A Questionable Shape (11 page)

‘All right,' I say. It doesn't matter, at this point, whether Matt even believes what he's saying: he's hell-bent on inspecting the house. ‘I get it. You need to go inside.' ‘I'll just be a minute,' he says, climbing out of the car. Before he can leave for good, I call after him. He bends back down in the open doorway, resting his hands on the roof to look in at me. ‘Promise me this at least,' I say. ‘Today's the last time. Tomorrow and Friday—we play it safe.' He nods ambiguously, then rises and swings the car door shut. After I watch him disappear into the house, I wait for what seems like much more than a minute—five minutes, ten—before I finally stop counting.

While he's been inside, I've had ample time to think over everything he said. And no matter how I look at it, it leaves me feeling queasy and suspicious. For one thing, I find it worrisome that he keeps defining undeath in opposition to his father: unlike the mortal Mr. Mazoch, who remained indoors like a ghost, the undead are driven to roam about; and unlike the plumber Mr. Mazoch, who helped construct buildings for a living, the undead are supposedly destructive. He seems determined to disambiguate his father's reanimated body from his father: it is not only not his father, but the
opposite
of his father. And why would Matt
need to believe that, unless he was planning to kill it? Unless he was planning to put it—if not out of its misery—then at least out of its antonymy?

I have been trying to push these thoughts out of my mind. I would like to give Matt the benefit of the doubt. I would like to believe what he wants me to believe about the windows: that he did not break them; that he truly believes Mr. Mazoch broke them; and that he might be right. To believe this, I have to believe that Mr. Mazoch punched those panes, either out of muscle memory (my own reading), or ‘spatial hatred' (as Mazoch says), or for some other reason altogether.
⁵²
But the more I try to imagine it, the more difficult it becomes, and what I end up
imagining instead is Matt: planting his feet apart at each window, cocking the bat at his shoulder, swinging his tremendous arcs. Anything to convince me that ‘he' came back. To keep the search going.

A month ago, when we first established the deadline, Matt made me promise him that I would enforce it. ‘Don't let me get desperate,' he told me. ‘Don't let me go a day beyond the deadline.' If he ever suggests an extension, we agreed, I am supposed to remind him why we settled on one month in the first place: not only because hurricane season will be beginning in earnest in August, but also because four weeks is the maximum amount of time we thought that anyone could spend looking for his—for a missing person. If all else fails, Matt told me, I'm simply supposed to abandon ship. To inform him that my month is up, and that while he doesn't have to quit, he'll be carrying on alone.

At this thought, the car doors' locks thump upward, on signal from Matt's remote key fob, and I look through the windshield with a jolt. He is standing in the front doorway, holding up some kind of trace for me to see. A red piece of paper, like a crimson color swatch. It looks like a Netflix envelope, at this distance.

 

MATT AND I ARE STANDING ON THE ROOFTOP OF Citiplace Cinemas, surveying the empty parking lots below us. The only thing down there is Matt's car, parked parallel to the boarded-up tickets window. The theater itself has long been abandoned, as have all the other businesses in the shopping center: the Barnes and Noble shut down and the Marble Slab shut down, the baby boutique, the deli, the Federal Express shut down. These buildings are gathered across the parking lot, arrayed side by side to form a village of beige plaster, and the theater looms over them like a kind of castle. When we first got here, I narrowly talked Matt out of breaking into the multiplex, in order to inspect its eleven empty screening rooms. As a compromise, he talked me into climbing up the safety ladder out back. From the roof, he said, we would be able to see for hundreds of yards in every direction. For hundreds of yards there is nothing to see.

Matt stands on the opposite edge from me, commanding a lateral view of the Barnes and Noble. I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on the plaza's entrance, which I watched through the binoculars awhile. The traffic lights there were still blinking green, then amber, then red, even though the plaza's intersections have all been barren for weeks.
⁵³
Now I'm training the
binoculars on Matt. I study the back of his head as he studies the parking lot, waiting for him to turn around and call it quits. He hasn't so much as stretched his neck. He is keeping a stiff and steadfast vigil for Mr. Mazoch.

On the drive over from Denham, he explained the significance of Citiplace to him and his father. It was the Netflix envelope, he said—for indeed it was a Netflix envelope, spotted in a trash pile on the carpet—that finally reminded him of the site. He was an idiot not to have thought of it before, he confessed: we should have been staking it out every day. He spoke for the duration of the ride, breathlessly briefing me on his history with the building. He and his father had always bonded here before the heart attack. They caught a film more or less monthly once Matt went off to college, when Mr. Mazoch fell into the habit, if he hadn't seen his son in a few weeks, of calling him on a Sunday and asking (this was the code they'd developed) whether there were any good movies playing. There rarely were. But the movies were only a pretext, Matt said, and he didn't mind opening the listings and picking a title at random. Superhero films, the stateside remakes of Japanese ghost movies, heist flicks. They always arrived in the early afternoon, sat always in the back row, and were almost always the only audience members there, alone in the bargain darkness of the matinee theater. Mr.
Mazoch paid. He liked to pay in cash, Matt said, and a memory he didn't expect to have of his father—but which he says has persisted in him with startling vividness—is of the man standing outside the theater's ticket booth at noon: squinting in the harsh, concrete-refracted sunlight, wedging a meaty hand down into his jeans pocket for a wad of wrinkled twenty-dollar bills. After the movie let out Mr. Mazoch typically suggested that they go to the Barnes and Noble across the plaza, where he would entertain himself among the thick antiques guidebooks shelved on the second floor,
⁵⁴
while Matt, over in the literature section,
skimmed through a novel or collected poems or volume of criticism (which Mr. Mazoch, if he saw Matt holding on to it when they were getting ready to leave, would gently grab from him like a restaurant check, and pay for at the register himself). To conclude the afternoon Mr. Mazoch treated Matt to coffee and bagels in the bookstore's café, which is where most of the actual ‘bonding' took place: Matt asking his father whether he'd come across any good finds at garage sales lately, Mr. Mazoch asking his son how his schoolwork, weightlifting, and love life were going. The coffee, the caffeinated conversation, was the real point of their day together. But when Mr. Mazoch called on the weekends, he never asked, ‘Wanna grab some coffee?' He always asked, ‘Any good movies playing?'

This changed after the heart attack. It's not that they stopped going to films altogether, but that the ritualistic dimension of the afternoons, the self-consciousness of the bonding, grew to be morbid, and oppressive, and distracting for Matt. He was no longer just spending an afternoon with his father at the movies. Privately, in back of his thoughts, he was always spending
what might be their last afternoon together at the movies
. So if they were to watch
The Ring
together one Sunday, and if Mr. Mazoch were to suffer a fatal second heart attack the following week,
The Ring
would go down forever in Matt's memory as the last movie he saw with his father. Their last conversation together would have been about the haunted videotape in
The Ring
. One of Matt's last images of his father's face would have been of its being bathed in the projector light of
The Ring
: Ring light gleaming in his father's eyes, Ring light tinting the gray threads of his shaggy
hair. These were the thoughts that Matt was having, these were the things that he was thinking, in that delicate time, he told me. He had no way of knowing then that Mr. Mazoch would live several healthy years beyond the anniversary of his bypass, nor that what would eventually do him in would be, not another heart attack, but—
literally
no way of knowing this—the walking dead. For the first year after the operation, Matt couldn't take it for granted from week to week that his father was still alive. In the shower he wondered,
Even now, is my father dying?
And if at an odd hour he felt his cell phone vibrating against his thigh, that nightmarish ice-water feeling would immediately flood his chest, for he was convinced he was being notified of his father's death.

They did try going to the movies. They went to
The Ring
, in fact. But instead of watching the film with his father, Matt watched himself watching the film with his father, trying to carefully stage and frame the mise en scéne of this memory, in case it was his last. He described this watching-himself-watching sensation almost as an out-of-body experience: as if his imagination, detached and astrally projected toward the ceiling of the theater, were looking down on him and his father in their theater seats, filming the memory from an external vantage point. Even as he was ‘in' the moment with his father, Matt was seeing how he would one day remember the moment with his father. So in a sense he wasn't in the present moment at all, but already far in the future, viewing the edited-together memory of that moment. It was as if he had managed to transport himself, by an act of self-conscious prolepsis, years ahead of time, skipping beyond his father's actual death, to the point decades hence when, reminiscing, he would be able to look back fondly on the afternoon that he was even then looking forward from. He could not help seeing his father—who was sitting and breathing right there next to him—through the filter of the future tense, seeing him the way that he would remember him once he was dead. It reminded him, he said, of the experience of visiting a
landmark that's been scheduled to be destroyed, or of touring a monument in a city you know you'll never revisit: the logic of your self-consciousness petrifies those buildings as already-vanished, already-ruins, already-lost, even as you're inside them, such that you can never really
see
them in any present-tense kind of way. Your experience of them becomes mediated by the memory of them that you're anticipating. This was how his experience of Mr. Mazoch felt mediated, those last afternoons at Citiplace, Matt said. He felt like a tourist to his father's presence, a sightseer of the monument of his mortality. Which just wasn't a way he wanted to relate to his father at all.

So they stopped going to Citiplace. At this point I had to interrupt Matt to ask:
did
he remember the last movie they saw together?
Solaris
, he said, the Hollywood remake of Tarkovsky's classic, directed by Baton Rouge's own Steven Soderbergh.

After
Solaris
, Matt declared a tacit moratorium on going to the movies. It was simply too charged an activity. The solution that most pleased him was this: since getting coffee together had less baggage as a tradition (since Matt wouldn't ask himself at a café, ‘Is this the last time I'm going to have coffee with my father?', or, ‘What if my last memory of my father's face is of him stuffing it with a poppyseed bagel?'), Mr. Mazoch started inviting Matt, not to the movies, but to grab a coffee, which monthly they would catch up with each other over a couple mugs of, not at the old Barnes and Noble in-store Starbucks by Citiplace, but at Louie's, a considerably less cathected café. And since Matt still wanted to be able to talk about films with his father, and to have movies (if not movie theaters) continue to play some part in their relationship, he gave Mr. Mazoch, that first Christmas after his operation, a subscription to Netflix. So if they stopped
seeing
movies together, still they didn't stop discussing them. Over coffee Matt would ask Mr. Mazoch about the films he'd rented recently, and Mr. Mazoch would ask Matt which films he should rent next. Matt would recommend the movies that meant the
most to him (the three-hour Swedish chamber dramas and the whimsical Italian metafictions, the jagged-shadowed German silents and the melancholic French heist films), and for their subsequent meeting Mr. Mazoch would come prepared with capsule reviews: what thrilled him, what bored him, what he felt he didn't understand. What shot or image or line of dialogue he hadn't been able to get out of his head all week. ‘What was his favorite?' I interrupted a second time to ask.
Solaris
, Matt said again. ‘Really?' I said. ‘
Solaris
?'
⁵⁵
Matt nodded, not taking his eyes off the road. He said that Mr. Mazoch had rented Tarkovsky's
version out of curiosity, because he recognized the title and remembered having seen the remake with Matt. And he evidently loved the film enough that he kept on renting it, having Netflix mail him the DVD once every few months, so that he could rewatch it whenever the mood struck. In fact, that was the DVD that Matt found this morning: a copy of
Solaris
had been slipped inside its red Netflix envelope and discarded on the carpet. It was likely the last movie Mr. Mazoch had watched in mortal life. He had probably been intending to mail it back the very day he got bitten. So the movie that would have been foremost in his mind after reanimating, Matt said, was
Solaris
.

He said this just as we were arriving at Citiplace, and there could have been no more staggering an anticlimax to Matt's narrative (after that final detail about the
Solaris
DVD, whose red envelope at the scene of Mr. Mazoch's death was meant to seal Matt's entire argument) than pulling into the whitish salt flats of these vast and vacant parking lots, where you could see, almost at a glance, that the place was utterly deserted. If Mr. Mazoch had been anywhere on the premises—a dark figure marring any inch of that white field—he would have stood out as stark and alien as a man in an Antonioni landscape. But it was clear he wasn't here. No one was. And as Matt circled the theater in the car, then began insisting that we break inside, it became clear to me that Matt felt betrayed by his absence.