A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  But I find that I cannot say this, any of it. At least not here, not yet. Not after all the disappointments of today, not with Matt meekly avoiding my eye, and not mere moments before he has to make his descent, braving the katabasis of the safety ladder, to climb down into that hellish, heartbreaking parking lot, where once again his deadbeat undead dad has jilted him. So instead I say, while shaking my head, ‘Let me run it by Rachel.’ Hopefully he will recognize this for the stalling tactic that it is, and will call it quits on his own. For now he nods, then turns without a word to clamber over the top rung. He keeps his head bent on the climb down, watching his feet and the emptiness of the parking lot beneath him, until he disappears beneath the rooftop’s ledge. I give him a lead of five or six rungs before following him.

  TONIGHT, AFTER MUCH STURM UND DRANG, I finally talk Rachel into practicing defamiliarization with me. Presently we’re trying it out in the living room, sitting in meditative silence and locking eyes across the coffee table. Because the room is dim and the atmosphere one of intense concentration (and also because both pairs of our hands have come to rest pronated on the tabletop), anyone seeing this might mistake it for a séance. Which wouldn’t be altogether inaccurate: we are indeed invoking a kind of dead. Each of us is invoking undeath in the face of the other.

  ‘It’s a hateful thing to do,’ Rachel protested, when I first proposed the exercise to her. This was shortly after I got home. We had just finished discussing how my day went, and I had chosen—in the end—not to run the extension by her. In fact, I didn’t run anything by her: neither the broken windows, nor Matt’s suspicion that someone has been ‘prowling’ his father’s property. I added these to my mental checklist of things to confess to her one day—when they will be too far past to worry her—as I summarized our trip to Citiplace. When I announced our surprise hiatus tomorrow, she smiled and clapped her hands: ‘A holiday!’ She would take the day off too, she said, from the shelter. But how should we celebrate tonight? It was here that I suggested—in what I thought was an offhand way—that we try another exercise like yesterday’s. I opened our copy of FIGHT THE BITE to the de familiarization chapter and handed it to her. Why not pass the evening practicing estrangement techniques?

  Rachel had barely glanced at the first page before refusing, and I knew that it was the diagram that was distressing her. The illustration features a blank-faced man and a blank-faced woman56 seated in profile, staring into each other’s eyes, as if competing in a blinking contest. Between their pupils a single horizontal line extends, and crawling across this wire is a series of wriggles, such as a cartoonist might use to depict heat rising off of a road. But what each wriggle really resembles—in this context—is a graveyard worm, inching from one eye to the other. As the caption explains, the participants are projecting these wriggles to ‘estrange’ each other’s faces. ‘At least read the thing,’ I said to Rachel. ‘Give it that much of a shot.’ She made a theatrical sigh and started reading.

  Defamiliarization techniques were designed by psychologists early on in the outbreak, to prepare people for the shock of seeing their undead loved ones. The idea is that ‘My wife!’ is the exact last reaction anyone needs to be having when confronted with his reanimated wife. Better to react, ‘My wife is not my wife,’ or, ‘My wife is undead,’ or, best yet, ‘That undead is not my wife.’ Since reacting in this way requires disabling the parts of you that exclaim, ‘My wife!’ whenever you see your wife’s face, you have to find some way of shutting down momentarily the complex of your facial-recognition software, in a kind of willed prosopagnosia. Only then can you forget the ‘wife’ in your wife’s face. Then you can react to it as merely a stranger’s face, as some indifferent ‘this woman’s’ face, which (de-wifed, and thus far deracinated from all the marital and erotic symbolic orders in which it’d been ensconced) means as little to you as a face passed in the street. This is where the pamphlet’s exercises come in. People can use them to practice not-recognizing each other while still alive, the better to damp down recognition when they see each other undead. Hence the blinking-contest diagram. If, like the man, you were to stare into your wife’s face every night until it went weird, teaching yourself to say, ‘My wife is not my wife’ while looking at her (and not only that, but if you practiced doing this until you could actually estrange her face at will, as if toggling a defamiliarization filter on and off), then, when your wife was undead, and you found yourself being attacked by ‘her’ face, you could avoid making the fatal mistake of responding familiarly to it. The moment you saw it, you could simply flip on your inner estrangement switch. Then, drained of all recognizability, it would appear merely as some undead’s face, as strange and primally frightening to you as one encountered in an alleyway at night, and you could respond to it (reflexively, unthinkingly) in the way that self-preservation demanded you respond to every undead face.57

  The chapter laid all of this out quite clearly. But even after Rachel had finished reading it, she still refused. It was a hateful thing to do, she insisted. ‘I understand why you would say that,’ I said. ‘I do. But the thing about this “hateful thing”—the thing to really keep in mind right now—is that you may have to do it eventually. Whether you practice it with me tonight or not, in the future you may have no choice. Because when I come at you like that, and my face is pale and affectless and a bloody mess, the reaction that’s going to save your life is, “That’s not Michael.”’ ‘That’s not Michael,’ she repeated. ‘That’s right. All I’m asking you to do is to look at me and say that’s not me. Estrange me once, two times, while I’m still alive—train yourself to not recognize the me in my face—so that you won’t be caught off guard when I’m undead.’ ‘If you’re undead.’ ‘If I’m undead.’ ‘But you’re not undead,’ she said, ‘not yet. And I don’t want to have to pretend that you are, and “estrange” your face. You’re my lover, I love your face. You are you.’ ‘Except that someday soon I might not be, Rachel. And there will be precious little difference between this face—’ Here I let my face slacken, dropping my jaw and emptying my eyes of all liveliness. ‘—and the face that you see on that day.’ ‘Then I’ll “estrange” it when the time comes. What do you want me to say?’ ‘You won’t know how when the time comes. You won’t have the slightest idea how to estrange my face when the time comes. You won’t know because you’ll never have practiced. It’s no different from anything else. Imagine if this were CPR I wanted to practice, how absurd you’d sound. “But you’re my lover, I love your lungs. Your lungs are functioning.”’ ‘You’re being ridiculous.’ ‘Tell me about it.’ ‘You’re being ridiculous because there is a difference. Nothing changes if I pump on your chest, breathe into your mouth. And if you asked me to prod you away from me with a foam bat, or to lock the door on you and build a barricade against it as you pounded, I would do that too. Because it’s just play. But it’s not play for me to look at your face and dehumanize it, to will myself to see you as a stranger or a corpse. It’s hateful. Everything changes then, and that’s the difference. How could I get in bed with you tonight if all I was thinking was, “That’s not Michael”? “Who is this person, this stranger? What is he doing in my bed?”’ ‘Okay, that’s fair—I’ll grant you that it’s a little creepy. But surely you’re exaggerating the aftereffects. How long could the estrangement last? A few seconds? A minute?’ ‘It doesn’t matter. I love your face. I don’t want to think of it that way.’ ‘Tell my corpse you love my face!’ ‘Michael, please—’ ‘Tell me how much you’ll love my face when you see it gnawing on your arm! With your blood smeared all over its cheeks—my cheeks!—like barbeque sauce!’ I was pawing grotesquely at my cheeks. ‘I don’t understand you,’ she said. ‘At first you refuse to leave the apartment at all, and now you’re gone eight hours a day, looking for infected with Matt. Which is fine. But then, when you do come home, all you want to do is pretend that we’re infected. Not, let’s watch a movie. Not, let’s go for a walk. But: Rachel, let’s pretend that we’re u
ndead. This search is making you morbid, Michael. You’d rather pretend you’re undead with me than actually live with me.’ ‘Come on, you don’t believe that. You said it just because it sounds dramatic, but you don’t really believe it. Look, you’re even smiling.’ ‘Stop.’ ‘Rachel, of course I’d rather we didn’t have to do this. But it’s not about what I’d rather, it’s about what’s reasonable. It’s about what one of us is going to have to do if the other is ever infected.’ ‘You know that’s not going to happen.’ ‘Oh? It used to happen every other night in this city. Who knows when it might happen again? Or what might happen if a hurricane hits and breaches a quarantine? Your problem is that you’re still underestimating how difficult it can be—and I mean both emotionally and psychologically difficult—to reconcile a face’s familiarity with an unfamiliar state of being. And there will be no face more familiar to you than mine, and no state of being more unfamiliar than undeath.’58 ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Okay?’ ‘You wouldn’t know how to cross that bridge if it bit you on the ass! Rachel! Turn on the news right now, pick any channel, and you’ll see someone who thought they could just cross the bridge when they came to it. And they’ll be bleeding to death most likely, if they’re not already dead. You think Mazoch could ever cross that bridge? You think that if we had found his father at Citiplace today, he would have simply trotted across that bridge?’ ‘Oh my God. Was this Matt’s idea, Michael? Don’t lie to me. Is he the one who told you about this? Is that what he’s been planning this whole time? To “defamiliarize” Mr. Mazoch, so that he can kill him? Is that why you want to defamiliarize me?’

  And so on in that vein, for what felt like an hour. Ultimately Rachel came around, but only after I had assured her that Mazoch was not—to my knowledge—plotting a patricide. The second I said this, I realized that I was effectively forswearing an extension: I couldn’t go on hiding my doubts from her for another week. As it was, she could barely wait for Friday. She insisted that we invite Matt over for dinner that night, in part so that we could celebrate our ‘last day’ (her words), but also so that she could put her mind at ease about his motives. I felt a premonitory chill at this—imagining what Matt might say at such a dinner, if Rachel asked him point-blank about his motives—but I nodded. I’d invite him tomorrow, I said.

  Once that was settled, Rachel voted that we begin with the blinking-contest exercise, so we rearranged the couches in the living room and positioned ourselves just like the man and woman in the diagram. It’s been fifteen minutes now since we started. Following the pamphlet’s instructions, I’ve been focusing on a specific feature (the asterism of freckles to the right of Rachel’s nose) and waiting for its isolated oddness to overflow her entire face. Rachel, apparently, has been focusing on my philtrum. Neither of us knows what to expect, what this estrangement is supposed to feel like. Will we be able to tell when it happens? During the first couple of minutes we joked about how awkward what we were doing was: I said I felt as if I were looking at a Magic Eye poster, staring and staring into this pointillist assemblage of monotonic dots until—seething and rearranging themselves like television static—they begin to rise up and resolve into a three-dimensional image; Rachel said she felt as if she were looking at a Rothko painting, staring and staring into the margin between two color fields until—the marine below and the crimson above intensifying in her peripheral vision—the whole canvas starts to glow. Indeed, when I made this observation, the spandrel of skin between my eyebrows was tingling fuzzily, as happens when I concentrate too hard on Magic Eye posters, and Rachel was looking at me with an expression that I’d only ever seen her look at Rothkos with. But now, a quarter hour later, no three-dimensional defamiliarization effect has risen from her freckled dots, and I doubt whether her patient gaze has kindled any Rothko glow of estrangement in my face.

  ‘This isn’t working for me,’ I say. ‘Is this working for you?’ ‘No,’ she admits, ‘but I think something might have been starting to happen.’ ‘It’s the eyes. I can’t pretend you’re a stranger, much less undead, when your eyes are so distinct and green.’ ‘You have such dark eyes,’ she says softly, and I expect her to compare them to night sky or to coffee. She mentions something to this effect every time that we stare into each other’s eyes,59 in the same tone of voice and with undiminishing tenderness, and I know now that she would be defenseless, utterly, against the beguiling blackness of my undead body’s eyes. Except—of course!—that my undead body’s eyes wouldn’t be dark, they’d be glaucomatic and milk-white. Nor would her eyes be at all green, or recognizable in their greenness. ‘Why don’t we try it with our eyes rolled up?’ I say. ‘We can take turns. Let me try with your eyes rolled up.’ Dutifully she exposes to me the flayed-grape undersides of her eyeballs, fixing her pupils on some point in her skull. But almost immediately what this reminds me of is the face that she makes during orgasms (especially when she is astride me, her head hung back and her eyes emptily white, as if filled with the Zen emptiness of her own pleasure), and I am so far from thinking of her as infected that my penis stiffens. ‘Okay, that doesn’t seem to be helping,’ I say. ‘Do you want to try it on me?’ ‘No,’ she says, rightening her eyes. ‘I’m fine.’

  Who knew this would be so difficult? The way the pamphlet described it, I thought defamiliarization would be the kind of thing that one could get the knack of, as if, having mastered it, you could always call upon it as a private parlor trick. As if, while sitting at dinner on Friday, I could amuse myself by estranging Matt and Rachel, crossing my eyes and projecting rays of alienation onto their faces, which, spotlit with oddness, would be as unfamiliar to me then as if caught in the beam of a recherché-light (‘Now I know him, now I don’t: Matt, stranger, Matt, stranger’). Then it really would be a matter of simply switching it on or off in the presence of the undead. But what good is it as a survival reflex if you have to concentrate on the undead’s face for thirty minutes? If you have to fixate on its freckles and be careful not to let your thoughts wander, not to get distracted or glance elsewhere, lest one sudden saccade disrupt the steadiness of your gaze, shattering your concentration and forcing you to refocus on the freckle and start all over? If this is what Rachel would have to do when confronted with my undead body—if this is what would be required of her to build her way up to ‘Michael is not Michael’—then God help her if she ever finds me on the campus lawn.

  I look at her again, trying to see her as my undead body would. I take in her entire face this time: her green eyes and high cheekbones; the Dutch jut of her nose; her hair, shorn short, jagged and blond as grass in December. I love this face. But to my reanimated eyes, it would just be a stranger’s face. And if this were a stranger’s face, would I still love it? If I were just seeing it in a crowd somewhere, having never met Rachel, not even knowing to call the face by the name of Rachel? No. It would be as inert to me as any other. I know that. I know that there is nothing intrinsically beloved in these features. When tonight I say that it, as a face, is lovely, all I mean by this is that I invest it with loveliness, that the parts of me that love rush out to meet the face halfway. The face acts as a vessel for my own emotional responses, my memories and associations, the personal narratives and idiosyncratic reactions that I pour into the face on seeing it. If I could somehow stem the flow of those from inside me, her face really would be drained of all recognizability, as bare and dry as a bowl.60 So just pretend that you never met her, I tell myself. Imagine your way into the nothing you’d feel if you passed this face as a stranger in the street. Pretend that she’s just a stranger in the street, whom you’re staring intently at for some reason. A human face, as yet nameless, infinitely other than you. Now (is it happening?) her face does seem to recede into a weird distance. It withdraws, just as occasionally my own face will if I peer too long at my reflection: that unsettling moment, which you can always feel coming on like a sneeze, when your face sinks ten layers deep into the silver of the bathroom mirror, and begins to stare back at you
like a stranger. Is this how her face would appear to me in undeath?

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Rachel says. Her concentration breaks like a wave breaking across her face, which breaks my concentration on her face. She starts blinking rapidly and jawing her cheek muscles in a fit of relaxed tension. ‘No no no,’ I say, ‘I was just getting it!’ ‘Well, I was getting nowhere.’ ‘You really have to think of it as an absolute estrangement. That’s the key, I think. You’re not just concentrating on my face, you’re uncovering in it a kind of infinite otherness. You’re not just forgetting the me in my face, you’re restoring to it this mask of radical alterity.’ ‘You make it sound like an exfoliating cream,’ she says. And it’s true, I was making it sound that way. When I try to visualize the very thing that I was describing, the image is undeniably ridiculous: me, laid out on a Levinasian spa bed, with white dollops of alterity rubbed into my cheeks, cucumber slices over my eyes. ‘You’re right,’ I say, ‘forget the mask. But there are still techniques we haven’t tried yet…’ And I go on to explain one of the pamphlet’s other methods for inducing defamiliarization.

  How it works is that both partners, still seated across from one another, close their eyes for five minutes, meditating unbrokenly on some other person’s face. They clear their heads of all interfering thoughts and images, then really try to see that face. They build up the face painstakingly, detail by accreted detail, starting with just a wire-frame template of a head, then gradually filling in its surface area with skin, a mask of flesh out of which they can then mold a nose, a mouth, a brow, adding only in the final stages of the meditation the colors and shades that will render nostrils, lips, and hair. When this high-resolution face hovers graphically before the mind’s eye, close enough to kiss, they’re to hold it like this for the whole five minutes (keeping it the sole content of their consciousnesses) so that when the time’s up, and they do snap open their eyelids to look at one another (dissolving the dreamlike scrim of the meditated face), the rush of sense data will be overwhelming. They will be staring at the real live face seated opposite them, but their mind, still stamped with the meditated face’s afterimage, will lag behind the eyes. The mind will be slow to recognize the partner’s face qua partner’s face. It will comprehend it only as an assortment of skin-toned shapes, a jumble of geometric flesh, a strange face. For a few seconds at least, it should be possible to look at the partner freshly, to see their face as a bare percept, before eventually all the emotional responses and memories and personal narratives percolate through the afterimage filter and obtain to it (i.e., the partner’s face) like a name (just as, when you wake suddenly from a powerful dream, it may take up to half a minute for your mind to figure out that what you’re looking at is a ceiling fan). Having tricked yourself into seeing your partner estranged in this way, you’ll have an important baseline experience from which to practice the more advanced estrangement exercises, which, by refining technique, train you not just to stumble onto but to actively control the defamiliarization effect.