I shrugged. What, in fact, I wondered, did I have to lose? At the very least this was a distraction from my own life. And so I agreed.
He took me by the arm, began to tug me slowly off the road, into the slush and snow.
“Wait,” I said. “Let’s wait for the morning.”
But no, was I not the man after all? I had to trust him, we had to go now, there was not a moment to lose. And what, finally, did I care? Another day of shivering and cold? I would have it sooner or later, so why not sooner? So I allowed myself to be led off the road and away.
We trudged through the night, my hands gone blue with cold, my feet so numb I could hardly feel them. When he saw how I was suffering, he drew from around his shoulders an old blanket, which I wrapped around myself, and then felt at least slightly less cold.
We stopped near dawn and he cleared a spot of snow and ice and with a solitary match and pine needles started a small fire, slowly feeding it into a blaze. My feet, out of my wet shoes now, at first stayed numb and then felt as if they were being repeatedly stabbed. It was almost more than I could bear.
“Just a little more,” he said to himself. In the firelight I could see just how haggard his face really was. “Just a little more,” he said again.
And I looked at him and saw in his eyes a look closer to death than to mere exhaustion. A shadow had settled into his face and it lay there, just beneath the skin, blurring his features.
“Perhaps,” I said, “we should go back.”
He gave a little start, and then his eyes settled on me and he slowly smiled. “Just a little more,” he said again. “Just a little more.”
And so, just a little more. A slow tramp up into the mountains, the snow no longer slush but deep and powdery now, sticky, and the two of us tramping forward, he pushing a path through the snow and I following, the going slower as the sun slipped lower in the sky.
Until at last, past exhaustion, he seemed to glimpse what he was looking for, and we made for it.
It was a small miner’s shack. Inside, it was empty, not even wood for a fire. We were, both of us, too exhausted to trudge back out and go in search of dry timber, so instead we worked our way into a corner and huddled together, our bodies tight around each other, as the wind whistled around us.
I felt his face next to mine grow slowly cold, the heat draining out of him. And then I fell into a state between waking and sleeping and perhaps as well between death and life. In that state I saw myself again staring at her back, again afraid that she might turn around and reveal her face in a terrible way. But she did not turn around. It was as if she were frozen: she neither moved nor breathed. This made me even more afraid than if she were to turn around.
When the wind fell and morning light struck again, I opened my eyes to see my companion’s lips gone blue, his face turning blue as well. He could open his eyes and move them, but hardly more than that.
And now what? I asked him. He was in no condition to go on, I argued. Now that we were here, would he not tell me what it was we had come in search of?
He regarded me torpidly through half-closed eyes. Slowly his mouth opened itself, his lips pulling apart only reluctantly, as if his face were being slowly torn, but then, instead of speech, a dim, wracked sound issued from his throat, and he died.
There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape. The void here—only one of several in what, from the wandering of love, my life had become—was this notion of some vague treasure awaiting me, something waiting to be taken, if only I could figure out what it was. I searched my companion’s pockets, my fingers trembling with cold, but found nothing to indicate what we had been looking for, nor anything to tell me who, exactly, my companion had been. I searched the shack itself, carefully, but found nothing to indicate the nature of what we had been searching for and no signs of a hiding place. I stripped him to see if he had any tattoos or hidden markings that might reconfigure my sense of the world, and found nothing. But rather than putting the clothes back on him, I put them on my own body, over my own clothing, so as to keep warm, so as to disguise myself.
Since I was in a miner’s shack, perhaps whatever it was I was meant to find was in the mine. But coming out of the shack, I could see no sign of a mine. I could, I thought, search until I found something, but I had no food, did not know what I was looking for. This was, I convinced myself, the hole that was opening into a void for me: a desire for some unknown riches, which I might not even recognize were I to see them, was coaxing me forward and into my own oblivion, offering to make me not rich but dead.
And it was with this realization that her face sprang up before me at last. In my head I saw her turn away from the creek and turn toward me and smile—her stark blue eyes, her high cheekbones, her beautiful, full lips, her slightly skewed teeth: I could piece together little of her beyond that—whole regions of her face and head remaining unrendered and incomplete—but it was enough to fill me with a desire to see her again, a desire that pulled me out of the void and saved my life.
I kept her image before me as I moved back down the mountain again, along the trail we had blazed through the snow during our ascent. The journey seemed quicker this time, the crust of the snow already broken, the path already there to follow, the downward slope urging me quickly forward. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, not stopping even after darkness fell. I kept plodding down, hardly conscious of anything around me until, unsure of how many hours I had traveled, how many steps I had taken, I found myself at last on the road.
What immediately followed I have assembled after the fact and by inference. The few bits and pieces that I do remember feel less lived than observed from a distance. I was found delirious and shivering and nearly dead, by some car that had stopped. I was taken to what seemed at first to me an asylum but which I have allowed myself over time to be convinced was a hospital. There, doctors in pale-blue coats lopped off the toes on one foot and removed most of the other foot. A few fingers were cut free as well, while a few others still continued to itch and buzz with pain. I was asked who I was, without result: in my addled state I hardly knew the answer myself at first and then I chose to keep to myself the answers slowly coming to me. Eventually they stopped asking.
All the while I kept her image before me: the movement of her lips as she asked me, Do you love me? and myself still unsure how or if I had responded, but knowing that now I would answer, Yes. And when, finally, I was coherent again, I lay in bed with my bandaged hands and stared at the ceiling and plotted how I would make my way back to her.
And then one day, abruptly and without warning, I simply climbed out of bed, slipped into my clothes, and left. I walked out the front door of the hospital and climbed into the first likely car I saw and not without difficulty hot-wired it and then, gripping the steering wheel with my bandaged hands, drove away. I could imagine her there, still by the creek, still waiting for me. I imagined how she would turn and face me and smile. Where have you been? I imagined her asking, and imagined myself shrugging and responding, Nowhere, though there was no place in my imagining for how her face might change once she saw my mangled hands and feet.
I drove through the night and I drove through the dawn, coming in from the west with the sun in my eyes. I left the car on the side of the paved road in place of the first car I had stolen, then walked the rest of the way up the paved road, down the gravel road, down the dirt road. The house looked just as I had left it, and I banged my way through the screen door and inside, calling her name, receiving no response.
The house was still, the floors and furniture dim with dust, and I wandered from room to room, confused. Finally I went out the back door and into the meadow.
I could instantly see her there, sitting just as I had left her, and I started quickly toward her, calling her name again.
But onc
e I came a little farther I found myself slowing, stopping. For I could see that what I had thought was her arm was only the bones that had once structured the arm, the flesh mostly gone. And I saw that a part of her on the other side, too, was in the process of grimly disarticulating itself with the aid of vermin and time, and I remembered what, out of love or hate, had happened, and why I had left in the first place.
And then what choice was there but to turn about in my dead man’s clothes and leave, to go through the house and out the front door and get into the car again, to set off again, to fling myself free of her gravitation and, this time, never, never come back?
Girls in Tents
In the late afternoons, after school, in the days just after their father had left their mother, the two girls would strip all the blankets off their beds. Gathering them up as best they could, they carried them out of their rooms and down the narrow hall to drop them in a heap in the living room. They tucked blanket edges under couch cushions or put them on furniture with encyclopedias piled on them, and then stretched the blankets from couch to chair or from chair to window ledge. When done, they had a series of tents, all overlapping, the living room become a series of billows and dips under which they could crouch.
For several months they lived each afternoon under these tents, light coming mottled through the fabric. They felt good there. Sometimes they read or drew or talked there, other times just sat. When their mother came home from work, she often knelt down and asked how they were doing, and what. The youngest girl mostly half-shrugged and said fine, they were doing fine. The oldest girl never answered unless she had to, unless the mother addressed her directly and more than once. It was not that she disliked her mother, only that she thought it was none of the mother’s business. The tents had been the oldest girl’s idea; she had made them so as to have a substitute house within the larger house, for now that the father was gone the house no longer felt like it was her house. It was only in the tents that she began to feel at home again. In the tents it was the two of them, the two girls, alone but together, and nothing changing unless they wanted it to. So when the mother knelt down to ask what they were doing in the tents, the oldest girl didn’t feel she should have to answer: the tents were not about the mother.
When the father had left, it was as if he had taken part of the house with him. It no longer felt like the oldest girl’s house, but neither did it feel like her house at the apartment the father rented across town. Every other week the girls’ father showed up, looking somewhat disoriented, to take them away to his apartment, where they stayed for almost two full days, the father trying to keep them entertained until the mother arrived on Sunday afternoon to take them to church. At the father’s house, in his apartment, the girls slept on the front-room floor in sleeping bags. This practice the father sometimes referred to as camping, which made the oldest girl try to imagine she was out in the open, under the stars. But still she never felt at home in a sleeping bag like she did in the tents.
One problem with the father’s new house was that there were not enough blankets to make a good tent. The father was what the mother called a cold sleeper; he had only one blanket in his apartment and usually slept (so the oldest girl had found sometimes late at night when she couldn’t sleep and went to the father’s bedroom to see if the father was asleep himself) on the edge of the bed, half his body uncovered, the blanket splitting him in two. During the day, the girls were allowed to take this single blanket from the bed and stretch it from the back of the couch to the bookshelves behind, then tuck it in tightly between the books, but one blanket was not enough; it made a tunnel but hardly a tent. They had tried, the two girls, unzipping the sleeping bags to use them as blankets to make tents, but the sleeping-bag fabric was heavy and thick—light didn’t come through in the way it did with a good blanket. And in any case, the father didn’t have enough furniture to make good tents. All he had was a couch and a chair. Now that he was out of the house, the father didn’t have much of anything. In the kitchen, all he had of utensils were three of each: three knives, three forks, three spoons, all taken from the larger collection of wedding flatware that still resided with the mother. If he and the girls ate anything, the father would have to wash utensils before they could eat again.
The father, when he was feeling exuberant, when he was at his best, would claim that they were lucky girls, that most little girls did not have two houses like they did. But the oldest girl felt that no, they did not now have two houses: they were between houses and thus in a way had no house. And it was clear to the oldest girl that their father did not feel at home in his new house, that in a way he had no home of his own either. Unlike the father, the oldest girl at least had the tents to go to, and after school, each day, she and her sister would make the tents and lie beneath in the warm space, watching the mottled light filter through.
Near the end of his fourth month out of the house, the father began to let them down. He still showed up on Friday to take them to his house, to his apartment, but they never could count on when. Before, he had always been sitting on the porch when they came home from school, but now it was hard to say. Sometimes he was there, waiting, but most days he would not show up until the mother was long home from work and it had begun to grow dark outside. A few times the mother got tired of waiting and called him, and when he showed up ten minutes later he was shamefaced and apologetic.
The oldest girl knew something was going wrong with the father, but could not say what exactly. She knew he was distracted but could not say why. In a way, what or why did not matter. The youngest girl, too, felt something going wrong with the father, and the youngest girl was nervous about him. The youngest girl was, so the mother always said, high-strung, and thus needed from time to time to be soothed and calmed down. The oldest girl always tried to calm her down. She did not always notice things as quickly as the oldest girl did, but when she did notice them she seemed to feel them more, and since the father had left, it had somehow become the oldest girl’s job to help calm her down. Because of that, the oldest girl had learned not to show when she knew something or felt it, so that sometimes she felt like she was just watching things happening but nothing really was ever happening to her. The oldest girl thus had learned to cope with everything alone and quickly, so that by the time the youngest girl began to catch wind of things she could be there, as calm and placid as glass, to comfort her.
So while it was true that the oldest girl knew something was wrong with the father well before the youngest girl, by the time the youngest girl began to notice and feel it the oldest girl had stopped worrying and already saw this wrongness now instead as a condition of life to be adapted to. The youngest girl worried about what was happening with the father, but the oldest girl, while calming the youngest girl and distracting her and making up games in the tent for her, was not so much worried as only curious about where it would all lead.
The father kept coming to get them, mostly late but occasionally on time. Sometimes he seemed so distracted that he could not even be talked to. They would ride back with him to his apartment in silence. Once there, he would sometimes notice them and smile, and sometimes they would even walk a few blocks together for ice cream and then figure out something else to do, but mostly they would just sit around the apartment in their inadequate blanket tunnel while the father lay on the blanketless bed reading a book or just staring up at the ceiling. Sometimes he would come out of the bedroom and sit at one end of the blanket tunnel and give them choices about what they could do. They could order a pizza or they could have pasta. They could go to a movie or they could go to the zoo. Which did they want to do? The oldest girl had developed a system of not putting any demands on the father, figuring that putting demands on him would make him even less dependable than he already was, so mostly she shrugged and said she didn’t care. The youngest girl usually followed her lead. But somehow not caring put another sort of demand on the father, so that he just shook his head and often went back i
nto the bedroom without deciding on any particular thing, and nothing was done. Something was happening to the father so that he was slowly disengaging himself from them, even when they were actually present and there. The oldest girl could guess where it was going, that they would see the father less and less and one day see him not at all. But all she could do while she comforted the youngest girl and kept her from the truth was steel herself for what would happen next.
On the day the father failed to arrive, the mother had made other arrangements. She would not be home after work, had an engagement, would not be back until the next day. She had in fact called the father the night before to let him know this, to stress that he must come on time. This, the youngest girl thought later, once night had fallen and she and her sister were alone in the tents, had been a mistake on the mother’s part. The mother did not understand how the father worked, since she herself, the mother, worked so differently. She did not see that saying such things to the father made him not more dependable but less so.
So, when they left in the morning, the mother gave them their lunches and reminded them that she would not be home, that when they got back from school the father would be there waiting for them. She kissed them and drove them to school and left them there like she always did, and they went to their classes and ate lunch and went to their classes again. When school was over, the oldest girl went to the youngest girl’s classroom and got her and together they walked home.
At the house, the father wasn’t there yet. They took the key from under the doormat and cleaned it off and let themselves in. Hello, the youngest girl called out hopefully as they entered the house, but there was no answer.
Fugue State Page 7
