A Questionable Shape (18 page)

In the end, I promise her I will find some way of ‘stopping' him. This is as we're lying in bed, that I promise her this. She has her back to mine, in the addorsed posture of domestic discord, and I think I can feel her nod in the dark. We pass the rest of the night in silence. For my part, I have not been able to fall asleep. I doubt that Rachel has either. As I've been lying here, my back to hers, I dread the things she must be thinking. How I've betrayed her. How she doesn't know me. ‘Who is this person?' she must be asking herself. ‘This stranger? What is he doing in my bed?'

ON THE DRIVE INTO DENHAM THIS MORNING, NOT long after we cross the bridge, Matt and I hit a roadblock. Fifty yards from Mr. Mazoch's, there is a checkpoint barring the way: sputtering flares, orange barricades, riot guards. ‘What's this?' Matt asks, slowing to a stop. He starts to cut the wheel left, and I assume that he's about to turn around. Take us home. Instead, he drives us down a side street, circumventing the barriers, and after a series of back alleys and shortcuts that I do not recognize, we emerge on the other side of the roadblock, pulling into Mr. Mazoch's driveway.

From here, it's immediately clear what the commotion is. At the Freedom Fuel down the street, there are four police cruisers in the parking lot, corralling a crowd of what looks like fifteen infected silhouettes. These can't be strays—there must have been a ‘spill' at one of the nearby quarantines. Matt and I turn to watch the scene through the back window: the cruisers are parked hood to hood in a quadrilateral formation, penning in the silhouettes, which shuffle back and forth restlessly. Until an LCDC van can arrive, they are evidently going to have to be wrangled this way. Indeed, even as I am thinking this, I hear a siren somewhere behind us, a single far-off
whoop-whoop
. I glance back to the windshield, expecting to see the LCDC van coasting up the road, but what I see is another orange barricade, which has since been dragged into the street we used to get here. Trapping us in. I laugh to myself. Of course we're trapped here. Of course this is happening. The one day that we overstep the deadline—on our
first
supernumerary day—Mazoch drives us into a maelstrom of moaning corpses. At least I'm here with him, I console myself. I was right to come, just as I told Rachel.
Because if Matt were alone right now, he would surely be sprinting into that parking lot, trying to wrestle his way past the riot guards.

As if reading my thoughts, Matt begins to unbuckle his seatbelt. ‘Hey?' I ask. ‘What's up?' Without answering he pushes the car door open and climbs out, and before I have a chance to stop him he is hurrying across the yard. But he does not sprint toward the Freedom Fuel, as I had expected. He goes jogging up the driveway and disappears into the house. It does not take me long to realize what he himself must have realized: that if Mr. Mazoch
is
one of those infected, then there may be signs of struggle in the living room. That is what he has raced inside to find. Shattered chairs, boot scuffs on the linoleum, claw marks in the walls. Any proof that his father has been dragged out bodily, kicking and moaning, by the riot guards now holding him at the gas station. I wait for what feels like much more than a minute—five, ten—before I finally stop counting. Probably he has taken up his post by one of the windows, peering through the binoculars at the parking lot. Scanning the crowd for his father's face.

I still have not tried talking to Matt this morning. We left my apartment in silence, with some vestigial tenseness from last night. My plan was to deliver my speech when we got here, but I was too infuriated. Now I'm stuck waiting in the car, killing time until he returns. It will have to be when he gets back. The moment he sits down in the driver's seat, I will have to talk to him. And so that is what I have been preparing to do while he's been inside: rehearsing what I will say to him. Drafting an apostrophic monologue in my mind. Telling him things in my head and telling myself that I'll tell them to him when he returns. What I've been telling him is this:

‘No, listen. You're never going to find your father. Isn't it time you gave up this particular ghost? To have checked the number of sites that we have, the number of times that we have, for as
long a time as we have, would have been enough to satisfy any reasonable person. Your father's obviously been hit by a car or shot dead, or else he's fallen off the map altogether. Wandered into a swamp and sunk. But you're not a reasonable person. You want to check each site more, even to check more sites. You ask me, “What if he isn't in Baton Rouge?” What if? You'll drive to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, is what if. And why? Because he's “a walking corpse!”, “a rotting corpse!”, “straight out of Revelations!” Because he has to be “burned or buried!” forthwith! Until you went off like a Neo-Nazi about the need to extinguish the infected, I thought that you might still want to protect the man. If your goal was to commit him to a quarantine before he got himself killed, if our search was conceived as a rescue mission, then indeed your indefatigability would be noble. But it's obvious that your only aim is patricide: not to avenge your father's murder, but to re-murder your murdered father. And so your indefatigability is insane. Three weeks ago, when there was a chance he could be found, even this—a mercy killing—might have seemed reasonable to me. But now? The odds are so high that he's already dead, yet still you need to find him. You're combing rubble, ground zero, for the man you want to kill. We're well beyond the dedication of a son who can't stand the thought of his undead father. This is the dedication of a warlord, a warlord ordering his enemy's head! And you'll go further even than that. You won't stop until you sever his head yourself! With your own hands! It's not enough for you to just assume that he's roadkill, you have to
see
him dead—best if beaten to death by you of course—and you'll search full-time to do it. Where is all this energy and anger coming from? What has been sustaining you every day for the past month? Whom or what would you even be avenging by killing your father? Certainly not your father. Are you mad at him for letting himself get bitten? Did those unboarded windows, that unlocked door, seem as careless to you, as selfish, as the cigarettes and
fast food that he gave himself a heart attack with? Do you think that he has neglected his obligations to you as a father, that he should have fought harder for your sake to survive? That, if he really loved you, he would have come to Citiplace? What shit! You don't need me to tell you what shit that is, Matt. Because blaming a man for dying is what's selfish. And clocking eight-hour days to hunt the object of your mourning, so that you can vent your rage on it with a baseball bat. For that matter, enlisting your friend to accompany you on this manhunt, endangering that friend by driving him through infected neighborhoods, without being forthright with him about your motives; but enlisting him anyway because his presence “helps you not to think”—i.e., helps you not to get locked into the obsessive and embittered track of indictments against your father, memories of your father, thoughts of your father that would eat you alive as surely as your father would if only you were left alone with them—is what's selfish. To say nothing of shattering windows like some madman, so as to fabricate evidence, and feeding me a line about how we've been “closing in”… all so that you could spring this extra week on me at the last minute. And what happens then? Am I supposed to ride sidecar like this for another month? A year? How long do you need to keep looking, before you finally accept that there's nothing to find? No. I can't let you keep on like this. Not for another week. Not for another
day.
Whatever it is that I'm complicit in by accompanying you in this, it isn't healthy for you or right. Call this the intervention of a concerned friend, consider this my official unsolicited advice to you: quit when I do. Forget the search. Try volunteering or something else instead. Defer to the hurricane and count your dad among the victims. But don't spend another week gnawing at this wound. Because I won't be gnawing at it with you.'

Is more or less what I've been thinking at Matt this morning. Now I twist around in my seat again, to check on the progress at the Freedom Fuel. In the time that I've been waiting, additional
infected have arrived: either attracted on their own by the commotion, or else rounded up in the vicinity. Wherever they came from, six new silhouettes have converged on the nearest cruiser, clumping around its sides. If the police are concerned about this, they don't show it. As I watch, a single infected (a stick figure, at this distance) detaches itself from the hood and starts wandering across the parking lot. The cruiser merely flashes its sirens—they glint blue-red, blue-red for three revolutions above its roof—and the infected comes shuffling back.

At the thought of Mazoch watching this from the window, through his binoculars, I become strangely enraged. I can actually feel the monologue welling up in my mouth, like spit before the vomit, and I unbuckle my seatbelt as violently as I can before flinging open the car door.

But when I jog up the driveway and up the porch steps and barge into the living room, I don't find Matt standing at any of the windows. He's slumped on the sofa: elbows on knees, head in hands. The binoculars are lying on the cushion beside him. He looks up at me. ‘Any news out there?' ‘No,' I say, ‘not yet.'

I take a moment to survey the living room. For the most part it's as I suspected: no signs of struggle, no traces. But this is the first I've been inside since beginning the search, and I'm surprised by the degree of dilapidation. The place looks even more miserable than I remembered. In the short time that the windowpanes have been shattered, the interior appears to have been exposed to catastrophic elements: the carpet where I stand is sodden from dew and rain, and the July air is heavy and hot and hard to inhale, exactly as humid in here as outside. Along the walls, the outlets are nicotine brown around the sockets (power surge?), and in the corner of the room, all three bulbs of the brass floor lamp (whose central pole branches out into three adjustable eyestalks, forming an ommatophorous torchiere, each stalk capped with a miniature trumpet shade of jade-green glass) are blown, charred black from poppage. Elsewhere the
unchecked humidity seems to have had effects that I associate only with serious flood damage, for instance in post-Katrina photos of abandoned buildings: the five faux-mahogany particleboard blades of Mr. Mazoch's ceiling fan all droop downward now, curling together in a tarantula of warped wood; and the walls' navy paint seems to be, like,
bubbling
in places, trapped air (I guess) swelling it upward in convex blobs. The place is falling apart. Plus random animals appear to have taken advantage of the shattered windows as well. Dotting the gray carpet are the dried fecal pellets of free-ranging rodents and cats, which fauna are probably also responsible for the shredded paper strewn around the coffee table.

This coffee table—actually an old treasure chest, wooden, with a vaulted top and rusted hinges—is currently serving Matt as a footrest. I wonder whether he has been sitting there this whole time, kicking up his feet while I waited alone in the car. Or, for that matter, whether he has been sitting like that all week, every morning after his inspections. This is the room that he has had to see each day. He looks up at me again, head still in hands, and sees me staring: ‘What?'

‘Listen,' I say, on the verge of launching into my monologue. But I find that I'm unable to. I snap at him instead: ‘Well, what are you waiting for? Aren't you going to come look out the window? You've got a straight shot with the binoculars.' He shakes his head. ‘I looked earlier,' he says, and there is immense futility and tiredness in his voice. I wonder whether he knows about the new arrivals, the six additional infected to buoy his hope, but I have no intention of telling him. ‘I'm sorry, you know,' he says. ‘For driving you out here like this. Into the middle of a lockdown. You were right the other day, what you said: about the risks I've been taking. What we're doing is dangerous, and you didn't have to do it. So thanks.' ‘Well thanks, Matt. I appreciate that.' ‘And I just wanted to tell you that you don't have to worry about it. About me—' ‘Really, it's—' ‘—because I'm finished.'
I study his face for some clue, but it's inscrutable. ‘Finished?' ‘This, the search, it's over. You were right. It's been over, and today's the last day I'm going to ask you to do this. So I wanted to let you know. You know. How much I've appreciated…' ‘The help.' ‘Everything.' Somewhere behind me, another far-off siren sounds outside, and Matt lifts his chin at the window: ‘How are things looking at the Freedom Fuel?' I turn to the frame and make a show of peering through it (I even arch all ten fingers over my brow, forming a glare-reducing testudo with my hands, such that I am the very image of flamboyant voyeurism), but in truth I'm too distracted by what Matt's just said to concentrate, and anyway there don't appear to be any new details to discern: the six new infected are still absorbed by the cruiser; the LCDC van is still nowhere to be seen. ‘Well?' he asks. ‘No sign,' I say.

I continue looking out the window all the same, fingers steepled at my forehead, rather than turn to face him. I can barely process what he's said. If it's really true that he's finished, then that would at least absolve me from the obligation of delivering my monologue. Reasonable, realistic, and resigned, he would not need to be talked out of anything. But on the other hand, this is the same Mazoch whom I had imagined—just yesterday—driving himself to the ends of the earth, his deepest desire precisely never to be finished. It's possible that he's only telling me what he thinks I need to hear. If he has a bad conscience about putting me in danger or endangering my relationship—if he regrets having invited me along in the first place—then he might be trying to get me to quit. He did declare this the last day of
our
search, after all, not his. His exact words were, ‘Today's the last day I'm going to ask you to do this.' Maybe Mazoch, in his own way, was trying to insinuate or admit that he has every intention of carrying on with the search without me.