A Questionable Shape (2 page)

A few weeks into the outbreak, Rachel wrote me an email reminding me of this afternoon—as if I needed to be reminded—in which she referred to the lights in her hands as ‘Bethlehem stars' (I knew at once what she had in mind, but to me those slivers of brilliance had always seemed, all wriggling whitely in her hands, more like lampyrid maggots than stars). She asked me whether I remembered Tunica, and specifically whether I recalled the constellation that she had caught, ‘as bright as Bethlehem stars.' Of course I did. The entire day was—to adopt a photic vocabulary—‘seared' into my memory, and it was this episode especially, the quiet magic and mad happiness of watching sunlight play on each other's bodies, that
Rachel and I had incorporated into the mythos of our courtship. We always referred back to it with semi-tragic nostalgia, as if for a prelapsarian period in our love. We might ask, in the middle of a fight say, why things couldn't be now as they were then, or remark, in acute distress, that we hadn't watched light together in weeks. That was the rhetorical strategy of this particular email, which exhorted the two of us—this was after a string of nasty fights, induced in part by the cabin fever of our staying inside the boarded-up apartment for days—to exhibit only our best selves: to try getting out and going on a sunset walk together; to recuperate the love we'd displayed at Tunica, when we spent whole minutes staring patiently into her hands, into the lights there, as if stargazing. A bath of Edenic goldness, a trace of our best selves: it is this kind of life that that afternoon has taken on in our imaginations. And because neither of us has been able to visit Tunica Hills since, we both, if we were infected I mean, might be expected to head straight there, bypassing other sites (our crappy apartment even) in search of this one memory. Following, as it were, our Bethlehem stars.
⁵

After some hesitation, I decide to write ‘Tunica Hills*' at the bottom of Rachel's list. We won't be going there today—or any other, for that matter—but I suspect that Rachel will appreciate its presence on the page. At the very least she'll savor the coincidence of our sharing the site with the Mazochs. Of course, it's unlikely that the hills hold the same significance in Matt and his dad's relationship as they do in hers and mine, or that Mr. Mazoch could be expected to wander so far afield. But maybe they do, and maybe he could, in which case Matt might devise
a way of driving up there after all. Probably, though, we'll just keep visiting the same handful of sites, until we find Mr. Mazoch or until Mr. Mazoch finds us. Or, failing that, until Friday arrives, and Matt abandons this search and gives up.

 

TODAY, AS ON EVERY OTHER, MAZOCH AND I BEGIN the search at his father's house, which—recessed at the end of a dirt driveway, its aluminum siding gone faded and dun, with tar-colored gaps showing between its shingles—is more of a squalid shack than a home, and not a place where (personally) I think we're likely to find the man. But earlier this morning, while casing the perimeter, Matt discovered a broken window out back. Now, emboldened by the discovery (and despite my objections), he's looking inside the house. I keep watch in the car, gripping a wooden baseball bat between my legs.
⁶

This is the one time since the first day of the search that he's insisted on going inside, and it was in vain that I tried to talk him out of it. The house
had
to be empty, I told him. The window wasn't even a point of ingress, just a pane in the rear door's fanlight. Even if an infected did reach up to punch a hole there (and why would it?), there was no way it could get in. But Matt was adamant: he had to check. So for the past half hour, as he has been patrolling his father's rooms, I've been glancing from window to window and mirror to mirror in a state of nervy surveillance. It's reassuring to see that the area is as deserted as ever. The houses on either side of Mr. Mazoch's are both still
boarded up and unvandalized. Down the block the Freedom Fuel gas station is empty: all of the pumping stations have been removed from beneath its porte-cochere. There are no undead silhouettes. It's 9:05. Matt has been inside for an unusually long time now—close to half an hour. What's he doing in there? I imagine him grappling with a random infected, or staunching a bite wound over the bathroom sink. But no. He's probably just taking his time. Reminiscing. It's been weeks since he's seen the place, and he might be using this opportunity to sit in the empty living room, meditating among Mr. Mazoch's antiques. I study the front door in the rearview,
⁷
waiting for him to reemerge.

That one time we went inside together, on the first day of the search, it occurred to me that maybe his father hadn't wanted to survive, or at the very least that he had been waiting for death with a kind of patience. None of his windows had been boarded, nor the flimsy wooden doors. The scene surrounding the bloodstains in the living room carpet was so legible, forensically speaking, that reading it took a matter of seconds: the front door hanging open and left unlocked; a bright, uncovered lamp (the bulbs still glowing, Matt says, when he got there) situated in direct view of the street; no weapon—not a rifle, a kitchen knife, even a baseball bat—lying on the floor. The man was totally defenseless, and, what's worse, he was broadcasting that defenselessness by leaving his windows unboarded. It's surprising that he wasn't attacked and infected earlier on in the outbreak, though I suppose his living in a satellite town, in such a sparsely populated area, gave him a survivor's edge over city dwellers. Although, again, my impression of Matt's father is that ‘survivor' would have been the worst wrong word to describe him.

I don't just mean that the windows aren't boarded.
⁸
There's
also the fact that the house itself, a dingy rental, doesn't much seem like a place where the sixty-four-year-old Mr. Mazoch would have found life ‘largest, best.' Subsisting on disability checks after his near-fatal heart attack, Matt's father evidently didn't know what to do with himself in retirement. He lived alone here, half an hour from anyone he loved enough to want to see, and if he went out at all he did so only to eat, or to attend an occasional garage sale or auction. Most afternoons he stayed inside and watched daytime television (Antiques Roadshow, Storage Wars). I know all that because Matt told me, but I could have guessed it—it was forensically legible—from the hermitic, indifferent disarray in which the house was kept. Mr. Mazoch seemed not to have minded sleeping on an unsheeted mattress; or heaping his soiled clothes at the end of the hallway and piling clean clothes at the foot of his bed; or letting scum develop in the bathroom, and his toiletries crowd all over the sink, and letting the tiles of the floor dislodge, uprooted from their grout; or ignoring a leak in the roof until a water stain spread gan-grenously down the wall; or abandoning weeks of dirty dishes in the sink, and storing cardboard boxes of dinner plates on a dusty stovetop, and keeping a refrigerator stocked with nothing
but that garish light, forcing him to eat out every meal (which of course he did at those restaurants Matt and I visit daily now, all notorious purveyors of cheap, greasy, disheartening foods); or dropping newspapers and plastic bags and empty take-out containers just on the floor, wherever he was done with them; or accumulating so many antiques (lamps, sofas and chairs, vintage high-school yearbooks, vitrines still filled with pharmaceutical paraphernalia, tin coffee cans, streetlight fixtures, radon-painted wristwatches, illuminated anatomy maps, heavy Coca Cola signs, stuffed wildlife and wall-mounted shark jaws, immovable marble gravestones, a faux-marble bust of Caesar, old stamps, state plates, the guts of a stock ticker in a plastic dome, gorgeously filigreed headphones, et cetera), accumulating so many of these and like items, in such a bachelor's hoard of disorganized piles, that only a narrow, barely navigable path could be made from the living room to the bedroom. So not a ‘survivor,' exactly, so much as a man who had very little left to anticipate. A visit with Matt once a month, another disability check. The opening of his eyes another morning: sunlight on the ceiling, this breathing again. If he had expected regular guests, he might have kept the house presentable; if he had expected to live long enough to justify cultivating a pleasant space, he might not have let the house crowd so cartonnage-like around him. As it stood, he had contented himself to lead, for the past few years anyway, a moribund life, a deathbed life, lying alone and complacent at the center of a massing decay. The outbreak must have seemed to him, like the flood of a hurricane, or a wreck at an intersection, or a second heart attack, as fitting an end as any, not to be resisted when it came.

Why would a man, released into undeath, return to a house like this one? It seems unreasonable to expect to find him here, and yet it—arguably the
least
probable stop on the itinerary of the undead Mr. Mazoch's nostos—is our first stop every morning. While I wait outside in the car, Matt cases the perimeter,
peering in through each window like an orphan at Christmas, trying to get a good look at his father's rooms.
⁹
And each morning he rounds the corner, shaking his head no to me, a blankness on his face. Thus our days begin, exactly as inauspicious as this.

Then again, I might be wrong about Matt's father. It's possible that I have mischaracterized him: that in fact the man was a survivor; that he fought through his heart attack tenaciously; that, despite appearances, he lived for his accumulation of antiques and for his breakfasts out at McDonald's. That he didn't welcome the undead that attacked him, as one swallows a willing lungful of water, but tried energetically to fend it off. What little I know or think I know of the man's character was gleaned from what Mazoch told me and from spending a single afternoon in his house. So perhaps this house, comprising as it does the final years of his life, is denser with nostalgic energy than I've been giving it credit for. Perhaps one day—even today!—Mazoch will find his father standing in the shower stall after all, hot water running down the length of his body, darkening the denim of his jeans. Perhaps Mazoch is finding him in there right now.

Still watching the front door in the rearview, I reach for the mirror and tilt it upward slightly, bringing the finger-oil whorl to head height in the threshold. The smudge hovers right where Mazoch's face will be reflected. When he opens that door, he'll walk face-first into the blur. The second he steps outside, he really will have a blankness on his face. A Holbein blankness, a death's-head blankness: the face his father would see.

MATT AND I ARE PLAYING CHESS IN HIGHLAND Road Park, deep in a deserted picnic field. This was Matt's idea: both the hike into the field, and the game of chess (he keeps a board in his trunk). Whether he associates the game with this place from his childhood outings with Mr. Mazoch, and just likes to play when he comes here; or whether he had hoped that by reassembling enough of the props of one memory—himself, the grass, the beige and black plastic of the figurines—his father would arrive as if bidden to complete the scene; or whether his desire to play was more subconsciously motivated than that… were questions that interested me for precisely four moves into the first game, at which point Matt captured a pawn of mine so unexpectedly as to sting my pride, and I resolved to focus entirely on the match. In the end I lost, though it was very (indeed, frustratingly) close, as was the second match that I lost. In each case the balance tipped in Mazoch's favor only late into the middlegame, when a deadlocked block of our pieces—one of those nasty mires in which any given piece threatens three others and is defiladed in three directions by comrades ready to counterattack, and which develop on the board like (it always seems to me) that scene at the end of action movies, when the hero draws a gun on the villain, only to have a gun drawn on him by a henchman, who is surprised to have a gun drawn on him by the hero's newly arrived sidekick, himself now compromised by the gun being drawn by a second henchman, et cetera, et cetera—finally dissolved in such a way that I was put on the defensive, masterfully pursued, and ruthlessly checkmated. Needless to say, I am determined to win one match before we leave.

When we first got here, pulling into the parking lot, I assumed we'd be surveying the area from the car. But Matt surprised me by stepping outside. What was I waiting for, he asked. Wasn't I coming with him? Obviously I refused. The grounds of the park, which has been closed to the public since the first weeks of the outbreak, haven't been tended to in months, and the weeds have risen far above our knees. Overgrown and deserted like this, the place has a kind of sunken, shipwrecked look, as I can recall it did anytime hurricane rains flooded the valleys between its hills. Standing beside the car, Mazoch pointed across the field toward three far live oaks, separated from us by a sprawling waste of waist-high grass.
¹⁰

‘Are you kidding?' I asked. ‘An abandoned house isn't enough for you?' I told him that we'd already taken enough risks today, without trudging through jungle. Matt waved off my concerns. He reminded me that the infected would have been rounded up as comprehensively here as everywhere else in the city. Then he cited, from this morning's paper, what was meant to be a mollifying statistic: there had been only two attacks in Baton Rouge this past week. Statistically speaking, he said, we were more likely to be mauled by sharks, in the shallows of some Florida beach, than be ambushed here. Which was all that I could think about, naturally, as I followed behind him into the tall grass. Wading through the overgrowth, unable to see my feet, I felt exactly like
a selachophobe in dark ocean: each step seemed to bring my ankle nearer to the gray hand that would grip it, tripping then dragging me beneath the surface, to be fed upon like chum.