“Yes,” said the voice. “So you wrote. What made this happen, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” said Arnaud. “How should I know?”
“Think carefully. Did it have anything to do with you?”
He kept looking at the plane of glass, trying to worm his vision through. The voice kept at him, asking him the same questions in slightly different ways, repeating, following procedure. Arnaud kept answering as best he could.
“About this record of your interview,” said the voice. “Is it, to the best of your knowledge, accurate?”
“Of course,” claimed Arnaud. And then, “What record?”
The voice started to speak, fell silent. Arnaud waited, listened. There it was again, a rustling.
“What does the word term fugue state mean to you?” asked the voice. But now it sounded harsher, less encouraging, almost like a different voice.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Arnaud.
“And yet you wrote it. What exactly did you mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Arnaud. “I just wrote it.”
“Do you see, Arnaud? Right here? Fugue state?”
He turned his face toward the black square and then, remembering, toward the glass, saw nothing.
“Well?” said the voice.
“Well what?” asked Arnaud.
“And yet,” said the voice.
But then it interrupted itself, argued with itself in two different tones and cadences about what question should be asked next.
But how could a single voice do this? Arnaud wondered.
“How many of the one of you are there?” he asked. “Two?”
He waited. The voice did not answer. Perhaps he had said it wrong. Perhaps he had not said what he meant. He was preparing to repeat the question when the voice answered, in its harsher tone.
“How many of us do there appear to you to be?”
He opened his mouth to respond, closed it. He must have said something wrong, he realized, but he was no longer sure what.
“Do you remember your name?” said a voice slowly.
“Yes,” said Arnaud. “Of course I do.” But then realized no, he did not.
“Will you please tell it to me?” the voice said.
Arnaud hesitated. What was it? It was there, almost on the tip of his tongue. “Why?” he asked. “Why exactly do you need to know?”
A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, what do you see?”
A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, what is happening to you?”
A voice said, changing, “Arnaud, how do you feel?”
“Fine,” said Arnaud. “I feel fine.”
He waited. “Why do you ask?” he finally said.
His face felt wet. Was he in the rain? No, he was indoors. There couldn’t be rain. He could no longer see through his eyes.
He knew, from the tone of the voice, or voices, that someone thought something was wrong with him. But he couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out what that could possibly be.
There was a series of days he could not remember, how many days he was never certain, days in which, he temporarily deduced, he must have lain comatose and bleeding from the eyes on the floor of a kitchen, next to a woman he assumed, but no longer was certain, must be his wife. And all the days before those, which he could not remember either. By the time he managed to open his eyes and felt as though the world around him were moving at a rate his senses could comfortably apprehend, the woman, whoever she was, was dead. Thus his first memory, quickly coming apart, was of lying next to her, staring at her gaunt face, at the lips constricted back to show the tips of her canines.
Who is she? he wondered.
And myself, he wondered, who exactly am I?
Near his face was a puddle of water. He did not recognize the reflection that quivered along its surface. He rolled his head down into the water, lapped some up with his tongue.
After a while he worked up enough strength to crawl across the kitchen floor, tracing the water to its source, and to duck his head under a skirt below the sink. There, an overflowing metal bowl rested beneath the leaking elbow of a pipe.
The water in the bowl was filthy, covered with a thin layer of scum. He brushed this gently apart with his stubbled chin, then tried to lap up the cleaner water below.
It was musty, but helped. He lay still for a while, his cheek against the damp, rotting wood of the cabinet floor, one temple applied to the cold metal of the bowl.
Later he managed to pull himself up and stagger to a cabinet. Inside, he found some stale crackers and sucked on these, then sat in a kitchen chair, his mouth dry. His eyes hurt. So did his ears and the lining of his mouth.
He got up and ate some more crackers, then stared into the refrigerator. The food inside was rotting. He scavenged the heel of a loaf of bread, scraped off the mold and ate.
After the better part of the day had waned, he began to feel more human. He searched the pockets of the woman on the floor. They contained a few coins and a wallet stuffed with cards. Something, he discovered, was wrong with his eyes. He knew what the cards were by their shape and appearance — credit card, identification card, cash card, library pass — but was puzzled to find he could not read them. The characters on them, what he assumed were characters, meant nothing. He stared at them for some time and then slid them into his pocket. Later, he covered the woman’s body with a sheet.
In the bathroom mirror, he did not recognize himself. The face staring back at him had blood crusted about its eyes, above its lips, and to either side of its chin, the center of the chin now covered with a diluted slurry of blood and water. His eyes were bloodshot, oddly scored and pitted. His vision, he realized, was dim, as if he were slowly going blind. Perhaps his pupils had always been that way.
He washed the face, scrubbing the blood from the wrinkles around the eyes with soap and with a toothbrush he had found in the cabinet above the sink. When he was done, he shaved carefully.
He regarded himself in the mirror. Who am I? he wondered. But that was not what he meant exactly. Only that he had no name to put with what he knew himself to be.
When he tried to open the door, he found it locked. He unlocked the deadbolt, tried to open it again, but the door still wouldn’t open. He wandered from room to room. The windows were barred from the outside, the street lying far below. The sheet was still in the kitchen, the woman still dead under it. Yes, he thought, that’s right, he remembered. It was in a way reassuring to know she had not been imagined, though in another way not reassuring at all.
What was her name? He didn’t know. Nothing leaped to mind. Nothing sounded quite right. And what about him? Nothing sounded quite right, nor quite wrong, either.
In the back of one of the closets he found a small prybar and a hammer. He used them to knock the pins from the door hinges, then tried to pry the door open from its hinged side. It creaked, but still didn’t come.
Using the prybar as a chisel, he slowly splintered a hole through the center of the door at eye level. There was, he discovered, something just beyond the door, made of plywood. He slowly broke a hole through this as well until, at last, he had a fist-sized opening that debouched onto an ordinary hall.
“Hello?” he called out. “Anyone there?”
When there was no answer, he went into the kitchen, stepping over the sheet. He started opening drawers. There was a drawer containing a series of utensils, stacked very carefully into slots, a drawer containing stray keys and books of stamps and a rubber-band ball, a drawer containing nested measuring cups and spatulas and turkey basters and pie shields. Then, above them, a shelf holding a jumble of pots and pans, a cabinet scattered with ascending stacks of dishes and nested hard-plastic drinking cups. He worked two of the rubber bands off the ball, then slid the rest of the drawers closed.