Unless he has no intention of quitting. Unless what he is really doing — by placing Mr. Mazoch abroad in his mind — is precisely the opposite: extending the search indefinitely, devising a task that he could never satisfy himself as having finished. This way, after having scoured every inch of Baton Rouge, Matt would still have Texas, Florida, and Arkansas to check. Then he could move on to Montana, Mexico, the Mariana Trench. There would always be one more corner of the globe for Matt to search for his father in. And supposing that Matt survived beyond the year or so it would take Mr. Mazoch (in most climates) to decay, he might still feel obliged to check Alaska, or the North Pole while he was at it, or any other place where his father’s body might have been frozen. If that is what Matt wants, I realize, I cannot help him: if he would prefer to spend the rest of his life holding out this last North Pole hope (laying away a little nest egg to buy a snowmobile with, so that he can go hunting for his popsicle father), then closure will be impossible. And maybe that has always been what Matt wanted. Not to find Mr. Mazoch, but to never find Mr. Mazoch: to forever have this desideratum dangling just out of reach, leading him day after day deeper into the calendar, like his own Bethlehem star to follow.
‘Listen,’ I say, and I want to ask Matt what it is that’s driving him to find his father anyway, whether he wants to put the man down, out of his misery — whether he wants to be the one to do it, rather than a thunderstorm or a riot guard with an assault rifle — or whether he just wants to see for himself that the man is infected, and escort him safely to a quarantine. What it is he’d be unable to do or driven to the ends of the earth to do, if Mr. Mazoch actually were abroad. What I ask instead is, ‘Do you really think that he’s abroad?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘or — I don’t know.’ He raises the binoculars again to peer across the water: ‘But he’s probably not on these barges.’
I look along with him, straining my eyes to distinguish the shapes of some of the undead. They’re too far off even to tell how tall they are. Watching Matt as he watches, I see that he is no longer chewing his cheek: his square jaw is grim and set as he scans those rows of decaying faces. Somewhere among them is the Mr. Mazoch look-alike. I picture a hulking frame in a blue plaid shirt, its back to the binoculars. An undead ringer from behind. And what if he had never turned around? We would have had to call Rachel to cancel our celebration dinner and wait here, until finally the guard made us leave. Then we would have had to return here tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until finally the barges were emptied, never able to find the doppelganger again in the crowd. Then we would have had to revisit all of the quarantines, skimming through the mug shots in the rosters, until finally Matt found the face that isn’t his father’s, the face that could have been his father’s.
If Matt’s hopefulness had been dragged out like that — if the close call had taken a week to resolve — I doubt that this search would be finished. As it stands, I can barely believe that it is finished. All day, as Matt has been taking his leave of Mr. Mazoch’s sites, there have been very few leave-taking gestures: he did not lock the door in Denham, or even bother casing the antiques mall; he did not try returning to Citiplace, or to Highland Road Park. With silent unceremoniousness he drove us from one site to the next, then on to the quarantines, without the least degree of anxiety or panic. As methodical as on any other day this month. He didn’t behave as if the search was over, because for part of him — I realize — it wasn’t yet: the search wasn’t finished until the day was. At each site there was still the next site to check, and after the quarantines, the barges. It was as if some part of him kept believing — up to the very last minute, until the doppelganger turned around — that his father might be found.
FOR DINNER, RACHEL MADE A RICH ORANGE curry that she had me slice potatoes for, and I threw together a very basic salad: greens, cheese, balsamic. Mazoch thoughtfully brought a bottle of wine, a Gewürztraminer76 that I had to drink Rachel’s glass of because she complained, smacking her mouth and contorting her face, that it was too sweet. She polished off a glass of Syrah instead, and now we’re all pleasantly drunk at the table. Although the ostensible occasion for this dinner is the end of the search, none of us have dared discuss it. Nor has Rachel interrogated Matt about his motives. The furthest she has gone is to ask him how our day went, and the two of them have been going back and forth about quarantines. To distract myself in the meanwhile, I’ve been watching the candle flames gutter in their sockets.77 And on my salad plate there is a leftover film of balsamic and olive oil, a viscid, deep-brown emulsion, which — when I incline the plate left and right — rolls darkly down to the edges, like a storm cloud on a dish. Neither Rachel nor Matt seems to notice me.
‘If you ask me,’ Matt continues, ‘LCDC are being big softies. Tremendous softies. The infected need to be burned or buried, not barged. Not treated to a cruise on the Mississippi.’ Rachel looks horrified, and I know she’s struggling not to bring up Mr. Mazoch: ‘That’s so… callous. You can’t be serious.’ ‘Do you know what Baton Rouge’s current ratio is? Of the undead to the living? Something like one to twenty. So about forty thousand undead. That’s as if every LSU student were infected. And you’re telling me that you want to keep them on barges and in quarantines?’ ‘Well, we couldn’t keep them there forever. But we can’t just kill them all either. They’re people, they have families. Imagine—’ ‘Families they wouldn’t blink at eating.’ ‘—imagine if every coma victim in the nation were euthanized at once, or everyone with Alzheimer’s. That would be so tragic. Whatever this infection is, we’ve known about it for less than a year. We’ve had less than a year to study it. Why not just be patient, wait for a cure?’ ‘Because there’s no cure for death!’ Mazoch says, laughing. ‘You don’t rub Neosporin on a dead body — you burn it or you bury it.’ ‘You’re talking about genocide.’ ‘No, absolutely not, it is misguided, boneheaded, and dangerous to talk about genocide. There could be nothing less relevant or helpful right now than mapping human models of violence over what’s happening. This talk about euthanizing the undead or murdering the undead. Committing genocide. The only vocabulary commensurate with the epidemic is an epidemiological one, one that calls a virus a virus. Each undead body is a viral agent, programmed only to spread a disease, and I could no more murder one than I could murder HIV.’ ‘The problem with that analogy—’ ‘You want to personalize them, I understand that. They wander back to their homes, as if they remember, as if they’re still people. You hear pundits say, “They need to be burned,” and you bristle. You learned about the Holocaust like everyone else in elementary school, so you think we’re on the verge of some equivalent eviclass="underline" the systematic cremation of millions of people. But these aren’t people. This is nothing like Europe’s so-called Jewish problem. If anything, this is a dybbuk problem. And if we don’t put a bullet in the head of every one of them, sooner or later it’s going to be a problem of apocalyptic proportions.’ ‘You can’t believe that. You sound like a movie trailer.’ ‘I really do believe it. There are forty thousand contagious cannibals — and think about that for a moment. Contagious cannibals. You get bitten and you become one, you are what you’re eaten by. Nothing could proliferate more factorially, more fatally, than a virus like that. And there are forty thousand of these killing machines being kept in, what, libraries? Dorm rooms? Barges? What happens when they break free? What happens when a hurricane hits and causes another “spill,” or when the virus mutates and becomes airborne?’ ‘So that’s your final solution: a bullet in the head of every infected citizen. Don’t bother building a more secure quarantine, or housing them on some kind of land preserve. Don’t study them and try to understand the infection. Just burn them or bury them. Never mind the fact that there’s clearly something still left in there, some residue of who they used to be. Memories of certain neighborhoods, motor skills. When you see a little infected girl picking up her violin, or when you see those lab experiments: how smart they still are, their aptitude for problem solving—’ ‘Problem solving! Let me tell you about problem solving. The only problem they’ll solve is how to get past your barricades and eat you alive. Problem solving of the octopus prying open the oyster. Problem solving of the polar bear unzipping the zipper of the tent. Those are the problems they know how to solve.’ ‘But that’s just it. We have no reason to believe they can’t be domesticated. What if they can be trained, tamed, taught not to attack people?’ ‘Rotting corpses as household pets, or in the zoos. A plague straight out of Revelations, an army of walking dead, and you’ll picket for their domestication.’ ‘I’ll “picket” so that innocent people aren’t killed. These are people, Matt. People with a disease. Do you know what I heard on the news the other week? There was a sound bite of an infected man moaning. A speech pathologist had taught him to say “Barbara.” He drew it out in a moan, it was breathy, but it was clear as day: “Barbara.” Barbara, his daughter, was in the studio when they played the sound bite, and after she heard him say her name, she buried her face in her hands and wept.’ ‘That’s very heartwarming. You could teach a parrot to say “Barbara.” You could teach a Furby to say “Barbara”! This is echolalia and nothing else, this is sophism and wishful thinking. Here’s a sound bite for Barbara: have a speech pathologist teach one to moan, “We are going to eat you.” We are going to eat you! That’s all their moaning means. Teach one to say that, and then we’ll see whether little Barbara bursts into tears.’ ‘She was forty.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Barbara. You called her “little Barbara.” But she was forty years old.’