Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

My behavior put predictable strains on the relationship. As soon as Rachel crossed the threshold, I would rush to detain her, pleading with her not to leave: ‘It’s a buffet out there — you go, you’re going to get bitten. You think the streets are safe. You think, “I’ll just avoid the bad neighborhoods,” the seedy neighborhoods. But that’s not what’s at issue anymore. These aren’t crackheads who want your purse, who will stalk you only on Plank Road and only at midnight. They don’t care that you live in the Chateau Dijon apartment complex, or that it’s broad daylight — it means nothing to them to attack you on a tree-lined street at noon, surrounded by respectable people. They are respectable people, or they used to be, and they’ll roam anywhere. Even the good neighborhoods. Even the Whole Foods! There’s nowhere you can go that isn’t dangerous. All it would take is for one person to reanimate, for all hell to break loose.’ If she stopped to dignify this with a response, it was to tell me that I was being ridiculous. I was out of touch with reality. Everyone was going outside now. People were even allowed to visit some of the quarantines, to see and say goodbye to undead relatives there. Public places were well protected, she said, and so was the relief center. If I wanted to lock myself away, fine, but I couldn’t bury her alive with me. She needed to do what she could to help. She was going out, and that was that.

Before she left, as despite my protests she almost always did, she would kiss me on the cheek, promising me that she would be prudent. Prudent! In those khaki shorts and that sleeveless tank top, every inch of exposed skin practically begging to be bitten! The whole time she was gone I would sit in my spot on the living room sofa, watching the news in the dark and nursing dark thoughts about Rachel. The news, which showed people being bitten in the streets, the very streets Rachel was now wandering. Every minute that I waited for her someone new on the news was being bitten — some fresh victim. Then, to compound my anxiety during commercials, I would reread FIGHT THE BITE , skimming the chapter on domestic infections, with its thorough list of precautions (such as wearing mouthguards to bed, in the event of nighttime reanimation; or conducting full-body searches; or practicing ‘defamiliarization’ 20techniques). When after a few hours of this Rachel did come home, walking through the door and exclaiming ‘It’s so beautiful outside!’, how coolly and paranoiacally I felt obliged to receive her. On bad days I would even make her bare her forearms and ankles, her calves, so that I could inspect them for bite wounds, as if she would ever try to conceal such a thing from me (what was more likely, of course, was that she would have unknowingly ingested infected food, but however much I worried about that I had no way of testing her for it, so it was the ankles that these afternoons I examined). ‘What kind of monster do you think I am,’ Rachel would cry, as I lifted her pants leg and palpated the unbroken skin of her thigh, ‘that I would let my own lover be infected?’ Or, if she caught me eyeballing her calf from across the room: ‘If you don’t stop looking at me like that, I’m going to freak out. Really, I’m starting to freak out.’ Then, so that she didn’t ‘freak out’ and begin weeping, I would have to embrace her trembling body, hold her close to me and rub her back, when for all I knew there was some plum-colored ring of teethmarks still hidden, like a hickey, beneath the rim of her sock… which finally one day felt to me so much like hugging a rabid dog (like rubbing a rabid dog’s back and telling this rabid dog in an earnest voice that I trusted it) that I grew nauseated with resentment, of her and of myself for yielding to her, and pushed her away from me. To be bitten at the throat mid-sentence, even while I was telling her that I loved and trusted her! To die the death of some dumb Romeo, kissing poisoned lips to prove his love! ‘Look,’ I said, waving a copy of FIGHT THE BITE in my hand, ‘we need to observe the proper precautions. We’re behaving like idiots.’ ‘What’s idiotic is that if we go on like this we’ll kill each other.’

She was alluding to a recent news story, in which a man, returning home drunk, startled his wife and was shot dead by her, who in her keyed-up state had mistaken him for infected. But that premonition—‘We’ll kill each other’—disquieted me at a much more personal level. It was almost as if Rachel were tweaking my conscience. For at night I would imagine it, killing her, as I lay in bed unable to sleep. ‘What would I have to do,’ I would ask myself, ‘if this creature, asleep on my chest, woke and was monstrous?’ There was never really any question: I would have to throw the comforter, verdant and spring-patterned, over her head, not only to keep her from biting me but also to keep me from seeing her face; then I would have to beat her to death with the baseball bat that we stow under the bed. The trick, I thought, was to be beating on a mound beneath the covers. To be beating some soft writhing green thing, rather than Rachel, nude and recognizable. And to drag her body, still bundled in blankets, out to the street without ever once actually looking at her face, which would have to be as forbidden to me as Eurydice’s, or Medusa’s. I didn’t like to think about it.

‘That’s absurd,’ I told her, ‘we’re not going to kill each other .’ But I was noticeably shaken by what she’d said, and she probably could have guessed what I was thinking. First, that it was emotionally corrosive to fantasize so much about murdering my lover, to hold her in such distrust, and second, that yes, perhaps it was possible, one night I might make a mistake and strike at her warm flesh.

It was around this time that Rachel wrote me the email reminding me of Tunica Hills, recalling the Bethlehem stars there and insisting on how vital to the relationship our taking quiet walks and watching afternoon light together was. How long could I remain holed up in this gloomy apartment, as if in a nuclear bunker, she wanted to know? And how long did I realistically expect her to stay here with me? If I didn’t learn to leave the apartment, she would have to leave, even if it meant moving back in with her mom. Eventually, she wrote, I would have to come to terms with what was happening, because in all likelihood it would go on happening for months, maybe years. And if others had come to terms with it, why couldn’t I? That there were periodic flare-ups in shopping malls didn’t seem to derail people’s lives any more than that, in Tel Aviv, there were periodic suicide bombings in cafés and public buses, she wrote. People drove to the grocery store (‘Even Whole Foods!’) as they always had, and if on the way there they spotted an infected in the road, very well, they might pull over to look at it (the way that when a black bear, a cub, wanders out onto the shoulder of a rural highway, people always pull over to photograph it), or else they might just drive past it altogether indifferently. And when a street was overrun with infected, police were quick to block it off with barriers and road flares, warning traffic away, until all the infected could be detained. Was I aware that more people were attacked in their homes than in public spaces? (I wasn’t.) Or that, in general, it was safer to walk outdoors, where assiduous police officers combed the streets all hours, than to stay alone inside? (Again, no.) The infected weren’t monsters, she wrote, or killing machines. They wouldn’t chase you down relentlessly to bite you. They were just diseased, brain-damaged people, and they were only as dangerous as you allowed them to be. If you didn’t put yourself in a position to be bitten, you wouldn’t be. Any able-bodied person could outrun them. Everyone else had realized this by now. The only reason that I hadn’t — Rachel wrote — was that I refused to go outside. Once I saw for myself how calm things had become, the shock would wear off. She concluded her email with a caricature of the redneck-ascetic existence that I risked slipping into: living in paranoid withdrawal in a fallout shelter, feeding on canned goods, polishing my rifles, prophesying dissolution for a society that was as homeostatic and heedless of me as ever. Swearing at a government I didn’t trust to protect me. ‘Let’s not live that way. Love, Rachel.’