This, too — just the fact that he’s here right now, in the antiques store’s parking lot, whether he’s spitting apple seeds onto its gravel or gristly beef — bespeaks a synonymy with his father. For it’s clear that the crowning similarity, the point of pure identity where he and Mr. Mazoch converge, is this itinerary that Matt’s acceded to. In shadowing Mr. Mazoch (in staking out his haunts), Matt follows literally in his father’s footsteps. He begins each morning in Denham just as Mr. Mazoch did; visits the same gas stations and grocery stores and, today, the same roadside antiques mall; sits in his car in the parking lots of these places, haunting another man’s haunts. He’s picked up precisely where Mr. Mazoch left off. At least before, prior to this search, Matt (however synonymous with his father he may otherwise have been) had unique routines to distinguish him. The map of his activities throughout Baton Rouge — were he to mark in thick ink the streets that he traveled — would have diverged noticeably from his father’s, his own red route coursing from LSU to the gym to the library. But now that route, briefly diverted, has returned like a tributary to the river that Mr. Mazoch’s synonymy is. Now Matt, who forswore a life of manual labor and fast food, reports every morning to the plumbing warehouse and the McDonald’s, slavishly reiterating the dailiness of his father’s existence. Their two maps are congruent now — the symmetrization is finished! — to the last cartographic detail.
Perhaps that more than anything is at the root of Matt’s anger: that he has become his father, or else is doomed to become him. I glance at him again, at his strong square jaw and blunt nose and cleft chin, and try to match him up in my mind with Mr. Mazoch (a man I’ve never met, or even seen a photo of). Imagining the tendrils of brown fog from the antiques mall, I try to visualize how Matt’s features might change if they were aged in timelapse to Mr. Mazoch’s age. If his face decayed as fast as that apple he’s finished eating.
Matt lets loose a sigh and drums the steering wheel impatiently, then honks the horn three times. Nothing, anywhere, stirs. Even the birch, whose shadow we’ve been gawking at like Platonic troglodytes, is unruffled by breeze: its leaves are all still, and green as the Real.
‘Do you want to get out of here?’ I ask. ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘I guess so,’ he says. ‘I guess I do.’ But after starting the engine he just sits for a minute before moving the gearshift into reverse.
TYPICALLY FOR LUNCH WE EAT PACKED sandwiches in the parking lot of Louie’s Café, but today Matt decides to order a meal inside. I sit opposite him in a red vinyl booth, watching him tear into a grill-striped breast of chicken. I still haven’t asked him what he wants to do when he finds his father, but all throughout lunch I’ve been working up the nerve to.
‘If you ever did find him,’ I begin… but almost immediately I lose my resolve. Instead of asking what he wants to do, I decide to ask — in a roundabout way — where he’d want to do it. That is, I ask where he’d most prefer to find the man. ‘If you could find him anywhere,’ I continue, ‘where would you want it to be?’ ‘Out of all the sites?’ Matt asks. ‘Let me think about it.’ He picks up his silverware and resumes eating, as if to defer the question, and I watch as he keeps shoveling in bites, shredding white threads of chicken through the fork tines, chewing with his mouth open. Each time his teeth part, flashing a clump of meat, I wince a little.34
Matt sees me staring: ‘You’re looking at me like a starving person. Why don’t you order something?’ ‘Do you know how nervous it makes me just to watch you eat? I’m not going to order a dish of infected food for myself. With a side of infection. And who knows what in the water, which probably it’s not even bottled, just straight from the tap.’ ‘Not even the tap: squeezed fresh from an infected’s lesions.’ I cringe. I’m remembering the footage of this one Youtube video, in which the wounds and pustules along an infected’s skin dehisce from sunburn — there is a runny yellowness like yolk. Mazoch regards me skeptically: ‘Not even dessert?’ ‘Confections?’ I say, allowing for a beat: ‘More like infections.’ ‘Very good, Vermaelen.’ ‘I mean, I’m exaggerating, but what a dumb risk.’ ‘Yeah, I’m a real daredevil. It’s like, I’m such an Evel Knievel, of eating chicken breast and rice, I’m not even wearing a condom right now.’
I, who engage daily in sessions of unprotected sex with Rachel, appreciate that my armchair mysophobia is at some level an overreaction. The chicken meat would, after all, have been well cooked, and the infection itself (of which basically nothing has been empirically verified: not whether it can be transmitted across species, or even whether animals, which are universally asymptomatic, can in fact serve as carriers at all) could probably still be assumed to sizzle and be sterilized in a frying pan. Even the bit about the tap water was merely rhetorical. While FIGHT THE BITE strongly discourages drinking anything other than bottled or boiled water, and while FEMA has supplied citizens with aluminum cans boldly and majuscularly labeled FILTERED DRINKING WATER, there have been no reports, so far as I know, of the contamination of wells by infected effluent. Yet it would be as meaningless as an aggregate of spit on the surface of his ice water, or as meaningless as blood let from a minor wound into food handled by an ungloved hand, for a kind of absence to uncoil in Mazoch by the end of the week. Even assuming that he could trust a line cook or a server not to intentionally infect his meal,35 there’s no accounting for ignorance, or carelessness. Mazoch knows all of this. I don’t understand what’s gotten into him. Eating chicken now, after a month of packed lunches? It reeks of ‘He had a week left till retirement,’ a kind of fate-baiting self-endangerment and heedless hamartia. It’s like he’s daring the infection to infect him.
But by far the dumber risk is that we’re even inside right now. Although the diner is empty of other customers, there’s still the staff on hand: our waitress; a police officer stationed as security; some cooks. Paradoxically, the presence of the officer has the effect of making me feel less safe. He’s just one more body to reanimate. Any person in this room — if not all of them — could drop to the floor at any moment, and begin to reanimate. Then it would be like that food-court footage all over again, in which a single person manages to spark a mass outbreak. And if it were Mazoch who reanimated today — going limp in his booth, twitching in revivification — there would be only three feet of the formica of the tabletop separating him from me. As he sprawled across it, clutching at me with his thewy hands, I would have to fend him off, fend off his huge strength, for as long as I could, until the officer a few booths over rushed here to restrain him. Assuming, that is, that the officer himself hadn’t already reanimated. I look over Matt’s broad shoulder toward the officer’s booth, trying to make out whether the man has ordered or eaten anything since he’s been here, but all I can see is the back of the seat opposite him.
When the waitress returns to take Mazoch’s plate, she offers him a laminated dessert menu, and he props it on the table so that I can see its centerfold photographs of brownies. Such a menu as the devil might have shown Jesus in the desert, each brownie stage-lit and provocatively angled, glinting in places throughout its morsel moisture and the deep obscene brownness of its glaze. Mazoch must be able to tell by my expression that I’m little tempted: ‘You know we’re talking a thousandth decimal place? What are the chances,’ he asks, emphasizing the word ‘chances,’ ‘that one brownie or one piece of chicken, from this diner, this afternoon, is going to infect either of us?’ ‘In my case, no chance,’ I answer, ‘because I refuse to order anything.’ ‘Suit yourself,’ he says.