I remind him that he still hasn’t answered my question, about where he’d want to find his father, and he folds the dessert menu down on the table. ‘I know where I wouldn’t want to find him,’ he says. ‘I do too,’ I say. ‘Feeding, right?’ When we first discussed this, toward the beginning of the search, I asked Matt whether he was ever afraid of finding Mr. Mazoch. And he confided in me that there were certain scenarios that kept him up at night. He would never want to find Mr. Mazoch feeding, he said: to see him crouched over his victim, hands rooting inside an opened stomach, the ribs pried and the long guts unspooled, and to hear the sloppy wetness of his chewing; for his father to turn back, looking over his shoulder, and for the man to be unrecognizable by the cloudiness of his eyes, so vacant, wide, and white, and by the blood, too, smeared carelessly across his mouth, as by a child’s finger-painting hand. Even worse than finding his father feeding, he said, would be to find him at the moment when, having fed too much, his undigesting stomach burst: to see him lying helpless in a ditch, his legs and arms rotating futilely, like an upturned beetle’s, around the scene of his unseamed belly, the gore steaming in the grass where it spilled, and his mouth giving terribly of froth, a white flow down either side, as if vomiting moonlight. These and like places, these and like positions, Mazoch would prefer not to find his father in, he told me. They belong only to the undead, are images that the undead have introduced.36 Better to see his father shrouded in some illusion of humanity — better to find him brushing, out of habit, his teeth, or standing peacefully above his bed — than to see him utterly transformed by undeath, feeding as only they feed, dismembered and atwitch as only they can be. Or at least these were Mazoch’s sentiments the last time that we discussed this.37
So I’m surprised today to hear him give a different answer: ‘Where I wouldn’t want to find him,’ he says, ‘is at his elementary school, or high school, or another childhood place. Places that predate me and his fatherhood.’ Not out of vanity or some need to be remembered, he explains, as if he should be the figure who looms largest in his father’s memory, and whose apartment it is that the man should return to in undeath. But even to find him at the antiques mall, or his house in Denham, would be better than finding him in more ancient neighborhoods. At least then he’d be returning to portions of his life that Matt understood of him: he’d still be making sense of himself, in some way, as a father (as related to Matt), rather than as a son, returning to his own father’s home but otherwise… unattached. ‘Does that make sense?’ he asks. It does, and I tell him so. In fact, I am momentarily relieved to hear him say it. Because if Matt prefers to think of his father’s corpse as a father, to find it in a fatherly space, then he can’t possibly be intending to kill it. Could he? He must want — as Rachel did with her own father — nothing more than to rescue Mr. Mazoch. See him safely to a quarantine. Hence the strong emotional incentives Matt has for believing (or for making himself believe) that it is ‘his father’ he is saving. If his plan really were to put Mr. Mazoch down, then all the emotional incentives would have to be running in the opposite direction. Wouldn’t they? Assuming that he seriously intended to one day swing a bat into his father’s body, Matt would almost certainly prefer to dissociate that body from the idea of his father, to reject any recognition of Mr. Mazoch there. Baseball bat in hand, Matt would need to think himself to the point at which his father was not his father. In which case a ‘childhood site’ or an ‘ancient neighborhood’—a place devoid of paternal associations — would be exactly where Matt would want to find him. Somewhere that he could regard him as a stranger.
‘So these are the places?’ I ask. ‘The antiques mall, or in Denham?’ Alternately massaging each bicep with the opposite hand, Matt reconsiders: ‘No. Maybe just in a neutral space. Standing in a field off the interstate, maybe, neither like himself or not.’ During those first weeks, whenever we drove down the interstate, we would often pass fields such as this, peopled by their white shapes. Stray infected that had wandered off, like cattle, into a cool place to stand before noon. Lit up by our headlights in the morning fog, they would stand out so lustrous and ghostly that, yes, ‘neither like themselves nor not’ is right: it was as if they occupied some intervening space between the living and the undead, not speaking and not breathing, but not cannibalizing anyone either. Just standing purposeless and still. And the mist was so thick in the fields that it was easy to imagine that dew had settled on their bodies, dampening their nightgowns, and to imagine that the dew on their bodies would catch the light, when the light came, in a vivid glistening. Easy, too, to sympathize with Matt on this point, to imagine him wanting to find his father there. For who wouldn’t want to find a father like this, undead or otherwise, standing in a misty field at dawn and slanted upon by a shaft of rising sun, which would give every droplet to flash momentarily on his skin, flaring out whitely, as if he were sprinkled, not with moisture, but with roscid light? I can imagine with perfect clarity and ease Mazoch swinging a bat on such a father.
The waitress returns, and when Mazoch hands her the menu, she asks whether we won’t be having any dessert. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’ll be having this gentleman here for dessert. In about an hour.’ ‘That’s not funny,’ I say. ‘I think it’s funny.’ ‘Well, it’s not.’ How graceful of this waitress, Elizabeth, to laugh before leaving, as if she did think it was funny, or even understood.
WHEN I GET HOME THIS AFTERNOON, THE FIRST thing Rachel asks me is whether I’ve asked Matt about his plans. I have to confess that I haven’t. ‘But I didn’t even need to ask,’ I tell her. Recounting what Matt said in the diner, I reassure her that I have no doubts about the search (this is not true, of course. But it would be impossible to confess my doubts without worrying her even more [and even more needlessly] than I have already). Rachel seems satisfied with my answer. At any rate, she doesn’t ask any follow-up questions, and before she can, I suggest that we try an exercise together. Inspired by my conversation with Matt, I ask whether she thinks we ought to be making lists: whether we ought to compile some of our personal rendezvous points, the respective and mutual haunts that we expect ourselves to return to. That way, if one of us ever goes missing, the other will know approximately where to look. Rachel agrees that this is a good idea, and we each grab a pen and notepad, and a beer, and step out onto our apartment complex’s concrete walkway. Sitting single file, we set to work, writing in steady silence. Now the sun is low, but the day is still warm, our beers cold, and the sky brilliant above us.38
Cross-legged, with my back to our apartment door, I watch Rachel ahead of me. She appears to have stopped writing for the moment. Her journal is pressed against her knees, which she’s drawn up to her chest, and she leans forward a little, hugging her shins, her long bare limbs beautiful in the sunlight. I take in the sight of her blond head, the arc of her back. Sensing that she’s being watched, she turns her head over her shoulder to face me now, smiling, and I understand that she’s having a truly pleasant time with this. This exercise delights her. She’s treating it as an opportunity to turn certain memories over in her mind, to meditate on the moments in her life when she’s been most present. ‘Where would my reanimated body return to?’ she asks herself, and it is a happy question. As in: where would my body be happiest to go? Where would it want its afterlife to take place? Which locations did I love enough to want to make a heaven of?39