A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  ‘What do you think?’ I say, and Rachel seems game. So I set my cell phone’s alarm for five minutes from now and place the phone ceremoniously on the coffee table. Straightening my back, closing my eyes, I ask Rachel whose face she will be imagining. Her father’s, she says. I say Mazoch’s.

  THURSDAY

  I CALL MAZOCH AT SEVEN THIS MORNING TO confirm the hiatus, but he doesn’t answer. This morning (our penultimate morning) is the first time in three and a half weeks that he’s requested a ‘personal day’ like this. When the voice mail picks up, I leave a message asking whether we’ll be resuming the search tomorrow, then invite him over for dinner afterward (‘to celebrate,’ I say, hoping he’ll get the hint). I know that he turns his phone off when reading, so I don’t think much of it when I hang up.

  But I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s seven thirty now, and I’m back in bed with Rachel, who I expect will sleep in later than usual (last night we both tossed and turned, as unnerved by the estrangement exercises as she predicted we would be). While waiting for her to wake, I’ve been staring into the boarded-up darkness of our bedroom. For a while I tried to fall back asleep in this way,61 but then I gave that up and started to think about Mazoch reading. Specifically, about the likelihood that he is actually reading. Or whether he might be back at Mr. Mazoch’s right now: crouching down to the carpet, a muddy boot on each hand; walking a trail of footprints back and forth. Just a little something for us to find tomorrow morning.

  How could he be reading, I wonder? How can anyone read? Once, at the start of the search, I asked Mazoch what he’d be doing for the weekend, and he said reading. When I asked how he could manage to, he said that it relaxed him, eased his tension, otherwise did him good. There was too much time to think, he said, driving around the city all day. Whereas if he sat at his desk and concentrated on a Milosz poem, it was like lighting a thought-repellant candle in the mind. He didn’t specify which thoughts it was that he wanted to repel, which thoughts would be fluttering, mosquito-like, at the edge of his reading, but I could guess: thoughts of his father, of the epidemic, of the apocalypse, of death.

  Thoughts like these are what make it impossible for me to read, and in fact they’re the reason that I haven’t picked up a book, not really, since the start of all this. Occasionally I’ll try to read with Rachel in bed, but I always find myself skimming distractedly. How am I supposed to follow a text when I know that, at any moment, my reading might be interrupted—my life imperiled—by the beating on the door of an undead fist? When page by page I am viscerally aware, in all my nerviness and coiled energy, that I might suddenly be called upon to leap up from the mattress and slide the dresser against the threshold, in an improvised barricade, and that with emergency haste I’ll have to alert the authorities, lock myself and Rachel in the bathroom, and wait patiently—alone with the sound of its pounding and moaning—for the creature to be detained? These fantasies are difficult to subdue, so more often than not I just lie still, with Rachel reading next to me and with my own book splayed open on my stomach. I stare indolently into the ceiling. I watch the ventilator grille directly overhead, with its little scrap of paper taped to the end, acting as a kind of telltale: when the air conditioner is off, the scrap hangs inertly vertical there, but the moment that the air conditioner switches on, it wags out in a lateral drift, so as to signal that the grille emits a live breeze. For minutes this little tag of paper will float passively along, like some remora on a shark of wind, and it will be enchanting to watch, will put briefly out of mind what the book on my stomach cannot.

  After he said that he’d be reading Milosz, I asked Mazoch—whose apartment is a minor library—what good he thought his reading would do him, when you could almost still see an apocalypse, on the horizon, like a storm.62 The day that I asked him this, the sky actually was black and overcast with storm. Darkling clouds banked all the way down I-10 to the western horizon, where alone there was a clearing, a backlit strip of sky, still glowing a little from a sunset we’d missed. Driving in this direction, speeding a little in this direction, toward where the margin of sky had, in the afterglow of the sunset, turned the color of vanilla cream, and where wisps of cloud were so gilt and silvered that they looked like breath on fire, Mazoch evaded my question by adducing examples of readers who had not been deterred by apocalypses, waving one hand then the other off the steering wheel as he described them to me: first, there was Mr. Henry Bemis, the bookish librarian and sole H-bomb survivor in the Twilight Zone episode ‘Time Enough at Last,’ who after a lifetime of postponed reading is finally left alone in a deserted city, with no humans to distract him and with all the food and supplies he might need to survive, and who decides, in the teeth of this apocalypse, to organize for himself a two-year reading syllabus from among the books at the public library (only, famously, to have his reading glasses shatter); then there was the Arab from Book V of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, who, in an apocalyptic dream sequence, rides across the desert bearing a stone (which, in the logic of the dream, is actually a ‘book,’ Euclid’s Elements) and a seashell (also a book, one that, when the narrator holds it to his ear, prophesies ‘in an unknown tongue… Destruction to the children of the earth/By deluge, now at hand’), and so the Arab rides across the desert to bury these books and preserve his ‘twofold charge’ from apocalyptic destruction, even with ‘the fleet waters of a drowning world/In chase of him’ (‘[M]ine eyes/Saw, over half the wilderness diffused,/A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause:/ “It is,” said he, “the waters of the deep/Gathering upon us”’); and finally there was the character of Borges in Borges’s short story ‘The Book of Sand,’ who buys from a rare-books dealer an ‘infinite book’ (the titular Book of Sand, which comprises an infinite number of randomly generated pages, such that a reader can never find the same page twice), and who, on realizing that this book is the apocalypse itself (‘I considered fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite, and suffocate the planet in smoke’), does not bury it or cast it into the sea but leaves it instead on a shelf of the Mexican National Library. So why not read in an apocalypse, Mazoch seemed to be asking me, via each of these examples. Why not commune solitarily with books, as Mr. Bemis did?; or preserve books from a flood that will leave no humans to read them, as the Arab of the Bedouin tribes did?; or, not only read in the apocalypse, but read the apocalypse itself, as the character of Borges did, and as he allowed future readers to do by stocking this apocalypse among the novels and poems of the Mexican National Library? Following these readers’ lead, why shouldn’t Mazoch cram his apartment with books, or spend the weekend reading Milosz, or take this morning off to read? And why shouldn’t I try to read today as well?

  I have been asking myself these questions as I lie here in bed, and I keep arriving at the same answer: I cannot read today because my reading has always been (before the outbreak I mean) teleological in nature, and this strikes me as unsustainable in an apocalyptic state. Take undergrad for example. Why, before the dead walked, did I study Kant? I never took a class on Kant, so the usual incentive structures (seminars, papers, grades) were not what motivated me. Why did I read him then? Because scholarly comprehension seemed valuable and because I looked forward to the day when each great thinker, like a grocery item, was scratched off my list; because, in certain circles, quoting or paraphrasing or alluding to the fact of having read Kant carried potent social cachet; because the thick gray spine of the Critique of Pure Reason was so conspicuous on my to-read shelf, so baldly visible a monument to my ignorance (not like the niggardly maroon spine of Descartes’ Meditations, which it was easy for a cursory glance to pass over, and so which I could comfortably leave on the to-read shelf, even though my not having read it was in some ways even more embarrassing and scandalous than my not having read the first Critique), that I couldn’t bear to invite fellow philosophy majors over to my dorm without prematurely promoting it to my shelf of read books, where of course it would to
rment me, like the beating of a telltale heart, as if I were in constant danger of someone following the sightline of my nervous glances, spotting the book, and asking, nightmarishly, ‘Ah, I see you’ve read the first Critique—how about those antinomies, eh?’ So when for months I mastered the Critique by diligent lucubration, I did so not for the present pleasure of the text, but for what I just now referred to as teleological motives, with an eye toward the self I might be at seventy: my to-read shelf barren, my banter well stocked and alluding wittily to Kant, the great project of my education completed.

  Were all my motives so petty, designed merely to elevate my self-image, rather than my intellect or my spirit? No, I read, too, in the pursuit of things that seemed in inspired moments ineffable and vast, and noble in their vastness.63 But for the most part reading was just a joyless war of attrition with my to-read list. Which, needless to say, was a war of attrition that the list easily won, marshalling in its favor factorial laws so ancient, so textbook hydracephalic, that they’re almost clichéd: for every book I disposed of I acquired three. Nor was I even able to read these books with great rigor or systematicity, feverish as I was to be finished. If I organized any kind of Henry Bemis-ish summer syllabus for myself, linking texts and authors together in what seemed like illuminating combinations, I lasted through maybe two books of my master class before, distracted, I directed my energies elsewhere. How to commit myself to one line of texts when there was so much else to read, when time lavished on Russian Formalism was time lost in phenomenology, philosophy of language, critical theory? And so my to-read list layered itself in this way, with upper and lower crusts of priority, undergoing the most volatile upheavals and displacements. Certain entries from the bottom strata, books I hadn’t planned on reading for months, would with an unexpected shift in interest be extruded above all others, as if to be read immediately, until I visited a bookstore and buried them beneath new purchases, themselves to be sifted and sunk; I would carry Shklovsky in my backpack, his essay collection just at the surface of my reading program, and then suddenly other authors—because they had been mentioned in conversation, because I had read an interesting London Review of Books article about them, because I had otherwise been made to feel remiss for not having read them (as if the mere mention of an unread author’s name were some cloud of dust that I’d been left behind in, kicked up by a competitor I was compelled to catch up with)—would become my number-one priority, such that Heidegger or Wittgenstein or Agamben would all irrupt before him (i.e., Shklovsky), each promoted to the top of my reading program and abandoned in turn with equal fitfulness and inattention.

  In a manner of speaking, my only goal in reading was to outlive my to-read list, to finish it before time and mortality finished me. And I was willing to make the appropriate sacrifices (a robust social life, for instance) to see this project through. What ultimately sustained and what alone could have sustained me were my teloi, specifically the illusion of progress that attended them, whereby I convinced myself that I was closer to my goal at twenty-four than I had been at twenty.64 I cleaved to this illusion not only down the ranks of my to-read list, but also through the pages of a single book. And in fact there was nothing more immediately or visibly satisfying to me, nothing more addictive or compulsive, than the physical progress that my reading made through a single book. How the completed pages thickened beneath the thumb that pinned them down, and how the unread pages thinned! How the dog-ear—the creased page corner that served to mark my place and that, when the book was closed, appeared as a single black fissure in the otherwise white field of the fore-edge—how each day that dark line went deeper and deeper in, rightward through the white, bearing down on the creamy pages between it and the back cover like some snowplow’s prow, shoveling all the snow of my ignorance! How when I pinned fifty or so pages between my thumb and forefinger and scaled my thumb back along their edges, letting them siffle down swiftly like the pages of a flipbook, I could watch all my marginalia and ink in motion, as if animated, this blue-black cartoon of exclamation points and scrawled words and ‘Rachel’ popping instantaneously into frame! It was little visible rewards like these that made me feel as if I were accomplishing something. They quantified my efforts. They were, if not the fruits of my labor, then the rinds of those fruits. And it was that much easier to stay home nights and read when I could track my dog-ear’s movement through the book, congratulating myself before going to sleep: ‘I’m a hundred pages smarter tonight.’ Or to finish the volume and slide it into place on my shelf, thinking, ‘I’m one book smarter tonight.’

  Such was the nature of this illusion of progress that it often felt as if I were just within reach of finishing the list, even as the list tripled beneath me. One more year of reading, two at most, graduate school, and then the list would be done with. So even if Mazoch’s mention of a book that I hadn’t yet read—or, worse, that I had never heard of—induced in me real impulses of panic, panic that announced mortality in my worry as the graying of hair or a heart surgery might have in another man, then, still, that panic was simply enough put aside, mollified, forgotten, by reading another book. Even if I was easily discouraged by counting up my books’ spines and, assuming an average of thirty pages an hour, tabulating how much time I had spent reading them;65 even if I earnestly considered shunting myself off the track of my reading and onto that of some more vigorous hobby… still I recognized that such a path was by now closed off to me. Windsailing while unread books lay in my apartment would only make me anxious, and, besides, could be postponed, I consoled myself, until once the reading was done. For after all, didn’t the books get read, sometimes as many as two in an afternoon? Didn’t my bookshelf fatten like a leech? It seemed possible to finish the to-read list, not only within my lifetime, but within just a dedicated decade, giving over the rest of my life to vacation and illiterate ease. Was this merely a pipe dream? Was reading, as a worried professor once warned me it was, a race that I was always simultaneously winning and losing?66 I couldn’t be bothered, other than in bleak moments, to ask.

  Benighted by bibliophily! And yet you couldn’t even call it ‘phily,’ a ‘love’ of books, because I was mastered by meaner demons. Of insecurity, of anxiety, of self-abnegation, of anything but a pleasurable, healthy love-relation. It was as if what I suffered from was bibliophobia, a fear of books that I exorcised precisely by reading them, as if the very act of turning their pages—like switching on the light in a darkened room or throwing back the shower curtain behind which you are certain some murderer lurks—sanitized at once all the mystery of my ignorance of them, and defused their awful power over my imagination. But at any rate benighted by something.

  Could anything have dissolved so thoroughly the illusion of progress, so bluntly given the lie to my ‘antipodal goal,’ as an outbreak of the walking dead? My reading was always oriented toward some future, in which I was educated and articulate and admired in high societies. And could anything have shattered so completely one’s hopes for the future, one’s life plans and social ambitions (to say nothing of society itself), as an undead apocalypse? When I am in my worst and most pessimistic moods, I assume that the epidemic can promise only a few outcomes, none of which involve the self I might be at seventy, reclining in a leather chair in my personal library, with winter light and wisdom redounding upon my gray head. In a matter of months, I sometimes assume, I will be fed upon, or all my loved ones will be fed upon, or I will take my own life, or, unable to bring myself to do this even after state and social institutions have collapsed entirely, I will grub among garbage bins behind abandoned grocery stores, defending myself from nomadic, malnourished, and desperate humans as much as from the undead.

  I would no sooner read Kant in this world than I would on a desert island. And in fact I haven’t read Kant, or anyone else for that matter, since that first week of panicked news reports. If I were to become more sensitive to the present pleasure of the text, as Mazoch and Rachel seem to be, if I learned to ‘content
myself with the discovery of precious stones,’ then perhaps there would remain hope yet for Mazoch to make a Mr. Bemis of me. Until then, my books will remain boxed up beneath the bed, where I cannot see them.

  Lately I have been trying to convince myself that it’s safe enough to read again: that outbreaks and attacks are becoming ever rarer, and that there’s nothing to worry about anymore. Even so, I lack the motivation to unbox my books. My only substantial reading material these past couple of months has been FIGHT THE BITE, plus research articles about the infection. The fact is—and as sad as it makes me to admit this—literature has begun to feel hollow to me. Nothing that I read helps me understand the undead. Philosophy, which was supposed to teach me how to die, to prepare me for death, has left me utterly unprepared to meet undeath. I am no better equipped to understand it, after all the Heidegger and David Chalmers and Kant I’ve read, than Mazoch is, who merely has Milosz in his quiver. So whenever I flip through my undergrad copy of the first Critique, for old time’s sake, it is with a kind of sad apathy: Kant’s awe-inspiring blueprints of the human mind (his architectonic tables of our reasoning faculties, categories, and intuitions) tell me nothing about the undead mind. After five or so pages, fidgety with impatience, I have to put Kant aside. Whether I will be able to read next week, once the search is over, I still don’t know.