Fugue State Read online

  They put their schoolbooks down on the couch and then went to get their already packed overnight bags out of their rooms and put them next to the front door, up against the wall right beside the door, so that when the father arrived they would be all ready to go. They sat on the couch, waiting. Usually, the oldest girl thought, the mother was there and would have them do something while she herself called the father, but they were alone, the oldest girl thought, that was fine, the oldest girl thought, they would manage. Or at least she would. The youngest girl, she could see, was beginning to fidget and get anxious. She was sitting on the couch and trying to figure out what was happening, or rather not happening, and soon she was going to start to panic.

  “Let’s go get a snack,” said the oldest girl to her, poker-faced, as if getting a snack and their father’s absence weren’t actually connected. They went into the kitchen and the oldest girl boosted the youngest girl up onto the counter so that she could stand there and open the cabinet and get the snacks out. Getting up on the counter was a special treat for the youngest girl, the oldest girl knew. The youngest girl got down the sandwich cookies and sat on the edge of the counter while the oldest girl opened the packages and divided the cookies out. The way the girls liked to eat sandwich cookies was to break them open and scrape the cream out with their teeth and then eat the cookie part later, dipped in milk. But even when they were done, cream and cookie halves and milk gone, the father still hadn’t arrived.

  The sun was getting low in the sky outside, the oldest girl noticed. She wondered how long it would be before the youngest girl noticed. The oldest girl helped her sister off the counter and they went back into the living room and the oldest girl, trying to be casual about it, turned on the light.

  “When is he coming?” asked the youngest girl.

  “He’s on his way,” said the oldest girl. And then she said, “Time for tents.”

  They did it the way they always did. The oldest girl went into her room and pulled her blankets into a pile and carried them out all at once, then dumped them on the living room floor. The youngest girl carried out just one of her blankets and then waited for the oldest girl to come get the other one. Together, they pushed the armchair closer to the couch and brought in the kitchen chairs as well. They got the encyclopedias down from the shelf and then set about spreading the blankets out, tucking them into the couch cushions and anchoring them down with books.

  When they were done, the tents overlapped and stretched from couch to fireplace, in some places as high as the girls sitting and in others almost touching the floor. The girls crawled under an edge and got in and moved into the middle, where, near the armchair, they could sit upright without the tents touching them, the overhead light coming differently through the different blankets around them, shining oddly on their flesh.

  “I’m hungry,” said the youngest girl.

  “We had a snack,” said her sister.

  “When is he coming?”

  “Soon.”

  “Did you call him?”

  The oldest girl did not answer. She did not want to call the father, though she knew that was what the mother would do. She wanted him to come on his own. Instead, she crawled out of the tents and got some bread and a knife and a mostly empty jar of peanut butter and crawled with it back into the tents.

  “We’re not supposed to eat in the living room,” said the youngest girl.

  “We’re not in the living room,” said the oldest girl, “we’re in the tents. Besides, mother isn’t here.”

  When the bread was gone and they had scraped the rest of the peanut butter out of the jar, they sat and waited. The oldest girl watched the youngest girl’s pale and anxious face, and wondered how her own face looked. And while she was sitting there, looking at her sister’s face and wondering about her own, she saw the face begin to change and her sister begin to cry. The oldest girl reached out across the tent and put her hand on her sister’s back and began to move her hand. It was like she was petting an animal—or rather, since she herself, concentrating on staying as calm as glass for the sake of her sister, felt distant not only from her sister’s back but from her own hand, as if she were watching someone else pet an animal.

  The youngest girl, she realized, was asking about the father. Where was he? Wasn’t he coming? Where was he? Why wasn’t he here? The oldest girl just kept patting her back. And where was the mother?, the youngest girl wanted to know. Not only where was the father but where was the mother?

  “She’s not here,” said the oldest girl.

  The youngest girl kept crying and asking questions, which made the oldest girl think that she didn’t really want an answer, or at least didn’t want the real answer. The oldest girl kept patting her sister on the back and waiting for it to be over, waiting for her to calm down. When she finally did, her face was blotched red and her eyes were puffy. She sat in the tents looking drained and not looking at anything at all.

  “What do we do?” the youngest girl asked.

  “We wait for him to come,” said the oldest girl.

  “But what if he doesn’t come?”

  “He’ll come,” said the oldest girl.

  “But what if he doesn’t?”

  “He will,” said the oldest girl firmly.

  She crawled out of the tents and got some pillows from their bedrooms. She brought them back into the tents and coaxed her sister into lying down. We’ll just wait, she told her. We’ll just lie down and relax and wait for him to come.

  Later, the oldest girl was not sure how long they had stayed there together, waiting, the oldest girl sitting, the youngest girl lying down. The oldest girl watched the youngest girl’s eyes narrow and finally close. Then she kept sitting and watching, the blanket fabric brushing her head lightly. She waited.

  When her own head began to nod, she shook it and got up, crawled out of the tents. In the kitchen she checked the clock; it was after eleven, much later than she was allowed to stay up. She looked out the window; there was no moon, the night thick and dark. She could see the dim shape of the porch supports, the ghost of the garage a dozen feet past them, but little more. It was as if the world had dissolved.

  She locked the back door, left the front door unlocked so the father could get in. She went around the house, turning lights on. When she was done, she went back into the living room, sat just outside the tents.

  She could hear her sister inside the tents, breathing softly. Otherwise the house was quiet. Why not telephone the father? she wondered. But that was the sort of thing the mother would do, the sort of thing, the oldest girl thought, that made the father less dependable. The father, she felt, had to come on his own.

  She sat there cross-legged, just outside the tents, guarding her sister, waiting for the father to come. Eventually, he would come, she was sure of it. He would remember them. He would remember her.

  And, she thought as her eyes grew heavy, when the father did burst through the door, wild-eyed and unshaven, wearing only his pajama bottoms, she would still be there, she was certain, sitting cross-legged just outside the tents. He would look at her and she would look back, and then she would turn and crawl back into the tents and lay her head down next to her sister’s on the pillow, and sleep. If the father wanted to follow her in, that was fine—there was plenty of room in the tents, and for the mother, too, if she wanted to come. But they would have to understand that in the tents it was the two girls who made the rules. It would be up to the girls now to be in charge, she thought, yawning. It was up to them, not the parents, which meant it was mostly up to the oldest girl. The father would have to understand that.

  But if he didn’t come, she finally thought hours later, her legs tingling from being crossed so long, the sky beginning to grow light outside, if he didn’t come, she could learn to live with that too.

  Wander

  And after many days of wandering—days of bitter cold, days in which we wore out what remained of our shoes and then lost toes and then wrapped our
feet in rags, days in which we were hard-pressed to decide what wounded and floundering flesh was safe to consume and what must be passed over, days when we passed warily by other tribes of men such as ourselves, days when we were forced to decide whether to haul one another forward or abandon one another along what remained of the roadside—we came at last to a place not utterly undone by devastation. The snow and ice first acquired a different sheen, and then grew slick underfoot, and then began to give way to water and soon was entirely gone. God in his mercy had left it undiscovered and awaiting us, or so we believed at the time.

  The feeling returned to our fingers for the first time in many months. There were a dozen dwellings intact and sufficient among the ruins, and we made our way into one to find there the dead huddled together dry and hollow now, their bodies like emptied sacks. We lay them with respect in one of the beds of the house and sealed the room because the living should not hold ground in common with the dead. Then we took, from cabinets and closets, dried goods and cans, and many of these proved still edible, and for the first time in many days we did not have to scrabble for food.

  We chose a room and tore the planking from the floor and built just outside the house a fire and slept the sleep of the dead.

  But in the morning, we began to recall the dead boarded into the room beside us and began to wonder if we had sinned in our actions against them. Our leader, Hroar, determined that we must show them our respect by aiding them on their way to heaven, and so with the smoldering remnants of our fire we made of their house a pyre and let it burn until the dead were nothing but smoke.

  “We must,” Hroar told us, “find a dwelling free of the dead and make of it a dwelling for the living.”

  We chose another of the still standing dwellings and entered therein and there too we found the dead, their bodies dry and hollowed out, like emptied sacks. There were nowhere signs of life, only a thin settling of dust over all things. We took from the house all goods and cans and stripped it of what lumber it could spare and still be a pyre, and then commended the dead to God’s notice and set the house aflame.

  It proved the same with each dwelling standing, each clotted with the dead. Quickly we learned to approach the window of each dwelling and, seeing the dead, leave them undisturbed. It was Hroar who would have it thus, for, he asked, Why would God have left the town for us to discover if our only purpose was to destroy it? No, he said, if they were not disturbed, the dead would be willing to await their reward.

  Thus at the end of the second day we had not found a dwelling to call our own. And when we camped, it was not within a shelter but on open ground, and though the ground was free of ice and we now had food and fuel for fires, many grumbled against Hroar and even suggested that we should merely heap the dead together and burn them all and keep their dwellings for ourselves.

  On the third day we awoke to find our faces and hands strangely tender with heat and Hroar himself missing. We huddled together and consulted one another as to what should be done, and might in fact have left that place had we known a place to go. As it was, we clung to each other and sometimes searched through the ruins around us. Here too we found bodies, but not nearly so many, and most of them little more than piles of ash. Here too we saw, on what remained of building walls, strange figures: human in size and shape, but with their limbs and bodies odd and misshapen, as if the shadows of monsters had been torn from them to become immobile and fixed, and this filled us with dread.

  The place which at first had thus seemed so much a deliverance to us now seemed a warning or perhaps a punishment. There were even those of us who claimed to see in the shadowed figures a premonition of our own deaths.

  Hroar returned late in the day, claiming to have found a dwelling free of the dead, a wide and sumptuous hall with room for all, our new home. Let us rejoice, he proclaimed, for our wandering may cease at last.

  We rejoiced and then did follow him. He led us through the ruined settlement and to the heart of the rubble and there, buried and hidden, where before we had seen only destruction, was a strange dwelling, partially covered over but seemingly intact. Under his direction we cleared a path to the doorway as best we could and then clambered our way inside.

  It was, as he had claimed, a great hall, sufficient to accommodate all our tribe and even more. It was, as he said, intact, though the small windows along three sides were blocked and filled with rubble. Indeed, we would have been vexed to see for darkness were there not a glow from one corner of the room. There, at the juncture of wall and floor, was a hole brimmed with water, and through that hole came a bluish light and heat, and looking closer one could see the shape of a blinking eye. The water was hot and, as one reached into it and toward the blue eye, became hotter still. There were, too, here and there on the walls, the same dark shadows that we had seen elsewhere, but with more frequency here. Yet Hroar, who had shared none of our speculations about these markings, was of the belief that they were merely the guardians of the place itself, there to protect the place and preserve it for ourselves.

  “This place is a gift from the true and living God,” he was quick to say. “He has prepared it for us.” And though many of us had our misgivings, we quelled them, found a place for ourselves on the floor, and slept.

  I slept soundly and without dreams until the deep of the night, when I awoke to a strange rushing and gurgling sound, and when I opened my eyes the blue glow was gone. I could see nothing, but could hear some of my comrades stirring and some crying out, and the room growing hot and strange until there was the same rushing and gurgling and the blue glow began to return and the room started to cool. Then I sat up and looked about me in the half-light and saw many of my comrades in similar posture, but all of us finally lay down one by one and returned to sleep.

  And yet when we awoke, it was to find our two comrades closest to the watery hole both dead, one side of their bodies afflicted with deep and grievous wounds. Some of the men behind them had wounds on their faces and hands as well, and yet they claimed to have felt nothing, and then we knew we had been victim of the creature whose eye we had seen in the hole. Hroar, full of fury, plunged his hand deep into the water to try to pluck out the monster’s blue eye, but brought back a hand boiled and stripped of much of its flesh.

  We burnt the bodies of our comrades, and then we took counsel from Hroar and it was determined that as the creature had come at night it was a creature of darkness and would come again at night, at which time we would set upon it and lay it low. We prayed to God for strength and spent the day preparing our weapons.

  The night again was peaceful until very late, when we heard the same rush and gurgle and the blue glow vanished. Immediately we were on our feet and striking about near the watery hole, the hall growing hotter until one of us managed to ignite a torch. But then we saw nothing except the water drained from the hole and the eye gone and terrible wounds on our hands and chest and arms—wounds that continued to grow without any tangible agent inflicting them, until one of our number, Hrafn, fell, and the remainder of us, sorely afflicted and knowing not where to strike, fled the hall.

  The wounds continued to suppurate no matter how we tried to heal them. When several of us finally ventured back into the hall, we found the hole again filled with water, and the creature, eye staring balefully up at us, had returned to its lair. Hroar, heavy of heart and loath to lose more men, commanded us to leave the hall.

  But we did not return to our wandering, instead circling day after day just outside the settlement that contained the hall we had thought offered unto us by God. Hroar, despite his boiled and dying hand, despite the wounds on his arms and face and chest, could not let go of the idea of the hall, of the end of wandering. And though we had been too sorely afflicted to venture a return to the hall itself, we had long followed Hroar and would not abandon him. So we stayed circling the town, while Hroar himself lost first his hand and then, from infection, his forearm. He grew gaunt and gray and ceased to speak. A few of us deserted
him but the rest, stalwart, remained. There was, after all, food here for a time and wood to burn, and we were happier than we had been wandering—though the same could not be said for our Lord Hroar, who daily grew less of a man, more of a ghost.

  Sometimes other wanderers would stumble into our midst. We would feed them and I would recount to them the tale of our lost hall and invite them to join us as we waited for God to relieve our suffering. To a man they declined, for who would swear fealty to a one-armed and maddened lord?

  So we stayed and awaited God’s will. We awaited Hroar’s death, which would release us from our awful circling and allow a more aimless wandering. And yet he did not die. He was reduced to little more than a man of bone, eyes hollow in his sockets, but still did not die. Indeed, there were those among us who began to fear that he did not die because he was already dead, and these soon slipped away in the dead of night and were not seen or heard again. But the rest of us remained fatally bound to Hroar.

  And then one day a man came who seemed unlike the others we had encountered, a man broad of face and of limb, a good head taller than even Hroar, and with teeth filed sharp. He hailed us from afar and asked to approach and we beckoned him to share our meal. He sat and ate silently with us and when he was done asked which was Hroar, the mighty lord of a people laid low? He had heard tales of the warrior who had been given by God a hall of ancient design only to lose it again and he was here to offer his fealty, to help Hroar recover his hall.

  Hroar stood. He commended the stranger for his bravery and asked of him his name and the name of his father.

  “I have no father,” the man said. “As for my own name, I have none.”

  He would, he said, challenge our enemy and regain our hall, and thus make a name for himself. Our Lord Hroar swore to him that if he would do as he said, he Hroar would take him unto his bosom as his son and heir, and the name the man would have would be Hroar’s own.