Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

Matt beams at us both, as if genuinely oblivious, and lifts his wineglass over the table. With the last remaining sip of Gewürztraminer, he raises a toast to ‘one more week.’ We all clink drinks, and Rachel shoots me a withering glance over the rim of her glass. Matt doesn’t notice this either. Later in the night, when he finally rises to leave, he even hugs Rachel goodbye, and at the door he squeezes my hand hard, gripping my bones like a barbell. ‘See you tomorrow?’ he asks. ‘Same time?’

‘Same time,’ I say.

‘Same time?’ Rachel repeats, the moment I’ve closed the door, without any regard for her volume or for how far down the walkway Matt could have possibly gotten. She’s standing behind the couch, arms crossed over her chest: ‘You have to stop him.’ ‘I’ll talk to him tomorrow,’ I promise. ‘Not good enough,’ she says. ‘Don’t “talk to” him, Michael. Stop him. You heard him tonight. He’s a murderer. He’s a homicide waiting to happen. If he keeps on like this, he’ll—’ ‘What am I supposed to tell him? Tell me what to tell him, what you would tell him, and I’ll tell him.’ ‘Tell him he’s a maniac, Michael! That he’s driving himself insane!’ ‘Rachel, I can’t tell him that.’ ‘Why not? Because it will hurt his feelings?’ ‘Mazoch? I’d be more afraid of his feelings hurting me. I’d be more afraid of Mazoch flexing his feelings, and a button popping off his shirt and hitting me in the eye.’ ‘Tell him he needs to quit the search. Tell him that if he kills his father, if he kills a fly , you’re calling the police. Tell him you’ll have him locked up for “man”slaughter, if it comes down to that. I don’t care what you tell him. But don’t come home and tell me that you’ve set him loose for another week.’ She stops herself here, taking a deep breath. And although she doesn’t say as much, I can sense the ultimatum lurking beneath her final sentence: that it’s the search or her. That if I continue to accompany Matt now — aiding and abetting him in what certainly seems like murder — she couldn’t bear to live with me. Yet staying home isn’t an option either: if I call it quits without trying to intervene — if I simply dust my hands of Matt and Mr. Mazoch, looking the other way on a potential patricide — she will hold me partially to blame for whatever happens. I shake my head in disbelief: ‘You make it sound like I want him out there. Like I approve of all this. What, do you think I’d help him hide the body?’ ‘Like you hid the extension, you mean? And the windows? And God knows what else?’ ‘I didn’t want to frighten you, is all. I assumed a hooligan had vandalized the house.’ I pause to assess the truth value of this (Matt qualifies, probably, as a hooligan), then press on: ‘And since the search was almost over anyway—’ Rachel rolls her eyes at the lameness of this explanation, leaving me no option but to double down on it. ‘It was an error in judgment,’ I say, ‘and now you can’t forgive me. I’m not just a liar apparently, but a killer too. You hear Matt spouting off for one night about the Holocaust and dybbuk problems, and suddenly I’m his Eichmann. Honey, you can trust me. You don’t have to worry about Mr. Mazoch.’ ‘Let’s not talk about Mr. Mazoch, Michael.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Just, let’s not talk about him. Okay?’ ‘Why? What is it this time?’ ‘Drop it.’ ‘You think I’m insufficiently sensitive to discuss Matt’s father?’ ‘ Drop it.’ ‘You think I’m too callous and fanatical, like Matt?’ ‘You really want me to tell you?’ ‘Yes! Please!’ ‘I know how you see them. Mr. Mazoch is no more human to you than he is to Matt: just a weird new life form. You’d sooner strap him to an EEG than get him to a quarantine. You’d rather hand him over to Oliver Sacks than to LCDC. No, Michael, I “trust” you. I know you would never let Matt kill him. You’re too obsessed. Sometimes I think what you really want—’ ‘What? Say it.’ ‘Is to be infected yourself.’ ‘Jesus Christ.’ ‘Just so you can see what it’s like.’

As Rachel and I continue to argue (while doing dishes, cleaning the kitchen, brushing our teeth), I try not to let on how much her accusation has shaken me. But I can’t stop thinking about what she’s said. I know that it’s preposterous, of course: I know — even if Rachel doesn’t — that I’m not some overzealous Jekyll, ready to inject myself with a sample. Yet it’s still disturbing that that is how she sees me. When I review the few risks I’ve been exposing myself to lately (for instance, hiking into an overgrown field), I can hardly imagine the mountains she must be making of them: treating each as an attempt at self-destruction, away of flirting with infection. As if, in her eyes, I’m just as bad as Matt. As if there is some subconscious part of me — a hidden undeath drive — that desires being bitten. Is that why she thinks I’m accompanying him tomorrow?

In the end, I promise her I will find some way of ‘stopping’ him. This is as we’re lying in bed, that I promise her this. She has her back to mine, in the addorsed posture of domestic discord, and I think I can feel her nod in the dark. We pass the rest of the night in silence. For my part, I have not been able to fall asleep. I doubt that Rachel has either. As I’ve been lying here, my back to hers, I dread the things she must be thinking. How I’ve betrayed her. How she doesn’t know me. ‘Who is this person?’ she must be asking herself. ‘This stranger? What is he doing in my bed?’

ON THE DRIVE INTO DENHAM THIS MORNING, NOT long after we cross the bridge, Matt and I hit a roadblock. Fifty yards from Mr. Mazoch’s, there is a checkpoint barring the way: sputtering flares, orange barricades, riot guards. ‘What’s this?’ Matt asks, slowing to a stop. He starts to cut the wheel left, and I assume that he’s about to turn around. Take us home. Instead, he drives us down a side street, circumventing the barriers, and after a series of back alleys and shortcuts that I do not recognize, we emerge on the other side of the roadblock, pulling into Mr. Mazoch’s driveway.

From here, it’s immediately clear what the commotion is. At the Freedom Fuel down the street, there are four police cruisers in the parking lot, corralling a crowd of what looks like fifteen infected silhouettes. These can’t be strays — there must have been a ‘spill’ at one of the nearby quarantines. Matt and I turn to watch the scene through the back window: the cruisers are parked hood to hood in a quadrilateral formation, penning in the silhouettes, which shuffle back and forth restlessly. Until an LCDC van can arrive, they are evidently going to have to be wrangled this way. Indeed, even as I am thinking this, I hear a siren somewhere behind us, a single far-off whoop-whoop . I glance back to the windshield, expecting to see the LCDC van coasting up the road, but what I see is another orange barricade, which has since been dragged into the street we used to get here. Trapping us in. I laugh to myself. Of course we’re trapped here. Of course this is happening. The one day that we overstep the deadline — on our first supernumerary day — Mazoch drives us into a maelstrom of moaning corpses. At least I’m here with him, I console myself. I was right to come, just as I told Rachel. Because if Matt were alone right now, he would surely be sprinting into that parking lot, trying to wrestle his way past the riot guards.

As if reading my thoughts, Matt begins to unbuckle his seatbelt. ‘Hey?’ I ask. ‘What’s up?’ Without answering he pushes the car door open and climbs out, and before I have a chance to stop him he is hurrying across the yard. But he does not sprint toward the Freedom Fuel, as I had expected. He goes jogging up the driveway and disappears into the house. It does not take me long to realize what he himself must have realized: that if Mr. Mazoch is one of those infected, then there may be signs of struggle in the living room. That is what he has raced inside to find. Shattered chairs, boot scuffs on the linoleum, claw marks in the walls. Any proof that his father has been dragged out bodily, kicking and moaning, by the riot guards now holding him at the gas station. I wait for what feels like much more than a minute — five, ten — before I finally stop counting. Probably he has taken up his post by one of the windows, peering through the binoculars at the parking lot. Scanning the crowd for his father’s face.