A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  39 Rachel, to clarify, doesn’t actually think that her undead self would experience happiness at these sites, only that past happiness would be a motivation for return. She doesn’t believe that the infected are capable of appreciating their reasons for returning, or of taking joy in mortal spaces. In fact, she finds this aspect of undeath almost unbearably sad, and she even remarked, earlier this afternoon, as we were beginning our lists, ‘What’s sad is that I’ll be going to all these places without ever even really seeing them.’ Like Matt, Rachel associates undeath with blindness, though not clinical or even phenomenological blindness so much as, maybe, existential. She means by this those times in your life when you’re your worst self, soulless and unobservant, reverting to a kind of robotic autopilot, in which you move through the world in a daze, without noticing any of the details that you usually take so much pleasure in noticing. That’s what she expects being undead to be like. And what’s sad, she says, about the idea of being stuck like this in undeath, is that the sites you’ll be returning to will be places from the exact opposite times in your life. Places like Tunica, where you were most awake and most attentive, most in love with the world and filled with joy for phenomena, where you were so alive and alert to detail that the scenery has been seared—eidetically, nostalgically—into your unconscious. The sad irony of undeath, for Rachel, is that your worst self is the one seeking out your best self ’s sites. You get to return to the regions of presence, the places in your life where you were most present, but you have to haunt them as a vassal of absence.

  40 That is yet another way that I sometimes imagine undeath: like being lost in a labyrinth, in the maze of the underworld. Staggering down infinite hallways of smoky shade. What first inspired this comparison, I suspect, was simply the morpheme ‘maze’ in Mazoch’s name. It was probably a free-associative, onomastic accident that I began thinking about labyrinths at all. But it makes a certain kind of sense, when I stop to consider it. Classically speaking, labyrinths are places where fathers deposit their monstrous sons: mazes where they bring their sons to get lost, dungeons to disinherit their minotaurs in. And now it’s Matt who’s in search of his monstrous father, the minotaur Mr. Mazoch, who is himself banished to a kind of maze, the Cretan corridors that he accretes around himself as he wanders across Baton Rouge. While Matt pursues him, I ride along as his guide, leading him deep into the labyrinth and back again, my folder of Mapquest directions like some Ariadne’s thread. Meanwhile Mr. Mazoch, if the neurologists are to be believed, has maps of his own to follow: he isn’t lost at all.

  41 The trees had turned a vespine yellow, as if trying to terrify what would eat them. This was Rachel’s suggestion, anyway, her explanation for the world’s lushness: that it had to color-code itself like a bug. What an autumn afternoon needed most, she said, was to flare bold in the eye of its predator, the encroaching winter. The hues of the sky and the trees would deepen accordingly, in keeping with the aposematism of the season.

  42 Or even somewhere else altogether. In addition to the sites Matt doesn’t want to visit (the high school, the childhood home), you also have to factor in the unknown quantities, any places Matt hasn’t thought of yet, plus the ones he has no way of even knowing about. There are bound to be certain epistemological blocks and search biases that have been acting as blinders from the outset, preventing him from conceiving of every potentiality. And this is a serious obstacle. If every Thursday Mr. Mazoch frequented a gentleman’s club, it’s doubtful that Matt would know about it: not only because Mr. Mazoch never would have told him, but also because Matt, just as a matter of epistemological blockage, would be biased away from imagining it, from even entertaining it as a possibility.

  43 ‘Predate’ was the word Matt used in the diner, but it strikes me as uncomfortably loaded, and I prefer ‘precede.’ After the outbreak, it’s impossible to ignore the double meaning of ‘predate,’ its twinned temporal and carnivorous connotations. For what predates undeath in you (the past that becomes activated, your prior self’s muscle memories and habits and haunts) is what predates in undeath (preys, hunts, feeds, and so on upon).

  44 I’ll bet Joyce could write a good short story about this titled ‘The Undead,’ in which an oblivious and self-satisfied husband goes in search of his reanimated wife, visiting all the landmarks of their courtship in Dublin… only to suffer a rude surprise when he finds her ghoulish body back in Galway, standing on the street where decades ago a young suitor, Michael Furey, had serenaded her.

  45 The way that a crashed Word document will restore, not the state of its data the moment it crashed, but the state of its data from whenever it last auto-recovered, a minute or an hour or a day ago. The reanimated Rachel would then be like a first-draft Rachel, auto-recovered from way back, preserving none of the sentences leading up to the crash. All the words I’ve left in her would be lost.

  46 Suddenly it occurs to me—I’m certain of it—that Matt planted the other traces as well. If he’s willing to shatter these windows, then why not the rear door’s fanlight? And why not hike into Highland Road Park last weekend, leaving a scrap of plaid for us to find? But then—just as suddenly and certainly—I reject the idea.

  47 Taken to its limit—I have often reflected—this kind of muscle memory would persist even in Frankenstein’s monster, whose undead body comprises not just one memory system, but dozens. After all, Dr. Frankenstein quilted the monster together from the segments of various corpses, and there is no reason to believe that these disembodied appendages (sewn onto the monster and there reanimated) would behave any differently from our own undead. The muscle memory of his right hand, harvested from one German peasant (a carpenter), would differ from the muscle memory of his left one, harvested from another (a farmer): whereas the one hand might reach for a hammer, the other might reach for a pitchfork. As with the undead, this equipmental knowledge would remain unconscious for the monster, who literally ‘lets not his right hand know what his left hand doeth.’ In this way, the borders of his know-how would be strictly delineated by stitchwork, making his body a map of gerrymandered memories: the left hand would be zoned off, county of the know-how of baling hay; and the right hand zoned off, county of the know-how of swinging the hammer; the right foot zoned off, county of the know-how of punting; and so on.

  48 Here my model is Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who located both epistemology and ontology in the hands. In his account, the know-how of a hand handling its equipment, the ‘ready-to-hand’ knowledge of a hand, is the most immediate way that man (what Heidegger calls ‘Dasein,’ literally ‘Being There’) has of understanding objects. The more that a hand uses a hammer, the more that it unveils the true ‘hammer-being’ of the hammer. And granting that this epistemology of the hand doubles as an ontology of the hand—that is, an account of how hands go about being in the world or otherwise constituting the Being of that world—such ready-to-hand knowledge is naturally fraught with existential significance. Whenever Dasein uses the hammer, he relates not just to the hammer but to everything: the nails in his desk drawer, the desk, the chair at the desk, the room itself, with its walls and windows and doors, the hallway outside and the house, continually spiraling outward, ad infinitum, until the hammer has formed a total world. Being-in-the-world means being caught up in just such a network of equipmental relations, which Dasein is enmeshed in anytime he grabs a tool. For Heidegger, to hold something is both to know and to be. In the case of our undead, the ramifications of this chiral ontology are clear. If an infected breaks into its old bedroom, and its hand roots under the bed for the hammer that it ‘knows’ is there, then doesn’t the infected also ‘know’ the equipmental totality of the mattress, bed, room, and house, that is, the entire Being-in-the-World of its quondam Dasein, which is to say, couldn’t the infected be, in some qualified way, precisely the same Dasein? And in the case of Frankenstein’s monster, these ontological ramifications multiply mind-bogglingly across all of his limbs. Because each hand wants to root for a differ
ent tool from a different life, and because each foot wants to walk toward a different home—because the monster has to coordinate all of his limbs independently, just to stumble forward and turn a doorknob—it’s as if his entire body were a gangline of Daseins, pulling the musher of his madman’s brain.

  49 Here my model is, not Heidegger, but Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian critic who writes about habituated memory in his essay ‘Art as Device.’ He refers to the phenomenon as ‘automatized perception.’ Humans can perform one task so often, he writes, so unconsciously, that we gradually cease to see what we’re doing: ‘The object fades away… We know it’s there but we do not see it.’ Shklovsky compares this state of unawareness to death, and quotes from the diaries of Leo Tolstoy, who reports having been habit-blinded one afternoon while dusting his room: when he came to his sofa, Tolstoy writes, he couldn’t remember (‘for the life’ of him) whether he had already dusted it or not, so unconsciously had he been sleepwalking throughout the space. It was exactly like being dead. After quoting this passage, Shklovsky delivers his famous motto, which does not fail to raise the hackles on my arms whenever I remember it now: ‘[L]ife fades into nothingness,’ he writes. ‘Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives.’ For yes, that is exactly how it is with our undead: they do not see us, but they know we’re here. They push their shopping carts, pick up dusters, eat our wives.

  50 Matt is actually quite insistent on this point. I learned this for myself one morning several weeks ago, when we drove past a field and I made the mistake of referring to the stray infected there (five distant silhouettes, standing perfectly still in the morning fog, pale and spectral in what must have been white nightgowns) as ‘ghostly.’ ‘No,’ Matt corrected me, with a vehemence I found surprising, ‘they’re not like ghosts at all.’ He spent the rest of the morning in lecture mode, elucidating all of the irreducible differences between the undead and specters. For one thing, he said, you would never see ghosts just standing out in a field like that, beneath a bare sky in broad daylight. They are fundamentally interior creatures. Once a spirit returns to haunt a house, there’s this sense in which it’s bound to the premises, almost by a spatial loyalty, a sedentary fidelity to place. It’s the undead who are free (or rather, compelled) to roam about. That’s the difference. You can tell the infected apart from ghosts not by the corporeality of one, or the insubstantiality of the other, but by their relation to space, he claimed. At the time, Matt’s spatial distinction reminded me strongly of Mr. Mazoch. For his life, too, had had two distinct relations to space: before his heart attack, he had been a veritable man about town, driving from job to job and moving from house to house; whereas afterward, he mostly stayed inside, becoming an eremite in retirement, the final years of which he spent (by Matt’s account) with the agoraphobic unimaginativeness of a ghost. Ever since then I’ve wondered whether this is the true subtext of Matt’s ghost/ghoul dichotomy, the reason he was so vehement about maintaining it: that if the undead aren’t ghosts, then neither is his father. In undeath, Mr. Mazoch can be the opposite of a ghost, and, to the degree that he had led a ghostly life, he can be the opposite of himself. Freed from the physical restraints that had anchored him so long in Denham, Mr. Mazoch (or his body) would be at liberty to wander wherever it wanted, shuffling for indefatigable miles all over Baton Rouge. Quickened, at last, after five years of ghostlike motionlessness. (According to this view of things, Mr. Mazoch must have just split the difference when he died: he must have divided up his kingdom of infinite space, with his undead corpse taking the outside [banished to Mr. Mazoch’s mortal paths], and his ghost taking the inside [unable to exit its house in Denham, where even now it might be trapped, pacing translucently from room to room]. This is assuming, of course, that Mr. Mazoch would get both, both a reanimated corpse and a ghost. You’d have to say that he was cleaved in twain, leaving both a spiritual remainder and a bodily remainder, and that these opposite supernatural energies, diverging from his death, went haunting in different directions: the one inside, the other out. It makes rigorous, dualist sense. [I can’t help wondering, though, what would happen if the undead corpse and the specter of Mr. Mazoch ever met each other. I imagine the mutual shock, the dropped monocles: ‘My good sir, I am Mr. Mazoch.’ ‘But I’m afraid that’s quite impossible—for you see, I am Mr. Mazoch.’])

  51 I have seen these images on the nightly news as nightly as he has. But it has never occurred to me to associate them with demolition, structural destructiveness, an anti-interiority or spatial hatred. I’ve always associated them instead with parturition: my mind juxtaposes the image of the undead hand, grasping through the broken window, with that of the obstetrician’s hand, groping in the womb for a baby’s ankle. Never in so many words do I complete this analogy, never consciously, but as a matter of tone and mood, connotation and texture, as a kind of nightmare inversion or necrotic mirror, what the hand always seems subliminally to be doing is birthing people. Reaching into the house as into a womb, to drag out the inhabitants feet-first: not into life, but into undeath.

  52 One possibility I have been considering is the numb tingling of undeath, that asleep-limb feeling that I assume all reanimated bodies experience. If that is what it is like to be undead, then this might provide one explanation for why they thrash around so compulsively. Because imagine how fidgety it would have to make you: to feel smothered in this way—your whole body—as claustral and cramped as being buried alive. The moment you reanimated, your skin would be washed in that haptic static, compacted by it: surrounded by itching as by earth. And no matter where you wandered, you would still feel suffocated and underground, even when standing in an open field (even those peaceful corpses I saw in the pasture, in their white nightgowns, might have been feeling this way: they might have just been carrying their caskets with them, a virtual box around their bodies, like an aura, or a snail shell). Maybe it is only by punching in windows or beating down doors, only by clawing at barricades or tearing through stomachs—only by ceaselessly reenacting the breaching of the coffin lid—that they can achieve any kind of peace. Maybe bursting through surfaces is just a form of burrowing therapy, a way of digging their way up out of the buried-alive feeling. As if to be undead is to be coated in this restive, metaphysical taphephobia, an unyielding feeling of being crushed by space. And so maybe that is a reason that Mr. Mazoch might have walked from window to window last night, punching the panes. He could have been rooting his hand into interiorities for the relief. Groping for moments of rupture, of puncture, the way that a sleeper’s hand will keep seeking out new cool parts beneath a pillow. It certainly seems unlikely, though.

  53 What I was watching were the pedestrian signals, those boxes attached halfway up the traffic poles. I was especially transfixed by the ‘Walk’ signal, a bright-white profile of a man mid-stride. To the naked eye, the man is just an anthropomorphic white smear. But when magnified by binoculars, he’s revealed to be composed of numerous miniature lightbulbs, a dozen or so individual pearls of whiteness. Seen up close, these lend the silhouette a bumpy, knobbly texture, which makes it seem, not like a man, but like a berry of light: his head especially (an aggregate of glowing bulbs, all syncarpous and starlit, a perfect oval of refulgent drupelets) looks like the kind of berry that would grow in outer space, on a star bush or something. At first I found this mesmerizing. But the longer I stared at him, the more each bulb just reminded me of an undead eye. It was as if his entire body were ocellated with white eyeballs, the way Rachel’s body had been by the owls. As if every inch of his skin could see me. I almost had to turn away. But soon enough the ‘Walk’ man faded, and the signal box went black. Then there rose in his absence the rusty ‘Yield’ hand, flat and orange and still, like the bloody palm prints that the infected leave, slapping at the door to get inside. That was what did make me turn away.

  54 Fat, flimsy paperbacks, Matt described these guidebooks as, almost like telephone directories, except filled with low-quality, black
-and-white photos of esoteric objects, complete with detailed descriptions of their provenance and up-to-date price listings. Mr. Mazoch had to consult these whenever he bought something at a garage sale without knowing exactly what it was, and so without knowing what price to put on it in his booth at the antiques mall. I asked Matt for an example. A buff-colored stuffed lion with a Steiff logo on its paw, for example, which Mr. Mazoch paid twenty dollars for at an auction and didn’t look up in a guidebook until later, where it was listed at several hundred. Or the strange vehicle he found at an old farm’s estate sale, a rusted-over, steel-frame cage on wheels, with a rotted leather seat and two pump-action wooden handles, which looked like something out of Mad Max, but which turned out to be a 19th-century hand-and-foot recumbent tricycle, for women in gowns to get around in, and which Mr. Mazoch paid seventy-five dollars for and later sold for several hundred. (The profits of these items aren’t incidental to their narratives. It has emerged in Matt’s stories about his father that Mr. Mazoch really did see himself as a swashbuckling arbitrageur of antiques. The thrill of the game was to root out potential diamonds in the rough, paying twenty-five cents for a porcelain bowl in one market [the flea market] and trying to sell it for twenty-five dollars in another [the antiques mall]. So as interested as he was in the strange histories of his collection, and as engaging as he found researching odd facts about them [e.g., that Steiff was the company that invented the teddy bear, and hence the progenitor of innumerable stuffed collectibles], the invariable punch line of any antiques anecdote he told Matt was just what he paid for an item and for just how much he sold it. The way that a fisherman ends any story with the size of the fish. ‘Bought that lion for twenty dollahs,’ he’d always conclude, Matt said. ‘Sold it for three hundred.’ [Whenever Matt is impersonating or doing dialogue for his father, he unconsciously pronounces ‘dollah’ the Louisiana way, presumably Mr. Mazoch’s way. Matt himself pronounces it ‘dollar.’])