A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  ‘If you ever did find him,’ I begin… but almost immediately I lose my resolve. Instead of asking what he wants to do, I decide to ask—in a roundabout way—where he’d want to do it. That is, I ask where he’d most prefer to find the man. ‘If you could find him anywhere,’ I continue, ‘where would you want it to be?’ ‘Out of all the sites?’ Matt asks. ‘Let me think about it.’ He picks up his silverware and resumes eating, as if to defer the question, and I watch as he keeps shoveling in bites, shredding white threads of chicken through the fork tines, chewing with his mouth open. Each time his teeth part, flashing a clump of meat, I wince a little.34

  Matt sees me staring: ‘You’re looking at me like a starving person. Why don’t you order something?’ ‘Do you know how nervous it makes me just to watch you eat? I’m not going to order a dish of infected food for myself. With a side of infection. And who knows what in the water, which probably it’s not even bottled, just straight from the tap.’ ‘Not even the tap: squeezed fresh from an infected’s lesions.’ I cringe. I’m remembering the footage of this one Youtube video, in which the wounds and pustules along an infected’s skin dehisce from sunburn—there is a runny yellowness like yolk. Mazoch regards me skeptically: ‘Not even dessert?’ ‘Confections?’ I say, allowing for a beat: ‘More like infections.’ ‘Very good, Vermaelen.’ ‘I mean, I’m exaggerating, but what a dumb risk.’ ‘Yeah, I’m a real daredevil. It’s like, I’m such an Evel Knievel, of eating chicken breast and rice, I’m not even wearing a condom right now.’

  I, who engage daily in sessions of unprotected sex with Rachel, appreciate that my armchair mysophobia is at some level an overreaction. The chicken meat would, after all, have been well cooked, and the infection itself (of which basically nothing has been empirically verified: not whether it can be transmitted across species, or even whether animals, which are universally asymptomatic, can in fact serve as carriers at all) could probably still be assumed to sizzle and be sterilized in a frying pan. Even the bit about the tap water was merely rhetorical. While FIGHT THE BITE strongly discourages drinking anything other than bottled or boiled water, and while FEMA has supplied citizens with aluminum cans boldly and majuscularly labeled FILTERED DRINKING WATER, there have been no reports, so far as I know, of the contamination of wells by infected effluent. Yet it would be as meaningless as an aggregate of spit on the surface of his ice water, or as meaningless as blood let from a minor wound into food handled by an ungloved hand, for a kind of absence to uncoil in Mazoch by the end of the week. Even assuming that he could trust a line cook or a server not to intentionally infect his meal,35 there’s no accounting for ignorance, or carelessness. Mazoch knows all of this. I don’t understand what’s gotten into him. Eating chicken now, after a month of packed lunches? It reeks of ‘He had a week left till retirement,’ a kind of fate-baiting self-endangerment and heedless hamartia. It’s like he’s daring the infection to infect him.

  But by far the dumber risk is that we’re even inside right now. Although the diner is empty of other customers, there’s still the staff on hand: our waitress; a police officer stationed as security; some cooks. Paradoxically, the presence of the officer has the effect of making me feel less safe. He’s just one more body to reanimate. Any person in this room—if not all of them—could drop to the floor at any moment, and begin to reanimate. Then it would be like that food-court footage all over again, in which a single person manages to spark a mass outbreak. And if it were Mazoch who reanimated today—going limp in his booth, twitching in revivification—there would be only three feet of the formica of the tabletop separating him from me. As he sprawled across it, clutching at me with his thewy hands, I would have to fend him off, fend off his huge strength, for as long as I could, until the officer a few booths over rushed here to restrain him. Assuming, that is, that the officer himself hadn’t already reanimated. I look over Matt’s broad shoulder toward the officer’s booth, trying to make out whether the man has ordered or eaten anything since he’s been here, but all I can see is the back of the seat opposite him.

  When the waitress returns to take Mazoch’s plate, she offers him a laminated dessert menu, and he props it on the table so that I can see its centerfold photographs of brownies. Such a menu as the devil might have shown Jesus in the desert, each brownie stage-lit and provocatively angled, glinting in places throughout its morsel moisture and the deep obscene brownness of its glaze. Mazoch must be able to tell by my expression that I’m little tempted: ‘You know we’re talking a thousandth decimal place? What are the chances,’ he asks, emphasizing the word ‘chances,’ ‘that one brownie or one piece of chicken, from this diner, this afternoon, is going to infect either of us?’ ‘In my case, no chance,’ I answer, ‘because I refuse to order anything.’ ‘Suit yourself,’ he says.

  I remind him that he still hasn’t answered my question, about where he’d want to find his father, and he folds the dessert menu down on the table. ‘I know where I wouldn’t want to find him,’ he says. ‘I do too,’ I say. ‘Feeding, right?’ When we first discussed this, toward the beginning of the search, I asked Matt whether he was ever afraid of finding Mr. Mazoch. And he confided in me that there were certain scenarios that kept him up at night. He would never want to find Mr. Mazoch feeding, he said: to see him crouched over his victim, hands rooting inside an opened stomach, the ribs pried and the long guts unspooled, and to hear the sloppy wetness of his chewing; for his father to turn back, looking over his shoulder, and for the man to be unrecognizable by the cloudiness of his eyes, so vacant, wide, and white, and by the blood, too, smeared carelessly across his mouth, as by a child’s finger-painting hand. Even worse than finding his father feeding, he said, would be to find him at the moment when, having fed too much, his undigesting stomach burst: to see him lying helpless in a ditch, his legs and arms rotating futilely, like an upturned beetle’s, around the scene of his unseamed belly, the gore steaming in the grass where it spilled, and his mouth giving terribly of froth, a white flow down either side, as if vomiting moonlight. These and like places, these and like positions, Mazoch would prefer not to find his father in, he told me. They belong only to the undead, are images that the undead have introduced.36 Better to see his father shrouded in some illusion of humanity—better to find him brushing, out of habit, his teeth, or standing peacefully above his bed—than to see him utterly transformed by undeath, feeding as only they feed, dismembered and atwitch as only they can be. Or at least these were Mazoch’s sentiments the last time that we discussed this.37

  So I’m surprised today to hear him give a different answer: ‘Where I wouldn’t want to find him,’ he says, ‘is at his elementary school, or high school, or another childhood place. Places that predate me and his fatherhood.’ Not out of vanity or some need to be remembered, he explains, as if he should be the figure who looms largest in his father’s memory, and whose apartment it is that the man should return to in undeath. But even to find him at the antiques mall, or his house in Denham, would be better than finding him in more ancient neighborhoods. At least then he’d be returning to portions of his life that Matt understood of him: he’d still be making sense of himself, in some way, as a father (as related to Matt), rather than as a son, returning to his own father’s home but otherwise… unattached. ‘Does that make sense?’ he asks. It does, and I tell him so. In fact, I am momentarily relieved to hear him say it. Because if Matt prefers to think of his father’s corpse as a father, to find it in a fatherly space, then he can’t possibly be intending to kill it. Could he? He must want—as Rachel did with her own father—nothing more than to rescue Mr. Mazoch. See him safely to a quarantine. Hence the strong emotional incentives Matt has for believing (or for making himself believe) that it is ‘his father’ he is saving. If his plan really were to put Mr. Mazoch down, then all the emotional incentives would have to be running in the opposite direction. Wouldn’t they? Assuming that he seriously intended to one day swing a bat into his father’s body, Matt would almost certainl
y prefer to dissociate that body from the idea of his father, to reject any recognition of Mr. Mazoch there. Baseball bat in hand, Matt would need to think himself to the point at which his father was not his father. In which case a ‘childhood site’ or an ‘ancient neighborhood’—a place devoid of paternal associations—would be exactly where Matt would want to find him. Somewhere that he could regard him as a stranger.

  ‘So these are the places?’ I ask. ‘The antiques mall, or in Denham?’ Alternately massaging each bicep with the opposite hand, Matt reconsiders: ‘No. Maybe just in a neutral space. Standing in a field off the interstate, maybe, neither like himself or not.’ During those first weeks, whenever we drove down the interstate, we would often pass fields such as this, peopled by their white shapes. Stray infected that had wandered off, like cattle, into a cool place to stand before noon. Lit up by our headlights in the morning fog, they would stand out so lustrous and ghostly that, yes, ‘neither like themselves nor not’ is right: it was as if they occupied some intervening space between the living and the undead, not speaking and not breathing, but not cannibalizing anyone either. Just standing purposeless and still. And the mist was so thick in the fields that it was easy to imagine that dew had settled on their bodies, dampening their nightgowns, and to imagine that the dew on their bodies would catch the light, when the light came, in a vivid glistening. Easy, too, to sympathize with Matt on this point, to imagine him wanting to find his father there. For who wouldn’t want to find a father like this, undead or otherwise, standing in a misty field at dawn and slanted upon by a shaft of rising sun, which would give every droplet to flash momentarily on his skin, flaring out whitely, as if he were sprinkled, not with moisture, but with roscid light? I can imagine with perfect clarity and ease Mazoch swinging a bat on such a father.

  The waitress returns, and when Mazoch hands her the menu, she asks whether we won’t be having any dessert. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ll be having this gentleman here for dessert. In about an hour.’ ‘That’s not funny,’ I say. ‘I think it’s funny.’ ‘Well, it’s not.’ How graceful of this waitress, Elizabeth, to laugh before leaving, as if she did think it was funny, or even understood.

  WHEN I GET HOME THIS AFTERNOON, THE FIRST thing Rachel asks me is whether I’ve asked Matt about his plans. I have to confess that I haven’t. ‘But I didn’t even need to ask,’ I tell her. Recounting what Matt said in the diner, I reassure her that I have no doubts about the search (this is not true, of course. But it would be impossible to confess my doubts without worrying her even more [and even more needlessly] than I have already). Rachel seems satisfied with my answer. At any rate, she doesn’t ask any follow-up questions, and before she can, I suggest that we try an exercise together. Inspired by my conversation with Matt, I ask whether she thinks we ought to be making lists: whether we ought to compile some of our personal rendezvous points, the respective and mutual haunts that we expect ourselves to return to. That way, if one of us ever goes missing, the other will know approximately where to look. Rachel agrees that this is a good idea, and we each grab a pen and notepad, and a beer, and step out onto our apartment complex’s concrete walkway. Sitting single file, we set to work, writing in steady silence. Now the sun is low, but the day is still warm, our beers cold, and the sky brilliant above us.38

  Cross-legged, with my back to our apartment door, I watch Rachel ahead of me. She appears to have stopped writing for the moment. Her journal is pressed against her knees, which she’s drawn up to her chest, and she leans forward a little, hugging her shins, her long bare limbs beautiful in the sunlight. I take in the sight of her blond head, the arc of her back. Sensing that she’s being watched, she turns her head over her shoulder to face me now, smiling, and I understand that she’s having a truly pleasant time with this. This exercise delights her. She’s treating it as an opportunity to turn certain memories over in her mind, to meditate on the moments in her life when she’s been most present. ‘Where would my reanimated body return to?’ she asks herself, and it is a happy question. As in: where would my body be happiest to go? Where would it want its afterlife to take place? Which locations did I love enough to want to make a heaven of ?39

  Needless to say, the question is proving more complicated than that for me. In fact I find this exercise perplexing, and in between each rendezvous point that I’ve been able to come up with (Tunica Hills, our apartment, a campus lawn that she and I once picnicked on), I’ve allowed countless minutes to pass. My problem, I know, is indecisiveness. I lack any confidence in myself or the list, in my predictive capacities or the predictability of my undead body. For what do I really know—aside from a popular-science version of the process—about the undead’s supposed homing instinct? In undeath, a reanimated body can somehow navigate around the streets of its past, returning to sites that have been memorialized as loci in its unconscious. In interviews and newspaper articles, neurologists have even coined a word for this process: mnemocartography. As if the undead could simply read their memories like roadmaps, to keep from getting lost in their labyrinths.40 But what does this really explain? How accurate are these maps? Do only happy sites get maps? Sad sites, shameful sites, traumatic sites? Sites of repression or repetition or rage? How must a memory be affectively inflected for the body to make a note of its postal address? With what authority could I guarantee Rachel that she could find me at that campus lawn?

  It was a perfectly ordinary campus lawn. Just an average stretch of grass that we brought blankets and a gin handle to a single dusk last October (a ‘liquor picnic,’ she’d called it), lying alone on our spot in the quad to drink and admire the sunset. What I remember especially is the sweater Rachel was wearing, white cashmere, the kind whose threads fray upward in a fuzz of invisible cilia. She was careful to lie across the red plaid blanket that we’d laid out on the grass, so that she wouldn’t get dirt stains or chlorophyll on the cashmere. Nevertheless, a rogue dead leaf that had found its way onto the blanket somehow got enmeshed in her sweater. It was caught in her right sleeve’s field of fuzz, floating half a centimeter above the sleeve itself on the tips of all those fine white threads. From a certain angle, this gave the brittle leaf the appearance of hovering in the air, and when I pointed out the illusion to Rachel, she laughed with delight. Beaming down at the levitating leaf, she said it looked as if it were bodysurfing on a crowd of ghosts. And by God it did: that dead leaf, brown and crispate, seemed to be borne aloft by a thousand invisible, white hands. And she had noticed it and said so! I was so overcome with love for her then that the entire afternoon seemed to be corroborating the joy in my chest: how crisp the dusk was; how warm I felt from gin; how, even in the early darkness, low as a storm’s shadow, the fall hues around us were still so vibrant and lush, almost to a threatening degree;41 and then that creaky song of geese overhead, two-toned and pendular, like the swaying of an unoiled porch swing—how, if you closed your eyes, you actually felt as if you were lying in a field of unoiled porch swings.

  A fine memory. If a couples counselor asked me to adduce memorable moments from our courtship, this memory, surely, would make the cut. But if I were asked, as in fact I have been asked, to adduce memorable moments from my entire life (to survey all of my private Bethlehem stars, drawing up the mnemonic astrolabe that my undead body might be navigating by), who’s to say that this memory—one pinprick of light in my life among many—wouldn’t be lost in the glare of another? Aren’t there strong reasons for doubting that my phantom-footed shape would bother returning there? The lawn is a comparatively limited site, given that I visited it only once and associate only one happiness with it. So it could feasibly be superseded by some older site, a place that has afforded me heterogeneous joys on multiple occasions. If I were being completely honest with myself, wouldn’t I cross the lawn off my list, and replace it, say, with my elementary-school playground? It was on this very playground that I enjoyed—for fifty minutes a day, five days a week, eight years of my childhood—recess, a period of unfettered, enth
usiastic play. Wouldn’t the steady, daily, decade-long accumulation of this enthusiasm all but guarantee the playground a first-magnitude memory, more alluring by far (to my undead self at least) than the campus lawn would be?

  When I first started brainstorming for this exercise, I thought that it would be a rapid-fire, first-thought-best-thought process. I thought that I would just jot down the most obvious sites that occurred to me, on the assumption that they would be the ones to occur to my undead body. That’s exactly what Matt and I did on behalf of Mr. Mazoch: we stuck to the surface of Matt’s memories of his father, picking out all the prominent spaces from the final years of his life.

  But look where that has gotten Matt. Look at how arbitrary and unscientific that selection process is, and how much inefficiency has been introduced into Matt’s search algorithm as a result. Every day he has to check his father’s house, the antiques mall, Louie’s Café (what are all, after all, only best guesses), visiting a dozen such sites with equal vigilance, even though Mr. Mazoch is likely to return, at most, to only a few of them. Matt’s forced to spread his time indiscriminately, among both likely and unlikely sites, simply because he has no way of distinguishing them. He can never be sure, when staking out the house in Denham, that his father isn’t at Louie’s, or vice versa.42 That’s why these traces must be so crazy-making for Mazoch: if only he had been in Denham an hour later, he must be telling himself, instead of at Louie’s. Then he could have seen his father shattering that window.

  This scenario is what my own list is supposed to be preventing for Rachel. I should be presenting her with a conscientiously compiled, manageable handful of places that I’m 100% sure of my visiting. That’s the degree of certainty I should have—100%!—about my sites and myself. I owe it to her to give my selection process that kind of deliberation and thought, because otherwise she’ll be putting herself as fruitlessly at risk—frustrating the work of her mourning just as much—as Mazoch is whenever he patrols by trial and error the full miscellany of his father’s haunts. I can’t bear the thought of Rachel waiting alone in the rain, jilted by me in undeath, due to the carelessness with which I’ve compiled my list. What if she’s waylaid by undead at a site she never would have gone to if I hadn’t thoughtlessly assured her I could be found there? I imagine her calling out my name on the campus lawn, dangerously calling attention to herself, all while I’m standing beneath the monkey bars on the playground of my old elementary school, a place that she’s never heard me speak about and so has no reason to associate me with. Does Rachel even know where I went to grade school?