Fugue State Read online

  My older sister, the younger sister thought, will know what to do.

  But her older sister was standing there not doing anything. The doorbell rang again, and still they waited, the younger sister nervously rubbing her hooves together.

  They waited awhile for the doorbell to ring a third time. When it did not, her older sister leaned close to her and whispered Come on. But they had taken only a few steps when they heard not ringing but a hard, loud knock: four sharp, equally spaced blows right in a row. And that stopped them just as much as if someone had yanked back on their bridles.

  It was like that for hours—for what, anyway, seemed like hours. Her hands were getting sweaty in the shoes. Her feet in the bread bags were much, much worse, the napkins at the bottom of each bag grown damp. Her mouth, too, hurt in the corners because of the rubber band. Her older sister took a few steps and the younger sister, not knowing what else to do, followed. Her older sister, she saw, had taken the shoes off her hands without the younger sister noticing and had gotten the rubber band out of her mouth and was now creeping very slowly past the door. The younger sister followed, trying not to look at the curtain-covered window beside the door, trying not to see the shadow of whatever was on the other side, but seeing enough to know that, whatever it was, it was big, and seeing too, when the knocking started once again, the door shiver in its frame.

  In their bedroom, her sister helped her get the shoes off. They had been on long enough that they felt like they were still on even once they had come off. The rubber-band bridle got caught in her hair so that her sister had to snip it out with a scissor, which made the bridle snap and raised a red stripe of flesh across her cheekbone and almost made her cry. The rubber bands holding the plastic bags to her legs had left purple grooves on her calves, and her feet were hot and wet and itchy. She dried them off on a hand towel and put her shoes on while her older sister stood on a stool by the bedroom window and tried to see out.

  “He’s still there,” she said.

  “What is it?” asked the younger sister.

  “I don’t know,” said her older sister. “Who, you mean.”

  But the younger sister had meant not who, but what. She wanted to climb on the stool beside her sister and look out as well, but was too scared.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  “Do?” said her sister. “Let’s play until he’s gone.”

  So they had begun again, with the plastic horses again, only this time it was a slow negation of everything that had happened before. Before, it had seemed like anything could happen; now all the younger sister could think about was about how they were trapped in the house, how they couldn’t leave, how they were supposed to leave but couldn’t. The mustangs were just ordinary horses now and could no longer move their plastic legs but simply stayed motionless as they were propelled meaninglessly across the floor. The bear was gone for good and she and her sister weren’t horses anymore, just two trapped girls. Everything was wrong. They were trapped in the house and she knew they would always be trapped. The younger sister kept trying to play, but all she could do was cry.

  Her older sister was comforting her, telling her everything was fine, but the way she said it, it was clear nothing was fine. Everything was hell.

  “What is it?” she asked again.

  “He’s probably not even there anymore,” said her older sister. “I bet we can leave soon.”

  And, to be truthful, it probably was soon after that, though it didn’t feel that way to the younger sister, that her older sister went back into the bedroom and climbed up on the stool again and looked out and said that it was safe now and everything was fine and this time seemed to mean it. They gathered their books and their lunches and opened the front door and darted out. The whole street seemed deserted. The older sister, who hated to be late, made them both run to school, and the younger sister reached her class even before Mrs. Clark had finished calling roll. When you looked at it that way, almost no time had actually passed. When you looked at it that way, as her older sister in fact had, really nothing at all had happened.

  But for the younger sister there was less of her from there on out. Part of her was still wearing shoes on her hands and a rubber band in her mouth and was somewhere, sides bloody, looking for her pack. And part of her was still there, motionless, trapped in the house, waiting for the door to shiver in its frame.

  She was still, years later, trying to figure out how to get back those parts of her. And what was left of her she could hardly manage to do anything with at all.

  “So what do you want me to do?” her sister finally one day asked, her voice tinny through the telephone. “Play mustangs with you again?” And then she laughed nervously.

  And yes, in fact, that was exactly what the younger sister wanted. Maybe it would do something, it was worth a try, yes. If her sister would only do that, perhaps something—anything—could happen.

  But after so many years, so many telephone conversations burning and reburning the same paths through their minds, so many years of playing the same roles, how could she ask this of her older sister? She knew her role enough to know she could never bring herself to ask this of her older sister. Not in what seemed like a million years.

  A Pursuit

  For some days now, I have felt myself to be pursued by my second ex-wife. At first I believed the pursuer to be my third ex-wife, and perhaps for a time the two of them were working together—for all I know, they may still be. Indeed, though recent evidence has suggested the pursuer is my second ex-wife, evidence just a few days ago pointed to my third ex-wife.

  Perhaps the two of them spell each other so as to stay fresh and alert, while I, alone, a solitary ex-husband, have only myself to rely on. Perhaps the second ex-wife drives while the third ex-wife sleeps, and vice versa. But is it always the same car that pursues me? I can no longer say. I try not to think too obsessively about my pursuers, but what else am I to think about?

  They are behind me, watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake.

  So far I have made no mistakes.

  What, one might well ask, has become of my first ex-wife? Why, if the other two choose to pursue me, doesn’t she? Is it simply that, time having passed, she neither cares for me nor despises me as do my two more recent wives? Perhaps she is merely indifferent?

  Until a few weeks ago, it had been years since I had word from a single one of my trinity of ex-wives. I was living, alone and isolated, in peace near the sea—white stone, blinding sun—when I received a letter from my first ex-wife. This letter was written in a hand that, although admittedly familiar, did not seem her hand. Had my first ex-wife not burnt all my possessions upon leaving me—believing as she did for no sane reason that I was having an affair with the woman who would become my second wife (and, later still, my second ex-wife)—I could have compared her handwriting to that found in the letter, which struck me as the work of a decidedly male hand. My first ex-wife had many faults, but she was by no stretch of the imagination manly in either person or voice. To see her name signed in a masculine script surprised me. No, to find an ex-wife who could be described, in the mildest of ways, as masculine, one would have to look to my third and most recent ex-wife, but even she wrote in only a marginally masculine hand, what one might call a hermaphroditic hand. But no, as to my first ex-wife, no. True, it was her name scrawled at the letter’s end. True, many of the letter’s turns of phrase were, if not definitively her own, not outside her habits of speech as I remembered them, but no, the hand, no: either this was not a letter from my first ex-wife or this was a letter dictated by her to an amanuensis.

  As to the contents of the letter, those are hardly important. In any case now, having driven for so long, I can recall only a smattering of details: expressions of affection (perhaps mere formalities) slowly decaying into veiled insults and accusations. This was perhaps not so surprising a combination to find in a letter from one ex-spouse to another. What surprised me was that she had chosen to write
at all. For a decade, I had had only silence from her. At the divorce proceedings—held with her manacled and wearing prison garb because of her incendiary spirit and the jail time it had earned her—she had voiced not a solitary word, nor had a word for me escaped her during the entire course of her prison sentence, nor indeed after her release. But now, suddenly, ten wordless years later, she posts an epistolary outpouring crammed with affection and hatred? And not in her own hand but in the hand of another, a hand decidedly male?

  There was, as well, wedged between blandishments and attacks, a puzzling request; viz., that I stop persecuting her. Persecuting her? I wondered. I had had no contact with her for more than a decade. And, despite its conflagratory difficulties, I looked back on our time together, our marriage together, with a certain melancholy fondness. I had nothing but the kindest of feelings toward her, had no desire to cause her any pain or discomfort whatsoever. Just the opposite. Yet here was a letter whose deep, low voice told me, Stop persecuting me and leave me alone. It was such a baffling accusation, considering the facts, that I could read her words only against themselves, as a statement of an unconscious desire to be persecuted by me, as an appeal to see me again. This, coupled with the maleness of the handwriting, was enough to propel me immediately in search of her.

  Yet now, pursued by my second ex-wife, unless it be my third ex-wife after all, I wonder if I read her veiled request correctly. True, were it only a question of one ex-wife operating in a vacuum, I would have been, undoubtedly, correct, but when you add a second and then a third ex-wife into the equation, particularly when one or both of the latter pair seem to be pursuing you, the psychology at work becomes a decidedly murky affair. People clustered in twos or threes or fours, I have come to believe, both constitute creatures in and of themselves and, together as tandems or triunes or packs, form another sort of myriad-minded creature whose actions are far from predictable. Thus, I find myself exponentially more shaken thinking that I might be simultaneously pursued by a pair of ex-wives than I would knowing myself pursued by either one alone, and much more shaken by the combination of my first ex-wife with the male hand in which her letter is inscribed—which suggests a second, shadowy presence—than I would be by the same letter inscribed in her own feminine hand.

  But I am losing myself. I intended merely to say that once I had realized I was being pursued, I began to realize the situation was perhaps more complicated than I had initially supposed. Initially, I merely thought that perhaps my first ex-wife was being persecuted in my name but by some other party, or else that she had simply gone insane.

  I set out to find my ex-wife, planning to question her face-to-face about the letter and to determine if it had actually been from her and, if so, to discover either who had transcribed the letter for her or how it was that her hand had become so masculine since I had last seen her. My intentions were, it should be clear, innocent. I simply wanted to verify, clarify, confirm.

  I had no expectation of a long journey. I packed only a small overnight bag, which I placed on the seat beside me, where it still remains. I drove the car along a winding road up from the sea and into a series of rocky hills described in the better guidebooks as picturesque, twisting and turning through them until they gave way to mountains. I slid from one nation into another, and from there soon passed into a third. I passed through a squalid metropolis, made a steep ascent to the alpine town inscribed as the return address on my first ex-wife’s envelope. I spent the night there, in a strangely dreamless sleep at a small makeshift guesthouse, with no guest register and a shared bathroom, and woke up refreshed. From there it was easy work, after deploying a few well-placed questions gleaned from a pocket Berlitz, to follow a narrow gravel road edging across the mountainside perhaps thirty meters above the town itself, a road that dead-ended at my first ex-wife’s residence.

  In the town I had bought, I will admit, flowers—but not from any intention to renew our intimacy. No, these were simply a peace offering, a device to render her more tractable, to forestall any burning. I climbed out of the car, carrying the flowers in their cone of paper, and approached the front door. There was no bell. I knocked, received no response. I knocked again. Still receiving no reply, I depressed the poignet. It levered down gently and the door slid open. I saw no reason not to enter.

  Inside, the house was brightly lit, a generator slowly humming just behind a rear wall. Beside the sink was a bucket of silty water and into this I placed the flowers. The cone of paper I removed and smoothed flat, intending to use it to write a note, and this I would have done had I not noticed, just then, the line of blood trailing from the fireplace grate to the bedroom door. I approached it and prodded it with the tip of my shoe. It was mostly dry, but somehow that did not reassure me.

  At times one wants to assert one’s connection to one’s ex-wives, at other times one reminds oneself they are ex-wives for good reason.

  I am by inclination a curious man but have learned through the years, plagued by three wives in turn, to squelch this curiosity. Perhaps my first ex-wife was lying dying on the other side of the door, or perhaps she was already dead. Perhaps this was not her blood at all but the blood of another and she was there beside the cold corpse of the man (assuming it was a man) she had killed. Perhaps it was the same man who had written the letter. To find out, all I had to do was step across the room, perhaps four modest strides in all, and open the bedroom door.

  But I could think of no scenario whereby I stood to gain anything by opening the door. I had read in my impressionable youth too many crime novels not to know that these things always go awry, that certain doors one should never open. So I left, stuffing the paper cone into my pocket, wiping the poignet free of my fingerprints on the way out, leaving my first ex-wife, dead or living, to her fate.

  In subsequent days, driving, I have had a great deal of time to consider my actions. In one respect I was correct to remain in ignorance, to avoid precipitating myself into a difficult situation. Yet in another respect, had I opened that door, I would at least know what was on the other side, might at least have some vague sense of why I am now being pursued. As it stands, my first ex-wife, like Schrödinger’s famous and long-suffering cat, seems a creature flickering between life and death, neither alive nor dead—which is to say at once both alive and dead. She is the worst kind of ghost. I would be lying if I did not confess to feeling haunted by her, feeling her presence close to me, almost just over my shoulder sometimes, as I drive. Taking that into account, you might say that, yes, perhaps, in a manner of speaking, I am being pursued by all three of my ex-wives.

  I did not open the door. Instead, I fled. I would, I thought, just clamber into my car and regain my seaside town as quickly as possible. The sooner I fled, the less chance I would have, so my reasoning went, of being implicated in whatever had happened behind the door. There were, admittedly, the several villagers to whom I had spoken in order to get directions, but there was nothing I could do about them. And I should explain—and would in fact have explained at the outset were it not that the strain and exhaustion of being subject to pursuit have made me less methodical than I habitually am—that I had taken steps upon my initial contact with these villagers to misdirect them: a slightly altered appearance, a bit of mud smeared to obscure the license number and throw into doubt the car’s nation of origin.

  Perhaps you, sitting beside me as I drive, feel you deserve an explanation. But no, wait, I look beside me and see not a flesh-and-blood human but only my overnight bag: no one sits beside me. I am, as the French say, parlant tout seul, speaking all alone. No explanation is needed. Suffice it to say that after three wives I have become a careful man. Knowing my first ex-wife capable, quite frankly, of virtually anything, and my other two ex-wives cut of equally ruthless cloth, I would have been a fool not to take every precaution. Though I shall be the first to admit that these actions may strike others, at least those not privy to my life-experience, as an indication of culpability. But culpable of having done
what? What, in fact, actually happened? And isn’t anything, cast in the wrong light, an indication of culpability?

  Would it help if I were to swear to you, by the deceased individual of your choice, that I had nothing to do with my first ex-wife’s demise, assuming she is in fact dead?

  No, it would not help, because you do not exist. I am speaking only to myself. I am speaking all alone.

  One becomes so easily distracted. A part of oneself must watch the road, follow its twists and turns. What is left of one’s mind, stripped of sleep, half-taken with paying attention to the car behind, the pursuing car, when there is a pursuing car, is prone to follow its own path. I have smoked a cigarette, a Dunhill, a favorite of my second wife, one of six cigarettes remaining to me, and feel now slightly light-headed but a little better, a little more focused. This feeling, surely, will not last for long.

  But for the moment here we are in the past again, leaving my first ex-wife’s house for the first time, driving as quickly as we can without drawing attention to ourselves—same muddied license plate, same altered appearance, perhaps just a bit of panic, perhaps even the vague desire to turn around and go back, to open the bedroom door, consequences be damned. We have left, or rather I have left, the alpine town, am beginning to wend my way homeward, when I catch a brief glister in my rearview mirror. At first I pay no attention, then it comes again, flashing across my eye, and then yet again, until at last, forced to take a closer look, I see sunlight glinting off the hood of a car. I adjust my mirror and think no more of it—I am after all on a road, cars are to be expected. Yet when after a number of divagations and turnings and accelerations it is still with me, I begin to pay it more heed. Can it be that I am being followed? I slow to allow the car to pass and it does so, barreling perilously around me on a curve, the sun slung upon its side window in such fashion that I cannot catch a glimpse of its driver. And then it is gone.