WEDNESDAY
WHEN MATT AND I ARRIVE AT MR. MAZOCH’S THIS morning, the front of the house is damaged. There’s a beige dent of chipped wood in the door, and two of the windows have been shattered. It appears as if someone tried — and failed — to get inside. Looking at the gaping holes in the windowpanes, the jutting stalagmites of jagged glass, I’m too shocked at first to know how to react. Matt’s reaction is unequivocal. ‘Shit,’ he whistles. ‘Do you believe that?’ When he turns to me, his face is expressionless. ‘He came back.’
As a matter of fact, I do not believe it. Matt is already unbuckling his seatbelt to go inside. But before he can leave I ask him who he thinks ‘he’ is, exactly. ‘I don’t know,’ he admits. ‘I don’t want to jump to conclusions. But why couldn’t it have been him?’ I bite my tongue. ‘You’re not going into the house again?’ I ask him. ‘For the third day in a row?’ ‘Mike,’ he says. I study the windows, still unsure what to make of them. They don’t seem low enough for an infected to crawl through. And they’re too haphazardly shattered — their panes still too intact — to have admitted a human body. Matt shakes his head. ‘The house has been vandalized,’ he says.
Though I do not go so far as to accuse Mazoch of breaking those windows himself (of coming here last night, bat in hand, and swinging into them as he did at the antiques mall, then denting the door for good measure), the possibility has not escaped my notice. Even if Mr. Mazoch would ever damage his own property like this, his sense of timing really does strain credulity. After I’ve dismissed the other ‘traces’?46 Two days before the deadline? I do not say this to Matt’s face, of course. I simply ask him to walk me through his logic. ‘Tell me why,’ I tell him. ‘Why the systematic destruction of property? Why march up and down the front of the house, punching holes in windowpanes, instead of just breaking in through a single entrance? That’s not how they behave.’
This is actually a question I’ve devoted a considerable amount of thought to, even before this morning. If we were to ever find Mr. Mazoch here — I have often asked myself — what might he be doing? How would he be behaving? I have pictured him in countless scenarios: fumbling with the knob of his locked front door; dragging a rake behind him in the driveway; standing in the yard with a plunger, pumping dumbly at the grass. But never punching his own windows. And in fact, the more that I try to imagine it, the more difficult it is. He would remember that this was his house. Before he could shatter his window, some memory in the hand would stay his hand. The recognition would be as much a matter of muscle memory as of reasoning, engrained as deeply in his hand as in his head. Only if he saw fresh meat beyond the windowpane, some victim on the other side, would his instinct to feed override his hand.
That is one of the few aspects of undeath that I feel certain about. In addition to their homing instinct, it is clear to me that they have something like equipment memory, a residue of know-how in their hands. Every night I watch them on the news, operating tools from their mortal lives: pushing a shopping cart down a grocery-store aisle, lamely striking at a tree with a hammer. Their faces are vacant, and it’s evident that they don’t quite know what they’re doing. But the hand knows: it is seeking a handle, gripping at instruments from its former life. The hand remembers what the head does not.47 Whenever I see an infected swinging a hammer, I am convinced that some memory of carpentry is compelling it to: the feel of polished wood, a familiar heft in the palm, a range of motion — at least this (and who can say what else?) persists in the hand.48 Even if an infected cannot see, or is seeing into some other world, its body still goes about its business in this world. The hand maneuvers the shopping cart around obstacles, it hits its target with the hammer. It is operating purely by memory.49
That is one of the questions I have to ask myself, when I ask myself what it would be like to be undead. Not only what and whether I would see; not only which sites my body would return to… but also what my hands would do. How they would behave. Coursing through them — filling them to the tips of their fingers, like the faucet water that engorges a latex glove — must be all the habits and motions that they serve as the phenomenological repositories of. They could never really cease being my hands. I try to picture them on my undead body, compelling it to perform some echt gesture from my mortal life: cradling Rachel’s face; massaging my eyeballs; buttering toast. They would do whatever I’d done with them — whatever I’d taught them to — beforehand. They would be before-hands. And so they would never adopt new habits, in undeath. They would not try to play the piano, for instance, or to casually vandalize my apartment. Even if they did things that I never did with them (like tear into another person’s flesh), they would do them somewhat in my manner: ripping into the meat in the same way that, at barbeques, they used to rip into ribs.
It’s one of the few aspects of undeath I’m certain of.
I do not say all of this to Matt. I tell him, in short, that Mr. Mazoch could not be responsible for these windows: that this was not the handiwork of his hand.
But Matt has theories of his own. He shakes his head throughout my speech, and once I’m finished, he asks: ‘Why wouldn’t an infected break some windows? That’s all you see them doing on the news. Beating on windows, punching through walls. They hate the inside.’
Matt has expatiated before on the exteriority of the undead, their compulsive nomadism and aversion to shelter. Unlike ghosts, he has often observed, the undead do not linger in a single space. They’re too itinerant for that, wandering restlessly between a whole chain of spaces. That is usually what he means by ‘They hate the inside’: that they are exterior creatures, the opposite of ghosts.50 But today is the first time that he’s ever adduced this so-called spatial hatred as an explanation for their destructiveness. When he says this I look again at Mr. Mazoch’s house, trying to see the thing from Matt’s point of view. Is this what he thinks ‘hating the inside’ would entail? That it wouldn’t be enough for Mr. Mazoch to simply be outside all the time, wandering from site to site? That he would also have to destroy his house, shattering his own windows? ‘You can’t really believe that,’ I tell him. But Matt refuses to back down. Not only does he believe it, he says, but, ‘I have always believed it.’ He has always noticed this about the undead hand: how it has a wrecking ball’s abhorrence of interiority. How anytime it encounters a wall, a door, it just pounds automatically, beating without rest to bestow openness. Whenever he watches the nightly news, he says, and sees an undead hand bursting through a boarded-up window, grasping at air, he imagines that it hates the inside: that what it is grasping for is more boards, another layer to destroy.51 And whenever he sees, on the nightly news, a group of undead hunched around their victim’s stomach (prying open the rib cage to pick through the intestines, not even feeding, just as if for the joy of it), he imagines that they are destroying the architecture of the body: the abdominal wall, the posterior, anterior, lateral walls. ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ he quotes for me now, as if citing Frost as an authority. ‘That wants it down.’
‘All right,’ I say. It doesn’t matter, at this point, whether Matt even believes what he’s saying: he’s hell-bent on inspecting the house. ‘I get it. You need to go inside.’ ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ he says, climbing out of the car. Before he can leave for good, I call after him. He bends back down in the open doorway, resting his hands on the roof to look in at me. ‘Promise me this at least,’ I say. ‘Today’s the last time. Tomorrow and Friday — we play it safe.’ He nods ambiguously, then rises and swings the car door shut. After I watch him disappear into the house, I wait for what seems like much more than a minute — five minutes, ten — before I finally stop counting.