A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  I shake my head. This is easily Matt’s most unnerving example yet. ‘The undead don’t spread their infection merely by moving,’ I remind him, ‘by walking across a map as Command and Conquer ’s units do.’ They do so by biting other humans. And whereas the enemy AI in videogames really are mindlessly violent—programmed to attack anything within their radius of awareness—the undead are less predictable. An infected might stagger for hundreds of miles without biting another human, without snuffing out a single mortal POV, and so without exhausting one speck of fog of war. And how is his model supposed to account for that? Do I have a better one, he asks? I consider bringing up Bubble Bobble, then shake my head again. Perhaps it would be best to avoid videogames altogether: the more abstractly Matt thinks about the pandemic, I realize, the less capable he is of individuating the undead. They just become blind tiles on a monolith of mini-screens, or an all-obliterating boundary line, or—as with Command and Conquer—a literal army of darkness. Points on a chart to be wiped out.

  How could he look them in the eye as often as he does, zoomed in through the binocular lenses like that, and not wonder what might be going on inside them? How could he conclude that they are experiencing nothing, that there is nothing it is like to be them? ‘They just don’t seem blind,’ I say. ‘Have you ever seen one in person? Without binoculars, I mean?’

  ‘No,’ he admits, shrugging. I lean over the chessboard to get his attention: ‘Well, I have,’ I tell him. I try to describe my only encounter with an undead: how I was out for a walk one night when I spotted it; how it exuded this eerie awareness, palpable even from two blocks away. ‘I couldn’t tell whether it saw me,’ I say. ‘But it definitely knew I was there. It was quote unquote looking directly at me.’

  Matt raises an eyebrow, unfazed, then raises his knight from the board. ‘It’s your move,’ he says, setting the knight down between my pawns. I advance the farther of the two—as I have been planning—and place it in the strike zone of one of his. If he captures the remaining fork-pawn with his knight, I’ll be able to capture his pawn with my own, moving it that much closer to the eighth rank.

  The advance of a pawn to the eighth rank! Now here is a model for transformation into undeath. Whenever a pawn reaches the end of the chessboard, it is finally able to metamorphose into a queen. A new system of moves opens up to it. What used to be impossible, even to conceive, has been unlocked inside it, and suddenly the entire board is in play. There has bloomed in its chest, where once a pulsion moved it only forward and only one square at a time, a compass rose, given to limitless extension in every direction.

  What if that is what it is like to become undead? Not like being blinded, but just the opposite: like being promoted into a new modality of seeing, one that would seem infinitely advanced and incomprehensible to mortals. For all Matt knows, the undead could have communal vision, routed by a hive mind, such that what any undead sees the entire species sees.15 If that were the case, then whenever a random undead looked at Matt, it would be a way for Mr. Mazoch to look at Matt. Any gesture Matt wanted to convey to his father could simply be conveyed to that undead, as to a courier: one relay in a network of seeing. I try to imagine what it must have been like for him, those first few seconds after reanimation. Mr. Mazoch must have felt whatever it is that the promoted pawn feels, right inside his eyeball: now a vision moves laterally, now backward, with the white ease of the white queen, and so different are these rules that it feels as if there are no rules. Why can’t Matt imagine that that is what happened to his father?

  ‘Versmallen, go.’ Ah. He has captured my pawn with his, keeping it from ever reaching the eighth rank. I move forward a knight of my own, and a breeze stirs the grass around us. The whole world seems to sway. ‘It’s getting hot,’ I say, mopping sweat from my forehead. Matt nods. He places his finger on the tip of his king and wobbles the piece back and forth a little, as if to topple it in forfeit. But a moment after letting it droop, he cups the base of its skull with his fingertip, then lifts the piece to a standing position. I watch the king as it rises (or seems to rise, uncannily, by itself), gliding from back to feet with this Nosferatu stiffness.

  THE NIGHT THAT I FIRST SAW AN INFECTED WAS A few weeks into the epidemic, a transitional period, when conditions were stabilizing but when I was nevertheless still afraid to leave our apartment. LCDC had lifted its curfew; the BRPD had issued a public statement declaring streets ‘under control’; and quarantines were by then up and running. Almost no one believed—as initially everyone had, when after The Broadcast16 all we knew was that the dead were rising, biting, proliferating virally—that societal collapse and its concomitant anarchy were only one breached stronghold away. The grocery stores were actually selling supplies again, rather than being raided for them, and newscasters recited ‘findings’ from scientific studies on the undead, rather than breathless exhortations to protect our loved ones. In short, much of the chaos of the early days had dissipated, the way a nightmare’s logic will midway through the morning’s piss, or a morning’s mist will mid-afternoon.

  Nevertheless, I remained afraid to leave our apartment. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Rachel and I had been told by panicked newscasters to board up our windows and hoard up on canned goods. During those first seventy-two hours, all of Baton Rouge was barricaded. The only people who dared step outdoors were soldiers in riot gear and virologists in canary-yellow biohazard suits. Then one morning Rachel and I turned on the TV, and LCDC was holding a press conference. A spokeswoman at a podium told us all how safe it was to go outside. The worst had already passed, we were told. The virus was not airborne, we were told. Knowing what we knew now about the infection, an outbreak could never spread that fast again. The LCDC had been working around the clock to print and distribute copies of FIGHT THE BITE, which condensed all available knowledge about the epidemic. Copies had been mailed to census addresses, and were available in bulk at relief shelters. So long as we studied these survival manuals carefully, and exercised the proper precautions, it should be safe to leave our homes.

  Rachel, heartened by the news, was eager to explore the city. We hadn’t seen daylight in days, and our diet had been reduced to microwave-heated green beans and oatmeal. Now that the curfew had been eased, Rachel wanted to take a walk to the LSU Lakes and see sun sparkling on water. She wanted to see what new foods they had for us to eat at the relief tents on the campus fairgrounds. She wanted to drive to the grocery store and buy real food. And eventually she wanted to visit her father’s grave. She wanted me to come with her.

  Only, I didn’t share Rachel or the public’s faith in LCDC’s reassurances. Pace the spokeswoman at the podium, it struck me that in fact nothing would be simpler than for a single stray infected to spark another citywide outbreak. Or for a security breach in a quarantine to unleash hundreds of infected at once. Or for the so-called ‘virus’—which no scientist had actually identified beneath a microscope, even as they assured us it was not airborne—to simply mutate overnight, as real viruses are wont to do, and make itself airborne. Then Baton Rouge would again devolve into a Hieronymus Bosch pit, as we had all watched it do only days beforehand: telephones down, emergency teams unavailable, escape routes jammed with traffic, neighborhoods flooded as at Mardi Gras with bacchantes. Who could guarantee that this stability was anything more than a lull? No, the sensible thing, it seemed to me, was to just batten17 down the hatches and wait. A week, two weeks, until we were absolutely sure that conditions would remain stable outside. Even if that meant locking and bolting our apartment door and swallowing the proverbial key.

  Rachel thought that I was overreacting. Soon she began volunteering at one of the relief centers, and every morning that she left—five days a week—we had to repeat this argument in our living room. I would be sitting on the sofa, and Rachel would be standing in the threshold of our opened front door, framed in sunlight and fresh air. ‘You can’t stay inside all the time,’ she would tell me. ‘It’ll make you crazy. Why
don’t you come out for a walk with me? Not even far—just to the relief center. There will be plenty of people there.’ Here I would shake my head and chuckle in disbelief. Did she not understand, as I did, that ‘plenty of people’ was precisely the problem? That there was a plague on out there, and that we were well beyond the stage at which we could take leisurely afternoon strolls together?18 Had she not paid sufficient attention to the Youtube video that I had plunked her down in front of (a thirty-second clip of a mass outbreak in a shopping mall), and therefore failed to internalize the agoraphobic lesson that that footage was meant to convey?19 She didn’t, she hadn’t, and she had.

  My behavior put predictable strains on the relationship. As soon as Rachel crossed the threshold, I would rush to detain her, pleading with her not to leave: ‘It’s a buffet out there—you go, you’re going to get bitten. You think the streets are safe. You think, “I’ll just avoid the bad neighborhoods,” the seedy neighborhoods. But that’s not what’s at issue anymore. These aren’t crackheads who want your purse, who will stalk you only on Plank Road and only at midnight. They don’t care that you live in the Chateau Dijon apartment complex, or that it’s broad daylight—it means nothing to them to attack you on a tree-lined street at noon, surrounded by respectable people. They are respectable people, or they used to be, and they’ll roam anywhere. Even the good neighborhoods. Even the Whole Foods! There’s nowhere you can go that isn’t dangerous. All it would take is for one person to reanimate, for all hell to break loose.’ If she stopped to dignify this with a response, it was to tell me that I was being ridiculous. I was out of touch with reality. Everyone was going outside now. People were even allowed to visit some of the quarantines, to see and say goodbye to undead relatives there. Public places were well protected, she said, and so was the relief center. If I wanted to lock myself away, fine, but I couldn’t bury her alive with me. She needed to do what she could to help. She was going out, and that was that.

  Before she left, as despite my protests she almost always did, she would kiss me on the cheek, promising me that she would be prudent. Prudent! In those khaki shorts and that sleeveless tank top, every inch of exposed skin practically begging to be bitten! The whole time she was gone I would sit in my spot on the living room sofa, watching the news in the dark and nursing dark thoughts about Rachel. The news, which showed people being bitten in the streets, the very streets Rachel was now wandering. Every minute that I waited for her someone new on the news was being bitten—some fresh victim. Then, to compound my anxiety during commercials, I would reread FIGHT THE BITE, skimming the chapter on domestic infections, with its thorough list of precautions (such as wearing mouthguards to bed, in the event of nighttime reanimation; or conducting full-body searches; or practicing ‘defamiliarization’20 techniques). When after a few hours of this Rachel did come home, walking through the door and exclaiming ‘It’s so beautiful outside!’, how coolly and paranoiacally I felt obliged to receive her. On bad days I would even make her bare her forearms and ankles, her calves, so that I could inspect them for bite wounds, as if she would ever try to conceal such a thing from me (what was more likely, of course, was that she would have unknowingly ingested infected food, but however much I worried about that I had no way of testing her for it, so it was the ankles that these afternoons I examined). ‘What kind of monster do you think I am,’ Rachel would cry, as I lifted her pants leg and palpated the unbroken skin of her thigh, ‘that I would let my own lover be infected?’ Or, if she caught me eyeballing her calf from across the room: ‘If you don’t stop looking at me like that, I’m going to freak out. Really, I’m starting to freak out.’ Then, so that she didn’t ‘freak out’ and begin weeping, I would have to embrace her trembling body, hold her close to me and rub her back, when for all I knew there was some plum-colored ring of teethmarks still hidden, like a hickey, beneath the rim of her sock… which finally one day felt to me so much like hugging a rabid dog (like rubbing a rabid dog’s back and telling this rabid dog in an earnest voice that I trusted it) that I grew nauseated with resentment, of her and of myself for yielding to her, and pushed her away from me. To be bitten at the throat mid-sentence, even while I was telling her that I loved and trusted her! To die the death of some dumb Romeo, kissing poisoned lips to prove his love! ‘Look,’ I said, waving a copy of FIGHT THE BITE in my hand, ‘we need to observe the proper precautions. We’re behaving like idiots.’ ‘What’s idiotic is that if we go on like this we’ll kill each other.’

  She was alluding to a recent news story, in which a man, returning home drunk, startled his wife and was shot dead by her, who in her keyed-up state had mistaken him for infected. But that premonition—‘We’ll kill each other’—disquieted me at a much more personal level. It was almost as if Rachel were tweaking my conscience. For at night I would imagine it, killing her, as I lay in bed unable to sleep. ‘What would I have to do,’ I would ask myself, ‘if this creature, asleep on my chest, woke and was monstrous?’ There was never really any question: I would have to throw the comforter, verdant and spring-patterned, over her head, not only to keep her from biting me but also to keep me from seeing her face; then I would have to beat her to death with the baseball bat that we stow under the bed. The trick, I thought, was to be beating on a mound beneath the covers. To be beating some soft writhing green thing, rather than Rachel, nude and recognizable. And to drag her body, still bundled in blankets, out to the street without ever once actually looking at her face, which would have to be as forbidden to me as Eurydice’s, or Medusa’s. I didn’t like to think about it.

  ‘That’s absurd,’ I told her, ‘we’re not going to kill each other.’ But I was noticeably shaken by what she’d said, and she probably could have guessed what I was thinking. First, that it was emotionally corrosive to fantasize so much about murdering my lover, to hold her in such distrust, and second, that yes, perhaps it was possible, one night I might make a mistake and strike at her warm flesh.

  It was around this time that Rachel wrote me the email reminding me of Tunica Hills, recalling the Bethlehem stars there and insisting on how vital to the relationship our taking quiet walks and watching afternoon light together was. How long could I remain holed up in this gloomy apartment, as if in a nuclear bunker, she wanted to know? And how long did I realistically expect her to stay here with me? If I didn’t learn to leave the apartment, she would have to leave, even if it meant moving back in with her mom. Eventually, she wrote, I would have to come to terms with what was happening, because in all likelihood it would go on happening for months, maybe years. And if others had come to terms with it, why couldn’t I? That there were periodic flare-ups in shopping malls didn’t seem to derail people’s lives any more than that, in Tel Aviv, there were periodic suicide bombings in cafés and public buses, she wrote. People drove to the grocery store (‘Even Whole Foods!’) as they always had, and if on the way there they spotted an infected in the road, very well, they might pull over to look at it (the way that when a black bear, a cub, wanders out onto the shoulder of a rural highway, people always pull over to photograph it), or else they might just drive past it altogether indifferently. And when a street was overrun with infected, police were quick to block it off with barriers and road flares, warning traffic away, until all the infected could be detained. Was I aware that more people were attacked in their homes than in public spaces? (I wasn’t.) Or that, in general, it was safer to walk outdoors, where assiduous police officers combed the streets all hours, than to stay alone inside? (Again, no.) The infected weren’t monsters, she wrote, or killing machines. They wouldn’t chase you down relentlessly to bite you. They were just diseased, brain-damaged people, and they were only as dangerous as you allowed them to be. If you didn’t put yourself in a position to be bitten, you wouldn’t be. Any able-bodied person could outrun them. Everyone else had realized this by now. The only reason that I hadn’t—Rachel wrote—was that I refused to go outside. Once I saw for myself how calm things had become, the shock would
wear off. She concluded her email with a caricature of the redneck-ascetic existence that I risked slipping into: living in paranoid withdrawal in a fallout shelter, feeding on canned goods, polishing my rifles, prophesying dissolution for a society that was as homeostatic and heedless of me as ever. Swearing at a government I didn’t trust to protect me. ‘Let’s not live that way. Love, Rachel.’