father’s child, her older sister had gone on to start a family of her own. It was like her older sister had been part of a different family. The younger sister could never start a family of her own—not because, as everyone claimed, she was irresponsible but because she knew it just brought her one step closer to ending up like her mother and father. It was not that she was irresponsible, but only that she was terrified of ending up mad or dead.

  The incident had occurred when their parents were still around, before they were, in the case of the mother, dead and, in the case of the father, mad. There were, it had to be admitted in retrospect, signs that things had gone wrong with their parents, things her older sister must have absorbed and quietly processed over time but which the younger sister was forced to process too late and all at once. The incident, the younger sister felt, was the start of her losing her hold on her life. Even years later, she continued to feel that if only she could understand exactly what had happened, what it all meant, she would see what had gone wrong and could correct it, could, like the older sister, muffle her feelings, begin to feel things less and, in the end, perhaps not feel anything at all. Once she felt nothing, she thought, knowing full well how crazy it sounded, she could go on to have a happy life.

  But her older sister couldn’t understand. To her older sister, what the younger sister referred to as the incident was nothing—less than nothing, really. As always, her older sister listened patiently on the other end of the line as the younger sister posed the same questions over again. “Do you remember the time we were trapped in the house?” she might begin, and there would be a long pause as her older sister (so the younger sister believed) steeled herself to go through it once more.

  “We weren’t trapped exactly,” her older sister almost always responded. “No need to exaggerate.”

  But that was not how the younger sister remembered it. How the younger sister remembered it was that they were trapped. E
ven the word trapped did not strike her as forceful enough. But her older sister, as always, saw it as her role to calm the younger sister down. The younger sister would make a statement and then her older sister would qualify the statement, dampen it, smooth it over, nullify it. This, the younger sister had to admit, did calm her, did make her feel better momentarily, did made her think, Maybe it isn’t as bad as I remembered. But the long-term effect was not to make her feel calmer but to make her feel insane, as if she were remembering things that hadn’t actually happened. But if they hadn’t happened the way she remembered, why was she still undone more than twenty years later? And as long as her sister was calming her, how was she ever to stop feeling undone?

  No, what she needed was not for her sister to calm her, not for her sister, from the outset, to tell her there was no need to exaggerate. But she could not figure out how to tell her sister this—not because her older sister was unreasonable but because she was all too reasonable. She sorted the world out rationally and in a way that stripped it of all its power. Her older sister could not understand the effect of the incident on the younger sister because she, the older sister, had not let it have an effect on her.

  For instance, her older sister could not even begin to conceive how the younger sister saw the incident as the single most important and most devastating moment of her life. For her older sister, the incident had been nothing. How was it possible, her older sister wanted to know, that the incident had been more damaging for her than their mother’s suicide or their father’s mental collapse? It didn’t make any sense. Well, yes, the younger sister was willing to admit, it didn’t make any sense, and yet she was still ruined by it, still undone. If I can understand exactly what happened, she would always tell her older sister, I’ll understand where I went wrong.

  “But nothing happened,” her older sister said. “Nothing. That’s just it.”

  And that was the whole problem. The sisters had played the same roles for so many years that they didn’t know how to stop. Responding to each other in a different way was impossible. Every conversation had already been mapped out years in advance, at the moment the younger sister was first compelled to think of herself as the irresponsible one and the older sister was first made to be a calming force. They weren’t getting anywhere, which meant that she, the younger sister, wasn’t getting anywhere, was still wondering what, if anything, had happened, and what, if anything, she could do to free herself from it.

  •

  What she thought had happened—the way she remembered it when, alone, late at night, she lay in bed after another conversation with her sister—was this: their mother had vanished sometime during the night. Why exactly, the younger sister didn’t know. Their father, she remembered, had seemed harried, had taken their mother somewhere during the night and left her there, but had been waiting for them, seated on the couch, when they woke up. He had neither slept nor bathed; his eyes were very red and he hadn’t shaved. Somehow, she remembered, her sister hadn’t seemed surprised. Whether this was because the sister wasn’t really surprised or because, as the calm one, she was never supposed to appear surprised, the younger sister couldn’t say.

  She remembered the father insisting that nothing was wrong, but insisting almost simultaneously that he must leave right away. There was, the younger sister was certain, something very wrong: what exactly it had been, she was never quite certain. Something with the mother, certainly, perhaps her suicidal juggernaut just being set in motion—though her older sister claimed that no, it must have been something minor, a simple parental dispute that led to their mother going to stay temporarily with her own mother. And the only reason the father had to leave, the older sister insisted, was that he had to get to work. He had a meeting, and so had to leave them alone, even though they were perhaps too young—even the older sister had to admit this—to be left alone.

  Her older sister claimed too that the father had bathed and looked refreshed and was in no way harried. But this, the younger sister was certain, was a lie, was just the older sister’s attempt to calm her. No, the father had looked terrible, was harried and even panicked, the younger sister wasn’t exaggerating, not really. Do you love me? the younger sister sometimes had to say into the phone. Do you love me? she would say. Then stop making me feel crazy, and just listen.

  So there was her father, in her head, simultaneously sleepless and well-rested, clean and sticky with sweat. He had to leave, he had explained to them. He was sorry but he had to leave. But it was all right, he claimed. He set the stove timer to sound when it was time for them to go to school. When they heard the timer go off, he told them, they had to go to school. Did they understand?

  Yes, both girls said, they understood.

  “And one more thing,” the father said, his hand already reaching for the knob. “Under no circumstances are you to answer the door. You are not to open the door to anyone.”

  •

  And after that? According to the older sister, nothing much. The father left. The sisters played together until the timer rang, and then they opened the door and went to school.

  But that was not how the younger sister remembered it. There was, first of all and above all, the strangeness of being alone in the house for the first time. There was a giddiness to that, a feeling they had stepped beyond the known world, a feeling the younger sister never for a moment forgot. A feeling which made it seem like not just minutes were going by, but hours.

  “But it was just a few minutes,” her older sister insisted.

  “Like hours,” said the younger sister. “Not actually hours but like hours.” All right, she conceded, not actual hours—though she knew that when it came down to it, there was no such thing as actual hours. But for all intents and purposes she had already lost her sister, once again had rapidly reached a point where she could no longer rely on her sister to help her understand what exactly had happened. But she kept talking anyway, because once she had started talking what could she do but keep on?

  The point was, time slowed down for the younger sister and never really sped back up again. There was a giddiness and a sense that anything could happen, anything at all. There were only two rules: the world would end when the timer rang, and under no circumstances were they to answer the door. But within those constraints, anything could happen.

  What did they play? They played the same things they had always played, but the games were different too, just as the girls, alone, had become different. Her older sister, as always, went along with what the younger sister wanted to play, playing down to her level, but this time anything could happen. The small toy mustangs they played with dared do things they had never done before, cantering all the way across the parents’ bedroom, where they gathered and conferred and at last decided on a stratagem for defeating the plastic bear, which, once bested, was flushed down the toilet and was gone forever. The two girls watched with sweaty faces and flushed cheeks as the bear disappeared: anything could happen. The younger sister pulled herself up on the bathroom counter and opened the cabinet and used the mother’s lipstick on her own lips, something she was never allowed to do, and then used the lipstick to paint red streaks on the horses’ sides, bloodied from where they had been gashed by the bear in battle. The most injured mustang limped slowly away and found a cave to hide in. He lay down inside it and hoped that the cool and the dark either would help him get better or would kill him. At first the cave was just the space under the couch, but the mustang wasn’t getting better, so the younger sister stuck him in her armpit and called that a cave and held her arm clamped to her side. When, later, she reached him back out, the blood had smeared off all over inside the cave, and the horse was miraculously healed and allowed to return to the pack.

  “It’s not called a pack,” her older sister told her over the telephone. “It’s a herd.”

  But the younger sister knew they had called it a pack, that anything could happen and that pack was part of it too. They had known at the time it was a
herd but they had called it a pack, and they had said it wrong on purpose. They were building a whole world up around them, full of things more vivid and slippery than anything the real world could offer. Just because her older sister couldn’t remember didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

  And the sisters had become mustangs as well, had joined the pack as well—couldn’t she remember? They took the two biggest rubber bands they could find and stretched them from their mouths over the back of their heads like bridles. They took old plastic bread bags their mother had saved, and filled the bottoms with paper napkins and rubber-banded them to their legs and then slipped shoes over their hands. And suddenly it wasn’t just pretend but something was happening that had never happened before. Couldn’t she remember? It was ecstatic and crazed and like they were fleeing their bodies—it was the only thing like a religious experience the younger sister had ever had, and she had had it when she was six.

  And then suddenly it all went wrong.

  They heard the timer go off and ran to turn it off but they were still wearing shoes on their hands and neither of them wanted to take the shoes off, so they tried to stop the timer by trapping its stem between two shoes and turning it, but the timer stem was old and too smooth to turn like that. So while the timer buzzed on, the younger sister had neighed at her older sister and together they had cantered to the dining-room table and taken a chair, supporting it between them with their hooves, and brought it to the stove. The younger sister stood on it and leaned over the burner, feeling the enamel warm in one spot from the pilot light, and turned the timer off with her teeth, by twisting her head.

  That was, the younger sister knew, the sign that the world had come to an end, that it was over, that now they had to go to school. Only it wasn’t the end, for as soon as the timer was turned off, the doorbell rang. It froze both of them and they stood there, bread bags on their feet and shoes on their hands, and kept very still and very quiet. They were not to answer the door, their father had been very clear about that. But they were also supposed to go to school. How could you go to school when someone was at the door, ringing the doorbell, trying to come in?