A Questionable Shape (12 page)

I don't think Matt was deluding himself about the theater, necessarily. I can see how a site like Citiplace, attended ritually enough over enough weekends, might function for this father and this son the way that a baseball stadium or campground would for others, and I can even see a case being made for Mr. Mazoch's reanimated corpse returning to it, out of habit if
nothing else, and for Matt's prudence in including it in our itinerary. But after watching Matt grow excited as we approached I-10's off-ramp, and seeing his disappointment now that we've arrived, I find it hard not to think of him as a man grasping at straws. He didn't just believe that Mr. Mazoch might have returned here: he needed to believe that we'd find him
today
, on our very first visit. None of the other sites are working out, so Matt is struggling to come up with new ones. After three and a half weeks with no trace of his father (unless you count the traces in Denham, which I am becoming more and more convinced—as I observe him from across the roof—that Matt himself manufactured), he must be starting to ask himself whether he has miscalculated. ‘How well do I really know him?' he must be asking himself. ‘Do I really know him at all?' Now that his sense of his father, of where he would return to, is faltering, Matt must be subjecting it to revision. If not Highland Road Park, then Citiplace. And if not Citiplace, then where?

The mistake Matt is making is the same one I made yesterday, when I grew anxious over Rachel's list (which did not, thankfully, include any Michael Fureys). Namely, Matt is treating the theater as a place that Mr. Mazoch would think of. If the theater meant something to both of them, Matt must be reasoning, and if it meant as much to Mr. Mazoch as it did to him, then Mr. Mazoch would ‘think to come here.' That is why Matt grew so excited at the sight of the Netflix envelope, and why he kicked himself for not having thought to come here before. That's also why he must feel such anger and disappointment now, as though Mr. Mazoch had somehow let him down by letting Citiplace slip his mind. By forgetting—out of self-centeredness or indifference or neglect—this place that meant so much to his son.

But the problem with this reasoning is that Mr. Mazoch
couldn't
‘think to come here.' Matt hasn't miscalculated his father by failing to find him here, and Mr. Mazoch hasn't betrayed his son by failing to come. For it isn't Mr. Mazoch's mind that
Matt has to try to imagine his way into, or Mr. Mazoch's mind whose memories, impulses, and destinations Matt has to try to anticipate. It isn't even Mr. Mazoch, anymore, whom Matt is really looking for: it's Mr. Mazoch's undead body. That is the paradox: Matt has to think his way into the mind of a creature that may not have one. A creature of unknowable impulses, of ineffable instinct. Given that that's the case, it's no wonder that Matt's emotions are so confused. Because on the one hand, the undead behave
as if
they are consciously retrospective beings, returning to sites that ‘meant something' to them in their mortal lives. Yet on the other hand, it is
as if
they are blank automata, shuffling to these landmarks absently, merely carrying out a program, like robots of remembering. On the one hand, they are creatures of pure memory: they return only to sites from their past, and can find their way back to neighborhoods buried far in their childhoods. But on yet another hand (and this is turning out to be a real Shiva of dialectical reasoning), they are creatures of pure forgetfulness: the sites they return to, so potent with mortal nostalgia, mean nothing to them, and they navigate them unconsciously, are as sleepwalkers there. What they are propelled by is a blind drive. They know they want to return to certain spaces, but they don't know why. They know the spaces are there, but they do not see them. In this way, they inhabit a radical in-between-ness: between total recall and total amnesia, total nostalgia and total obliviousness, between all remembering and all forgetting. And not only in between, but both at once, somehow. It is as if they recall the space (as a destination) at the exact same time as they forget it (as conscious content, as memory). So it is as if the undead are constantly being fed mnemonic madeleines, except that the tea the madeleines are steeped in is actually Lethe water: the crumbs of each memory come soggy with their own forgottenness, they are simultaneously remembering the place (qua destination) and forgetting it (qua memory) while they chew. Even as the site is recalled
it dissolves, and what is left, in the undead, is something like an aftertaste of memory, a sudden and inexplicable craving for place. They know they want to go there—the house, the movie theater, the campus lawn—but they don't know why.

Staring at the back of Matt's head through the binoculars, I know that he knows all of this. Still, knowing it does not help, and I can only imagine what he is feeling right now. Something like the rejection I felt yesterday, when imagining Rachel's list; or else the rejection that I
would
feel (exponentially bitterer) if I failed to find her at the campus lawn. Whatever the scale of Matt's disappointment, I do know that he can't go on feeling this way. One month seems like enough for a lifetime. As if he can sense me staring at him, he turns around now, and I lower the binoculars. He has finally given up on the site, it looks like. His distant silhouette waves at me, and I wave back, and with that we begin to trudge across the rooftop toward one another.

We meet halfway, by the safety ladder, where Matt nods once in greeting before bending to grip the handlebars. ‘Hey,' I say, and he pauses. ‘Why don't we come back here tomorrow?' I ask. ‘Or Friday?' His back straightens when I say this. Letting go of the ladder, he stands to face me, and in the moment before he speaks, I dread what he is about to say. ‘About tomorrow,' he says. ‘I think I need a break. Maybe decompress, do some reading. What if we take the day off?' I nod quickly in relief. ‘Sure,' I say, ‘no problem. We can always come back Friday.'

‘About Friday,' he says, and I feel the dread return. ‘I know we settled on that deadline. But we hadn't foreseen—' He looks away, searching for words. ‘These are extenuating circumstances,' he continues. ‘Someone's prowling my dad's property. What if they come back? I can't just abandon the place now. I need you there with me.' Why not give it one more week, he asks? What do I say?

‘Matt,' I say. He doesn't respond, or even look at me. He has no doubt been preparing this speech the whole time we've been
standing here, and now he is bracing himself for the speech that we both know I am supposed to have been preparing as well. How he's getting desperate. How we set the deadline for a reason. How I'll quit if he doesn't.

But I find that I cannot say this, any of it. At least not here, not yet. Not after all the disappointments of today, not with Matt meekly avoiding my eye, and not mere moments before he has to make his descent, braving the katabasis of the safety ladder, to climb down into that hellish, heartbreaking parking lot, where once again his deadbeat undead dad has jilted him. So instead I say, while shaking my head, ‘Let me run it by Rachel.' Hopefully he will recognize this for the stalling tactic that it is, and will call it quits on his own. For now he nods, then turns without a word to clamber over the top rung. He keeps his head bent on the climb down, watching his feet and the emptiness of the parking lot beneath him, until he disappears beneath the rooftop's ledge. I give him a lead of five or six rungs before following him.

 

TONIGHT, AFTER MUCH STURM UND DRANG, I finally talk Rachel into practicing defamiliarization with me. Presently we're trying it out in the living room, sitting in meditative silence and locking eyes across the coffee table. Because the room is dim and the atmosphere one of intense concentration (and also because both pairs of our hands have come to rest pronated on the tabletop), anyone seeing this might mistake it for a séance. Which wouldn't be altogether inaccurate: we are indeed invoking a kind of dead. Each of us is invoking undeath in the face of the other.

‘It's a hateful thing to do,' Rachel protested, when I first proposed the exercise to her. This was shortly after I got home. We had just finished discussing how my day went, and I had chosen—in the end—not to run the extension by her. In fact, I didn't run anything by her: neither the broken windows, nor Matt's suspicion that someone has been ‘prowling' his father's property. I added these to my mental checklist of things to confess to her one day—when they will be too far past to worry her—as I summarized our trip to Citiplace. When I announced our surprise hiatus tomorrow, she smiled and clapped her hands: ‘A holiday!' She would take the day off too, she said, from the shelter. But how should we celebrate tonight? It was here that I suggested—in what I thought was an offhand way—that we try another exercise like yesterday's. I opened our copy of
FIGHT THE BITE
to the de familiarization chapter and handed it to her. Why not pass the evening practicing estrangement techniques?

Rachel had barely glanced at the first page before refusing, and I knew that it was the diagram that was distressing her. The illustration features a blank-faced man and a blank-faced
woman
⁵⁶
seated in profile, staring into each other's eyes, as if competing in a blinking contest. Between their pupils a single horizontal line extends, and crawling across this wire is a series of wriggles, such as a cartoonist might use to depict heat rising off of a road. But what each wriggle really resembles—in this context—is a graveyard worm, inching from one eye to the other. As the caption explains, the participants are projecting these wriggles to ‘estrange' each other's faces. ‘At least read the thing,' I said to Rachel. ‘Give it that much of a shot.' She made a theatrical sigh and started reading.

Defamiliarization techniques were designed by psychologists
early on in the outbreak, to prepare people for the shock of seeing their undead loved ones. The idea is that ‘My wife!' is the exact last reaction anyone needs to be having when confronted with his reanimated wife. Better to react, ‘My wife is not my wife,' or, ‘My wife is undead,' or, best yet, ‘That undead is not my wife.' Since reacting in this way requires disabling the parts of you that exclaim, ‘My wife!' whenever you see your wife's face, you have to find some way of shutting down momentarily the complex of your facial-recognition software, in a kind of willed prosopagnosia. Only then can you forget the ‘wife' in your wife's face. Then you can react to it as merely a stranger's face, as some indifferent ‘this woman's' face, which (de-wifed, and thus far deracinated from all the marital and erotic symbolic orders in which it'd been ensconced) means as little to you as a face passed in the street. This is where the pamphlet's exercises come in. People can use them to practice not-recognizing each other while still alive, the better to damp down recognition when they see each other undead. Hence the blinking-contest diagram. If, like the man, you were to stare into your wife's face every night until it went weird, teaching yourself to say, ‘My wife is not my wife' while looking at her (and not only that, but if you practiced doing this until you could actually estrange her face at will, as if toggling a defamiliarization filter on and off), then, when your wife
was
undead, and you found yourself being attacked by ‘her' face, you could avoid making the fatal mistake of responding familiarly to it. The moment you saw it, you could simply flip on your inner estrangement switch. Then, drained of all recognizability, it would appear merely as some undead's face, as strange and primally frightening to you as one encountered in an alleyway at night, and you could respond to it (reflexively, unthinkingly) in the way that self-preservation demanded you respond to every undead face.
⁵⁷

The chapter laid all of this out quite clearly. But even after Rachel had finished reading it, she still refused. It was a hateful thing to do, she insisted. ‘I understand why you would say that,' I said. ‘I do. But the thing about this “hateful thing”—the thing to really keep in mind right now—is that you may have to do it eventually. Whether you practice it with me tonight or not, in the future you may have no choice. Because when I come at you like that, and my face is pale and affectless and a bloody mess, the reaction that's going to save your life is, “That's not Michael.”' ‘That's not Michael,' she repeated. ‘That's right. All I'm asking you to do is to look at me and say that's not me. Estrange me once, two times, while I'm still alive—train yourself to not recognize the me in my face—so that you won't be caught off guard when I'm undead.' ‘If you're undead.' ‘If I'm undead.' ‘But you're not undead,' she said, ‘not yet. And I don't want to have to pretend that you are, and “estrange” your face. You're my lover, I love your face. You
are
you.' ‘Except that someday soon I might not be, Rachel. And there will be precious little difference between this face—' Here I let my face slacken, dropping my jaw and emptying my eyes of all liveliness. ‘—and the face that you see on that day.' ‘Then I'll “estrange” it when the
time comes. What do you want me to say?' ‘You won't know how when the time comes. You won't have the slightest idea how to estrange my face when the time comes. You won't know because you'll never have practiced. It's no different from anything else. Imagine if this were CPR I wanted to practice, how absurd you'd sound. “But you're my lover, I love your lungs. Your lungs
are
functioning.”' ‘You're being ridiculous.' ‘Tell me about it.' ‘You're being ridiculous because there is a difference. Nothing changes if I pump on your chest, breathe into your mouth. And if you asked me to prod you away from me with a foam bat, or to lock the door on you and build a barricade against it as you pounded, I would do that too. Because it's just play. But it's not play for me to look at your face and dehumanize it, to will myself to see you as a stranger or a corpse. It's hateful. Everything changes then, and that's the difference. How could I get in bed with you tonight if all I was thinking was, “That's not Michael”? “Who is this person, this stranger? What is he doing in my bed?”' ‘Okay, that's fair—I'll grant you that it's a little creepy. But surely you're exaggerating the aftereffects. How long could the estrangement last? A few seconds? A minute?' ‘It doesn't matter. I love your face. I don't want to think of it that way.' ‘Tell my corpse you love my face!' ‘Michael, please—' ‘Tell me how much you'll love my face when you see it gnawing on your arm! With your blood smeared all over its cheeks—my cheeks!—like barbeque sauce!' I was pawing grotesquely at my cheeks. ‘I don't understand you,' she said. ‘At first you refuse to leave the apartment at all, and now you're gone eight hours a day, looking for infected with Matt. Which is fine. But then, when you do come home, all you want to do is pretend that
we're
infected. Not, let's watch a movie. Not, let's go for a walk. But: Rachel, let's pretend that we're undead. This search is making you morbid, Michael. You'd rather pretend you're undead with me than actually live with me.' ‘Come on, you don't believe that. You said it just because it sounds dramatic, but you don't really
believe it. Look, you're even smiling.' ‘Stop.' ‘Rachel, of course I'd rather we didn't have to do this. But it's not about what I'd rather, it's about what's reasonable. It's about what one of us is going to have to do if the other is ever infected.' ‘You know that's not going to happen.' ‘Oh? It used to happen every other night in this city. Who knows when it might happen again? Or what might happen if a hurricane hits and breaches a quarantine? Your problem is that you're still underestimating how difficult it can be—and I mean both emotionally and psychologically difficult—to reconcile a face's familiarity with an unfamiliar state of being. And there will be no face more familiar to you than mine, and no state of being more unfamiliar than undeath.'
⁵⁸
‘I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Okay?' ‘You wouldn't know how to cross that bridge if it bit you on the ass! Rachel! Turn on the news right now, pick any channel, and you'll see someone who thought they could just cross the bridge when they came to it. And they'll be bleeding to death most likely, if they're not already dead. You think Mazoch could ever cross that bridge? You think that if we had found his father at Citiplace today, he would have simply trotted across that bridge?' ‘Oh my God. Was this Matt's idea, Michael? Don't lie to me. Is he the one who told
you about this? Is that what he's been planning this whole time? To “defamiliarize” Mr. Mazoch, so that he can kill him? Is that why you want to defamiliarize
me
?'