Naturally, the longer I stared at it — and I did keep staring at it — the more morbid my thoughts grew. Not only was it undead, I realized, but it was Mazoch. His height, his shape, why not? Why couldn’t Mazoch (who had called off the search under mysterious circumstances and who wasn’t answering his phone and who it seemed less and less plausible was sitting in his room reading Milosz) have been bitten and killed, have reanimated and followed us here? Of course it was absurd, a paranoid fantasy. There was no way Mazoch could have died. Yet there were so many ways in which Mazoch could have died! At least a hundred ways! Dead in the ditch he swerved into when, driving home late last night, he nodded off at the wheeclass="underline" if he wasn’t killed on impact, if he was simply knocked unconscious and trapped, then roadside infected could have come to inspect the wreck and fed with ease upon his flesh. Or — if he made it home safe last night after all — say that he was bitten in bed in his sleep, having forgotten, from distraction or exhaustion or whatever else, to bolt the front door. Or — if in fact he slept soundly and without incident — say that, rather than read Milosz this morning, he decided to conduct one day’s search without me, returning to Citiplace to inspect the empty theaters. Why not this morning, after months of daily exposure to the epidemic, for the probabilistically obvious to happen? Why not the one day that I wasn’t there for a stray to catch him at his ankle and infect him?
Though what struck me as likelier still — likelier even than any of these scenarios — and likelier every minute that I compared the silhouette with Mazoch’s likeness, was that Mazoch had infected himself. That he was sick, perverse, that finally he had snapped and that this was the hellish price he had to pay for devoting himself so crazily to the chase of his father. That ‘taking the day off to read’ was a euphemism for ‘killing myself,’ that what ‘reading Milosz’ meant was that Mazoch would stir into a glass of water a single drop of contaminated blood (milked like venom from a nail some infected had stepped on) and drain it down as resolutely as he would a protein shake. All week, I realized, he’d been trying to get himself infected: with Highland Road Park, with the chicken breast, with every nail rusted and jutting from his dad’s doorjamb. He’d been playing Russian roulette with the infection. But time after time he’d escaped unscathed, and so today, I realized, he had decided to finish the job himself.
Nothing seemed more lucid or inevitable to me than this. For what if not this — precisely to become infected and to reanimate — had Mazoch this whole time been planning? What better way to intercept an undead father than by carrying out an Orphic strategy, by descending into the underworld after him? Undead, Mazoch could exceed the limits that as a mortal he’s been bringing himself to the edges of. He could shuffle from Denham to Louie’s and back again without stopping, could actually keep pace with the father he was pursuing. What he would lose in speed (the undead can’t drive) he would gain in stamina (the undead need not rest), such that his body would finally be equal to this monomaniacal task. The only trick would be to ensure that his reanimated body did indeed wander to Denham and Louie’s and back, to Mr. Mazoch’s haunts, rather than to Matt’s idiosyncratic own. Hence this hopeless search, designed less as an actual manhunt for Mr. Mazoch than as a training module for Matt’s undead corpse. So that his reanimated body would wander to his father’s haunts, Mazoch wandered to his father’s haunts. Daily he drove to them, investing each with all the associative energies necessary to compel his corpse to return to it. Yes, Mazoch knew exactly what he was doing. If those two officers hadn’t arrived this afternoon to arrest it, his reanimated body, memory-possessed, would have visited Denham and Louie’s no less diligently than Mazoch had, no less routinely and methodically and obsessively than Mazoch had, when, himself memory-possessed, he drove to these sites every morning like some pilgrim of remembering.
How clear to me it all was! Mazoch, self-consciously blazing a trail for his reanimated body, laying down a track for it to travel! Mazoch, engraining in himself muscle memories, habits, kernels of place, plotting for himself a mnemocartographic itinerary, all to guide his reanimated body! What else had I taken him to be doing? Obviously his final effort of will was to tighten this spring within himself (as if each day’s repetition of the routine — that mind-numbing drive out to Denham and back — were just another twist of the dorsal key of his inner tin soldier) so that his automatous corpse, like a wind-up toy whose ‘winding up’ Mazoch’s last few weeks on Earth were, would wobble forward to exactly those places that Mazoch wanted it to. No wonder he had set the deadline at a month: that was probably how much time he thought the engraining would take. And no wonder he had been in such a rush to visit extra sites this week, then to search another week: he had to squeeze these sites into his itinerary. Highland Road Park. Citiplace. This lake that he stands right now on the southern shore of.
That was him, wasn’t it, staring hungrily out over the water at us… thank God for that patrol car. It was only here, at the thought ‘thank God for the patrol car,’ that I truly comprehended what mortal danger I’d been in, here that the scales fell from my eyes (and, with them, any compunctions I’d had about abandoning myself altogether to ‘bad thoughts’). For where else (it occurred to me) did Mazoch visit diligently every morning? Where besides Denham would his reanimated body, in inertial thrall to habit and reflex, have eventually been made to wander? Our very apartment! The home in which we slept! Oh, he would have headed straight there one morning, as if to pick me up for a day of work! This he didn’t take into account, this he didn’t plan for. He needed me to keep him company while for months he drilled a route into his body, he needed me to ‘help him not to think’ and to be a pleasant phatic presence in his passenger seat. But what he didn’t take into account was that my apartment, first stop every morning, would have been as much a component of ‘the route’ for his reanimated body as any other site. One morning he would have done what he did every morning: he would have gone to Mustard Castle, taken the stairs to our apartment, and knocked three times at our door. There would have come in the middle of some morning Mazoch’s familiar hearty knock at the door! And this time he wouldn’t quit until it splintered. They never quit until it splinters, not if they know you’re inside. Mazoch would have brought all his huge strength to bear on the battering down of our door, as if the only purpose he had ever had in mind, while working out, was splintering doors, as if for this and nothing else he exercised. To splinter my door and eat me alive he did his military pushups every morning! To keep himself well fed in the underworld he chinned himself on the pull-up bar in his threshold! To endow his corpse with what muscles it’d need to pry my life open like a crawfish shell, the better to suck my brains out, he curled his barbells before the mirror! That vain bastard would have eaten me alive — staring at his smug silhouette across the lake I felt sure of it! — if only those two officers hadn’t been here to stop him.