So when Rachel asks me right now what I’m thinking, I’m thinking of the undead corpse across the water, imagining that it’s Mazoch, and ideating its eating us alive in our sleep. But what I answer her is, ‘Nothing in particular,’ since this is, strictly speaking, true: I am thinking about ‘nothing’ in particular, particularly the nothingness of undeath, which I’m worried that Mazoch in particular may have infected himself with. And I am thinking, too, about the somethingness of that nothing. Staring at the undead silhouette, I can’t help wondering what’s going on inside its body, or what Mazoch — if indeed it is Mazoch — must be experiencing: no doubt an order of being inconceivable to me. Part of me yearns for a pair of binoculars right now, not only to confirm that the silhouette is his, but also to look him in the eye. For if he truly did infect himself, then he would be seeing everything he claimed they could not see. All the things that I (still on the mortal side of life) can barely understand. One of the living dead now, he would be living the very limit to my knowledge: he would be the nothing that can be known about undeath.68 So it is this — the nothings that must be massing in Mazoch’s mind — that I myself have in mind, when I tell Rachel that I am thinking about nothing.
To forestall any follow-up questions, I ask her reciprocally, ‘But what about you? What were you thinking, just a minute ago, before you thought to ask me?’ And how my mood lightens when she begins! For it turns out that Rachel has, somehow, avoided thinking about undeath and the silhouette all day. She’s succeeded brilliantly in distracting herself and has thankfully thought enough good things for the both of us. Gesturing to the water, she enumerates all the good things there that have been holding her interest since we got here: (1) because the freeway bridges the lake, all the cars overhead get reflected, and the eighteen-wheelers especially have been enjoyable to watch (that is, not the actual vehicles speeding along the overpass, but their reflections in the lake below, streaking rectangles of distortion that shudder through the muddy water: they look so monstrous, she says, these gray shapes skimming beneath the surface, that whenever one passes she can’t help thinking, ‘A Leviathan! A Loch Ness!’); (2) when ducks kick off the shore and glide out across the water, their wakes ripple back in lunular trails — like this:))) — such that each duck seems to be opening up a string of parentheses, nesting digressions that manage to hold the entire lake (the reflected clouds and reflected eighteen-wheelers, and the floating litter, too) in their aside of water,69 which can be closed only when another duck drifts by in the opposite direction, unleashing a terminating series of brackish brackets;70 (3) she can’t tell whether the white blob in the branches of that cypress, jutting out from the righthand bank, is a trash bag or an ibis, since the tree is far enough off that her eyes are unable to register any of the blob’s smaller movements — whether the whipping of windblown plastic or the wing-shuffling of a bird readjusting — and she has waffled for so long regarding which it is (sure one moment that it enjoys a heartbeat, and a gullet and guts, full of all the thrumming life that living birds are stuffed with; then equally certain an instant later that it’s just a pale plastic bag, puffed up and empty with air) that by now the white blob seems positively anamorphic, a smear of ambiguity that resolves from one angle into a bird and from another into a bag, as if Rachel, merely by tilting her head and following the spectrum along which these two images merged, could watch the smooth plastic begin to feather, begin to grow a beak and black eyes, as the bag graded into the ibis.71
‘Well,’ she concludes, ‘I guess that’s it — that’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking this whole time.’ That’s it. What pleasant things to be thinking! Reflections, ducks, ibis-bags, not one of them referring to the silhouette. I wish I could think such pleasant things. Maybe once the search is finally over, I’ll be able to. Maybe next week we can walk back here, and I can make it a point to admire the eighteen-wheelers. For a moment I consider confessing to Rachel how badly I’ve betrayed the spirit of our day’s goal. I consider telling her what’s been weighing on my mind lately, every hitch in the search I’ve kept hidden from her, and then sharing all of my suspicions about the silhouette as well. I imagine the two of us laughing it off together: ‘It looks nothing like Mazoch!’ we would laugh. What made me think that that silhouette was Mazoch?
But just then my cell phone vibrates once against my thigh, and a nightmarish ice-water feeling floods my chest: I am certain that I am being notified of Mazoch’s undeath. As I dig into my pocket and withdraw the phone, I brace myself for the sight of the display screen… only to see, however, that Mazoch himself has texted me. Same time tomorrow, he wants to know? There on my cell phone is his name and his number, the message stamped at this very minute. But is it really possible? Mazoch, delivered like that from undeath? Suddenly becoming not that silhouette — as irrevocably not it as the ibis that’s just launched from the cypress branch is not a plastic bag?
I text back — not ‘Thank God you’re alive’—but the letter ‘Y.’ And when Rachel asks me who it was, I simply say, ‘Mazoch,’ as if this weren’t in itself a miracle to be savored.
FRIDAY
IT’S FIVE P.M., THE END OF A LONG DAY. AFTER waiting all morning in Denham, we’ve spent the past several hours — as on other Fridays — visiting quarantines. Now we’re at the last on our list: the levee.72 There is nowhere else to look. At the base of the embankment, where the canted concrete yields to the yellow-grassed riverbank, Matt stands beside me with the binoculars, peering across the Mississippi. There are three barges moored on the opposite shore, each crammed to capacity with undead.73
The barges must be thirty yards away, but even from here I can distinguish the fence of chain-link that has been erected around each boat’s perimeter, a barbwire barrier rising head-high and hazing the air with grayness. Standing behind the chain-link, boxed in on each bed, are what look to be two hundred undead silhouettes, packed shoulder to shoulder and wall to wall. Each barge resembles a little chunk of prison yard: the silver fence and the tense inmates. Presiding over these prison ships is a single police officer at the top of the levee, stationed in a glass guard booth on the slope directly behind us. The sun is hovering high overhead, spangling the muddy river water densely. That clouded current, purling south, is broad and brown, and where the light flecks it it looks nebular somehow, but fetid, like a diarrheal Milky Way. Indeed, so massive and cosmic is the Mississippi that the boats on it seem toylike. And at the sight of them it hits me — viscerally, as if for the first time — that obviously these infected cannot stay here: they will need to disembark before hurricane season.