A Questionable Shape (24 page)

Here my model is Martin Heidegger, a philosopher who located both epistemology and ontology in the hands. In his account, the know-how of a hand handling its equipment, the ‘ready-to-hand' knowledge of a hand, is the most immediate way that man (what Heidegger calls ‘Dasein,' literally ‘Being There') has of understanding objects. The more that a hand uses a hammer, the more that it unveils the true ‘hammer-being' of the hammer. And granting that this epistemology of the hand doubles as an ontology of the hand—that is, an account of how hands go about being in the world or otherwise constituting the Being of that world—such ready-to-hand knowledge is naturally fraught with existential significance. Whenever Dasein uses the hammer, he relates not just to the hammer but to everything: the nails in his desk drawer, the desk, the chair at the desk, the room itself, with its walls and windows and doors, the hallway outside and the house, continually spiraling outward, ad infinitum, until the hammer has formed a total world. Being-in-the-world means being caught up in just such a network of equipmental relations, which Dasein is enmeshed in anytime he grabs a tool. For Heidegger, to hold something is both to know and to be. In the case of our undead, the ramifications of this chiral ontology are clear. If an infected breaks into its old bedroom, and its hand roots under the bed for the hammer that it ‘knows' is there, then doesn't the infected also ‘know' the equipmental totality of the mattress, bed, room, and house, that is, the entire Being-in-the-World of its quondam Dasein, which is to say, couldn't the infected be, in some qualified way, precisely
the same
Dasein? And in the case of Frankenstein's monster, these ontological ramifications multiply mind-bogglingly across all of his limbs. Because each hand wants to root for a different tool from a different life, and because each foot wants to walk toward a different home—because the monster has to coordinate all of his limbs independently, just to stumble forward and turn a doorknob—it's as if his entire body were a gangline of Daseins, pulling the musher of his madman's brain.

Here my model is, not Heidegger, but Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian critic who writes about habituated memory in his essay ‘Art as Device.' He refers to the phenomenon as ‘automatized perception.' Humans can perform one task so often, he writes, so unconsciously, that we gradually cease to see what we're doing: ‘The object fades away… We know it's there but we do not see it.' Shklovsky compares this state of unawareness to death, and quotes from the diaries of Leo Tolstoy, who reports having been habit-blinded one afternoon while dusting his room: when he came to his sofa, Tolstoy writes, he couldn't remember (‘for the life' of him) whether he had already dusted it or not, so unconsciously had he been sleepwalking throughout the space. It was exactly like being dead. After quoting this passage, Shklovsky delivers his famous motto, which does not fail to raise the hackles on my arms whenever I remember it now: ‘[L]ife fades into nothingness,' he writes. ‘Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives.' For yes, that is exactly how it is with our undead: they do not see us, but they know we're here. They push their shopping carts, pick up dusters, eat our wives.

Matt is actually quite insistent on this point. I learned this for myself one morning several weeks ago, when we drove past a field and I made the mistake of referring to the stray infected there (five distant silhouettes, standing perfectly still in the morning fog, pale and spectral in what must have been white nightgowns) as ‘ghostly.' ‘No,' Matt corrected me, with a vehemence I found surprising, ‘they're not like ghosts at all.' He spent the rest of the morning in lecture mode, elucidating all of the irreducible differences between the undead and specters. For one thing, he said, you would never see ghosts just standing out in a field like that, beneath a bare sky in broad daylight. They are fundamentally interior creatures. Once a spirit returns to haunt a house, there's this sense in which it's bound to the premises, almost by a spatial loyalty, a sedentary fidelity to place. It's the undead who are free (or rather, compelled) to roam about. That's the difference. You can tell the infected apart from ghosts not by the corporeality of one, or the insubstantiality of the other, but by their relation to space, he claimed. At the time, Matt's spatial distinction reminded me strongly of Mr. Mazoch. For his life, too, had had two distinct relations to space: before his heart attack, he had been a veritable man about town, driving from job to job and moving from house to house; whereas afterward, he mostly stayed inside, becoming an eremite in retirement, the final years of which he spent (by Matt's account) with the agoraphobic unimaginativeness of a ghost. Ever since then I've wondered whether this is the true subtext of Matt's ghost/ghoul dichotomy, the reason he was so vehement about maintaining it: that if the undead aren't ghosts, then neither is his father. In undeath, Mr. Mazoch can be the opposite of a ghost, and, to the degree that he had led a ghostly life, he can be the opposite of himself. Freed from the physical restraints that had anchored him so long in Denham, Mr. Mazoch (or his body) would be at liberty to wander wherever it wanted, shuffling for indefatigable miles all over Baton Rouge. Quickened, at last, after five years of ghostlike motionlessness. (According to this view of things, Mr. Mazoch must have just split the difference when he died: he must have divided up his kingdom of infinite space, with his undead corpse taking the outside [banished to Mr. Mazoch's mortal paths], and his ghost taking the inside [unable to exit its house in Denham, where even now it might be trapped, pacing translucently from room to room]. This is assuming, of course, that Mr. Mazoch would get both, both a reanimated corpse
and
a ghost. You'd have to say that he was cleaved in twain, leaving both a spiritual remainder and a bodily remainder, and that these opposite supernatural energies, diverging from his death, went haunting in different directions: the one inside, the other out. It makes rigorous, dualist sense. [I can't help wondering, though, what would happen if the undead corpse and the specter of Mr. Mazoch ever met each other. I imagine the mutual shock, the dropped monocles: ‘My good sir,
I
am Mr. Mazoch.' ‘But I'm afraid that's quite impossible—for you see,
I
am Mr. Mazoch.'])

I have seen these images on the nightly news as nightly as he has. But it has never occurred to me to associate them with demolition, structural destructiveness, an anti-interiority or spatial hatred. I've always associated them instead with parturition: my mind juxtaposes the image of the undead hand, grasping through the broken window, with that of the obstetrician's hand, groping in the womb for a baby's ankle. Never in so many words do I complete this analogy, never consciously, but as a matter of tone and mood, connotation and texture, as a kind of nightmare inversion or necrotic mirror, what the hand always seems subliminally to be doing is birthing people. Reaching into the house as into a womb, to drag out the inhabitants feet-first: not into life, but into undeath.

One possibility I have been considering is the numb tingling of undeath, that asleep-limb feeling that I assume all reanimated bodies experience. If that is what it is like to be undead, then this might provide one explanation for why they thrash around so compulsively. Because imagine how fidgety it would have to make you: to feel smothered in this way—your whole body—as claustral and cramped as being buried alive. The moment you reanimated, your skin would be washed in that haptic static, compacted by it: surrounded by itching as by earth. And no matter where you wandered, you would still feel suffocated and underground, even when standing in an open field (even those peaceful corpses I saw in the pasture, in their white nightgowns, might have been feeling this way: they might have just been carrying their caskets with them, a virtual box around their bodies, like an aura, or a snail shell). Maybe it is only by punching in windows or beating down doors, only by clawing at barricades or tearing through stomachs—only by ceaselessly reenacting the breaching of the coffin lid—that they can achieve any kind of peace. Maybe bursting through surfaces is just a form of burrowing therapy, a way of digging their way up out of the buried-alive feeling. As if to be undead is to be coated in this restive, metaphysical taphephobia, an unyielding feeling of being crushed by space. And so maybe
that
is a reason that Mr. Mazoch might have walked from window to window last night, punching the panes. He could have been rooting his hand into interiorities for the relief. Groping for moments of rupture, of puncture, the way that a sleeper's hand will keep seeking out new cool parts beneath a pillow. It certainly seems unlikely, though.

What I was watching were the pedestrian signals, those boxes attached halfway up the traffic poles. I was especially transfixed by the ‘Walk' signal, a bright-white profile of a man mid-stride. To the naked eye, the man is just an anthropomorphic white smear. But when magnified by binoculars, he's revealed to be composed of numerous miniature lightbulbs, a dozen or so individual pearls of whiteness. Seen up close, these lend the silhouette a bumpy, knobbly texture, which makes it seem, not like a man, but like a berry of light: his head especially (an aggregate of glowing bulbs, all syncarpous and starlit, a perfect oval of refulgent drupelets) looks like the kind of berry that would grow in outer space, on a star bush or something. At first I found this mesmerizing. But the longer I stared at him, the more each bulb just reminded me of an undead eye. It was as if his entire body were ocellated with white eyeballs, the way Rachel's body had been by the owls. As if every inch of his skin could see me. I almost had to turn away. But soon enough the ‘Walk' man faded, and the signal box went black. Then there rose in his absence the rusty ‘Yield' hand, flat and orange and still, like the bloody palm prints that the infected leave, slapping at the door to get inside. That was what
did
make me turn away.

Fat, flimsy paperbacks, Matt described these guidebooks as, almost like telephone directories, except filled with low-quality, black-and-white photos of esoteric objects, complete with detailed descriptions of their provenance and up-to-date price listings. Mr. Mazoch had to consult these whenever he bought something at a garage sale without knowing exactly what it was, and so without knowing what price to put on it in his booth at the antiques mall. I asked Matt for an example. A buff-colored stuffed lion with a Steiff logo on its paw, for example, which Mr. Mazoch paid twenty dollars for at an auction and didn't look up in a guidebook until later, where it was listed at several hundred. Or the strange vehicle he found at an old farm's estate sale, a rusted-over, steel-frame cage on wheels, with a rotted leather seat and two pump-action wooden handles, which looked like something out of
Mad Max
, but which turned out to be a 19th-century hand-and-foot recumbent tricycle, for women in gowns to get around in, and which Mr. Mazoch paid seventy-five dollars for and later sold for several hundred. (The profits of these items aren't incidental to their narratives. It has emerged in Matt's stories about his father that Mr. Mazoch really did see himself as a swashbuckling arbitrageur of antiques. The thrill of the game was to root out potential diamonds in the rough, paying twenty-five cents for a porcelain bowl in one market [the flea market] and trying to sell it for twenty-five dollars in another [the antiques mall]. So as interested as he was in the strange histories of his collection, and as engaging as he found researching odd facts about them [e.g., that Steiff was the company that invented the teddy bear, and hence the progenitor of innumerable stuffed collectibles], the invariable punch line of any antiques anecdote he told Matt was just what he paid for an item and for just how much he sold it. The way that a fisherman ends any story with the size of the fish. ‘Bought that lion for twenty dollahs,' he'd always conclude, Matt said. ‘Sold it for
three hundred
.' [Whenever Matt is impersonating or doing dialogue for his father, he unconsciously pronounces ‘dollah' the Louisiana way, presumably Mr. Mazoch's way. Matt himself pronounces it ‘dollar.'])

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.)