III.
While all of the stories in the collection could serve as examples of how Evenson uses language to combine the emotional richness of “Younger” with the physical extremes of “The Adjudicator,” none does it as remarkably as the title story, “Fugue State.”
Rather than tell a single protagonist's story, “Fugue State” follows the passage of a disease from one character to the next. In a sense, the main character of the story is the disease itself, the symptoms of which manifest in its victims as severe hemorrhaging of blood from the eyes, ears, and nose; increasing numbness or cloudiness of the senses; irreversible amnesia; confusion regarding personal identity; and loss of language comprehension, thus reducing each character to a vague, lost sort of person. In most cases, the victims of this disease die immediately, with the select few who survive the initial stage of the disease doomed to live constantly in the present, consumed by their constant attempts to discover answers to the questions they forgot they answered moments ago. In “Fugue State,” plot is merely the means by which Evenson uses the language of the story to emphasize its creative nature, providing a loose structure against which readers can check the various clues they've picked up throughout the story: through language, we give expression to our identity, our emotions, we understand others. Without it, there is nothing but the present, flashing and incomprehensible, consuming us. Language is the tool that prevents our dissociation.
The story begins in the midst of a mysterious interrogation, during which a suspect named Bentham claims to have “fallen into a sort of fugue state.” Arnaud, the examiner, takes careful notes throughout the session, but Bentham quickly becomes confused, delirious, bleeds out and dies. Arnaud, then, is placed in a locked room by his superiors; he makes a telephone call, dialing “the number” (note that he already cannot remember whom he is calling; it is simply “the number”) and leaves a confused message on someone named Hafner or Hapner’s answering machine. When he can no longer understand the notes he has scribbled in his notebook, he realizes that his mental abilities have failed, and as the guards strap him into the bed, he too falls into a fugue state, bleeding out as the interrogation is underway.
The setting shifts to an apartment where a man awakens to discover a woman dead on the kitchen floor beside him. He cannot remember anything about himself, though he discovers dried blood about his eyes, ears, mouth, and nostrils, so we understand that he has survived the first stage of the disease. When he searches the pockets of the woman, he finds he cannot read her identity cards, for the “characters on them, what he assumed were characters, meant nothing.” Essentially, as in Arnaud’s case, the disease, the fugue state, has wiped out his ability to perceive written language as anything other than marks on a page. It does not keep him, however, from understanding the basics of spoken language, for eventually he discovers a blinking device nearby, the button of which he presses to hear Arnaud’s message:
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?
He listens to the tape a few more times and settles upon the name Hapner for himself. This much he can grasp, a name and its connection to an identity, a point from which to begin his search.
Carrying the machine with him, Hapner wanders through the building, which has been quarantined, looking for Bentham and Arnaud, the names he heard on the tape. He talks his way into an apartment two floors down by lying about his health, but is soon found out by the owner, an armed man named Roeg who managed to survive the outbreak without contracting the disease. Roeg realizes his mistake in allowing Hapner into the apartment (“I know a Hafner on the eighth floor… But you’re not him,” he says) when Hapner cannot follow his conversation. The disease works, apparently, by disrupting both one’s ability to understand written language as a symbolic vehicle and one’s ability to keep in mind a rhetorical context, a sense of the history of language, in order to create meaning. In his panic, Roeg shoots at Hapner, but the fugue state overcomes him. As Roeg slowly drops onto the couch, Hapner speaks soothingly to him, carefully wiping “away the blood already seeping up through the man’s eye sockets.”
From there, the characters of “Fugue State” descend into a further chaos made possible by the progression of the disease. After Hapner leaves Roeg, he is attacked by a thief, whom he kills with a hammer. During the fight, Hapner suffers a broken arm and then the disease reemerges, reducing him to an incoherent, lost, mentally depleted, nearly languageless figure. He stumbles back to Roeg’s apartment, now unrecognizable. As he dies, he listens one final time to the recording:
Did it all come flooding back to him? Not exactly, no. It went on from there but he was no longer listening. Hapner, his mind was saying, Arnaud. He tried to sit down, crashed to the floor. He lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to hold on to the two names, to keep them at least. But they were already slipping away.
Hapner dies without an identity, lacking awareness of his own self, having fully become dissociated from the world. He can only focus on two names, two words, merely a few sounds, now devoid of any meaning.
Then, in the story’s final twist, another man awakens on a couch. Evenson leaves enough clues for us to realize that this man is Roeg, having regained consciousness, whose weakened ability to retain language and its meaning is readily apparent in how quickly he loses control of himself. He looks around, sees a man with a broken arm on the floor (formerly Hapner), dead apparently. Struggling with amnesia, he finds the answering machine, depresses the button, and listens, deciding afterwards that he was indeed Hapner, though even here he is still unsure. “I must be a private detective,” he thinks, in perhaps the funniest moment of the book. The new Hapner tries to write down the name he has taken, but cannot make sense of the marks on the paper. He leaves the building, his building, immediately forgets the name he had assigned to himself, immediately forgets that the building is his own, and, as he stands in the street, he looks back at the building, feels it is oddly familiar, and then turns towards it, thinking it worthy of his investigation:
Probably as good a place to start as any, he thought. He crossed the street, opened the door to the building. Who knows what I will find? he thought.
Well, we do, for our abilities to understand language, to make use of it as a conduit of meaning, have not failed us, and we have yet to become “englobed” by the chaotic blur of the world as it surrounds us. Language, its complex structure, its rational ordering of meaning, is our defense, and Evenson, with Fugue State, has once again confirmed his appreciation of this. With great imagination, he demonstrates not only how words and sentences can fit together in interesting ways, but also how their “combinatorial agility” (as Barthelme once put it) can reveal “how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.”
And what do we see in Evenson’s stories but a part of Being that we try to avoid in our own lives as much as possible? It is the part that we hope to ignore until the very last possible moment, until all other methods of escape have dropped away, leaving us wide-eyed, distraught, fully associated now with our greatest fears. For ours is a common end, a part of Being as natural as goodness, health, and life, and just as inevitable as the closing of a book: cruelty, sickness, death. Is it odd, then, to suggest that, despite the sometimes disturbing effects his writing can produce–no, perhaps even on account of them–Evenson's revelation of this gloomy underside of Being actually functions to temporarily relieve our own neurosis? Is it odd to suggest that Evenson’s words are so powerful, so carefully strung together that they can wrap us in other worlds of his creation, thus briefly dissociating us from the sometimes unpleasant happenings of our own?
No, I don’t think it is odd at all. In fact, I’m thankful we have access to a writer like Evenson so that he might console us with his stories, his characters, and his language when our very existence, our own individual identities so often appear weakened, threatened, seemingly dissociated from our right and truthful selves, whatever they may turn out to be.
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