A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  No. That is insane. That is exactly the kind of thought you can’t let yourself think, I tell myself. For one thing, you don’t even know that he was wearing that plaid shirt when he reanimated. And secondly, any infected could be wearing a plaid shirt. You said so yourself. You’re making the same mistake Mazoch made, yesterday at the barges. Making a false positive. Treating that torn blue plaid like some boar’s tusk scar. No, that infected isn’t Mr. Mazoch. It couldn’t be.

  And yet, on the other hand, it could be. His height, his shape, why not? All that would be required is that his undead body tried returning here today, either for the first time in a month or for the third time this week. Before he could reach his house, he would have been diverted into the Freedom Fuel parking lot, either attracted there himself, or corralled by the police officers. And that could be him pounding on the window of the cruiser, trying to get inside, reaching for the blond-haired square-jawed boy whom he could very well have mistaken for Matt.

  I center the infected’s head in my binoculars, magnifying its mop of unruly tousles. That way, when it turns around to the house (its house?), I’ll have its face in frame. Absurdly, I feel this need to see its face, as if everything would be settled then. As if I’d be able to recognize Mr. Mazoch, whose photo I’ve still never seen, or discern some family resemblance.

  But the infected does not turn around. It keeps beating its gray fist against the windowpane. It certainly does look as if it has had a lot of practice punching windowpanes. Indefatigably it beats, showing no sign of stopping, and I know now that nothing is going to catch its attention from behind. In the shatterproof glass, it has found the perfect opponent. Pounding away, it is free to indulge its breaching instinct indefinitely. Nothing will distract it from this task, not until it’s too late: not until the LCDC van arrives to detain it. If I want to determine whether it’s Mr. Mazoch, I’ll have to call Matt over to the window. I’ll have to tell him, casually, that some new infected have arrived, and hand him the binoculars to check.

  Except I can’t just call Matt to the window. Now? Now that he is finally ‘finished’? Calling him to the window after he has finally let his father go, and given up the search for good, would be to risk relapse in the worst way. If I made him lock his binoculars on the back of this so-called ‘Mr. Mazoch’ (but in fact just another false positive, some evilly conceived Mr. Mazoch doppelganger), Matt would be ruined. He would again be filled with wishful thinking about his father: that the man was waiting for him somewhere, that he still existed to be found. Even when the infected did turn around, and Matt confirmed for himself that it was just another false positive, the damage would already be done. The search’s embers would be rekindled in Matt: if not this infected, he would tell himself, in this parking lot, then some other infected, somewhere else. The trick was just not to give up.

  And even that reaction would be a best-case scenario. Because Matt might not bother waiting for it to turn around. Instead of seeing ‘his father’ out there, he might simply see the monster he had condemned so mercilessly last night: a ‘killing machine’ and ‘contagious cannibal,’ trying to ‘solve the problem’ of the cop cruiser, beating against the window so that it could get at that officer (that Matt doppelganger) inside. So that it could eat what it thought was its son alive. The moment Matt saw that, he might be crazed with the need to kill it. I’d have to hold him back by main strength, just to keep him from sprinting with his bat to the parking lot, where he’d be sure to get himself arrested, if not shot, if not bitten. Yes. That could happen, too, if I called Matt over. Then I would have all that blood and horror and heartbreak on my hands.

  I think back to the day when Rachel and I visited her father’s grave. If I had actually heard something suspicious then (a far rustle underground, a scratching sound), what would I have done? Would I have told her, leaving her no option—psychologically—but to dig down through six feet of earth and splinter her dad’s casket? Or would I have let it go, dismissing it as the nothing that it probably was? Sparing her that misery.

  I pan the binocular lenses over the infected’s shoulder, looking into the car again. This time, the officer’s back is to me. With his right hand on the wheel, he’s gesturing with the left above his head, whipping his index finger around in a frantic circle, as if miming lasso motions. He appears to be signaling someone. Dropping the binoculars from my eyes, I squint through the sudden sunlight and see whom he must have been signaling: at the edge of the parking lot is the white LCDC van, its sliding side door already open, and two officers in riot gear standing beside it. Their silhouettes are black, a complete and Kevlar dark. When they arrived I have no idea. While I was watching the doppelganger, the LCDC van must have pulled quietly into the parking lot. ‘Vermaelen,’ I hear Matt say behind me. ‘What’s the word?’ ‘Van,’ I say. ‘Give it a few minutes.’

  I steeple my fingers over my brow again, shading my eyes. On the passenger side of the cruiser, Mr. Mazoch (or his doppelganger) is still standing in place. But his companion in the black polo has already begun to wander toward the van, having abandoned the officer at the wheel for the freestanding riot guards. The dark silhouette shuffles slowly, heading across the parking lot’s stark white concrete. One of the guards has his arms extended before him, locked stiff like a fisherman’s, and as I watch he begins to swivel in place, turning his torso from the cruiser to the van. Suddenly the infected swerves, staggering in that direction, moving in a rigid line toward the van’s opened side door. Wherever the guard turns, the infected follows. It takes me a moment to understand what is happening, but then I remember these high-tech shepherd’s staffs from the news: they’re the standard wildlife handlers, an aluminum pole of pool-cleaning length, with a steel collar attached at its end. Clamping the collar around an infected’s neck, an officer can wrench its body in the desired direction, controlling its movements from ten safe feet away. A handler such as this must be what the riot guard is commanding. Invisible in the distance, its thin pole is what’s responsible for this optical illusion, in which the guard appears to have telekinetic powers: how he seems to just Jedi the infected forward with his gesturing hands. Sure enough, the second guard now extends his own arms before him, and the infected begins writhing violently, in sudden protest. Meanwhile a third guard is sprawled like a marksman across the van’s hood, presumably aiming an assault rifle or something at the entire scene. Providing the others cover as they corral the infected. Everything else is deathly still and quiet.

  I raise the binoculars again and zero in on the Mr. Mazoch doppelganger. He is still leaning against the cruiser, but he’s motionless, no longer pounding its window with his fist. He stands at attention, all six feet of him ramrod straight with his arms at his sides, his head slightly inclined to peer over the roof. At any moment, I know, he will be unable to resist his curiosity any longer. Following suit with his companion, he will shuffle into the parking lot, to investigate these strange new humans who have arrived on the scene. Then, before he understands what is happening, those mandibular pincers will come clamping around his neck from behind, and an unknown power start wrenching at his spine, until he is dragged into the van.

  Even as I am thinking this, Mr. Mazoch—if indeed it is Mr. Mazoch—begins to move. He sidesteps rightward, crabwise, along the length of the cruiser. I follow him with the binoculars, trying to keep his gray head in frame. In seconds he clears the cruiser’s hood, and with nothing to separate him from the LCDC van, he begins to stride forward. Soon he has put sufficient distance between himself and the binoculars for me to be able to see, not just his torso, but his entire body. He takes long diagonal lunges across the parking lot, heading for one of the riot guards. He leaves his arms at his sides, where they swing languidly. His gray hands. Over his shoulder, a few yards away, I can just make out the riot guard. He is aiming the wildlife handler at Mr. Mazoch, and he is outfitted (as I’d figured) in the full exoskeletal regalia: the gleaming visored helmet and Kevlar vest and glossy greaves and
gloves, all pitch dark in the morning sunlight. He has his combat boots posted firmly on the ground, hunching himself down into a tense stance, preparatory to wrestling with the infected. The aluminum pole is held outright, the collar’s clamps opened wide and ready to seize their prey. The thing looks like a praying-mantis face. Mr. Mazoch pauses, as if evaluating the situation. He angles his body leftward slightly, blocking my view of the riot guard, and I can’t see what’s going on with the pole. Only the familiar close-up of his gray hair and blue plaid shirt. He stands confused, deliberating. He’s just a yard out of the mandibles’ range. Any moment now—the second he resumes shuffling forward—he is going to walk into that trap. I keep the binoculars trained on the back of his head, too scared to look away. Except then, just when I think that he is about to take a step, something must finally catch his attention from behind. For in a slow, graceless motion he is turning, shifting his body around to face the house.

  At the sight of his face in the binoculars, I stop breathing. But it is just a stranger’s face. No different from a funeral corpse: the gray skin drawn tight around the mouth, the expression slack and placid. The pallor. At first it is impossible to determine anything by his features. I could easily convince myself that this is Mr. Mazoch’s face; I could just as easily convince myself that it isn’t. After a second or two I think to close my eyes, and I try—as during the second defamiliarization exercise—to build a mental image of Matt’s own face. I clear my head of all interfering thoughts and images, and really try to see his face, to see it as it would be in old age. At Mr. Mazoch’s age. Beginning with the wire-frame template of Matt’s head, I fill it in with flesh and craft the finer details: the strong square jaw, the blunt nose, the cleft chin. Meditating unbrokenly on this face for several moments, I finally snap my eyelids open. And there it is: its afterimage shimmers briefly beyond the binocular lenses, slipping over the infected’s face like a mask. It fits the infected’s face perfectly. Mapping onto all his contours. The jaw. The blunt nose. Even the cleft chin. Yes. There’s no denying it. That is Mazoch’s face. Mr. Mazoch’s face.

  Now would be the time to call Matt to the window, if that were a thing I was going to do. But I can’t. As Mr. Mazoch stares back at his house—back at this room where he reanimated, the grave that he crawled out of—I stare mesmerized into his eyes, which are wide open and white, and which seem to be peering into my own eyes, directly through the binocular lenses. I know that this is impossible. That he cannot see me. That at most I would appear as a silhouette in the window, a dim shape beyond the frame. Yet his eyes never blink, and I feel seen. Magnified, they look exactly as I have always imagined: each is as bone-pale and opaque as the Holbein blur. I could swear that they are seeing something. I try to imagine what it must have been like for him, those first few seconds after reanimation. To have to come to in this room, mere moments after bleeding to death. The opening of his eyes one more morning: sunlight on the ceiling, these memories again. Whatever it was he saw then—whether the skull’s side of his life, or all the paths of the underworld, or the beacon of a Bethlehem star—it must have led him wandering into the past. For that is the world he belongs to now. That is probably what he’s seeing—what he’s peering into—at this very moment: memories of this house. Visions of Matt as a kid in this house. The long nights spent cataloguing antiques. As for the house itself—its dilapidated exterior, the dingy siding and shattered windows—he probably can’t see it at all. It must appear to him as it appeared to me, in the streaky rearview mirror at the beginning of the week: vague, whorled, amorphous. Which is just as well. The building is not what he came back here to see. This house is not his home, anymore. Even though he has returned to it, he is looking through it—beyond it—to his true home. He cannot see it, but he knows it’s here. He is transfixed by something else, his eyes wide open and opiated, lost in an enraptured staring. His gaze is glazed with satiety. Whatever it is he sees, he obviously can’t tear his eyes from it. He needs to get his fill of it, before turning his back on it, and facing the riot guard behind him.

  Watching him, I realize that Rachel was right: part of me really does desire this. To see for myself. See what it would be like. Of course, I could study the undead for the rest of my life, I know, and still not comprehend what they’re experiencing. The only way to see for myself would be to get bitten. That is clearer to me now than ever, confronted with the inscrutable whiteness of Mr. Mazoch’s eyes. They are clouded with mystery, giving nothing away. Admonishing me from that other world.

  Was Rachel right about that too? Would I actually let myself get bitten? If given the choice, is the infection how I would prefer to go? After all, it is an entirely new form of dying: different from cancer, or car wrecks, or heart attacks. Different from anything any of us grew up expecting. Instead of the certain nothingness of death—the complete cessation of consciousness—there is this strange and ineffable something. And although we can’t know what it will be like, we can assume that it is more than nothing. So if someone offered me a bite wound on my deathbed, I might be tempted to take it. When it came time to relinquish being, I might be unwilling—or unable—to let go: of my self, of my memories, of this world. I might try to keep one foot on earth (my phantom foot), while the other tested out Lethe.

  Maybe that is the source of Matt’s anger: not that Mr. Mazoch let go—let himself get bitten, let himself die—but that he didn’t let go. That, at the critical moment, he clung to somethingness, rather than pass over into nothingness. I look into his face through the binoculars: his eyes are still wide and white; his mouth hangs open slightly, breathless, in the labored gape of sleep apnea. He may not have let go, but Matt has let him go. As far as Matt’s concerned, his father is dead. And once the riot guards clamp him down and wrestle him into the van, Matt won’t be responsible for him. Quarantined, Mr. Mazoch will be free to pace back and forth in his room for the rest of his ‘life,’ walking the treadmill of its floor in the direction of his memories.

  I let the binoculars drop to my chest. Instantaneously Mr. Mazoch—if indeed it is Mr. Mazoch—vanishes. His face is replaced by the glacial brightness of the day. Squinting in the sunlight, I can barely even make out the parking lot, where everything has become frozen and small again. It takes me a moment to relocate the doppelganger and the riot guard: I see a bluish silhouette and a blackish silhouette, standing together in a static diorama. A few yards behind them, the other guard is busy with his wildlife handler, tugging an infected forward. As for Mr. Mazoch, he still seems free, for the moment. It’s possible that he has already turned around, away from the house, and is about to advance on the riot guard. Or else that the guard has taken a step forward himself, and is about to clamp his neck from behind. They’re too far off to know for sure. Whatever the case, it will only be a matter of time. In twenty minutes, half an hour, all of the infected will have been rounded up, and the van will pull as quietly out of the parking lot as it pulled into it. Then the distant whoop-whoop of a siren will signal the end of the lockdown, and the barriers will be dragged out of the streets. Matt and I will leave this house. Matt will drive me home.

  I turn my back on the window, and have to blink blindly at the dimness of the living room. Matt, a dark shape on the sofa, clears his throat. It has been several minutes since either of us has spoken. ‘Vermaelen,’ he says. ‘See anything out there?’ I can’t tell whether he’s looking at me, but I shake my head. I mean to tell him no. There’s nothing to see.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to the following institutions for their generosity and hospitality: the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, especially Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek; the Speakeasy, especially Jackqueline Frost and Andrew Meyer; and the Corporation of Yaddo, especially Sean Marshall and Candace Wait.

  Thanks as well to the following readers for their insight and support: Jin Auh, Adam Eaglin, Aaron Kunin, Eric Obenauf, Emily Pullen, Arden Reed, Ed Skoog, Caroline Thomas, Rachel Van Pelt, and Eliza Jane Wood. Speci
al thanks to Ben Mauk.

  Finally, this book is not for or to Sam Chang, but by and with her. Thank you.

  COMING SEPTEMBER 2013 !

  “It’s fine work in its manic pacing and its summoning of certain cultural emblems. Present tense with a vengeance. I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the face.”

  —DON DELILLO

  MIRA CORPORA IS THE DEBUT NOVEL FROM ACCLAIMED PLAYWRIGHT Jeff Jackson, an inspired, dreamlike adventure by a distinctive new talent.

  LITERARY AND INVENTIVE, BUT ALSO FAST-PACED AND GRIPPING, Mira Cor pora charts the journey of a young runaway. A coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories, featuring a colony of outcast children, teenage oracles, amusement parks haunted by gibbons, mysterious cassette tapes, and a reclusive underground rockstar.

  WITH ASTOUNDING PRECISION, JACKSON WEAVES A MOVING TALE of discovery and self-preservation across a startling, vibrant landscape.

  Also published by TWO DOLLAR RADIO

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