A Questionable Shape

by Bennett Sims

  55 The incredulity in my voice had nothing to do with Solaris itself, which I think is a fine candidate for a favorite movie. But I was struck by the uncanny symmetry: that their relationship should be bookended by the same movie, and that it should be this movie, essentially an allegory for undeath. In it, a group of cosmonauts on a space station orbit the titular planet, to study its odd telepathic properties. Solaris, which can somehow materialize their memories, has begun incarnating doubles or doppelgangers of people from their pasts. Appearing aboard the space station out of thin air, these ‘visitors’—as the cosmonauts call them—haunt them just like ghosts. But they behave in a way creepily prescient of our own undead. For one thing, they reanimate: if a visitor dies, its prone body will eventually undergo a resurrection on the floor, twitching grotesquely back to life. For another thing, the visitors are creatures of memory and habit, mimicking their models back on Earth. Yet as Matt was describing his history with Solaris to me, I couldn’t tell whether he was alert to these parallels himself. Nor was it clear to me whether he had seen Tarkovsky’s version, which I was reluctant to actually ask him about. For the original Solaris ends with the protagonist’s decision not to return to Earth (where in reality his father has died) but instead to descend to Solaris, where he can submerge himself in the memories that it generates: when last we see him, he is entering the simulacral projection of his childhood home, reunited with the Solaric incarnation of his (un)dead father. It would seem that Matt—whether he has seen this movie or not; whether he remembers this ending or not—is subconsciously reenacting its ending every morning, when he breaks into his dad’s house in Denham. Hence my reluctance to discuss it with him. (Soderbergh’s version has a different ending, but the film is no less prescient about undeath. Assuming that Soderbergh has survived the epidemic, I wonder what he makes of his hometown now, haunted as it is by these visitors.)

  56 Throughout every chapter in FIGHT THE BITE, the artists hew to the generic convention (observable in most safety manuals) of not conveying emotion in their subjects’ faces. Like the passengers in aircraft manuals, who seem to suffer plane crashes apathetically, reaching for oxygen masks as calmly as for a ceiling light’s dangle-chain, the characters in FIGHT THE BITE are curiously underwhelmed by the epidemic. By placing a strict taboo on representations of panic (or of any other human feeling), the safety manual effects a kind of iconoclasm of affect, portraying a world in which the imperiled meet death like stolid pod people. So whether characters are boarding up windows, being bitten, or bleeding to death, they each wear the same fixed facial expression: bored, prim-lipped, unblinking. What’s fascinating about this generic convention in FIGHT THE BITE particularly is that the undead are portrayed with the same glazed faces. The expression is probably meant, in their case, to signify automatism, but it is in fact indistinguishable from the ‘calmness’ or ‘equanimity’ of the living. A curious result is that the transition from life to undeath in the pamphlet is artistically understated. Since the undead faces are equally affectless as the living ones, the only aspect that distinguishes them is their empty, white eyeballs; and since all that the reanimation sequences entail is the blanking of a victim’s eyes (in three panels a man can be brutally bitten, collapse, then get up again without the expression on his face changing; in each stage identical except that, in the final panel, the artist enucleates his pupils), it is as if whited eyes are the only price to pay for undeath. As if that is the only toll for entry into the underworld: not two pennies on the eyelids, but two clouded contacts in the eyeballs.

  57 The dialectical point that goes unmade in FIGHT THE BITE (and which I myself neglected to make, in my argument with Rachel about it) is that this so-called estranged or defamiliarized way of seeing—in which you reduce familiar faces to indistinct blurs, drained of all memory and affect—is precisely how the undead ‘see’ by default. They always already see this way: they know we’re here, but they do not see us. That is why they can so uniformly ignore their loved ones’ faces, and why undead husbands can eat their wives. The dialectical point, then, is just this: that you have to briefly make yourself undead to avoid being made undead. Confronted with an undead face, you have to perceive it in the same way that it is perceiving you—to see as it sees and to that degree participate in its vision—in order to escape being bitten. That’s one of the secret reasons I’m so fascinated by these exercises: it’s as if I’m teaching myself to see as the undead see. As if—by estranging Rachel successfully—I could see her as the jogger was seeing me.

  58 Here I had to stop myself from bringing up her father’s funeral. Hasn’t she herself said that she found it impossible to believe, on that day, that the peaceful and composed face in the coffin belonged to a corpse? That she kept expecting him to open his eyes or smile at her? That, no matter how insistently she told herself that he really was gone, his face kept resisting the death that she attributed to it, as if rejecting a graft of ontological tissue? Now imagine if his eyes did open, I wanted to say to her, and if the state of being that you had to attribute to him was, not death—a concept people are pretty well accustomed to and know more or less when to apply—but undeath, this weird thing that no one understands, and that seems so unlikely, and unlikeliest yet when those white eyes are open like that, looking at you. How hard would that be, I wanted to ask her? How difficult? For all the obvious reasons I bit my tongue.

  59 For my part, I’ve only ever compared Rachel’s eyes to Hitchcock’s The Birds, specifically a brief sequence in which seagulls can be seen breasting light against a green hill in the distance of Bodega Bay: their white flecks, hovering over verdure, are what I’m always reminded of when I stare into Rachel’s eyes indoors, for typically swimming in her eye water are little glints from the light bulbs overhead, gull-like gleams winging throughout her irises’ green. I made this comparison well before the outbreak, but since then I’ve had to keep mum about Rachel’s beautiful Bodega Bay eyes, because The Birds has become something of a sore point between us. What happened was that we were rewatching it one night after The Broadcast, and I made the reasonable observation that it could be viewed as a prescient or prophetic undeath film, i.e., that The Birds seemed to be ‘about’ the very epidemic we were now living through. All you had to do was substitute Hitchcock’s avian monsters with our own undead: crowds of birds begin inexplicably attacking the human population; the film’s characters have to board their windows and barricade their doors against waves of aggressive birds; the birds, having destroyed these barricades, flood into the houses and devour their victims alive; characters announce that it is the end-times, an apocalypse, that there are just too many birds, et cetera. At this point in my analysis Rachel let loose an exasperated sigh and complained that we couldn’t watch any movie anymore, not without my finding some way to connect it up to the epidemic and proclaim it an ‘allegory for undeath.’ Guilty as charged, I suppose, though I’m still right about The Birds. And in fact, much of Hitchcock’s corpus seems to prophesy undeath. There’s Psycho, of course, in which a son keeps the stuffed corpse of his mother in the cellar, dressing up as her so that he can wreak havoc in the guise of her reanimated body. But there is also Vertigo, which (as with Solaris) Matt seems to be subconsciously reenacting. In this movie, a lover—believing his beloved to be dead—begins to revisit and stake out all of her haunts: the park, the museum, the apartment. Like Mazoch, he is recreating the route of her undead itinerary, for when he knew her she had been caught in a kind of undeath: seemingly possessed by the ghost of her great-grandmother, she would often fall into somnambulistic trances, wandering to all of her ancestress’s haunts, visiting the park, the museum, and the apartment on a hypnotic circuit. It is to these spaces that the lover returns, expecting to find his beloved’s undead body there. At each site he spots a doppelganger, a look-alike whom he mistakes for his beloved, just as Matt—peering through the binoculars outside of Mr. Mazoch’s haunts—sometimes identifies a false positive as his father. I don’t know wh
ether Matt has ever seen Vertigo (as with Solaris, I’ve been reluctant to bring it up with him). And I suppose it’s out of the question to rewatch it with Rachel. But it is uncanny. You’d think Hitchcock knew about the infection half a century before the rest of the world did.

  60 Odd that ‘draining the face’ is a metaphor I’ve thought of before, only in a diametrically opposite context; that is, the context of vividly committing Rachel’s face to memory. The way in which I kiss Rachel when I’m overjoyed by the beauty of her face—this is how I kissed her at Tunica, for instance, beneath the waterfall, when I saw her smiling goofily at me—is to cup my hands on either cheek and tilt her face toward mine, toward my mouth, the way you bring in a cereal bowl to drink the leftover milk. And while I’m ‘draining’ Rachel’s face in this manner, bringing it slowly toward my own as if to sip from it, I’m usually looking at her and thinking something like, ‘I’ll never forget this face, at this moment,’ which is precisely what I’m trying to forget by ‘draining’ her face tonight.

  61 I employed my usual trick, of focusing on the power light of Rachel’s computer speakers across the room. In the perspectiveless blackness, this glowing green bead (floating where Rachel’s desk should be) always seems suspended in infinite interstellar space. Nothing is visible but it, a pseudo-sidereal point of light, with cavernous darkness between us. To help myself fall asleep, I like to imagine that I am an astronaut adrift on a NASA mattress, at the very edge of space (where there are no more stars, only far chill emptiness), and that the point of light that I’m descrying is actually a rift at the end of the universe, a tear in the black fabric where the cosmos stops. Having reached the point where the expanding universe finally dead-ends, I am glimpsing what lies beyond it: I can see the obverse side of spacetime, shining through this tiny chink. This keyhole into something inconceivable and green. As I said, I frequently play this game with Rachel’s speaker bead, but today was the first time that it occurred to me to compare it to undeath. Perhaps this is what it is like to be undead, I found myself thinking. You cross infinite darkness, with only a virid dot in the distance, shining like a Bethlehem star. At the far edge of the blackness of your mind, you see this single stab of green: the little gleam of what’s left alive in you, visible through a rift in the underworld. And condensed into that dimensionless point would be all the memories that you are trying to get back to, there on the mortal side of your life. In my case, Tunica, the apartment, and the campus lawn would all be compacted together, stelli-fied, pulling at me with their green gravity. And so as I lay there (drifting into half-sleep, feeling myself drift toward this bead, as if caught in its nostalgic tractor beam), I thought, dreamily, ‘This is what it is like to be undead.’

  62 Earlier that same week, during a heavy summer thunderstorm, one of Baton Rouge’s processing centers—i.e., the temporary way stations where LCDC vans can unload their undead, until space has been made for them at an actual quarantine—lost power and suffered a security breach. LCDC was equivocal about what happened, but a guard was rumored to have been careless, and was bitten, and certain fail-safes would appear to have failed. The upshot is that a dozen undead managed to escape from the so-called processing center (in fact a high-school gymnasium in a residential neighborhood) and to go on a biting spree, infecting more than twenty nearby civilians, including three small children. The public uproar surrounding ‘the spill’ (as newscasters decorously referred to it) eventually led to the decommissioning of residential processing centers altogether. As a result, unprocessed undead are now being housed on cargo ships and barges on the Mississippi—far from any neighborhoods—while officials weigh all the options for some more permanent solution. Naturally, these ‘death ships’ (as talk-radio pundits fearmongeringly refer to them) have only escalated debates over hurricane season, which is all that pundits seem to be screaming about, these days. What if New Orleans floods, they scream? Or Slidell? Or New Iberia? Tropical storms have already begun brewing off the coast, and earlier on in the season hurricanes hit Veracruz and Cuba, which came to serve as worldwide object lessons in disaster preparedness: floodwaters freed floods of undead from the quarantines, and both governments—unprepared, underfunded—were powerless to prevent mass outbreaks. As pundits like to point out, the same thing could easily happen here. So FEMA, anxious to avoid any similar swivets stateside, has been urging all of the Gulf Coast towns to evacuate their quarantines, and to ship their undead to safer cities. So far, none have.

  63 For instance, when Rachel and I first moved in together, I read the books that lined her shelves, because I thought that these would give me special access to her, teach me a little about her, just as eating her favorite brand of cereal (Special-K bran flakes littered with dehydrated strawberry shavings, little tart discs of bloodred that puckered my mouth to suck on them) taught me of her tongue, taught me the taste of her mornings and some midnights. I would study her copy of Lolita and try fervently to imagine her reading it—under what skies, in what seasons, with what things on her mind—as if all these granular traces of her could be scraped from the page by my reading, like breadcrumbs from a tablecloth, into the eager maw of my heart. This particular project tapered off gradually as we lived together, as she began to seem less inscrutable and more human and as I began to feel less pressured to solve the mystery of her loveliness. But even now it gives me pleasure, flipping casually through one of her novels, to see her pleasure on the page. To see which passages she has underlined or, as if they were correct answers, scrawled checkmarks next to. Even when I was reading my own copies of books, I strove to read them somewhat with Rachel’s eye. Whenever I came across a passage that reminded me strongly of ones that she had underlined; or that called to mind an anecdote or key term or in-joke that we shared; or that contained some visual detail that, it struck me, she herself would be liable to notice, I wrote her name there in the margin: ‘Rachel,’ loveliest apostil. What was I doing? At the time, I conceived of it as a squirrel’s project. I was burying her name in forgettable places so that, skimming through these books in a few years (perhaps after we had separated, perhaps after I had even forgotten her), my eye would be surprised by her name in the margin. Reading over the annotated passage, I would then be able to unearth from forgetfulness the day that I had marked it, as well as whatever memory of Rachel it had reminded me of in the first place (that scene she’d underlined in Lolita!, that anecdote!, our in-joke!—Rachel!), bringing on a remembering in my chest just charged with unbearable joy and suffering. And if, like the squirrel who forgets where half its acorns are buried and leaves them forever in the dirt, I happened never to skim through some of the books again, all the better, for her name would have time to take root and grow there, oak of unbearable joy and suffering.

  64 I never could have read if I knew, really understood and knew, that there was no such thing as true progress: that I was trapped on an Eleatic treadmill, a Zeno-esque hamster wheel. Deep down I had to convince myself, delusionally or not, that I was nearing a definite end to my scholarship. Whereas the moment I accepted the futility of my task, I would have had to quit. ‘For then,’ Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, I ‘would have felt like those who wished to dig a hole straight through the earth: each one of them perceives that with his utmost lifelong efforts he can excavate but a very small portion of the enormous depth, and this is filled up again before his eyes by the labor of his successor, so that a third man seems to be doing a sensible thing in selecting a new spot for his attempts at tunneling. Now suppose some one shows conclusively that the antipodal goal cannot be attained thus directly. Who then will still care to toil on in the old depths, unless in the meantime he has learned to content himself with finding precious stones… ?’

  65 Hundreds of hours, it turned out, thousands, a statistic of near-astronomical scale that had the power, in the shock of its high number and in its vertiginous mathematical sublimity, to wake me momentarily from my dazed reading and force me to consider all of the activities
I might have been pursuing in that time instead: lovemaking, windsailing, preparing elaborate meals, all glimpsed in breathless montage, like the life I hadn’t lived flashing before my eyes.

  66 Strange that my visual representation of this metaphor, the image that came suddenly to mind when he spoke it, was not the ‘Eleatic treadmill,’ those nightmare legs that carry you no farther down the hallway than where you stand, running terribly in place, but rather (no doubt influenced by my memory of that Nietzsche passage) the childhood futility of trying to dig a hole in the beach, how the sand always spills back in faster than you can trowel it out. When now I imagine combining these two images—in order to generate a sandy version of the race that is always simultaneously being won and lost—what I come up with is the exacerba-tory torsions of a man shin-deep in quicksand, how the churning of his legs only sinks him deeper where he stands.