A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  So later that same night, at around three a.m., while Rachel was sleeping and while I couldn’t seem to, I decided to go for a walk. As if I were both the hands and the child thrown into the deep end by the hands. Heading out from our apartment, I made my way through residential neighborhoods toward the LSU Lakes. It was a typically humid Louisiana mid-morning, and for the most part, through many of the blocks that I passed, things were as Rachel said. While there were no police ‘assiduously’ patrolling our neighborhood, there were no roving infected either. Only wide streets empty with midnight and orange with the brume of the streetlamps. I kept to the sidewalk, alongside wide-lawned townhouses that seemed—except for their boarded windows—perfectly peaceful. Live oaks lined each street, holding out their heavy branches like armfuls of scooped leaves, and they cast erratic shadows through the foggy light. When overhead a warm wind blew, swaying the trees’ branches, the branch shadows would sway too, sweeping darkly over the sidewalk concrete and over my feet. The shadows swept back and forth, like a massive phantasmal broom. In the humid air all around me, the streetlamps’ orange brume; and on the ground just beneath me, the oak trees’ black broom. What a nice and tranquil evening! Was Rachel right? Were flashmobs of undead an anomaly? Was it actually possible to walk alone unmolested, as if the epidemic—the riots, the fires, the cannibal feeding frenzies—were just a nightmare the nightly news was having? Was it really over, as easily staunched as any other modern outbreak: no more apocalyptic, in the end, than AIDS, the West Nile virus, or bird flu?

  She was right. Undeath felt as far from our beautiful neighborhood, from this warm morning, as those bombs in Tel Aviv. Soon I even felt safe, at ease, and after a while I was able to put thoughts of the undead out of my mind entirely. The sky was unusually clear and bright, and all I had on my mind was the full moon. On a nighttime walk before the epidemic, under a similarly clear sky, Rachel had once marveled to me over how many poems had been written about the moon, how many metaphors and similes people had devised, in the history of figurative speech, to describe it. What if the moon was encrusted over with these metaphors, Rachel asked? What if it had built up these centuries of metaphors around itself, like a mollusk secreting its shell? And when everyone dies, she went on, when the human race blinks out and all of its poems are forgotten, what will the moon then look like, having crawled out of that shell?

  A day before my three-a.m. stroll, even an hour before it, I would have answered her that we would find out soon enough: that the human race was finally perishing, being extinguished by this plague of undeath, and that as soon as every person (including us) had been infected, she and I could turn our cloudy, white eyes to the night sky and see, uncomprehending, what shape a naked moon took. But while actually on my stroll, walking through those peaceful streets, where I could see by the light of that moon that there were no infected, I answered her (i.e., mentally) who knows! It might be millennia yet before we humans die off, and there are still so many more metaphors with which to calcify the moon.

  That was when I saw the infected, the first I’d ever seen. He was a middle-aged man in running clothes, standing in the road a couple of blocks away, and even if there hadn’t been a bloodstain soaked through his T-shirt (the stain looked more like a great black bib, at that distance, than anything else), I would have been able to tell by his stillness, utter and inhuman, as well as by the posture of his forward slouch, that he was undead, that that white marmoreal figure in the road was not to be called out to. When I spotted him I froze, just (as Rachel had said!) as if I’d seen a black bear. Something wild, dangerous, my own death. He was facing in my direction, his body angled toward me as if he were looking directly at me. But did he notice me? Should I back away slowly? If he did notice me, would he moan and alert others, or would he follow me silently back to the apartment, dogging me like Nemesis? And what was he doing anyway? He only stood there, as if thinking. A minute passed like this, and in that minute my adrenaline receded. I remembered—it occurred to me—that he had been a man once. He would have been a jogger, I decided. Bitten while jogging, on his left shoulder. He would have staggered home for help, where tragically he died, reanimated, and bit into his wife (whose blood it was soaked through his shirt). When he was seventeen he would have run cross-country with Baton Rouge High School’s track team, would have been one among that shoal of shirtless boys whom I used to see jogging listlessly, glistening, through the Garden District on humid afternoons. And now that he was undead—a creature of habit now, compelled to return to those sites whose pellets were most prominent in the chaff cloud of his memory—he would have wandered out here to the Garden District, as if reporting for another session of track practice. That was what he was doing tonight, I decided: waiting outside for the track team, for them to come meet him. And maybe they would, one day: maybe other varsity runners from the class of ’XX would be bitten and reanimated, and maybe, like this man, they would be compelled toward the neighborhood where they had trained. They would all find each other here one night, a dozen undead reunited, to begin shambling through these streets as a team.

  These and like thoughts are what I found myself thinking. ‘So that’s the kind of man he was,’ I reveried, even as I stared at that revenant—that killing machine!—just two blocks away. That it had had a track team, a wife, a whole life, when what I should have been keeping strenuously in mind was that it had nothing, nothing but this nothing that it was infected with and that it had to give, if I was stupid and slow enough to let it. Of course, when it finally seemed to move—when I saw or imagined that I saw it shuffle one foot out in front of the other—I tensed my entire body. The second it shuffled its foot I remembered clearly all that it was sick with and all that the spit in its mouth meant, how everything breaks with the skin that breaks beneath that bite. Had it seen me? Was it hungry? But they were never not hungry: they fed until they burst. I knew that, just as I knew, if it were to let out its throaty gurgle, exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do. Panic, start running, or scream for help, for instance. Instead I was supposed to back away without attracting any more of its attention, or else it would moan still louder, and there would be others. The track team! How could I have forgotten? Twenty spindly undead in short shorts would come trotting out into the street, as promptly as at a coach’s whistle, the minute it started moaning! Together they would run me down and feast on my body, I was sure of it. Tearing open my stomach to sift through my intestines, turning me inside out like a Necker cube. My death—my gory death, my careless, ass’s, idiot’s death—more than my life flashed before my eyes.

  And not only my own death. For once I reanimated, I realized, I would return automatically to our apartment, as much a danger to Rachel as the jogger had been to its wife. My hand would bloody the front door, slap after insistent slap, until Rachel, waking alone in bed, would rush worriedly to the peephole to see—me, vindicated by the grisliness of my own end! Victim of the streets she’d insisted on the statistical safety of! She would fling open the door to me, I imagined, unable to do what needed to be done, and hug me, too, as I’d always feared hugging her. And then I would do what I was programmed to: with inexorable reflexivity my mouth would clamp down on her throat, my uncontrollable, remote-controlled mouth, while, entranced, my face and eyes would remain expressionless. Biting into my lover as I’d gnaw a pillow in my sleep. Rachel! Measureless were the remorseful transports that this image of myself reduced me to, as I waited for the jogger to sound its unearthly moan.21

  But he never did moan. For a while, in fact, he didn’t do anything. He swayed there, and I stood and watched him sway. Above me a breeze passed through the oak trees’ leaves, and I watched as a current of rustle traveled up the block, live oak by live oak, in a line of thrashing branches. Eventually they reached the infected’s far white figure, overtaking him. As the branches between us swayed, their shadows swished atop the intervening concrete, and I could see that all of the street leading up to the infected was shaded: the paveme
nt roiled with movement—with black turmoil—as if being buckled by an earthquake of shadows. Down at my feet some of its tremors swished over my shoes. And raising my eyes from my feet, moving my eyes slowly along the length of the street, one patch of thrashing shadow at a time, I could almost believe that I was following just a single tremor in motion, one black seism traveling up the block. This shockwave, beginning at my shoes, seemed to ripple outward, breaking over itself in crests and troughs until it broke over the feet of the infected. His white shape stayed in place, being lapped at by the blackness. I lifted my arm at him, as if in a wave, then actually waved both arms. He didn’t respond, and I let my arms drop to my sides. The tree shadows continued cascading toward him, in flurries of movement that threw his motionlessness into relief. Why didn’t he move? Even as he stood there, he seemed to exist on another plane. His stillness—his total unresponsiveness to everything around him: the wind, the shadows, me—seemed ghostly, as though he occupied some sublime interstice between life and death, and nothing in this world could touch him. Could he perceive any of this? There was a great vacancy in his staring. He was present, but only as the manifestation of an absence. Neither here, nor not here. Neither a brain-damaged human, nor a murderous corpse. Nor even, quite, some indeterminate mixture between the two. It seemed in that moment as if I could go on accreting neithers like this all night—as if I could stand here, all night, frozen in apophatic paralysis—and still be no nearer an understanding of what he was. Of what it would be like to be like him.22

  I remember wishing I could see his eyes. The way he was staring, he seemed to be gazing into the sublime, or at the face of Death. And so too did sublimity and Death—gazing out into our world through those eyes—seem to be seeing me. I felt something like the awe that the visitant must feel, in the presence of the archangel, or the alien, and I knew then that I would do anything to understand.

  I stood opposite him for I don’t know how long, watching. And when finally he turned his back to me and departed, I watched him wander, somnolently, into someone’s front yard, where he glanced left and right in seeming disorientation before disappearing in the alleyway between two houses. Just like that. There was even this hush lingering in the air behind him.

  For how many minutes did I remain there, waiting to see him again or another one? Ten, at most. Then I phoned the police and walked home. I woke Rachel coming in, and told her, when she asked where I’d been, that I wasn’t afraid of outside anymore. She was right, I said: I did need to get out of the apartment.

  It wasn’t long after this that Mazoch emailed about the search.

  TUESDAY

  THIS MORNING RACHEL WAKES EARLY, AN HOUR or two before she usually leaves for the shelter, and waits with me in the kitchen while I wait for Mazoch.

  Last night I told her about the traces he had found (the broken window, the plaid cloth), and also about his conviction that we were ‘closing in.’ She pursed her lips and repeated, ‘Closing in.’ That was all she said on the subject, and her tone was hard to read. But I sensed there was something she wanted to say, so I was not surprised this morning when she woke with my alarm. Now, while I stand beside the toaster, I’m waiting for her to speak.

  She’s been brooding at the kitchen table, her face still pale from sleep, her blond hair frazzled into an aureole. When I turn my back to her I can still feel her watching me, and so—to have something to do with my hands—I prematurely pop the toaster. I busy myself with the butter knife, frowning down at the soft slices, barely warm. When I glance back up, she is indeed still watching me. Even her pajamas are watching me: the polka-dot pants; the white tank top, semé with cartoon owls. They ocellate her body, multiplying her watching a hundredfold. Finally she clears her throat: ‘What—’ she begins. ‘What if you do find Mr. Mazoch?’

  Ah. So that is what she woke so early to ask. I should have guessed. It’s not a question that I have posed, in so many words, to Matt. But it’s the very first question that Rachel posed to me, back when I initially broached the search with her. ‘He doesn’t want to kill him, does he?’ she asked. When I didn’t respond right away, she brought her hands to her cheeks: ‘Oh my God. He wants to kill him.’

  At the time, I told her that I had no idea what Matt’s plans were. We hadn’t discussed them, I said, and anyway, the search was more emotionally complicated than that, for Matt. He himself probably didn’t know deep down what he was doing. Nor was it something I felt comfortable putting him on the spot about. She was making it sound as if I were knowingly abetting Matt’s Ahabism, manning the oars while he sharpened the harpoons, in some monomaniacal manhunt. When in fact the situation was much grayer, I told her.

  This was all strictly speaking true. I really didn’t know what Matt was planning. We really hadn’t discussed it. And because we haven’t discussed it since, I’ve been able to continue the search in good faith. Rachel’s been able to condone it as well, so long as we both operate under the tacit assumption that it is a rescue mission: that Matt intends to commit Mr. Mazoch to a quarantine. On most days of the search, this interpretation seems viable. But then there are days—such as yesterday, at Highland Road Park—when I harbor my suspicions. Although I’ve never admitted as much to Rachel, it does seem at times as if Matt might entertain the prospect of euthanasia: that he might be driven to put Mr. Mazoch out of his misery. While I personally would advocate strongly against this (it’s illegal, for one thing; and for another, we can’t be sure that what the undead are experiencing is misery),23 I also recognize that I can go only so far in dissuading Matt. It’s ultimately his decision to make.

  I have never admitted this to Rachel. Thankfully, over the past few weeks, I haven’t had to. As it began to seem less and less likely to her that we would ever actually find Mr. Mazoch, Matt’s motives ceased to be an issue. With Mr. Mazoch out of mind, Rachel has been free to conceive of the search as a purely ritual activity. When she imagines Matt and me driving around the city, it is as if we are circling an empty center, like two monks raking sand. The search is aimless, autotelic, without object. It serves its own purposes. For Matt, she imagines, it must be a ritual of mourning and memorial: he is visiting the sites of his father, so that he can reflect on the man and remember. Whereas for me, it must be a ritual of routine: it is a structured excuse for me to get out of the apartment each day, as well as a safe way of encountering the undead (to conquer my fear of them, on the one hand; and to come to understand them, on the other). We will simply perform these rituals until Friday, she imagines, and then we will be finished.

  She’s not half-wrong. The search really is each of those things, for each of us. Except it is also, in its own way, a search. Rachel was able to forget this only when the search was returning no results. But now that Mazoch is actually discovering ‘traces,’ she evidently feels a burning need to know his plans.

  Looking at her there, with her arms crossed over her owls, I can tell that equivocation will not cut it this morning. I won’t get far by reminding her that these so-called traces are so many false hopes and red herrings, or by pointing out to her where their true danger lies: not that they might lead us to Mr. Mazoch, but that they might lead Matt—as I am beginning to worry—right off the deep end, into a bottomless obsession, where every minor coincidence is imbued with meaning and grief. I can already tell that this is not the response that Rachel will need to hear: putting the traces aside, she will still want to know—hypothetically—what Matt’s motives are. What he would do if. The words ‘closing in’ are clearly still fresh in her mind, and in the bedroom this morning, when I grabbed my baseball bat, she blanched.

  Here is where Rachel is coming from. Her own father was diagnosed with lung cancer when she was in seventh grade, and survived—or, really, ‘was sustained’—in a moribund state from then until she was seventeen. She has explained the medical details to me before. Soon after his diagnosis, it was recommended that he have his dominant lung removed, a procedure so risky—Rachel’s family wa
s to find out only later—that most doctors refuse to perform it. The surgery itself went well, except not without attendant post-operative complications,24 which were to prove disastrous. His remaining lung began to fill with fluid, and he had to be attached to a ventilator. Too weak to be weaned off the vent, he instead became dependent on it, such that he was left susceptible to a succession (Rachel: ‘a domino effect’; the hospital staff: ‘a train wreck’) of medical crises. If he fell into an unsupervised sleep, he risked suffocation, but, because his blood was highly ammoniated, he was beset with a lethargy that made keeping awake even for fifteen minutes a trial. Unable to move, and likely deprived of oxygen in what unsupervised sleeps he did fall into, he suffered limb atrophy; he suffered short-term memory loss; he suffered, regularly, organ failure. One crisis precipitated another in the body of this man whom the hospital—Rachel informed me with unbelievable bitterlessness—had actually come to nickname ‘The Train Wreck.’ How many times, during the year and a half that he was hospitalized, did Rachel believe, in the panic in her heart, that her father was dying? How many mornings was she woken briskly and told, with no explanation, that she had to accompany her mother to the hospital, that it was an emergency? In how many garish conference rooms did her mother explain to her that her father was not going to last through the day, and how many times was Rachel made to stand by her father’s (The Train Wreck’s!) bedside to tell him goodbye? Each time, she said, she turned her head to hide from him the tears in her eyes.