And so on in that vein, for what felt like an hour. Ultimately Rachel came around, but only after I had assured her that Mazoch was not — to my knowledge — plotting a patricide. The second I said this, I realized that I was effectively forswearing an extension: I couldn’t go on hiding my doubts from her for another week. As it was, she could barely wait for Friday. She insisted that we invite Matt over for dinner that night, in part so that we could celebrate our ‘last day’ (her words), but also so that she could put her mind at ease about his motives. I felt a premonitory chill at this — imagining what Matt might say at such a dinner, if Rachel asked him point-blank about his motives — but I nodded. I’d invite him tomorrow, I said.
Once that was settled, Rachel voted that we begin with the blinking-contest exercise, so we rearranged the couches in the living room and positioned ourselves just like the man and woman in the diagram. It’s been fifteen minutes now since we started. Following the pamphlet’s instructions, I’ve been focusing on a specific feature (the asterism of freckles to the right of Rachel’s nose) and waiting for its isolated oddness to overflow her entire face. Rachel, apparently, has been focusing on my philtrum. Neither of us knows what to expect, what this estrangement is supposed to feel like. Will we be able to tell when it happens? During the first couple of minutes we joked about how awkward what we were doing was: I said I felt as if I were looking at a Magic Eye poster, staring and staring into this pointillist assemblage of monotonic dots until — seething and rearranging themselves like television static — they begin to rise up and resolve into a three-dimensional image; Rachel said she felt as if she were looking at a Rothko painting, staring and staring into the margin between two color fields until — the marine below and the crimson above intensifying in her peripheral vision — the whole canvas starts to glow. Indeed, when I made this observation, the spandrel of skin between my eyebrows was tingling fuzzily, as happens when I concentrate too hard on Magic Eye posters, and Rachel was looking at me with an expression that I’d only ever seen her look at Rothkos with. But now, a quarter hour later, no three-dimensional defamiliarization effect has risen from her freckled dots, and I doubt whether her patient gaze has kindled any Rothko glow of estrangement in my face.
‘This isn’t working for me,’ I say. ‘Is this working for you?’ ‘No,’ she admits, ‘but I think something might have been starting to happen.’ ‘It’s the eyes. I can’t pretend you’re a stranger, much less undead, when your eyes are so distinct and green.’ ‘You have such dark eyes,’ she says softly, and I expect her to compare them to night sky or to coffee. She mentions something to this effect every time that we stare into each other’s eyes,59 in the same tone of voice and with undiminishing tenderness, and I know now that she would be defenseless, utterly, against the beguiling blackness of my undead body’s eyes. Except — of course! — that my undead body’s eyes wouldn’t be dark, they’d be glaucomatic and milk-white. Nor would her eyes be at all green, or recognizable in their greenness. ‘Why don’t we try it with our eyes rolled up?’ I say. ‘We can take turns. Let me try with your eyes rolled up.’ Dutifully she exposes to me the flayed-grape undersides of her eyeballs, fixing her pupils on some point in her skull. But almost immediately what this reminds me of is the face that she makes during orgasms (especially when she is astride me, her head hung back and her eyes emptily white, as if filled with the Zen emptiness of her own pleasure), and I am so far from thinking of her as infected that my penis stiffens. ‘Okay, that doesn’t seem to be helping,’ I say. ‘Do you want to try it on me?’ ‘No,’ she says, rightening her eyes. ‘I’m fine.’
Who knew this would be so difficult? The way the pamphlet described it, I thought defamiliarization would be the kind of thing that one could get the knack of, as if, having mastered it, you could always call upon it as a private parlor trick. As if, while sitting at dinner on Friday, I could amuse myself by estranging Matt and Rachel, crossing my eyes and projecting rays of alienation onto their faces, which, spotlit with oddness, would be as unfamiliar to me then as if caught in the beam of a recherché-light (‘Now I know him, now I don’t: Matt, stranger, Matt, stranger’). Then it really would be a matter of simply switching it on or off in the presence of the undead. But what good is it as a survival reflex if you have to concentrate on the undead’s face for thirty minutes? If you have to fixate on its freckles and be careful not to let your thoughts wander, not to get distracted or glance elsewhere, lest one sudden saccade disrupt the steadiness of your gaze, shattering your concentration and forcing you to refocus on the freckle and start all over? If this is what Rachel would have to do when confronted with my undead body — if this is what would be required of her to build her way up to ‘Michael is not Michael’—then God help her if she ever finds me on the campus lawn.
I look at her again, trying to see her as my undead body would. I take in her entire face this time: her green eyes and high cheekbones; the Dutch jut of her nose; her hair, shorn short, jagged and blond as grass in December. I love this face. But to my reanimated eyes, it would just be a stranger’s face. And if this were a stranger’s face, would I still love it? If I were just seeing it in a crowd somewhere, having never met Rachel, not even knowing to call the face by the name of Rachel? No. It would be as inert to me as any other. I know that. I know that there is nothing intrinsically beloved in these features. When tonight I say that it, as a face, is lovely, all I mean by this is that I invest it with loveliness, that the parts of me that love rush out to meet the face halfway. The face acts as a vessel for my own emotional responses, my memories and associations, the personal narratives and idiosyncratic reactions that I pour into the face on seeing it. If I could somehow stem the flow of those from inside me, her face really would be drained of all recognizability, as bare and dry as a bowl.60 So just pretend that you never met her, I tell myself. Imagine your way into the nothing you’d feel if you passed this face as a stranger in the street. Pretend that she’s just a stranger in the street, whom you’re staring intently at for some reason. A human face, as yet nameless, infinitely other than you. Now (is it happening?) her face does seem to recede into a weird distance. It withdraws, just as occasionally my own face will if I peer too long at my reflection: that unsettling moment, which you can always feel coming on like a sneeze, when your face sinks ten layers deep into the silver of the bathroom mirror, and begins to stare back at you like a stranger. Is this how her face would appear to me in undeath?
‘I can’t do it,’ Rachel says. Her concentration breaks like a wave breaking across her face, which breaks my concentration on her face. She starts blinking rapidly and jawing her cheek muscles in a fit of relaxed tension. ‘No no no,’ I say, ‘I was just getting it!’ ‘Well, I was getting nowhere.’ ‘You really have to think of it as an absolute estrangement. That’s the key, I think. You’re not just concentrating on my face, you’re uncovering in it a kind of infinite otherness. You’re not just forgetting the me in my face, you’re restoring to it this mask of radical alterity.’ ‘You make it sound like an exfoliating cream,’ she says. And it’s true, I was making it sound that way. When I try to visualize the very thing that I was describing, the image is undeniably ridiculous: me, laid out on a Levinasian spa bed, with white dollops of alterity rubbed into my cheeks, cucumber slices over my eyes. ‘You’re right,’ I say, ‘forget the mask. But there are still techniques we haven’t tried yet…’ And I go on to explain one of the pamphlet’s other methods for inducing defamiliarization.