Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

When I first started brainstorming for this exercise, I thought that it would be a rapid-fire, first-thought-best-thought process. I thought that I would just jot down the most obvious sites that occurred to me, on the assumption that they would be the ones to occur to my undead body. That’s exactly what Matt and I did on behalf of Mr. Mazoch: we stuck to the surface of Matt’s memories of his father, picking out all the prominent spaces from the final years of his life.

But look where that has gotten Matt. Look at how arbitrary and unscientific that selection process is, and how much inefficiency has been introduced into Matt’s search algorithm as a result. Every day he has to check his father’s house, the antiques mall, Louie’s Café (what are all, after all, only best guesses), visiting a dozen such sites with equal vigilance, even though Mr. Mazoch is likely to return, at most, to only a few of them. Matt’s forced to spread his time indiscriminately, among both likely and unlikely sites, simply because he has no way of distinguishing them. He can never be sure, when staking out the house in Denham, that his father isn’t at Louie’s, or vice versa. 42That’s why these traces must be so crazy-making for Mazoch: if only he had been in Denham an hour later, he must be telling himself, instead of at Louie’s. Then he could have seen his father shattering that window.

This scenario is what my own list is supposed to be preventing for Rachel. I should be presenting her with a conscientiously compiled, manageable handful of places that I’m 100 % sure of my visiting. That’s the degree of certainty I should have—100 %!—about my sites and myself. I owe it to her to give my selection process that kind of deliberation and thought, because otherwise she’ll be putting herself as fruitlessly at risk — frustrating the work of her mourning just as much — as Mazoch is whenever he patrols by trial and error the full miscellany of his father’s haunts. I can’t bear the thought of Rachel waiting alone in the rain, jilted by me in undeath, due to the carelessness with which I’ve compiled my list. What if she’s waylaid by undead at a site she never would have gone to if I hadn’t thoughtlessly assured her I could be found there? I imagine her calling out my name on the campus lawn, dangerously calling attention to herself, all while I’m standing beneath the monkey bars on the playground of my old elementary school, a place that she’s never heard me speak about and so has no reason to associate me with. Does Rachel even know where I went to grade school?

‘Done?’ she asks. Looking up I see that she’s set her journal on the concrete and twisted around to study me. Her legs are still propped in front of her, dangling between the balusters of the safety railing. I nod distractedly, then ask, ‘Do you know where I went to grade school?’ ‘St. Aloysius. You’ve told me that.’ ‘You attended Sacred Heart?’ ‘Kay through eight,’ she says, ‘St. Joseph’s for high school. But they’re not on the list.’ Her face scrunches in sudden concern: ‘Should they be on the list?’ ‘That’s a matter for you and your conscience.’ ‘But did you put Aloysius?’ ‘The playground,’ I lie (though I now have every intention of adding it). ‘Oh, the playground!’ she sighs. I can tell by her voice, a whimsy of transported joy, that it’s been years since she’s remembered recess, and that the very word ‘playground’—like the ringing of the recess bell — has sent a crowd of childhood reveries stampeding forth from the recesses of her memory. She writes something down on her list. ‘What about the lawn where we went on that picnic?’ I ask. ‘Do you remember?’ ‘Of course I do,’ she says, ‘the little leaf! I have it down already. But thank you for reminding me.’ She has it down already! Oh, what a jolt of confidence — in that memory, in the list, in myself — it is to hear her say that! Why did I ever doubt the campus lawn? I imagine the other sites that would lie above and below it on her list (her father’s grave, surely, plus the wing of the hospital where he’d been kept; her mother’s house; Tunica probably; and, now that I’ve reminded her of it, the playground at Sacred Heart), and I gratify myself with the illusion that we know everything about one another, are transparent to each other, that our memories share everything.

‘So are you ready?’ Rachel asks. ‘To read them?’ I glance over at her open journal, in which her tight, clean script has filled an entire page, and I note that her list is already much longer than I had been expecting. Maybe five times as long as mine. The amount of ink alone outstrips the half dozen sites I’ve attributed to her so far, and I estimate that after her father’s grave, the playground, and the campus lawn, after Tunica, the hospital, and her mother’s house, there will be room enough still for ten more sites on the lines she’s filled.

Yet which ten sites? When I try to fathom them, I feel an abyss opening within me. I recall what Matt said today, about needing to find Mr. Mazoch in a fatherly space. Almost despite myself, I find that this is what I’m hoping now — desperately — with regard to Rachel. I’m actually anxious to hear the results of her list, which I would prefer to comprise solely our spots. I want those extra ten lines to hold no surprises, only sites I recognize. For every site that has nothing to do with me, or even with her in relation to me, I will feel strangely rejected.

I don’t just mean places that precede 43me, sites from before we met. There are plenty of moments from Rachel’s past that she has shared with me, and I think of these as memories that she has put in relation to me by relating them to me. Take the story of her father’s death. When she narrates this to me in bed at night, what she’s doing is putting it into play in our relationship. All the locations that this memory colligates (the hospital, her father’s grave, the bedroom that he died in) become our sites, even though she acquired them before we met. The reason she’s even sharing that memory to begin with is that she wants me, as her lover, to know that about her. It’s a biographical experience she considers so fundamental to her sense of self that I couldn’t properly love her — couldn’t know her as my beloved — without first having incorporated it into my own personal sense of who she is. The subtext of any memory that a lover shares is, ‘I want you, my lover, to know this about me, because this is the facet of myself I want you to love. When you say, “I love you,” mean by “you” the subject of this memory.’ That’s why those initial late-night self-disclosures are so important. In developing a coherent narrative of her life, the beloved ends up constructing a self for the lover to love. So I’m keenly mindful of the fact that Rachel related her father memories to me for a reason. She wants me to know and love her as the daughter she used to be: that’s one self she self-identifies as when she self-identifies as my lover. Rachel-qua-daughter and Rachel-qua-lover are contiguous — if not altogether overlapping — selves in her. As a result, any sites deriving from the daughterly period of her life might still qualify as our sites. That’s why I wouldn’t feel rejected by the presence of the hospital on her list.

Whereas if she lists other sites, from memories she’s never shared with me, I’m not sure how I’d feel. There must be millions of moments in Rachel’s past that have yet to come up in conversation, entire years of biographical material and life experience that have gone unmentioned, not because she’s forgotten about them, or because she’s hiding them from me, but simply because there’s never been a real occasion to bring them up. Yet some of these incidental memories might nevertheless be fondly nostalgic, qualifying as destinations for her in undeath. These are the kinds of sites that could be lurking on her list right now. As soon as Rachel reveals them to me, I’ll be duty-bound (should she ever reanimate) to go searching for her there. Like Matt, I find this prospect slightly disquieting. This idea that the version of the person I’ll be looking for won’t be the version I’ve personally known… that I’ll have to search for Rachel in buildings and neighborhoods unfamiliar to me, concealed from me, hidden on the dark side of her memory’s moon.