Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

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, 32and 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. 33Matt 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. 34