by Bennett Sims
Would be aggrieved and confused, for that matter, if I were to defend Mazoch, to devil’s-advocate for him, or especially if I were to continue to accompany him each morning in full knowledge of his ‘plan.’
This would all be easier for me if, like Rachel, I could simply condemn patricide outright. If I were not even tempted to defend it as an option. But the fact is that the ethics of undeath are murky to me. The questions that Matt and Rachel have been made to face, in the wake of the epidemic, are not questions that it has made me face. This choice between the grave and the quarantine, the shovel and the baseball bat… I have trouble, truthfully, even imagining myself in their shoes. Because my own parents both died (car crash) and were cremated years before the epidemic, they have always been ineligible for undeath. I scattered their ashes myself. I never had to worry about their reanimating, or ask myself what I would do. What my duties would be. Unlike Rachel and Matt, I’ve never had to think of them in terms of undeath. I’ve had to think only of myself in terms of undeath. So whenever I try to align myself with Rachel, and work up some primordial disgust at the thought of patricide, I find that I cannot do it. Who knows how I would react, if I were Matt? It’s his decision.
This, like so much else, is not something I can explain to Rachel this morning. So I do not try to. Having finished buttering our barely toasted toast, I bring the plate to the table and sit beside her. ‘I still don’t know,’ I say to her. ‘I don’t know what he wants to do. But I’ll ask.’
‘Michael,’ she says, reaching over to put her hand on my hand. ‘Mm,’ I say. ‘Just promise me you won’t let him use that bat.’ And here I exhale, immensely relieved, for at last she has given me something that I can truthfully tell her: ‘Rachel. Honey. You know we never use the bats.’
LATER THIS MORNING, I WATCH FROM THE passenger seat as Matt uses his bat to break into a building.
We’re staking out the antiques mall in Denham where Mr. Mazoch used to rent a booth. It’s a squat stucco box isolated on an empty stretch of road, and it’s been locked up for as long as we’ve been coming here: the glass double-doors in front are both expertly boarded from inside, with a length of chain wound around the push bar and a heavy padlock dangling dull and scrotal from the links. Since Mr. Mazoch couldn’t have broken in, we’ve never tried to. Normally Matt just cases the place and we sit in the parking lot to wait.
But today Matt pauses at the double doors, and I watch from the car as he scrutinizes the windows. He taps at the glass, as if experimentally, with the bat handle’s beveled knob. Then, before I understand what is about to happen, he plants his feet apart, cocking the bat at his shoulder, and swings a tremendous arc into one of the windows, which must be shatterproof, for it wobbles indomitably and the bat recoils. Even from across the parking lot I can hear the hollow pdunk of it. Undeterred, Matt simply rides the recoil of the bat and heaves his hips into a second swing, which recoils again, and then into a third swing, and so on.
After the fourth or fifth swing, I realize what Matt must be thinking. It is the same thing he was thinking at Mr. Mazoch’s earlier this morning, when he insisted on inspecting the house for a second time: he is determined to find another trace today. A trail of muddy bootprints. Another scrap of blue plaid cloth. He’s going to find something, if not at his father’s house then here, and he’ll beat down those double doors to do it. Never mind that the mall—likely boarded since the outbreak—cannot be home to any recent traces. And never mind the incredible risks he’s courting. For instance, any infected in the vicinity, whom Matt might be summoning with each resounding drumbeat of the bat. Or else the police coasting down the road, who might catch him in the act of trespassing. Or else—it finally occurs to me—whatever is inside the antiques mall, which was probably padlocked for a reason. I roll down my window in haste and shout across the parking lot: ‘Hey, Bambino! Barry Bonds! Cool it!’
Once Matt returns to the driver’s seat, we have very little to say to one another. I don’t ask him what he thought he’d find inside, and he doesn’t tell me. We just stare out the windshield at the antiques mall in silence. As usual, there is nothing to see: sunlight radiates off the gravel and onto the storefront’s stucco, which looks buttered with noon light.29 The only shade comes from a drooping birch tree, planted at the edge of the lot, where it casts sprays of shadow onto the façade. Eventually Matt reaches into his backpack and withdraws an apple. Over the next several minutes the silence in the car is punctuated by the log-splitting sound of his bites. I glance now and then from the windshield to watch him, waiting for him to finish so that we can leave. But he is eating the fruit with ruminative slowness, staring intently out the window as he chews, and he lets long moments pass between each bite.30
At last, to break the silence, I ask him what he’s looking at. He explains: he has also been admiring the storefront’s stucco, he says, watching as the nearby birch’s shadow ivies up the building. Its branches cast a fine, fernlike pattern against the emblazed plaster: ‘Like veins,’ he says. And indeed the flattened shadows, branching slenderly into twigs and thin tendrils on the surface of the wall, look veiny in ways that the three-dimensional shoots do not. Before I can say anything about this, Mazoch asks, rhetorically, whether I know what the birch’s shadow reminds him of: ‘Other than veins I mean.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I give up.’ ‘My father.’ ‘…Yeah?’ ‘It reminds me of my dad’s heart attack, actually.’
He proceeds to tell me that when he visited the hospital, a cardiologist showed him Mr. Mazoch’s coronary angiogram, an X-ray in which only the heart’s blood vessels, not the organ itself, were visible. The branching veins—flushed for this purpose with radiopaque dyes—showed up ash-gray on the monitor, a network of dark tendrils swaying in an undyed mist of X-rayed whiteness, and there they looked so much like the shadow of a tree (or else just a tree at night, its silhouette outlined by the ghostly fog that Mr. Mazoch’s translucent heart appeared as) that to this day, years later he says, he still reads the tracery of trees’ shadows angiogrammatically, as the calligraphy of his father’s heart. ‘It looked just like that,’ he remarks, pointing again to the capillary shadow on the brilliant storefront. ‘The angiogram did.’
This is only the second time that Matt has ventured more than a passing reference to Mr. Mazoch’s heart attack. The first was one morning while we were driving, during which he gave tactful but evasive answers to my questions until, once it’d become clear he didn’t really want to talk about it, I stopped asking them. All I learned then was this: over six feet tall and three hundred pounds, and for that matter over sixty years old, Mr. Mazoch worked full time as a plumber (which, according to Matt, was more backbreaking and labor-intensive than one would think [it often involved carrying claw-footed bathtubs up the steep staircases of un-air-conditioned houses, for instance]); at work he sustained himself on Snickers bars, eating on his half-hour lunch break every day only these turd-dark sticks of saturated fat, and elsewhere as here his diet consisted of whatever was worst for him, his dinners spent at fried-chicken chains and his breakfasts, if he bothered to eat breakfast at all, at McDonald’s. Oh, and he smoked too, about a pack a day. So one night after handling a jackhammer all afternoon Mr. Mazoch suffered that seized-up pain in his sternum and vomited gray spume into the shower. Matt, in college and living on campus at that point, wasn’t there when it happened. It was only much later in the night that he received a call from the hospital, where Mr. Mazoch had managed (while undergoing myocardial infarction! while his great heart fibrillated!) to drive himself.
His father had had a heart attack, Matt was told, and was being operated on as they spoke. A quadruple bypass. Could he come to the hospital? He could. I know now what he saw on arrival—the treetop angiogram of Mr. Mazoch’s X-rayed veins—but at the time all he mentioned of his visit to the hospital was what the cardiologist had told him: (1) that it had been ‘this close’—accompanied by a hair’s breadth of air between two demonstrating fingers—that if
Mr. Mazoch had arrived ‘even ten minutes later’ he’d be dead; and (2) that when asked for his son’s cell number Mr. Mazoch had instructed them to tell the boy, not that he’d be okay or that there was no need to worry, but that he loved him, last-words words, just that he loved him and nothing else. Matt’s tone spiked when he related these two things, in his voice a little anger flashed like mica.31 And it was here that I backed off from what struck me as a sore subject. Today, when he remarks the birch’s resemblance to the angiogram, I can hear the slightest echo of that anger, and so I refrain—for the time being—from asking him what Rachel asked me to. I wonder how long he has been brooding over this association: whether the shadow could have reminded even earlier of the heart attack (of all the excesses that led up to it: the obesity and the greed and the sheer ignorant gourmandism), and whether it was out of anger that Matt attacked the double doors. At this thought I imagine him battering the façade itself (swinging that bat like an ax into the shadow, as if chopping into the trunk of the tree of the veins of his father’s heart), and at this thought I imagine him battering Mr. Mazoch, beating on his undead body, just as Rachel fears.
Mazoch is finished with his apple. He has eaten the entirety of the core with grim efficiency, and I watch as he spits the dark seeds out of the driver-side window, where they patter onto the gravel of the parking lot. How far from the tree the fruit falls, it occurs to me! The father ashes a cigarette onto the gravel, the son spits out apple seeds. Is this what the heart attack meant to Matt, in the end? A memento mori, spurring him to eat an apple a day? Was Mr. Mazoch’s incised chest, bloated and vulnerable on the operating table, Matt’s own archaic torso of Apollo, exhorting him to change his life? Probably not. Matt, with his wrestler’s build and workout regimen, has likely been eating an apple a day for ages, and he definitely didn’t need his father’s brush with death to scare him off Snickers bars and greasy hamburgers. If anything, Mr. Mazoch’s heart attack would have only confirmed Matt in his habits. But I’d still be willing to bet that those habits—the bookishness no less than the bodybuilding—were formed in direct contradistinction to Mr. Mazoch. That is, I’d be willing to bet that Matt styled himself consciously as his father’s opposite.
It can’t be an accident that the fruit has fallen as far off as it has. Indeed, it’s as if Matt’s entire life has been engaged in this one Sisyphean task: to roll the fruit as far uphill from the tree as possible. That Mr. Mazoch was a college dropout and plumber, Matt should graduate summa from LSU’s English department; that Mr. Mazoch preoccupied himself with the most quotidian artifacts from the past (lamps and church hats and farm tools, interesting only secondarily, for the dust of history they were coated with), Matt should devote himself to books, the past’s loftiest artifacts; that Mr. Mazoch held his gut in his hands before the mirror every decade, his expanding gut, and appraised the deep concavity of his belly button (like a prostate it had enlarged! Big as a grape now, so unbelievably extended from the tight punctum it had made in his washboard stomach when at twenty he was slim as Matt!), and that Mr. Mazoch, staring each decade at his widening, worsening reflection, had the naivety to ask (his wife, Matt, the reflection itself), ‘Why do I keep putting on weight? Plumbing is such physical labor. I’m out there sweating every day, working with my hands, but I can’t seem to keep the pounds off!’, that as his wastebasket brimmed with Snickers wrappers he had the naivety to ask why he couldn’t keep the pounds off… Matt should do weighted pull-ups from the bar suspended in his doorframe,32 and each morning complete a set of one hundred elevated pushups (his feet propped on the cushion of an office chair), and hold his body horizontal to the ground for quivering, minute-long sessions of core-strengthening planks, and not only that, but should also mind his diet, eating organic apples whole for lunch, and spitting the seeds out hard, the way cartoon characters spit bullets, as if each ballistic spat black apple seed were itself the force that was keeping the doctor away.
What an antonymic existence Mazoch’s led! The wage laborer inverted as the scholar; the car cluttered with bronze lamps and landscape paintings inverted as the car cluttered with OEDs and usage guides (or, to put it another way, junk in the trunk inverted as Strunk in the trunk); the three hundred pounds of the quadruple bypass inverted as the three hundred pounds of the all-time bench max.
It has been a noble effort on Matt’s part, but, of course, no son can succeed in such an antonymic project. No matter how differentiated the son thinks he’s become, in actuality he has never left, never escaped out from under, the law of patrimonial synonymy that this whole time has been mastering him. The father’s habits, gestures, and ways of being end up predetermining him, such that even as he ‘differs’ from his father, he’s nonetheless bound to the man by some common denominator.33 Matt crouching in a dank aisle, browsing the spines of secondhand novels; Mr. Mazoch crouching in a dank aisle, browsing a Depression-era child’s doll set. Matt unable to say no to a bargain, even if it means pushing his apartment to capacity, stacking long-dead authors’ books in teetering hoodoos on the bedroom floor; Mr. Mazoch unable to say no to a bargain, even if it means pushing his dilapidated house to capacity, ranging a long-dead child’s dolls across the seat of his living room couch. Matt living by himself, in lonely, disorganized reclusion, consoled only by his library; Mr. Mazoch living by himself, in lonely, disorganized reclusion, consoled only by his antiques. Two collectors, two hoarders, casting a wide net over the past tense and trawling its goods into their rats’ nests. No, so far from being antonyms, there could be nothing more identical than Matt the scholar of dusty sentences and Mr. Mazoch the scholar of dusty whatever else. Even the bodybuilding, so ostensibly oppositional to everything Mr. Mazoch’s dietetics represented, is just one long way around the barn among others. For once Matt is his father’s age (once his slowed metabolism renders weighted pull-ups and pushups insufficient exercise, and once he aches too much or is too tired or weak to do even them as regularly as he’d need to, and once his lifelong disregard for cardiovascular exercise starts catching up with him), all this otiose muscle that he’s spent his youth building up will gradually atrophy and sag, deteriorating into so much fatherly fat. Then the symmetrization will be finished. Surely Matt is aware of this! At least subconsciously, he must appreciate the fact that this final symmetry between him and his father is preparing itself even now in his body, latently stored there like the heart disease that he’s probably inherited as well. He must understand that if I were to submerge him in the antiques store’s stale miasma, aging him, he’d come out in minutes resembling Mr. Mazoch.
This, too—just the fact that he’s here right now, in the antiques store’s parking lot, whether he’s spitting apple seeds onto its gravel or gristly beef—bespeaks a synonymy with his father. For it’s clear that the crowning similarity, the point of pure identity where he and Mr. Mazoch converge, is this itinerary that Matt’s acceded to. In shadowing Mr. Mazoch (in staking out his haunts), Matt follows literally in his father’s footsteps. He begins each morning in Denham just as Mr. Mazoch did; visits the same gas stations and grocery stores and, today, the same roadside antiques mall; sits in his car in the parking lots of these places, haunting another man’s haunts. He’s picked up precisely where Mr. Mazoch left off. At least before, prior to this search, Matt (however synonymous with his father he may otherwise have been) had unique routines to distinguish him. The map of his activities throughout Baton Rouge—were he to mark in thick ink the streets that he traveled—would have diverged noticeably from his father’s, his own red route coursing from LSU to the gym to the library. But now that route, briefly diverted, has returned like a tributary to the river that Mr. Mazoch’s synonymy is. Now Matt, who forswore a life of manual labor and fast food, reports every morning to the plumbing warehouse and the McDonald’s, slavishly reiterating the dailiness of his father’s existence. Their two maps are congruent now—the symmetrization is finished!—to the last cartographic detail.
Perhaps that more than a
nything is at the root of Matt’s anger: that he has become his father, or else is doomed to become him. I glance at him again, at his strong square jaw and blunt nose and cleft chin, and try to match him up in my mind with Mr. Mazoch (a man I’ve never met, or even seen a photo of). Imagining the tendrils of brown fog from the antiques mall, I try to visualize how Matt’s features might change if they were aged in timelapse to Mr. Mazoch’s age. If his face decayed as fast as that apple he’s finished eating.
Matt lets loose a sigh and drums the steering wheel impatiently, then honks the horn three times. Nothing, anywhere, stirs. Even the birch, whose shadow we’ve been gawking at like Platonic troglodytes, is unruffled by breeze: its leaves are all still, and green as the Real.
‘Do you want to get out of here?’ I ask. ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘I guess so,’ he says. ‘I guess I do.’ But after starting the engine he just sits for a minute before moving the gearshift into reverse.
TYPICALLY FOR LUNCH WE EAT PACKED sandwiches in the parking lot of Louie’s Café, but today Matt decides to order a meal inside. I sit opposite him in a red vinyl booth, watching him tear into a grill-striped breast of chicken. I still haven’t asked him what he wants to do when he finds his father, but all throughout lunch I’ve been working up the nerve to.