Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

Mr. Mazoch was sixty-four when he went missing. From what little Matt’s told me about his life, I gather that the man ordered his adult existence almost exclusively around these spaces: never worked another job than plumbing; only ever lived with Mrs. Mazoch, spending his last decades alone in that one house in Denham; and had as his single hobby (his only reason for traveling elsewhere) ‘antiquing,’ i.e., driving to garage sales at dawn on the weekends and buying up refuse from families’ attics, which he could then put on display in his own home or sell for a profit to dealers. Not an avid traveler, not a sampler of novelties: just a workhorse who lived and loved at a few addresses, where even now he might be found. Where, at any rate, Matt still expects to run into him.

At each of the sites, Matt’s MO is to case the perimeter, looking for traces that Mr. Mazoch might have left there. But in the past three weeks we’ve turned up nothing. Day after day the premises remain undisturbed and blank. That is how thoroughly the police have been patrolling the streets: any remaining strays are quickly apprehended and sent to the quarantines. When Matt first emailed me (when I-10 was still jammed with mass-exodus car wrecks), it was impossible to imagine conditions ever stabilizing to this degree. But now we really are learning to live with undeath. The federal government has standardized its plan for handling the epidemic, and Louisiana has been faring no more or less poorly than any other plague state. Though most schools, businesses, and malls remain closed for decontamination, FEMA has begun providing relief in the form of refugee shelters and welfare checks. It’s FEMA relief that is funding Matt’s search, in fact, and funding the shelter where Rachel volunteers every day. The worst that’s going to happen appears to have already happened, and life in the city is returning to some version of normal.

Other than the quarantines — which Matt and I visit on Fridays — I’m not sure what else to include on Rachel’s list. There are a few extra sites, but none that we bother to check on our rounds: Matt inspects his apartment himself, and he also visits his mom’s house (the one that she won in the divorce, and raised him in). Now, as we’re heading into the final week, he’s begun suggesting that we revise our itinerary. Maybe stake out some new sites. For instance, there are places from his own childhood that he’s brought up before: like his elementary school, where Mr. Mazoch had to wait in carpool for him, or Highland Road Park, where he used to take Matt to play chess on those weekends when he had custody. I add these to the list with asterisks, in the event that we end up going, then explain in a footnote 4that they’re provisional.

One site that Matt has mentioned in a passing way is Tunica Hills, a pine-forested park up near St. Francisville, with hiking trails winding along red-clay cliffs and down through precipitous waterfalls. He and Mr. Mazoch had gone on day trips there when Matt was a kid, and they always remembered the hikes fondly together, promising they’d do it again sometime. But once Matt was grown, Mr. Mazoch was already too out of shape — his back too wracked from manual labor — to attempt anything so physically strenuous. Then, after the heart attack, it was out of the question forever. So Tunica may well be a site on Mr. Mazoch’s radar, a locus of nostalgia and regret. Matt’s said that he might expect himself to wander there, eventually, if he were undead. I doubt we could actually go — it’s a three-hour drive; the area’s too large to feasibly locate one body in; and, because of the travel ban that’s been enforced, we’d have to circumvent border guards simply to leave Baton Rouge — but it’s nice to talk about.

I myself remember Tunica fondly (even though I’ve been only once), and could almost be guaranteed to return undead to it, so strong a pull does it exert over my memory. Rachel and I went on one of our best dates there, late last summer. Like Matt and Mr. Mazoch, we hiked along the cliff trails, and at the end of one steep uphill slog we rewarded ourselves by splashing around and otherwise disporting in the algid waters of a wading pool, and by showering beneath the thundering brainfreeze of its waterfall. We must have stayed in that same place for hours, passing the entire afternoon — or at least this is how I remember it — kissing and smiling goofily at one another. In fact, I find that most of the frames of this memory are just of Rachel’s smiling face: her jagged blond hair plastered wetly against her cheeks, her green eyes gleaming as I cradle her head in my hands. Everything’s shot through with a burnished yellow light, as if there were actually lens flares in my memory. I’ve discussed this effect with Rachel — the color saturation of my memory of that day, its emphasis on amber — and she says that she experiences the same thing, that what she can recall of Tunica is more like a music video than a memory. She thinks that it’s a result of our having paid such close attention to the quality of light in the park. On our hike, she kept stopping to admire the sun’s suffusion in the air, pointing out the way that it punched through the pine branches in great gold shafts, so like the conical tractor beams of hovering UFOs that all those backlit motes of dust, which were in fact being circulated in every direction, seemed to float only upward, in abducted currents. Given the level of attention we paid to scenes like that, it’s possible that our memory is a little sundrunk, Rachel said. The moment that even now, a year afterward, we still recall to one another is the one when Rachel cupped her hands beneath the waterfall and withdrew them, holding them up so that a scattering of sunlight was reflected there, between her hands, lambent in the water and over the skin of her palms. The sun was diffracted into a dozen small spots of glare, wriggling white oblongs, like larvae of light. We stared at them for a full minute, delighted. Because they were caught in her handful of water, Rachel was able to slosh them around, and to make them appear to sift through the creases between her opening fingers, and finally to make an offering of them: to extend her hands to me, the way the moon rises, and proffer her handful of the sun’s light. As she ladled it over my head, I didn’t shiver, or feel reinvigorated by solar forces, but I pretended to.

A few weeks into the outbreak, Rachel wrote me an email reminding me of this afternoon — as if I needed to be reminded — in which she referred to the lights in her hands as ‘Bethlehem stars’ (I knew at once what she had in mind, but to me those slivers of brilliance had always seemed, all wriggling whitely in her hands, more like lampyrid maggots than stars). She asked me whether I remembered Tunica, and specifically whether I recalled the constellation that she had caught, ‘as bright as Bethlehem stars.’ Of course I did. The entire day was — to adopt a photic vocabulary—‘seared’ into my memory, and it was this episode especially, the quiet magic and mad happiness of watching sunlight play on each other’s bodies, that Rachel and I had incorporated into the mythos of our courtship. We always referred back to it with semi-tragic nostalgia, as if for a prelapsarian period in our love. We might ask, in the middle of a fight say, why things couldn’t be now as they were then, or remark, in acute distress, that we hadn’t watched light together in weeks. That was the rhetorical strategy of this particular email, which exhorted the two of us — this was after a string of nasty fights, induced in part by the cabin fever of our staying inside the boarded-up apartment for days — to exhibit only our best selves: to try getting out and going on a sunset walk together; to recuperate the love we’d displayed at Tunica, when we spent whole minutes staring patiently into her hands, into the lights there, as if stargazing. A bath of Edenic goldness, a trace of our best selves: it is this kind of life that that afternoon has taken on in our imaginations. And because neither of us has been able to visit Tunica Hills since, we both, if we were infected I mean, might be expected to head straight there, bypassing other sites (our crappy apartment even) in search of this one memory. Following, as it were, our Bethlehem stars. 5