La Fuite

Lyrics

The subject is a man of good character.
Ansel Bourne.
Age sixty.
Note the date: January seventeenth, eighteen eighty-seven.
Observe the departure.

He draws his money from a bank in Providence.
Walks from his sister's house on Broad Street, Pawtucket.
The air is biting. The sky is a flat, indifferent grey.
He carries a small satchel.
He does not look back.
There is nothing to look back upon.
The file is closed. The memory, a room with the door locked from the outside.
Psychogenic. A clean surgical cut.

This is La Fuite.
The flight.
The body walks on, but the man inside is gone.
A new tenant arrives, bewildered by the furniture.
He does not know the name on the mail.
He does not recognize the face in the mirror.
He is simply… walking.

Two months later. Two hundred miles south.
Norristown, Pennsylvania.
He is A.J. Brown. A stationer.
Sells penny candy, newspapers, toys and fancy articles.
Does a fairly good business.
A quiet man.
The hand can't form the signature for a name it has never heard.
The motor memory of Ansel Bourne is unavailable to A.J. Brown.
A ghost in the machine, or a machine with a new ghost.

This is La Fuite.
The flight.
The body walks on, but the man inside is gone.
A new tenant arrives, bewildered by the furniture.
He does not know the name on the mail.
He does not recognize the face in the mirror.
He is simply… walking.

March fourteenth. He wakes up.
The stationery shop smells of paper and sugar, and it is utterly alien.
He is Ansel Bourne again.
He is terrified.
Where is A.J. Brown?
He is a two-month gap in a spool of tape. A lost chapter.
William James takes notes.
A perfect discontinuity of consciousness.

Two lives in one body.
Each a stranger to the other.
The perfect amnesia.
The perfect escape.
You walk away, and you forget who is walking.
Specimen closed.
Case filed.