Barging the undead, as LCDC and FEMA are now holding weekly press conferences to admit, is an untenable stopgap solution. Even if Baton Rouge is spared a direct collision in August or September, we can still expect storms heavy enough to demolish the fences, which is why LCDC’s timeline requires decommissioning the ships in the next couple of weeks. Some pundits, still horrified at the thought of the infected being brought back ashore (especially if it means reinstating residential processing centers), have suggested that they simply be relocated a few yards downriver, aboard the USS Kidd, the Fletcher-class destroyer docked here as a war memorial. Easily capable of housing the few hundred bodies, the Navy vessel would then serve — from the pundits’ point of view — as a kind of negative Noah’s ark, preserving anti-creatures or demons from destruction by flood. But no one has seriously brought this suggestion before the Louisiana Naval War Memorial Commission, and it seems likelier that the city’s surveyors will find some disused municipal building (a library, a prison, a dorm room) to be retrofitted as a quarantine. At any rate, they will have to find something before August. By then, any loose infected — any strays on the streets, who have not already been rounded up and quarantined, or else stumbled upon some reliable shelter to squat in — are going to be in for an interesting time: dashed by floods headfirst against telephone poles; brain-fried in electrified rainwater; crushed beneath fallen branches. Staring at the clear sky above us, I find it difficult to believe that there are already tropical storms forming over the Atlantic right now. But that is how it happens: one day you turn on the weather channel and see, in that satellite photo of the ocean far below, a cloudbank where the blue should be. It is vast, and white, with a spiral’s pupil in its center, and it reminds you suddenly — as it couldn’t have even a year ago — of an immense undead eyebalclass="underline" milky, hundreds of miles wide, this blindness in the sky. You can monitor it daily, watching as it approaches the coast, but there is simply no way to telclass="underline" whether it will weaken once it hits land, or worsen as a hurricane; whether its winds will accelerate (ascending the pentatonic intensities of the Saffir-Simpson Scale: becoming a Category 3, then a 4, then a 5), or whether they will dissipate harmlessly. No way to tell till the week of. The day of. Those are the kinds of odds that Mr. Mazoch is looking at, if he’s still on the streets come August. And though Mazoch has never spoken openly about this, it has to be some of what he’s thinking right now as he chews the skin along the inside of his cheek, and scans the barges for his father’s face.
‘See anything?’ I ask. He doesn’t lower the binoculars. ‘Matt?’ ‘Shh.’ I stare at him a moment longer, then turn to the silhouettes. Which one is it, I wonder? I hear Matt hiss ‘Shit,’ and when I glance back the binoculars are hanging at his chest. His face looks broken. ‘What is it?’ ‘I thought it was him,’ he says. ‘It was him. But then it turned around.’ ‘Do you want to keep looking?’ I ask. ‘I can’t make out any faces beyond the first rows.’ Of course: as if the undead would have been arranged, as for a class photo, with tallest in the back. Our only option is to keep trying our luck from the levee. Disconsolate relatives are typically advised (as we were ten minutes ago, by the guard in his booth) to wait a week or so until the present load of infected has been relocated, then to make the rounds of the other quarantines (‘Go back again,’ Matt had sighed, exhausted).
‘You want to take a look?’ he asks, offering me the binoculars. I squint at the dim figures across the water, which together resemble some flash-mob mirage of the single lakeside silhouette from yesterday. He is asking whether I want to study them, on this our last day. But I shake my head. I do not need to see hundreds of undead eyes today. Rachel was right: the search is making me morbid. I need to think better thoughts. If there were only one out there, or even a handful, I might accept Matt’s offer. I might try to satisfy my curiosity, or else — if I could never satisfy my curiosity — come to terms with the radical insatiability of my curiosity. But a whole crowd of them? To be overwhelmed by that wide wall of white eyes, hundreds, all bearing down on and boring through me… to have that be my last memory of the search? It would be too much.
After I decline the binoculars, Matt lifts his chin at something over my shoulder, then asks: ‘You see that?’ When I turn around all I see is the Mississippi Bridge: its great latticework of girders is gridded against the southern horizon like a waffle iron, filled with blue sky as with batter. Then, far above the bridge, I spot what must have caught Matt’s attention: a high airplane, trailing a bright contrail behind it. The line of vapor has silvered brilliantly from within, and the jet, itself glinting like a knife tip, seems to be cutting into the sky to reveal it, carving a gash for this bright light to seep through. Like an incision being made in a lit lampshade. This is the first time since the travel ban has been enforced that I’ve seen a contrail in the sky. It’s a species of cloud I’d thought had gone extinct, and watching this one now is strangely thrilling, the way that finding the first coelocanth must have been, or seeing the dove come back from the flood, olive leaf in beak. When Matt sees that I can see the jet, he asks, ‘How many passengers do you think are infected on that plane?’ ‘Christ,’ I say, ‘I don’t know.’ Probably any passengers would be military personnel and FEMA agents, well screened by virologists before boarding. Nevertheless, I try to think of how many people would be inside the glint above us, and what the chances are that at least two or three of them could have made it through the screening process undetected: latent carriers, bearing the infection with them wherever the plane is bearing them. I say, ‘Maybe zero.’
‘I’m beginning to suspect my dad isn’t even in Baton Rouge anymore,’ Mazoch says. ‘As in he’s boarded a plane somewhere?’ I ask. I try to imagine Mr. Mazoch making a getaway flight that first night, hours after he was bitten. Fleeing to Italy, and renting a hotel room to reanimate in.74 But this is not what Mazoch has in mind. ‘No,’ he says, ‘not necessarily. Just that he might have driven off, before… Or else crossed the border on foot.’
I have a difficult time telling how serious he is. Not only are there border guards stationed to keep the epidemic within state lines, but Mr. Mazoch, who seems never to have left southern Louisiana, would have too provincial a memory system to be compelled abroad anyway.75 Mr. Mazoch, the prince recluse of Denham Springs, not only contracts an uncharacteristic wanderlust but also actually bypasses every border guard instructed to stop him? Those are a lot of what-ifs for Mazoch to be broaching now, on this our last day. But maybe that’s simply what he needs to believe, in order to be able to quit: that his father won’t be in Baton Rouge when the first hurricane hits. That he is too far abroad to be found. In order to absolve himself of the responsibility to go looking, Matt might be expanding the parameters of the search beyond feasibility, forking bales and bales of square miles onto the haystack that Mr. Mazoch is already the proverbial needle lost within.