Song for the Unraveling of the World Read online

  He ate an apple, then ate a banana. There was something wrong with the banana—it was harder to chew up than he remembered bananas being: it tasted stringy, bitter. But the apple tasted exactly like he remembered apples tasting. He chewed slowly, washing them both down with water.

  “How was your week?” asked his day therapist.

  “Fine,” he said. He was hunched over, his hands in his jacket pockets, folded in on himself.

  “Did you have any memorable dreams?” asked his day therapist, after a long silence.

  “No,” he claimed. “Not a one.”

  All the while he was thinking, Born stillborn. Stillborn and yet born. What a terrible thing that must be. If a twin doesn’t survive in the womb, he was thinking, it is usually because the other twin takes the nourishment meant for him. If that twin is stillborn, it’s fine: he can be buried and forgotten and he will stay in the ground. But if a twin is born stillborn, well, where does that leave him exactly?

  His day therapist was staring at him. How long had he been staring? Perhaps a great deal of time had gone by.

  “What is it?” asked Haupt.

  “What were you thinking about just then?” asked the therapist. Behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes looked attentive, alert.

  “This and that,” Haupt said.

  His day therapist stayed still, waiting him out, more like the night therapist than the day therapist. Again Haupt wondered whether he should think of them as one person, or two.

  The day therapist was still staring at him. Haupt moved his hands within his pockets until one of them found the handle of the knife and closed over it. He squeezed it.

  “I was thinking about apples,” he said.

  “Apples?” said the day therapist, surprised.

  “And bananas,” said Haupt. “What do you suppose apples and bananas have in common?”

  The day therapist’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Is this a trick question?” he asked.

  “Of course it is,” said Haupt. He imagined his knuckles going white around the handle of the knife. The day therapist was more like an apple than a banana. He would not be easy to peel. Perhaps it would be better to chew all of him up. “But answer it anyway,” Haupt said. “Humor me.”

  Leaking Out

  I.

  It was abandoned, the clapboard peeling and splintered, but practically a mansion. And surely, thought Lars, warmer than the outside. No wind, at least. The front door was padlocked and the windows boarded, but it didn’t take long to find the place where the boards only looked nailed down and the shards of glass had been picked out of a window frame. The place where, with a minimum of effort, he could wriggle his way through and inside.

  But of course that place meant that someone had arrived before him, and might still be inside. He didn’t mind sharing—it was a big enough house that there was plenty of it to go around—but would they?

  “Hello?” he called softly into the darkened house. When there was no answer, he pushed his duffel bag through the gap and wormed in after it.

  He waited for his eyes to adjust. Even after a few minutes had passed all he saw were odd thin gray stripes floating in the air around him. Eventually, he divined these to be the joins between the boards nailed over the windows, letting the slightest hint of light leak in.

  He felt around with one gloved hand. The floor seemed bare. No rubbish, no sign of habitation—which meant that whoever had been here hadn’t stayed long or perhaps, like him, had just arrived.

  “Hello?” he called again, louder this time, then listened. No answer.

  Just me, then, he told himself. Though he wasn’t entirely sure it was just him. He groped for the top of his duffel bag and unzipped it, then worked his glove off with his teeth so he could root around by touch inside. Lumps of cloth that were wadded dirty clothing, the squat cylinders of batteries, the thin length of a knife, a dented tin plate, a can of food, another. There it was, deep in the bag: a hard, long cylinder with a pebbled grip. He took it out, fiddled with it until he found the switch.

  The flashlight beam came on, the glow low, the battery nearly dead or the contacts corroded. He shook the flashlight a little and its beam brightened enough to cut through the dark.

  He shined it about him, walking around. Ordinary room, it seemed. The only odd thing was how clean it was: no debris, no dust. The pine floors shone as if they had just been waxed. Immaculate. Had he been wrong in thinking the house deserted? But no, it had appeared ruined from the outside, and the windows were boarded.

  Strange, he thought. And then the flashlight flickered and went out.

  He shook it, slapped it with the heel of his hand, but it didn’t come on again. He cursed himself for having left his duffel bag near the window. He retreated slowly backward in what he hoped was the direction he had come from. Darkness was making the space change, become uncertain, vast. He kept backing up anyway.

  The backstay of his shoe struck something. Feeling behind him he found a wall. Where was the window he had entered through? He couldn’t find it, there was just solid wall.

  It’s only a house, he told himself. No need to worry. Only a house.

  But he’d never been able to bear the dark. He hadn’t liked it when he was a boy and he didn’t like it now. He felt along the wall again. Still no window. He was hyperventilating, he realized. Take a breath, he told himself, calm down.

  He passed out.

  When he woke up he was calm somehow, as if he were another person. He had none of the disorientation that comes from waking in a strange place. It was almost as if the place wasn’t strange after all—as if he’d been there a very long time, perhaps forever.

  The stripes, he thought. And immediately he began to see them, the lines of gray that marked the windows. There were none near him—the wall he had been touching must have been an interior wall, he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. How had he gotten so turned around?

  He stood and made his way to them. Halfway there, he stumbled over something and went down in a heap. His duffel bag, he thought at first, but when he groped around on the floor for it, he found nothing at all. What had he tripped on?

  He climbed to his feet. Once he touched the wall with the window in it, he swept his foot over the floor looking for his duffel bag, but still didn’t find it. He tugged on the slats of wood over the window. None were loose.

  Wrong window, he thought, wrong wall. He did his best not to panic.

  Turning away, he peered into the darkness. He could barely make out, at what seemed a great distance, another set of lines defining another set of windows. He made his way toward it.

  The duffel bag was there this time—he stumbled on it, and when he bent down and felt around for it, it had the decency not to vanish. It felt slightly wrong beneath his fingers. No doubt that had come about when he had forced it through the gap in the boards and let it drop. He shouldn’t worry, it was his duffel bag: what else could it possibly be?

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he searched through it for the spare batteries and in a moment had them. He unscrewed the cap at the end of the flashlight. Shaking out the old batteries, he dropped them onto the floor with a thunk and then pushed the new ones in, screwing the cap back into place.

  Carefully he pressed the switch, and this time the beam came on bright and strong. The room became a room again, boundaries clear and distinct. Nothing to be afraid of, just an ordinary room, empty except for him and his duffel bag.

  He slung the bag over his shoulder and started toward the door that led deeper into the house. Halfway there he stopped and, turning, swept the light across the floor behind him. The dead batteries, he wondered, where can they possibly have gone? They simply weren’t there.

  The adjoining room offered a stairway and then narrowed into a passageway that led to the remainder of the ground floor. Here too everything appeared immaculate, the floor and stairs dustless, as if they had just been cleaned.

  He shined the light up the sta
irway but didn’t climb it, instead following the passage back. After openings leading to a dining room, a kitchen, and a storeroom, the passage terminated in a series of three doors, one directly before him and one to either side. He tried the door to his right and found it locked. The one on the left was locked as well. But the door in front of him opened smoothly. He went through.

  A fireplace dominated the room, a large ornate affair faced in porcelain tile. The grate and firebox were as clean as the rest of the house: spotless, as if a fire had never been made. There was a perfectly symmetrical stack of wood to one side, a box of kindling in front of it. On the other side was a poker in its stand, also seemingly unused. The porcelain of the tiles had been painted with what at first struck him as birds but which, as he drew closer, he realized were not birds at all but a series of gesticulating disembodied hands.

  And there, on the wall above the mantel, what he took at first for a curious work of art: something seemingly scribbled directly on the plaster. Upon closer inspection, it proved to be a stain—the only blemish he had seen in the whole house. And then he came closer, and closer still, and recoiled: it was not just any stain, he realized. It was the remnants of a great cloud of blood.

  There were two armchairs here and a bearskin on the floor. He could light a fire and get warm. Did he dare start one? What if someone saw smoke coming up from the chimney? Would they cause trouble for him?

  But his batteries wouldn’t last forever and the last thing he wanted was to be left in the dark again. No, he needed a fire. If he was caught, so what: it would mean a night in jail and then they’d let him go. And the jail would be warm.

  He balanced the flashlight on its end so that the light fountained up toward the ceiling, then rummaged through his bag until he found his book of matches.

  It was bent and crumpled, the striking pad worn along the middle of the strip through to the paper backing. Most of the matches were torn out and gone.

  Carefully he arranged the split logs in a crosshatched stack, and then on top of this built a little mound of tinder. The mound looked, he realized, like a star, and once he’d noticed this he found his fingers working to make it even more of one.

  The first match he struck fizzled out. The second did a little better, but the tinder didn’t catch. With the third, once the match was alight he ignited the matchbook as well, pushing both into the tinder.

  He blew on the flame until the tinder caught, watched it blacken and curl, charring its mark onto the pale wood below, and then that caught too. He stared into the flames. Soon he felt the warmth radiating from the fire. Soon after that, it was too hot to stay near.

  He made his way back to one of the armchairs. Before he could sit in it, he realized there was something already there. A rubberized blanket perhaps, strangely shaped and nearly see-through. An odd color, a dirty pink—pigskin maybe, stretched thin or perhaps cured in a way that gave it translucency. It was soft to the touch, and warm—no doubt from the fire. He grasped it in both hands and lifted it, found it to be more a sheath than a blanket, something you could crawl into, as large as a man, roughly the shape of a man as well.

  He dropped it as if stung, took a few steps away from the chair. His first impulse was to flee, but with each step away from the sheath he felt safer, more secure. Somebody’s idea of a joke, he told himself, an odd costume. Nothing to worry about.

  He settled into the other chair, still shaken. He would rest for a few minutes, warm up, and then leave.

  A moment later, he was sound asleep.

  He dreamed that he was in an operating theater, much like the one his father had performed surgery in when he was still alive. There was a chair on the upper tier reserved solely for him, his name on a brass plate set in the back of the chair. When he entered the theater, everyone turned and faced him, and stared. It was crowded, every chair taken but his own, and to reach his spot he had to force his way down the aisle and to the center of the row, stepping with apologies over the legs of the others. Down below, the surgeon stood with his gloved hands held motionless and awkwardly raised, his face mostly hidden by his surgical mask. He seemed to be waiting for Lars to take his seat.

  Lars sat and then, when the surgeon still continued to stare at him, motioned for him to proceed. The surgeon nodded sharply and turned toward the only other man on the theater floor: a tall, elderly gentleman, stripped nude and standing just beside the operating table.

  The surgeon ran his hand across a tray of instruments and took up a scalpel. He made a continuous incision along the man’s clavicle, from one shoulder to the other. The elderly man didn’t seem to mind or even to feel it. He remained standing, smiling absently. The surgeon set the bloody scalpel down on the edge of the operating table. Carefully, he worked his gloved fingers into the incision he had created and then, once he had a firm grasp on the skin, began very slowly to pull it down, gradually stripping the man’s flesh off his chest in a single slick sheet, from time to time looking back at Lars, as if for approval.

  Lars awoke gasping, unsure of where he was. He was sweating, the room warmer than when he’d fallen asleep, the fire glowing a deep red, the heat making the air in front of the fireplace shimmer.

  “Bad dream?” asked a voice.

  He turned, startled. There in the other armchair was a man. Something was wrong with his skin: it hung strangely on him, too loose in the fingers and elbows, too tight in other places. There was something wrong too with his face, as if the skin didn’t quite align with the bones beneath. One eye was oddly stretched so that it was open too wide, the other bunched and all but shut.

  “Bad dream?” asked the malformed man again.

  “Yes, it is,” said Lars.

  “Was, you mean,” said the malformed man. But Lars had not meant was but is. I’m dreaming, thought Lars. I’m still asleep and dreaming.

  “What are you staring at?” asked the man. “Is it me?” He reached up and touched his face, and then began to tug on it, sliding the skin slightly over with a wet sucking sound. The eye that had been bloated began to shrink back, the other eye opening up. Lars, sickened, had to look away.

  “There we are,” said the man. “You see? Nothing to be concerned over.” When Lars still stared into the fire, he added, “Look at me.”

  Reluctantly Lars did. It was, he saw, just a normal man now, not malformed at all.

  “What was wrong with you?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

  “Wrong?” asked the man. He smoothed back his hair. “Nothing. Why would you think anything is wrong?”

  Lars opened his mouth, then closed it again. From the other chair, the man watched him.

  “I hadn’t realized someone else was here,” Lars finally managed. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I’ll go.”

  “Nonsense,” said the man. “It’s a big house. A mansion of sorts. I don’t mind sharing.”

  “It’s only—”

  “Don’t worry,” said the man. “I’ve already eaten.”

  What the hell? wondered Lars. Had the man thought he wasn’t going to stay because he had no food to offer? Was that a custom around these parts? Confused, he started to rise from the chair.

  But the other man was already up, patting the air in front of him with his hands. Sit, sit, he was saying. To get past him, Lars would have to touch him, and that was something he felt he did not want to do.

  He let himself fall back into the chair. Impossibly, the man was already back at his own chair as well, sitting down. The skin on one side of his face seemed to be growing loose again, or maybe that was no more than the flickering of the firelight.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” said the man. “Though perhaps it wasn’t I who woke you.”

  “I … don’t know,” said Lars.

  The man uncrossed his legs and then crossed them in the other direction. “Will you tell it to me?” he asked.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Your dream? Will you share it with me?”

  “I
don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  The man smiled, gave a little laugh. “No? Then the least I can do is try to help you fall back to sleep.”

  “There was once a man who was not a man,” the man began. He was frowning—or perhaps it was that his face was slipping. “He acted like a man, and yet he was not in fact a man, after all. Then why, you might wonder, did he live with men or among them?

  “Why indeed?

  “But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It simply tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.

  “He acted like a man and in many respects he was a man, and yet he was not a man as well, and sometimes he would forget this and allow himself to relax a little and leak out.”

  “What?” said Lars, his voice rising.

  “Leak out,” said the man. He had pulled his chair a little closer, or at least it seemed that way to Lars.

  “But what,” said Lars, “how—”

  “Leak out,” said the man with finality. “I already told you this is not that kind of story, the kind that explains things. Be quiet and listen.

  “He would relax a little and leak out, and sometimes it was hard for him to make his way back in again. Sometimes people would come along while he was this way, humans, and he’d have to decide what to do with them. Or perhaps to them. Sometimes, if he couldn’t get back in to where he had been, he could at least get into one of them.”

  The man reached out abruptly and touched his cheek. Lars felt warmth spreading through his face. Or maybe it was cold, but so cold it felt warm. He found he could not move.

  “Sometimes,” said the man, “once he got into one of them, he would stay for a while. But other times, he would simply swallow them up and be done with them.”

  II.

  When he woke up, it was late in the day, enough sunlight leaking through the gaps between boards to fill the house with a pale light. He was lying on the floor, on the bearskin, and had slept in such a way that he was stiff all along one side, his shoulder tingling, his jaw tight. The other man was nowhere to be seen.