A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  The way that the eye can pinch that one point—where the lefthand sides of the cube meet in a Y at the bottom—and pull it perspectivally forward, such that the cube telescopes out, or else press it back, such that

  the cube collapses, and how easy to toggle back and forth between the two cubes. This was how it felt when I watched the whole crowd convert: alive, undead. As if (to adopt Wittgenstein’s expression) I was merely ‘seeing them as’ undead. As if I was merely focusing on whatever point of the crowd drew forth their undead aspect, and as if—simply by blinking my eyes or scanning over the image—I might ‘see them as’ alive again, their undeath disappearing into their mortal aspect as surely as the Necker cube withdraws back into its sunkenness. Wittgenstein describes playing a similar game himself one day, when he attempted to see human beings as automata: ‘[C]an’t I imagine,’ he writes, ‘that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness…? …“The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.”… [It] will produce… some kind of uncanny feeling… Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-piece of a window as a swastika, for example.’ Just so was I trying, as I watched the video, to see the automata there as living people. But they were utterly lost to their undead aspect, no amount of crossing my eyes would draw their liveliness out of them. The only way to simulate the double-aspectual toggling of ‘alive, undead, alive, undead’ was to rewind and fast-forward the video, dragging the Youtube player’s gray progress bar back and forth, so that the crowd onscreen would jerkily revert from corpses to human beings and back again. ‘That’s awful,’ Rachel said, when I showed it to her, and I said, ‘Who watches such a thing and wants to go for a walk?’

  20 This is the chapter’s term for the various coping mechanisms required when confronting undead loved ones. Part of the reason that the house is such a treacherous environment, according to the pamphlet, is that people fall prey to fatal misrecognitions there: husbands hug undead wives; mothers dandle undead children. When you see your spouse standing before the refrigerator, or see your child stumbling out of the bathroom at night, you are primed by the context to see them as alive. And so, to prepare you for these kinds of encounters, the chapter includes a series of mental exercises and thought experiments that you can practice, all involving a process called ‘defamiliarization.’

  21 I often describe their moan as unearthly, but what I really mean is that it is ‘earthly’ in the most exact sense of the word. When an undead opens its mouth and produces that low, guttural sound, as dark and compact as garden dirt, what the moan sounds like is an alarm of the earth. As if, by trespassing aboveground when they should be buried beneath six feet of earth, the undead have triggered some tocsin of the earth, and the reediness of their lowing is its own siren.

  22 Even today, I cannot conceive of undeath except in terms of these neithers: to the degree that I understand it at all, it is still as that which resists understanding. A limit condition, irreducible to the usual dichotomies. For this reason the designation ‘living dead’—in its oxymoronic self-negation—seems to sum up best the fundamental in-between-ness of the creatures. In any given dichotomy, they will constitute neither the positive nor the negative pole—neither living nor dead, neither psychopath nor psychopomp—but everything that circulates between them. That is why any ‘neither _____ nor _____’ construction, yoking together any two oppositional terms, will approximate the essence of undeath for me: the creatures coincide with the very structure of the correlative conjunction. They are like walking ‘neither _____ nor _____’s, Janus-faced with blanks.

  23 It seems clear, at any rate, that the undead don’t feel pain. Matt assumes that they don’t feel anything at all. For my part, I have always assumed that being undead would feel the same way that a sleeping foot feels, when you sit on it for too long and try to flex your toes: there is numbness initially, then a cold prickling sensation, following fast behind that first rush of blood. Wherever an infected bites you, I imagine, the bite wound must form a nidus of numb tingling, which spreads steadily outward: starting from the arm and climbing up the shoulder, across the chest, over the stomach, until your whole body feels asleep. That is what it would feel like to be undead, I often think.

  24 From what I can gather her father, exposed to all manner of diseases and antibiotic-resistant microbes circulating through the hospital, eventually developed something like staph infection.

  25 For the first few weeks, the mucous comprised black chunks of tar, which were discharged darkly into the fluid in the dangling bag. When Rachel first described this, I imagined ashy particles weightlessly afloat, stirred up then sinking, like tealeaves in the wake of a press pot’s plunger. She said that that’s more or less right, except that after a while the discharge tended to be ‘more phlegmatic.’

  26 It wasn’t until a week later that LCDC—in part to quiet the public’s Judgment Day-flavored anxieties—conducted two experiments: first, they excavated a control group of corpses, all of them buried before the first reported case of infection and none of them reanimated; second, to be certain, they injected syringes of infected blood into their bodies (with no results). Which is to say, it wasn’t until a week later that people realized that only the freshly dead and mortally infected were reanimating.

  27 Here’s what I remember about the drive there: that Rachel stared gloomily out of the passenger-side window and said nothing for the duration, and that I felt too self-conscious about the momentousness of the trip to try to say anything myself. What might have been said? The rural road that led to the cemetery was lined with tall, fresh pines, and in the spare tena. m. light only their tips were lit. Sunlight slanted across the uppermost branches, leaving everything below cold with shadow, and the sight of it reminded me of the sensation of doing dishes in the sink: that moment when the drain has been plugged and the basin filled with frigid water, and the hands are plunged, wrist-deep, into the cold to scrub the dishes, leaving everything from the forearm up dry. Something might have been said about that. But the more calmed I became by this comparison—as I watched the sunstruck treetops lean and all the pine needles waver a little in a wind that I couldn’t feel, and as I recalled the glovelike encompassing frigidness of reaching my hands down into dishwater—the more frivolous I felt it to be, as a thing to say, given the circumstances. So I didn’t share this comparison with Rachel, who generally likes it when I point out effects of light. Instead I placed my hand on her thigh, and, letting out a surprised grateful noise like ‘Mm,’ she covered it with her own.

  28 Could anything rankle Rachel more than what must seem like Mazoch’s breezy disregard, his flagrant ingratitude, for the luck of a recrudescent father? Her own father taken first by disease, then by death, then by an undeath that did not bear him forth on its tide… and here is a son whose apparent new lifegoal is to find and eliminate, once and for all, the father who is always so reliably returned to him. Returned from divorce (for Mr. Mazoch did stick around to help raise Matt), returned from a near-fatal heart attack (which Mr. Mazoch survived), returned even from death: gliding back like some obedient fatherly boomerang from every distance into which life heaves him from Matt, who, as if mistaking him for skeet, steels himself now to pull the trigger. Unthinkable and unfair, it must seem to Rachel, probably.

  29 This is an effect that Rachel and I have often admired together in Chateau Dijon’s courtyard. What is it about white stucco that makes it so absorptive of sunlight? At noon especially, a wall of it will glow with weird, backlit intensity, sort of throbbing with light, whereas other surfaces (such as cement sidewalks) are merely sheeny. Why is it that stucco, uniquely stucco, can be slathered over with these rich gold glazes? Is it its pebbly texture? I have in mind, by way of ‘slather,’ the example of toast, how much easier toast is to butter than the downy smoothness of fresh bread. As I confirmed for myself at breakfast with Rachel this morning, you can never
‘spread’ butter over fresh bread, only nudge it ineffectually across the surface, the knife’s edge like a push broom guiding its little garbage of butter (pressing down on the knife, or applying any kind of force at all, will just make matters worse, since the delicate bread punctures easily and is twice as hard to butter torn). With toast, though, the crisp bristles where the bread burns provide a pleasantly resistive force, abrading the butter as it’s being dragged over them, firmly withstanding the knife’s scraping, even helping to trap the melted butter’s runoff. Is stucco architecture’s toast? Can sunlight be slathered over it more easily, does light deliquesce better on its rough, raised pebbles, is this why it glistens with sopped goldenness like the photo-toast in Denny’s menus? It certainly seems that way.

  30 The apple is a red delicious, which, I’ve noticed, tend to oxidize faster than other varieties, their exposed cores embrowning almost instantly. Matt’s is no exception. Each time I turn back to him, some crater that his bite marks made—initially a white, kind of whittled color—has already started tarnishing, turning the same shade of brown as every aged thing. Because the aerated patches of apple meat ‘age’ in a matter of seconds, it’s like watching in timelapse lace fading in an attic: something snow-white fogging over with brownness. And it has occurred to me, as I’ve been watching him, that this ‘brown fog of decay’ is not unlike Matt’s black fog of war: namely, that it too could serve as an apt representation for the epidemic. For what is the infection if not a breath of decay that is blowing over the world? There is a sense in which the infection is accelerating our aging, not only at the level of the body (instantly cadaverizing it, fast-forwarding the corpse’s decomposition), but at the level of civilization (turning buildings into premature ruins, tainting them with ancientness). Whenever I stare out the windshield at the boarded-up antiques mall, I can’t help imagining that that is what is happening inside: that it is a ruin now, suffused with brown fog; that the trapped air in there has become polluted by particles of infection, filling the building—over the course of its abandonment—with sepia tones as with floodwater. I picture clouds of it drifting brownly down the aisles, over the furniture and the clothing racks, fading whatever they touch and aging it on contact. In this way, I imagine, the boarded-up antiques mall would function as a hothouse of aging, a microwave of aging, such that if you placed a lace nightgown inside, you could watch the cloth grow foxed like an oxidizing apple core, and such that if you placed your own hand inside, it’d instantly blanche and embrown (turning the dead-leaf color of hands in monochromatic old photographs) before shriveling off altogether. It is curiously satisfying to consider that this is what Matt would have found inside today, if he’d succeeded in breaking open the double doors: that a stream of pressurized brown gas would have come whistling out from the cracks, like steam from a burst pipe, and scalded his face with age. Wrinkling him, graying his hair, melting the flesh from his skull. Turning him into a cadaver no less quickly than undeath would.

  31 I didn’t ask, but I assumed that that anger was at Mr. Mazoch: (1) for recklessly neglecting to dial an ambulance and to that extra degree imperiling himself, for stopping at stoplights on his drive to the hospital even as his cardiologist’s fingers, unbeknownst to him, were pinching that much more of the air between them, squashing like a bug the ghost of a chance that his heart had; and (2) for being willing and resigned to die, for issuing at the critical moment last, rather than fighting words, the message ‘Tell him that I love him’ really bearing the double meaning ‘I give up,’ as in, ‘I’m ready now for death, so please send my love to the son whom I won’t fight hard enough to live to see.’ Or this was the best explanation I could come up with, anyway, for the anger in Matt’s voice: namely, that Matt felt that Mr. Mazoch was shirking his duty to his son to survive. It’s possible that I’m wrong. Matt might have just been angry with the doctor: (1) for fetishizing the nearness of death (‘This close,’ ‘Only ten minutes’), tormenting a son with details he ought to have kept to himself; and (2) for failing to deliver on the phone the message that Mr. Mazoch had asked him to, namely, by informing Matt that Mr. Mazoch was in the operating theater but not that he sent his love.

  32 And really, what other purpose could the working out serve? It is so impractical and even dangerous an activity, under the given circumstances: it’s not as if the crowded undead will be intimidated by Mazoch’s bench max, or deterred by the body blows that he rains on their insensate bodies. By focusing so much athletic attention on bulk strength, rather than on cardiovascular stamina or speed, Mazoch is not only failing to train the survival skills he might actually need (sprinting, cross-country endurance, stamina) but training skills directly impedimental to them (weightlifting power that will only slow him down, literal ‘dead weight’). The working out seems designed solely to correct Mr. Mazoch’s physical indifference, his obesity and ill health, at the level of the son’s body, which by brute determination and for no other reason Matt has transformed into the opposite of his father’s body. Flexing shirtless before the bathroom mirror, basking in his own oppositeness, heaving that fruit farther and farther from his father: this is the only purpose that the working out has served.

  33 Undeath, too, is just such a system of synonymy. By biting its victims, an undead passes on to them, as if genetically, all the physical characteristics of the infection (necrosis, moaning, whited eyeballs), thereby rendering them synonyms of itself. That’s why all undead, though returning to idiosyncratic haunts and observing distinct behavioral patterns, seem driven by the same motor, so to speak. The surest way for Matt to become his father would be for him to be bitten by his father.

  34 What the sight reminds me of is the cover illustration of FIGHT THE BITE, a starkly outlined drawing of cartoon jaws. Opened in a wide ellipse, the jaws form a wreath of teeth around the pamphlet’s title, I guess as if about to bite down on it (this is probably what the graphic designer intended), but actually resembling, to an even greater degree, the mouth that a willful boy makes when he wants to display chewed food at the dinner table: a ‘say “Ahh”’ mouth, gaping rudely, as if exposing to a grossed-out sibling all the mashed-up bits of title inside.

  35 FIGHT THE BITE refers to this phenomenon as ‘spite bites’: namely, when people who are nonfatally contaminated (e.g., by a scratch, or a bite on the ankle: any manner of infection that—instead of killing them instantly—leaves them with a week of fever and dread before they become undead) decide to spend their last days alive contaminating as many other victims as they can. They mete out to others the dumb luck and injustice of it, either by having unprotected sex, or splitting meals and drinking after people, or sharing needles, or even, fantastically, biting strangers in the street, in a kind of rehearsal for undeath. For this reason, FIGHT THE BITE warns readers to exercise caution even around living, asymptomatic humans. It also lists the 1-800 numbers of several 24-hour hotlines, so that—in the event that you are nonfatally infected—psychiatrists and counselors can talk you down from spite biting anyone yourself, before you get to a quarantine.

  36 How often, before this epidemic, would Mazoch or I have witnessed an image of cannibalism, or of a disemboweled man still walking? Maybe once a year, when we watched a horror movie or some samurai seppuku scene? Now these and similar sights are broadcast semi-nightly and are indissociable from the undead. We recognize the undead by the posture of their feeding (the way that packs of them will hunch over the torn-open stomach of a corpse, sifting its intestines through their fingers), as well as by their cadaverous imperviousness to dismemberment: the way that one, cut in half at the waist, will drag itself forward by dogged fistfuls of grass. In images like these we recognize the undeath in them. Compare that recognition with the kind we feel when we see them performing echo-practic rituals of motor instinct—when, watching them sit in their cars or drag razors across their rotting cheeks, we might halfway mistake them for human—and it’s no wonder that Mazoch’s preference lies with the latter.

 
37 He even referred me to a relevant passage of Wordsworth: ‘[We] grieved/ To have a soulless image on the eye/That had usurped a living thought/ That never more could be’ (The Prelude). In context Wordsworth is describing the anticlimactic Alps, but it really would be grievous for Mazoch to have the soulless image of his undead father branded irreversibly on the eye, to have some trademark gesture of undeath—his father’s teeth tearing into warm flesh—usurp the living memory of the man. (Mazoch’s bibliomantic ability to flip through old poems and find auguries of undeath has never failed to impress me, so one day I tried flipping through his copy of The Prelude myself. Within minutes—and as if guided—I stumbled upon the following passage, unmarked by Mazoch: ‘And, on the shape of that unmoving man,/His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,/ As if admonished from another world.’ Reading it, I caught my breath. It really did seem unmistakable as a description, not just of any encounter with any undead, but of my own with the jogger. In context, of course, Wordsworth is simply describing his encounter with a blind beggar, and the passage’s applicability to undeath can be only an artifact of hindsight bias: an open-and-shut case of poetic postdiction.)

  38 At this late date in the epidemic, it still strikes me as strange that I can enjoy such simple pleasures—the warmth of sunlight on my arms, the freeing bitterness of this beer—when chances are that someone is being bitten and infected not very far from here. This seems to be a special talent of Louisianans: how citizens’ sensibilities can remain unsynchronized with their city’s. When a hurricane heads for New Orleans, the city shuts down: schools close, work is canceled, news stations broadcast storm warnings. But all that the people do to prepare is stockpile alcohol. They celebrate as on any other holiday: they drink drinks called Hurricanes! One can detect in Louisianans’ reactions to disasters like this a reckless kind of hysteresis, as if—even after sociocultural institutions have acknowledged an apocalypse, and even after larger fields and forces of normalcy have withdrawn—there remains this ferromagnetic lag in the people themselves, who behave as if nothing has changed, who persist, charged with quotidian energies in an apocalyptic system. Who drink Hurricanes and barbeque brisket beneath skies blackened with ominousness. It is this same native trait, no doubt, that enabled Mazoch to enjoy his chicken breast at Louie’s this afternoon, chewing mouthful after insouciant mouthful.