Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

Rachel had barely glanced at the first page before refusing, and I knew that it was the diagram that was distressing her. The illustration features a blank-faced man and a blank-faced woman 56seated in profile, staring into each other’s eyes, as if competing in a blinking contest. Between their pupils a single horizontal line extends, and crawling across this wire is a series of wriggles, such as a cartoonist might use to depict heat rising off of a road. But what each wriggle really resembles — in this context — is a graveyard worm, inching from one eye to the other. As the caption explains, the participants are projecting these wriggles to ‘estrange’ each other’s faces. ‘At least read the thing,’ I said to Rachel. ‘Give it that much of a shot.’ She made a theatrical sigh and started reading.

Defamiliarization techniques were designed by psychologists early on in the outbreak, to prepare people for the shock of seeing their undead loved ones. The idea is that ‘My wife!’ is the exact last reaction anyone needs to be having when confronted with his reanimated wife. Better to react, ‘My wife is not my wife,’ or, ‘My wife is undead,’ or, best yet, ‘That undead is not my wife.’ Since reacting in this way requires disabling the parts of you that exclaim, ‘My wife!’ whenever you see your wife’s face, you have to find some way of shutting down momentarily the complex of your facial-recognition software, in a kind of willed prosopagnosia. Only then can you forget the ‘wife’ in your wife’s face. Then you can react to it as merely a stranger’s face, as some indifferent ‘this woman’s’ face, which (de-wifed, and thus far deracinated from all the marital and erotic symbolic orders in which it’d been ensconced) means as little to you as a face passed in the street. This is where the pamphlet’s exercises come in. People can use them to practice not-recognizing each other while still alive, the better to damp down recognition when they see each other undead. Hence the blinking-contest diagram. If, like the man, you were to stare into your wife’s face every night until it went weird, teaching yourself to say, ‘My wife is not my wife’ while looking at her (and not only that, but if you practiced doing this until you could actually estrange her face at will, as if toggling a defamiliarization filter on and off), then, when your wife was undead, and you found yourself being attacked by ‘her’ face, you could avoid making the fatal mistake of responding familiarly to it. The moment you saw it, you could simply flip on your inner estrangement switch. Then, drained of all recognizability, it would appear merely as some undead’s face, as strange and primally frightening to you as one encountered in an alleyway at night, and you could respond to it (reflexively, unthinkingly) in the way that self-preservation demanded you respond to every undead face. 57

The chapter laid all of this out quite clearly. But even after Rachel had finished reading it, she still refused. It was a hateful thing to do, she insisted. ‘I understand why you would say that,’ I said. ‘I do. But the thing about this “hateful thing”—the thing to really keep in mind right now — is that you may have to do it eventually. Whether you practice it with me tonight or not, in the future you may have no choice. Because when I come at you like that, and my face is pale and affectless and a bloody mess, the reaction that’s going to save your life is, “That’s not Michael.”’ ‘That’s not Michael,’ she repeated. ‘That’s right. All I’m asking you to do is to look at me and say that’s not me. Estrange me once, two times, while I’m still alive — train yourself to not recognize the me in my face — so that you won’t be caught off guard when I’m undead.’ ‘If you’re undead.’ ‘If I’m undead.’ ‘But you’re not undead,’ she said, ‘not yet. And I don’t want to have to pretend that you are, and “estrange” your face. You’re my lover, I love your face. You are you.’ ‘Except that someday soon I might not be, Rachel. And there will be precious little difference between this face—’ Here I let my face slacken, dropping my jaw and emptying my eyes of all liveliness. ‘—and the face that you see on that day.’ ‘Then I’ll “estrange” it when the time comes. What do you want me to say?’ ‘You won’t know how when the time comes. You won’t have the slightest idea how to estrange my face when the time comes. You won’t know because you’ll never have practiced. It’s no different from anything else. Imagine if this were CPR I wanted to practice, how absurd you’d sound. “But you’re my lover, I love your lungs. Your lungs are functioning.”’ ‘You’re being ridiculous.’ ‘Tell me about it.’ ‘You’re being ridiculous because there is a difference. Nothing changes if I pump on your chest, breathe into your mouth. And if you asked me to prod you away from me with a foam bat, or to lock the door on you and build a barricade against it as you pounded, I would do that too. Because it’s just play. But it’s not play for me to look at your face and dehumanize it, to will myself to see you as a stranger or a corpse. It’s hateful. Everything changes then, and that’s the difference. How could I get in bed with you tonight if all I was thinking was, “That’s not Michael”? “Who is this person, this stranger? What is he doing in my bed?”’ ‘Okay, that’s fair — I’ll grant you that it’s a little creepy. But surely you’re exaggerating the aftereffects. How long could the estrangement last? A few seconds? A minute?’ ‘It doesn’t matter. I love your face. I don’t want to think of it that way.’ ‘Tell my corpse you love my face!’ ‘Michael, please—’ ‘Tell me how much you’ll love my face when you see it gnawing on your arm! With your blood smeared all over its cheeks — my cheeks! — like barbeque sauce!’ I was pawing grotesquely at my cheeks. ‘I don’t understand you,’ she said. ‘At first you refuse to leave the apartment at all, and now you’re gone eight hours a day, looking for infected with Matt. Which is fine. But then, when you do come home, all you want to do is pretend that we’re infected. Not, let’s watch a movie. Not, let’s go for a walk. But: Rachel, let’s pretend that we’re undead. This search is making you morbid, Michael. You’d rather pretend you’re undead with me than actually live with me.’ ‘Come on, you don’t believe that. You said it just because it sounds dramatic, but you don’t really believe it. Look, you’re even smiling.’ ‘Stop.’ ‘Rachel, of course I’d rather we didn’t have to do this. But it’s not about what I’d rather, it’s about what’s reasonable. It’s about what one of us is going to have to do if the other is ever infected.’ ‘You know that’s not going to happen.’ ‘Oh? It used to happen every other night in this city. Who knows when it might happen again? Or what might happen if a hurricane hits and breaches a quarantine? Your problem is that you’re still underestimating how difficult it can be — and I mean both emotionally and psychologically difficult — to reconcile a face’s familiarity with an unfamiliar state of being. And there will be no face more familiar to you than mine, and no state of being more unfamiliar than undeath.’ 58‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Okay?’ ‘You wouldn’t know how to cross that bridge if it bit you on the ass! Rachel! Turn on the news right now, pick any channel, and you’ll see someone who thought they could just cross the bridge when they came to it. And they’ll be bleeding to death most likely, if they’re not already dead. You think Mazoch could ever cross that bridge? You think that if we had found his father at Citiplace today, he would have simply trotted across that bridge?’ ‘Oh my God. Was this Matt’s idea, Michael? Don’t lie to me. Is he the one who told you about this? Is that what he’s been planning this whole time? To “defamiliarize” Mr. Mazoch, so that he can kill him? Is that why you want to defamiliarize me ?’