FUGUE IN D MINOR WITH DISSOCIATIVE STATE
1. Exposition: Abandoned car, dirt road, collapsed coat, single shoe on the shoulder. Her husband memorizing the horses in the sky while police detectives lift her fingerprints from the wheel and the wind lifts the last of her perfume.
2. Counter subject: For days helicopters wheel above the tire tracks, the police tape.
3. Episode: April, 1957. Her father shook her awake. Smoke from the stairwell, her brothers’ footsteps hard on the narrow steps, no mother, no baby, repeating sirens down the Philadelphia streets. And in the emergency room, her father held her hand for the last time. Diagonal light. Ammonia and coffee cups. There was nothing to read.
4. Middle entry: Two weeks later, the helicopters fan the canyon, the hotel parking lot, the cliff, the contents of her purse in the repeating tide. A flotilla of lipsticks.
5. Example and Analysis: In 1926, Agatha Christie went missing for 11 days in the English countryside. Empty car, strewn belongings. They found her living in a hotel registered under a different name. A vacation from herself: No guns, no libretto.
6. False entry: At a gas station off the PCH 24 miles north of Santa Barbara, the night manager reported a woman fitting her description buying coffee at 1:30 on the morning of October 17. A man’s jacket, jeans, pretty enough that he remembered: The passenger seat, just change, thank-you.
7. Stretto: No, I didn’t mean it that way. She had a glass of wine with dinner, sometimes a little more. We were fine. Everything. Was. Fine.
8. Final Entry: When they found her, there were sonatas inside her head. They hummed faintly, like static, like incoming weather, like television. She didn’t know what they were. The world was flat: A Nebraska road, the horizon, a bed sheet.
9. Coda: As he drove home to the city, down the coast and then inland through the desert wind farms and the geography of the moon, his sirens mute, lights off, he thought: Retrograde amnesia, aphasia, maybe PTSD. He thought: The headlights are a different color these days. He thought: What if tomorrow I wake up and I’m gone too.
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