Song for the Unraveling of the World

by Brian Evenson

“Were you here earlier?” she asked. “Talking to my friend?”

  He looked confused, unsure of what answer she expected. Like there was a right and a wrong answer. But there was no right or wrong answer—she just wanted the truth.

  And then he decided on a strategy. “I don’t know,” he said in a voice that was meant to be coy. “Was I?”

  Immediately she got up and left.

  She walked on to the next bar. She looked for Karin inside, and when she didn’t find her went to the next bar. After that, there were no more bars, so she walked back, thinking she would check each of the bars in reverse order until she found her friend.

  She would have, too, if she hadn’t seen, far down the block, the man in the gold suit. There he was, the back of his suit, the back of his head, walking away, unless it was someone else. But how many men in gold suits could there be in one city? No, she thought, it wasn’t someone else, it couldn’t be.

  She followed him. It was late, the bars still crammed with people but almost nobody outside on the street. He was walking quickly. To keep up with him she had to occasionally break into a jog.

  She moved swiftly past the windows of the remaining bars, through the puddles of light and noise coming through their half-open windows and doors, until she was on quieter, darker streets, the noise and light fading behind her. He was still there, a little way ahead. There were fewer streetlights now and she couldn’t always see him glistening.

  What am I doing? she wondered. This is dangerous. But she kept following him.

  And then he slowed, or she sped up, or both, for there he was right in front of her, almost close enough for her to touch him. How could she have gotten so close without realizing? Was she that drunk? There she was, reaching out, her fingertips brushing the smooth cool fabric stretched across his back, then reaching further still to grasp the man by the shoulder.

  He stopped walking, turned to face her. Or would have, if he had had a face. There was only a smoothness where a face might be.

  This was shocking enough, but then, somehow, he smiled. And for someone to smile without a face was more shocking still.

  2.

  What happened next? She wasn’t sure. How could she be sure? Because when he had smiled like that, in a way that, faceless, should have been impossible, it had felt as though a part of her, the part able to think, had fled. What was left of her just had a series of scattered impressions, things she couldn’t quite make rational sense of, couldn’t quite link up.

  During that time he hadn’t touched her. Instead, he just looked at her—or not looked exactly, since he didn’t have a face: he directed his head in her general direction and then began to walk backward, away from her. She, as if hypnotized, followed.

  The way he walked was too smooth, without hesitation. Impossible to do, if you couldn’t see where you were going. She began to wonder if he did have a face after all, but a face that was on the wrong side of his head, hidden there, under his hair.

  He walked backward, down one street and then down another, without hesitation, as easily as if he could see where he was going. Perhaps he had memorized the route. He moved to a doorway, still walking backward. He pressed himself against the door and put his hands behind his back. She heard the sounds of him working the lock. A moment later the door swung inward.

  Behind him was a cramped entryway, a set of stairs. He glided up them, still walking backward. He moved along the hall at the top of them, and she followed. She walked past office doors with pebbled glass windows, company names gilded on them. And then he stopped at what seemed a bathroom door, a stylized image of a human figure on it. He held the door open and ushered her in.

  She had to duck under his arm to get in the door. Inside, the light was dim, the room almost in darkness. She had entered expecting him to follow her, but he hadn’t followed. He let the door swing slowly shut instead, leaving her alone.

  When her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she realized that she wasn’t in a bathroom at all. She wasn’t sure it was, properly speaking, a room. The walls weren’t straight but instead bowed, and seemed to flex and relax, as if the room, if it was a room, was breathing. She turned to go out, only to find there was no door to go out of: the wall behind her was as smooth and blank as the man in the glistening suit’s face.

  Dawn held still, her head swimming with alcohol, and waited. She waited. Something has to happen, she told herself. Eventually something must happen. When nothing did, she sat down and crossed her legs.

  Maybe she slept a little, or maybe she simply stared. Eventually, aware again, she began to believe there were shapes flitting around her, whirling and insubstantial, but becoming more substantial the more attention she paid them.

  For a long time these shapes were just vibrant colors melding and clashing. Then either they became sharper or she did: it dawned on her that what she was seeing were human figures. She watched one glide across the space in front of her, slightly off balance, then another follow and catch up with the first, wrapping it in an embrace. The first figure turned and met the embrace, or seemed to, but then it either fell back or was pushed away, the second figure falling on top of it. And then the two figures were writhing, one atop the other. Karin got lucky, she found herself thinking, though she was not sure what had made her think the figure was meant to be Karin.

  And then, a moment later, she realized that she had spoken too soon, that what she had thought was an embrace had never been an embrace at all, but one figure destroying another.

  She cried out. The figures paid her no heed, one because it was already motionless and spreading in a broad puddle of light across the floor, the other because it couldn’t hear her. She stood and pounded on the wall, if it was a wall, and screamed to be let out, but there was no answer. She felt the wall, searched for the door, trying not to look at the figures as they regrouped and acted out the same sinister pantomime over again. After a while, she put her head between her knees and tried to breathe, tried to think, tried to understand what she could do.

  And then, in a moment of inspiration, she stood, moved to the center of the room, and, as naturally as possible, walked backward, toward the wall. She felt behind her with both hands and there it was, the handle, and she pulled on it and a moment later was out the door.

  3.

  Which was why she knew before finding her body that Karin was dead, why she didn’t respond with shock or alarm when, a few minutes later, she stumbled backward out of the bathroom that was not a bathroom, made her way the half dozen blocks back to her car, drove to Karin’s house, and discovered the body of her friend stabbed to death on the floor. But she had called the police when she was still several miles from the house. She knew. She already knew.

  She didn’t tell the police this. She didn’t tell the police any of it. No, for the police, she claimed it was simply a matter of Karin disappearing while they were out and her searching for her, looking everywhere, and finally going to her house.

  But what, she kept wondering as she talked, if I had gone to Karin’s house to look for her rather than following the man in the gold suit?

  Would she have been able to save her friend? No: instead, both of them would be dead. She was sure of it.

  Indeed, for months after, when she closed her eyes, she would see that man in the gold suit, moving perfectly backward, looking at her despite not having a face, luring her away from her own death.

  Wanderlust

  I.

  That first time, when Rask had first felt the urge, he’d had a good job, a delightful girlfriend he was engaged to marry, an excellent apartment. He had been at work, sitting in his cubicle, typing up a quarterly evaluation of his section, when he felt someone watching him. He turned but nobody was there.

  He turned back, continued with his report. A moment later he felt it again, the hair rising on the back of his neck. This time he turned quickly, whipping his head around—still, nobody there. Could it be one of his fellow workers? No, none of them were looki
ng this way. Or they were looking out of open curiosity, wondering why he had spun around so quickly, what was the matter with him.

  He got up and went to the bathroom. He stood in a stall, door closed, and stared at the little coat hook on the back of the door. He waited. Did he still feel the gaze behind him? No.

  He flushed the unused toilet for form’s sake. He splashed water on his face at the sink. There he was in the mirror, looking as he always did, a little more haggard perhaps, slightly exhausted, but still recognizably himself, still Rask. He stayed there, meeting his reflection’s gaze, hesitating.

  And then he felt it again: that prickling of somebody else’s gaze on the back of his neck; the unavoidable feeling of being watched. In the mirror, he examined the line of closed stall doors behind him. There were no feet below any of them, no movement, no sign of human presence, and yet he still felt watched.

  He tried to shake it off. He splashed water over his face again. He returned to his desk and quickly drank the rest of his coffee, and then felt the blood vessels pulsing in his eyes. He still felt watched. There was a video camera affixed to one corner of the ceiling, but it didn’t work, never had—the light wasn’t on, he could see where the power line had been cut—nevertheless, he waited for a moment when he thought he was unobserved and taped a piece of paper over the lens. But this didn’t make him feel any less observed.

  He waited until everyone else had left and then sat there, alone, just him. He still felt watched. He prowled the floor of the office, just to make sure. He turned off all the computers, every one in every cubicle. He put the pictures of family members and boyfriends and girlfriends facedown on the desks. He unplugged the radios and boom boxes and put them into desk drawers. And then he went back to his desk and sat, fingers poised over the keyboard as if he were about to type something, even though the computer was not on. He waited.

  A moment later, he felt it.

  This is crazy, he thought. I’m being crazy. But thinking this didn’t make him feel less watched.

  At home his girlfriend was sitting at the table, arms crossed.

  “I didn’t know if I should eat or wait,” she said. “And so, I waited.”

  “You should have eaten,” Rask said.

  “I thought you’d call me if you were going to be late,” she said. “Usually you do.”

  “I didn’t know how late I was,” he said. “I lost track of time. I’m sorry.”

  They ate lukewarm lasagna. After dinner, she spread some catalogs on the table. She asked Rask what he thought of this wedding dress or that wedding dress, this table setting, that technique of folding a napkin.

  “Fine,” he said, half ignoring her. “Yes. Good. Good.”

  “What’s wrong with you tonight?” she finally asked.

  But that was a question that Rask didn’t quite know how to answer. Someone is watching me, didn’t sound right, nor did, I keep imagining that I’m being watched. The truth was somewhere in between these things, though where exactly, and how to define it in a way that she would understand, he wasn’t sure.

  She was still staring at him, waiting for an answer.

  “I’m just tired,” he finally said.

  That night, lying beside her, staring up at the ceiling, he felt even more strongly that he was being watched, and slowly he felt panic begin to rise. He put up with it as long as he could and then got out of bed. His girlfriend moaned a little but did not wake up.

  He went into the living room. He tried to sit and read, but still he felt it. He stood and began to pace, moving from one side of the living room to the other, and felt a little better, if only for a while. When he extended his route into the kitchen, that helped, though that too, in time, didn’t feel like enough. Before long, he found himself opening the door into the hallway, striding out of his apartment and down to the elevator and back, and then, before he knew clearly what he was doing, he was dressed and walking down the emergency stairwell and out the door, up and down the streets near his apartment, and then up and down streets a few blocks away, and then out into the city beyond.

  II.

  Thus began for Rask what he would refer to later, after his institutionalization, as his days of wandering. He went from city to city, never staying more than a week at a time, begging or stealing food, sleeping under bridges or in parks, moving along whenever he felt again that he was being observed. Was he being observed? He didn’t know, just as he hadn’t known the first time, but he felt something, thought he felt something, and that was enough to make his anxiety rise. The only thing that would alleviate the anxiety was to move, to walk and not stop walking, to wander.

  As he went from city to city, his face and hands becoming sun-and wind-chapped, rough, the soles of his shoes wearing thin, his clothing becoming sweat stained and stinking, he began to see the world in a different way. He had been in dozens of cities, and the more he visited, the harder time he had seeing them as distinct and separate. They struck him as more and more alike, as if parts of the same city were being rearranged and used over again. He would see an alley and think Chicago, even though he was in Nashville. But it was, he was sure, almost sure, the same alley he had seen in Chicago. A freeway overpass in Salt Lake City and one in Albuquerque not only looked alike but also seemed to be, the more he thought about it, exactly the same. There were even moments when he would see someone discard something into a dumpster—a broken brooch, a bag of family photographs, a top hat with a hole punched through the top of it—and when he opened the dumpster would find nothing there at all. And yet, opening another dumpster days later, in an entirely different city, there the things were, waiting for him.

  Every place is one place, he began to feel. For a while this seemed like mere theoretical knowledge and then, unexpectedly, it seemed like much more than that. He became convinced that, if he could bring himself to believe, he would be able to navigate from these bits and pieces of places back to the places where they had originated. He could enter a dumpster at West 180th Street in Hudson Heights and emerge behind a nightclub in South Beach. All he had to do was keep fixed in his mind the place where he had originally seen the piece of the other city. He would close his eyes, move forward, and when he opened them he would be elsewhere.

  But even when this actually started happening, a part of Rask held back. Was it really happening or was he simply imagining it? Cities didn’t really work like that, did they? Was he doing it all himself? Was he allowing days to pass in a kind of fugue state while he hitchhiked his way from one city to another? But any time he started to feel a presence again, any time he began to feel watched, he would search out these flaws in the city’s fabric and, when he found them, use them to go to another city.

  Sometimes he considered his life: what it had been, what had become of it. He had left, he thought sometimes, for no reason. And now he was wandering for no reason. He had given everything up—his job, his girlfriend, his life. But any time he began to feel this way, he would quickly begin to feel eyes on him again. And then he would think, No, I was right to leave. What else could I have done?

  And so it went on, with Rask moving from city to city, either on foot or by way of these bits of overlap, these places where one city led into another. He slept where he fell, ate what he could. He was constantly on the move, staying always one step ahead of that gaze that always seemed on the verge of finding him.

  III.

  It might have gone on like that forever if it hadn’t been that one night, sleeping in the Bayview section of San Francisco under a dead tree that looked as if it had been meticulously decorated with garbage, he looked out and saw across the street something that looked familiar.

  It should look familiar, he told himself, I’ve been looking across this street every night for four nights now. Time to move on.

  But as he gathered his few things and loaded the three-wheeled shopping cart, something clicked for him. He hadn’t seen it before because it hadn’t been there before. It had only started bein
g there that night.

  Limping, he pushed his cart across the street for a closer look. It was a building unlike the others around it. New construction, he thought at first; then he touched it and thought, No. It was old, the bricks scratched and worn, the mortar between bricks crumbling. It was a building he had seen before, he thought again, he just wasn’t quite sure where or when.

  And then, suddenly, he realized where and when it was.

  He went and pushed open the door and shuffled his way into the building. Even though it was night outside, the interior was brightly lit, with sunlight spilling through the windows. This made him more nervous than he had been in a long time.

  He shuffled his way to the elevator and climbed in. Though there were people on the elevator with him they neither looked at him nor acknowledged him. Perhaps it was how he looked, how he smelled. Perhaps it was something more.

  He got out on the proper floor and walked through the room filled with cubicles until he found the one that used to belong to him. In a sense, it did still belong to him: there he was, his younger self, sitting at the computer, his back to him.

  Rask just stood, staring. For a moment he thought, Now I will be able to see who it was watching me, and then, when the younger Rask, irritated, turned and stared straight through him, he realized, It was me.

  He followed himself to the bathroom, watching his panic increase. He couldn’t stop watching. He followed himself home. He watched himself eat dinner with his girlfriend. He could still, though years had gone by for him, taste the lukewarm lasagna on his tongue. He watched. He stayed there, leaning over the bed as his younger, saner self stared up into the night and began to pace back and forth and eventually left the apartment. It would be years, this Rask knew, before he would return.

  It might have gone differently after that. Rask might have followed himself out, kept watching himself, but there was his girlfriend, awake and out of bed. When she saw him, she screamed. He moved toward her, trying to explain, trying to get her to recognize that it was him, Rask, only a decade older, but she was already hitting him with anything that came to hand. He tolerated the blows for a moment, still trying to speak, and then she hit him in the head with an empty wine bottle and even though the bottle didn’t break the blow knocked him off his feet. His head buzzed. He tried to get up and found it easier to lie there. He heard her dialing 911 and tried again to get to his feet. He was still trying when something struck him hard in the head and knocked him out.