A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  But I can predict that I will not be reading anything this morning, on my day off. What will I do instead? Make breakfast for Rachel. Make love to Rachel. Maybe take a walk to the LSU Lakes.

  IT’S MID-AFTERNOON, AND RACHEL AND I HAVE found a nice patch of grass by the water. We’ve spread out a blanket on the northern shoreline, right beneath the shade of a live oak, where we’ve both been trying to clear our heads of thoughts of the infection.

  I’m sitting with my back to the broad oak bole, legs spread out so that Rachel can nestle between them. She’s reclining into me, her own legs straight before her and her head resting on my chest. My arms are crossed over her waist, her arms are on my arms. Ahead of Rachel’s feet the muddy shallows lap at some agapanthus stems, and farther out, in the middle distance, the lake is bisected by an overpass of I-10, its concrete support columns grown mossy where they meet their reflections in the water. Beyond the freeway is the southern shore, its gravel strip shimmering in the sun like a beach. The cypresses along the side banks, emerging from the shallows, stoop over the brown water, and their branches are bare except for where ibises roost in them. When they flap their wings in the branches, the ibises resemble pale hearts in empty ribcages. Bordering the right shoreline, Park Boulevard is busy even now: traffic steady in both directions.67 But the tarmac jogging path circling the lake is empty, and there is only one car visible on the opposite shore’s parking strip. The only vehicles on the overpass are eighteen-wheelers. Their passing trailers are rectangular and blank. The car on the opposite shore, I see, is a police cruiser. Atop its glinting roof, against the bright air behind it, there is the winking of its lights—blue-red, blue-red—as they strobe sirenlessly. It’s a quiet day. The people who would be here normally (the sorority girls jogging along the path, the grizzled black fishermen fishing the fishless water) appear to be avoiding the lake, even though it isn’t technically closed to the public. Standing a few yards ahead of the police cruiser is a single undead silhouette, staring in our direction. It has been standing like that without moving or making a sound since we got here. The officers in the cruiser appear to be supervising the creature, ensuring that it stays put until an LCDC van arrives to detain it. Other than this watcher across the water, Rachel and I have had the area more or less to ourselves.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asks me now, interrupting for the first time in several minutes our pleasant quiet. The goal we had set for the day was to avoid mulling on the infection. Rachel wanted for us to get outside in fine weather and ‘think good things,’ as alive to loveliness and light as if we were on a hike at Tunica. But the truth is that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the corpse across the water. Even when I try to focus on good things, my thoughts are brought ineluctably back to it; it alone is the final, dispiriting link in every chain of associations. As an example: for a while I had my head cocked back, so that I could look up at the parasol of oak leaves above us. The sunlight was glaring on the backs of the leaves, which—singularly waxy and heavy and dark-green—received this light in a blinding sheen. The sheen reminded me of nothing more than erased paper, that tanline-like whiteness that you can scrub paper down to if you erase in one place too many times. Because the leaves overhead were so similarly white (as white as nothing at all), it seemed as if someone had taken an eraser to them, worn them thin, leaving where their green was these patches of attrited whiteness. That was all pleasant and fine to notice. But then the glare of sunlight on the leaves started to remind me of nothing more than nothing, than erasure and absence, a leaf ’s Being being scrubbed away by an ontic eraser. And once my mind made the relevant connections between sheeny light and nullness, the game was up: I imagined that the oak leaves, glazed with erasure-colored sun, were absences that had actually leafed into the world, lobate blanknesses that had budded through the air and there unfolded, immaculately white, like magnolias of lack. This seemed as apt a representation as any for the infection (which, too, is an absence of sorts, which too has flowered whitely into the world, bite mark by bite mark), so there I was thinking about the infection and undeath and all the other unpleasant things that gazing at the oak leaves was supposed to be taking my mind off of. Not least the silhouette on the opposite shore, which for obvious reasons I found it impossible, then, not to look at. And the sight of it—awful even at this distance! That pale shape still stationed there, that corpse standing sentinel over us all afternoon… could my chain of associations have been tethered to any better death’s head than this? Could I have hauled in my chain of associations, link by submerged link, and found any more horrific a memento mori attached as its anchor? The eyes white as erased paper, the cadaver a carapace of lack—that’s where my chain of associations led!

  Naturally, the longer I stared at it—and I did keep staring at it—the more morbid my thoughts grew. Not only was it undead, I realized, but it was Mazoch. His height, his shape, why not? Why couldn’t Mazoch (who had called off the search under mysterious circumstances and who wasn’t answering his phone and who it seemed less and less plausible was sitting in his room reading Milosz) have been bitten and killed, have reanimated and followed us here? Of course it was absurd, a paranoid fantasy. There was no way Mazoch could have died. Yet there were so many ways in which Mazoch could have died! At least a hundred ways! Dead in the ditch he swerved into when, driving home late last night, he nodded off at the wheel: if he wasn’t killed on impact, if he was simply knocked unconscious and trapped, then roadside infected could have come to inspect the wreck and fed with ease upon his flesh. Or—if he made it home safe last night after all—say that he was bitten in bed in his sleep, having forgotten, from distraction or exhaustion or whatever else, to bolt the front door. Or—if in fact he slept soundly and without incident—say that, rather than read Milosz this morning, he decided to conduct one day’s search without me, returning to Citiplace to inspect the empty theaters. Why not this morning, after months of daily exposure to the epidemic, for the probabilistically obvious to happen? Why not the one day that I wasn’t there for a stray to catch him at his ankle and infect him?

  Though what struck me as likelier still—likelier even than any of these scenarios—and likelier every minute that I compared the silhouette with Mazoch’s likeness, was that Mazoch had infected himself. That he was sick, perverse, that finally he had snapped and that this was the hellish price he had to pay for devoting himself so crazily to the chase of his father. That ‘taking the day off to read’ was a euphemism for ‘killing myself,’ that what ‘reading Milosz’ meant was that Mazoch would stir into a glass of water a single drop of contaminated blood (milked like venom from a nail some infected had stepped on) and drain it down as resolutely as he would a protein shake. All week, I realized, he’d been trying to get himself infected: with Highland Road Park, with the chicken breast, with every nail rusted and jutting from his dad’s doorjamb. He’d been playing Russian roulette with the infection. But time after time he’d escaped unscathed, and so today, I realized, he had decided to finish the job himself.

  Nothing seemed more lucid or inevitable to me than this. For what if not this—precisely to become infected and to reanimate—had Mazoch this whole time been planning? What better way to intercept an undead father than by carrying out an Orphic strategy, by descending into the underworld after him? Undead, Mazoch could exceed the limits that as a mortal he’s been bringing himself to the edges of. He could shuffle from Denham to Louie’s and back again without stopping, could actually keep pace with the father he was pursuing. What he would lose in speed (the undead can’t drive) he would gain in stamina (the undead need not rest), such that his body would finally be equal to this monomaniacal task. The only trick would be to ensure that his reanimated body did indeed wander to Denham and Louie’s and back, to Mr. Mazoch’s haunts, rather than to Matt’s idiosyncratic own. Hence this hopeless search, designed less as an actual manhunt for Mr. Mazoch than as a training module for Matt’s undead corpse. So that his reanimated bo
dy would wander to his father’s haunts, Mazoch wandered to his father’s haunts. Daily he drove to them, investing each with all the associative energies necessary to compel his corpse to return to it. Yes, Mazoch knew exactly what he was doing. If those two officers hadn’t arrived this afternoon to arrest it, his reanimated body, memory-possessed, would have visited Denham and Louie’s no less diligently than Mazoch had, no less routinely and methodically and obsessively than Mazoch had, when, himself memory-possessed, he drove to these sites every morning like some pilgrim of remembering.

  How clear to me it all was! Mazoch, self-consciously blazing a trail for his reanimated body, laying down a track for it to travel! Mazoch, engraining in himself muscle memories, habits, kernels of place, plotting for himself a mnemocartographic itinerary, all to guide his reanimated body! What else had I taken him to be doing? Obviously his final effort of will was to tighten this spring within himself (as if each day’s repetition of the routine—that mind-numbing drive out to Denham and back—were just another twist of the dorsal key of his inner tin soldier) so that his automatous corpse, like a wind-up toy whose ‘winding up’ Mazoch’s last few weeks on Earth were, would wobble forward to exactly those places that Mazoch wanted it to. No wonder he had set the deadline at a month: that was probably how much time he thought the engraining would take. And no wonder he had been in such a rush to visit extra sites this week, then to search another week: he had to squeeze these sites into his itinerary. Highland Road Park. Citiplace. This lake that he stands right now on the southern shore of.

  That was him, wasn’t it, staring hungrily out over the water at us… thank God for that patrol car. It was only here, at the thought ‘thank God for the patrol car,’ that I truly comprehended what mortal danger I’d been in, here that the scales fell from my eyes (and, with them, any compunctions I’d had about abandoning myself altogether to ‘bad thoughts’). For where else (it occurred to me) did Mazoch visit diligently every morning? Where besides Denham would his reanimated body, in inertial thrall to habit and reflex, have eventually been made to wander? Our very apartment! The home in which we slept! Oh, he would have headed straight there one morning, as if to pick me up for a day of work! This he didn’t take into account, this he didn’t plan for. He needed me to keep him company while for months he drilled a route into his body, he needed me to ‘help him not to think’ and to be a pleasant phatic presence in his passenger seat. But what he didn’t take into account was that my apartment, first stop every morning, would have been as much a component of ‘the route’ for his reanimated body as any other site. One morning he would have done what he did every morning: he would have gone to Mustard Castle, taken the stairs to our apartment, and knocked three times at our door. There would have come in the middle of some morning Mazoch’s familiar hearty knock at the door! And this time he wouldn’t quit until it splintered. They never quit until it splinters, not if they know you’re inside. Mazoch would have brought all his huge strength to bear on the battering down of our door, as if the only purpose he had ever had in mind, while working out, was splintering doors, as if for this and nothing else he exercised. To splinter my door and eat me alive he did his military pushups every morning! To keep himself well fed in the underworld he chinned himself on the pull-up bar in his threshold! To endow his corpse with what muscles it’d need to pry my life open like a crawfish shell, the better to suck my brains out, he curled his barbells before the mirror! That vain bastard would have eaten me alive—staring at his smug silhouette across the lake I felt sure of it!—if only those two officers hadn’t been here to stop him.

  So when Rachel asks me right now what I’m thinking, I’m thinking of the undead corpse across the water, imagining that it’s Mazoch, and ideating its eating us alive in our sleep. But what I answer her is, ‘Nothing in particular,’ since this is, strictly speaking, true: I am thinking about ‘nothing’ in particular, particularly the nothingness of undeath, which I’m worried that Mazoch in particular may have infected himself with. And I am thinking, too, about the somethingness of that nothing. Staring at the undead silhouette, I can’t help wondering what’s going on inside its body, or what Mazoch—if indeed it is Mazoch—must be experiencing: no doubt an order of being inconceivable to me. Part of me yearns for a pair of binoculars right now, not only to confirm that the silhouette is his, but also to look him in the eye. For if he truly did infect himself, then he would be seeing everything he claimed they could not see. All the things that I (still on the mortal side of life) can barely understand. One of the living dead now, he would be living the very limit to my knowledge: he would be the nothing that can be known about undeath.68 So it is this—the nothings that must be massing in Mazoch’s mind—that I myself have in mind, when I tell Rachel that I am thinking about nothing.

  To forestall any follow-up questions, I ask her reciprocally, ‘But what about you? What were you thinking, just a minute ago, before you thought to ask me?’ And how my mood lightens when she begins! For it turns out that Rachel has, somehow, avoided thinking about undeath and the silhouette all day. She’s succeeded brilliantly in distracting herself and has thankfully thought enough good things for the both of us. Gesturing to the water, she enumerates all the good things there that have been holding her interest since we got here: (1) because the freeway bridges the lake, all the cars overhead get reflected, and the eighteen-wheelers especially have been enjoyable to watch (that is, not the actual vehicles speeding along the overpass, but their reflections in the lake below, streaking rectangles of distortion that shudder through the muddy water: they look so monstrous, she says, these gray shapes skimming beneath the surface, that whenever one passes she can’t help thinking, ‘A Leviathan! A Loch Ness!’); (2) when ducks kick off the shore and glide out across the water, their wakes ripple back in lunular trails—like this: )))—such that each duck seems to be opening up a string of parentheses, nesting digressions that manage to hold the entire lake (the reflected clouds and reflected eighteen-wheelers, and the floating litter, too) in their aside of water,69 which can be closed only when another duck drifts by in the opposite direction, unleashing a terminating series of brackish brackets;70 (3) she can’t tell whether the white blob in the branches of that cypress, jutting out from the righthand bank, is a trash bag or an ibis, since the tree is far enough off that her eyes are unable to register any of the blob’s smaller movements—whether the whipping of windblown plastic or the wing-shuffling of a bird readjusting—and she has waffled for so long regarding which it is (sure one moment that it enjoys a heartbeat, and a gullet and guts, full of all the thrumming life that living birds are stuffed with; then equally certain an instant later that it’s just a pale plastic bag, puffed up and empty with air) that by now the white blob seems positively anamorphic, a smear of ambiguity that resolves from one angle into a bird and from another into a bag, as if Rachel, merely by tilting her head and following the spectrum along which these two images merged, could watch the smooth plastic begin to feather, begin to grow a beak and black eyes, as the bag graded into the ibis.71

  ‘Well,’ she concludes, ‘I guess that’s it—that’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking this whole time.’ That’s it. What pleasant things to be thinking! Reflections, ducks, ibis-bags, not one of them referring to the silhouette. I wish I could think such pleasant things. Maybe once the search is finally over, I’ll be able to. Maybe next week we can walk back here, and I can make it a point to admire the eighteen-wheelers. For a moment I consider confessing to Rachel how badly I’ve betrayed the spirit of our day’s goal. I consider telling her what’s been weighing on my mind lately, every hitch in the search I’ve kept hidden from her, and then sharing all of my suspicions about the silhouette as well. I imagine the two of us laughing it off together: ‘It looks nothing like Mazoch!’ we would laugh. What made me think that that silhouette was Mazoch?

  But just then my cell phone vibrates once against my thigh, and a nightmarish ice-water feeling floods my chest: I am c
ertain that I am being notified of Mazoch’s undeath. As I dig into my pocket and withdraw the phone, I brace myself for the sight of the display screen… only to see, however, that Mazoch himself has texted me. Same time tomorrow, he wants to know? There on my cell phone is his name and his number, the message stamped at this very minute. But is it really possible? Mazoch, delivered like that from undeath? Suddenly becoming not that silhouette—as irrevocably not it as the ibis that’s just launched from the cypress branch is not a plastic bag?

  I text back—not ‘Thank God you’re alive’—but the letter ‘Y.’ And when Rachel asks me who it was, I simply say, ‘Mazoch,’ as if this weren’t in itself a miracle to be savored.

  FRIDAY

  IT’S FIVE P.M., THE END OF A LONG DAY. AFTER waiting all morning in Denham, we’ve spent the past several hours—as on other Fridays—visiting quarantines. Now we’re at the last on our list: the levee.72 There is nowhere else to look. At the base of the embankment, where the canted concrete yields to the yellow-grassed riverbank, Matt stands beside me with the binoculars, peering across the Mississippi. There are three barges moored on the opposite shore, each crammed to capacity with undead.73