Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

29

This is an effect that Rachel and I have often admired together in Chateau Dijon’s courtyard. What is it about white stucco that makes it so absorptive of sunlight? At noon especially, a wall of it will glow with weird, backlit intensity, sort of throbbing with light, whereas other surfaces (such as cement sidewalks) are merely sheeny. Why is it that stucco, uniquely stucco, can be slathered over with these rich gold glazes? Is it its pebbly texture? I have in mind, by way of ‘slather,’ the example of toast, how much easier toast is to butter than the downy smoothness of fresh bread. As I confirmed for myself at breakfast with Rachel this morning, you can never ‘spread’ butter over fresh bread, only nudge it ineffectually across the surface, the knife’s edge like a push broom guiding its little garbage of butter (pressing down on the knife, or applying any kind of force at all, will just make matters worse, since the delicate bread punctures easily and is twice as hard to butter torn). With toast, though, the crisp bristles where the bread burns provide a pleasantly resistive force, abrading the butter as it’s being dragged over them, firmly withstanding the knife’s scraping, even helping to trap the melted butter’s runoff. Is stucco architecture’s toast? Can sunlight be slathered over it more easily, does light deliquesce better on its rough, raised pebbles, is this why it glistens with sopped goldenness like the photo-toast in Denny’s menus? It certainly seems that way.

30

The apple is a red delicious, which, I’ve noticed, tend to oxidize faster than other varieties, their exposed cores embrowning almost instantly. Matt’s is no exception. Each time I turn back to him, some crater that his bite marks made — initially a white, kind of whittled color — has already started tarnishing, turning the same shade of brown as every aged thing. Because the aerated patches of apple meat ‘age’ in a matter of seconds, it’s like watching in timelapse lace fading in an attic: something snow-white fogging over with brownness. And it has occurred to me, as I’ve been watching him, that this ‘brown fog of decay’ is not unlike Matt’s black fog of war: namely, that it too could serve as an apt representation for the epidemic. For what is the infection if not a breath of decay that is blowing over the world? There is a sense in which the infection is accelerating our aging, not only at the level of the body (instantly cadaverizing it, fast-forwarding the corpse’s decomposition), but at the level of civilization (turning buildings into premature ruins, tainting them with ancientness). Whenever I stare out the windshield at the boarded-up antiques mall, I can’t help imagining that that is what is happening inside: that it is a ruin now, suffused with brown fog; that the trapped air in there has become polluted by particles of infection, filling the building — over the course of its abandonment — with sepia tones as with floodwater. I picture clouds of it drifting brownly down the aisles, over the furniture and the clothing racks, fading whatever they touch and aging it on contact. In this way, I imagine, the boarded-up antiques mall would function as a hothouse of aging, a microwave of aging, such that if you placed a lace nightgown inside, you could watch the cloth grow foxed like an oxidizing apple core, and such that if you placed your own hand inside, it’d instantly blanche and embrown (turning the dead-leaf color of hands in monochromatic old photographs) before shriveling off altogether. It is curiously satisfying to consider that this is what Matt would have found inside today, if he’d succeeded in breaking open the double doors: that a stream of pressurized brown gas would have come whistling out from the cracks, like steam from a burst pipe, and scalded his face with age. Wrinkling him, graying his hair, melting the flesh from his skull. Turning him into a cadaver no less quickly than undeath would.

31

I didn’t ask, but I assumed that that anger was at Mr. Mazoch: (1) for recklessly neglecting to dial an ambulance and to that extra degree imperiling himself, for stopping at stoplights on his drive to the hospital even as his cardiologist’s fingers, unbeknownst to him, were pinching that much more of the air between them, squashing like a bug the ghost of a chance that his heart had; and (2) for being willing and resigned to die, for issuing at the critical moment last, rather than fighting words, the message ‘Tell him that I love him’ really bearing the double meaning ‘I give up,’ as in, ‘I’m ready now for death, so please send my love to the son whom I won’t fight hard enough to live to see.’ Or this was the best explanation I could come up with, anyway, for the anger in Matt’s voice: namely, that Matt felt that Mr. Mazoch was shirking his duty to his son to survive. It’s possible that I’m wrong. Matt might have just been angry with the doctor: (1) for fetishizing the nearness of death (‘ This close,’ ‘Only ten minutes ’), tormenting a son with details he ought to have kept to himself; and (2) for failing to deliver on the phone the message that Mr. Mazoch had asked him to, namely, by informing Matt that Mr. Mazoch was in the operating theater but not that he sent his love.

32

And really, what other purpose could the working out serve? It is so impractical and even dangerous an activity, under the given circumstances: it’s not as if the crowded undead will be intimidated by Mazoch’s bench max, or deterred by the body blows that he rains on their insensate bodies. By focusing so much athletic attention on bulk strength, rather than on cardiovascular stamina or speed, Mazoch is not only failing to train the survival skills he might actually need (sprinting, cross-country endurance, stamina) but training skills directly impedimental to them (weightlifting power that will only slow him down, literal ‘dead weight’). The working out seems designed solely to correct Mr. Mazoch’s physical indifference, his obesity and ill health, at the level of the son’s body, which by brute determination and for no other reason Matt has transformed into the opposite of his father’s body. Flexing shirtless before the bathroom mirror, basking in his own oppositeness, heaving that fruit farther and farther from his father: this is the only purpose that the working out has served.

33

Undeath, too, is just such a system of synonymy. By biting its victims, an undead passes on to them, as if genetically, all the physical characteristics of the infection (necrosis, moaning, whited eyeballs), thereby rendering them synonyms of itself. That’s why all undead, though returning to idiosyncratic haunts and observing distinct behavioral patterns, seem driven by the same motor, so to speak. The surest way for Matt to become his father would be for him to be bitten by his father.

34

What the sight reminds me of is the cover illustration of FIGHT THE BITE , a starkly outlined drawing of cartoon jaws. Opened in a wide ellipse, the jaws form a wreath of teeth around the pamphlet’s title, I guess as if about to bite down on it (this is probably what the graphic designer intended), but actually resembling, to an even greater degree, the mouth that a willful boy makes when he wants to display chewed food at the dinner table: a ‘say “Ahh”’ mouth, gaping rudely, as if exposing to a grossed-out sibling all the mashed-up bits of title inside.

35

FIGHT THE BITE refers to this phenomenon as ‘spite bites’: namely, when people who are nonfatally contaminated (e.g., by a scratch, or a bite on the ankle: any manner of infection that — instead of killing them instantly — leaves them with a week of fever and dread before they become undead) decide to spend their last days alive contaminating as many other victims as they can. They mete out to others the dumb luck and injustice of it, either by having unprotected sex, or splitting meals and drinking after people, or sharing needles, or even, fantastically, biting strangers in the street, in a kind of rehearsal for undeath. For this reason, FIGHT THE BITE warns readers to exercise caution even around living, asymptomatic humans. It also lists the 1-800 numbers of several 24-hour hotlines, so that — in the event that you are nonfatally infected — psychiatrists and counselors can talk you down from spite biting anyone yourself, before you get to a quarantine.