A Questionable Shape (3 page)

Midway into the field, Mazoch stopped suddenly, cocking his head to squint at something to our left. I spotted a short shrub, nondescript, then watched as he knelt beside it. After a moment he called me over, and I saw what had caught his attention: in the thorns of the thin branches, there was a blue scrap of tattered plaid cloth. There was no telling how old it was. It could have preceded the epidemic, even, left here by some Ultimate Frisbee player, foraging for his disc. But as I watched him pore over the plaid—with a kind of Sherlockian scrupulosity, as if searching it for prints—an absurd thought occurred to me. When he looked up, his face was bloodless: ‘I know it sounds crazy.' ‘So don't say it.' ‘Would you believe me if I told you my dad had a shirt like this?' ‘I would believe you if you told me
I
have a shirt like this. It's generic plaid.
Everybody
has this shirt.' ‘I know, I know. It's probably nothing. But weird, right? First the window, then this? Two traces in the same day. It's like we're closing in.' Closing in on what, I did not ask him. I simply nodded and asked what he wanted to do. Set up camp, he said. Stake the site out.

We quickly stamped down a clearing of flattened stalks, like a protective ring, for about ten feet around ourselves, and we have been playing chess here for the past two hours. Standing, we can scan the horizon for any silhouettes; sitting, out of sight, we can concentrate safely on our games, listening for disturbances in the rim of the grass. It's been forty minutes since either of us has bothered to take a periscopic survey of the park. The sun has risen higher overhead, basting us both with sweat. I doubt we'll wait much longer beyond the close of this game.

Of which it's still Matt's move. He's lying across from me, propped up on one elbow and studying his configuration of units. When he extends his free hand to hover it over a knight, I sit up and watch him deliberate. Two of my pawns are divided in
such a way that he could place the knight on a square equidistant from them, forking both at once and forcing me to sacrifice one over the other. He lifts the knight in question, then lets the piece hang tentatively in the air, between his fingers, like a junkyard car from one of those crane magnets. ‘Ready now?' I ask. He places the knight back on the square where he found it. ‘Hold your horses, Vermaelen.' ‘Move yours.' He smiles: ‘When I'm ready.'

I close my eyes and begin to massage them. When he's ready. For a quiet moment there is phosphene-less dark against my eyelids, until I thumb a pressure cloud of electric blue into vision. One of the conversations we've been having off and on all day, in between moves in our matches, is about what being undead would be like. It's a topic I've been meaning to raise with Mazoch lately, and today it came up while we were flattening out our playing area. As we marched around in a wide circle, making a spectacle of ourselves, I stopped to peer across the field. ‘Do you think any infected could see us out here?' I asked him. Matt shook his head. They were just corpses, he said. Rotting as they walked. Their eyeballs were glaucomatic and clouded and white. How well could they possibly see? If he had to guess, he'd say they were close to blind. I was surprised to hear this,
¹¹
and I told Matt that he had touched on a topic of particular fascination for me. As we finished stamping down the grass and started setting up the chessboard, I asked him how he thought the undead navigated, if not by sight.
¹²
Oh, he'd read the usual studies, he
said: lab tests suggested that reanimated eyeballs, critically compromised, were possibly over-reliant on motion and light. But he had his doubts that they could perceive visual data at all. He went on to speculate—after making his opening gambit—that the undead probably can't see consciously, no matter how well their eyeballs are functioning. So even when the undead seem to ‘see' an object in the distance, they must actually—Matt felt sure of this—just be seeing it in the way that a robot with sensors sees, or the way in which a sleepwalker maneuvers through an environment: by processing and responding to brute stimuli. Automatically, unreflectively, beneath the threshold of awareness. Rather than seeing in the mind's eye way that he and I can see—when we appreciate the greenness of this grass around us, or the blueness of this sky—the undead must be all dark inside, he said. Consciously blind while physically sighted.

Matt's response distressed me at the time, and not only because it allowed him—by capitalizing on my distraction—to take my pawn. Rather, I found his dogmatism in the debate unsettling. No matter what, he refused to believe that the undead were conscious.
¹³
This seemed like the secular equivalent
of denying that they had souls—a dualist way of dehumanizing them—and it made me wonder how far he would go in denying their subjectivity. Such questions interested me precisely until he announced ‘Checkmate,' at which point I did my best to push these thoughts out of mind. But as I sit here now (rubbing my closed lids, massaging phosphenes into my eyeballs), it has begun to bother me all over again.

‘Hey,' I say, opening my eyes. Matt is reaching for his knight when he looks up at me. ‘What did you mean by “all dark inside”? How do you even visualize it?'

I half-expect him to quote Chalmers, or, knowing Matt, to quote Homer or Milton or some other blind poet. But after a moment he responds that what he always visualizes—what the blindness of undeath reminds him of—are the black graphics in videogames. ‘Like kill screens,' he says, ‘when a character dies. Or like the sidewalls of a platformer, the boundary lines you can't cross.' In videogames, he explains, this darkness signifies death, or the void, or the unknowable, and it always has the same unnerving texture: completely flat and black, without depth. ‘That's what I mean when I say “all dark inside,”' he says.

Again I want to ask him about Mr. Mazoch—whether he thinks of his father this way, as nothing more than a brain-dead game-over screen—but what I hear myself asking instead
is what games he has in mind. ‘
Goldeneye
,' he says. Whenever he lies in bed at night, and tries to imagine the advance of the epidemic (how far and fast its blindness's vectors are spreading; how that darkness is encroaching on the globe), he says that he pictures it as a worldwide game of
Goldeneye
. When four people play this first-person shooter at once, the television has to be divided into quadrants, mini-screens that accommodate each character's point of view. Once a player is shot dead, his POV runs red with blood before shutting darkly off. And while the other three quadrants continue to televise the POV of their respective players (framing the rifles or Moonraker Lasers in their hands, the corridors they're jogging down), there remains in one corner of the TV this black box, the kill screen, where the dead player's eyes have closed. With each character who dies, obviously, another quadrant winks out. ‘That's what I always think of at night,' Matt says. He visualizes the epidemic as a global agglomeration of kill screens. Because if there were billions more players, he says—if you multiplied the mini-screens a billionfold—the TV would eventually be honeycombed with these black cells. Assuming that all the POV in the world were arranged on an analogous master screen, with ‘live feeds' televising mortal sightlines and ‘kill screens' representing undeath, a viewer could measure the progress of the epidemic just by watching the cells black out across the grid. The screen would build in blackness like a hive of blindness, he says, until finally—when its entire surface was covered—the visible world would be replaced by this monochrome plane of unseeing.

‘I don't see it,' I say. I ask him how this master screen would distinguish undeath from just plain death: wouldn't these ‘live feeds' go dark no matter what? No matter whether it was a bullet, or a brain injury, or a bite wound that extinguished them? ‘If you want a videogame to model the epidemic, you need to find a better example.'

‘I've thought of that too,' Matt says. And he confesses
that, while lying in bed at night, he has also tried visualizing the epidemic in other ways. He asks me to imagine the scrolling levels from
Super Mario Brothers
, the ones in which all the scenery onscreen drifts steadily backward, as if on a conveyor belt, forcing Mario to run ever forward, lest the lefthand side of the screen, which swallows the scenery as it goes, swallow him as well. This black limit of the screen, he says, this onrushing apocalyptic line, like a tidal wave of dark water,
¹⁴
drowning all of the trees and clouds and Goombas that have backslid into the oblivion of the out-of-frame: what could better convey the urgency and inexorability of the infection, the way that it seems to sweep over the land? What could better model the submersion of mortal eyes in the undead depths of phenomenological blackness?

‘Almost anything else,' I tell him. In truth, I'm horrified that Matt has made even Mario a nightmare for himself. If his model has to be a videogame, why can't it be
Tetris
or
Bubble Bobble
or something? I don't tell him this, of course. I just find ways of picking apart his model. This so-called scrolling line, for example, which shepherds Mario forward and subsumes everything in its path: it's too easily confused with time, I say. And besides, if the grid of POV isn't homogenous enough, a limit that razes everything at once is homogenous to a fault. It's not our experience of the epidemic that a wall of it barrels down. It actually spreads in pockets, in these widely dispersed,
concentrated bursts. Here Matt holds up a finger. For his third and final model for visualizing the epidemic
is
as ‘pockets' of blackness, a graphic that he's borrowed from isometric strategy games like
Command and Conquer
. At the beginning of every level, he describes, a player's units are deployed on a map that is shrouded over with black cloud cover, a dense mist that gets referred to, in the game's instruction manual, as the ‘fog of war.' This enveloping fog represents at any given moment the epistemological situation of your army: each inch of terrain that hasn't yet been explored will remain obscured by it, whereas those areas that
have
been explored will have their share of it burned away, disclosing the pixilated landscape underneath (soils, rocks, trees, rivers, and, eventually, the enemy base). The only way to burn off the fog of war is to send units into the thick of it, their reconnaissance serving to clear a path through its bosky dark. When a player scatters a handful of units radially, out from his base to the edges of the map, each infantryman, jeep, and tank will just bore through the fog, clearing it away in narrow runnels of revealed terrain, which gradually come to vermiculate the larger darkness (on tundra levels these runnels are white, since the pixilated landscape that gets disclosed is snow: as white tendrils branch across the blackness of the map, a vision seems to spill like milk). You could imagine, Mazoch tells me, an inverse epistemological situation, one in which the terrain is already revealed but in which all of the units exude contrails of fog of war: inky clouds that stream backward from jeeps and tanks, obnubilating everything, as if they were cuttlefish propelling themselves across the screen. In this model, the units would represent the undead, and the infection as a whole could be measured by how woven over with blindness the world was. Where they had spread, phenomenological darkness; and in the recesses they hadn't reached yet, living vision. ‘Can you see it?' he asks.

I shake my head. This is easily Matt's most unnerving example
yet. ‘The undead don't spread their infection merely by moving,' I remind him, ‘by walking across a map as
Command and Conquer
's units do.' They do so by biting other humans. And whereas the enemy AI in videogames really are mindlessly violent—programmed to attack anything within their radius of awareness—the undead are less predictable. An infected might stagger for hundreds of miles without biting another human, without snuffing out a single mortal POV, and so without exhausting one speck of fog of war. And how is his model supposed to account for that? Do I have a better one, he asks? I consider bringing up
Bubble Bobble
, then shake my head again. Perhaps it would be best to avoid videogames altogether: the more abstractly Matt thinks about the pandemic, I realize, the less capable he is of individuating the undead. They just become blind tiles on a monolith of mini-screens, or an all-obliterating boundary line, or—as with
Command and Conquer
—a literal army of darkness. Points on a chart to be wiped out.

How could he look them in the eye as often as he does, zoomed in through the binocular lenses like that, and not wonder what might be going on inside them? How could he conclude that they are experiencing
nothing
, that there is nothing it is like to be them? ‘They just don't
seem
blind,' I say. ‘Have you ever seen one in person? Without binoculars, I mean?'

‘No,' he admits, shrugging. I lean over the chessboard to get his attention: ‘Well, I have,' I tell him. I try to describe my only encounter with an undead: how I was out for a walk one night when I spotted it; how it exuded this eerie awareness, palpable even from two blocks away. ‘I couldn't tell whether it saw me,' I say. ‘But it definitely knew I was there. It was quote unquote looking directly at me.'

Matt raises an eyebrow, unfazed, then raises his knight from the board. ‘It's your move,' he says, setting the knight down between my pawns. I advance the farther of the two—as I have been planning—and place it in the strike zone of one of his. If
he captures the remaining fork-pawn with his knight, I'll be able to capture his pawn with my own, moving it that much closer to the eighth rank.

The advance of a pawn to the eighth rank! Now
here
is a model for transformation into undeath. Whenever a pawn reaches the end of the chessboard, it is finally able to metamorphose into a queen. A new system of moves opens up to it. What used to be impossible, even to conceive, has been unlocked inside it, and suddenly the entire board is in play. There has bloomed in its chest, where once a pulsion moved it only forward and only one square at a time, a compass rose, given to limitless extension in every direction.