A Questionable Shape (8 page)

Mazoch is finished with his apple. He has eaten the entirety of the core with grim efficiency, and I watch as he spits the dark seeds out of the driver-side window, where they patter onto the gravel of the parking lot. How far from the tree the fruit falls, it occurs to me! The father ashes a cigarette onto the gravel, the son spits out apple seeds. Is this what the heart attack meant to Matt, in the end? A memento mori, spurring him to eat an apple a day? Was Mr. Mazoch's incised chest, bloated and vulnerable on the operating table, Matt's own archaic torso of Apollo, exhorting him to change his life? Probably not. Matt, with his wrestler's build and workout regimen, has likely been eating an apple a day for ages, and he definitely didn't need his father's brush with death to scare him off Snickers bars and greasy hamburgers. If anything, Mr. Mazoch's heart attack would have only confirmed Matt in his habits. But I'd still be willing to bet that those habits—the bookishness no less than the bodybuilding—were formed in direct contradistinction to Mr. Mazoch. That is, I'd be willing to bet that Matt styled himself consciously as his father's opposite.

It can't be an accident that the fruit has fallen as far off as it has. Indeed, it's as if Matt's entire life has been engaged in this one Sisyphean task: to roll the fruit as far uphill from the tree as possible. That Mr. Mazoch was a college dropout and plumber, Matt should graduate summa from LSU's English department; that Mr. Mazoch preoccupied himself with the most quotidian artifacts from the past (lamps and church hats and farm tools, interesting only secondarily, for the dust of history they were coated with), Matt should devote himself to books, the past's loftiest artifacts; that Mr. Mazoch held his gut in his hands before the mirror every decade, his expanding gut, and appraised the deep concavity of his belly button (like a prostate it had enlarged! Big as a grape now, so unbelievably extended from the tight punctum it had made in his washboard stomach when at twenty he was slim as Matt!), and that Mr. Mazoch, staring each
decade at his widening, worsening reflection, had the naivety to ask (his wife, Matt, the reflection itself), ‘Why do I keep putting on weight? Plumbing is such physical labor. I'm out there sweating every day, working with my hands, but I can't seem to keep the pounds off!', that as his wastebasket brimmed with Snickers wrappers he had the naivety to ask why he couldn't keep the pounds off… Matt should do weighted pull-ups from the bar suspended in his doorframe,
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and each morning complete a set of one hundred elevated pushups (his feet propped on the cushion of an office chair), and hold his body horizontal to the ground for quivering, minute-long sessions of core-strengthening planks, and not only that, but should also mind his diet, eating organic apples whole for lunch, and spitting the seeds out hard, the way cartoon characters spit bullets, as if each ballistic spat black apple seed were itself the force that was keeping the doctor away.

What an antonymic existence Mazoch's led! The wage laborer inverted as the scholar; the car cluttered with bronze lamps and landscape paintings inverted as the car cluttered with OEDs and usage guides (or, to put it another way, junk in the trunk
inverted as Strunk in the trunk); the three hundred pounds of the quadruple bypass inverted as the three hundred pounds of the all-time bench max.

It has been a noble effort on Matt's part, but, of course, no son can succeed in such an antonymic project. No matter how differentiated the son thinks he's become, in actuality he has never left, never escaped out from under, the law of patrimonial synonymy that this whole time has been mastering him. The father's habits, gestures, and ways of being end up predetermining him, such that even as he ‘differs' from his father, he's nonetheless bound to the man by some common denominator.
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Matt crouching in a dank aisle, browsing the spines of secondhand novels; Mr. Mazoch crouching in a dank aisle, browsing a Depression-era child's doll set. Matt unable to say no to a bargain, even if it means pushing his apartment to capacity, stacking long-dead authors' books in teetering hoodoos on the bedroom floor; Mr. Mazoch unable to say no to a bargain, even if it means pushing his dilapidated house to capacity, ranging a long-dead child's dolls across the seat of his living room couch. Matt living by himself, in lonely, disorganized reclusion, consoled only by his library; Mr. Mazoch living by himself, in lonely, disorganized reclusion, consoled only by his antiques. Two collectors, two hoarders, casting a wide net over the past tense and trawling its goods into their rats' nests. No, so far from being antonyms, there could be nothing more identical than Matt the scholar of dusty sentences and Mr. Mazoch the scholar of dusty whatever else. Even the bodybuilding, so ostensibly oppositional to
everything Mr. Mazoch's dietetics represented, is just one long way around the barn among others. For once Matt is his father's age (once his slowed metabolism renders weighted pull-ups and pushups insufficient exercise, and once he aches too much or is too tired or weak to do even them as regularly as he'd need to, and once his lifelong disregard for cardiovascular exercise starts catching up with him), all this otiose muscle that he's spent his youth building up will gradually atrophy and sag, deteriorating into so much fatherly fat. Then the symmetrization will be finished. Surely Matt is aware of this! At least subconsciously, he must appreciate the fact that this final symmetry between him and his father is preparing itself even now in his body, latently stored there like the heart disease that he's probably inherited as well. He must understand that if I were to submerge him in the antiques store's stale miasma, aging him, he'd come out in minutes resembling Mr. Mazoch.

This, too—just the fact that he's here right now, in the antiques store's parking lot, whether he's spitting apple seeds onto its gravel or gristly beef—bespeaks a synonymy with his father. For it's clear that the crowning similarity, the point of pure identity where he and Mr. Mazoch converge, is this itinerary that Matt's acceded to. In shadowing Mr. Mazoch (in staking out his haunts), Matt follows literally in his father's footsteps. He begins each morning in Denham just as Mr. Mazoch did; visits the same gas stations and grocery stores and, today, the same roadside antiques mall; sits in his car in the parking lots of these places, haunting another man's haunts. He's picked up precisely where Mr. Mazoch left off. At least before, prior to this search, Matt (however synonymous with his father he may otherwise have been) had unique routines to distinguish him. The map of his activities throughout Baton Rouge—were he to mark in thick ink the streets that he traveled—would have diverged noticeably from his father's, his own red route coursing from LSU to the gym to the library. But now that route, briefly diverted, has
returned like a tributary to the river that Mr. Mazoch's synonymy is. Now Matt, who forswore a life of manual labor and fast food, reports every morning to the plumbing warehouse and the McDonald's, slavishly reiterating the dailiness of his father's existence. Their two maps are congruent now—the symmetrization is finished!—to the last cartographic detail.

Perhaps that more than anything is at the root of Matt's anger: that he has become his father, or else is doomed to become him. I glance at him again, at his strong square jaw and blunt nose and cleft chin, and try to match him up in my mind with Mr. Mazoch (a man I've never met, or even seen a photo of). Imagining the tendrils of brown fog from the antiques mall, I try to visualize how Matt's features might change if they were aged in timelapse to Mr. Mazoch's age. If his face decayed as fast as that apple he's finished eating.

Matt lets loose a sigh and drums the steering wheel impatiently, then honks the horn three times. Nothing, anywhere, stirs. Even the birch, whose shadow we've been gawking at like Platonic troglodytes, is unruffled by breeze: its leaves are all still, and green as the Real.

‘Do you want to get out of here?' I ask. ‘Are you hungry?' ‘I guess so,' he says. ‘I guess I do.' But after starting the engine he just sits for a minute before moving the gearshift into reverse.

 

TYPICALLY FOR LUNCH WE EAT PACKED sandwiches in the parking lot of Louie's Café, but today Matt decides to order a meal inside. I sit opposite him in a red vinyl booth, watching him tear into a grill-striped breast of chicken. I still haven't asked him what he wants to do when he finds his father, but all throughout lunch I've been working up the nerve to.

‘If you ever
did
find him,' I begin… but almost immediately I lose my resolve. Instead of asking what he wants to do, I decide to ask—in a roundabout way—where he'd want to do it. That is, I ask
where
he'd most prefer to find the man. ‘If you could find him anywhere,' I continue, ‘where would you want it to be?' ‘Out of all the sites?' Matt asks. ‘Let me think about it.' He picks up his silverware and resumes eating, as if to defer the question, and I watch as he keeps shoveling in bites, shredding white threads of chicken through the fork tines, chewing with his mouth open. Each time his teeth part, flashing a clump of meat, I wince a little.
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Matt sees me staring: ‘You're looking at me like a starving person. Why don't you order something?' ‘Do you know how nervous it makes me just to watch
you
eat? I'm not going to order
a dish of infected food for myself. With a side of infection. And who knows what in the water, which probably it's not even bottled, just straight from the tap.' ‘Not even the tap: squeezed fresh from an infected's lesions.' I cringe. I'm remembering the footage of this one Youtube video, in which the wounds and pustules along an infected's skin dehisce from sunburn—there is a runny yellowness like yolk. Mazoch regards me skeptically: ‘Not even dessert?' ‘Confections?' I say, allowing for a beat: ‘More like
in
fections.' ‘Very good, Vermaelen.' ‘I mean, I'm exaggerating, but what a dumb risk.' ‘Yeah, I'm a real daredevil. It's like, I'm such an Evel Knievel, of eating chicken breast and rice, I'm not even wearing a condom right now.'

I, who engage daily in sessions of unprotected sex with Rachel, appreciate that my armchair mysophobia is at some level an overreaction. The chicken meat would, after all, have been well cooked, and the infection itself (of which basically nothing has been empirically verified: not whether it can be transmitted across species, or even whether animals, which are universally asymptomatic, can in fact serve as carriers at all) could probably still be assumed to sizzle and be sterilized in a frying pan. Even the bit about the tap water was merely rhetorical. While
FIGHT THE BITE
strongly discourages drinking anything other than bottled or boiled water, and while FEMA has supplied citizens with aluminum cans boldly and majuscularly labeled
FILTERED DRINKING WATER
, there have been no reports, so far as I know, of the contamination of wells by infected effluent. Yet it would be as meaningless as an aggregate of spit on the surface of his ice water, or as meaningless as blood let from a minor wound into food handled by an ungloved hand, for a kind of absence to uncoil in Mazoch by the end of the week. Even assuming that he could trust a line cook or a
server not to intentionally infect his meal,
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there's no accounting for ignorance, or carelessness. Mazoch knows all of this. I don't understand what's gotten into him. Eating chicken now, after a month of packed lunches? It reeks of ‘He had a week left till retirement,' a kind of fate-baiting self-endangerment and heedless hamartia. It's like he's daring the infection to infect him.

But by far the dumber risk is that we're even inside right now. Although the diner is empty of other customers, there's still the staff on hand: our waitress; a police officer stationed as security; some cooks. Paradoxically, the presence of the officer has the effect of making me feel
less
safe. He's just one more body to reanimate. Any person in this room—if not all of them—could drop to the floor at any moment, and begin to reanimate. Then it would be like that food-court footage all over again, in which a single person manages to spark a mass outbreak. And if it were Mazoch who reanimated today—going limp in his booth, twitching in revivification—there would be only three feet of the formica of the tabletop separating him from me. As he sprawled across it, clutching at me with his thewy hands, I would have to fend him off, fend off his huge strength, for as long as I could, until the officer a few booths over rushed here to restrain
him. Assuming, that is, that the officer himself hadn't already reanimated. I look over Matt's broad shoulder toward the officer's booth, trying to make out whether the man has ordered or eaten anything since he's been here, but all I can see is the back of the seat opposite him.

When the waitress returns to take Mazoch's plate, she offers him a laminated dessert menu, and he props it on the table so that I can see its centerfold photographs of brownies. Such a menu as the devil might have shown Jesus in the desert, each brownie stage-lit and provocatively angled, glinting in places throughout its morsel moisture and the deep obscene brownness of its glaze. Mazoch must be able to tell by my expression that I'm little tempted: ‘You know we're talking a thousandth decimal place? What are the chances,' he asks, emphasizing the word ‘chances,' ‘that one brownie or one piece of chicken, from this diner, this afternoon, is going to infect either of us?' ‘In my case, no chance,' I answer, ‘because I refuse to order anything.' ‘Suit yourself,' he says.

I remind him that he still hasn't answered my question, about where he'd want to find his father, and he folds the dessert menu down on the table. ‘I know where I
wouldn't
want to find him,' he says. ‘I do too,' I say. ‘Feeding, right?' When we first discussed this, toward the beginning of the search, I asked Matt whether he was ever
afraid
of finding Mr. Mazoch. And he confided in me that there were certain scenarios that kept him up at night. He would never want to find Mr. Mazoch feeding, he said: to see him crouched over his victim, hands rooting inside an opened stomach, the ribs pried and the long guts unspooled, and to hear the sloppy wetness of his chewing; for his father to turn back, looking over his shoulder, and for the man to be unrecognizable by the cloudiness of his eyes, so vacant, wide, and white, and by the blood, too, smeared carelessly across his mouth, as by a child's finger-painting hand. Even worse than finding his father feeding, he said, would be to find him at the moment when,
having fed too much, his undigesting stomach burst: to see him lying helpless in a ditch, his legs and arms rotating futilely, like an upturned beetle's, around the scene of his unseamed belly, the gore steaming in the grass where it spilled, and his mouth giving terribly of froth, a white flow down either side, as if vomiting moonlight. These and like places, these and like positions, Mazoch would prefer not to find his father in, he told me. They belong only to the undead, are images that the undead have introduced.
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Better to see his father shrouded in some illusion of humanity—better to find him brushing, out of habit, his teeth, or standing peacefully above his bed—than to see him utterly transformed by undeath, feeding as only they feed, dismembered and atwitch as only they can be. Or at least these were Mazoch's sentiments the last time that we discussed this.
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