A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  A month ago, when we first established the deadline, Matt made me promise him that I would enforce it. ‘Don’t let me get desperate,’ he told me. ‘Don’t let me go a day beyond the deadline.’ If he ever suggests an extension, we agreed, I am supposed to remind him why we settled on one month in the first place: not only because hurricane season will be beginning in earnest in August, but also because four weeks is the maximum amount of time we thought that anyone could spend looking for his—for a missing person. If all else fails, Matt told me, I’m simply supposed to abandon ship. To inform him that my month is up, and that while he doesn’t have to quit, he’ll be carrying on alone.

  At this thought, the car doors’ locks thump upward, on signal from Matt’s remote key fob, and I look through the windshield with a jolt. He is standing in the front doorway, holding up some kind of trace for me to see. A red piece of paper, like a crimson color swatch. It looks like a Netflix envelope, at this distance.

  MATT AND I ARE STANDING ON THE ROOFTOP OF Citiplace Cinemas, surveying the empty parking lots below us. The only thing down there is Matt’s car, parked parallel to the boarded-up tickets window. The theater itself has long been abandoned, as have all the other businesses in the shopping center: the Barnes and Noble shut down and the Marble Slab shut down, the baby boutique, the deli, the Federal Express shut down. These buildings are gathered across the parking lot, arrayed side by side to form a village of beige plaster, and the theater looms over them like a kind of castle. When we first got here, I narrowly talked Matt out of breaking into the multiplex, in order to inspect its eleven empty screening rooms. As a compromise, he talked me into climbing up the safety ladder out back. From the roof, he said, we would be able to see for hundreds of yards in every direction. For hundreds of yards there is nothing to see.

  Matt stands on the opposite edge from me, commanding a lateral view of the Barnes and Noble. I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on the plaza’s entrance, which I watched through the binoculars awhile. The traffic lights there were still blinking green, then amber, then red, even though the plaza’s intersections have all been barren for weeks.53 Now I’m training the binoculars on Matt. I study the back of his head as he studies the parking lot, waiting for him to turn around and call it quits. He hasn’t so much as stretched his neck. He is keeping a stiff and steadfast vigil for Mr. Mazoch.

  On the drive over from Denham, he explained the significance of Citiplace to him and his father. It was the Netflix envelope, he said—for indeed it was a Netflix envelope, spotted in a trash pile on the carpet—that finally reminded him of the site. He was an idiot not to have thought of it before, he confessed: we should have been staking it out every day. He spoke for the duration of the ride, breathlessly briefing me on his history with the building. He and his father had always bonded here before the heart attack. They caught a film more or less monthly once Matt went off to college, when Mr. Mazoch fell into the habit, if he hadn’t seen his son in a few weeks, of calling him on a Sunday and asking (this was the code they’d developed) whether there were any good movies playing. There rarely were. But the movies were only a pretext, Matt said, and he didn’t mind opening the listings and picking a title at random. Superhero films, the stateside remakes of Japanese ghost movies, heist flicks. They always arrived in the early afternoon, sat always in the back row, and were almost always the only audience members there, alone in the bargain darkness of the matinee theater. Mr. Mazoch paid. He liked to pay in cash, Matt said, and a memory he didn’t expect to have of his father—but which he says has persisted in him with startling vividness—is of the man standing outside the theater’s ticket booth at noon: squinting in the harsh, concrete-refracted sunlight, wedging a meaty hand down into his jeans pocket for a wad of wrinkled twenty-dollar bills. After the movie let out Mr. Mazoch typically suggested that they go to the Barnes and Noble across the plaza, where he would entertain himself among the thick antiques guidebooks shelved on the second floor,54 while Matt, over in the literature section, skimmed through a novel or collected poems or volume of criticism (which Mr. Mazoch, if he saw Matt holding on to it when they were getting ready to leave, would gently grab from him like a restaurant check, and pay for at the register himself). To conclude the afternoon Mr. Mazoch treated Matt to coffee and bagels in the bookstore’s café, which is where most of the actual ‘bonding’ took place: Matt asking his father whether he’d come across any good finds at garage sales lately, Mr. Mazoch asking his son how his schoolwork, weightlifting, and love life were going. The coffee, the caffeinated conversation, was the real point of their day together. But when Mr. Mazoch called on the weekends, he never asked, ‘Wanna grab some coffee?’ He always asked, ‘Any good movies playing?’

  This changed after the heart attack. It’s not that they stopped going to films altogether, but that the ritualistic dimension of the afternoons, the self-consciousness of the bonding, grew to be morbid, and oppressive, and distracting for Matt. He was no longer just spending an afternoon with his father at the movies. Privately, in back of his thoughts, he was always spending what might be their last afternoon together at the movies. So if they were to watch The Ring together one Sunday, and if Mr. Mazoch were to suffer a fatal second heart attack the following week, The Ring would go down forever in Matt’s memory as the last movie he saw with his father. Their last conversation together would have been about the haunted videotape in The Ring. One of Matt’s last images of his father’s face would have been of its being bathed in the projector light of The Ring: Ring light gleaming in his father’s eyes, Ring light tinting the gray threads of his shaggy hair. These were the thoughts that Matt was having, these were the things that he was thinking, in that delicate time, he told me. He had no way of knowing then that Mr. Mazoch would live several healthy years beyond the anniversary of his bypass, nor that what would eventually do him in would be, not another heart attack, but—literally no way of knowing this—the walking dead. For the first year after the operation, Matt couldn’t take it for granted from week to week that his father was still alive. In the shower he wondered, Even now, is my father dying? And if at an odd hour he felt his cell phone vibrating against his thigh, that nightmarish ice-water feeling would immediately flood his chest, for he was convinced he was being notified of his father’s death.

  They did try going to the movies. They went to The Ring, in fact. But instead of watching the film with his father, Matt watched himself watching the film with his father, trying to carefully stage and frame the mise en scéne of this memory, in case it was his last. He described this watching-himself-watching sensation almost as an out-of-body experience: as if his imagination, detached and astrally projected toward the ceiling of the theater, were looking down on him and his father in their theater seats, filming the memory from an external vantage point. Even as he was ‘in’ the moment with his father, Matt was seeing how he would one day remember the moment with his father. So in a sense he wasn’t in the present moment at all, but already far in the future, viewing the edited-together memory of that moment. It was as if he had managed to transport himself, by an act of self-conscious prolepsis, years ahead of time, skipping beyond his father’s actual death, to the point decades hence when, reminiscing, he would be able to look back fondly on the afternoon that he was even then looking forward from. He could not help seeing his father—who was sitting and breathing right there next to him—through the filter of the future tense, seeing him the way that he would remember him once he was dead. It reminded him, he said, of the experience of visiting a landmark that’s been scheduled to be destroyed, or of touring a monument in a city you know you’ll never revisit: the logic of your self-consciousness petrifies those buildings as already-vanished, already-ruins, already-lost, even as you’re inside them, such that you can never really see them in any present-tense kind of way. Your experience of them becomes mediated by the memory of them that you’re anticipating. This was how his experience of Mr. Mazoch felt mediated, those last afternoons at C
itiplace, Matt said. He felt like a tourist to his father’s presence, a sightseer of the monument of his mortality. Which just wasn’t a way he wanted to relate to his father at all.

  So they stopped going to Citiplace. At this point I had to interrupt Matt to ask: did he remember the last movie they saw together? Solaris, he said, the Hollywood remake of Tarkovsky’s classic, directed by Baton Rouge’s own Steven Soderbergh.

  After Solaris, Matt declared a tacit moratorium on going to the movies. It was simply too charged an activity. The solution that most pleased him was this: since getting coffee together had less baggage as a tradition (since Matt wouldn’t ask himself at a café, ‘Is this the last time I’m going to have coffee with my father?’, or, ‘What if my last memory of my father’s face is of him stuffing it with a poppyseed bagel?’), Mr. Mazoch started inviting Matt, not to the movies, but to grab a coffee, which monthly they would catch up with each other over a couple mugs of, not at the old Barnes and Noble in-store Starbucks by Citiplace, but at Louie’s, a considerably less cathected café. And since Matt still wanted to be able to talk about films with his father, and to have movies (if not movie theaters) continue to play some part in their relationship, he gave Mr. Mazoch, that first Christmas after his operation, a subscription to Netflix. So if they stopped seeing movies together, still they didn’t stop discussing them. Over coffee Matt would ask Mr. Mazoch about the films he’d rented recently, and Mr. Mazoch would ask Matt which films he should rent next. Matt would recommend the movies that meant the most to him (the three-hour Swedish chamber dramas and the whimsical Italian metafictions, the jagged-shadowed German silents and the melancholic French heist films), and for their subsequent meeting Mr. Mazoch would come prepared with capsule reviews: what thrilled him, what bored him, what he felt he didn’t understand. What shot or image or line of dialogue he hadn’t been able to get out of his head all week. ‘What was his favorite?’ I interrupted a second time to ask. Solaris, Matt said again. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Solaris?’55 Matt nodded, not taking his eyes off the road. He said that Mr. Mazoch had rented Tarkovsky’s version out of curiosity, because he recognized the title and remembered having seen the remake with Matt. And he evidently loved the film enough that he kept on renting it, having Netflix mail him the DVD once every few months, so that he could rewatch it whenever the mood struck. In fact, that was the DVD that Matt found this morning: a copy of Solaris had been slipped inside its red Netflix envelope and discarded on the carpet. It was likely the last movie Mr. Mazoch had watched in mortal life. He had probably been intending to mail it back the very day he got bitten. So the movie that would have been foremost in his mind after reanimating, Matt said, was Solaris.

  He said this just as we were arriving at Citiplace, and there could have been no more staggering an anticlimax to Matt’s narrative (after that final detail about the Solaris DVD, whose red envelope at the scene of Mr. Mazoch’s death was meant to seal Matt’s entire argument) than pulling into the whitish salt flats of these vast and vacant parking lots, where you could see, almost at a glance, that the place was utterly deserted. If Mr. Mazoch had been anywhere on the premises—a dark figure marring any inch of that white field—he would have stood out as stark and alien as a man in an Antonioni landscape. But it was clear he wasn’t here. No one was. And as Matt circled the theater in the car, then began insisting that we break inside, it became clear to me that Matt felt betrayed by his absence.

  I don’t think Matt was deluding himself about the theater, necessarily. I can see how a site like Citiplace, attended ritually enough over enough weekends, might function for this father and this son the way that a baseball stadium or campground would for others, and I can even see a case being made for Mr. Mazoch’s reanimated corpse returning to it, out of habit if nothing else, and for Matt’s prudence in including it in our itinerary. But after watching Matt grow excited as we approached I-10’s off-ramp, and seeing his disappointment now that we’ve arrived, I find it hard not to think of him as a man grasping at straws. He didn’t just believe that Mr. Mazoch might have returned here: he needed to believe that we’d find him today, on our very first visit. None of the other sites are working out, so Matt is struggling to come up with new ones. After three and a half weeks with no trace of his father (unless you count the traces in Denham, which I am becoming more and more convinced—as I observe him from across the roof—that Matt himself manufactured), he must be starting to ask himself whether he has miscalculated. ‘How well do I really know him?’ he must be asking himself. ‘Do I really know him at all?’ Now that his sense of his father, of where he would return to, is faltering, Matt must be subjecting it to revision. If not Highland Road Park, then Citiplace. And if not Citiplace, then where?

  The mistake Matt is making is the same one I made yesterday, when I grew anxious over Rachel’s list (which did not, thankfully, include any Michael Fureys). Namely, Matt is treating the theater as a place that Mr. Mazoch would think of. If the theater meant something to both of them, Matt must be reasoning, and if it meant as much to Mr. Mazoch as it did to him, then Mr. Mazoch would ‘think to come here.’ That is why Matt grew so excited at the sight of the Netflix envelope, and why he kicked himself for not having thought to come here before. That’s also why he must feel such anger and disappointment now, as though Mr. Mazoch had somehow let him down by letting Citiplace slip his mind. By forgetting—out of self-centeredness or indifference or neglect—this place that meant so much to his son.

  But the problem with this reasoning is that Mr. Mazoch couldn’t ‘think to come here.’ Matt hasn’t miscalculated his father by failing to find him here, and Mr. Mazoch hasn’t betrayed his son by failing to come. For it isn’t Mr. Mazoch’s mind that Matt has to try to imagine his way into, or Mr. Mazoch’s mind whose memories, impulses, and destinations Matt has to try to anticipate. It isn’t even Mr. Mazoch, anymore, whom Matt is really looking for: it’s Mr. Mazoch’s undead body. That is the paradox: Matt has to think his way into the mind of a creature that may not have one. A creature of unknowable impulses, of ineffable instinct. Given that that’s the case, it’s no wonder that Matt’s emotions are so confused. Because on the one hand, the undead behave as if they are consciously retrospective beings, returning to sites that ‘meant something’ to them in their mortal lives. Yet on the other hand, it is as if they are blank automata, shuffling to these landmarks absently, merely carrying out a program, like robots of remembering. On the one hand, they are creatures of pure memory: they return only to sites from their past, and can find their way back to neighborhoods buried far in their childhoods. But on yet another hand (and this is turning out to be a real Shiva of dialectical reasoning), they are creatures of pure forgetfulness: the sites they return to, so potent with mortal nostalgia, mean nothing to them, and they navigate them unconsciously, are as sleepwalkers there. What they are propelled by is a blind drive. They know they want to return to certain spaces, but they don’t know why. They know the spaces are there, but they do not see them. In this way, they inhabit a radical in-between-ness: between total recall and total amnesia, total nostalgia and total obliviousness, between all remembering and all forgetting. And not only in between, but both at once, somehow. It is as if they recall the space (as a destination) at the exact same time as they forget it (as conscious content, as memory). So it is as if the undead are constantly being fed mnemonic madeleines, except that the tea the madeleines are steeped in is actually Lethe water: the crumbs of each memory come soggy with their own forgottenness, they are simultaneously remembering the place (qua destination) and forgetting it (qua memory) while they chew. Even as the site is recalled it dissolves, and what is left, in the undead, is something like an aftertaste of memory, a sudden and inexplicable craving for place. They know they want to go there—the house, the movie theater, the campus lawn—but they don’t know why.

  Staring at the back of Matt’s head through the binoculars, I know that he knows all of this. Still, knowing it does not help, an
d I can only imagine what he is feeling right now. Something like the rejection I felt yesterday, when imagining Rachel’s list; or else the rejection that I would feel (exponentially bitterer) if I failed to find her at the campus lawn. Whatever the scale of Matt’s disappointment, I do know that he can’t go on feeling this way. One month seems like enough for a lifetime. As if he can sense me staring at him, he turns around now, and I lower the binoculars. He has finally given up on the site, it looks like. His distant silhouette waves at me, and I wave back, and with that we begin to trudge across the rooftop toward one another.

  We meet halfway, by the safety ladder, where Matt nods once in greeting before bending to grip the handlebars. ‘Hey,’ I say, and he pauses. ‘Why don’t we come back here tomorrow?’ I ask. ‘Or Friday?’ His back straightens when I say this. Letting go of the ladder, he stands to face me, and in the moment before he speaks, I dread what he is about to say. ‘About tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I think I need a break. Maybe decompress, do some reading. What if we take the day off?’ I nod quickly in relief. ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘no problem. We can always come back Friday.’

  ‘About Friday,’ he says, and I feel the dread return. ‘I know we settled on that deadline. But we hadn’t foreseen—’ He looks away, searching for words. ‘These are extenuating circumstances,’ he continues. ‘Someone’s prowling my dad’s property. What if they come back? I can’t just abandon the place now. I need you there with me.’ Why not give it one more week, he asks? What do I say?

  ‘Matt,’ I say. He doesn’t respond, or even look at me. He has no doubt been preparing this speech the whole time we’ve been standing here, and now he is bracing himself for the speech that we both know I am supposed to have been preparing as well. How he’s getting desperate. How we set the deadline for a reason. How I’ll quit if he doesn’t.