A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  THE PEOPLE WHO WATCHED HER PASS BY

  A NOVEL BY SCOTT BRADFIELD

  “Challenging [and] original… A billowy adventure of a book. In a book that supplies few answers, Bradfield’s lavish eloquence is the presiding constant.”—New York Times Book Review

  I’M TRYING TO REACH YOU

  A NOVEL BY BARBARA BROWNING

  * The Believer Book Award Finalist.

  “I think I love this book so much because it contains intimations of the potential of what books can be in the future, and also because it’s hilarious.”—Emily Gould, BuzzFeed

  THE ORANGE EATS CREEPS

  A NOVEL BY GRACE KRILANOVICH

  * National Book Foundation 2010 ‘5 Under 35’ Selection.

  * NPR Best Books of 2010.

  * The Believer Book Award Finalist.

  “Krilanovich’s work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins.”—NPR

  FREQUENCIES

  A new non-fiction journal of artful essays.

  “The quality of each piece makes this journal heavy with literary weight.”

  —NewPages

  VOLUME 1 / FALL 2012

  Essays by Blake Butler, Joshua Cohen, Tracy Rose Keaton, Scott McClanahan; Interview with Anne Carson.

  VOLUME 2 / SPRING 2013

  Essays by Sara Finnerty, Roxane Gay, Alex Jung, Aaron Shulman, Kate Zambreno; A discussion about ghosts featuring Mark Z. Danielewski, Grace Krilanovich, Douglas Coupland, and others; Plus, T. S. Eliot interviews

  T. S. Eliot!

  VOLUME 3 / FALL 2013, COMING SOON!

  Essays by Lawrence Shainberg, D. Foy, Antonia Crane; and more!

  1 Sometimes I wonder whether we, the living, are constantly generating the magnetoreceptive memory pellets that will guide us in undeath. Could it be that each time a place leaves a powerful impression on us, it deposits into our unconscious these mineral flecks of nostalgic energy? Eventually, over the course of a lifetime, these might accrete and calcify into little lodestones in our minds: geospatial anamnestic kernels, capable of leading us back to places, but activated, for whatever reason, only in undeath. In that case, the undead mind would really just be a chaff cloud of remembrance, this mass of pellets causing sharp pain as it shifted magnetically in the direction of various homes. And the undead wouldn’t remember memories so much as be shepherded by them, tugged by headaches toward recalled geographies. (It occurs to me on clear nights that the Pleiades, clustered like buckshot in Taurus’s thigh, might be like memory pellets of this type. When the Pleiades shift, the bull’s thigh aches in that direction, and it is a kind of homesickness that leads him sinking beneath the horizon.)

  2 I like the phrase ‘phantom-footed’ because I’ve often imagined the footprints of the undead phosphorescing beneath moonlight, as if ectoplas-mically, such that they glow in determined trails toward particular houses, restaurants, live oaks… wherever that undead had found life ‘largest, best.’ It would be like reading a map of remembering to look down on all the ectoplasmic paths glimmering through the city at night. Like Hardy’s spirit, our ‘walking dead’ don’t simply walk: anytime an undead is walking, what it’s really doing is remembering. It’s retracing steps from its former life and moving blindly along a vector of memory. In this way, the tracks that it leaves (of rainwater, of dirt across a carpet, of blood) record more than a physical path: they also materialize a line of thought, the path of that remembering.

  3 A far-off infected usually constitutes our great excitement for the day: Matt will peer at it awhile through the windshield, then—shaking his head—pass on the binoculars to me (though I still haven’t worked up the nerve to look through them. I’ve only ever seen one undead in person—up close I mean—and it was eerie enough from two blocks away, by the naked eye).

  4 Since the outbreak, I have often reflected that the footnote is the typographic mark most emblematic of undeath. By opening up a subjacent space on the page, the footnote digs a grave in the text, an underworld in the text. The words that are banished there are like thoughts that the text has repressed, pushed down into its unconscious. But they go on disturbing it from beneath, such that if the text were ever infected, they are the words that would guide it. Footnotes are a text’s phantom feet.

  5 All that Rachel meant by the phrase when she first wrote it—little was known at that point about the homing of the undead—was that the lights were brilliant and beautiful. It’s a happy coincidence that these Bethlehem stars happen also to have matured in our memories in the way that they have, and that they might serve—like the Pleiades, like memory pellets—as the guiding lights that will shepherd our undead bodies.

  6 We bring these bats with us everywhere, but we’ve never yet had to use them. Technically speaking it would be illegal to: it’s considered murder to murder the undead. Only in self-defense, in close-quartered combat, are you supposed to follow FIGHT THE BITE’s concussion instructions (‘A Knock to the Head Will Stop ’Em Dead’). Otherwise, the infected are to be quarantined, since they possess roughly the same citizen status and legal rights as, say, coma patients or the mentally ill. (In this respect, it’s noteworthy that FIGHT THE BITE rarely ever refers to the infected as ‘undead,’ which is considered dysphemistic and dehumanizing.)

  7 Matt backed into the driveway for getaway purposes, so I had to fiddle with the rearview mirror to bring Mr. Mazoch’s house into frame. As I was doing so my thumb smudged the glass, leaving a whitish smear of finger oil on its surface. Now, whenever I glance up at the mirror, I see that cyclopean smudge, as milky and white as an undead eyeball: it mars the glass like a cataract, distorting whatever reflections lie behind it. Currently it’s hovering over the house’s façade, forming a scotomatous opacity in the aluminum siding, which looks erased somehow. Whereas everything else in the reflection is pristine, this one patch of Being has been rendered otherworldly and blurred. Is that how it is to be undead, I wonder? Is everything blurred like this, when seen through undead eyes? I try to imagine what Mr. Mazoch might be seeing, wherever he is right now: whether the whole world is otherworldly to him, on the other side of the smudge. (What I have in mind here is Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors. This portrait features two 16th-century French dignitaries posing in a parlor beside a globe and an astrolabe. Meanwhile, distorting the foreground, is a gash-like diagonal pancake of bone-white blur. Only when you approach the painting from the side does this blur resolve itself, clarifying into the image of a skull… with the result, however, of distorting the rest of the painting. So the portrait, looked at from one angle, has a small blur where the death’s head’s hid; then, once you reveal this skull, it’s everything else that becomes as blurry as death is. As if to really see Death requires blinding yourself to Being, and vice versa: either you can see the skull as the ambassadors see it; or you can see the ambassadors as the skull is seeing them. This optical illusion is precisely how I’ve been imagining that the smudge in Mr. Mazoch’s house would operate. When I’m able to contain the distortion within one spot of the bone-white siding, and keep everything else coherent, it’s as if I remain—optically—on the side of the ambassadors. But when Mr. Mazoch, undead, sees the blur all over, it’s because he’s entered the skull’s side of his life. [What was the name of this painting technique, anyway? Rachel would know. I’ll have to ask Rachel when I get home. She was the one who introduced me to Holbein in the first place: my resident art-history major.])

  8 Though this is literally one of the first pieces of advice in FIGHT THE BITE: ‘Ch. 2. Fight the Bite: Hide Your Light!’ Fitting the window frames with iron bars would certainly deter the undead, but it would do nothing to prevent catching their attention and attracting crowds of them. Even with curtains drawn, the warmth of each window would serve as a beacon. Mr. Mazoch’s carelessness here—with regard to his lamp—is tantamount to the air-raid lapse of a lit-up attic. He would have been a bull’s-eye in some ghoul’s eyes. (Whenever I step outside in t
he morning, and see the boards that Rachel and I installed in our own windows, I feel a strange rush of proprietary pride. The first place we rented together, this apartment was merely the cheapest we could find, a one-bedroom unit in the cinderblock Chateau Dijon complex [or Mustard Castle, as Matt calls it], which we moved into last summer with zero plans to renew the lease. But once the epidemic erupted, we were forced to fortify our hovel overnight : nailing plywood to the window frames, and shifting makeshift barricades—bookcases, sofas, the refrigerator—in front of them. Just like that, our starter apartment had become our end-times apartment, doubling as both a domicile and a citadel. And suddenly it felt—for the first time in a year—like home. We had protected it, and it was protecting us. It was what was keeping the bad things outside. What a beautiful apartment!)

  9 I can only imagine what it might be costing Matt right now, to actually linger inside those rooms. I picture him taking long, sommelieran drafts of his father’s shirt collars, which might still smell faintly of his father. One of Rachel’s most potent flashbacks to her own father was brought on by a scent memory like this. She told me how one morning, when she went to unlock her street-parked car, she saw that a burglar had—by all appearances just the night before—broken into it. This would have been a few years ago, before we were dating. Sitting in her driver’s seat that morning, and feeling very violated and unsafe because the burglar had made a mess of the CDs in the center console and of the insurance papers in the dash, she caught the sharp odor of smoke from a cigarette, which the burglar must have been smoking. Sunk deep into the upholstery, the smoke was recognizable as a particular brand, the brand that her father had smoked and the brand that had killed him. This scent memory (its suddenness, the instantaneousness of the association) put her powerfully in mind of the man, she said, and part of her felt that her father was there in the car with her: she was half-prepared to hear his voice from behind, as if it weren’t a stranger’s cigarette smoke but the very presence of her father’s ghost that her body—at the level of the subconscious, at the level of the limbic system—was picking up signals from and being flooded with automatic responses of familiarity and warmth with regard to. She felt so grateful, she told me, to be reminded like this of the man (to be transported bodily to the precinct of his memory) that, almost involuntarily, she composed a mental prayer of thanksgiving to the burglar, for breaking into her car and smoking a cigarette the night before, like some St. Pavlov, St. Proust, some St. saving synapse from out of her past. It wouldn’t surprise me if Matt eventually confessed that this is the real reason he went inside this morning: not because he actually expected to find Mr. Mazoch, but because he wanted to smell his father where he lay. Because there are certain memories accessible only by that smell. Because—if later on this afternoon he was going to have to confront the corpse of the man, and be repelled by its dead fetor—he wanted to begin the day with just a little of his human scent.

  10 After Katrina, this area of the park was heavily flooded, to the point that the hilltops just barely emerged from out of that sheet of black, practically lacustrine rainwater. I can remember that the trees that breached the surface of the water seemed to float there like verdant boats, and that boats, in fact, were actually taken out for sheer novelty on the water, trawling slow wakes across a space where, a week ago, birds might have flown and where, but for fear of water moccasins, one could swim down through the frigid water, all the way to the grass on the ground, lowering oneself along a ladder of underwater branches. That is how high the weeds look now: Matt may as well have been suggesting that we swim.

  11 My own longstanding suspicion—which I did not share with him—is that the undead do see: it’s just that the way in which they see is so different from human vision that it would be misleading to call it seeing. That they’re really seeing something else (a Holbein blur, a death’s head, the skull’s side of their life) when they see.

  12 It was at this point in our conversation that I began to wonder specifically about Mr. Mazoch. If he couldn’t see, then how did Matt expect him to find his way back to the park? Maybe that is why he brought the game along, I thought: less as a chessboard than a Ouija board, inviting the blind Mr. Mazoch to join us (as if the high hats of the regal pieces—the crowns and tiaras and miters that all terminate in small crosses—could, like antennae, actually broadcast signals of distress, activating the relevant pellets in the chaff cloud of Mr. Mazoch’s remembering, and guiding him reliably down Highland Road).

  13 Indeed, he seemed to be thinking of them more or less as zombies, those hypothetical thought-experimental monsters from mind-body philosophy. For they, too, are defined as lacking conscious experience, with no interior appreciation for the greenness of green. As David Chalmers puts it in The Conscious Mind, the zombie has ‘no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.’ It is—in Chalmers’ phrase—‘all dark inside.’ Is that what Matt thinks it would be like to be undead, I asked myself? Nothing? Or is he imagining a more mundane—a less metaphysical—brand of blindness? (E.g., blindsight, the technical term for the kind of vision that he seemed to be describing: ‘consciously blind while physically sighted.’ In the neuroscientific literature, there are plenty of case studies of living patients who perceive in this way. Although they’re cortically blind, their brains are still able to respond to certain visual stimuli—edges, borders, motion, light—without consciously ‘seeing’ any of it. In Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran even compares this ability to the philosopher’s zombie, explaining how one blindsight patient can reach out her hand and snatch a pencil with unerring dexterity: ‘You’d never have guessed she was blind,’ he writes. ‘It was as if some person—an unconscious zombie inside her—had guided her actions.’)

  14 In later, more sophisticatedly animated video games, the principle of the scrolling level actually would be embodied by some elemental threat pursuing the character—like a barreling inferno, or an avalanche, or, yes, a tidal wave—rather than just the leftmost line of the screen. I’m surprised that Matt doesn’t use one of these other games as his example, rather than just blurting out ‘Mario,’ who seems like a sore or touchy figure for Matt to make himself consider (after all, Mario is a plumber like Mr. Mazoch, with warp tunnels to the underworld no less). But I suppose that the association remains latent for Matt.

  15 If there were a video game model for this kind of communal vision, it would have to be—not the POV of a character in Goldeneye, restricted to a single quadrant—but the higher-order POV of the human player, who, looking at the TV screen, is able to take in all four quadrants at once. This player can see, not just what lies in his character’s line of sight, but what lies in any line of sight. His visual knowledge is quadrupled by the reconnaissance of the three other players. He sees, in a word, everything that is seen.

  16 ‘Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills! The people it kills get up and kill!’

  17 ‘Batten’ was a word that I was thinking a good deal about at that time. In Greek tragedies like The Bacchae or Oedipus Rex, the chorus always describes a plague as having ‘battened’ on Thebes, which I tend to interpret parasitically, as if Euripides’s bacchae, those frenzied women who disembowel and cannibalize the Theban citizens (and who, it has occurred to me more than once, may well be the distant ancestresses of our own undead), were in fact fattening like mosquitoes on the city’s blood. So throughout the outbreak my mind was worrying this word, ‘batten,’ like a tongue scouring a peach pit, such that the word would come unbidden to me, even as I was thinking of other things. If I was watching the news, and mentally composing a list of last-minute escape routes, I would suddenly be able to distinguish, buoying up over my interior monologue from I didn’t know where, the discrete thought, ‘They’re battening on Baton Rouge’ or ‘This plague has battened on Baton Rouge,’ which would then submerge again and be forgotten just as quickly.

  18 On this subject, Mazoch likes to appose Ro
bert Hass’s version of the famous Issa haiku (‘In this world/we walk on the roof of hell/gazing at flowers’) to something that we heard a preacher say on talk radio one morning (‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth’): the dead and the living are sharing roofspace now, and it’s nothing like so simple as it once was to take a walk.

  19 The clip is security footage from an overhead camera, low quality and grainy but in color. People are crowded in what looks like the food court of a mall, surrounding a woman who has fallen. The people jostle each other, some trying to get to the fallen woman and some trying to give her space, but most just standing there staring on. One man is kneeling beside the woman, holding her hand in his hand. He checks her pulse, then looks up at the crowd and shakes his head. But at just this moment someone points to the woman, who has opened her eyes again, and when the man turns back to her she pulls him down by his shirt collar, biting—battening on—his throat. At this point things become hectic: the screaming crowd tries to flee all at once, and many people end up crushed underfoot; the infected woman crawls on all fours to a trampled boy and bites into him; meanwhile the man, bleeding terribly and evidently having already reanimated, also begins biting people, who are trapped on the ground beneath fallen bodies; consumers from the food court rush into frame, trying to pull the man and the woman off of their victims, only to be bitten in turn by those victims; et cetera, et cetera. It all happens fast (the clip is, as I said, only thirty or forty seconds), and the crowd onscreen is infected so quickly and so uniformly that their conversion has the appearance of an optical illusion. One moment they’re alive, the next all undead, the way that a Necker cube inverts itself on the eye: