A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  Is more or less what I’ve been thinking at Matt this morning. Now I twist around in my seat again, to check on the progress at the Freedom Fuel. In the time that I’ve been waiting, additional infected have arrived: either attracted on their own by the commotion, or else rounded up in the vicinity. Wherever they came from, six new silhouettes have converged on the nearest cruiser, clumping around its sides. If the police are concerned about this, they don’t show it. As I watch, a single infected (a stick figure, at this distance) detaches itself from the hood and starts wandering across the parking lot. The cruiser merely flashes its sirens—they glint blue-red, blue-red for three revolutions above its roof—and the infected comes shuffling back.

  At the thought of Mazoch watching this from the window, through his binoculars, I become strangely enraged. I can actually feel the monologue welling up in my mouth, like spit before the vomit, and I unbuckle my seatbelt as violently as I can before flinging open the car door.

  But when I jog up the driveway and up the porch steps and barge into the living room, I don’t find Matt standing at any of the windows. He’s slumped on the sofa: elbows on knees, head in hands. The binoculars are lying on the cushion beside him. He looks up at me. ‘Any news out there?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘not yet.’

  I take a moment to survey the living room. For the most part it’s as I suspected: no signs of struggle, no traces. But this is the first I’ve been inside since beginning the search, and I’m surprised by the degree of dilapidation. The place looks even more miserable than I remembered. In the short time that the windowpanes have been shattered, the interior appears to have been exposed to catastrophic elements: the carpet where I stand is sodden from dew and rain, and the July air is heavy and hot and hard to inhale, exactly as humid in here as outside. Along the walls, the outlets are nicotine brown around the sockets (power surge?), and in the corner of the room, all three bulbs of the brass floor lamp (whose central pole branches out into three adjustable eyestalks, forming an ommatophorous torchiere, each stalk capped with a miniature trumpet shade of jade-green glass) are blown, charred black from poppage. Elsewhere the unchecked humidity seems to have had effects that I associate only with serious flood damage, for instance in post-Katrina photos of abandoned buildings: the five faux-mahogany particleboard blades of Mr. Mazoch’s ceiling fan all droop downward now, curling together in a tarantula of warped wood; and the walls’ navy paint seems to be, like, bubbling in places, trapped air (I guess) swelling it upward in convex blobs. The place is falling apart. Plus random animals appear to have taken advantage of the shattered windows as well. Dotting the gray carpet are the dried fecal pellets of free-ranging rodents and cats, which fauna are probably also responsible for the shredded paper strewn around the coffee table.

  This coffee table—actually an old treasure chest, wooden, with a vaulted top and rusted hinges—is currently serving Matt as a footrest. I wonder whether he has been sitting there this whole time, kicking up his feet while I waited alone in the car. Or, for that matter, whether he has been sitting like that all week, every morning after his inspections. This is the room that he has had to see each day. He looks up at me again, head still in hands, and sees me staring: ‘What?’

  ‘Listen,’ I say, on the verge of launching into my monologue. But I find that I’m unable to. I snap at him instead: ‘Well, what are you waiting for? Aren’t you going to come look out the window? You’ve got a straight shot with the binoculars.’ He shakes his head. ‘I looked earlier,’ he says, and there is immense futility and tiredness in his voice. I wonder whether he knows about the new arrivals, the six additional infected to buoy his hope, but I have no intention of telling him. ‘I’m sorry, you know,’ he says. ‘For driving you out here like this. Into the middle of a lockdown. You were right the other day, what you said: about the risks I’ve been taking. What we’re doing is dangerous, and you didn’t have to do it. So thanks.’ ‘Well thanks, Matt. I appreciate that.’ ‘And I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have to worry about it. About me—’ ‘Really, it’s—’ ‘—because I’m finished.’ I study his face for some clue, but it’s inscrutable. ‘Finished?’ ‘This, the search, it’s over. You were right. It’s been over, and today’s the last day I’m going to ask you to do this. So I wanted to let you know. You know. How much I’ve appreciated…’ ‘The help.’ ‘Everything.’ Somewhere behind me, another far-off siren sounds outside, and Matt lifts his chin at the window: ‘How are things looking at the Freedom Fuel?’ I turn to the frame and make a show of peering through it (I even arch all ten fingers over my brow, forming a glare-reducing testudo with my hands, such that I am the very image of flamboyant voyeurism), but in truth I’m too distracted by what Matt’s just said to concentrate, and anyway there don’t appear to be any new details to discern: the six new infected are still absorbed by the cruiser; the LCDC van is still nowhere to be seen. ‘Well?’ he asks. ‘No sign,’ I say.

  I continue looking out the window all the same, fingers steepled at my forehead, rather than turn to face him. I can barely process what he’s said. If it’s really true that he’s finished, then that would at least absolve me from the obligation of delivering my monologue. Reasonable, realistic, and resigned, he would not need to be talked out of anything. But on the other hand, this is the same Mazoch whom I had imagined—just yesterday—driving himself to the ends of the earth, his deepest desire precisely never to be finished. It’s possible that he’s only telling me what he thinks I need to hear. If he has a bad conscience about putting me in danger or endangering my relationship—if he regrets having invited me along in the first place—then he might be trying to get me to quit. He did declare this the last day of our search, after all, not his. His exact words were, ‘Today’s the last day I’m going to ask you to do this.’ Maybe Mazoch, in his own way, was trying to insinuate or admit that he has every intention of carrying on with the search without me.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask him. I keep my voice casual: ‘Now that you’re finished.’ ‘I’m not sure, to be honest. Maybe volunteer. Take a look at one of the shelters.’ ‘That’s good. I was going to say something about that.’ Mazoch doesn’t respond. If he’s planning to continue the search on his own, he evidently isn’t going to tell me. But if he wants to keep his search a secret, let him. Let him drive alone to this dilapidated house, and sit on that waterlogged sofa, every morning for the rest of the summer, if that’s the form his mourning takes. When Rachel and I invite him over for dinner, we’ll just talk about other things. And when he and I meet up to play chess, we’ll studiously avoid the subject. We’ll all pretend he isn’t waiting still.

  ‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘You and Rachel?’ ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I don’t know. She’ll just be happy that I’m home.’ Or vice versa. On my way out this morning, Rachel stopped me at the door, placing her hands on my shoulders. She made me promise that today would be the last day. I nodded, said ‘I promise,’ and gave her a covenantal kiss on the cheek. If I had decided to go out again tomorrow, there’s no guarantee that she would have been home when I got back. And even with the search over, it will take longer than next week for us to normalize. Worry for Matt will continue to be the explicit subject or tacit subtext of our every waking moment. Whenever he doesn’t answer his phone, Rachel will assume that he’s snuck off to Denham. And whenever I go out to buy milk, she’ll assume that I’ve snuck off with him. I doubt that Matt fully appreciates this—the extent of the dust cloud that he has left behind him, domestically—and I’m tempted to let him know. No, Matt, Rachel and I have not made plans. We haven’t been able to think too far beyond your manhunt.

  ‘Plus there are projects,’ I say. ‘Things to do around the apartment, hurricane-wise.’ In the silence I feel Mazoch nodding behind me. It may have just occurred to him—as it’s occurred to me—that this house, too, is unprepared, hurricane-wise. If no FEMA crews get here first, it’ll probably be demolished come August. A single week of mild storms would be enough
to reduce the living room to a ruin: for rain to lash in through the broken windows; for mud and mold, for water rot, to claim everything; and for the creeping tendrils and vines, which cling already to the window frames, to spill over into the space of the house, covering the floors with lush overgrowth. Followed by whatever havoc would be wrought by the rodents and cats, driven inside by the wind. So even if Mazoch wants to keep coming here—sitting vigil among his father’s things; basking in the memories of the man that they catalyze—soon enough that won’t be an option. There won’t be any ‘here’ here to speak of. By September, whatever of his father’s things remain will be utterly defaced: the antiques and trinkets strewn across the room will be rusted over, and the furniture all moth-eaten and murl-ing. Sunlight will puncture the staved-in roof, birds roost in the rafters. Every surface will be maculated with mold. Eventually the space, arrogated by nature in this way, won’t even remind Matt of his father at all. Its signifiers of ‘Mr. Mazoch’ will gradually be overcoded by signifiers of ruin, anonymized by them, until ‘Mr. Mazoch’s house’ has grown indistinguishable from any other disaster site: just generically derelict, and therefore unrecognizable. Whether or not Matt gives up looking for his father, I have to imagine he’ll give up coming here.

  I turn back to look at him. He’s still got his elbows on his knees, head in hands, and though his shoulders flex beneath the thin white cotton of his t-shirt, he looks small somehow. Hunched into himself like that. He even looks—sitting alone on his dad’s sofa, in the middle of his dad’s wrecked and ransacked living room, surrounded by all the dead man’s antiques—like a little kid. His dad died here. This is the place he died. And the sofa, the wooden chest, the brass floor lamp: these are his dead dad’s things. In any other era, Matt might have inherited them. Now he sits among them, in the house where his dead dad came back, and where for a month Mazoch has waited, daily, for his dead dad to come back. He won’t be coming back. Not here, not if he hasn’t already. And not only that, but who knows where he even is by now. Matt knows that. Something in his hunched posture suggests to me he’s accepted this: the windows, the missing shirt, the closing in. He’ll never see his dad again. In this moment, he really does look finished. Leaning forward, fingers buried in his hair, he’s staring beyond the far wall without blinking. He looks like a statue of something: one of those bronzed embodiments of abstract concepts. He looks like the perfect sculpture of having come to terms—with loss, with death, his dad’s absence—he looks like a Rodin of resignation. Printed across the plinth the treasure chest makes beneath his feet should be the title, ‘I’m Finished.’

  I feel a newfound respect for him swell inside me. What strength it must have taken for him to be finished! Seeing me staring, he makes a quizzical expression. Then he reaches for the binoculars. ‘You want to take a look?’ he asks, holding them out. ‘Sure,’ I say, and cross the room to accept them.

  Back at the window I face the Freedom Fuel, raising the binoculars and bracing myself for whatever it is I might see: a rotting face, two white eyes. But by chance what the lenses alight on is the besieged cruiser, its passenger side, and all I have a view of is the backs of two infected as they beat their hands against the window. Their shirts are all I see. A black polo on the left, a blue work shirt on the right. I try panning the binoculars between their shoulders, to clear a sightline through the window, and eventually I get a bead on the officer inside. He’s looking out the windshield, head in profile. He can’t be much older than we are: a scrawny kid with a blond buzz cut and a strong square jaw like Matt’s, gripping the steering wheel and looking bored. He stares stoically ahead, presumably at the three infected pounding on the hood, and I wonder whether the expression on his face (phlegmatic, contemptuous) is what the scuba mask conceals in the shark cage: they want nothing more than to destroy him, but they can’t get at him. He can go on sitting there, baiting them, until the van arrives to detain them. Like Matt, this officer is probably fantasizing about putting a bullet in the head of every infected surrounding his car. And perhaps, in the very near future, he’ll be authorized to. If quarantines nationwide keep overflowing and no medical solutions are forthcoming, the government might decide to unknot the Gordian hordes by sanctioning mass extermination. Of course, the executions would have to be handled humanely, conducted by whitecoats with syringes. But this kid might still get his chance to take a few potshots. I imagine him and a partner parked in the bayou at night, hunting for strays, one swinging the beam of a roof-mounted searchlight, while the other hangs out of the passenger-side window with a scoped hunting rifle (just like the bored sniper teams who are occasionally dispatched to neutralize nutria rats, prowling the swamps late at night in a wildlife-control jeep, and searching the bright plate of their spotlight for any hollow eyeshine [e.g., in bushes or in lakewater, where two jacklit tapeta, flaring out momentarily, will yield a brief Geminian glimmer]). I imagine the kid and his partner searching the darkness for those milky-green cataracts, and taking a swig of bourbon for every pair that they extinguish. A pull of Bulleit for every bullet they put in the head of an infected.

  Stepping back from the window, I manage to get a better angle on the righthand infected. His upper torso is completely visible now, and I can see that his blue work shirt is ratty, scuffed with mud and ripped in places, as if he’s been wandering in a swamp himself. No bloodstains, though. The back of his head looks human: a shaggy mane of gray hair, jagging unkemptly to his shoulders. His shoulders slope massively into his torso, which is barrel-shaped and obese. Clearly this infected used to be—is—a tower of a man, huge in height and bulk. He’s still leaning against the passenger side of the car, pounding on the window, so it’s difficult to tell how tall he really is. But tall, at any rate. Tall enough to carry his excess weight. From his silver head of hair and (literally) blue collar, I try to make inferences about his age, his station. From his shoulders I make inferences about his physical dimensions. What I come up with is that the infected looks about sixty, about six feet, about three hundred pounds. Working class. When I look more closely at his shirt, I notice that it’s plaid. The same generic pattern as the scrap in Highland Road Park.