Brian Evenson - Fugue State - stories

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.

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 just 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.