A Questionable Shape (22 page)

‘Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills! The people it kills get up and kill!'

‘Batten' was a word that I was thinking a good deal about at that time. In Greek tragedies like
The Bacchae
or
Oedipus Rex
, the chorus always describes a plague as having ‘battened' on Thebes, which I tend to interpret parasitically, as if Euripides's bacchae, those frenzied women who disembowel and cannibalize the Theban citizens (and who, it has occurred to me more than once, may well be the distant ancestresses of our own undead), were in fact fattening like mosquitoes on the city's blood. So throughout the outbreak my mind was worrying this word, ‘batten,' like a tongue scouring a peach pit, such that the word would come unbidden to me, even as I was thinking of other things. If I was watching the news, and mentally composing a list of last-minute escape routes, I would suddenly be able to distinguish, buoying up over my interior monologue from I didn't know where, the discrete thought, ‘They're battening on Baton Rouge' or ‘This plague has battened on Baton Rouge,' which would then submerge again and be forgotten just as quickly.

On this subject, Mazoch likes to appose Robert Hass's version of the famous Issa haiku (‘In this world/we walk on the roof of hell/gazing at flowers') to something that we heard a preacher say on talk radio one morning (‘When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth'): the dead and the living are sharing roofspace now, and it's nothing like so simple as it once was to take a walk.

The clip is security footage from an overhead camera, low quality and grainy but in color. People are crowded in what looks like the food court of a mall, surrounding a woman who has fallen. The people jostle each other, some trying to get to the fallen woman and some trying to give her space, but most just standing there staring on. One man is kneeling beside the woman, holding her hand in his hand. He checks her pulse, then looks up at the crowd and shakes his head. But at just this moment someone points to the woman, who has opened her eyes again, and when the man turns back to her she pulls him down by his shirt collar, biting—battening on—his throat. At this point things become hectic: the screaming crowd tries to flee all at once, and many people end up crushed underfoot; the infected woman crawls on all fours to a trampled boy and bites into him; meanwhile the man, bleeding terribly and evidently having already reanimated, also begins biting people, who are trapped on the ground beneath fallen bodies; consumers from the food court rush into frame, trying to pull the man and the woman off of their victims, only to be bitten in turn by those victims; et cetera, et cetera. It all happens fast (the clip is, as I said, only thirty or forty seconds), and the crowd onscreen is infected so quickly and so uniformly that their conversion has the appearance of an optical illusion. One moment they're alive, the next all undead, the way that a Necker cube inverts itself on the eye:

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?'

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.