Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

So later that same night, at around three a.m., while Rachel was sleeping and while I couldn’t seem to, I decided to go for a walk. As if I were both the hands and the child thrown into the deep end by the hands. Heading out from our apartment, I made my way through residential neighborhoods toward the LSU Lakes. It was a typically humid Louisiana mid-morning, and for the most part, through many of the blocks that I passed, things were as Rachel said. While there were no police ‘assiduously’ patrolling our neighborhood, there were no roving infected either. Only wide streets empty with midnight and orange with the brume of the streetlamps. I kept to the sidewalk, alongside wide-lawned townhouses that seemed — except for their boarded windows — perfectly peaceful. Live oaks lined each street, holding out their heavy branches like armfuls of scooped leaves, and they cast erratic shadows through the foggy light. When overhead a warm wind blew, swaying the trees’ branches, the branch shadows would sway too, sweeping darkly over the sidewalk concrete and over my feet. The shadows swept back and forth, like a massive phantasmal broom. In the humid air all around me, the streetlamps’ orange brume; and on the ground just beneath me, the oak trees’ black broom. What a nice and tranquil evening! Was Rachel right? Were flashmobs of undead an anomaly? Was it actually possible to walk alone unmolested, as if the epidemic — the riots, the fires, the cannibal feeding frenzies — were just a nightmare the nightly news was having? Was it really over, as easily staunched as any other modern outbreak: no more apocalyptic, in the end, than AIDS, the West Nile virus, or bird flu?

She was right. Undeath felt as far from our beautiful neighborhood, from this warm morning, as those bombs in Tel Aviv. Soon I even felt safe, at ease, and after a while I was able to put thoughts of the undead out of my mind entirely. The sky was unusually clear and bright, and all I had on my mind was the full moon. On a nighttime walk before the epidemic, under a similarly clear sky, Rachel had once marveled to me over how many poems had been written about the moon, how many metaphors and similes people had devised, in the history of figurative speech, to describe it. What if the moon was encrusted over with these metaphors, Rachel asked? What if it had built up these centuries of metaphors around itself, like a mollusk secreting its shell? And when everyone dies, she went on, when the human race blinks out and all of its poems are forgotten, what will the moon then look like, having crawled out of that shell?

A day before my three-a.m. stroll, even an hour before it, I would have answered her that we would find out soon enough: that the human race was finally perishing, being extinguished by this plague of undeath, and that as soon as every person (including us) had been infected, she and I could turn our cloudy, white eyes to the night sky and see, uncomprehending, what shape a naked moon took. But while actually on my stroll, walking through those peaceful streets, where I could see by the light of that moon that there were no infected, I answered her (i.e., mentally) who knows! It might be millennia yet before we humans die off, and there are still so many more metaphors with which to calcify the moon.

That was when I saw the infected, the first I’d ever seen. He was a middle-aged man in running clothes, standing in the road a couple of blocks away, and even if there hadn’t been a bloodstain soaked through his T-shirt (the stain looked more like a great black bib, at that distance, than anything else), I would have been able to tell by his stillness, utter and inhuman, as well as by the posture of his forward slouch, that he was undead, that that white marmoreal figure in the road was not to be called out to. When I spotted him I froze, just (as Rachel had said!) as if I’d seen a black bear. Something wild, dangerous, my own death. He was facing in my direction, his body angled toward me as if he were looking directly at me. But did he notice me? Should I back away slowly? If he did notice me, would he moan and alert others, or would he follow me silently back to the apartment, dogging me like Nemesis? And what was he doing anyway? He only stood there, as if thinking. A minute passed like this, and in that minute my adrenaline receded. I remembered — it occurred to me — that he had been a man once. He would have been a jogger, I decided. Bitten while jogging, on his left shoulder. He would have staggered home for help, where tragically he died, reanimated, and bit into his wife (whose blood it was soaked through his shirt). When he was seventeen he would have run cross-country with Baton Rouge High School’s track team, would have been one among that shoal of shirtless boys whom I used to see jogging listlessly, glistening, through the Garden District on humid afternoons. And now that he was undead — a creature of habit now, compelled to return to those sites whose pellets were most prominent in the chaff cloud of his memory — he would have wandered out here to the Garden District, as if reporting for another session of track practice. That was what he was doing tonight, I decided: waiting outside for the track team, for them to come meet him. And maybe they would, one day: maybe other varsity runners from the class of ’XX would be bitten and reanimated, and maybe, like this man, they would be compelled toward the neighborhood where they had trained. They would all find each other here one night, a dozen undead reunited, to begin shambling through these streets as a team.

These and like thoughts are what I found myself thinking. ‘So that’s the kind of man he was,’ I reveried, even as I stared at that revenant — that killing machine! — just two blocks away. That it had had a track team, a wife, a whole life, when what I should have been keeping strenuously in mind was that it had nothing, nothing but this nothing that it was infected with and that it had to give, if I was stupid and slow enough to let it. Of course, when it finally seemed to move — when I saw or imagined that I saw it shuffle one foot out in front of the other — I tensed my entire body. The second it shuffled its foot I remembered clearly all that it was sick with and all that the spit in its mouth meant, how everything breaks with the skin that breaks beneath that bite. Had it seen me? Was it hungry? But they were never not hungry: they fed until they burst. I knew that, just as I knew, if it were to let out its throaty gurgle, exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do. Panic, start running, or scream for help, for instance. Instead I was supposed to back away without attracting any more of its attention, or else it would moan still louder, and there would be others. The track team! How could I have forgotten? Twenty spindly undead in short shorts would come trotting out into the street, as promptly as at a coach’s whistle, the minute it started moaning! Together they would run me down and feast on my body, I was sure of it. Tearing open my stomach to sift through my intestines, turning me inside out like a Necker cube. My death — my gory death, my careless, ass’s, idiot’s death — more than my life flashed before my eyes.

And not only my own death. For once I reanimated, I realized, I would return automatically to our apartment, as much a danger to Rachel as the jogger had been to its wife. My hand would bloody the front door, slap after insistent slap, until Rachel, waking alone in bed, would rush worriedly to the peephole to see — me, vindicated by the grisliness of my own end! Victim of the streets she’d insisted on the statistical safety of! She would fling open the door to me, I imagined, unable to do what needed to be done, and hug me, too, as I’d always feared hugging her. And then I would do what I was programmed to: with inexorable reflexivity my mouth would clamp down on her throat, my uncontrollable, remote-controlled mouth, while, entranced, my face and eyes would remain expressionless. Biting into my lover as I’d gnaw a pillow in my sleep. Rachel! Measureless were the remorseful transports that this image of myself reduced me to, as I waited for the jogger to sound its unearthly moan. 21