A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  That one time we went inside together, on the first day of the search, it occurred to me that maybe his father hadn’t wanted to survive, or at the very least that he had been waiting for death with a kind of patience. None of his windows had been boarded, nor the flimsy wooden doors. The scene surrounding the bloodstains in the living room carpet was so legible, forensically speaking, that reading it took a matter of seconds: the front door hanging open and left unlocked; a bright, uncovered lamp (the bulbs still glowing, Matt says, when he got there) situated in direct view of the street; no weapon—not a rifle, a kitchen knife, even a baseball bat—lying on the floor. The man was totally defenseless, and, what’s worse, he was broadcasting that defenselessness by leaving his windows unboarded. It’s surprising that he wasn’t attacked and infected earlier on in the outbreak, though I suppose his living in a satellite town, in such a sparsely populated area, gave him a survivor’s edge over city dwellers. Although, again, my impression of Matt’s father is that ‘survivor’ would have been the worst wrong word to describe him.

  I don’t just mean that the windows aren’t boarded.8 There’s also the fact that the house itself, a dingy rental, doesn’t much seem like a place where the sixty-four-year-old Mr. Mazoch would have found life ‘largest, best.’ Subsisting on disability checks after his near-fatal heart attack, Matt’s father evidently didn’t know what to do with himself in retirement. He lived alone here, half an hour from anyone he loved enough to want to see, and if he went out at all he did so only to eat, or to attend an occasional garage sale or auction. Most afternoons he stayed inside and watched daytime television (Antiques Roadshow, Storage Wars). I know all that because Matt told me, but I could have guessed it—it was forensically legible—from the hermitic, indifferent disarray in which the house was kept. Mr. Mazoch seemed not to have minded sleeping on an unsheeted mattress; or heaping his soiled clothes at the end of the hallway and piling clean clothes at the foot of his bed; or letting scum develop in the bathroom, and his toiletries crowd all over the sink, and letting the tiles of the floor dislodge, uprooted from their grout; or ignoring a leak in the roof until a water stain spread gan-grenously down the wall; or abandoning weeks of dirty dishes in the sink, and storing cardboard boxes of dinner plates on a dusty stovetop, and keeping a refrigerator stocked with nothing but that garish light, forcing him to eat out every meal (which of course he did at those restaurants Matt and I visit daily now, all notorious purveyors of cheap, greasy, disheartening foods); or dropping newspapers and plastic bags and empty take-out containers just on the floor, wherever he was done with them; or accumulating so many antiques (lamps, sofas and chairs, vintage high-school yearbooks, vitrines still filled with pharmaceutical paraphernalia, tin coffee cans, streetlight fixtures, radon-painted wristwatches, illuminated anatomy maps, heavy Coca Cola signs, stuffed wildlife and wall-mounted shark jaws, immovable marble gravestones, a faux-marble bust of Caesar, old stamps, state plates, the guts of a stock ticker in a plastic dome, gorgeously filigreed headphones, et cetera), accumulating so many of these and like items, in such a bachelor’s hoard of disorganized piles, that only a narrow, barely navigable path could be made from the living room to the bedroom. So not a ‘survivor,’ exactly, so much as a man who had very little left to anticipate. A visit with Matt once a month, another disability check. The opening of his eyes another morning: sunlight on the ceiling, this breathing again. If he had expected regular guests, he might have kept the house presentable; if he had expected to live long enough to justify cultivating a pleasant space, he might not have let the house crowd so cartonnage-like around him. As it stood, he had contented himself to lead, for the past few years anyway, a moribund life, a deathbed life, lying alone and complacent at the center of a massing decay. The outbreak must have seemed to him, like the flood of a hurricane, or a wreck at an intersection, or a second heart attack, as fitting an end as any, not to be resisted when it came.

  Why would a man, released into undeath, return to a house like this one? It seems unreasonable to expect to find him here, and yet it—arguably the least probable stop on the itinerary of the undead Mr. Mazoch’s nostos—is our first stop every morning. While I wait outside in the car, Matt cases the perimeter, peering in through each window like an orphan at Christmas, trying to get a good look at his father’s rooms.9 And each morning he rounds the corner, shaking his head no to me, a blankness on his face. Thus our days begin, exactly as inauspicious as this.

  Then again, I might be wrong about Matt’s father. It’s possible that I have mischaracterized him: that in fact the man was a survivor; that he fought through his heart attack tenaciously; that, despite appearances, he lived for his accumulation of antiques and for his breakfasts out at McDonald’s. That he didn’t welcome the undead that attacked him, as one swallows a willing lungful of water, but tried energetically to fend it off. What little I know or think I know of the man’s character was gleaned from what Mazoch told me and from spending a single afternoon in his house. So perhaps this house, comprising as it does the final years of his life, is denser with nostalgic energy than I’ve been giving it credit for. Perhaps one day—even today!—Mazoch will find his father standing in the shower stall after all, hot water running down the length of his body, darkening the denim of his jeans. Perhaps Mazoch is finding him in there right now.

  Still watching the front door in the rearview, I reach for the mirror and tilt it upward slightly, bringing the finger-oil whorl to head height in the threshold. The smudge hovers right where Mazoch’s face will be reflected. When he opens that door, he’ll walk face-first into the blur. The second he steps outside, he really will have a blankness on his face. A Holbein blankness, a death’s-head blankness: the face his father would see.

  MATT AND I ARE PLAYING CHESS IN HIGHLAND Road Park, deep in a deserted picnic field. This was Matt’s idea: both the hike into the field, and the game of chess (he keeps a board in his trunk). Whether he associates the game with this place from his childhood outings with Mr. Mazoch, and just likes to play when he comes here; or whether he had hoped that by reassembling enough of the props of one memory—himself, the grass, the beige and black plastic of the figurines—his father would arrive as if bidden to complete the scene; or whether his desire to play was more subconsciously motivated than that… were questions that interested me for precisely four moves into the first game, at which point Matt captured a pawn of mine so unexpectedly as to sting my pride, and I resolved to focus entirely on the match. In the end I lost, though it was very (indeed, frustratingly) close, as was the second match that I lost. In each case the balance tipped in Mazoch’s favor only late into the middlegame, when a deadlocked block of our pieces—one of those nasty mires in which any given piece threatens three others and is defiladed in three directions by comrades ready to counterattack, and which develop on the board like (it always seems to me) that scene at the end of action movies, when the hero draws a gun on the villain, only to have a gun drawn on him by a henchman, who is surprised to have a gun drawn on him by the hero’s newly arrived sidekick, himself now compromised by the gun being drawn by a second henchman, et cetera, et cetera—finally dissolved in such a way that I was put on the defensive, masterfully pursued, and ruthlessly checkmated. Needless to say, I am determined to win one match before we leave.

  When we first got here, pulling into the parking lot, I assumed we’d be surveying the area from the car. But Matt surprised me by stepping outside. What was I waiting for, he asked. Wasn’t I coming with him? Obviously I refused. The grounds of the park, which has been closed to the public since the first weeks of the outbreak, haven’t been tended to in months, and the weeds have risen far above our knees. Overgrown and deserted like this, the place has a kind of sunken, shipwrecked look, as I can recall it did anytime hurricane rains flooded the valleys between its hills. Standing beside the car, Mazoch pointed across the field toward three far live oaks, separated from us by a sprawling waste of waist-high grass.10

  ‘Are
you kidding?’ I asked. ‘An abandoned house isn’t enough for you?’ I told him that we’d already taken enough risks today, without trudging through jungle. Matt waved off my concerns. He reminded me that the infected would have been rounded up as comprehensively here as everywhere else in the city. Then he cited, from this morning’s paper, what was meant to be a mollifying statistic: there had been only two attacks in Baton Rouge this past week. Statistically speaking, he said, we were more likely to be mauled by sharks, in the shallows of some Florida beach, than be ambushed here. Which was all that I could think about, naturally, as I followed behind him into the tall grass. Wading through the overgrowth, unable to see my feet, I felt exactly like a selachophobe in dark ocean: each step seemed to bring my ankle nearer to the gray hand that would grip it, tripping then dragging me beneath the surface, to be fed upon like chum.

  Midway into the field, Mazoch stopped suddenly, cocking his head to squint at something to our left. I spotted a short shrub, nondescript, then watched as he knelt beside it. After a moment he called me over, and I saw what had caught his attention: in the thorns of the thin branches, there was a blue scrap of tattered plaid cloth. There was no telling how old it was. It could have preceded the epidemic, even, left here by some Ultimate Frisbee player, foraging for his disc. But as I watched him pore over the plaid—with a kind of Sherlockian scrupulosity, as if searching it for prints—an absurd thought occurred to me. When he looked up, his face was bloodless: ‘I know it sounds crazy.’ ‘So don’t say it.’ ‘Would you believe me if I told you my dad had a shirt like this?’ ‘I would believe you if you told me I have a shirt like this. It’s generic plaid. Everybody has this shirt.’ ‘I know, I know. It’s probably nothing. But weird, right? First the window, then this? Two traces in the same day. It’s like we’re closing in.’ Closing in on what, I did not ask him. I simply nodded and asked what he wanted to do. Set up camp, he said. Stake the site out.

  We quickly stamped down a clearing of flattened stalks, like a protective ring, for about ten feet around ourselves, and we have been playing chess here for the past two hours. Standing, we can scan the horizon for any silhouettes; sitting, out of sight, we can concentrate safely on our games, listening for disturbances in the rim of the grass. It’s been forty minutes since either of us has bothered to take a periscopic survey of the park. The sun has risen higher overhead, basting us both with sweat. I doubt we’ll wait much longer beyond the close of this game.

  Of which it’s still Matt’s move. He’s lying across from me, propped up on one elbow and studying his configuration of units. When he extends his free hand to hover it over a knight, I sit up and watch him deliberate. Two of my pawns are divided in such a way that he could place the knight on a square equidistant from them, forking both at once and forcing me to sacrifice one over the other. He lifts the knight in question, then lets the piece hang tentatively in the air, between his fingers, like a junkyard car from one of those crane magnets. ‘Ready now?’ I ask. He places the knight back on the square where he found it. ‘Hold your horses, Vermaelen.’ ‘Move yours.’ He smiles: ‘When I’m ready.’

  I close my eyes and begin to massage them. When he’s ready. For a quiet moment there is phosphene-less dark against my eyelids, until I thumb a pressure cloud of electric blue into vision. One of the conversations we’ve been having off and on all day, in between moves in our matches, is about what being undead would be like. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to raise with Mazoch lately, and today it came up while we were flattening out our playing area. As we marched around in a wide circle, making a spectacle of ourselves, I stopped to peer across the field. ‘Do you think any infected could see us out here?’ I asked him. Matt shook his head. They were just corpses, he said. Rotting as they walked. Their eyeballs were glaucomatic and clouded and white. How well could they possibly see? If he had to guess, he’d say they were close to blind. I was surprised to hear this,11 and I told Matt that he had touched on a topic of particular fascination for me. As we finished stamping down the grass and started setting up the chessboard, I asked him how he thought the undead navigated, if not by sight.12 Oh, he’d read the usual studies, he said: lab tests suggested that reanimated eyeballs, critically compromised, were possibly over-reliant on motion and light. But he had his doubts that they could perceive visual data at all. He went on to speculate—after making his opening gambit—that the undead probably can’t see consciously, no matter how well their eyeballs are functioning. So even when the undead seem to ‘see’ an object in the distance, they must actually—Matt felt sure of this—just be seeing it in the way that a robot with sensors sees, or the way in which a sleepwalker maneuvers through an environment: by processing and responding to brute stimuli. Automatically, unreflectively, beneath the threshold of awareness. Rather than seeing in the mind’s eye way that he and I can see—when we appreciate the greenness of this grass around us, or the blueness of this sky—the undead must be all dark inside, he said. Consciously blind while physically sighted.

  Matt’s response distressed me at the time, and not only because it allowed him—by capitalizing on my distraction—to take my pawn. Rather, I found his dogmatism in the debate unsettling. No matter what, he refused to believe that the undead were conscious.13 This seemed like the secular equivalent of denying that they had souls—a dualist way of dehumanizing them—and it made me wonder how far he would go in denying their subjectivity. Such questions interested me precisely until he announced ‘Checkmate,’ at which point I did my best to push these thoughts out of mind. But as I sit here now (rubbing my closed lids, massaging phosphenes into my eyeballs), it has begun to bother me all over again.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, opening my eyes. Matt is reaching for his knight when he looks up at me. ‘What did you mean by “all dark inside”? How do you even visualize it?’

  I half-expect him to quote Chalmers, or, knowing Matt, to quote Homer or Milton or some other blind poet. But after a moment he responds that what he always visualizes—what the blindness of undeath reminds him of—are the black graphics in videogames. ‘Like kill screens,’ he says, ‘when a character dies. Or like the sidewalls of a platformer, the boundary lines you can’t cross.’ In videogames, he explains, this darkness signifies death, or the void, or the unknowable, and it always has the same unnerving texture: completely flat and black, without depth. ‘That’s what I mean when I say “all dark inside,”’ he says.

  Again I want to ask him about Mr. Mazoch—whether he thinks of his father this way, as nothing more than a brain-dead game-over screen—but what I hear myself asking instead is what games he has in mind. ‘Goldeneye,’ he says. Whenever he lies in bed at night, and tries to imagine the advance of the epidemic (how far and fast its blindness’s vectors are spreading; how that darkness is encroaching on the globe), he says that he pictures it as a worldwide game of Goldeneye. When four people play this first-person shooter at once, the television has to be divided into quadrants, mini-screens that accommodate each character’s point of view. Once a player is shot dead, his POV runs red with blood before shutting darkly off. And while the other three quadrants continue to televise the POV of their respective players (framing the rifles or Moonraker Lasers in their hands, the corridors they’re jogging down), there remains in one corner of the TV this black box, the kill screen, where the dead player’s eyes have closed. With each character who dies, obviously, another quadrant winks out. ‘That’s what I always think of at night,’ Matt says. He visualizes the epidemic as a global agglomeration of kill screens. Because if there were billions more players, he says—if you multiplied the mini-screens a billionfold—the TV would eventually be honeycombed with these black cells. Assuming that all the POV in the world were arranged on an analogous master screen, with ‘live feeds’ televising mortal sightlines and ‘kill screens’ representing undeath, a viewer could measure the progress of the epidemic just by watching the cells black out across the grid. The screen would build in blackness like a hive of blindness
, he says, until finally—when its entire surface was covered—the visible world would be replaced by this monochrome plane of unseeing.

  ‘I don’t see it,’ I say. I ask him how this master screen would distinguish undeath from just plain death: wouldn’t these ‘live feeds’ go dark no matter what? No matter whether it was a bullet, or a brain injury, or a bite wound that extinguished them? ‘If you want a videogame to model the epidemic, you need to find a better example.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that too,’ Matt says. And he confesses that, while lying in bed at night, he has also tried visualizing the epidemic in other ways. He asks me to imagine the scrolling levels from Super Mario Brothers, the ones in which all the scenery onscreen drifts steadily backward, as if on a conveyor belt, forcing Mario to run ever forward, lest the lefthand side of the screen, which swallows the scenery as it goes, swallow him as well. This black limit of the screen, he says, this onrushing apocalyptic line, like a tidal wave of dark water,14 drowning all of the trees and clouds and Goombas that have backslid into the oblivion of the out-of-frame: what could better convey the urgency and inexorability of the infection, the way that it seems to sweep over the land? What could better model the submersion of mortal eyes in the undead depths of phenomenological blackness?

  ‘Almost anything else,’ I tell him. In truth, I’m horrified that Matt has made even Mario a nightmare for himself. If his model has to be a videogame, why can’t it be Tetris or Bubble Bobble or something? I don’t tell him this, of course. I just find ways of picking apart his model. This so-called scrolling line, for example, which shepherds Mario forward and subsumes everything in its path: it’s too easily confused with time, I say. And besides, if the grid of POV isn’t homogenous enough, a limit that razes everything at once is homogenous to a fault. It’s not our experience of the epidemic that a wall of it barrels down. It actually spreads in pockets, in these widely dispersed, concentrated bursts. Here Matt holds up a finger. For his third and final model for visualizing the epidemic is as ‘pockets’ of blackness, a graphic that he’s borrowed from isometric strategy games like Command and Conquer. At the beginning of every level, he describes, a player’s units are deployed on a map that is shrouded over with black cloud cover, a dense mist that gets referred to, in the game’s instruction manual, as the ‘fog of war.’ This enveloping fog represents at any given moment the epistemological situation of your army: each inch of terrain that hasn’t yet been explored will remain obscured by it, whereas those areas that have been explored will have their share of it burned away, disclosing the pixilated landscape underneath (soils, rocks, trees, rivers, and, eventually, the enemy base). The only way to burn off the fog of war is to send units into the thick of it, their reconnaissance serving to clear a path through its bosky dark. When a player scatters a handful of units radially, out from his base to the edges of the map, each infantryman, jeep, and tank will just bore through the fog, clearing it away in narrow runnels of revealed terrain, which gradually come to vermiculate the larger darkness (on tundra levels these runnels are white, since the pixilated landscape that gets disclosed is snow: as white tendrils branch across the blackness of the map, a vision seems to spill like milk). You could imagine, Mazoch tells me, an inverse epistemological situation, one in which the terrain is already revealed but in which all of the units exude contrails of fog of war: inky clouds that stream backward from jeeps and tanks, obnubilating everything, as if they were cuttlefish propelling themselves across the screen. In this model, the units would represent the undead, and the infection as a whole could be measured by how woven over with blindness the world was. Where they had spread, phenomenological darkness; and in the recesses they hadn’t reached yet, living vision. ‘Can you see it?’ he asks.