Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

10

After Katrina, this area of the park was heavily flooded, to the point that the hilltops just barely emerged from out of that sheet of black, practically lacustrine rainwater. I can remember that the trees that breached the surface of the water seemed to float there like verdant boats, and that boats, in fact, were actually taken out for sheer novelty on the water, trawling slow wakes across a space where, a week ago, birds might have flown and where, but for fear of water moccasins, one could swim down through the frigid water, all the way to the grass on the ground, lowering oneself along a ladder of underwater branches. That is how high the weeds look now: Matt may as well have been suggesting that we swim.

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My own longstanding suspicion — which I did not share with him — is that the undead do see: it’s just that the way in which they see is so different from human vision that it would be misleading to call it seeing. That they’re really seeing something else (a Holbein blur, a death’s head, the skull’s side of their life) when they see.

12

It was at this point in our conversation that I began to wonder specifically about Mr. Mazoch. If he couldn’t see, then how did Matt expect him to find his way back to the park? Maybe that is why he brought the game along, I thought: less as a chessboard than a Ouija board, inviting the blind Mr. Mazoch to join us (as if the high hats of the regal pieces — the crowns and tiaras and miters that all terminate in small crosses — could, like antennae, actually broadcast signals of distress, activating the relevant pellets in the chaff cloud of Mr. Mazoch’s remembering, and guiding him reliably down Highland Road).

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Indeed, he seemed to be thinking of them more or less as zombies, those hypothetical thought-experimental monsters from mind-body philosophy. For they, too, are defined as lacking conscious experience, with no interior appreciation for the greenness of green. As David Chalmers puts it in The Conscious Mind , the zombie has ‘no phenomenal feel. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.’ It is — in Chalmers’ phrase—‘all dark inside.’ Is that what Matt thinks it would be like to be undead, I asked myself? Nothing ? Or is he imagining a more mundane — a less metaphysical — brand of blindness? (E.g., blindsight, the technical term for the kind of vision that he seemed to be describing: ‘consciously blind while physically sighted.’ In the neuroscientific literature, there are plenty of case studies of living patients who perceive in this way. Although they’re cortically blind, their brains are still able to respond to certain visual stimuli — edges, borders, motion, light — without consciously ‘seeing’ any of it. In Phantoms in the Brain , V.S. Ramachandran even compares this ability to the philosopher’s zombie, explaining how one blindsight patient can reach out her hand and snatch a pencil with unerring dexterity: ‘You’d never have guessed she was blind,’ he writes. ‘It was as if some person — an unconscious zombie inside her — had guided her actions.’)

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In later, more sophisticatedly animated video games, the principle of the scrolling level actually would be embodied by some elemental threat pursuing the character — like a barreling inferno, or an avalanche, or, yes, a tidal wave — rather than just the leftmost line of the screen. I’m surprised that Matt doesn’t use one of these other games as his example, rather than just blurting out ‘Mario,’ who seems like a sore or touchy figure for Matt to make himself consider (after all, Mario is a plumber like Mr. Mazoch, with warp tunnels to the underworld no less). But I suppose that the association remains latent for Matt.

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If there were a video game model for this kind of communal vision, it would have to be — not the POV of a character in Goldeneye , restricted to a single quadrant — but the higher-order POV of the human player, who, looking at the TV screen, is able to take in all four quadrants at once. This player can see, not just what lies in his character’s line of sight, but what lies in any line of sight. His visual knowledge is quadrupled by the reconnaissance of the three other players. He sees, in a word, everything that is seen .

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‘Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills! The people it kills get up and kill!’

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‘Batten’ was a word that I was thinking a good deal about at that time. In Greek tragedies like The Bacchae or Oedipus Rex , the chorus always describes a plague as having ‘battened’ on Thebes, which I tend to interpret parasitically, as if Euripides’s bacchae, those frenzied women who disembowel and cannibalize the Theban citizens (and who, it has occurred to me more than once, may well be the distant ancestresses of our own undead), were in fact fattening like mosquitoes on the city’s blood. So throughout the outbreak my mind was worrying this word, ‘batten,’ like a tongue scouring a peach pit, such that the word would come unbidden to me, even as I was thinking of other things. If I was watching the news, and mentally composing a list of last-minute escape routes, I would suddenly be able to distinguish, buoying up over my interior monologue from I didn’t know where, the discrete thought, ‘They’re battening on Baton Rouge’ or ‘This plague has battened on Baton Rouge,’ which would then submerge again and be forgotten just as quickly.

18

On this subject, Mazoch likes to appose Robert Hass’s version of the famous Issa haiku (‘In this world/we walk on the roof of hell/gazing at flowers’) to something that we heard a preacher say on talk radio one morning (‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth’): the dead and the living are sharing roofspace now, and it’s nothing like so simple as it once was to take a walk.

19

The clip is security footage from an overhead camera, low quality and grainy but in color. People are crowded in what looks like the food court of a mall, surrounding a woman who has fallen. The people jostle each other, some trying to get to the fallen woman and some trying to give her space, but most just standing there staring on. One man is kneeling beside the woman, holding her hand in his hand. He checks her pulse, then looks up at the crowd and shakes his head. But at just this moment someone points to the woman, who has opened her eyes again, and when the man turns back to her she pulls him down by his shirt collar, biting — battening on — his throat. At this point things become hectic: the screaming crowd tries to flee all at once, and many people end up crushed underfoot; the infected woman crawls on all fours to a trampled boy and bites into him; meanwhile the man, bleeding terribly and evidently having already reanimated, also begins biting people, who are trapped on the ground beneath fallen bodies; consumers from the food court rush into frame, trying to pull the man and the woman off of their victims, only to be bitten in turn by those victims; et cetera, et cetera. It all happens fast (the clip is, as I said, only thirty or forty seconds), and the crowd onscreen is infected so quickly and so uniformly that their conversion has the appearance of an optical illusion. One moment they’re alive, the next all undead, the way that a Necker cube inverts itself on the eye:

The way that the eye can pinch that one point — where the lefthand sides of the cube meet in a Y at the bottom — and pull it perspectivally forward, such that the cube telescopes out, or else press it back, such that