A Questionable Shape (20 page)

I raise the binoculars again and zero in on the Mr. Mazoch doppelganger. He is still leaning against the cruiser, but he's motionless, no longer pounding its window with his fist. He stands at attention, all six feet of him ramrod straight with his arms at his sides, his head slightly inclined to peer over the roof. At any moment, I know, he will be unable to resist his curiosity any longer. Following suit with his companion, he will shuffle into the parking lot, to investigate these strange new humans who have arrived on the scene. Then, before he understands what is happening, those mandibular pincers will come clamping around his neck from behind, and an unknown power start wrenching at his spine, until he is dragged into the van.

Even as I am thinking this, Mr. Mazoch—if indeed it is Mr. Mazoch—begins to move. He sidesteps rightward, crabwise, along the length of the cruiser. I follow him with the binoculars, trying to keep his gray head in frame. In seconds he clears
the cruiser's hood, and with nothing to separate him from the LCDC van, he begins to stride forward. Soon he has put sufficient distance between himself and the binoculars for me to be able to see, not just his torso, but his entire body. He takes long diagonal lunges across the parking lot, heading for one of the riot guards. He leaves his arms at his sides, where they swing languidly. His gray hands. Over his shoulder, a few yards away, I can just make out the riot guard. He is aiming the wildlife handler at Mr. Mazoch, and he is outfitted (as I'd figured) in the full exoskeletal regalia: the gleaming visored helmet and Kevlar vest and glossy greaves and gloves, all pitch dark in the morning sunlight. He has his combat boots posted firmly on the ground, hunching himself down into a tense stance, preparatory to wrestling with the infected. The aluminum pole is held outright, the collar's clamps opened wide and ready to seize their prey. The thing looks like a praying-mantis face. Mr. Mazoch pauses, as if evaluating the situation. He angles his body leftward slightly, blocking my view of the riot guard, and I can't see what's going on with the pole. Only the familiar close-up of his gray hair and blue plaid shirt. He stands confused, deliberating. He's just a yard out of the mandibles' range. Any moment now—the second he resumes shuffling forward—he is going to walk into that trap. I keep the binoculars trained on the back of his head, too scared to look away. Except then, just when I think that he is about to take a step, something must finally catch his attention from behind. For in a slow, graceless motion he is turning, shifting his body around to face the house.

At the sight of his face in the binoculars, I stop breathing. But it is just a stranger's face. No different from a funeral corpse: the gray skin drawn tight around the mouth, the expression slack and placid. The pallor. At first it is impossible to determine anything by his features. I could easily convince myself that this is Mr. Mazoch's face; I could just as easily convince myself that it isn't. After a second or two I think to close my eyes, and I
try—as during the second defamiliarization exercise—to build a mental image of Matt's own face. I clear my head of all interfering thoughts and images, and really try to
see
his face, to see it as it would be in old age. At Mr. Mazoch's age. Beginning with the wire-frame template of Matt's head, I fill it in with flesh and craft the finer details: the strong square jaw, the blunt nose, the cleft chin. Meditating unbrokenly on this face for several moments, I finally snap my eyelids open. And there it is: its afterimage shimmers briefly beyond the binocular lenses, slipping over the infected's face like a mask. It fits the infected's face perfectly. Mapping onto all his contours. The jaw. The blunt nose. Even the cleft chin. Yes. There's no denying it. That is Mazoch's face. Mr. Mazoch's face.

Now would be the time to call Matt to the window, if that were a thing I was going to do. But I can't. As Mr. Mazoch stares back at his house—back at this room where he reanimated, the grave that he crawled out of—I stare mesmerized into his eyes, which are wide open and white, and which seem to be peering into my own eyes, directly through the binocular lenses. I know that this is impossible. That he cannot see me. That at most I would appear as a silhouette in the window, a dim shape beyond the frame. Yet his eyes never blink, and I feel seen. Magnified, they look exactly as I have always imagined: each is as bone-pale and opaque as the Holbein blur. I could swear that they are seeing something. I try to imagine what it must have been like for him, those first few seconds after reanimation. To have to come to in this room, mere moments after bleeding to death. The opening of his eyes one more morning: sunlight on the ceiling, these memories again. Whatever it was he saw then—whether the skull's side of his life, or all the paths of the underworld, or the beacon of a Bethlehem star—it must have led him wandering into the past. For that is the world he belongs to now. That is probably what he's seeing—what he's peering into—at this very moment: memories of this house. Visions of Matt as a kid
in this house. The long nights spent cataloguing antiques. As for the house itself—its dilapidated exterior, the dingy siding and shattered windows—he probably can't see it at all. It must appear to him as it appeared to me, in the streaky rearview mirror at the beginning of the week: vague, whorled, amorphous. Which is just as well. The building is not what he came back here to see. This house is not his home, anymore. Even though he has returned to it, he is looking through it—beyond it—to his true home. He cannot see it, but he knows it's here. He is transfixed by something else, his eyes wide open and opiated, lost in an enraptured staring. His gaze is glazed with satiety. Whatever it is he sees, he obviously can't tear his eyes from it. He needs to get his fill of it, before turning his back on it, and facing the riot guard behind him.

Watching him, I realize that Rachel was right: part of me really does desire this. To see for myself. See what it would be like. Of course, I could study the undead for the rest of my life, I know, and still not comprehend what they're experiencing. The only way to see for myself would be to get bitten. That is clearer to me now than ever, confronted with the inscrutable whiteness of Mr. Mazoch's eyes. They are clouded with mystery, giving nothing away. Admonishing me from that other world.

Was Rachel right about that too? Would I actually let myself get bitten? If given the choice, is the infection how I would prefer to go? After all, it is an entirely new form of dying: different from cancer, or car wrecks, or heart attacks. Different from anything any of us grew up expecting. Instead of the certain nothingness of death—the complete cessation of consciousness—there is this strange and ineffable something. And although we can't know what it will be like, we can assume that it is more than nothing. So if someone offered me a bite wound on my deathbed, I might be tempted to take it. When it came time to relinquish being, I might be unwilling—or unable—to let go: of my self, of my memories, of this world. I might try
to keep one foot on earth (my phantom foot), while the other tested out Lethe.

Maybe that is the source of Matt's anger: not that Mr. Mazoch let go—let himself get bitten, let himself die—but that he
didn't
let go. That, at the critical moment, he clung to somethingness, rather than pass over into nothingness. I look into his face through the binoculars: his eyes are still wide and white; his mouth hangs open slightly, breathless, in the labored gape of sleep apnea. He may not have let go, but Matt has let him go. As far as Matt's concerned, his father is dead. And once the riot guards clamp him down and wrestle him into the van, Matt won't be responsible for him. Quarantined, Mr. Mazoch will be free to pace back and forth in his room for the rest of his ‘life,' walking the treadmill of its floor in the direction of his memories.

I let the binoculars drop to my chest. Instantaneously Mr. Mazoch—if indeed it is Mr. Mazoch—vanishes. His face is replaced by the glacial brightness of the day. Squinting in the sunlight, I can barely even make out the parking lot, where everything has become frozen and small again. It takes me a moment to relocate the doppelganger and the riot guard: I see a bluish silhouette and a blackish silhouette, standing together in a static diorama. A few yards behind them, the other guard is busy with his wildlife handler, tugging an infected forward. As for Mr. Mazoch, he still seems free, for the moment. It's possible that he has already turned around, away from the house, and is about to advance on the riot guard. Or else that the guard has taken a step forward himself, and is about to clamp his neck from behind. They're too far off to know for sure. Whatever the case, it will only be a matter of time. In twenty minutes, half an hour, all of the infected will have been rounded up, and the van will pull as quietly out of the parking lot as it pulled into it. Then the distant
whoop-whoop
of a siren will signal the end of the lockdown, and
the barriers will be dragged out of the streets. Matt and I will leave this house. Matt will drive me home.

I turn my back on the window, and have to blink blindly at the dimness of the living room. Matt, a dark shape on the sofa, clears his throat. It has been several minutes since either of us has spoken. ‘Vermaelen,' he says. ‘See anything out there?' I can't tell whether he's looking at me, but I shake my head. I mean to tell him no. There's nothing to see.

My thanks to the following institutions for their generosity and hospitality: the Iowa Writers' Workshop, especially Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek; the Speakeasy, especially Jackqueline Frost and Andrew Meyer; and the Corporation of Yaddo, especially Sean Marshall and Candace Wait.

 

Thanks as well to the following readers for their insight and support: Jin Auh, Adam Eaglin, Aaron Kunin, Eric Obenauf, Emily Pullen, Arden Reed, Ed Skoog, Caroline Thomas, Rachel Van Pelt, and Eliza Jane Wood. Special thanks to Ben Mauk.

 

Finally, this book is not for or to Sam Chang, but by and with her. Thank you.

 

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.”

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