Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

‘See anything?’ I ask. He doesn’t lower the binoculars. ‘Matt?’ ‘ Shh .’ I stare at him a moment longer, then turn to the silhouettes. Which one is it, I wonder? I hear Matt hiss ‘Shit,’ and when I glance back the binoculars are hanging at his chest. His face looks broken. ‘What is it?’ ‘I thought it was him,’ he says. ‘It was him. But then it turned around.’ ‘Do you want to keep looking?’ I ask. ‘I can’t make out any faces beyond the first rows.’ Of course: as if the undead would have been arranged, as for a class photo, with tallest in the back. Our only option is to keep trying our luck from the levee. Disconsolate relatives are typically advised (as we were ten minutes ago, by the guard in his booth) to wait a week or so until the present load of infected has been relocated, then to make the rounds of the other quarantines (‘Go back again,’ Matt had sighed, exhausted).

‘You want to take a look?’ he asks, offering me the binoculars. I squint at the dim figures across the water, which together resemble some flash-mob mirage of the single lakeside silhouette from yesterday. He is asking whether I want to study them, on this our last day. But I shake my head. I do not need to see hundreds of undead eyes today. Rachel was right: the search is making me morbid. I need to think better thoughts. If there were only one out there, or even a handful, I might accept Matt’s offer. I might try to satisfy my curiosity, or else — if I could never satisfy my curiosity — come to terms with the radical insatiability of my curiosity. But a whole crowd of them? To be overwhelmed by that wide wall of white eyes, hundreds, all bearing down on and boring through me… to have that be my last memory of the search? It would be too much.

After I decline the binoculars, Matt lifts his chin at something over my shoulder, then asks: ‘You see that?’ When I turn around all I see is the Mississippi Bridge: its great latticework of girders is gridded against the southern horizon like a waffle iron, filled with blue sky as with batter. Then, far above the bridge, I spot what must have caught Matt’s attention: a high airplane, trailing a bright contrail behind it. The line of vapor has silvered brilliantly from within, and the jet, itself glinting like a knife tip, seems to be cutting into the sky to reveal it, carving a gash for this bright light to seep through. Like an incision being made in a lit lampshade. This is the first time since the travel ban has been enforced that I’ve seen a contrail in the sky. It’s a species of cloud I’d thought had gone extinct, and watching this one now is strangely thrilling, the way that finding the first coelocanth must have been, or seeing the dove come back from the flood, olive leaf in beak. When Matt sees that I can see the jet, he asks, ‘How many passengers do you think are infected on that plane?’ ‘Christ,’ I say, ‘I don’t know.’ Probably any passengers would be military personnel and FEMA agents, well screened by virologists before boarding. Nevertheless, I try to think of how many people would be inside the glint above us, and what the chances are that at least two or three of them could have made it through the screening process undetected: latent carriers, bearing the infection with them wherever the plane is bearing them. I say, ‘Maybe zero.’

‘I’m beginning to suspect my dad isn’t even in Baton Rouge anymore,’ Mazoch says. ‘As in he’s boarded a plane somewhere?’ I ask. I try to imagine Mr. Mazoch making a getaway flight that first night, hours after he was bitten. Fleeing to Italy, and renting a hotel room to reanimate in. 74But this is not what Mazoch has in mind. ‘No,’ he says, ‘not necessarily. Just that he might have driven off, before… Or else crossed the border on foot.’

I have a difficult time telling how serious he is. Not only are there border guards stationed to keep the epidemic within state lines, but Mr. Mazoch, who seems never to have left southern Louisiana, would have too provincial a memory system to be compelled abroad anyway. 75Mr. Mazoch, the prince recluse of Denham Springs, not only contracts an uncharacteristic wanderlust but also actually bypasses every border guard instructed to stop him? Those are a lot of what-ifs for Mazoch to be broaching now, on this our last day. But maybe that’s simply what he needs to believe, in order to be able to quit: that his father won’t be in Baton Rouge when the first hurricane hits. That he is too far abroad to be found. In order to absolve himself of the responsibility to go looking, Matt might be expanding the parameters of the search beyond feasibility, forking bales and bales of square miles onto the haystack that Mr. Mazoch is already the proverbial needle lost within.

Unless he has no intention of quitting. Unless what he is really doing — by placing Mr. Mazoch abroad in his mind — is precisely the opposite: extending the search indefinitely, devising a task that he could never satisfy himself as having finished. This way, after having scoured every inch of Baton Rouge, Matt would still have Texas, Florida, and Arkansas to check. Then he could move on to Montana, Mexico, the Mariana Trench. There would always be one more corner of the globe for Matt to search for his father in. And supposing that Matt survived beyond the year or so it would take Mr. Mazoch (in most climates) to decay, he might still feel obliged to check Alaska, or the North Pole while he was at it, or any other place where his father’s body might have been frozen. If that is what Matt wants, I realize, I cannot help him: if he would prefer to spend the rest of his life holding out this last North Pole hope (laying away a little nest egg to buy a snowmobile with, so that he can go hunting for his popsicle father), then closure will be impossible. And maybe that has always been what Matt wanted. Not to find Mr. Mazoch, but to never find Mr. Mazoch: to forever have this desideratum dangling just out of reach, leading him day after day deeper into the calendar, like his own Bethlehem star to follow.

‘Listen,’ I say, and I want to ask Matt what it is that’s driving him to find his father anyway, whether he wants to put the man down, out of his misery — whether he wants to be the one to do it, rather than a thunderstorm or a riot guard with an assault rifle — or whether he just wants to see for himself that the man is infected, and escort him safely to a quarantine. What it is he’d be unable to do or driven to the ends of the earth to do, if Mr. Mazoch actually were abroad. What I ask instead is, ‘Do you really think that he’s abroad?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘or — I don’t know.’ He raises the binoculars again to peer across the water: ‘But he’s probably not on these barges.’

I look along with him, straining my eyes to distinguish the shapes of some of the undead. They’re too far off even to tell how tall they are. Watching Matt as he watches, I see that he is no longer chewing his cheek: his square jaw is grim and set as he scans those rows of decaying faces. Somewhere among them is the Mr. Mazoch look-alike. I picture a hulking frame in a blue plaid shirt, its back to the binoculars. An undead ringer from behind. And what if he had never turned around? We would have had to call Rachel to cancel our celebration dinner and wait here, until finally the guard made us leave. Then we would have had to return here tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until finally the barges were emptied, never able to find the doppelganger again in the crowd. Then we would have had to revisit all of the quarantines, skimming through the mug shots in the rosters, until finally Matt found the face that isn’t his father’s, the face that could have been his father’s.

If Matt’s hopefulness had been dragged out like that — if the close call had taken a week to resolve — I doubt that this search would be finished. As it stands, I can barely believe that it is finished. All day, as Matt has been taking his leave of Mr. Mazoch’s sites, there have been very few leave-taking gestures: he did not lock the door in Denham, or even bother casing the antiques mall; he did not try returning to Citiplace, or to Highland Road Park. With silent unceremoniousness he drove us from one site to the next, then on to the quarantines, without the least degree of anxiety or panic. As methodical as on any other day this month. He didn’t behave as if the search was over, because for part of him — I realize — it wasn’t yet: the search wasn’t finished until the day was. At each site there was still the next site to check, and after the quarantines, the barges. It was as if some part of him kept believing — up to the very last minute, until the doppelganger turned around — that his father might be found.