A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  ‘Done?’ she asks. Looking up I see that she’s set her journal on the concrete and twisted around to study me. Her legs are still propped in front of her, dangling between the balusters of the safety railing. I nod distractedly, then ask, ‘Do you know where I went to grade school?’ ‘St. Aloysius. You’ve told me that.’ ‘You attended Sacred Heart?’ ‘Kay through eight,’ she says, ‘St. Joseph’s for high school. But they’re not on the list.’ Her face scrunches in sudden concern: ‘Should they be on the list?’ ‘That’s a matter for you and your conscience.’ ‘But did you put Aloysius?’ ‘The playground,’ I lie (though I now have every intention of adding it). ‘Oh, the playground!’ she sighs. I can tell by her voice, a whimsy of transported joy, that it’s been years since she’s remembered recess, and that the very word ‘playground’—like the ringing of the recess bell—has sent a crowd of childhood reveries stampeding forth from the recesses of her memory. She writes something down on her list. ‘What about the lawn where we went on that picnic?’ I ask. ‘Do you remember?’ ‘Of course I do,’ she says, ‘the little leaf! I have it down already. But thank you for reminding me.’ She has it down already! Oh, what a jolt of confidence—in that memory, in the list, in myself—it is to hear her say that! Why did I ever doubt the campus lawn? I imagine the other sites that would lie above and below it on her list (her father’s grave, surely, plus the wing of the hospital where he’d been kept; her mother’s house; Tunica probably; and, now that I’ve reminded her of it, the playground at Sacred Heart), and I gratify myself with the illusion that we know everything about one another, are transparent to each other, that our memories share everything.

  ‘So are you ready?’ Rachel asks. ‘To read them?’ I glance over at her open journal, in which her tight, clean script has filled an entire page, and I note that her list is already much longer than I had been expecting. Maybe five times as long as mine. The amount of ink alone outstrips the half dozen sites I’ve attributed to her so far, and I estimate that after her father’s grave, the playground, and the campus lawn, after Tunica, the hospital, and her mother’s house, there will be room enough still for ten more sites on the lines she’s filled.

  Yet which ten sites? When I try to fathom them, I feel an abyss opening within me. I recall what Matt said today, about needing to find Mr. Mazoch in a fatherly space. Almost despite myself, I find that this is what I’m hoping now—desperately—with regard to Rachel. I’m actually anxious to hear the results of her list, which I would prefer to comprise solely our spots. I want those extra ten lines to hold no surprises, only sites I recognize. For every site that has nothing to do with me, or even with her in relation to me, I will feel strangely rejected.

  I don’t just mean places that precede43 me, sites from before we met. There are plenty of moments from Rachel’s past that she has shared with me, and I think of these as memories that she has put in relation to me by relating them to me. Take the story of her father’s death. When she narrates this to me in bed at night, what she’s doing is putting it into play in our relationship. All the locations that this memory colligates (the hospital, her father’s grave, the bedroom that he died in) become our sites, even though she acquired them before we met. The reason she’s even sharing that memory to begin with is that she wants me, as her lover, to know that about her. It’s a biographical experience she considers so fundamental to her sense of self that I couldn’t properly love her—couldn’t know her as my beloved—without first having incorporated it into my own personal sense of who she is. The subtext of any memory that a lover shares is, ‘I want you, my lover, to know this about me, because this is the facet of myself I want you to love. When you say, “I love you,” mean by “you” the subject of this memory.’ That’s why those initial late-night self-disclosures are so important. In developing a coherent narrative of her life, the beloved ends up constructing a self for the lover to love. So I’m keenly mindful of the fact that Rachel related her father memories to me for a reason. She wants me to know and love her as the daughter she used to be: that’s one self she self-identifies as when she self-identifies as my lover. Rachel-qua-daughter and Rachel-qua-lover are contiguous—if not altogether overlapping—selves in her. As a result, any sites deriving from the daughterly period of her life might still qualify as our sites. That’s why I wouldn’t feel rejected by the presence of the hospital on her list.

  Whereas if she lists other sites, from memories she’s never shared with me, I’m not sure how I’d feel. There must be millions of moments in Rachel’s past that have yet to come up in conversation, entire years of biographical material and life experience that have gone unmentioned, not because she’s forgotten about them, or because she’s hiding them from me, but simply because there’s never been a real occasion to bring them up. Yet some of these incidental memories might nevertheless be fondly nostalgic, qualifying as destinations for her in undeath. These are the kinds of sites that could be lurking on her list right now. As soon as Rachel reveals them to me, I’ll be duty-bound (should she ever reanimate) to go searching for her there. Like Matt, I find this prospect slightly disquieting. This idea that the version of the person I’ll be looking for won’t be the version I’ve personally known… that I’ll have to search for Rachel in buildings and neighborhoods unfamiliar to me, concealed from me, hidden on the dark side of her memory’s moon.

  If she were just returning to a tree house or childhood idyll that she’d never thought to tell me about, or a gymnasium where, a decade ago, she practiced some sport I didn’t know she played, I might not mind so much having to find her there. But what if the site she returns to is the bedroom of a high-school sweetheart, a guy she dated even longer than she’s been dating me, and whose memory—despite her having never mentioned it—she’s apparently been cherishing the entire time we’ve been living together? Imagine if he were the secret love of her life, whose loss she’s never recovered from. What if she self-identifies more deeply as this other guy’s lover than as mine?44 What if his bedroom is on her list right now, one of the ten extra entries from her promiscuous memory? What if he is her paramour from the past tense, cuckolding me from her unconscious, such that her body will break up with me in undeath, leaving our apartment for him? Am I supposed to just stand vigil outside his bedroom, waiting for my moonstruck undead lover to shuffle back? But it wouldn’t even be ‘my’ lover who was shuffling there! The Rachel I’m dating, the ‘you’ I mean when I tell her ‘I love you,’ the self she’s constructed as a backdrop for me to project my love on, has never so much as mentioned this adolescent passion. Its memory isn’t included in the version of her I love. His name has never even come up in conversation between us. Where I’m concerned, she never dated the guy. So if Rachel returns to him when reanimated, it means that undeath has set her clock back: not my Rachel, but some decade-ago Rachel, a high-school Rachel, a beta Rachel45 who is this guy’s lover and (more to the point) this guy’s responsibility. If, in undeath, it’s Michael Furey whom her unconscious is oriented toward, then let Michael Furey go looking for her, is what I’m tempted to say, when I think about it.

  But before I can say anything, Rachel clears her throat, preparing to read from her list. And in the moment before she begins, I realize how dangerous I’ve allowed my anxiety to become. I’m investing entirely too much emotion into these sites. For if I would be heartbroken to find Rachel at Michael Furey’s, how might I feel to find her on the campus lawn? To see her kneeling in the grass, as if in search of the little leaf? Surely I would be overcome with love for her all over again. And in that case, who knows what I would do? I might even make the fatal mistake of hugging her. Nor is there any doubt that Rachel—if she were to find me there—would be doomed: that joyous context would prime her to see me as alive. Clearly neither of us is prepared to encounter the other in undeath, not psychologically, not emotionally. Soon, I decide. It will have to be soon. We’ll have to do the defamiliarization exercises.

  Rachel looks up at me now, wi
th a conspiratorial grin. As she starts to read from her list, I lean over and see that she’s beginning from the top, with the very first site she wrote down today: ‘The campus lawn,’ she says.

  WEDNESDAY

  WHEN MATT AND I ARRIVE AT MR. MAZOCH’S THIS morning, the front of the house is damaged. There’s a beige dent of chipped wood in the door, and two of the windows have been shattered. It appears as if someone tried—and failed—to get inside. Looking at the gaping holes in the windowpanes, the jutting stalagmites of jagged glass, I’m too shocked at first to know how to react. Matt’s reaction is unequivocal. ‘Shit,’ he whistles. ‘Do you believe that?’ When he turns to me, his face is expressionless. ‘He came back.’

  As a matter of fact, I do not believe it. Matt is already unbuckling his seatbelt to go inside. But before he can leave I ask him who he thinks ‘he’ is, exactly. ‘I don’t know,’ he admits. ‘I don’t want to jump to conclusions. But why couldn’t it have been him?’ I bite my tongue. ‘You’re not going into the house again?’ I ask him. ‘For the third day in a row?’ ‘Mike,’ he says. I study the windows, still unsure what to make of them. They don’t seem low enough for an infected to crawl through. And they’re too haphazardly shattered—their panes still too intact—to have admitted a human body. Matt shakes his head. ‘The house has been vandalized,’ he says.

  Though I do not go so far as to accuse Mazoch of breaking those windows himself (of coming here last night, bat in hand, and swinging into them as he did at the antiques mall, then denting the door for good measure), the possibility has not escaped my notice. Even if Mr. Mazoch would ever damage his own property like this, his sense of timing really does strain credulity. After I’ve dismissed the other ‘traces’?46 Two days before the deadline? I do not say this to Matt’s face, of course. I simply ask him to walk me through his logic. ‘Tell me why,’ I tell him. ‘Why the systematic destruction of property? Why march up and down the front of the house, punching holes in windowpanes, instead of just breaking in through a single entrance? That’s not how they behave.’

  This is actually a question I’ve devoted a considerable amount of thought to, even before this morning. If we were to ever find Mr. Mazoch here—I have often asked myself—what might he be doing? How would he be behaving? I have pictured him in countless scenarios: fumbling with the knob of his locked front door; dragging a rake behind him in the driveway; standing in the yard with a plunger, pumping dumbly at the grass. But never punching his own windows. And in fact, the more that I try to imagine it, the more difficult it is. He would remember that this was his house. Before he could shatter his window, some memory in the hand would stay his hand. The recognition would be as much a matter of muscle memory as of reasoning, engrained as deeply in his hand as in his head. Only if he saw fresh meat beyond the windowpane, some victim on the other side, would his instinct to feed override his hand.

  That is one of the few aspects of undeath that I feel certain about. In addition to their homing instinct, it is clear to me that they have something like equipment memory, a residue of know-how in their hands. Every night I watch them on the news, operating tools from their mortal lives: pushing a shopping cart down a grocery-store aisle, lamely striking at a tree with a hammer. Their faces are vacant, and it’s evident that they don’t quite know what they’re doing. But the hand knows: it is seeking a handle, gripping at instruments from its former life. The hand remembers what the head does not.47 Whenever I see an infected swinging a hammer, I am convinced that some memory of carpentry is compelling it to: the feel of polished wood, a familiar heft in the palm, a range of motion—at least this (and who can say what else?) persists in the hand.48 Even if an infected cannot see, or is seeing into some other world, its body still goes about its business in this world. The hand maneuvers the shopping cart around obstacles, it hits its target with the hammer. It is operating purely by memory.49

  That is one of the questions I have to ask myself, when I ask myself what it would be like to be undead. Not only what and whether I would see; not only which sites my body would return to… but also what my hands would do. How they would behave. Coursing through them—filling them to the tips of their fingers, like the faucet water that engorges a latex glove—must be all the habits and motions that they serve as the phenomenological repositories of. They could never really cease being my hands. I try to picture them on my undead body, compelling it to perform some echt gesture from my mortal life: cradling Rachel’s face; massaging my eyeballs; buttering toast. They would do whatever I’d done with them—whatever I’d taught them to—beforehand. They would be before-hands. And so they would never adopt new habits, in undeath. They would not try to play the piano, for instance, or to casually vandalize my apartment. Even if they did things that I never did with them (like tear into another person’s flesh), they would do them somewhat in my manner : ripping into the meat in the same way that, at barbeques, they used to rip into ribs.

  It’s one of the few aspects of undeath I’m certain of.

  I do not say all of this to Matt. I tell him, in short, that Mr. Mazoch could not be responsible for these windows: that this was not the handiwork of his hand.

  But Matt has theories of his own. He shakes his head throughout my speech, and once I’m finished, he asks: ‘Why wouldn’t an infected break some windows? That’s all you see them doing on the news. Beating on windows, punching through walls. They hate the inside.’

  Matt has expatiated before on the exteriority of the undead, their compulsive nomadism and aversion to shelter. Unlike ghosts, he has often observed, the undead do not linger in a single space. They’re too itinerant for that, wandering restlessly between a whole chain of spaces. That is usually what he means by ‘They hate the inside’: that they are exterior creatures, the opposite of ghosts.50 But today is the first time that he’s ever adduced this so-called spatial hatred as an explanation for their destructiveness. When he says this I look again at Mr. Mazoch’s house, trying to see the thing from Matt’s point of view. Is this what he thinks ‘hating the inside’ would entail? That it wouldn’t be enough for Mr. Mazoch to simply be outside all the time, wandering from site to site? That he would also have to destroy his house, shattering his own windows? ‘You can’t really believe that,’ I tell him. But Matt refuses to back down. Not only does he believe it, he says, but, ‘I have always believed it.’ He has always noticed this about the undead hand: how it has a wrecking ball’s abhorrence of interiority. How anytime it encounters a wall, a door, it just pounds automatically, beating without rest to bestow openness. Whenever he watches the nightly news, he says, and sees an undead hand bursting through a boarded-up window, grasping at air, he imagines that it hates the inside: that what it is grasping for is more boards, another layer to destroy.51 And whenever he sees, on the nightly news, a group of undead hunched around their victim’s stomach (prying open the rib cage to pick through the intestines, not even feeding, just as if for the joy of it), he imagines that they are destroying the architecture of the body: the abdominal wall, the posterior, anterior, lateral walls. ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ he quotes for me now, as if citing Frost as an authority. ‘That wants it down.’

  ‘All right,’ I say. It doesn’t matter, at this point, whether Matt even believes what he’s saying: he’s hell-bent on inspecting the house. ‘I get it. You need to go inside.’ ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ he says, climbing out of the car. Before he can leave for good, I call after him. He bends back down in the open doorway, resting his hands on the roof to look in at me. ‘Promise me this at least,’ I say. ‘Today’s the last time. Tomorrow and Friday—we play it safe.’ He nods ambiguously, then rises and swings the car door shut. After I watch him disappear into the house, I wait for what seems like much more than a minute—five minutes, ten—before I finally stop counting.

  While he’s been inside, I’ve had ample time to think over everything he said. And no matter how I look at it, it leaves me feeling queasy and
suspicious. For one thing, I find it worrisome that he keeps defining undeath in opposition to his father: unlike the mortal Mr. Mazoch, who remained indoors like a ghost, the undead are driven to roam about; and unlike the plumber Mr. Mazoch, who helped construct buildings for a living, the undead are supposedly destructive. He seems determined to disambiguate his father’s reanimated body from his father: it is not only not his father, but the opposite of his father. And why would Matt need to believe that, unless he was planning to kill it? Unless he was planning to put it—if not out of its misery—then at least out of its antonymy?

  I have been trying to push these thoughts out of my mind. I would like to give Matt the benefit of the doubt. I would like to believe what he wants me to believe about the windows: that he did not break them; that he truly believes Mr. Mazoch broke them; and that he might be right. To believe this, I have to believe that Mr. Mazoch punched those panes, either out of muscle memory (my own reading), or ‘spatial hatred’ (as Mazoch says), or for some other reason altogether.52 But the more I try to imagine it, the more difficult it becomes, and what I end up imagining instead is Matt: planting his feet apart at each window, cocking the bat at his shoulder, swinging his tremendous arcs. Anything to convince me that ‘he’ came back. To keep the search going.