Fugue State Read online

  “You are that sign,” he said. “You have said so yourself.”

  Would you believe that I was unfamiliar enough at that moment with the teachings of the Holy Bible so as not to understand the mistake being made? I was like a gentleman in a foreign country, reader, armed with just enough of the language to promote serious misunderstanding. So that when I stated, in return, “I am that sign,” and heard the rumble of approval around me, I thought merely that I was returning a formula, a manner of speech devoid of content. Realizing that because of the lateness of the season I might well have to remain in the Midwest through the worst of winter, I concluded it was in my interest to be on good terms with those likely to be of use to me.

  Indeed, it was not until perhaps a week later, as their discourse and their continued demands for “further light and knowledge” became more specific, that I realized that by saying “I am that sign,” I was saying to them, “I am your Jesus.” By that time, even had I effected a denial of my Jesushood, it would not have been believed, would have been seen merely as a paradoxical sort of teaching, a parable.

  But I digress. Suffice to say that I had become their Jesus by ignorance and remained in that ignorance for some little time, and remain to some extent puzzled even today by the society I have unwittingly created. Would I have returned from the Midwest if I were in accord with them? True, it may be argued that I did not return of my own, yet when I was captured, it is beyond dispute, I was on the road toward my original encampment. I had no other purpose or intention but to report to my superiors. What other purpose could have brought me back?

  In those first days, I stayed encamped on that crippled, pestilent prairie, surrounded by a group of Midwesterners who would not leave me and who posed increasingly esoteric questions: Did I come bearing an olive branch or a sword? (Neither, in fact, but a revolver.) What money changers would I overturn in this epoch? (But currency is of no use here, I protested.) What was the state of an unborn child? (Dead, I suggested, before realizing that by unborn they did not mean stillborn, but by then it was too late to retrace my steps.) They refused to leave my side, seemed starved to talk to someone like myself—perhaps, I reasoned, the novelty of a foreigner. They were already mythologizing the “miracle of the everlasting hare”—which I told them they were making too much of: were it truly everlasting, the hare would still be here and we could commence to eat it over again. They looked thoughtful at this. There was, they felt, some lesson to be had in my words.

  The day following the partaking of the hare, serious questions began to develop as to what we would eat next. I set snares and taught the others to do the same, but it seemed that the hare had been an anomaly and the snares remained unsprung. It was clear that the others expected me to feed them, as if by sharing my hare with them I had entered into an obligation to provide for them. I tried at times to shoo them away from me and even pointed the revolver once or twice, but though I could drive them off a little distance they were never out of sight and would soon return.

  But I am neglecting Finger. The men sat near me or, if I were walking, dogged my footsteps. I found my hunger filling my mind with a darkness and had no desire so strong as to abandon their company immediately. Soon they began to beseech me in plaintive tones, using phrases such as these:

  Master, call down manna from heaven.

  Master, strike that rock with your stave [n.b., I had no stave] and cause a fountain to spring forth.

  Master, transfigure our bodies so that they have no need of food but are nourished on the word alone.

  Being a heretic, I did not grasp the antecedent of this harangue (i.e., my Jesushood), but only its broader sense. Soon they were all crying out, and I, already maddened from hunger, did not know how to proceed. A fever overcame me. Perhaps, I thought, I could slip away from them. But no, it was clear they thought they belonged with me and would not let me go. If I was to rid myself of them, there seemed no choice but to kill them.

  It was here that my eyes fell upon Finger, he who had shared in my travails for many days, the cause of both much frustration and much joy. Here, I thought, is the inevitable first step, though I wept to think this. Divining no other choice, I drew my revolver and shot Finger through the head, then flensed him and trussed him and broiled him over the flames. He tasted, I must reluctantly admit, not unlike chicken. Poor Finger, I told myself, perhaps we shall meet in a better world.

  Their response to this act was to declare I had come not with an olive branch but with a sword, and to use the phrase He smiteth, a phrase which haunts me to this day.

  •

  It is by little sinful steps that grander evils come to pass. I am sorry to say that Finger was only a temporary solution, quickly consumed. I had hoped that, once sated, they would allow me to depart in peace, but they seemed bound to me more than ever now, and even offered me tributes: strange woven creations of no use nor any mimetic value, which they assembled from the tortured grass: crippled and faceless half-creatures that came apart in my hands.

  I thought and pondered and saw no way out but to sneak away from them by night. At first, I thought to have effected an escape, yet before I was even a hundred yards from the campsite, one of them had raised a hue and cry, and they were all there with me, begging me not to go.

  “I must go,” I claimed. “Others await me.”

  “Then we shall accompany you,” they said.

  “I must go alone.”

  This they would not accept. I cannot stop them from coming with me, I thought, but at least I may move them in the proper direction to facilitate my eventual return to my camp. And in any case, I thought, if we are to survive, we must leave this accursed plain where nothing grows but dust and scrub and misery. We must gain the hills.

  So gain the hills we did. My plan was to instruct them in self-sufficiency, in how to trap their own prey and how to grow their own foodstuffs, how to scavenge and forage and make do with what was at hand and thereby avoid starvation. This done, I hoped to persuade them to allow me to depart.

  We had arrived in the hills too late for crops, and animals and matter for foraging had grown scarce as well. We employed our first days gleaning what little food we could, gathering firewood and making for ourselves shelter prone to withstand the winter. But by the time winter set in with earnestness, we discovered our food all but gone and our straits dire indeed. I, as their Jesus, was looked to for a solution.

  We have reached that unfortunate chapter which I assume to be the reason for my having been asked to compose this accounting. Might I say, before I begin, that I regret everything, but that, at the time, I felt there to be no better choice? Were my inquest (assuming there is to be an inquest) to take place before a group of starved men, I might at least accrue some sympathy. But to the well-fed, necessity must surely appear barbarity. And now, again well-fed myself, I regret everything. Would I do it again? Of course not. Unless I were very hungry indeed.

  In the midst of our suffering, I explained to them that one of us must sacrifice himself for the others. I explained how I, as I had not yet finished my work, was unable to serve. To this they nodded sagely. And which of you, I asked, dare sacrifice himself, by so doing to become a type and shadow of your Jesus? There was among them one willing to step forward, and he was instantly shot dead. He smiteth, I could hear the men mumbling. What followed? Reader, we ate him.

  By winter’s end we had consumed two of his fellows, each of whom stepped forward unprotesting, each as my apostle honored to become a type and shadow of his Jesus by a sacrifice of his own. Their bones we cracked open to suck the marrow, but the skulls of all three we preserved and enshrined, out of respect for their sacrifice—along with the skull of Finger, which I had preserved and continue to carry with me to this day. Early in spring I urged them farther into the hills until we had discovered a small valley whose soil seemed fertile and promising. In a cave we discovered an unrefined salt. I taught them to fish and how as well to smoke their fish to preserve it, and th
is they described as becoming fishers of men (though to my mind they were more properly described as fishers offish). We again set snares along game trails and left them undisturbed and this time caught rabbits and birds, and sometimes a squirrel, and this meat we ate or smoked and preserved as well. The hides they learned to strip and tan, and they bound them about their feet. I taught them as well how to cultivate those plants as were available to them, and to make them fruitful. When they realized it was my will that they fend for themselves, they were quick to learn. And thus we were not long into summer when I called them together to inform them of my departure.

  At first they would not hear of this, and could not understand why their Jesus would leave them. Other sheep I have, I told them, that are not of this fold. Having spent the winter in converse with them and reading an old tattered copy of their Bible, I had become conversant in matters of faith, and though I never did feel a temptation to give myself over to it, I did know how best to employ it for my purposes. When even this statement did not seem sufficient for the most stubborn among them, who still threatened to accompany me, I told them, Go and spread my teachings.

  By this I meant what I had taught them of farming and clothing themselves and hunting but, just as with Barton, it would have served me well to be more specific. Indeed, this knowledge did spread, but with it came a ritual of the eating of human flesh throughout the winter months, a ritual I had not encouraged and had resorted to only in direst emergency. This they supported not only with glosses from the Bible, but with words from a new Holy Book they had written on birchbark, in which I recognized a twisted rendering of my own words.

  It was not until I had been discovered by my former compatriots and imprisoned briefly under suspicion and then returned to my own campsite that I heard any hint of this lamentable practice. It was inquired of me whether I had seen any such thing in my travels in the Midwest. Perhaps it was wrong of me to feign ignorance. And I had long returned to my duties, despite the hard questions concerning dog and dogcart and provisions that I had been unable to answer, before there were rumors that the practice had begun, like a contagion, to spread, and had even crossed from the Midwest into our own territories. I had indeed lost nearly all sense of my days as a Midwestern Jesus before the authorities discovered my name circulating in Midwestern mouths, inscribed in their Holy Books. If when I was again apprehended I was indeed preparing to flee—and I do not admit to such—it is only because of a fear of becoming a scapegoat, a fear that is in the process of being realized.

  If I had intended to create this cult around my own figure, why then would I have ever left the Midwest? What purpose would I have had in abandoning a world in which I could have been a god? The insinuations that I have been spreading my own cult in our own territories are spurious. There is absolutely no proof.

  There is one other thing I shall say in my defense: what takes place beyond the borders of the known world is not to be judged against the standards of this world. Then, you may well inquire, what standard of judgment should be applied? I do not know the answer to this question. Unless the answer be no standard of judgment at all.

  I was ordered to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus, and to the best of my ability I have done so. I regret to say that at the conclusion of my task I now for the first time see my actions in a cold light. I have no faith in the clemency of my judges, nor faith that any regret for those events I unintentionally set in motion will lead to a pardon. I have no illusions: I shall be executed.

  Yet I have one last request. After my death, I ask that my body be torn asunder and given in pieces to my followers. Though I remain a heretic, I see no way of bringing my cult to an end otherwise. Let those who want to partake of me partake, and then I will at least have rounded the circle, my skull joining a pile of skulls in the Midwest, my bones shattered and sucked free of marrow and left to bleach upon the plain. And then, if I do not arise from the dead, if I do not appear to them in a garment of white, Finger beside, then perhaps it all will end.

  And if I do arise, stripping the lineaments of death away to reveal renewed the raiment of the living? Permit me to say, then, that it is already too late for all of you, for I come not with an olive branch but with a sword. He smiteth, and when he smiteth, ye shall surely die.

  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 j
ust 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.