Blake But­ler has been writ­ing a com­ment­ary on each of the stor­ies con­tained in Brian Evenson’s forth­com­ing col­lec­tion, ‘Fugue State’, both on his blog and as a guest on vari­ous other sites. Writers’ Bloc is proud to be host­ing one of the reviews.

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Thir­teenth in the order of stor­ies in Brian Evenson’s ‘Fugue State’ (pub­lished by Cof­fee House Press) is ‘Bauer in the Tyrol,’ which ori­gin­ally appeared in ‘Four­teen Hills’.

Here, after the series of loops within loops and doors within doors of the pre­vi­ous twelve texts, we seem to have reached the void within the void.

‘Bauer in the Tyrol’ is imme­di­ately dis­tinct­ive in its poise from the stor­ies set before it if not in tone or lan­guage, then in the nature of its condition—here, truly for the first time, we have found a man at least cog­niz­ant of the prob­lem­atic nature of his sur­round­ings (that being that his wife is dying in the room with him and there is some­thing wrong with the air).

The strange set­ting of the ‘Tyrol’—which, accord­ing to sources could mean a num­ber of dif­fer­ent things, but offers a strange loc­ale to the text here in that it has a name and pos­sible con­texts, though none quite dis­tinct enough out­side the text’s grip to make it more than a sug­ges­tion of a familiarity—lending a very strange edge of known to the unknown.

In this elbow of the void, and in his under­stand­ing, our hero (if he could ever in any way be called that), Bauer, finds strange com­fort in the man­ner of his rut within the destruc­tion. His dying wife breath haunts him, and rep­lic­ates inside him, as he con­tin­ues to make clay fig­ures, that he also then des­troys, cre­at­ing a cycle of routine, if quite an ill one, in the con­text of where we’ve ended up.

And in this cycle of cre­ation and destruc­tion within the ruin spot, Bauer finds that he can sleep. For the first time in all of ‘Fugue State’, we are faced with a body who actu­ally can identify and under­stand the nature of what he has fallen into, or become—the cen­ter of the void is indeed a cen­ter, if still the blank­ness, and the ill. There is an odd con­tent to exist­ing in the routine of the skewed rooms—which in its exam­in­a­tion begins to feel much like every­day life. The filling of time within the no time. The mak­ing to be unmade.

Again, Evenson’s level hand in the recount­ing of Bauer’s calm pro­gres­sion, so blank it is not even devoid, makes the sunk famili­ar­ity of it hit that much harder, for how it feels not hard hit at all. It is every hour.

“The air was wrong, he was still cer­tain the air was wrong, but he was no longer cer­tain it mattered” (130).

A com­fort­able, wak­ing and unwak­ing kind of light, made ter­rible by the sheer fact that even­tu­ally, there is noth­ing left to do but sit at it and look, and per­haps nego­ti­ate with the clean­ing lady about the mat­ters of the day, as does Bauer among the hours spent in that same room with his wife dying, about which noth­ing in this sick­ing room will change, except to feel that much more com­mon on the body, and there. His wife, in her desist­ing, begins to seem to him more beau­ti­ful, more there: “… he felt he should besome­how ter­ri­fied but he was not” (130).

It is here, in this small and exquis­ite, awful, room, the void’s void, that the true look into the face of it bears face, a face that can not be rendered, but in the attempt of its ren­der­ing, its tex­ture shows.

There is a power to the ques­tion asked. To the door cracked open only far enough to see the strangling, wicked light within. It is a power that does not stay where you ask it to stay, as it can not be rendered, and that it is why it is the light. And that is why, in the hand­ling of it, the mak­ing of the lan­guage of it, there is the itch that learns to ride. That slips into the human body, into the mind, and there learns to reside.

In some ways then, Even­son is only a ves­sel, a cur­rent, though one most honed to catch­ing the shades and ions that many other ves­sels would only allow to fil­ter through.

Blake But­ler is the author of EVER (Cala­mari Press, 2009) and Scorch Atlas (forth­com­ing from Feather­proof Books). To read his other reviews of the stor­ies in ‘Fugue State’, visit his blog.