A Questionable Shape (13 page)

And so on in that vein, for what felt like an hour. Ultimately Rachel came around, but only after I had assured her that Mazoch was not—to my knowledge—plotting a patricide. The second I said this, I realized that I was effectively forswearing an extension: I couldn't go on hiding my doubts from her for another week. As it was, she could barely wait for Friday. She insisted that we invite Matt over for dinner that night, in part so that we could celebrate our ‘last day' (her words), but also so that she could put her mind at ease about his motives. I felt a premonitory chill at this—imagining what Matt might say at such a dinner, if Rachel asked him point-blank about his motives—but I nodded. I'd invite him tomorrow, I said.

Once that was settled, Rachel voted that we begin with the blinking-contest exercise, so we rearranged the couches in the living room and positioned ourselves just like the man and woman in the diagram. It's been fifteen minutes now since we started. Following the pamphlet's instructions, I've been focusing on a specific feature (the asterism of freckles to the right of Rachel's nose) and waiting for its isolated oddness to overflow her entire face. Rachel, apparently, has been focusing on my philtrum. Neither of us knows what to expect, what this estrangement is supposed to feel like. Will we be able to tell when it happens? During the first couple of minutes we joked about how awkward what we were doing was: I said I felt as if I were looking at a Magic Eye poster, staring and staring into this pointillist assemblage of monotonic dots until—seething and rearranging themselves like television static—they begin to rise up and resolve into a three-dimensional image; Rachel said she felt as if she were looking at a Rothko painting, staring and staring into the margin between two color fields until—the marine below and the crimson above intensifying in her peripheral
vision—the whole canvas starts to glow. Indeed, when I made this observation, the spandrel of skin between my eyebrows was tingling fuzzily, as happens when I concentrate too hard on Magic Eye posters, and Rachel was looking at me with an expression that I'd only ever seen her look at Rothkos with. But now, a quarter hour later, no three-dimensional defamiliarization effect has risen from her freckled dots, and I doubt whether her patient gaze has kindled any Rothko glow of estrangement in my face.

‘This isn't working for me,' I say. ‘Is this working for you?' ‘No,' she admits, ‘but I think something might have been starting to happen.' ‘It's the eyes. I can't pretend you're a stranger, much less undead, when your eyes are so distinct and green.' ‘You have such dark eyes,' she says softly, and I expect her to compare them to night sky or to coffee. She mentions something to this effect every time that we stare into each other's eyes,
⁵⁹
in the same
tone of voice and with undiminishing tenderness, and I know now that she would be defenseless, utterly, against the beguiling blackness of my undead body's eyes. Except—of course!—that my undead body's eyes
wouldn't
be dark, they'd be glaucomatic and milk-white. Nor would her eyes be at all green, or recognizable in their greenness. ‘Why don't we try it with our eyes rolled up?' I say. ‘We can take turns. Let me try with your eyes rolled up.' Dutifully she exposes to me the flayed-grape undersides of her eyeballs, fixing her pupils on some point in her skull. But almost immediately what this reminds me of is the face that she makes during orgasms (especially when she is astride me, her head hung back and her eyes emptily white, as if filled with
the Zen emptiness of her own pleasure), and I am so far from thinking of her as infected that my penis stiffens. ‘Okay, that doesn't seem to be helping,' I say. ‘Do you want to try it on me?' ‘No,' she says, rightening her eyes. ‘I'm fine.'

Who knew this would be so difficult? The way the pamphlet described it, I thought defamiliarization would be the kind of thing that one could get the knack of, as if, having mastered it, you could always call upon it as a private parlor trick. As if, while sitting at dinner on Friday, I could amuse myself by estranging Matt and Rachel, crossing my eyes and projecting rays of alienation onto their faces, which, spotlit with oddness, would be as unfamiliar to me then as if caught in the beam of a recherché-light (‘Now I know him, now I don't: Matt, stranger, Matt, stranger'). Then it really would be a matter of simply switching it on or off in the presence of the undead. But what good is it as a survival reflex if you have to concentrate on the undead's face for thirty minutes? If you have to fixate on its freckles and be careful not to let your thoughts wander, not to get distracted or glance elsewhere, lest one sudden saccade disrupt the steadiness of your gaze, shattering your concentration and forcing you to refocus on the freckle and start all over? If this is what Rachel would have to do when confronted with my undead body—if this is what would be required of her to build her way up to ‘Michael is not Michael'—then God help her if she ever finds me on the campus lawn.

I look at her again, trying to see her as my undead body would. I take in her entire face this time: her green eyes and high cheekbones; the Dutch jut of her nose; her hair, shorn short, jagged and blond as grass in December. I love this face. But to my reanimated eyes, it would just be a stranger's face. And if this
were
a stranger's face, would I still love it? If I were just seeing it in a crowd somewhere, having never met Rachel, not even knowing to call the face by the name of Rachel? No. It would be as inert to me as any other. I know that. I know that there
is nothing
intrinsically
beloved in these features. When tonight I say that it, as a face, is lovely, all I mean by this is that I invest it with loveliness, that the parts of me that love rush out to meet the face halfway. The face acts as a vessel for my own emotional responses, my memories and associations, the personal narratives and idiosyncratic reactions that I pour into the face on seeing it. If I could somehow stem the flow of those from inside me, her face really would be drained of all recognizability, as bare and dry as a bowl.
⁶⁰
So just pretend that you never met her, I tell myself. Imagine your way into the nothing you'd feel if you passed this face as a stranger in the street. Pretend that she's just a stranger in the street, whom you're staring intently at for some reason. A human face, as yet nameless, infinitely other than you. Now (is it happening?) her face does seem to recede into a weird distance. It withdraws, just as occasionally my own face will if I peer too long at my reflection: that unsettling moment, which you can always feel coming on like a sneeze, when your face sinks ten layers deep into the silver of the bathroom mirror, and begins to stare back at you like a stranger. Is this how her face would appear to me in undeath?

‘I can't do it,' Rachel says. Her concentration breaks like a wave breaking across her face, which breaks my concentration on her face. She starts blinking rapidly and jawing her cheek
muscles in a fit of relaxed tension. ‘No no no,' I say, ‘I was just getting it!' ‘Well, I was getting nowhere.' ‘You really have to think of it as an absolute estrangement. That's the key, I think. You're not just concentrating on my face, you're uncovering in it a kind of infinite otherness. You're not just forgetting the me in my face, you're restoring to it this mask of radical alterity.' ‘You make it sound like an exfoliating cream,' she says. And it's true, I was making it sound that way. When I try to visualize the very thing that I was describing, the image is undeniably ridiculous: me, laid out on a Levinasian spa bed, with white dollops of alterity rubbed into my cheeks, cucumber slices over my eyes. ‘You're right,' I say, ‘forget the mask. But there are still techniques we haven't tried yet…' And I go on to explain one of the pamphlet's other methods for inducing defamiliarization.

How it works is that both partners, still seated across from one another, close their eyes for five minutes, meditating unbrokenly on some other person's face. They clear their heads of all interfering thoughts and images, then really try to
see
that face. They build up the face painstakingly, detail by accreted detail, starting with just a wire-frame template of a head, then gradually filling in its surface area with skin, a mask of flesh out of which they can then mold a nose, a mouth, a brow, adding only in the final stages of the meditation the colors and shades that will render nostrils, lips, and hair. When this high-resolution face hovers graphically before the mind's eye, close enough to kiss, they're to hold it like this for the whole five minutes (keeping it the sole content of their consciousnesses) so that when the time's up, and they do snap open their eyelids to look at one another (dissolving the dreamlike scrim of the meditated face), the rush of sense data will be overwhelming. They will be staring at the real live face seated opposite them, but their mind, still stamped with the meditated face's afterimage, will lag behind the eyes. The mind will be slow to recognize the partner's face qua partner's face. It will comprehend it only as an assortment
of skin-toned shapes, a jumble of geometric flesh, a
strange
face. For a few seconds at least, it should be possible to look at the partner freshly, to see their face as a bare percept, before eventually all the emotional responses and memories and personal narratives percolate through the afterimage filter and obtain to it (i.e., the partner's face) like a name (just as, when you wake suddenly from a powerful dream, it may take up to half a minute for your mind to figure out that what you're looking at is a ceiling fan). Having tricked yourself into seeing your partner estranged in this way, you'll have an important baseline experience from which to practice the more advanced estrangement exercises, which, by refining technique, train you not just to stumble onto but to actively control the defamiliarization effect.

‘What do you think?' I say, and Rachel seems game. So I set my cell phone's alarm for five minutes from now and place the phone ceremoniously on the coffee table. Straightening my back, closing my eyes, I ask Rachel whose face she will be imagining. Her father's, she says. I say Mazoch's.

I CALL MAZOCH AT SEVEN THIS MORNING TO confirm the hiatus, but he doesn't answer. This morning (our penultimate morning) is the first time in three and a half weeks that he's requested a ‘personal day' like this. When the voice mail picks up, I leave a message asking whether we'll be resuming the search tomorrow, then invite him over for dinner afterward (‘to celebrate,' I say, hoping he'll get the hint). I know that he turns his phone off when reading, so I don't think much of it when I hang up.

But I've been thinking about it ever since. It's seven thirty now, and I'm back in bed with Rachel, who I expect will sleep in later than usual (last night we both tossed and turned, as unnerved by the estrangement exercises as she predicted we would be). While waiting for her to wake, I've been staring into the boarded-up darkness of our bedroom. For a while I tried to fall back asleep in this way,
⁶¹
but then I gave that up and started
to think about Mazoch reading. Specifically, about the likelihood that he is actually reading. Or whether he might be back at Mr. Mazoch's right now: crouching down to the carpet, a muddy boot on each hand; walking a trail of footprints back and forth. Just a little something for us to find tomorrow morning.

How could he be reading, I wonder? How can
anyone
read? Once, at the start of the search, I asked Mazoch what he'd be doing for the weekend, and he said reading. When I asked how he could manage to, he said that it relaxed him, eased his tension, otherwise did him good. There was too much time to think, he said, driving around the city all day. Whereas if he sat at his desk and concentrated on a Milosz poem, it was like lighting a thought-repellant candle in the mind. He didn't specify which thoughts it was that he wanted to repel, which thoughts would be fluttering, mosquito-like, at the edge of his reading, but I could guess: thoughts of his father, of the epidemic, of the apocalypse, of death.

Thoughts like these are what make it impossible for me to read, and in fact they're the reason that I haven't picked up a book, not really, since the start of all this. Occasionally I'll try to read with Rachel in bed, but I always find myself skimming distractedly. How am I supposed to follow a text when I know
that, at any moment, my reading might be interrupted—my life imperiled—by the beating on the door of an undead fist? When page by page I am viscerally aware, in all my nerviness and coiled energy, that I might suddenly be called upon to leap up from the mattress and slide the dresser against the threshold, in an improvised barricade, and that with emergency haste I'll have to alert the authorities, lock myself and Rachel in the bathroom, and wait patiently—alone with the sound of its pounding and moaning—for the creature to be detained? These fantasies are difficult to subdue, so more often than not I just lie still, with Rachel reading next to me and with my own book splayed open on my stomach. I stare indolently into the ceiling. I watch the ventilator grille directly overhead, with its little scrap of paper taped to the end, acting as a kind of telltale: when the air conditioner is off, the scrap hangs inertly vertical there, but the moment that the air conditioner switches on, it wags out in a lateral drift, so as to signal that the grille emits a live breeze. For minutes this little tag of paper will float passively along, like some remora on a shark of wind, and it will be enchanting to watch, will put briefly out of mind what the book on my stomach cannot.

After he said that he'd be reading Milosz, I asked Mazoch—whose apartment is a minor library—what good he thought his reading would do him, when you could almost still
see
an apocalypse, on the horizon, like a storm.
⁶²
The day that I asked him
this, the sky actually was black and overcast with storm. Darkling clouds banked all the way down I-10 to the western horizon, where alone there was a clearing, a backlit strip of sky, still glowing a little from a sunset we'd missed. Driving in this direction, speeding a little in this direction, toward where the margin of sky had, in the afterglow of the sunset, turned the color of vanilla cream, and where wisps of cloud were so gilt and silvered that they looked like breath on fire, Mazoch evaded my question by adducing examples of readers who had not been deterred by apocalypses, waving one hand then the other off the steering wheel as he described them to me: first, there was Mr. Henry Bemis, the bookish librarian and sole H-bomb survivor in the
Twilight Zone
episode ‘Time Enough at Last,' who after a lifetime of postponed reading is finally left alone in a deserted city, with no humans to distract him and with all the food and supplies he might need to survive, and who decides, in the teeth of this apocalypse, to organize for himself a two-year reading syllabus from among the books at the public library (only, famously, to
have his reading glasses shatter); then there was the Arab from Book V of Wordsworth's
The Prelude
, who, in an apocalyptic dream sequence, rides across the desert bearing a stone (which, in the logic of the dream, is actually a ‘book,' Euclid's
Elements
) and a seashell (also a book, one that, when the narrator holds it to his ear, prophesies ‘in an unknown tongue… Destruction to the children of the earth/By deluge, now at hand'), and so the Arab rides across the desert to bury these books and preserve his ‘twofold charge' from apocalyptic destruction, even with ‘the fleet waters of a drowning world/In chase of him' (‘[M]ine eyes/Saw, over half the wilderness diffused,/A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause:/ “It is,” said he, “the waters of the deep/Gathering upon us”'); and finally there was the character of Borges in Borges's short story ‘The Book of Sand,' who buys from a rare-books dealer an ‘infinite book' (the titular Book of Sand, which comprises an infinite number of randomly generated pages, such that a reader can never find the same page twice), and who, on realizing that this book is the apocalypse itself (‘I considered fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite, and suffocate the planet in smoke'), does not bury it or cast it into the sea but leaves it instead on a shelf of the Mexican National Library. So why
not
read in an apocalypse, Mazoch seemed to be asking me, via each of these examples. Why not commune solitarily with books, as Mr. Bemis did?; or preserve books from a flood that will leave no humans to read them, as the Arab of the Bedouin tribes did?; or, not only read
in
the apocalypse, but read the apocalypse itself, as the character of Borges did, and as he allowed future readers to do by stocking this apocalypse among the novels and poems of the Mexican National Library? Following these readers' lead, why
shouldn't
Mazoch cram his apartment with books, or spend the weekend reading Milosz, or take this morning off to read? And why shouldn't I try to read today as well?