A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  Of course, each proved in turn to be a false alarm, and it eventually became evident that, while he wasn’t going to die in the hospital, neither was his condition going to improve there. So his bed and ventilator were moved to a room in Rachel’s house, where her mother assumed the responsibility of operating and maintaining the equipment that was sustaining her husband’s life. Rachel recalls specifically a pump, a suctioning device designed to clear blockages from the ventilator’s air passage. Whenever her father’s oxygen intake dropped, sounding the vent’s alarm, her mother would have to be on hand to feed a small hose through his tracheotomy tube, snaking it deep into the interior of his chest; then, once the vacuum had been activated, the strawlike hose could be slowly withdrawn, until it had deposited in a plastic bag dangling beneath the ventilator whatever mucous had been obstructing the man’s breathing.25 It was often the case that nothing was the matter, he had just woken alone in the night and, afraid, purposefully held his breath, setting off the vent’s alarm so that Rachel’s mother would come to his bedside and talk to him. That this woman—who worked from home as a graphic designer to support herself and Rachel and to pay her husband’s increasingly steep medical bills; and who exercised such vigilance in her caretaking that she left the house only twice a week, to shop for groceries (when a nurse’s assistant relieved her), and carried a baby monitor with her even into the backyard, listening even there for the vent’s alarm; and who had to tend to her husband as to a quadriplegic (so atrophied had his limbs become), brushing his teeth, cutting his hair, trimming his fingernails, shaving him, daily removing the gauze from his pus-filled, cavitary bedsores in order to disinfect and re-dress them, bathing him too and cleaning up after every bowel movement (which movements, because he needed to be fed directly through a tube in his stomach and because this led to several digestive issues, were always a subject of concern [not least the concern of constipation, in which event Rachel’s mother apparently had to ‘reach inside and loosen things up’])—that this woman was a pillar of selflessness is beyond doubt. And though Rachel, I suspect out of modesty, has gone into considerably less detail regarding her own responsibilities, she has mentioned before that she began helping out her mom more in high school, when she assumed the task of maneuvering her father out of bed and into his wheelchair, and I know that for his birthday she sewed him sheets and hospital gowns, printed with moons, stars.

  When Rachel turned seventeen, there was a discussion in the family, and a decision was reached (in spite of Rachel’s protests) not to treat any of her father’s future medical problems. Comatose now, he had at some point stopped urinating, and his doctor diagnosed kidney failure. If untreated, the doctor said, he would drift off painlessly in his sleep and simply never wake up. Which is just what he did, two days after diagnosis. The sight of his corpse laid out in bed, gaunt and gowned and as if estranged from itself, didn’t move Rachel half so much as the sight of it in the mahogany coffin: buried in his old LSU sweater, and enjoying, in the mortician’s makeup on his face, a veneer of rude red health, her father resembled for the first time in many years her father, and she wept as she hadn’t even on the day she’d found him dead. To mourn him, she has explained, meant mourning two men, or at least two sets of memories: those of the young, vigorous father who raised her, as well as those of the debilitated, dependent, infantilized man-child whom in sickness he became. And it really wasn’t until the day of the funeral, when she saw again that sweater, that face, that that first set of memories was heartrendingly returned to her.

  Even before The Broadcast and the advent of undeath, Rachel described to me a recurring dream she had, in which her father, a revenant, would visit and speak with her from beyond the grave. Sometimes he appeared as the healthy father, others as the bedridden father, but more often than not he appeared as the corpse that in reality he was: his clothes tattered, his body in advanced stages of decay. Because the extent of his decomposition was directly proportionate to the amount of time that he had spent in the ground, his dream image grew increasingly gruesome as the years drew on. Though never so gruesome as to disrupt the grand feeling of benevolence that as a parent he gave off. Even with black sores eaten into the flesh of his cheeks, even with bone showing in his hand, he visited her dreams as a father, not a fiend, and she apprised him as she would a mortal father of all that had transpired in her life between his last appearance and this one. Rachel, who does not believe in ghosts, nevertheless describes her gratefulness for these dreams in hauntological terms, as if she were being afforded the opportunity to do with the spirit of the man what with his living self she could not: ‘It’s just nice to spend time with him—for so much of my adolescence he wasn’t really present,’ or, ‘It was good to talk to him again last night. It had been a while,’ or, ‘At least it’s some sort of contact.’ Always in the same comforted tone of voice, as uncomplicatedly glad to dream him as she was to breathe in the smell of his smoke from her car seats (and in fact: on the comfort that she derives from looking at her parents’ photo albums, or from asking her father’s friends and relatives to share with her their memories of him, Rachel once remarked, ‘When you lose your dad as early as I did you take him where you can get him’—even [especially] from strangers’ smoke on the car seats).

  Now imagine Rachel’s relief at the first reports of the dead coming back to life. And imagine how much she staked, everything, on the afternoon that we drove out to the cemetery where her father was buried. This was before LCDC had determined that, wherever the undead were coming from (whether from morgues and hospitals or from their deathbeds, whether from one irradiated neighborhood or from all over the city), they were decidedly not returning from their graves. For Rachel it was still reasonable to assume that her father would be among the dead whom the public then believed to be reanimating in their coffins.26 That her father, buried years before, wouldn’t have reanimated, Rachel could not know. One morning she woke from a dream in which her father’s corpse visited her in a pitiful state: unable to lift his left arm, unable to move the left side of his face, having returned from the grave only to find his wife married to another man and therefore forced to rent out a squalid tenement room by the railroad tracks. Describing the dream while lying beside me in bed that morning, she said that she was sure it was a sign. She simply sensed that he was suffering. She had to go see him.

  ‘He’s regained consciousness in his grave,’ she said. ‘He’s cramped in this dark box, barely bigger than his body. Just whimpering and waiting for someone to unearth him.’ ‘And you’re the one to do that?’ I asked. She hesitated, so I pressed on: ‘You’re going to drive out to the cemetery, dig down to his casket, and pry it open like a ghoul?’ ‘You say that as if it’s incredible—’ ‘It is incredible!’ ‘—but I know you would do the same. What if it were me lying underground somewhere, buried alive and waiting for you in my coffin?’ ‘More likely he’s doing in his coffin what for several years now you’ve taken him to be doing: reposing and decomposing. There’s no reason to think that now, this morning and after all this time, he’s reanimated.’ ‘It’s just a feeling I have.’ ‘You’re convinced of this? “A daughter knows”?’ ‘I have to see for myself.’ ‘“See for yourself ”! I’ll tell you what you’ll see. It won’t be the serene face you saw buried, I can guarantee you that, embalmed and all made up for the prom: it will be unspeakable putrefaction and decay. You open that coffin lid and what you’ll see is two creepy eyeballs staring back at you, no eyelids, just bulbous whites lolling around in his head, like the ones animatronic dolls have. And that shit-eating skeleton grin! That lipless rictus of exposed jawbone! That’s what you’ll see! Have you ever even seen maggots? Do you have any idea how revolting they are to see? Do you know what garbage men call them, when they find them writhing in the trash? “Disco Rice.” Well, your father’s face will have contracted a full Saturday Night Fever of disco rice, it will be alive and white with disco rice, I can guarantee you that, when you open that coffin lid.’ �
��Jesus, Michael, you think I haven’t thought of all this already?’ ‘Honestly, I don’t think you have. If you had thought this all the way through, if you’d really considered the emotional damage you’re going to sustain when you see your father in that condition—and not in a dream this time, Rachel: in real life, in full Technicolor 3-D!—you wouldn’t still be asking me where we keep the shovel.’ ‘You’re right. I may regret it, he may not have reanimated, I may be better off forgetting about it. But I can’t just forget about it. He’s my father, and I have to see for myself. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.’ ‘You may not live long with yourself if you do. Because what if he has reanimated? We bring him here and tie him to a chair in the kitchen? Strap down his arms and legs, like Wolfman, so that he doesn’t bite us in our sleep?’ ‘You’re my boyfriend—I need you to support me in this.’ ‘That’s exactly what you don’t need me to do. You need no more support in this than you did in caring for him. You know, or you think you know, that this is the right and daughterly thing, and what you need right now is for me to tell you that it’s insensible, a bad idea.’ ‘Is that what I needed when I was caring for him? For you to be there telling me that helping him into his wheelchair was “insensible,” “a bad idea”?’ ‘If he had been undead, yes, absolutely, that’s precisely what you would have needed: a friend to tell you that it’s insensible for anyone but a government agent, in a Hazmat suit, to help an undead man into his wheelchair. No one is in more awe of your dedication to your father than I am, but even I can see that grave-robbing is above and beyond the call of daughterly duty.’ ‘You would have me leave him in his coffin.’ ‘“You would have me leave him in his jail cell.” “You would have me leave him in his hospital bed.”’ ‘Stop it, I hate it when you do my voice.’ ‘The dead belong in their coffins. You wouldn’t spring your father from prison, just as you didn’t help him abscond from ICU. That’s not your duty to him. In all the time we’ve lived together—’ ‘A year?’ ‘In all that time I haven’t once heard you say, “My father is in a coffin, how uncomfortable, I have to dig him up.” You’ve made peace with your father’s death. Every time we talk about it you seem at peace and announce how at peace you are. Even when it happened you were at peace, not only with his death but with his burial. You’ve told me this before: how hard his relatives lobbied for his cremation and the scattering of his ashes and how it was you, not your mother, who defended his desire for a traditional burial. Now who is it who wants to drive out to his grave with a shovel and dig him up? Not his widow or any of his relatives but you. Have you even spoken with your mother about this yet?’ ‘She doesn’t believe that the buried are reanimating. She thinks only the recently deceased are.’ ‘A sensible woman. There’s no proof, not conclusive proof anyway, that any of the undead are coming from cemeteries, and in fact that seems more and more unlikely. Are any of them wearing suits and dresses? No, they’re all wearing pajamas and hospital gowns, if they’re wearing anything at all.’ ‘But that’s my point: what if he’s stuck in his coffin and is too weak to free himself? Even if the undead that you see on the streets aren’t from the cemeteries, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t buried corpses reanimating too.’ ‘So, what? We dig him up and bring him here? You watch the same news I do—his skin flakes off into my glass of milk and I’m dead, dead, then undead and on my way to contaminating you. Even if we take all precautions, we’re still bringing a rotting body into our apartment, to generate filth and disease, to make us and all of our neighbors sick. And the neighbors! As if we could keep him here without their noticing! They’ll hear him moaning the first day, and it won’t be LCDC they call, it’ll be the police. Because what you’re proposing is a crime, Rachel—’ ‘You only ever say my name when you’re mad at me.’ ‘I’m not mad at you, I’m just trying to talk sense. Your father belongs first of all in his coffin and secondly in a quarantine, and if we house him here instead, we’re in violation of the law. This isn’t the Underground Railroad, it’s the Chateau Dijon apartment complex. And if in fact your father has reanimated, he is decidedly not a runaway slave. He is—in your own words, Rachel—a diseased and brain-damaged man, a dangerous man.’ ‘I don’t know where you got the idea that I want to bring him here. I never said that. I just need to see for myself that he hasn’t revived in that horrible box, and, if he has, I need to let him out of it. Then I’ll call LCDC myself and be the first to commit him to a quarantine.’ I sighed. ‘A quarantine,’ I said, ‘someplace safe. And that would be all? Check the cemetery, call LCDC?’ ‘It’s not as if there aren’t visitation rights. There would be no need to bring him to the apartment. If I wanted to see him I could just visit the quarantine. Actually see him, instead of relying on these dreams.’

  It was noon when we arrived at the cemetery.27 Still abandoned after the outbreak, it was unsupervised by any guard or caretaker, and we were the only visitors—the only graverobbers—there. Alone among the green hills and the orderly rows of headstones, I stood by with the shovel while Rachel, kneeling beside her father’s grave, pressed her ear to the plot of grass above him, as if auscultating the ground for his heartbeat. She was probably listening for a faint and muffled moaning, or for clawing sounds at the coffin lid. She knelt like that for many minutes, then many minutes more, and the whole cemetery seemed deathly quiet indeed as I loomed uselessly above her, the shovel propped against my right shoulder. Whether she heard anything there she didn’t say. What I heard was her breathing and my own. I was thinking, then, about how Rachel would react to the sight of her undead father. The sight of his white eyes. If he actually had reanimated, I wondered, and if she actually did end up hearing something; if she actually did insist on digging down and if she actually opened that coffin lid—would we see the same thing? Would Rachel see, with me, the awesome otherworldliness in those eyes? While she knelt there with her ear to the grass, I braced myself for anything, including the shock of a pale hand bursting out of the soil. Though what eventually ended up happening was just that Rachel stood up and stretched and suggested that we leave. She seemed disappointed, but then, she didn’t cry, and on the ride home she was even able to announce—as if weighing the other side of the thing—that by this point he was probably merely a skeleton anyway.

  So that is where Rachel is coming from. That is where she is coming from when in the kitchen this morning she asks me what Matt plans to do once he finds Mr. Mazoch. That is where she is coming from when she asks me (not explicitly, but with the injured expression on her face, and with the expression, too, of all the wide-eyed owls on her tank top and all the eyelike polka-dots on her pants, which together stare me down like the members of a jury box) whether Mazoch plans to beat his father’s brains in with a baseball bat.

  And how can I go about answering this question? Even if I knew for certain that Matt’s plan was to dispatch Mr. Mazoch, I could never explain this to Rachel, who helped care for her father in ways Matt probably never dreamed of caring for his, and who objected out of principle to her family’s decision to euthanize him, and who visits him regularly on an oneiric plane, and who worried about his comfort and wellbeing even into (un) death. How could I explain to her that a son might prefer a dead father to an undead father, that an undead father might weigh like a burden on a son’s conscience? How to convey the sense of filial duty that might be motivating Mazoch to put down, not his father, but the shell of his father, the corpse of a man who had been ready to die and who in all probability did not wish to return from death? To do so I would have to persuade her of the logic of ‘Mr. Mazoch is not Mr. Mazoch,’ ‘My father is not my father,’ this sense in which a hungry creature that has inherited only the body, the remembered itinerary, and the gait of a man (or, if you rather, a man from whom everything but his body, muscle memory, and gait have been pared away, and to whom a hunger has been added) is not the man himself. No need to invoke the Ship of Theseus here! Such an argument would mean nothing, or next to nothing, to Rachel, who will take her father where she can get hi
m. Mr. Mazoch is barely there, consciousness-wise? He responds as an automaton to only the most basic stimuli? No matter. Her own father, laid out in his sickbed as a baby in its crib, could acknowledge only by the glaze in his eyes all the distractions that his family had set up in the room for him: Christmas lights, shiny garlands, balloons, flowers, a television set and a radio, countless other mobile-like devices intended to ward off his boredom. Mr. Mazoch is rotting as he moves? His entrails hang in strands from his stomach, and his eyeball dangles from its socket by an optic nerve? Trifles. Her own father appears in her dreams as a Frankenstein’s monster, patched imperfectly together from bloated corpses, with only half of his amassed body parts working properly at any given moment, and still she takes him where she can get him. Mr. Mazoch is capable only of inchoate moaning? So be it. For years the only phrases that her father was able to form through the pain of his tracheotomy tube were ‘You’re beautiful,’ ‘It hurts,’ and ‘I love you,’ and even in her dreams he’s occasionally afflicted with undead Tourette’s, involuntarily shouting obscenities in response to all of her questions about the afterlife. Did she not have to hide her tears as she was delivering one-sided goodbyes to her bedridden father, is she not now grateful for any dreams of a verbally incontinent father? On the contrary, she takes him where she can get him. Even Matt’s strongest justification for disgust—the fact that Mr. Mazoch feeds compulsively on the living—would cut no ice with Rachel. In the span of her adolescence her father went from eating spoonfuls of peanut butter straight from the jar (with such gusto that a whiff of Jif on my breath still reminds her, powerfully, of him) to folding all foods directly into his stomach, with the indifference of a mussel. ‘Cannibalism?’ Rachel would say. ‘Pah! A father’s diet is not his child’s concern.’ No, Rachel would take her father where she could get him, even a rotting aphasic anthropophagous father, and she would be aggrieved and confused to hear that Mazoch feels any differently.28