A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  What have I been thinking? That Matt’s vehemence in this debate comes as a shock, even to me. I can’t help wondering how much of it is the Gewürztraminer talking. The disappointment talking. Whether it is perhaps just the pointlessness of the barges—his anger at his missing father—that is fueling his resentment of the undead race right now. Or whether he is simply being provocative, contrarian, baiting Rachel with this eradication rhetoric. Whatever the explanation, he can’t possibly believe the things he’s been saying tonight. And even if he does believe them tonight, he couldn’t possibly have believed them this entire time, every day this past month. Could he? The crestfallen son I saw at Citiplace was not on the lookout for a ‘contagious cannibal’ or ‘killing machine’ to kill: he was searching for his father. So if Matt really does propose mass extermination, then he has to be making some exception in his heart for Mr. Mazoch. Doesn’t he? Not that he would shelter him and keep him alive, necessarily, just that he would be horrified if he found a lynch mob dismembering him. That at some level Matt must recognize the residual humanity of Mr. Mazoch—his ineliminable Mr. Mazochness—since at some level Matt must feel that only he, Mr. Mazoch’s son, bears the right or the responsibility to murder the man (if, indeed, he plans to murder the man). Otherwise, why search like this? Why race against what clock? Why not let the exterminators take care of him, or the armed guard, or the hurricane? Is more or less what I’ve been thinking.

  I’ve also been thinking about Rachel, whose face has been growing increasingly distraught, and who has surely been imagining Matt putting a ‘bullet in the head’ of Mr. Mazoch. If she had heard him going on like this any earlier, there would have been no question of her condoning the search. And it’s been valiant of her—in light of the search’s failure, when all this rhetoric is empty and inconsequential—to refrain from bringing up his father. To keep the argument abstract.

  I, too, would like to keep the argument abstract, and the final thing I’ve been thinking is how to explain Rachel’s point of view to Matt. Put it in terms he’d understand. I want to try to communicate her empathy for the undead—her respect for creation78—without any more recourse to infected fathers or little Barbaras. So when he asks what I’ve been thinking, I ask in turn, ‘Have you read Homo Sacer?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘but I’ve played bisexual baseball.’ ‘No, like—’ ‘I’m kidding. Of course I’ve read Homo Sacer.’

  But Rachel, as it turns out, hasn’t, so for her benefit I find myself drunkenly reconstructing Agamben’s argument79 before making my own point, which is that, basically, Rachel’s ethical unease regarding the reduction of the undead to something like bare life may after all be justified. ‘Because you can imagine exactly the kind of argument that Agamben would make: the undead occupy a “zone of indistinction,” a cloudy biological interstice, and it would be all too easy to dehumanize them, justifying anything from forced labor to genocide. Even if you reject the term “genocide,” you’re still talking about extinction. You’d be wiping out a new form of life in less than a year of its inception. Think of what scientists still have to learn from them: organisms of dead cells, creatures that persist beyond cell death. For all we know this could be a net evolutionary gain, the human race’s phylogenetic solution to mortality. So I think what Rachel’s saying is, “Hold on, let’s wait a minute—before we do anything rash why don’t we study this some more.”’ ‘And what I’m saying is that we don’t have a minute. We have approximately until hurricane season.’ ‘Yes, Matt, you’ve made it abundantly clear already that that’s what you’re saying.’ ‘The insane thing isn’t that walking corpses might be divested of their legal rights, Michael. That’s not the insane thing. The insane thing is that they haven’t been yet, that it’s been two months now and legal rights still adhere to them—walking corpses!—even as they decay on their feet. You don’t find that insane? True, the police aren’t going to conduct any murder investigations, if they find a slain undead in the streets. But by letter of the law you could be arrested for homicide. “Man”slaughter. That’s what’s insane!’ ‘The only people who have been or are going to be arrested for homicide are the sadists who lynch the infected. And you probably feel even as strongly as I do that lynch mobs shouldn’t be allowed to string stray infected up in trees. I hate to invoke families again—you seem to think it’s rhetorically illegitimate—but imagine if “little Barbara” walked outside and saw her undead father hanged, ten drunk men beating at him like a piñata. Or saw them pouring gasoline over him in the yard, setting him ablaze. These are the people who are and who will be arrested, not the families who quietly decide to put an undead relative to sleep.’ ‘What you—’

  Rachel expresses her desire to be talking about something else, and in response we all stop talking. The room becomes sauna-like with silence, the quiet as thick and conspicuous as heat. I’m still thinking about what I was just on the brink of saying: I wanted to ask Matt how he would react, if it were Mr. Mazoch who had been taught to moan ‘Matt,’ or if it were Mr. Mazoch strung up in a tree. As for Matt, he’s probably still on his own brink.

  Eventually he is the one to break the silence. Clearing his throat, he addresses me: ‘Mike,’ he says. ‘Matt,’ I say. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘About my dad’s windows.’ I do some throat-clearing of my own. So he’s finally ready to confess about the windows: either to claim responsibility for them, or to admit that he never truly suspected his father. To spare him the awkwardness—and to keep him from divulging any need-to-know information that Rachel does not need to know—I try to cut him off. ‘Matt, I—’

  ‘I need to know who broke them,’ he says. Rachel sits up at this. ‘What?’ she asks. ‘Someone broke your dad’s windows?’ He wipes his palm in the air before him, as if washing a windowpane: ‘Right in the front of his house. First thing we saw Wednesday morning.’ ‘Oh, my God,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’ ‘Mike didn’t tell you?’ ‘No,’ she says, looking confused. ‘It must have slipped his mind.’ Matt turns to me: ‘You didn’t run it by her?’ ‘Run what?’ I ask. ‘The extension. You said you’d run it by her.’ ‘You’d run what by me?’ Rachel asks. Before Matt can spill the entire miserable business to her, I interrupt him: ‘Matt, I thought you knew. This was our last day. This dinner .’ ‘No,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘No, I can’t quit now. Not yet. I need to give it more time. Just in Denham, just another week or so. You don’t have to come—’ Here he stops himself, for we both know this isn’t true. I do have to go with him. I can’t let him go alone. That’s the only reason he’s sharing this absurd plan with me: he knows I’ll insist on going with him.

  ‘“Extension”?’ Rachel repeats, narrowing her eyes at me. I wince. After everything Matt has said tonight, I realize how this must look to her. She must think that I have known all along about Matt’s violence (his genocidal rants, the volatility of his emotions, his clear and present capacity for patricide): that I have known about it but ignored it, turned a blind eye to it, even done my part to conceal it from her. She must think that I have been hiding the windows and the extension for the same reason. In short, that I have been Matt’s willing accomplice, accompanying him on a manhunt while downplaying all of its dangers. In a sense, of course, she’s right. That is exactly what I’ve been doing. There are things that I’ve been hiding from her: Matt’s violence, my doubts. And if he weren’t here right now, I’m sure I could explain it. Make her understand why I had to keep silent. But that’s not going to happen while he’s sitting there listening.

  For now, I try to soft-pedal the extension: ‘It was just an idea Matt was floating,’ I tell her. ‘Hypothetically.’ I look to Matt for confirmation, but he is still shaking his head: ‘Mike, I told you. I need to know who broke them.’ ‘You broke them!’ I almost shout, biting my lip just in time. He continues: ‘You don’t believe me about the windows. I know that. And it’s fine.’ ‘Matt, it’s not a matter of whether—’ ‘That’s fine,’ he repeats. ‘Because I can just go alone.’ ‘Alo
ne?’ ‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ he says. ‘And I can’t quit now, even if you do. Not two days after the break-in, not with two weeks left till hurricane season. I’m going to Denham tomorrow. I told you, you don’t have to come—’ Again he stops himself, providing me an opportunity to rush in to his rescue. I look to Rachel for assistance, or permission, but now she is the one shaking her head. ‘Michael?’ she says. ‘You’re going?’

  After a moment of strained silence, I splay my hands in helplessness. ‘Of course,’ I tell her. ‘You didn’t think I’d let him drive out there alone?’ I try to keep my tone breezy, smoothing over any hints of tension for Mazoch’s sake. ‘What’s a few more days?’ I ask. Rachel smiles weakly. ‘No, no,’ she says, like a gracious hostess, ‘a few more days. It’s nothing.’ ‘Really,’ Matt protests, ‘you don’t have—’ But Rachel cuts him off: ‘Michael’s right,’ she says. ‘You can’t go alone. It’s too dangerous.’ I can tell by her voice that she and I do not have the same danger in mind. It’s not Matt’s safety she’s worried about: it’s Mr. Mazoch’s.

  Matt beams at us both, as if genuinely oblivious, and lifts his wineglass over the table. With the last remaining sip of Gewürztraminer, he raises a toast to ‘one more week.’ We all clink drinks, and Rachel shoots me a withering glance over the rim of her glass. Matt doesn’t notice this either. Later in the night, when he finally rises to leave, he even hugs Rachel goodbye, and at the door he squeezes my hand hard, gripping my bones like a barbell. ‘See you tomorrow?’ he asks. ‘Same time?’

  ‘Same time,’ I say.

  ‘Same time?’ Rachel repeats, the moment I’ve closed the door, without any regard for her volume or for how far down the walkway Matt could have possibly gotten. She’s standing behind the couch, arms crossed over her chest: ‘You have to stop him.’ ‘I’ll talk to him tomorrow,’ I promise. ‘Not good enough,’ she says. ‘Don’t “talk to” him, Michael. Stop him. You heard him tonight. He’s a murderer. He’s a homicide waiting to happen. If he keeps on like this, he’ll—’ ‘What am I supposed to tell him? Tell me what to tell him, what you would tell him, and I’ll tell him.’ ‘Tell him he’s a maniac, Michael! That he’s driving himself insane!’ ‘Rachel, I can’t tell him that.’ ‘Why not? Because it will hurt his feelings?’ ‘Mazoch? I’d be more afraid of his feelings hurting me. I’d be more afraid of Mazoch flexing his feelings, and a button popping off his shirt and hitting me in the eye.’ ‘Tell him he needs to quit the search. Tell him that if he kills his father, if he kills a fly, you’re calling the police. Tell him you’ll have him locked up for “man”slaughter, if it comes down to that. I don’t care what you tell him. But don’t come home and tell me that you’ve set him loose for another week.’ She stops herself here, taking a deep breath. And although she doesn’t say as much, I can sense the ultimatum lurking beneath her final sentence: that it’s the search or her. That if I continue to accompany Matt now—aiding and abetting him in what certainly seems like murder—she couldn’t bear to live with me. Yet staying home isn’t an option either: if I call it quits without trying to intervene—if I simply dust my hands of Matt and Mr. Mazoch, looking the other way on a potential patricide—she will hold me partially to blame for whatever happens. I shake my head in disbelief: ‘You make it sound like I want him out there. Like I approve of all this. What, do you think I’d help him hide the body?’ ‘Like you hid the extension, you mean? And the windows? And God knows what else?’ ‘I didn’t want to frighten you, is all. I assumed a hooligan had vandalized the house.’ I pause to assess the truth value of this (Matt qualifies, probably, as a hooligan), then press on: ‘And since the search was almost over anyway—’ Rachel rolls her eyes at the lameness of this explanation, leaving me no option but to double down on it. ‘It was an error in judgment,’ I say, ‘and now you can’t forgive me. I’m not just a liar apparently, but a killer too. You hear Matt spouting off for one night about the Holocaust and dybbuk problems, and suddenly I’m his Eichmann. Honey, you can trust me. You don’t have to worry about Mr. Mazoch.’ ‘Let’s not talk about Mr. Mazoch, Michael.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Just, let’s not talk about him. Okay?’ ‘Why? What is it this time?’ ‘Drop it.’ ‘You think I’m insufficiently sensitive to discuss Matt’s father?’ ‘Drop it.’ ‘You think I’m too callous and fanatical, like Matt?’ ‘You really want me to tell you?’ ‘Yes! Please!’ ‘I know how you see them. Mr. Mazoch is no more human to you than he is to Matt: just a weird new life form. You’d sooner strap him to an EEG than get him to a quarantine. You’d rather hand him over to Oliver Sacks than to LCDC. No, Michael, I “trust” you. I know you would never let Matt kill him. You’re too obsessed. Sometimes I think what you really want—’ ‘What? Say it.’ ‘Is to be infected yourself.’ ‘Jesus Christ.’ ‘Just so you can see what it’s like.’

  As Rachel and I continue to argue (while doing dishes, cleaning the kitchen, brushing our teeth), I try not to let on how much her accusation has shaken me. But I can’t stop thinking about what she’s said. I know that it’s preposterous, of course: I know—even if Rachel doesn’t—that I’m not some overzealous Jekyll, ready to inject myself with a sample. Yet it’s still disturbing that that is how she sees me. When I review the few risks I’ve been exposing myself to lately (for instance, hiking into an overgrown field), I can hardly imagine the mountains she must be making of them: treating each as an attempt at self-destruction, away of flirting with infection. As if, in her eyes, I’m just as bad as Matt. As if there is some subconscious part of me—a hidden undeath drive—that desires being bitten. Is that why she thinks I’m accompanying him tomorrow?

  In the end, I promise her I will find some way of ‘stopping’ him. This is as we’re lying in bed, that I promise her this. She has her back to mine, in the addorsed posture of domestic discord, and I think I can feel her nod in the dark. We pass the rest of the night in silence. For my part, I have not been able to fall asleep. I doubt that Rachel has either. As I’ve been lying here, my back to hers, I dread the things she must be thinking. How I’ve betrayed her. How she doesn’t know me. ‘Who is this person?’ she must be asking herself. ‘This stranger? What is he doing in my bed?’

  SATURDAY

  ON THE DRIVE INTO DENHAM THIS MORNING, NOT long after we cross the bridge, Matt and I hit a roadblock. Fifty yards from Mr. Mazoch’s, there is a checkpoint barring the way: sputtering flares, orange barricades, riot guards. ‘What’s this?’ Matt asks, slowing to a stop. He starts to cut the wheel left, and I assume that he’s about to turn around. Take us home. Instead, he drives us down a side street, circumventing the barriers, and after a series of back alleys and shortcuts that I do not recognize, we emerge on the other side of the roadblock, pulling into Mr. Mazoch’s driveway.

  From here, it’s immediately clear what the commotion is. At the Freedom Fuel down the street, there are four police cruisers in the parking lot, corralling a crowd of what looks like fifteen infected silhouettes. These can’t be strays—there must have been a ‘spill’ at one of the nearby quarantines. Matt and I turn to watch the scene through the back window: the cruisers are parked hood to hood in a quadrilateral formation, penning in the silhouettes, which shuffle back and forth restlessly. Until an LCDC van can arrive, they are evidently going to have to be wrangled this way. Indeed, even as I am thinking this, I hear a siren somewhere behind us, a single far-off whoop-whoop. I glance back to the windshield, expecting to see the LCDC van coasting up the road, but what I see is another orange barricade, which has since been dragged into the street we used to get here. Trapping us in. I laugh to myself. Of course we’re trapped here. Of course this is happening. The one day that we overstep the deadline—on our first supernumerary day—Mazoch drives us into a maelstrom of moaning corpses. At least I’m here with him, I console myself. I was right to come, just as I told Rachel. Because if Matt were alone right now, he would surely be sprinting into that parking lot, trying to wrestle his way past the riot guards.

  As if reading my
thoughts, Matt begins to unbuckle his seatbelt. ‘Hey?’ I ask. ‘What’s up?’ Without answering he pushes the car door open and climbs out, and before I have a chance to stop him he is hurrying across the yard. But he does not sprint toward the Freedom Fuel, as I had expected. He goes jogging up the driveway and disappears into the house. It does not take me long to realize what he himself must have realized: that if Mr. Mazoch is one of those infected, then there may be signs of struggle in the living room. That is what he has raced inside to find. Shattered chairs, boot scuffs on the linoleum, claw marks in the walls. Any proof that his father has been dragged out bodily, kicking and moaning, by the riot guards now holding him at the gas station. I wait for what feels like much more than a minute—five, ten—before I finally stop counting. Probably he has taken up his post by one of the windows, peering through the binoculars at the parking lot. Scanning the crowd for his father’s face.

  I still have not tried talking to Matt this morning. We left my apartment in silence, with some vestigial tenseness from last night. My plan was to deliver my speech when we got here, but I was too infuriated. Now I’m stuck waiting in the car, killing time until he returns. It will have to be when he gets back. The moment he sits down in the driver’s seat, I will have to talk to him. And so that is what I have been preparing to do while he’s been inside: rehearsing what I will say to him. Drafting an apostrophic monologue in my mind. Telling him things in my head and telling myself that I’ll tell them to him when he returns. What I’ve been telling him is this:

  ‘No, listen. You’re never going to find your father. Isn’t it time you gave up this particular ghost? To have checked the number of sites that we have, the number of times that we have, for as long a time as we have, would have been enough to satisfy any reasonable person. Your father’s obviously been hit by a car or shot dead, or else he’s fallen off the map altogether. Wandered into a swamp and sunk. But you’re not a reasonable person. You want to check each site more, even to check more sites. You ask me, “What if he isn’t in Baton Rouge?” What if? You’ll drive to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, is what if. And why? Because he’s “a walking corpse!”, “a rotting corpse!”, “straight out of Revelations!” Because he has to be “burned or buried!” forthwith! Until you went off like a Neo-Nazi about the need to extinguish the infected, I thought that you might still want to protect the man. If your goal was to commit him to a quarantine before he got himself killed, if our search was conceived as a rescue mission, then indeed your indefatigability would be noble. But it’s obvious that your only aim is patricide: not to avenge your father’s murder, but to re-murder your murdered father. And so your indefatigability is insane. Three weeks ago, when there was a chance he could be found, even this—a mercy killing—might have seemed reasonable to me. But now? The odds are so high that he’s already dead, yet still you need to find him. You’re combing rubble, ground zero, for the man you want to kill. We’re well beyond the dedication of a son who can’t stand the thought of his undead father. This is the dedication of a warlord, a warlord ordering his enemy’s head! And you’ll go further even than that. You won’t stop until you sever his head yourself! With your own hands! It’s not enough for you to just assume that he’s roadkill, you have to see him dead—best if beaten to death by you of course—and you’ll search full-time to do it. Where is all this energy and anger coming from? What has been sustaining you every day for the past month? Whom or what would you even be avenging by killing your father? Certainly not your father. Are you mad at him for letting himself get bitten? Did those unboarded windows, that unlocked door, seem as careless to you, as selfish, as the cigarettes and fast food that he gave himself a heart attack with? Do you think that he has neglected his obligations to you as a father, that he should have fought harder for your sake to survive? That, if he really loved you, he would have come to Citiplace? What shit! You don’t need me to tell you what shit that is, Matt. Because blaming a man for dying is what’s selfish. And clocking eight-hour days to hunt the object of your mourning, so that you can vent your rage on it with a baseball bat. For that matter, enlisting your friend to accompany you on this manhunt, endangering that friend by driving him through infected neighborhoods, without being forthright with him about your motives; but enlisting him anyway because his presence “helps you not to think”—i.e., helps you not to get locked into the obsessive and embittered track of indictments against your father, memories of your father, thoughts of your father that would eat you alive as surely as your father would if only you were left alone with them—is what’s selfish. To say nothing of shattering windows like some madman, so as to fabricate evidence, and feeding me a line about how we’ve been “closing in”… all so that you could spring this extra week on me at the last minute. And what happens then? Am I supposed to ride sidecar like this for another month? A year? How long do you need to keep looking, before you finally accept that there’s nothing to find? No. I can’t let you keep on like this. Not for another week. Not for another day. Whatever it is that I’m complicit in by accompanying you in this, it isn’t healthy for you or right. Call this the intervention of a concerned friend, consider this my official unsolicited advice to you: quit when I do. Forget the search. Try volunteering or something else instead. Defer to the hurricane and count your dad among the victims. But don’t spend another week gnawing at this wound. Because I won’t be gnawing at it with you.’