A Questionable Shape (19 page)

‘So what are you going to do?' I ask him. I keep my voice casual: ‘Now that you're finished.' ‘I'm not sure, to be honest. Maybe volunteer. Take a look at one of the shelters.' ‘That's
good. I was going to say something about that.' Mazoch doesn't respond. If he's planning to continue the search on his own, he evidently isn't going to tell me. But if he wants to keep his search a secret, let him. Let him drive alone to this dilapidated house, and sit on that waterlogged sofa, every morning for the rest of the summer, if that's the form his mourning takes. When Rachel and I invite him over for dinner, we'll just talk about other things. And when he and I meet up to play chess, we'll studiously avoid the subject. We'll all pretend he isn't waiting still.

‘What about you?' he asks. ‘You and Rachel?' ‘Oh,' I say, ‘I don't know. She'll just be happy that I'm home.' Or vice versa. On my way out this morning, Rachel stopped me at the door, placing her hands on my shoulders. She made me promise that today would be the last day. I nodded, said ‘I promise,' and gave her a covenantal kiss on the cheek. If I had decided to go out again tomorrow, there's no guarantee that she would have been home when I got back. And even with the search over, it will take longer than next week for us to normalize. Worry for Matt will continue to be the explicit subject or tacit subtext of our every waking moment. Whenever he doesn't answer his phone, Rachel will assume that he's snuck off to Denham. And whenever I go out to buy milk, she'll assume that I've snuck off with him. I doubt that Matt fully appreciates this—the extent of the dust cloud that he has left behind him, domestically—and I'm tempted to let him know. No, Matt, Rachel and I have not made plans. We haven't been able to think too far beyond your manhunt.

‘Plus there are projects,' I say. ‘Things to do around the apartment, hurricane-wise.' In the silence I feel Mazoch nodding behind me. It may have just occurred to him—as it's occurred to me—that this house, too, is unprepared, hurricane-wise. If no FEMA crews get here first, it'll probably be demolished come August. A single week of mild storms would be enough to reduce the living room to a ruin: for rain to lash in through
the broken windows; for mud and mold, for water rot, to claim everything; and for the creeping tendrils and vines, which cling already to the window frames, to spill over into the space of the house, covering the floors with lush overgrowth. Followed by whatever havoc would be wrought by the rodents and cats, driven inside by the wind. So even if Mazoch
wants
to keep coming here—sitting vigil among his father's things; basking in the memories of the man that they catalyze—soon enough that won't be an option. There won't be any ‘here' here to speak of. By September, whatever of his father's things remain will be utterly defaced: the antiques and trinkets strewn across the room will be rusted over, and the furniture all moth-eaten and murl-ing. Sunlight will puncture the staved-in roof, birds roost in the rafters. Every surface will be maculated with mold. Eventually the space, arrogated by nature in this way, won't even remind Matt of his father at all. Its signifiers of ‘Mr. Mazoch' will gradually be overcoded by signifiers of ruin, anonymized by them, until ‘Mr. Mazoch's house' has grown indistinguishable from any other disaster site: just generically derelict, and therefore unrecognizable. Whether or not Matt gives up looking for his father, I have to imagine he'll give up coming here.

I turn back to look at him. He's still got his elbows on his knees, head in hands, and though his shoulders flex beneath the thin white cotton of his t-shirt, he looks small somehow. Hunched into himself like that. He even looks—sitting alone on his dad's sofa, in the middle of his dad's wrecked and ransacked living room, surrounded by all the dead man's antiques—like a little kid. His dad died here. This is the place he died. And the sofa, the wooden chest, the brass floor lamp: these are his dead dad's things. In any other era, Matt might have inherited them. Now he sits among them, in the house where his dead dad came back, and where for a month Mazoch has waited, daily, for his dead dad to come back. He won't be coming back. Not here, not if he hasn't already. And not only that, but who
knows where he even is by now. Matt knows that. Something in his hunched posture suggests to me he's accepted this: the windows, the missing shirt, the closing in. He'll never see his dad again. In this moment, he really does look finished. Leaning forward, fingers buried in his hair, he's staring beyond the far wall without blinking. He looks like a statue of something: one of those bronzed embodiments of abstract concepts. He looks like the perfect sculpture of having come to terms—with loss, with death, his dad's absence—he looks like a Rodin of resignation. Printed across the plinth the treasure chest makes beneath his feet should be the title, ‘I'm Finished.'

I feel a newfound respect for him swell inside me. What strength it must have taken for him to be finished! Seeing me staring, he makes a quizzical expression. Then he reaches for the binoculars. ‘You want to take a look?' he asks, holding them out. ‘Sure,' I say, and cross the room to accept them.

Back at the window I face the Freedom Fuel, raising the binoculars and bracing myself for whatever it is I might see: a rotting face, two white eyes. But by chance what the lenses alight on is the besieged cruiser, its passenger side, and all I have a view of is the backs of two infected as they beat their hands against the window. Their shirts are all I see. A black polo on the left, a blue work shirt on the right. I try panning the binoculars between their shoulders, to clear a sightline through the window, and eventually I get a bead on the officer inside. He's looking out the windshield, head in profile. He can't be much older than we are: a scrawny kid with a blond buzz cut and a strong square jaw like Matt's, gripping the steering wheel and looking bored. He stares stoically ahead, presumably at the three infected pounding on the hood, and I wonder whether the expression on his face (phlegmatic, contemptuous) is what the scuba mask conceals in the shark cage: they want nothing more than to destroy him, but they can't get at him. He can go on sitting there, baiting them, until the van arrives to detain them. Like Matt, this officer is
probably fantasizing about putting a bullet in the head of every infected surrounding his car. And perhaps, in the very near future, he'll be authorized to. If quarantines nationwide keep overflowing and no medical solutions are forthcoming, the government might decide to unknot the Gordian hordes by sanctioning mass extermination. Of course, the executions would have to be handled humanely, conducted by whitecoats with syringes. But this kid might still get his chance to take a few potshots. I imagine him and a partner parked in the bayou at night, hunting for strays, one swinging the beam of a roof-mounted searchlight, while the other hangs out of the passenger-side window with a scoped hunting rifle (just like the bored sniper teams who are occasionally dispatched to neutralize nutria rats, prowling the swamps late at night in a wildlife-control jeep, and searching the bright plate of their spotlight for any hollow eyeshine [e.g., in bushes or in lakewater, where two jacklit tapeta, flaring out momentarily, will yield a brief Geminian glimmer]). I imagine the kid and his partner searching the darkness for those milky-green cataracts, and taking a swig of bourbon for every pair that they extinguish. A pull of Bulleit for every bullet they put in the head of an infected.

Stepping back from the window, I manage to get a better angle on the righthand infected. His upper torso is completely visible now, and I can see that his blue work shirt is ratty, scuffed with mud and ripped in places, as if he's been wandering in a swamp himself. No bloodstains, though. The back of his head looks human: a shaggy mane of gray hair, jagging unkemptly to his shoulders. His shoulders slope massively into his torso, which is barrel-shaped and obese. Clearly this infected used to be—is—a tower of a man, huge in height and bulk. He's still leaning against the passenger side of the car, pounding on the window, so it's difficult to tell how tall he really is. But tall, at any rate. Tall enough to carry his excess weight. From his silver head of hair and (literally) blue collar, I try to make inferences
about his age, his station. From his shoulders I make inferences about his physical dimensions. What I come up with is that the infected looks about sixty, about six feet, about three hundred pounds. Working class. When I look more closely at his shirt, I notice that it's plaid. The same generic pattern as the scrap in Highland Road Park.

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.