Fugue States Read online

  ALSO BY PASHA MALLA

  The Withdrawal Method

  All Our Grandfathers Are Ghosts

  Why We Fight >… > Quran Neck

  People Park

  Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion (with Jeff Parker)

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2017 Pasha Malla

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2017 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  The quotations at the start of each section in this novel come from Fugue by Ebenezer Prout (London: Augener & Co., 1891).

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Malla, Pasha, 1978–, author

  Fugue states / Pasha Malla.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345811332

  eBook ISBN 9780345811356

  I. Title.

  PS8626.A449F84 2017  C813′.6  C2016-906015-2

  Book and cover design by Lisa Jager

  Cover image: (topographic map) © DmitriyRazinkov, (silhouettes) © grynold, both Shutterstock.com

  Interior image: (topographic map) © DmitriyRazinkov / Shutterstock.com

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Pasha Malla

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Exposition

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

  Development

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

  Finale

   Chapter 1

   Chapter 2

   Chapter 3

   Chapter 4

   Chapter 5

  About the Author

  People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

  –JAMES BALDWIN, Giovanni’s Room

  Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.

  –VIRGINIA WOOLF, The Waves

  And I’ve only lived a couple of my dad’s lives. A couple of my dud’s lives.

  –SWIRLIES

  EXPOSITION

  A fugue is a composition founded upon one subject, announced at first in one part alone, and subsequently imitated by all the other parts in turn…The name is derived from the Latin word fuga, a flight, from the idea that one part starts on its course alone, and that those which enter later are pursuing it.

  1

  SOMETIMES THIS WOULD HAPPEN.

  In the middle of an interview, Ash would stray off-script to pursue some tangential idea and along the way discover he was lost. Whether his thoughts snagged on a word or phrase, or his own dull voice began to fill his ears, or the author across the table assumed an irked or patient or pitying look, in an instant whatever he might have meant went galloping away. Rarely then did he have the sense to stop. Instead he’d resume the chase with renewed desperation and even more words, each sentence annihilating the last until he’d talked himself into a void: he was a fool, and a fraud, and he still had no clue what he’d been trying to say.

  It was Sherene, of course, who’d come to his rescue. Her voice would enter his headphones like a float tossed to a drowning man. Or a suggestion to put his feet down and touch bottom. ‘Whoa there, Ash,’ she’d say. They’d lock eyes through the glass. Winking, she’d suggest, ‘Why don’t we take another crack at that?’ and reset him at a pre-written question. They called these episodes ‘losing the plot.’ In the studio they were easy enough to fix; time could be erased and the interview edited so that no one might ever guess the depths of Ash’s panic.

  Not so when you lost the plot in real life, Ash thought. At his sudden silence he sensed all those people—strangers, mostly—tilting toward him. There was a touch of rapture upon their faces, stunned and wary. What a mistake, this speech. His sister’s eulogy had been brief and heartfelt. With her husband clutching her elbow, Mona had spoken without notes, choking back tears. And here Ash was, alone, reading in a voice like a polished stone—what? An essay, a story. Parts of it weren’t even true.

  Ash scanned the crowd again but couldn’t pick out Sherene. Thought he felt his phone humming in his back pocket. Reached for it, resisted.

  Someone coughed. His hand fell back to the lectern. The pages spread upon it were titled ‘Brij’ and numbered 1 and 2. Still to come was the ending, which struck him now as false. Though he didn’t trust himself to improvise.

  ‘I hope he’s home,’ Ash read, not looking up. A sob from the back of the hall nudged him to his final excruciating line: ‘Wherever my dad is, I hope he’s finally home.’

  And then he waited, as though for applause, before he fled the podium, banging the microphone stand and sending a warp of feedback honking up through the rafters.

  —

  IN THE FUNERAL HOME’S carpeted parlour their father’s friends and colleagues queued to greet Ash and Mona, proceeded to a photo display propped between two lurid eruptions of flowers, and dispersed into whispering clusters. Some roamers caromed from one group to the next, caressing the backs of the especially bereft: three circles with the palm of the hand, as if wiping clean a window. No family had made it from India.

  Ash was furious with Mona’s husband, Harj, some make of doctor without boundaries whose gaping nostrils betrayed the exploits of a serial nose-picker, and who now loitered behind his wife like a bad henchman in a baggy suit and moccasins. (Mona was so clean; couldn’t she do better?) Having handled the funeral arrangements Harj had insisted on local catering. But this was rural Quebec, not the Napa Valley. The results were three cling-wrapped platters of sandwiches, cubed cheese, cold cuts coiled into tubes and an assortment of pale, dreary fruit. Ash watched the guests—was that the right word?—fill their plates. A man had died and they were serving baloney!

  Since the phone call from his sister, the news lurking amid that terrible emptiness on the end of the line, over the week Ash’s grief had putrefied into rage. On the train from Toronto every overheard conversation became a target for his bile, quoted and viciously annotated via text to Sherene. (I feel your pain, she’d replied. Hugs!) It wasn’t until arriving in Montreal, wheeling his luggage through a wet snowfall, shoes soaked through to his socks, that Ash stopped short: his dad was dead. The hard-edged fact of it caging him there, unmoving and bewildered, in the slush.

  Here was the next mourner, a tall brown man bowing like a geisha. ‘Doctor Echebbi,’ he whispered. ‘I was a Fellow with your father at the Sleep Centre.’ The subdued tenor of his voice seemed to convey sincerity. ‘Brij was a great friend.’

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ said Ash.

  As this Echebbi slid along to his sister, Ash considered his own friends: who would consider their friendship great? The thought vanished as the woman next in line stepped up. As this person, whoever she was, extolled his father’s virtue
s Ash realized that a soundtrack—panpipes, Peruvian or Casio, likely another selection of Mona’s globally minded husband—was playing. Why the music? To make things easier? Sadder? More fun?

  On and on they came, dressed as if for job interviews. Sometimes Ash recognized a face: a law school classmate of Mona’s, some ancient neighbour, a coterie of his dad’s students, a pair of ‘aunties’ waddling up in their least flagrant saris. These two were old family friends and of that same obstinately maternal mode as Ash’s own relatives: busts like shelves, affectionate to the point of molestation.

  Ash was seized and smothered with kisses.

  ‘We’ve not seen you in years,’ said one, awestruck. ‘You’re a man!’

  ‘I am,’ Ash confessed.

  ‘Anything you or your sister need,’ said the other, ‘please ask.’

  What Ash needed was for his father to be alive. Could they help with that?

  The aunties fell upon Mona. Following them was a guy in jeans and a bowtie, scuttling past with such haste that Ash wondered if he were at the wrong funeral.

  Then a beaming couple who presented their two children as though posing for a portrait. ‘They’re eight and ten now,’ Ash was needlessly informed.

  Then a high school friend of his sister’s whom Ash had once tried to kiss. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, and she hugged him with one arm.

  Then that woman’s husband, shaking Ash’s hand with clueless vigour.

  Then Ash’s old pal Chip, pushing his palsied son in a wheelchair with the heft and carriage of an SUV. It was a long, tedious drive from Southern Ontario, through Montreal and over the Champlain Bridge into farmland, and Chip seemed accordingly annoyed. He wielded the kid like a battering ram, plowing through the crowd with a grimace of daring: just try and get in our way.

  But when he reached Ash, Chip’s ferocity crumbled. ‘Man, I’m so sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Losing your dad, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Ash. ‘We’re getting together at his place after this, if you…’ He trailed off, eyeing the kid gurgling away in his chair, head lolling.

  ‘Thanks, but Ty’s never been to Montreal. Going to head back shortly, see the sights. Got a hotel right downtown. Here till Tuesday. Any chance you can make it in?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ash. ‘I’ll call you.’ And then—he’d almost forgotten—‘Thanks for coming.’

  Chip and Ty rolled down the line. On came the next mourner. And the next. Faces blurred as Ash’s role turned mechanical, a factory worker in an assembly line of grief: shake hands, agree death was sad, ‘Thanks for coming,’ pass to Mona, repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

  Eventually, back on the sidewalk in Montreal, Ash had returned to the flow of pedestrians. Swept along, he thought about time: its passing, its irrevocability. And longed not for his father to be alive—impossible—but simply to revisit that moment before remembering he was gone. The old chestnut: one second a person was here and the next, not. An absence both swift and massive. ‘Passed away’ or ‘deceased’ felt too delicate. More conclusive, more honest, was the abrupt, fatal thud of dead.

  A bald head appeared at the door, lofting above the others like a zeppelin. As Ash watched, Matt’s eyebrows arched into the stupefied expression he believed to convey sympathy, the same look he’d presented that morning when he’d shown up on the family doorstep, hat literally in hand, like some long-lost uncle returned to assume his portion of the family grief. ‘I’m here as long as you need me,’ Matt had announced, plopped his backpack in the hall, and embraced Mona with such melodrama that there had seemed something scripted in how she’d wept into his jacket.

  Now the big man skipped the line like a VIP and ducked to haul Ash into the same rib-cinching hug. He’d always enjoyed touching people, craved it even. So after failed careers as a pro skier and actor, his latest scheme, massage therapy, almost made sense.

  ‘Great speech,’ he murmured into Ash’s neck. ‘Your dad would have been proud.’

  Ash squirmed free. ‘There’s food, if you’ve got the munchies.’

  ‘You know me too well,’ said Matt, though he lingered. And intercepted the next mourner, Mona’s father-in-law: ‘Good to see you, such a loss for us all.’

  Two years prior, in Winnipeg to record his show live at Thin Air, Ash had missed Matt’s mom’s funeral. (‘We were never that close,’ Matt had said by way of absolution; it had taken Ash a moment to realize this we was supposed to mean Matt and his mother.) So there was something consequential, even punitive, in how readily Matt assumed his role of best friend. Whatever his game, he stood at Ash’s side as stalwart and proud as a groomsman, beaming at some woman who swooped in upon a gush of silks and scent.

  ‘Here he is,’ she crooned, engulfing Ash’s hand with both of hers. ‘I listen to you every week.’

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ said Ash.

  The woman stroked his fingers as she might a wounded bird. ‘I loved your interview with that Spanish writer…What was his name?’

  ‘Spanish?’

  ‘Don Quixote,’ offered Matt, in the accent of Zorro.

  ‘I’m Barbara,’ she said, eyeing Matt—first dubiously, and then, when he winked, with a coy smile. ‘The Dean of Medicine?’

  ‘Hi,’ said Ash. As Barbara lingered, the queue bloated.

  ‘How long are you in town?’

  ‘I’m—’

  ‘The reason I ask is that we have a book club—the Secret Literary Auxiliary of Westmount—and we’d love for you to come in and speak to us.’

  ‘SLAW,’ said Ash; Barbara nodded. ‘And what would I be speaking about?’

  ‘Books!’

  ‘Guy sure does know his books,’ confirmed Matt.

  In the pile-up behind Barbara, Ash spotted Sherene. His heart lifted a bit, although no other co-workers had shown: no top brass, no talent, not even one of the interns to whom Ash generously imparted wisdom, every day. Sherene was it. A delegation.

  ‘And I so admired what you said at the funeral,’ said Barbara. ‘So different from your interviews—or your book. I’d love to sit down and pick your brain about writing.’

  Ash caught Sherene’s eye. She clasped her hands at her chin in a gesture of prayer or solidarity—or triumph? No: an apology. She held up her phone, lip-synched, ‘Sorry,’ and veered out of line with it to one ear and a finger plugging the other.

  In the meantime Matt had insinuated himself between Ash and Barbara, laying a paw on her shoulder. ‘If you’re interested, I’ve known Ash his whole life. Ask me anything you want about him.’ He slid his hand to her waist. ‘Anything.’

  —

  BY MID-AFTERNOON the Dhars and their companions—Matt, that is, and Harj—were back at Brij’s house in a nearby anglophone enclave of the Eastern Townships. Since its purchase their father had referred to this place, a cedar A-frame with sightlines to a nearby ski resort, as ‘the chalet.’ Pretentious, yes. But the place was cozy, with an open kitchen and adjoining den anchored by a big fireplace, one bedroom and a study upstairs and a cinderblock basement that Brij had long threatened to finish. After a series of prefab townhouses, it was the closest to an actual home that their dad had ever lived in.

  They sat around the dining table snacking on leftover catering and sharing a six-pack of skunky Heineken. Mona, four months pregnant, cracked one and Matt raised an eyebrow—which she caught.

  ‘One beer’s not going to kill me,’ she said. ‘Or the kid.’

  ‘It’s her choice,’ said Harj, and drank from his own beer in solidarity.

  Matt shrugged and took an egg salad sandwich over to the window to ogle the ski trails across the highway. Ash’s phone, sitting expectantly on the tabletop, flashed. At last, an apology from Sherene: So sorry I had to run, sweetie. Just getting everything ready for Tuesday, see you then? Ash wrote back to invite her to join them. Waited. No reply.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mona. ‘Might as well get on with this.’

  From a suitcase at her feet she produced B
rij’s will and placed it on the tabletop. Next came a grey cardboard container, six inches square. This she set beside the will. For a moment, no one moved or said a word.

  Matt returned for another sandwich, noticed the box. ‘Is that—’ he began.

  ‘It’s what’s left when you’re gone,’ said Ash. ‘Your powdered bones in a shoebox and instructions for divvying up your stuff.’

  ‘Ash,’ warned Mona. ‘Don’t.’

  But he wasn’t just being difficult. Ash wanted no part in any inheritance—to profit in some way—nor in that vain project of sublimating the dead man’s memory into his things. Besides, ‘estate’ seemed such a grandiose term for a two-bedroom cottage, some savings bonds, a modest rug collection and a Volvo. And then there were the ashes: garbage disposal duties as a last living rite.

  ‘There are no instructions for the…remains,’ said Mona, turning officious. ‘But I thought it could be something for us to talk about.’

  ‘What about joint custody?’ said Ash. ‘Just like when we were kids: Monday to Wednesday with you, I’ll take him Thursdays and Fridays, and we’ll alternate weekends.’

  Mona laughed a little, despite herself. It was Harj who swept in with the required gravitas, murmuring in the voice of a hypnotist, nostrils flaring: ‘Ash, you don’t have to hide behind jokes.’

  ‘Hide?’

  Harj closed his eyes, nodded. When a few seconds went by and he still hadn’t opened them, Ash winked at his sister. But she only frowned and took her husband’s hand.

  How could Mona allow, even cultivate, space for this interloper at the family table? At least Matt, back at the window, had the sense to butt out. Within hours of Brij passing, Harj had been on a flight home from some refugee camp, an act of sanctimony all the more vile for how he downplayed it, and made worse when he actually forgave Ash for not making it to Montreal until after the cremation.

  ‘If you don’t want to talk about the ashes, what about the house,’ said Mona.

  ‘Whether we sell? Be a shame.’