A Questionable Shape (23 page)

I didn't ask, but I assumed that that anger was at Mr. Mazoch: (1) for recklessly neglecting to dial an ambulance and to that extra degree imperiling himself, for stopping at stoplights on his drive to the hospital even as his cardiologist's fingers, unbeknownst to him, were pinching that much more of the air between them, squashing like a bug the ghost of a chance that his heart had; and (2) for being willing and resigned to die, for issuing at the critical moment last, rather than fighting words, the message ‘Tell him that I love him' really bearing the double meaning ‘I give up,' as in, ‘I'm ready now for death, so please send my love to the son whom I won't fight hard enough to live to see.' Or this was the best explanation I could come up with, anyway, for the anger in Matt's voice: namely, that Matt felt that Mr. Mazoch was shirking his duty to his son to survive. It's possible that I'm wrong. Matt might have just been angry with the doctor: (1) for fetishizing the nearness of death (‘
This
close,' ‘Only
ten minutes
'), tormenting a son with details he ought to have kept to himself; and (2) for failing to deliver on the phone the message that Mr. Mazoch had asked him to, namely, by informing Matt that Mr. Mazoch was in the operating theater but not that he sent his love.

And really, what other purpose could the working out serve? It is so impractical and even dangerous an activity, under the given circumstances: it's not as if the crowded undead will be intimidated by Mazoch's bench max, or deterred by the body blows that he rains on their insensate bodies. By focusing so much athletic attention on bulk strength, rather than on cardiovascular stamina or speed, Mazoch is not only failing to train the survival skills he might actually need (sprinting, cross-country endurance, stamina) but training skills directly impedimental to them (weightlifting power that will only slow him down, literal ‘dead weight'). The working out seems designed solely to correct Mr. Mazoch's physical indifference, his obesity and ill health, at the level of the son's body, which by brute determination and for no other reason Matt has transformed into the opposite of his father's body. Flexing shirtless before the bathroom mirror, basking in his own oppositeness, heaving that fruit farther and farther from his father: this is the only purpose that the working out has served.

Undeath, too, is just such a system of synonymy. By biting its victims, an undead passes on to them, as if genetically, all the physical characteristics of the infection (necrosis, moaning, whited eyeballs), thereby rendering them synonyms of itself. That's why all undead, though returning to idiosyncratic haunts and observing distinct behavioral patterns, seem driven by the same motor, so to speak. The surest way for Matt to become his father would be for him to be bitten by his father.

What the sight reminds me of is the cover illustration of
FIGHT THE BITE
, a starkly outlined drawing of cartoon jaws. Opened in a wide ellipse, the jaws form a wreath of teeth around the pamphlet's title, I guess as if about to bite down on it (this is probably what the graphic designer intended), but actually resembling, to an even greater degree, the mouth that a willful boy makes when he wants to display chewed food at the dinner table: a ‘say “Ahh”' mouth, gaping rudely, as if exposing to a grossed-out sibling all the mashed-up bits of title inside.

FIGHT THE BITE
refers to this phenomenon as ‘spite bites': namely, when people who are nonfatally contaminated (e.g., by a scratch, or a bite on the ankle: any manner of infection that—instead of killing them instantly—leaves them with a week of fever and dread before they become undead) decide to spend their last days alive contaminating as many other victims as they can. They mete out to others the dumb luck and injustice of it, either by having unprotected sex, or splitting meals and drinking after people, or sharing needles, or even, fantastically, biting strangers in the street, in a kind of rehearsal for undeath. For this reason,
FIGHT THE BITE
warns readers to exercise caution even around living, asymptomatic humans. It also lists the 1-800 numbers of several 24-hour hotlines, so that—in the event that you are nonfatally infected—psychiatrists and counselors can talk you down from spite biting anyone yourself, before you get to a quarantine.

How often, before this epidemic, would Mazoch or I have witnessed an image of cannibalism, or of a disemboweled man still walking? Maybe once a year, when we watched a horror movie or some samurai seppuku scene? Now these and similar sights are broadcast semi-nightly and are indissociable from the undead. We recognize the undead by the posture of their feeding (the way that packs of them will hunch over the torn-open stomach of a corpse, sifting its intestines through their fingers), as well as by their cadaverous imperviousness to dismemberment: the way that one, cut in half at the waist, will drag itself forward by dogged fistfuls of grass. In images like these we recognize the undeath in them. Compare
that
recognition with the kind we feel when we see them performing echo-practic rituals of motor instinct—when, watching them sit in their cars or drag razors across their rotting cheeks, we might halfway mistake them for human—and it's no wonder that Mazoch's preference lies with the latter.

He even referred me to a relevant passage of Wordsworth: ‘[We] grieved/ To have a soulless image on the eye/That had usurped a living thought/ That never more could be' (
The Prelude
). In context Wordsworth is describing the anticlimactic Alps, but it really would be grievous for Mazoch to have the soulless image of his undead father branded irreversibly on the eye, to have some trademark gesture of undeath—his father's teeth tearing into warm flesh—usurp the living memory of the man. (Mazoch's bibliomantic ability to flip through old poems and find auguries of undeath has never failed to impress me, so one day I tried flipping through his copy of
The Prelude
myself. Within minutes—and as if guided—I stumbled upon the following passage, unmarked by Mazoch: ‘And, on the shape of that unmoving man,/His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,/ As if admonished from another world.' Reading it, I caught my breath. It really did seem unmistakable as a description, not just of any encounter with any undead, but of my own with the jogger. In context, of course, Wordsworth is simply describing his encounter with a blind beggar, and the passage's applicability to undeath can be only an artifact of hindsight bias: an open-and-shut case of poetic postdiction.)

At this late date in the epidemic, it still strikes me as strange that I can enjoy such simple pleasures—the warmth of sunlight on my arms, the freeing bitterness of this beer—when chances are that someone is being bitten and infected not very far from here. This seems to be a special talent of Louisianans: how citizens' sensibilities can remain unsynchronized with their city's. When a hurricane heads for New Orleans, the city shuts down: schools close, work is canceled, news stations broadcast storm warnings. But all that the people do to prepare is stockpile alcohol. They celebrate as on any other holiday: they drink drinks called Hurricanes! One can detect in Louisianans' reactions to disasters like this a reckless kind of hysteresis, as if—even after sociocultural institutions have acknowledged an apocalypse, and even after larger fields and forces of normalcy have withdrawn—there remains this ferromagnetic lag in the people themselves, who behave as if nothing has changed, who persist, charged with quotidian energies in an apocalyptic system. Who drink Hurricanes and barbeque brisket beneath skies blackened with ominousness. It is this same native trait, no doubt, that enabled Mazoch to enjoy his chicken breast at Louie's this afternoon, chewing mouthful after insouciant mouthful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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).

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.

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.

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.

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.