A Questionable Shape (7 page)

It was noon when we arrived at the cemetery.
²⁷
Still abandoned after the outbreak, it was unsupervised by any guard or caretaker, and we were the only visitors—the only graverobbers—there. Alone among the green hills and the orderly rows of headstones, I stood by with the shovel while Rachel, kneeling beside her father's grave, pressed her ear to the plot of grass above him, as if auscultating the ground for his heartbeat. She was probably listening for a faint and muffled moaning, or for clawing sounds at the coffin lid. She knelt like that for many minutes, then many minutes more, and the whole cemetery seemed deathly quiet indeed as I loomed uselessly above her, the shovel propped against my right shoulder. Whether she heard anything there she didn't say. What I heard was her breathing and my own. I was thinking, then, about how Rachel would react to the sight of her undead father. The sight of his white eyes. If he actually had reanimated, I wondered, and if she actually did
end up hearing something; if she actually did insist on digging down and if she actually opened that coffin lid—would we see the same thing? Would Rachel see, with me, the awesome otherworldliness in those eyes? While she knelt there with her ear to the grass, I braced myself for anything, including the shock of a pale hand bursting out of the soil. Though what eventually ended up happening was just that Rachel stood up and stretched and suggested that we leave. She seemed disappointed, but then, she didn't cry, and on the ride home she was even able to announce—as if weighing the other side of the thing—that by this point he was probably merely a skeleton anyway.

So that is where Rachel is coming from. That is where she is coming from when in the kitchen this morning she asks me what Matt plans to do once he finds Mr. Mazoch.
That
is where she is coming from when she asks me (not explicitly, but with the injured expression on her face, and with the expression, too, of all the wide-eyed owls on her tank top and all the eyelike polka-dots on her pants, which together stare me down like the members of a jury box) whether Mazoch plans to beat his father's brains in with a baseball bat.

And how can I go about answering this question? Even if I knew for certain that Matt's plan was to dispatch Mr. Mazoch, I could never explain this to Rachel, who helped care for her father in ways Matt probably never dreamed of caring for his, and who objected out of principle to her family's decision to euthanize him, and who visits him regularly on an oneiric plane, and who worried about his comfort and wellbeing even into (un) death. How could I explain to her that a son might prefer a dead father to an undead father, that an undead father might weigh like a burden on a son's conscience? How to convey the sense of filial duty that might be motivating Mazoch to put down, not his father, but the shell of his father, the corpse of a man who had been ready to die and who in all probability did not wish to return from death? To do so I would have to persuade
her of the logic of ‘Mr. Mazoch is not Mr. Mazoch,' ‘My father is not my father,' this sense in which a hungry creature that has inherited only the body, the remembered itinerary, and the gait of a man (or, if you rather, a man from whom everything but his body, muscle memory, and gait have been pared away, and to whom a hunger has been added) is not the man himself. No need to invoke the Ship of Theseus here! Such an argument would mean nothing, or next to nothing, to Rachel, who will take her father where she can get him. Mr. Mazoch is barely there, consciousness-wise? He responds as an automaton to only the most basic stimuli? No matter. Her own father, laid out in his sickbed as a baby in its crib, could acknowledge only by the glaze in his eyes all the distractions that his family had set up in the room for him: Christmas lights, shiny garlands, balloons, flowers, a television set and a radio, countless other mobile-like devices intended to ward off his boredom. Mr. Mazoch is rotting as he moves? His entrails hang in strands from his stomach, and his eyeball dangles from its socket by an optic nerve? Trifles. Her own father appears in her dreams as a Frankenstein's monster, patched imperfectly together from bloated corpses, with only half of his amassed body parts working properly at any given moment, and still she takes him where she can get him. Mr. Mazoch is capable only of inchoate moaning? So be it. For years the only phrases that her father was able to form through the pain of his tracheotomy tube were ‘You're beautiful,' ‘It hurts,' and ‘I love you,' and even in her dreams he's occasionally afflicted with undead Tourette's, involuntarily shouting obscenities in response to all of her questions about the afterlife. Did she not have to hide her tears as she was delivering one-sided goodbyes to her bedridden father, is she not now grateful for any dreams of a verbally incontinent father? On the contrary, she takes him where she can get him. Even Matt's strongest justification for disgust—the fact that Mr. Mazoch feeds compulsively on the living—would cut no ice with Rachel. In the span
of her adolescence her father went from eating spoonfuls of peanut butter straight from the jar (with such gusto that a whiff of Jif on my breath still reminds her, powerfully, of him) to folding all foods directly into his stomach, with the indifference of a mussel. ‘Cannibalism?' Rachel would say. ‘Pah! A father's diet is not his child's concern.' No, Rachel would take her father where she could get him, even a rotting aphasic anthropophagous father, and she would be aggrieved and confused to hear that Mazoch feels any differently.
²⁸

Would be aggrieved and confused, for that matter, if I were to defend Mazoch, to devil's-advocate for him, or especially if I were to continue to accompany him each morning in full knowledge of his ‘plan.'

This would all be easier for me if, like Rachel, I could simply condemn patricide outright. If I were not even tempted to defend it as an option. But the fact is that the ethics of undeath are murky to me. The questions that Matt and Rachel have been made to face, in the wake of the epidemic, are not questions that it has made me face. This choice between the grave and the quarantine, the shovel and the baseball bat… I have trouble, truthfully, even imagining myself in their shoes. Because my own parents both died (car crash) and were cremated years before the
epidemic, they have always been ineligible for undeath. I scattered their ashes myself. I never had to worry about their reanimating, or ask myself what I would do. What my duties would be. Unlike Rachel and Matt, I've never had to think of them in terms of undeath. I've had to think only of myself in terms of undeath. So whenever I try to align myself with Rachel, and work up some primordial disgust at the thought of patricide, I find that I cannot do it. Who knows how I would react, if I were Matt? It's his decision.

This, like so much else, is not something I can explain to Rachel this morning. So I do not try to. Having finished buttering our barely toasted toast, I bring the plate to the table and sit beside her. ‘I still don't know,' I say to her. ‘I don't know what he wants to do. But I'll ask.'

‘Michael,' she says, reaching over to put her hand on my hand. ‘Mm,' I say. ‘Just promise me you won't let him use that bat.' And here I exhale, immensely relieved, for at last she has given me something that I can truthfully tell her: ‘Rachel. Honey. You know we never use the bats.'

 

LATER THIS MORNING, I WATCH FROM THE passenger seat as Matt uses his bat to break into a building.

We're staking out the antiques mall in Denham where Mr. Mazoch used to rent a booth. It's a squat stucco box isolated on an empty stretch of road, and it's been locked up for as long as we've been coming here: the glass double-doors in front are both expertly boarded from inside, with a length of chain wound around the push bar and a heavy padlock dangling dull and scrotal from the links. Since Mr. Mazoch couldn't have broken in, we've never tried to. Normally Matt just cases the place and we sit in the parking lot to wait.

But today Matt pauses at the double doors, and I watch from the car as he scrutinizes the windows. He taps at the glass, as if experimentally, with the bat handle's beveled knob. Then, before I understand what is about to happen, he plants his feet apart, cocking the bat at his shoulder, and swings a tremendous arc into one of the windows, which must be shatterproof, for it wobbles indomitably and the bat recoils. Even from across the parking lot I can hear the hollow
pdunk
of it. Undeterred, Matt simply rides the recoil of the bat and heaves his hips into a second swing, which recoils again, and then into a third swing, and so on.

After the fourth or fifth swing, I realize what Matt must be thinking. It is the same thing he was thinking at Mr. Mazoch's earlier this morning, when he insisted on inspecting the house for a second time: he is determined to find another trace today. A trail of muddy bootprints. Another scrap of blue plaid cloth. He's going to find
something
, if not at his father's house then here, and he'll beat down those double doors to do it. Never mind
that the mall—likely boarded since the outbreak—cannot be home to any recent traces. And never mind the incredible risks he's courting. For instance, any infected in the vicinity, whom Matt might be summoning with each resounding drumbeat of the bat. Or else the police coasting down the road, who might catch him in the act of trespassing. Or else—it finally occurs to me—whatever is
inside
the antiques mall, which was probably padlocked for a reason. I roll down my window in haste and shout across the parking lot: ‘Hey, Bambino! Barry Bonds! Cool it!'

Once Matt returns to the driver's seat, we have very little to say to one another. I don't ask him what he thought he'd find inside, and he doesn't tell me. We just stare out the windshield at the antiques mall in silence. As usual, there is nothing to see: sunlight radiates off the gravel and onto the storefront's stucco, which looks buttered with noon light.
²⁹
The only shade comes from a drooping birch tree, planted at the edge of the lot, where it casts sprays of shadow onto the façade. Eventually
Matt reaches into his backpack and withdraws an apple. Over the next several minutes the silence in the car is punctuated by the log-splitting sound of his bites. I glance now and then from the windshield to watch him, waiting for him to finish so that we can leave. But he is eating the fruit with ruminative slowness, staring intently out the window as he chews, and he lets long moments pass between each bite.
³⁰

At last, to break the silence, I ask him what he's looking at. He explains: he has also been admiring the storefront's stucco, he says, watching as the nearby birch's shadow ivies up the building. Its branches cast a fine, fernlike pattern against the emblazed plaster: ‘Like veins,' he says. And indeed the flattened shadows, branching slenderly into twigs and thin tendrils on the surface of the wall, look veiny in ways that the three-dimensional shoots do not. Before I can say anything about this, Mazoch asks, rhetorically, whether I know what the birch's shadow reminds him of: ‘Other than veins I mean.' ‘I don't know,' I say, ‘I give up.' ‘My father.' ‘…Yeah?' ‘It reminds me of my dad's heart attack, actually.'

He proceeds to tell me that when he visited the hospital, a cardiologist showed him Mr. Mazoch's coronary angiogram, an X-ray in which only the heart's blood vessels, not the organ itself, were visible. The branching veins—flushed for this purpose with radiopaque dyes—showed up ash-gray on the monitor, a network of dark tendrils swaying in an undyed mist of X-rayed whiteness, and there they looked so much like the shadow of a tree (or else just a tree at night, its silhouette outlined by the ghostly fog that Mr. Mazoch's translucent heart appeared as) that to this day, years later he says, he still reads the tracery of trees' shadows angiogrammatically, as the calligraphy of his father's heart. ‘It looked just like that,' he remarks, pointing again to the capillary shadow on the brilliant storefront. ‘The angiogram did.'

This is only the second time that Matt has ventured more than
a passing reference to Mr. Mazoch's heart attack. The first was one morning while we were driving, during which he gave tactful but evasive answers to my questions until, once it'd become clear he didn't really want to talk about it, I stopped asking them. All I learned then was this: over six feet tall and three hundred pounds, and for that matter over sixty years old, Mr. Mazoch worked full time as a plumber (which, according to Matt, was more backbreaking and labor-intensive than one would think [it often involved carrying claw-footed bathtubs up the steep staircases of un-air-conditioned houses, for instance]); at work he sustained himself on Snickers bars, eating on his half-hour lunch break every day only these turd-dark sticks of saturated fat, and elsewhere as here his diet consisted of whatever was worst for him, his dinners spent at fried-chicken chains and his breakfasts, if he bothered to eat breakfast at all, at McDonald's. Oh, and he smoked too, about a pack a day. So one night after handling a jackhammer all afternoon Mr. Mazoch suffered that seized-up pain in his sternum and vomited gray spume into the shower. Matt, in college and living on campus at that point, wasn't there when it happened. It was only much later in the night that he received a call from the hospital, where Mr. Mazoch had managed (while undergoing myocardial infarction! while his great heart fibrillated!) to drive himself.

His father had had a heart attack, Matt was told, and was being operated on as they spoke. A quadruple bypass. Could he come to the hospital? He could. I know now what he saw on arrival—the treetop angiogram of Mr. Mazoch's X-rayed veins—but at the time all he mentioned of his visit to the hospital was what the cardiologist had told him: (1) that it had been ‘this close'—accompanied by a hair's breadth of air between two demonstrating fingers—that if Mr. Mazoch had arrived ‘even ten minutes later' he'd be dead; and (2) that when asked for his son's cell number Mr. Mazoch had instructed them to tell the boy, not that he'd be okay or that there was no need
to worry, but that he loved him, last-words words, just that he loved him and nothing else. Matt's tone spiked when he related these two things, in his voice a little anger flashed like mica.
³¹
And it was here that I backed off from what struck me as a sore subject. Today, when he remarks the birch's resemblance to the angiogram, I can hear the slightest echo of that anger, and so I refrain—for the time being—from asking him what Rachel asked me to. I wonder how long he has been brooding over this association: whether the shadow could have reminded even earlier of the heart attack (of all the excesses that led up to it: the obesity and the greed and the sheer ignorant gourmandism), and whether it was out of anger that Matt attacked the double doors. At this thought I imagine him battering the façade itself (swinging that bat like an ax into the shadow, as if chopping into the trunk of the tree of the veins of his father's heart), and at this thought I imagine him battering Mr. Mazoch, beating on his undead body, just as Rachel fears.