Brian Evenson - Fugue State - stories

But what was I to do when, cracking open the last door, the door behind which the captain and crew by default had to be gathered, I found the room as impossibly empty as all the rest?

My memories of the next few hours are tenuous at best. I recall a kind of vague stumbling belowdecks, panic alternating with fury. I entered each room again to assure myself my shipmates were not there, then entered yet again. I held the pistol to my temple and tried to persuade myself to pull the trigger, but could not. With the crowbar, I broke what I could in the captain’s cabin and then remained there among the wreckage, listless. At some point I lost the gun, abandoned it somewhere belowdecks, and when I ran out of things to break, I let the crowbar trail from one hand and scrape along the floor until that too slipped from my fingers and was gone.

In the end, unwilling and unable to understand where they might have gone, I made my slow way up onto the deck. It was late afternoon, almost evening, the sun starting to blister the horizon. The deck was unoccupied. It was impossible, they were nowhere; it was impossible. I must leave the ship, I couldn’t help thinking, and once I’d thought it, the idea became intense and urgent, unavoidable. I must leave the ship, my mind kept telling me, I must leave the ship, and I might well have thrown myself overboard — for indeed I moved aft to do just that — had I not seen as I mounted the rail, at a little distance, a figure, human, swimming, slowly drawing closer to the boat.

I stayed leaning against the rail, fixed, watching the fellow come. He came only slowly, but still was almost upon us. The sun would soon set, I knew, and if our movement yesterday had been any indication, with the fading of the light the captain would weigh anchor and the boat would depart. Would the swimmer arrive before that?

And yet, I told myself, it was impossible, all of it. It was impossible that we had been pursued for the last two days by the same swimmer, impossible even if we had for his sake maintained a pace that would allow him to catch the ship. It was equally impossible for there to have been two different men in open ocean swimming after us on two successive days. What I was seeing, I told myself, was not in fact present; it was an absence, a nothingness, a trick of the light on the horizon, the movement of a blood vessel within my eye, a hallucination caused by lack of food and water.

But as the figure came closer, it became more and more difficult for me to maintain the idea of its nonexistence. It was impossible, it was a nothingness, but it was palpable, it was there. I could make out now the movement of the arms as the swimmer propelled himself forward. I caught sight of his head, a small bead, as it surged up for air and then returned to skim just below the surface again.

I watched him come, judging his speed, his distance, my apprehension growing. He would, I judged, reach the ship before the sun disappeared. I shouted for the crew but there was no response, the deck still deserted. I stayed, watching. He came on farther, and faster, and now I could see that he appeared fully dressed, his arms and back covered by what looked like a waterlogged overcoat. Why hadn’t he wriggled his way out of it? How had he managed to keeping swimming despite it? Another impossibility, I thought, and my apprehension deepened.

He kept coming. And then, almost as if time had torn, he was suddenly arrived, just below me, his hands on the ladder far below. He stayed there an instant, floating, facedown in the water, resting, just holding to the ladder, and then pulled his body forward and looked up at me, revealing his face.

I took a step back, staggered, feeling the deck spin out from under me as I went down. For the face I saw was both the last face I had expected to see and the only face I knew I must see: the face of Alfons Kuylers.

When I regained consciousness, it was to find myself in a heap on the deck, my head aching, darkness gathered save for the glow of a few scattered lanterns. There, across the deck, was the crew, crowded now around a blanket-draped man whose gaze I could not bring myself to meet.

I gathered myself and tried, slowly, to make my way belowdecks, whether to retrieve the captain’s pistol or simply to hide myself I wasn’t sure. I gave a wide berth to the crowd of sailors and the man they surrounded, but before I had set my feet on the treads of the stairs, the captain hailed me.

I stopped, waited. He came forward slowly, his eternal lantern held before him.

“Kuylers,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“That man there,” he said, flashing the light behind him, “claims you are not Kuylers after all.”

“There is some mistake,” I said.

“Yes,” said the captain. “He insists that it is he who is Kuylers. But who, then, are you?”

“No,” I said, not looking him in the face. “I am Kuylers.”

“You insist you are Kuylers?” asked the captain.

“I am Kuylers,” I said again, and turned to start down the stairs.

“So be it,” said the captain. “As you wish.”

I started to descend, but before I had wound even halfway down, I found myself roughly seized from above and below and dragged back up, a man on each arm and each leg. They hauled me despite my protests back onto the deck and from there across the deck, then dumped me into one of the lifeboats. When I tried to clamber out, I was struck on the side of the skull with a belaying pin. I fell back. I tried again, but after a second blow, this one striking my forearm in such manner as to render my whole arm numb, I desisted, lying instead along the curve of the bottom of the boat while the boat was slowly winched free of its cradle and swung out to hang over the waves. Slowly my descent began. From above shone the captain’s lantern, light and shadow aswirl around me with each rock and sway of the lifeboat suspended in the air. Behind him was gathered the crew, faces dim behind the lantern’s glare.

“Have pity!” I called to them.

But they merely continued to ratchet the lifeboat down toward the waves. I could see now, there beside the captain, the swimmer, still wrapped in his blanket, still resembling for good and all Alfons Kuylers, but his face behind the lantern oddly transformed. And then the release was sprung and the lifeboat crashed into the waves and I was swept back and forth and, finally, away.

How many hours I floated solitary and alone in that lifeboat I cannot say. I hid from the sun as I could, crouching low in the boat, drawing my coat up to shield my head. I watched from beneath my coat the shadows shiver about in the bottom of the boat as we shook and spun with the waves, and then the shadows thickened, and then the light would vanish entirely and I would be left only to that dizzy, rolling darkness of the waves, to a motion that never stopped. I had no food, no water. How many nights did I lie there huddled against the cold, counting each swell, waiting for morning to come until I could not even do that but lay dying along the bottom of the boat, unable to move? And then my former shipmates came to me and I could see their faces clearly for the first time, as gaunt and drawn as my own, and they gathered around me and spoke in quiet whispers as if waiting for me to die. And then, of a sudden, they were gone and Alfons Kuylers came alone, striding slowly over the weary waves like some dead, mad Christ and clambered into the boat and sat there beside me to continue my philosophical and theological instruction, as if death had whetted Kuylers’s appetite for paradox rather than quelled it. And then, when he realized I was almost too weak to take in his words, he leaned in close over me and I could see the way his skull had been broken by the lacquered walking stick and the way the blood had spilled out to darken the side of his face, and he whispered, “Wasn’t it sufficient to murder me? Did you have to steal my name as well?”