A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  The barges must be thirty yards away, but even from here I can distinguish the fence of chain-link that has been erected around each boat’s perimeter, a barbwire barrier rising head-high and hazing the air with grayness. Standing behind the chain-link, boxed in on each bed, are what look to be two hundred undead silhouettes, packed shoulder to shoulder and wall to wall. Each barge resembles a little chunk of prison yard: the silver fence and the tense inmates. Presiding over these prison ships is a single police officer at the top of the levee, stationed in a glass guard booth on the slope directly behind us. The sun is hovering high overhead, spangling the muddy river water densely. That clouded current, purling south, is broad and brown, and where the light flecks it it looks nebular somehow, but fetid, like a diarrheal Milky Way. Indeed, so massive and cosmic is the Mississippi that the boats on it seem toylike. And at the sight of them it hits me—viscerally, as if for the first time—that obviously these infected cannot stay here: they will need to disembark before hurricane season.

  Barging the undead, as LCDC and FEMA are now holding weekly press conferences to admit, is an untenable stopgap solution. Even if Baton Rouge is spared a direct collision in August or September, we can still expect storms heavy enough to demolish the fences, which is why LCDC’s timeline requires decommissioning the ships in the next couple of weeks. Some pundits, still horrified at the thought of the infected being brought back ashore (especially if it means reinstating residential processing centers), have suggested that they simply be relocated a few yards downriver, aboard the USS Kidd, the Fletcher-class destroyer docked here as a war memorial. Easily capable of housing the few hundred bodies, the Navy vessel would then serve—from the pundits’ point of view—as a kind of negative Noah’s ark, preserving anti-creatures or demons from destruction by flood. But no one has seriously brought this suggestion before the Louisiana Naval War Memorial Commission, and it seems likelier that the city’s surveyors will find some disused municipal building (a library, a prison, a dorm room) to be retrofitted as a quarantine. At any rate, they will have to find something before August. By then, any loose infected—any strays on the streets, who have not already been rounded up and quarantined, or else stumbled upon some reliable shelter to squat in—are going to be in for an interesting time: dashed by floods headfirst against telephone poles; brain-fried in electrified rainwater; crushed beneath fallen branches. Staring at the clear sky above us, I find it difficult to believe that there are already tropical storms forming over the Atlantic right now. But that is how it happens: one day you turn on the weather channel and see, in that satellite photo of the ocean far below, a cloudbank where the blue should be. It is vast, and white, with a spiral’s pupil in its center, and it reminds you suddenly—as it couldn’t have even a year ago—of an immense undead eyeball: milky, hundreds of miles wide, this blindness in the sky. You can monitor it daily, watching as it approaches the coast, but there is simply no way to tell: whether it will weaken once it hits land, or worsen as a hurricane; whether its winds will accelerate (ascending the pentatonic intensities of the Saffir-Simpson Scale: becoming a Category 3, then a 4, then a 5), or whether they will dissipate harmlessly. No way to tell till the week of. The day of. Those are the kinds of odds that Mr. Mazoch is looking at, if he’s still on the streets come August. And though Mazoch has never spoken openly about this, it has to be some of what he’s thinking right now as he chews the skin along the inside of his cheek, and scans the barges for his father’s face.

  ‘See anything?’ I ask. He doesn’t lower the binoculars. ‘Matt?’ ‘Shh.’ I stare at him a moment longer, then turn to the silhouettes. Which one is it, I wonder? I hear Matt hiss ‘Shit,’ and when I glance back the binoculars are hanging at his chest. His face looks broken. ‘What is it?’ ‘I thought it was him,’ he says. ‘It was him. But then it turned around.’ ‘Do you want to keep looking?’ I ask. ‘I can’t make out any faces beyond the first rows.’ Of course: as if the undead would have been arranged, as for a class photo, with tallest in the back. Our only option is to keep trying our luck from the levee. Disconsolate relatives are typically advised (as we were ten minutes ago, by the guard in his booth) to wait a week or so until the present load of infected has been relocated, then to make the rounds of the other quarantines (‘Go back again,’ Matt had sighed, exhausted).

  ‘You want to take a look?’ he asks, offering me the binoculars. I squint at the dim figures across the water, which together resemble some flash-mob mirage of the single lakeside silhouette from yesterday. He is asking whether I want to study them, on this our last day. But I shake my head. I do not need to see hundreds of undead eyes today. Rachel was right: the search is making me morbid. I need to think better thoughts. If there were only one out there, or even a handful, I might accept Matt’s offer. I might try to satisfy my curiosity, or else—if I could never satisfy my curiosity—come to terms with the radical insatiability of my curiosity. But a whole crowd of them? To be overwhelmed by that wide wall of white eyes, hundreds, all bearing down on and boring through me… to have that be my last memory of the search? It would be too much.

  After I decline the binoculars, Matt lifts his chin at something over my shoulder, then asks: ‘You see that?’ When I turn around all I see is the Mississippi Bridge: its great latticework of girders is gridded against the southern horizon like a waffle iron, filled with blue sky as with batter. Then, far above the bridge, I spot what must have caught Matt’s attention: a high airplane, trailing a bright contrail behind it. The line of vapor has silvered brilliantly from within, and the jet, itself glinting like a knife tip, seems to be cutting into the sky to reveal it, carving a gash for this bright light to seep through. Like an incision being made in a lit lampshade. This is the first time since the travel ban has been enforced that I’ve seen a contrail in the sky. It’s a species of cloud I’d thought had gone extinct, and watching this one now is strangely thrilling, the way that finding the first coelocanth must have been, or seeing the dove come back from the flood, olive leaf in beak. When Matt sees that I can see the jet, he asks, ‘How many passengers do you think are infected on that plane?’ ‘Christ,’ I say, ‘I don’t know.’ Probably any passengers would be military personnel and FEMA agents, well screened by virologists before boarding. Nevertheless, I try to think of how many people would be inside the glint above us, and what the chances are that at least two or three of them could have made it through the screening process undetected: latent carriers, bearing the infection with them wherever the plane is bearing them. I say, ‘Maybe zero.’

  ‘I’m beginning to suspect my dad isn’t even in Baton Rouge anymore,’ Mazoch says. ‘As in he’s boarded a plane somewhere?’ I ask. I try to imagine Mr. Mazoch making a getaway flight that first night, hours after he was bitten. Fleeing to Italy, and renting a hotel room to reanimate in.74 But this is not what Mazoch has in mind. ‘No,’ he says, ‘not necessarily. Just that he might have driven off, before… Or else crossed the border on foot.’

  I have a difficult time telling how serious he is. Not only are there border guards stationed to keep the epidemic within state lines, but Mr. Mazoch, who seems never to have left southern Louisiana, would have too provincial a memory system to be compelled abroad anyway.75 Mr. Mazoch, the prince recluse of Denham Springs, not only contracts an uncharacteristic wanderlust but also actually bypasses every border guard instructed to stop him? Those are a lot of what-ifs for Mazoch to be broaching now, on this our last day. But maybe that’s simply what he needs to believe, in order to be able to quit: that his father won’t be in Baton Rouge when the first hurricane hits. That he is too far abroad to be found. In order to absolve himself of the responsibility to go looking, Matt might be expanding the parameters of the search beyond feasibility, forking bales and bales of square miles onto the haystack that Mr. Mazoch is already the proverbial needle lost within.

  Unless he has no intention of quitting. Unless what he is really doing—by placing Mr. Mazoch abroad in his mind—is preci
sely the opposite: extending the search indefinitely, devising a task that he could never satisfy himself as having finished. This way, after having scoured every inch of Baton Rouge, Matt would still have Texas, Florida, and Arkansas to check. Then he could move on to Montana, Mexico, the Mariana Trench. There would always be one more corner of the globe for Matt to search for his father in. And supposing that Matt survived beyond the year or so it would take Mr. Mazoch (in most climates) to decay, he might still feel obliged to check Alaska, or the North Pole while he was at it, or any other place where his father’s body might have been frozen. If that is what Matt wants, I realize, I cannot help him: if he would prefer to spend the rest of his life holding out this last North Pole hope (laying away a little nest egg to buy a snowmobile with, so that he can go hunting for his popsicle father), then closure will be impossible. And maybe that has always been what Matt wanted. Not to find Mr. Mazoch, but to never find Mr. Mazoch: to forever have this desideratum dangling just out of reach, leading him day after day deeper into the calendar, like his own Bethlehem star to follow.

  ‘Listen,’ I say, and I want to ask Matt what it is that’s driving him to find his father anyway, whether he wants to put the man down, out of his misery—whether he wants to be the one to do it, rather than a thunderstorm or a riot guard with an assault rifle—or whether he just wants to see for himself that the man is infected, and escort him safely to a quarantine. What it is he’d be unable to do or driven to the ends of the earth to do, if Mr. Mazoch actually were abroad. What I ask instead is, ‘Do you really think that he’s abroad?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘or—I don’t know.’ He raises the binoculars again to peer across the water: ‘But he’s probably not on these barges.’

  I look along with him, straining my eyes to distinguish the shapes of some of the undead. They’re too far off even to tell how tall they are. Watching Matt as he watches, I see that he is no longer chewing his cheek: his square jaw is grim and set as he scans those rows of decaying faces. Somewhere among them is the Mr. Mazoch look-alike. I picture a hulking frame in a blue plaid shirt, its back to the binoculars. An undead ringer from behind. And what if he had never turned around? We would have had to call Rachel to cancel our celebration dinner and wait here, until finally the guard made us leave. Then we would have had to return here tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until finally the barges were emptied, never able to find the doppelganger again in the crowd. Then we would have had to revisit all of the quarantines, skimming through the mug shots in the rosters, until finally Matt found the face that isn’t his father’s, the face that could have been his father’s.

  If Matt’s hopefulness had been dragged out like that—if the close call had taken a week to resolve—I doubt that this search would be finished. As it stands, I can barely believe that it is finished. All day, as Matt has been taking his leave of Mr. Mazoch’s sites, there have been very few leave-taking gestures: he did not lock the door in Denham, or even bother casing the antiques mall; he did not try returning to Citiplace, or to Highland Road Park. With silent unceremoniousness he drove us from one site to the next, then on to the quarantines, without the least degree of anxiety or panic. As methodical as on any other day this month. He didn’t behave as if the search was over, because for part of him—I realize—it wasn’t yet: the search wasn’t finished until the day was. At each site there was still the next site to check, and after the quarantines, the barges. It was as if some part of him kept believing—up to the very last minute, until the doppelganger turned around—that his father might be found.

  FOR DINNER, RACHEL MADE A RICH ORANGE curry that she had me slice potatoes for, and I threw together a very basic salad: greens, cheese, balsamic. Mazoch thoughtfully brought a bottle of wine, a Gewürztraminer76 that I had to drink Rachel’s glass of because she complained, smacking her mouth and contorting her face, that it was too sweet. She polished off a glass of Syrah instead, and now we’re all pleasantly drunk at the table. Although the ostensible occasion for this dinner is the end of the search, none of us have dared discuss it. Nor has Rachel interrogated Matt about his motives. The furthest she has gone is to ask him how our day went, and the two of them have been going back and forth about quarantines. To distract myself in the meanwhile, I’ve been watching the candle flames gutter in their sockets.77 And on my salad plate there is a leftover film of balsamic and olive oil, a viscid, deep-brown emulsion, which—when I incline the plate left and right—rolls darkly down to the edges, like a storm cloud on a dish. Neither Rachel nor Matt seems to notice me.

  ‘If you ask me,’ Matt continues, ‘LCDC are being big softies. Tremendous softies. The infected need to be burned or buried, not barged. Not treated to a cruise on the Mississippi.’ Rachel looks horrified, and I know she’s struggling not to bring up Mr. Mazoch: ‘That’s so… callous. You can’t be serious.’ ‘Do you know what Baton Rouge’s current ratio is? Of the undead to the living? Something like one to twenty. So about forty thousand undead. That’s as if every LSU student were infected. And you’re telling me that you want to keep them on barges and in quarantines?’ ‘Well, we couldn’t keep them there forever. But we can’t just kill them all either. They’re people, they have families. Imagine—’ ‘Families they wouldn’t blink at eating.’ ‘—imagine if every coma victim in the nation were euthanized at once, or everyone with Alzheimer’s. That would be so tragic. Whatever this infection is, we’ve known about it for less than a year. We’ve had less than a year to study it. Why not just be patient, wait for a cure?’ ‘Because there’s no cure for death!’ Mazoch says, laughing. ‘You don’t rub Neosporin on a dead body—you burn it or you bury it.’ ‘You’re talking about genocide.’ ‘No, absolutely not, it is misguided, boneheaded, and dangerous to talk about genocide. There could be nothing less relevant or helpful right now than mapping human models of violence over what’s happening. This talk about euthanizing the undead or murdering the undead. Committing genocide. The only vocabulary commensurate with the epidemic is an epidemiological one, one that calls a virus a virus. Each undead body is a viral agent, programmed only to spread a disease, and I could no more murder one than I could murder HIV.’ ‘The problem with that analogy—’ ‘You want to personalize them, I understand that. They wander back to their homes, as if they remember, as if they’re still people. You hear pundits say, “They need to be burned,” and you bristle. You learned about the Holocaust like everyone else in elementary school, so you think we’re on the verge of some equivalent evil: the systematic cremation of millions of people. But these aren’t people. This is nothing like Europe’s so-called Jewish problem. If anything, this is a dybbuk problem. And if we don’t put a bullet in the head of every one of them, sooner or later it’s going to be a problem of apocalyptic proportions.’ ‘You can’t believe that. You sound like a movie trailer.’ ‘I really do believe it. There are forty thousand contagious cannibals—and think about that for a moment. Contagious cannibals. You get bitten and you become one, you are what you’re eaten by. Nothing could proliferate more factorially, more fatally, than a virus like that. And there are forty thousand of these killing machines being kept in, what, libraries? Dorm rooms? Barges? What happens when they break free? What happens when a hurricane hits and causes another “spill,” or when the virus mutates and becomes airborne?’ ‘So that’s your final solution: a bullet in the head of every infected citizen. Don’t bother building a more secure quarantine, or housing them on some kind of land preserve. Don’t study them and try to understand the infection. Just burn them or bury them. Never mind the fact that there’s clearly something still left in there, some residue of who they used to be. Memories of certain neighborhoods, motor skills. When you see a little infected girl picking up her violin, or when you see those lab experiments: how smart they still are, their aptitude for problem solving—’ ‘Problem solving! Let me tell you about problem solving. The only problem they’ll solve is how to get past your barricades and eat you alive. Problem solving of the octopus pryi
ng open the oyster. Problem solving of the polar bear unzipping the zipper of the tent. Those are the problems they know how to solve.’ ‘But that’s just it. We have no reason to believe they can’t be domesticated. What if they can be trained, tamed, taught not to attack people?’ ‘Rotting corpses as household pets, or in the zoos. A plague straight out of Revelations, an army of walking dead, and you’ll picket for their domestication.’ ‘I’ll “picket” so that innocent people aren’t killed. These are people, Matt. People with a disease. Do you know what I heard on the news the other week? There was a sound bite of an infected man moaning. A speech pathologist had taught him to say “Barbara.” He drew it out in a moan, it was breathy, but it was clear as day: “Barbara.” Barbara, his daughter, was in the studio when they played the sound bite, and after she heard him say her name, she buried her face in her hands and wept.’ ‘That’s very heartwarming. You could teach a parrot to say “Barbara.” You could teach a Furby to say “Barbara”! This is echolalia and nothing else, this is sophism and wishful thinking. Here’s a sound bite for Barbara: have a speech pathologist teach one to moan, “We are going to eat you.” We are going to eat you! That’s all their moaning means. Teach one to say that, and then we’ll see whether little Barbara bursts into tears.’ ‘She was forty.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Barbara. You called her “little Barbara.” But she was forty years old.’

  It is at this point that Matt turns to me. ‘Well, you’ve been especially quiet this evening. What do you think about all this?’