Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

Watching him, I realize that Rachel was right: part of me really does desire this. To see for myself. See what it would be like. Of course, I could study the undead for the rest of my life, I know, and still not comprehend what they’re experiencing. The only way to see for myself would be to get bitten. That is clearer to me now than ever, confronted with the inscrutable whiteness of Mr. Mazoch’s eyes. They are clouded with mystery, giving nothing away. Admonishing me from that other world.

Was Rachel right about that too? Would I actually let myself get bitten? If given the choice, is the infection how I would prefer to go? After all, it is an entirely new form of dying: different from cancer, or car wrecks, or heart attacks. Different from anything any of us grew up expecting. Instead of the certain nothingness of death — the complete cessation of consciousness — there is this strange and ineffable something. And although we can’t know what it will be like, we can assume that it is more than nothing. So if someone offered me a bite wound on my deathbed, I might be tempted to take it. When it came time to relinquish being, I might be unwilling — or unable — to let go: of my self, of my memories, of this world. I might try to keep one foot on earth (my phantom foot), while the other tested out Lethe.

Maybe that is the source of Matt’s anger: not that Mr. Mazoch let go — let himself get bitten, let himself die — but that he didn’t let go. That, at the critical moment, he clung to somethingness, rather than pass over into nothingness. I look into his face through the binoculars: his eyes are still wide and white; his mouth hangs open slightly, breathless, in the labored gape of sleep apnea. He may not have let go, but Matt has let him go. As far as Matt’s concerned, his father is dead. And once the riot guards clamp him down and wrestle him into the van, Matt won’t be responsible for him. Quarantined, Mr. Mazoch will be free to pace back and forth in his room for the rest of his ‘life,’ walking the treadmill of its floor in the direction of his memories.

I let the binoculars drop to my chest. Instantaneously Mr. Mazoch — if indeed it is Mr. Mazoch — vanishes. His face is replaced by the glacial brightness of the day. Squinting in the sunlight, I can barely even make out the parking lot, where everything has become frozen and small again. It takes me a moment to relocate the doppelganger and the riot guard: I see a bluish silhouette and a blackish silhouette, standing together in a static diorama. A few yards behind them, the other guard is busy with his wildlife handler, tugging an infected forward. As for Mr. Mazoch, he still seems free, for the moment. It’s possible that he has already turned around, away from the house, and is about to advance on the riot guard. Or else that the guard has taken a step forward himself, and is about to clamp his neck from behind. They’re too far off to know for sure. Whatever the case, it will only be a matter of time. In twenty minutes, half an hour, all of the infected will have been rounded up, and the van will pull as quietly out of the parking lot as it pulled into it. Then the distant whoop-whoop of a siren will signal the end of the lockdown, and the barriers will be dragged out of the streets. Matt and I will leave this house. Matt will drive me home.

I turn my back on the window, and have to blink blindly at the dimness of the living room. Matt, a dark shape on the sofa, clears his throat. It has been several minutes since either of us has spoken. ‘Vermaelen,’ he says. ‘See anything out there?’ I can’t tell whether he’s looking at me, but I shake my head. I mean to tell him no. There’s nothing to see.

My thanks to the following institutions for their generosity and hospitality: the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, especially Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek; the Speakeasy, especially Jackqueline Frost and Andrew Meyer; and the Corporation of Yaddo, especially Sean Marshall and Candace Wait.

Thanks as well to the following readers for their insight and support: Jin Auh, Adam Eaglin, Aaron Kunin, Eric Obenauf, Emily Pullen, Arden Reed, Ed Skoog, Caroline Thomas, Rachel Van Pelt, and Eliza Jane Wood. Special thanks to Ben Mauk.

Finally, this book is not for or to Sam Chang, but by and with her. Thank you.

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1

Sometimes I wonder whether we, the living, are constantly generating the magnetoreceptive memory pellets that will guide us in undeath. Could it be that each time a place leaves a powerful impression on us, it deposits into our unconscious these mineral flecks of nostalgic energy? Eventually, over the course of a lifetime, these might accrete and calcify into little lodestones in our minds: geospatial anamnestic kernels, capable of leading us back to places, but activated, for whatever reason, only in undeath. In that case, the undead mind would really just be a chaff cloud of remembrance, this mass of pellets causing sharp pain as it shifted magnetically in the direction of various homes. And the undead wouldn’t remember memories so much as be shepherded by them, tugged by headaches toward recalled geographies. (It occurs to me on clear nights that the Pleiades, clustered like buckshot in Taurus’s thigh, might be like memory pellets of this type. When the Pleiades shift, the bull’s thigh aches in that direction, and it is a kind of homesickness that leads him sinking beneath the horizon.)