Would be aggrieved and confused, for that matter, if I were to defend Mazoch, to devil’s-advocate for him, or especially if I were to continue to accompany him each morning in full knowledge of his ‘plan.’
This would all be easier for me if, like Rachel, I could simply condemn patricide outright. If I were not even tempted to defend it as an option. But the fact is that the ethics of undeath are murky to me. The questions that Matt and Rachel have been made to face, in the wake of the epidemic, are not questions that it has made me face. This choice between the grave and the quarantine, the shovel and the baseball bat… I have trouble, truthfully, even imagining myself in their shoes. Because my own parents both died (car crash) and were cremated years before the epidemic, they have always been ineligible for undeath. I scattered their ashes myself. I never had to worry about their reanimating, or ask myself what I would do. What my duties would be. Unlike Rachel and Matt, I’ve never had to think of them in terms of undeath. I’ve had to think only of myself in terms of undeath. So whenever I try to align myself with Rachel, and work up some primordial disgust at the thought of patricide, I find that I cannot do it. Who knows how I would react, if I were Matt? It’s his decision.
This, like so much else, is not something I can explain to Rachel this morning. So I do not try to. Having finished buttering our barely toasted toast, I bring the plate to the table and sit beside her. ‘I still don’t know,’ I say to her. ‘I don’t know what he wants to do. But I’ll ask.’
‘Michael,’ she says, reaching over to put her hand on my hand. ‘Mm,’ I say. ‘Just promise me you won’t let him use that bat.’ And here I exhale, immensely relieved, for at last she has given me something that I can truthfully tell her: ‘Rachel. Honey. You know we never use the bats.’
LATER THIS MORNING, I WATCH FROM THE passenger seat as Matt uses his bat to break into a building.
We’re staking out the antiques mall in Denham where Mr. Mazoch used to rent a booth. It’s a squat stucco box isolated on an empty stretch of road, and it’s been locked up for as long as we’ve been coming here: the glass double-doors in front are both expertly boarded from inside, with a length of chain wound around the push bar and a heavy padlock dangling dull and scrotal from the links. Since Mr. Mazoch couldn’t have broken in, we’ve never tried to. Normally Matt just cases the place and we sit in the parking lot to wait.
But today Matt pauses at the double doors, and I watch from the car as he scrutinizes the windows. He taps at the glass, as if experimentally, with the bat handle’s beveled knob. Then, before I understand what is about to happen, he plants his feet apart, cocking the bat at his shoulder, and swings a tremendous arc into one of the windows, which must be shatterproof, for it wobbles indomitably and the bat recoils. Even from across the parking lot I can hear the hollow pdunk of it. Undeterred, Matt simply rides the recoil of the bat and heaves his hips into a second swing, which recoils again, and then into a third swing, and so on.
After the fourth or fifth swing, I realize what Matt must be thinking. It is the same thing he was thinking at Mr. Mazoch’s earlier this morning, when he insisted on inspecting the house for a second time: he is determined to find another trace today. A trail of muddy bootprints. Another scrap of blue plaid cloth. He’s going to find something, if not at his father’s house then here, and he’ll beat down those double doors to do it. Never mind that the mall — likely boarded since the outbreak — cannot be home to any recent traces. And never mind the incredible risks he’s courting. For instance, any infected in the vicinity, whom Matt might be summoning with each resounding drumbeat of the bat. Or else the police coasting down the road, who might catch him in the act of trespassing. Or else — it finally occurs to me — whatever is inside the antiques mall, which was probably padlocked for a reason. I roll down my window in haste and shout across the parking lot: ‘Hey, Bambino! Barry Bonds! Cool it!’
Once Matt returns to the driver’s seat, we have very little to say to one another. I don’t ask him what he thought he’d find inside, and he doesn’t tell me. We just stare out the windshield at the antiques mall in silence. As usual, there is nothing to see: sunlight radiates off the gravel and onto the storefront’s stucco, which looks buttered with noon light.29 The only shade comes from a drooping birch tree, planted at the edge of the lot, where it casts sprays of shadow onto the façade. Eventually Matt reaches into his backpack and withdraws an apple. Over the next several minutes the silence in the car is punctuated by the log-splitting sound of his bites. I glance now and then from the windshield to watch him, waiting for him to finish so that we can leave. But he is eating the fruit with ruminative slowness, staring intently out the window as he chews, and he lets long moments pass between each bite.30
At last, to break the silence, I ask him what he’s looking at. He explains: he has also been admiring the storefront’s stucco, he says, watching as the nearby birch’s shadow ivies up the building. Its branches cast a fine, fernlike pattern against the emblazed plaster: ‘Like veins,’ he says. And indeed the flattened shadows, branching slenderly into twigs and thin tendrils on the surface of the wall, look veiny in ways that the three-dimensional shoots do not. Before I can say anything about this, Mazoch asks, rhetorically, whether I know what the birch’s shadow reminds him of: ‘Other than veins I mean.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I give up.’ ‘My father.’ ‘…Yeah?’ ‘It reminds me of my dad’s heart attack, actually.’
He proceeds to tell me that when he visited the hospital, a cardiologist showed him Mr. Mazoch’s coronary angiogram, an X-ray in which only the heart’s blood vessels, not the organ itself, were visible. The branching veins — flushed for this purpose with radiopaque dyes — showed up ash-gray on the monitor, a network of dark tendrils swaying in an undyed mist of X-rayed whiteness, and there they looked so much like the shadow of a tree (or else just a tree at night, its silhouette outlined by the ghostly fog that Mr. Mazoch’s translucent heart appeared as) that to this day, years later he says, he still reads the tracery of trees’ shadows angiogrammatically, as the calligraphy of his father’s heart. ‘It looked just like that,’ he remarks, pointing again to the capillary shadow on the brilliant storefront. ‘The angiogram did.’
This is only the second time that Matt has ventured more than a passing reference to Mr. Mazoch’s heart attack. The first was one morning while we were driving, during which he gave tactful but evasive answers to my questions until, once it’d become clear he didn’t really want to talk about it, I stopped asking them. All I learned then was this: over six feet tall and three hundred pounds, and for that matter over sixty years old, Mr. Mazoch worked full time as a plumber (which, according to Matt, was more backbreaking and labor-intensive than one would think [it often involved carrying claw-footed bathtubs up the steep staircases of un-air-conditioned houses, for instance]); at work he sustained himself on Snickers bars, eating on his half-hour lunch break every day only these turd-dark sticks of saturated fat, and elsewhere as here his diet consisted of whatever was worst for him, his dinners spent at fried-chicken chains and his breakfasts, if he bothered to eat breakfast at all, at McDonald’s. Oh, and he smoked too, about a pack a day. So one night after handling a jackhammer all afternoon Mr. Mazoch suffered that seized-up pain in his sternum and vomited gray spume into the shower. Matt, in college and living on campus at that point, wasn’t there when it happened. It was only much later in the night that he received a call from the hospital, where Mr. Mazoch had managed (while undergoing myocardial infarction! while his great heart fibrillated!) to drive himself.