While he’s been inside, I’ve had ample time to think over everything he said. And no matter how I look at it, it leaves me feeling queasy and suspicious. For one thing, I find it worrisome that he keeps defining undeath in opposition to his father: unlike the mortal Mr. Mazoch, who remained indoors like a ghost, the undead are driven to roam about; and unlike the plumber Mr. Mazoch, who helped construct buildings for a living, the undead are supposedly destructive. He seems determined to disambiguate his father’s reanimated body from his father: it is not only not his father, but the opposite of his father. And why would Matt need to believe that, unless he was planning to kill it? Unless he was planning to put it — if not out of its misery — then at least out of its antonymy?
I have been trying to push these thoughts out of my mind. I would like to give Matt the benefit of the doubt. I would like to believe what he wants me to believe about the windows: that he did not break them; that he truly believes Mr. Mazoch broke them; and that he might be right. To believe this, I have to believe that Mr. Mazoch punched those panes, either out of muscle memory (my own reading), or ‘spatial hatred’ (as Mazoch says), or for some other reason altogether.52 But the more I try to imagine it, the more difficult it becomes, and what I end up imagining instead is Matt: planting his feet apart at each window, cocking the bat at his shoulder, swinging his tremendous arcs. Anything to convince me that ‘he’ came back. To keep the search going.
A month ago, when we first established the deadline, Matt made me promise him that I would enforce it. ‘Don’t let me get desperate,’ he told me. ‘Don’t let me go a day beyond the deadline.’ If he ever suggests an extension, we agreed, I am supposed to remind him why we settled on one month in the first place: not only because hurricane season will be beginning in earnest in August, but also because four weeks is the maximum amount of time we thought that anyone could spend looking for his — for a missing person. If all else fails, Matt told me, I’m simply supposed to abandon ship. To inform him that my month is up, and that while he doesn’t have to quit, he’ll be carrying on alone.
At this thought, the car doors’ locks thump upward, on signal from Matt’s remote key fob, and I look through the windshield with a jolt. He is standing in the front doorway, holding up some kind of trace for me to see. A red piece of paper, like a crimson color swatch. It looks like a Netflix envelope, at this distance.
MATT AND I ARE STANDING ON THE ROOFTOP OF Citiplace Cinemas, surveying the empty parking lots below us. The only thing down there is Matt’s car, parked parallel to the boarded-up tickets window. The theater itself has long been abandoned, as have all the other businesses in the shopping center: the Barnes and Noble shut down and the Marble Slab shut down, the baby boutique, the deli, the Federal Express shut down. These buildings are gathered across the parking lot, arrayed side by side to form a village of beige plaster, and the theater looms over them like a kind of castle. When we first got here, I narrowly talked Matt out of breaking into the multiplex, in order to inspect its eleven empty screening rooms. As a compromise, he talked me into climbing up the safety ladder out back. From the roof, he said, we would be able to see for hundreds of yards in every direction. For hundreds of yards there is nothing to see.
Matt stands on the opposite edge from me, commanding a lateral view of the Barnes and Noble. I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on the plaza’s entrance, which I watched through the binoculars awhile. The traffic lights there were still blinking green, then amber, then red, even though the plaza’s intersections have all been barren for weeks.53 Now I’m training the binoculars on Matt. I study the back of his head as he studies the parking lot, waiting for him to turn around and call it quits. He hasn’t so much as stretched his neck. He is keeping a stiff and steadfast vigil for Mr. Mazoch.
On the drive over from Denham, he explained the significance of Citiplace to him and his father. It was the Netflix envelope, he said — for indeed it was a Netflix envelope, spotted in a trash pile on the carpet — that finally reminded him of the site. He was an idiot not to have thought of it before, he confessed: we should have been staking it out every day. He spoke for the duration of the ride, breathlessly briefing me on his history with the building. He and his father had always bonded here before the heart attack. They caught a film more or less monthly once Matt went off to college, when Mr. Mazoch fell into the habit, if he hadn’t seen his son in a few weeks, of calling him on a Sunday and asking (this was the code they’d developed) whether there were any good movies playing. There rarely were. But the movies were only a pretext, Matt said, and he didn’t mind opening the listings and picking a title at random. Superhero films, the stateside remakes of Japanese ghost movies, heist flicks. They always arrived in the early afternoon, sat always in the back row, and were almost always the only audience members there, alone in the bargain darkness of the matinee theater. Mr. Mazoch paid. He liked to pay in cash, Matt said, and a memory he didn’t expect to have of his father — but which he says has persisted in him with startling vividness — is of the man standing outside the theater’s ticket booth at noon: squinting in the harsh, concrete-refracted sunlight, wedging a meaty hand down into his jeans pocket for a wad of wrinkled twenty-dollar bills. After the movie let out Mr. Mazoch typically suggested that they go to the Barnes and Noble across the plaza, where he would entertain himself among the thick antiques guidebooks shelved on the second floor,54 while Matt, over in the literature section, skimmed through a novel or collected poems or volume of criticism (which Mr. Mazoch, if he saw Matt holding on to it when they were getting ready to leave, would gently grab from him like a restaurant check, and pay for at the register himself). To conclude the afternoon Mr. Mazoch treated Matt to coffee and bagels in the bookstore’s café, which is where most of the actual ‘bonding’ took place: Matt asking his father whether he’d come across any good finds at garage sales lately, Mr. Mazoch asking his son how his schoolwork, weightlifting, and love life were going. The coffee, the caffeinated conversation, was the real point of their day together. But when Mr. Mazoch called on the weekends, he never asked, ‘Wanna grab some coffee?’ He always asked, ‘Any good movies playing?’
This changed after the heart attack. It’s not that they stopped going to films altogether, but that the ritualistic dimension of the afternoons, the self-consciousness of the bonding, grew to be morbid, and oppressive, and distracting for Matt. He was no longer just spending an afternoon with his father at the movies. Privately, in back of his thoughts, he was always spending what might be their last afternoon together at the movies. So if they were to watch The Ring together one Sunday, and if Mr. Mazoch were to suffer a fatal second heart attack the following week, The Ring would go down forever in Matt’s memory as the last movie he saw with his father. Their last conversation together would have been about the haunted videotape in The Ring. One of Matt’s last images of his father’s face would have been of its being bathed in the projector light of The Ring: Ring light gleaming in his father’s eyes, Ring light tinting the gray threads of his shaggy hair. These were the thoughts that Matt was having, these were the things that he was thinking, in that delicate time, he told me. He had no way of knowing then that Mr. Mazoch would live several healthy years beyond the anniversary of his bypass, nor that what would eventually do him in would be, not another heart attack, but—literally no way of knowing this — the walking dead. For the first year after the operation, Matt couldn’t take it for granted from week to week that his father was still alive. In the shower he wondered, Even now, is my father dying? And if at an odd hour he felt his cell phone vibrating against his thigh, that nightmarish ice-water feeling would immediately flood his chest, for he was convinced he was being notified of his father’s death.