Brian Evenson - Fugue State - stories

In the bathroom, he took a last look at himself and then struck the mirror with the prybar. Cracks shot through. The silvered glass tipped off in shards, which broke further on the floor.

His hand, he saw, was blood-soaked, a flap of skin hanging open and folded over on its back. He was surprised to find it didn’t hurt.

He pushed the flap back in place, found gauze in the cabinet, wrapped his hand in it.

He picked out a smaller, more regular square of glass. After scraping each of its edges against the tile floor to dull it, he used the rubber bands to fasten it to the hooked end of the prybar. At the door, he worked the mirror-end of the prybar through the hole he had made, then slid the prybar through as far as he could without letting go of it.

It was hard to see past his knuckles and past the bar itself, harder still to hold the bar steady enough at one end to make sense of what he was seeing in the shard on the other: a wavering square of light and color. But there it was, he slowly could make it out, despite the wavering image: a large panel of raw wood, plywood, larger, it seemed than his door, studded with black pocks at regular intervals around its edge. The same black pocks in two lines up the middle of the panel as well. Stretching from the bottom corners to top corners of the panel were two strips of yellow plastic tape, covered in black characters that he could not read.

But something must have been awry with his thinking. He remained slightly crouched, holding the prybar, trying to keep it steady, concentrating, looking past his knuckles into the reflection, and it was all he could do, really, just to see the flittered bits and pieces and make some cohesive image out of them in his head. It was too much to force that image into actually meaning something as well. Even after his difficulty in trying to open the door, even after seeing the image in the shaky shard of mirror, after seeing the black pocks around the edge of the plywood, it took him some moments of just staring and thinking to realize he had been deliberately boarded in.

But when he did realize, the shock came all at once. His fingers let go of the prybar, and, overbalanced, it started to slide out of the hole and away from him. He just caught it. He pulled it back through and, shaking, sat down with his back to the door.

Why? he wondered.

He couldn’t say. Perhaps, he thought, they hadn’t known he and his wife were there. Assuming, he corrected himself, that she was his wife. Perhaps they had thought the apartment unoccupied.

But who, he wondered, were they?

There was the phone, he thought after a while. He could telephone someone to come get him out.

But whom did he know? He couldn’t remember having known anyone.

On the answering machine beside the phone a light was blinking. Why hadn’t he noticed it before?

He got up and pressed the button beneath the light.

Hello? A voice said. Mr. Hafner? Is that in fact the correct name? My name is Arnaud. I’m afraid I’ve been given your number in error.

Hapner, he thought, my name’s Hapner. Probably. Or something close to that. Unless he’s talking to somebody else.

There’s been a misunderstanding, the voice continued, Arnaud’s voice continued. What sort of misunderstanding? Hapner wondered. He was, Hapner was, to contact Arnaud’s wife. He was to ask her to do what she could to find out what had happened to Arnaud. He might, he was told, begin with Bentham. What a strange message, Arnaud thought. Or wait, the man thought, I’m not Arnaud, that’s not my name, my name is something else. What was it?

After listening to the tape several dozen times, he was almost certain he could remember his name. Hapner. Every few minutes he brought the name to his lips, whispered it. It would, he hoped, stay with him, on his tongue if not in his brain. And now, he thought, I have something to do. Bentham, he thought, Arnaud.

With the hammer and the prybar he began to widen the hole, first cracking and splintering away his own door and then slowly hammering the flattened, flanged end of the prybar through the plywood.

He was weak; his arms quickly grew sore and tired and the light he had at first been able to see coming through the windows had long faded. The hall outside, however, remained brightly lit.

The plywood broke loose in odd, thatched fragments, splitting within the body of a layer of wood rather than between layers. In the end he had a splintery and furzed channel wide enough to squeeze through. He drank some more water, ate some more crackers, and then sat on a chair in the kitchen, gathering his strength. His gaze caught on the sheet on the floor and he stooped to uncover the woman’s face. He regarded her closely, but no, he still did not recognize her.

Perhaps, he thought, I never knew her.

But then why, he wondered, was she here with me? Or, if you prefer, why was I here with her?

He went into the bedroom, looked through the closets. One was full of a woman’s clothing, the other of clothing belonging to a man. He tried on a sport coat. It was too small, and musty.

He tried on some of the other clothes, all too small.

Puzzled, he returned to the kitchen, stared again into the dead woman’s face.

It’s her home, he thought, not mine. And somebody else’s. I’m probably not even Hafner. Or Hapner.

He sat staring at her. The corpse was changing shape, becoming even less human. Soon it would start to smell. He couldn’t stay there, whether he was Hafner or no. And if he wanted to be anyone, he had to be Hafner, at least for now.

Hapner rummaged a shoulder bag from a closet and dropped the hammer and the prybar into it. After unplugging the answering machine, he put it in as well, then pushed the bag through the door’s hole.

It was tighter than he’d thought. He had to work one shoulder through and then turn sideways to get the other past. The ragged edges of the hole scraped raw the underflesh of one arm as well as the skin over his ribs. Halfway through, he thought he was stuck, and grew desperate and maddened, scratching and wriggling until he had worn the skin covering his hipbones bloody and until he fell on his neck and shoulders out onto the floor.

The other doors too had been sealed off, he saw. Along the length of the wall, where he would have expected doors to be, were sheets of plywood fastened to door and wall with ratchet-headed black screws.

He went down the hall and down the stairs. Doors on the floor below were sealed too, but not all of them, and he knocked on the three that weren’t. Nobody answered any of them. He tried to open them but found them all locked.

The next floor down was the same, doors mostly boarded over, no one answering the few still unsealed. He chose one at random and worked at it with the prybar and the hammer until he cracked the latch out through the frame of the door and the door swung open.

The layout of the apartment was identical to that of the apartment he had been in, except reversed.

“Hello?” he called.

No answer came. The windows were slightly ajar. A thin layer of dust covered everything. Not quite dust, he realized: stickier. What exactly, he couldn’t say. On the table a sheet of paper was held down by a burnished brass paperweight. There was something written on it, but he couldn’t read it. He picked it up and folded it, slid it into his back pocket.

In the closet were two smeared, bloody handprints. Under one of the beds was what seemed to be a human ear. He sat on his knees a long time, squinting at it, wondering if he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing, but in the end left it where it was without touching it. In the oven he found the tightly curved body of a cat, long dead, dry as a plate. When he touched it, its hair crackled away.