Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

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. 29The 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. 31And 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.

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.