How it works is that both partners, still seated across from one another, close their eyes for five minutes, meditating unbrokenly on some other person’s face. They clear their heads of all interfering thoughts and images, then really try to see that face. They build up the face painstakingly, detail by accreted detail, starting with just a wire-frame template of a head, then gradually filling in its surface area with skin, a mask of flesh out of which they can then mold a nose, a mouth, a brow, adding only in the final stages of the meditation the colors and shades that will render nostrils, lips, and hair. When this high-resolution face hovers graphically before the mind’s eye, close enough to kiss, they’re to hold it like this for the whole five minutes (keeping it the sole content of their consciousnesses) so that when the time’s up, and they do snap open their eyelids to look at one another (dissolving the dreamlike scrim of the meditated face), the rush of sense data will be overwhelming. They will be staring at the real live face seated opposite them, but their mind, still stamped with the meditated face’s afterimage, will lag behind the eyes. The mind will be slow to recognize the partner’s face qua partner’s face. It will comprehend it only as an assortment of skin-toned shapes, a jumble of geometric flesh, a strange face. For a few seconds at least, it should be possible to look at the partner freshly, to see their face as a bare percept, before eventually all the emotional responses and memories and personal narratives percolate through the afterimage filter and obtain to it (i.e., the partner’s face) like a name (just as, when you wake suddenly from a powerful dream, it may take up to half a minute for your mind to figure out that what you’re looking at is a ceiling fan). Having tricked yourself into seeing your partner estranged in this way, you’ll have an important baseline experience from which to practice the more advanced estrangement exercises, which, by refining technique, train you not just to stumble onto but to actively control the defamiliarization effect.
‘What do you think?’ I say, and Rachel seems game. So I set my cell phone’s alarm for five minutes from now and place the phone ceremoniously on the coffee table. Straightening my back, closing my eyes, I ask Rachel whose face she will be imagining. Her father’s, she says. I say Mazoch’s.
THURSDAY
I CALL MAZOCH AT SEVEN THIS MORNING TO confirm the hiatus, but he doesn’t answer. This morning (our penultimate morning) is the first time in three and a half weeks that he’s requested a ‘personal day’ like this. When the voice mail picks up, I leave a message asking whether we’ll be resuming the search tomorrow, then invite him over for dinner afterward (‘to celebrate,’ I say, hoping he’ll get the hint). I know that he turns his phone off when reading, so I don’t think much of it when I hang up.
But I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s seven thirty now, and I’m back in bed with Rachel, who I expect will sleep in later than usual (last night we both tossed and turned, as unnerved by the estrangement exercises as she predicted we would be). While waiting for her to wake, I’ve been staring into the boarded-up darkness of our bedroom. For a while I tried to fall back asleep in this way,61 but then I gave that up and started to think about Mazoch reading. Specifically, about the likelihood that he is actually reading. Or whether he might be back at Mr. Mazoch’s right now: crouching down to the carpet, a muddy boot on each hand; walking a trail of footprints back and forth. Just a little something for us to find tomorrow morning.
How could he be reading, I wonder? How can anyone read? Once, at the start of the search, I asked Mazoch what he’d be doing for the weekend, and he said reading. When I asked how he could manage to, he said that it relaxed him, eased his tension, otherwise did him good. There was too much time to think, he said, driving around the city all day. Whereas if he sat at his desk and concentrated on a Milosz poem, it was like lighting a thought-repellant candle in the mind. He didn’t specify which thoughts it was that he wanted to repel, which thoughts would be fluttering, mosquito-like, at the edge of his reading, but I could guess: thoughts of his father, of the epidemic, of the apocalypse, of death.
Thoughts like these are what make it impossible for me to read, and in fact they’re the reason that I haven’t picked up a book, not really, since the start of all this. Occasionally I’ll try to read with Rachel in bed, but I always find myself skimming distractedly. How am I supposed to follow a text when I know that, at any moment, my reading might be interrupted — my life imperiled — by the beating on the door of an undead fist? When page by page I am viscerally aware, in all my nerviness and coiled energy, that I might suddenly be called upon to leap up from the mattress and slide the dresser against the threshold, in an improvised barricade, and that with emergency haste I’ll have to alert the authorities, lock myself and Rachel in the bathroom, and wait patiently — alone with the sound of its pounding and moaning — for the creature to be detained? These fantasies are difficult to subdue, so more often than not I just lie still, with Rachel reading next to me and with my own book splayed open on my stomach. I stare indolently into the ceiling. I watch the ventilator grille directly overhead, with its little scrap of paper taped to the end, acting as a kind of telltale: when the air conditioner is off, the scrap hangs inertly vertical there, but the moment that the air conditioner switches on, it wags out in a lateral drift, so as to signal that the grille emits a live breeze. For minutes this little tag of paper will float passively along, like some remora on a shark of wind, and it will be enchanting to watch, will put briefly out of mind what the book on my stomach cannot.
After he said that he’d be reading Milosz, I asked Mazoch — whose apartment is a minor library — what good he thought his reading would do him, when you could almost still see an apocalypse, on the horizon, like a storm.62 The day that I asked him this, the sky actually was black and overcast with storm. Darkling clouds banked all the way down I-10 to the western horizon, where alone there was a clearing, a backlit strip of sky, still glowing a little from a sunset we’d missed. Driving in this direction, speeding a little in this direction, toward where the margin of sky had, in the afterglow of the sunset, turned the color of vanilla cream, and where wisps of cloud were so gilt and silvered that they looked like breath on fire, Mazoch evaded my question by adducing examples of readers who had not been deterred by apocalypses, waving one hand then the other off the steering wheel as he described them to me: first, there was Mr. Henry Bemis, the bookish librarian and sole H-bomb survivor in the Twilight Zone episode ‘Time Enough at Last,’ who after a lifetime of postponed reading is finally left alone in a deserted city, with no humans to distract him and with all the food and supplies he might need to survive, and who decides, in the teeth of this apocalypse, to organize for himself a two-year reading syllabus from among the books at the public library (only, famously, to have his reading glasses shatter); then there was the Arab from Book V of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, who, in an apocalyptic dream sequence, rides across the desert bearing a stone (which, in the logic of the dream, is actually a ‘book,’ Euclid’s Elements) and a seashell (also a book, one that, when the narrator holds it to his ear, prophesies ‘in an unknown tongue… Destruction to the children of the earth/By deluge, now at hand’), and so the Arab rides across the desert to bury these books and preserve his ‘twofold charge’ from apocalyptic destruction, even with ‘the fleet waters of a drowning world/In chase of him’ (‘[M]ine eyes/Saw, over half the wilderness diffused,/A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause:/ “It is,” said he, “the waters of the deep/Gathering upon us”’); and finally there was the character of Borges in Borges’s short story ‘The Book of Sand,’ who buys from a rare-books dealer an ‘infinite book’ (the titular Book of Sand, which comprises an infinite number of randomly generated pages, such that a reader can never find the same page twice), and who, on realizing that this book is the apocalypse itself (‘I considered fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite, and suffocate the planet in smoke’), does not bury it or cast it into the sea but leaves it instead on a shelf of the Mexican National Library. So why not read in an apocalypse, Mazoch seemed to be asking me, via each of these examples. Why not commune solitarily with books, as Mr. Bemis did?; or preserve books from a flood that will leave no humans to read them, as the Arab of the Bedouin tribes did?; or, not only read in the apocalypse, but read the apocalypse itself, as the character of Borges did, and as he allowed future readers to do by stocking this apocalypse among the novels and poems of the Mexican National Library? Following these readers’ lead, why shouldn’t Mazoch cram his apartment with books, or spend the weekend reading Milosz, or take this morning off to read? And why shouldn’t I try to read today as well?