A Questionable Shape (26 page)

Hundreds of hours, it turned out, thousands, a statistic of near-astronomical scale that had the power, in the shock of its high number and in its vertiginous mathematical sublimity, to wake me momentarily from my dazed reading and force me to consider all of the activities I might have been pursuing in that time instead: lovemaking, windsailing, preparing elaborate meals, all glimpsed in breathless montage, like the life I hadn't lived flashing before my eyes.

Strange that my visual representation of this metaphor, the image that came suddenly to mind when he spoke it, was not the ‘Eleatic treadmill,' those nightmare legs that carry you no farther down the hallway than where you stand, running terribly in place, but rather (no doubt influenced by my memory of that Nietzsche passage) the childhood futility of trying to dig a hole in the beach, how the sand always spills back in faster than you can trowel it out. When now I imagine combining these two images—in order to generate a sandy version of the race that is always simultaneously being won and lost—what I come up with is the exacerba-tory torsions of a man shin-deep in quicksand, how the churning of his legs only sinks him deeper where he stands.

The LSU Lakes have always been high-traffic. Because they're manmade, plopped as an afterthought into the middle of an already-developed neighborhood with already-developed traffic patterns, there's no cline of dwindling trees to intervene between the city and the natural space, no margin of carless quiet… simply an abrupt break where the two zones meet, such that each lake seems like an aside of water, cupped in the parentheses that the pavement makes around it. A wet digression interpolated into the city.

For instance, the irresolvable question of undead vision—whether they are blind or all-sighted, whether they see a blackness or a Holbein blur—would be being resolved, right now, in Mazoch's eyeballs. And his skin, spritzed by a breeze blowing in off the water, would settle at last the issue of sensation: whether it is only numbness that the undead feel, or else a buried-alive tingling. Just so if he were given a boarded door or some mortal tool, to exercise either spatial hatred or a habituated muscle memory: his hand would answer all of our questions about the undead hand. Standing across the lake from me, Mazoch would have been initiated into that sublimity. He would have finally come to learn what for weeks, it would seem, he had been looking for his father to teach him.

I was moved to see that Rachel, in her own way, was also thinking of parentheses this afternoon. After she explained the duck association to me, I shared my pavement association from earlier, the way that the streets seemed like parentheses cupping the lake. Rachel was no less moved than I was. She smiled and tapped my temple with her finger, implying that I'd broadcast the thought of parentheses to her. (And is not the parenthesis the punctuation mark of telepathy? Aren't all graphic representations of telepathy, in comic books I mean, just trails of parentheses? Readers know that one telepath is broadcasting thoughts to another when lunular mind waves—like this: )) )—emanate from her forehead. So if I did in fact transmit the thought of parentheses to Rachel today, the thought would have been projected from my forehead parenthetically, rippling through the air like a duck's wake.)

‘Brackish brackets' is Rachel's phrase. What I didn't point out to her is that the LSU Lakes are freshwater, such that the brackets aren't likely to be brackish. But of course the ducks in
Lake Charles
would emit brackish brackets, since the water is saltier there, so her image still stands.

This
is the painting technique responsible for Holbein blurs: anamorphosis! I never did remember to ask Rachel about it, but today I didn't have to. She simply intuited, as if telepathically, that I was curious, and used the term herself. I had to squeeze her hand when she said it. And as I tilted my head with her and studied the anamorphic metamorphoses of the trash bag, marveling at its mimicry of an ibis, I wondered for the first time whether I might have been falling victim to an identical illusion. Namely, whether the white blobs of the undead's eyeballs, similarly anamorphic, might contain none of the mystery that I keep straining to see in them, but are rather like this trash bag: just blurry garbage—puffed-up, hollow, empty. (A ‘phallic ghost,' in Lacan's phrase for Holbein's skull: a ‘trap for the gaze,' which ‘reflects our own nothingness.')

On the drive over Matt explained that his parents, high-school sweethearts, went on their first date here, kissing on the bank of the brown river. Would the area have looked much different then? One of my favorite parts of the levee is where the city's name has been spelled out in oversized cast-iron letters: B-A-T-O-N R-O-U-G-E, affixed like refrigerator magnets to the sloping concrete. Each letter is big enough that you can actually recline inside its negative space. When Rachel and I still came out here, we liked to watch sunsets from within the cusp of the R. I find myself wondering whether the letters would have already been in place when Mr. and Mrs. Mazoch went on that first date, and if so, whether they nestled inside one, and if so, which. (To keep rainwater from pooling in the letters—e.g., in the triangle of the A, the cusp of the R, or the trough of the U—the sculptors installed sluiceways at an angle in the iron, PVC-LINED passages through which the water could slant and drain. This is also how the letters are cleaned, since when rain washes down the concrete into the river, it carries the dirt off with it and purges the letters' enclosures. Something about this process has always fascinated me, as if the letters, and the words BATON ROUGE, were themselves being cleaned, semiotically as well as physically. So as if ‘meaning' [so often referred to metaphorically as the ‘sediment' of a sign, the rich associational crud that a word has accreted, and been encrusted over with, in the history of its usage] could be washed away alongside literal sediment. Every time that a storm's white spume gushes from the letters' downspouts, it looks as if the words are hemorrhaging meaning. [An image, incidentally, which seems to me like another good representation of the epidemic. For isn't this the effect that the infection has on language? Whenever the undead bite people, their victims' speech is soon reduced to moaning, as if undeath were a kind of contagious aphasia. By puncturing the skin with a bite of their dumb mouths, they might as well be puncturing the words themselves, so absolutely do these words hemorrhage their meanings. And once everyone is bitten, I often imagine, there will be no more spoken language: only this far dictionary of moaning. It's even almost tempting to think of the epidemic, of the undead in general, as having been sent to serve just that purpose, like some tidal wave of aphasia returning speechlessness to the earth: first to puncture words, installing sluiceways in the language, then to wash through them with the white spume of that moaning, rinsing the alluvia from their letters.])

This is the LCDC's infamous flotilla of ‘processing centers.' Until space can be made in the nursing homes or hospitals, the barges serve as auxiliary lazarettos, flat-bottom ferries on which the infected can float, waiting for some Charon to come quarantine them. Earlier this afternoon, as Matt and I were making the rounds of the real quarantines, he skimmed the thumbnail photos of their patient rosters, which LCDC still declines to post online (the logistics of such a database—a public registry of corpses' faces—have generally been too grisly to legislate): each Friday he has to sign in at front desks for access to the rosters, then flip through the clipboards for a mug shot of his father, and today this task felt more futile than ever (he had already checked the house in Denham a final time this morning. To my surprise, he didn't discover any muddy boot prints, or make any more mention of an extension). And now we're here, where no one has yet compiled a patient roster. The place is too makeshift for that. Mazoch just has to make do with the binoculars.

I've never considered the traveling undead before. What would happen if you reanimated while abroad? How would your undead body, discombobulated in this unfamiliar space, ever orient itself? If you were on vacation in Venice when the epidemic hit, and ended up getting infected, your body would just have to spend its undeath in Venice, wandering to your most recent haunts: the beach, the gondolas, the hotel restaurant.

From the LCDC's point of view, provincialism like this is a blessing. The fewer undead there are trying to pass from city to city and state to state, the easier it is to staunch the epidemic at local levels. Like Mr. Mazoch, I'd be one of the more manageable undead. Shuffling within my hundred-mile nostalgic radius, I would pose no threat to Floridians or Texans and do nothing to help spread the infection. Let this, then, be my gift to the human race: that I've never left this place.

Mazoch: ‘I picked this one out because it sounded like a tank.'

When Rachel first lit the wicks, there was still a good bit of wax built up around the bases of the brass candlesticks: the white runoff had congealed somehow anthropomorphically, in these knotted strands, such that it looked as if a congregation of gnarled ghosts was kneeling in prayer before the flame. They reminded me of the nightgown-clad and spectral infected that I had seen standing in the pasture that one morning. Midway through dinner, though, they all began to soften from the flame and melt, pooling in haunted puddles on the tablecloth.

Because of course her respect for creation would encompass the undead. When for breakfast she eats a grapefruit on the landing, holding closed her bathrobe and watching the sunrise over the apartment complex's courtyard, and announces, ‘It's a perfect morning,' she means all of it, nothing escapes her, not the sweet pink of the grapefruit, or the warm breeze, nor the bare light that collects in the glisten in her spoon, nothing, and if there happened to be an infected in the courtyard that morning, not that either. Her heart is like the sweep of a radar screen, this white line revolving a green field. Missing nothing and loving every blip. This is probably not something that Matt would understand.
I
barely understand. Which is why I've been trying to think of other terms to put it in.

Which I think I do an okay job of. The book is bound up with the ‘zones of indistinction' between life and death, namely what happens when political life is stripped from biological life (e.g., when a citizen is deprived of human rights), such that someone is biologically alive while legally dead. Agamben's eponymous mascot for this mode of ‘bare life' is
homo sacer
, a figure in classical Roman law who could be murdered with impunity—without its being considered criminal homicide—but who couldn't be sacrificed. (Agamben, for this reason, refers to
homo sacer
as a ‘living dead man.') Other examples abound, all of them politically disquieting: refugees who are afforded no rights in their host countries, German Jews who were fastidiously denaturalized before being murdered in the concentration camps, coma victims who are declared clinically dead before being euthanized, et al. In each case the divestment of political life from the biological body authorizes the murder, torture, or mistreatment of the living-dead man in question—a point that, in however slurred or garbled a fashion, I think I'm able to convey to Rachel.

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