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Drown by Howard DesChenes and Paul FR Hamilton
I.
The dirtied bluish linens. The inherited garnet jewelry. The books and notes I can't possibly have written. The red cough syrup without a label. There is too much red here. I can't remember myself, can't imagine choosing these objects, their little histories, my preferences. This is my bathroom, I tell the towel rack. This is not amnesia. I am only experiencing minor delays, like a single-engine jet grounded due to inclement weather. Driving in aimless circles, a low-hanging fog obstructing transmission between synapses, I open and shut these cupboards, my cupboards. But what is my name?
II.
The Reverend Ansel Bourne of Green, R.I., was brought up to the trade of carpenter; but, in consequence of a sudden temporary loss of sight and hearing under very peculiar circumstances, he became converted from Atheism to Christianity just before his thirtieth year, and has since that time lived the life of an itinerant preacher. He has been subject to headaches and temporary fits of depression of spirits during most of his life, and has had a few fits of unconsciousness lasting an hour or less. Otherwise his health is good, and his muscular strength and endurance excellent. He is of a firm and self-reliant character, and his charter for uprightness is such that no person who knows him will for a moment admit the possibility of his case not being perfectly genuine. His sudden assumption of the character, name, and trade of one "A.J. Brown" was an unprecedented act for which his prior disposition bears no precedent.
III.
It is an argument like any other argument. Our ears shut tight to one another, impenetrable as newborn cat's eyes.
You're not listening, I say.
I can't hear this now, you say back.
Something dull and vague replaces the complicated twists of argument. The switch flips, the bottom falls out, the dynamite sizzles. I am seized by I can't stay here go must leave. Choking on the walls, suffocating beneath those thick layers of white paint slathered on for each new tenant who occupies this room. Falling forward can't stay have to leave must get on the bus.
Tanya, you sigh, your terrible calm only igniting it further.
I find myself on the street, face dripping tears, feet racing toward nothing at all. Liner notes to Bach's The Art of Fugue dart in and out of my head, keeping time to the slap of my soles on the pavement. In a fugue, a musical theme or phrase is transposed a key, inverted, or repeated with slight alterations. The volume turns up in my head, must leave must leave pulsing through my veins, each syllable hammering out a syncopated rhythm against the slap of my running feet. The original melody elaborated, reduced, returned; yet still distinct, recognizably related to the original. Panic ices through me: I have left I am falling forward to no certain destination must leave must leave can't remember my name. Different sub-classifications of fugues drum in my head: tonal, real, must leave must leave.
In a fugue I walk toward the bus station, any station, any bus driving against the noise repeating in my skull. I hate buses, the smell of them, the Vietnam vets with stale tales and sick aunts, shoulders cramping against the high back of the seat. Must leave must leave burns through me, propelling me forward as the street grows blurry through my tears.
But fugues split hairs. There are real fugues and tonal fugues and endless arguments regarding which is which. The real fugues transpose invert repeat the same melodic structure; the tonal ones change the original melody in the process. Some argue tonal fugues are the true if not real fugues, since the complex transformation of melody through fugal response is precisely the point of the fugue in the first place. My mind is calming, the beat of must leave slowing as I seize on the problem of defining fugues. Not to mention fugue states, that favorite malady of Victorian America, traveling under a new identity in a trance-like state to another geographical as well as psychic state. From Providence to Pennsylvania, from upstanding citizen to wild-eyed preacher, fugues change the original, pulse their maddening repetitions through the reddening foreheads of proper New England gentlemen.
My feet stop at the West Side Highway. The Hudson is brackish today, a thick grey carpet connecting the posh quiet of suburban living-rooms to the off-key hum of urban apartments stacked up like old newspapers. Hills jut up across the water, the bedrooms of Washington Irving, Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle nestled in their greenery. I am not at the bus station. Your arms do not surround me and I cannot find my name.
IV.
On January 17, 1887, Mr. Bourne drew 551 dollars from a bank in Providence with which to pay for a certain lot of land in Greene, paid certain bills, and got into a Pawtucket horse-car. This is the last incident which he remembers. He did not return home that day, and nothing was heard of him for two months. He was published in the papers as missing, and foul play being suspected, the police sought in vain his whereabouts. On the morning of March 14th, however, at Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A.J. Brown, who had rented a small shop six weeks previously, stocked it with stationery, confectionery, fruit and small articles, and carried on his quiet trade without seeming to anyone unnatural or eccentric, woke up in a fright and called in the people of the house to tell him where he was. He said that his name was Ansel Bourne, that he was entirely ignorant of Norristown, that he knew nothing of shop-keeping, and that the last thing he remembered--it seemed only yesterday--was drawing the money from the bank in Providence.
He would not believe two months had elapsed. The people of the house thought him insane; and so, at first, did Dr. Louis H. Read, whom they called in to see him. But on telegraphing to Providence, confirmatory messages came that indeed this man was Mr. Bourne, and presently his nephew, Mr. Andrew Harris, arrived upon the scene, made everything straight, and took him home. He was very weak, having lost twenty pounds of flesh during his escapade, and had such a horror of the idea of the confectionery store that he refused to set in it again.
V.
From the moment Jane Schwartz first heard the word, she was in love. Epilepsy. It is not the -ectic fits she adores, but the simple state of it. Swooning into epilepsy, hyperventilating until the floor moves up to her forehead and I'm floating, I'm flying! she cries as she leaps down a full flight of orange shag-rugged stairs into the refinished basement. Her epilepsy always involves these peculiar travels down the stairs, out of bed, off the sidewalk, even out the front door one time. Swift trips, yet dangerous, accompanied by multiple bruises and concussions. They try pink pills, no-sugar diets, even meditation. Still the epilepsy seizes her, dancing through her blood stream, causing fits and fainting and flying to erupt unprovoked as it pulses through her pony-tailed forehead. After six months of it, Dr. Anderson squints down at her through his thick black-framed glasses and utters the one word her parents have been aching for. Specialist. The epilepsy needs a specialist.
Will she pass the test? Will those infinitesimal samples of saliva DNA ear wax scraped from her pores provide the evidence, the raw data proving her epilepsy true? Will they uncover a slender white-boned growth under the left ventricle of her brain, a specimen as lovely as those full-color portraits of malignant tumors hanging on the walls of Dr. Anderson's office? As they speed on the highway north to Syracuse, Jane misses the menthol scent of Dr. Anderson's waiting room, the probing fingers with their too-long nails, that slight intake of breath before he gives the diagnosis.
It was a cold seduction. The epilepsy would caress her at will, driving Jane out of bed, forcing her hand to grab empty band-aid boxes shove them down the downstairs toilet and flush, flush until she hears the plumbing argue with the metal lids. Abandoning her on the stairs, leaving her stomach to burn under her thin plaid pajamas while the bathroom floods, the seizures and fits would suddenly evaporate. Unrepentant epilepsy. Don Juan of diseases.
Or was it only unrequited love? Perhaps the epilepsy ignores her calls, allowing her seizures to fall on deaf ears? Epilepsy rides into the sunset, a classic country-western heartbreaker. I worried. Sitting diagonally across from Jane, nails just beginning to form over my soft toes, I shift against the red- hued walls, anxious and unable to sleep beneath my shut lids. Moored in my warm bath inside my dark sac inside the small brown Datsun rushing over the speed limit toward the Syracuse neurology specialist, I picked at my new toenails and wondered why the epilepsy didn't want to call her. Maybe it just didn't know her name. But what is my name?
VI.
The first two weeks of the period remained unaccounted for, as he had no memory, after he had once resumed his normal personality, of any part of the time, and no one who knew him seems to have seen him after he left home. The remarkable part of the change is, of course, the peculiar occupation which the so-called Brown indulged in. Mr. Bourne had never in his life had the slightest contact with trade. 'Brown' was described by the neighbors as taciturn, orderly in his habits, and in no way queer. He went to Philadelphia several times; replenished his stock; went regularly to church; and once at a prayer-meeting made what was considered by the hearers a good address, in the course of which he related an incident which he had witnessed in his natural state of Bourne.
VII.
Janie Walkerson, or Wilkerson, or maybe Patterson. Named like Jane Schwartz for Jane Russell, for whom all the Janes' mothers shared a passion. I was in labor and I was set to name you Ophelia--something real different, Jane's mother tells her. But the lady sharing my room in the hospital was naming hers Jane and when my water broke, Jane Russell was on the t.v., and I thought you'd have her dark hair and lovely lips and you do.
Jane Schwartz resisted Janie, remained resolutely Jane from the start, grateful so few nicknames could be produced from such a short name. Janie Walkerson, Willison, Peterson didn't mind 'Janie,' so Jane never thought of her as a Jane. Janie's mother had Angie Dickinson white-blonde hair with a middle part and a different big white American car each week, everything opening and closing with the push of a button. She was a driving mom, addicted to the parade of fat white cars she borrowed from the show room, bargaining over the kitchen phone for FM radio, plush carpeting, and a full tank from the latest used car-dealer husband who Jane never met.
Rugs crawled over every surface of the Patterson, Peterson, Wallerson house. Janie's thick pink shag rug trapped Barbie frying pans and hair pins in its synthetic arms but the Janes never played house with Barbie; she was used only for amputations and deliveries. Riding on top, Janie cries OK we have a boy coming out pulling her hands out of her cotton underwear as a chorus of mid-wife Barbies look on. Janie always the doctor, Jane beneath her thinking of Janie's mother driving a big white car. G.I. Joe, stripped of his camouflage and Uzi, emerges feet first, square jawed and fully bearded.
I don't want a boy, Jane tells Janie; put him back in. And up he travels: plastic head first, the synthetic fibers of his beard scratching inside her. Janie pushes, but he's stuck, his shoulders too broad, too muscle-bound to fit. He's a mutant from Jupiter invading by air! send him back to his spaceship! Jane looks down for a quick second, catching a glance of Joe's black-booted feet swinging out of her, feeling the scratchy pink carpet press into her back.
Those long pinked months before I was born I would test toe nail, thumb nail against the walls like some old movie scientist locked up in a musky laboratory inside a starless night. Jane thought of me like the deaf, dumb to the sneers lacing her answers, or like the blind, shut eyes peering out of my amniotic sac at her, not noticing whether it was a new jumper Jane put on today. Chipping away inside, testing and carving my way about while Jane is deflowered several houses away by Barbie and G.I. Joe in the thick jungle pink of Janie's floor, I absorb every shudder traveling up her spinal cord. Each scratch of the carpet tickles my still-forming central nervous system, radiating a quiver from my neck to my nailess toes.
VIII.
This was all that was known of the case up to June 1890 when I induced Mr. Bourne to submit to hypnotism, so as to see whether, in the hypnotic trance, his 'Brown' memory would not come back. It did so with surprising readiness; so much so indeed that it proved quite impossible to make him whilst in the hypnosis remember any of the facts of his normal life. He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but "didn't know as he had ever met the man." When confronted with Mrs. Bourne, he said that he had "never seen the woman before." On the other hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight, and gave all sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole thing was prosaic enough; and the Brown personality seems to be nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesiac extract of Mr. Bourne himself.
IX.
It was a boat house, not a house boat. An unwrecked ship surrounded by green lawn, with a fleet of white American sedans trailing up the driveway like a school of pale overfed fish to the anchor-shaped front door. Each bedroom had two porthole windows, and Janie's mom's room had a golden bathroom. The toilet, not just the seat but the toilet itself, was a particularly realistic-looking shade of gold, thick and metallic. The seat was made of a squishy substance that sighed when she sat. Jane avoided that bathroom; she could never shake the feeling as she eased herself down to the seat that she was pissing on an expensive couch. Janie's mother liked Jane to sleep over on Friday nights. Frosting her lids with blue, pasting on lashes one at a time, bleaching the roots of her Angie Dickinson, Janie's mom would leave before supper, mumbling instructions for the t.v. dinners and bedtime protocol as she sailed the white Buick, Chevy, or Ford out of the driveway. After a midnight movie and a round of Barbie and Joe, the girls would collapse in the den, sleeping on the beige modular couches.
It was the mornings that Jane loved on these overnights, early mornings in the kitchen making breakfast. The kitchen was a pastel heaven of children's cereal of every sugar-coated flavor, color television that always seemed to have the Flintstones opening sequence playing, and three different kinds of chocolate milk mix. By seven a.m. Janie Patterson or Walkerson, her hair frizzing out of a dirty blonde pony tail, would shake Jane awake, eager to give the grand kitchen tour. She opens each cupboard, displaying a virtual grocery shelf of sugar cereals, every flavor you'd please; seven picnics' worth of chips and onion dip; a rainbow of soda pop, from the predictable brown colas to hot fuchsia strawberry. A sugar-coated heaven accompanied by the high-pitched squeals of wall-to-wall Saturday morning comics. Janie's brother, Jamie, Jason, Johnny, ignored all night, would suddenly materialize in front of the cereal boxes, lodged on a shelf just out of his reach. Let's play invalid, Janie says. Johnny, you're too sick to eat so Jane has to eat your food for you.
Janie immobilizes Johnny, Jimmy, Jake in a neck lock in under thirty seconds; tries to force Jane to spit down his throat without losing her grip on her squealing brother. I...gotta go to the bathroom, Jane apologizes as she slithers away, grateful for once for the squish of the gold seat. Strains of mighty mouse here to save the Saturday morning t.v. echo through the house as Janie chews pastel cereals down his throat. Jane sits on the gold toilet even though she doesn't have to go, eyes clenched shut, waiting for the epilepsy to wrap around her.
I worried for Jane. Epilepsy was, after all, so terribly fickle. I thought Jane might dissolve down to her pink pajamas and silver baby tooth fillings as her ass slouched against the gold. What if she were trapped there, huddled on the gold toilet which didn't even flush properly, convulsing alone in the boat house moored on the trim green lawn? Or worse, what if the epilepsy refused her calls? From inside my red sac several houses away, I'd kick with anxiety as I heard Janie call for her, offering to make her a special mixture of all the cereals together.
X.
During the trance he looks old, the corners of his mouth are drawn down, his voice is slow and weak, and he sits covering his eyes and trying vainly to remember what lay before and after the two months of the Brown experience. "I'm all hedged in," he says: "I can't get out at either end. I don't know what set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don't know how I ever left that store, or what became of it." His eyes are practically normal, and all his sensibilities about the same in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped by suggestion to run the two personalities into one, and thereby make the memories continuous, but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne's skull today still covers two distinct personal selves.
XI.
For weeks after the visit to the specialist, Jane intercepts the mail every afternoon when she comes home from school, scanning each bill for a Syracuse return address, sniffing each envelope for the telltale scent of hospital food. She turns down requests from first Janie, then Janie's mother, for her attendance at Friday overnights, fearful that she will miss the Saturday morning delivery. Careful to draw no attention to her mail surveillance, she replaces the unopened mail in its metal box at the end of the driveway after each investigation. Before she investigates, she puts on a mailman outfit: her father's old grey fishing cap, her grandmother's tan suede jacket with crocheted buttons and wide lapels, an old pair of black stiletto heels her mother has donated to the dress-up box. Nothing too redolent of "spy."
Three weeks and four days after the visit, it arrives. A slim manila envelope smelling of rubbing alcohol, it arrives on a Tuesday with the hospital's return address and a Syracuse postmark. She opens it on the kitchen table. Forty-three minutes before her mother will be home from work, according to her digital wristwatch.
The first page is only a bill. She reads each word slowly. The second page is a series of numbers and multisyllabic words, titled Test Results. The third page is the charm: Diagnosis. EKG reveals no signs of epileptic brain activity. Hypothalamus appears to be functioning normally. Slight enlargement of right ventricle of the upper cerebellum. The epilepsy is rising in her throat, threatening nausea blackouts tears. Cheeks reddening into cherry circles, throat gripping tight, she runs to the remodeled basement bathroom. Maybelline Snow Frost White floods her nose with a sweet burn of isopropyl alcohol and perfume. Painting it, brushing that no, coating no with a soft snow frost white painting three layers over no until Diagnosis: EKG reveals signs of epileptic brain activity.
Epilepsy slips away as Snow Frost White hardens. The red carpet burns on Jane's butt. She stares at her tongue in the mirror. There is too much red here. She leaves the last of the epilepsy in the bathroom. Donning the unspy hat and coat for a final visit to the mail box, she folds the papers back along their original creases, closes the envelope, and proceeds to place it carefully back in the mailbox. She is hungry for cereal, for the lucky charms coco puffs barbies g.i. joes choked undigested down Janie's brother's throat.
XII.
The case (whether it contains an epileptic element or not) should apparently be classed as one of spontaneous hypnotic trance, persisting for two months. The peculiarity of it is that nothing else like it ever occurred in the man's life, and that no eccentricity of character came out of it.
XIII.
The grey waves of the Hudson are turning black. The pounding has vanished. I did not feel it receding; only once it is gone do I notice that the pounding has stopped and the bus no longer beckons.
I imagine your expression at this moment. I see you washing the dishes in the kitchen, oversoaping each fork as you are liable to do in a catastrophe. Gestures play across your face as you silently recall the fight, mouth occasionally twitching, eyes tearing over.
My feet run towards home. Tanya Tanya Tanya. The trochaic meter of my name provides a hummable soundtrack to my steps, right foot stamping out the stress of the first syllable. The pavement is jeweled with broken glass, embedded in the asphalt like carelessly mounted diamonds. Good night, I whisper. Good night.
[Some of Bourne's language is culled from William James.]
Jennifer Natalya Fink lives in Brooklyn, New
York. She is the author of the novel, Burn, and has won a variety of other awards for her fiction, including The Dana Award in the Novel, STORY Magazine's
Short Fiction Award, The Georgetown Review's Fiction Award, and the Billy
Heekin Foundation Award. She received her Ph.D. from NYU, and is the
co-editor of Performing Hybridity (Minnesota) and several other anthologies.
She is a professor at Pratt Institute, and also teaches at NYU, Gotham
Writers' Workshops, and Makor. She received artist's residencies from the Saltonstall
Foundation, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts.
Fink is the Founder
and Executive Director of The Gorilla Press, a non-profit organization
dedicated to promoting children's literacy through
bookmaking. She is listed in the 2002-2003 Who's
Who in America, and serves on the boards of many
other organizations. Currently, she is working on a
collection of short stories and essays, 13 Fugues, and a new
novel, Veronica.
back to the Jennifer Natalya Fink page
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Thirteen Fugues © 2003 Jennifer Natalya Fink
Drown © 2003 Howard DesChenes and Paul FR Hamilton
The work featured in this journal is under copyright protection
by the individual authors and artists and may not be duplicated
or reprinted without their permission.
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