It is at this point that Matt turns to me. ‘Well, you’ve been especially quiet this evening. What do you think about all this?’
What have I been thinking? That Matt’s vehemence in this debate comes as a shock, even to me. I can’t help wondering how much of it is the Gewürztraminer talking. The disappointment talking. Whether it is perhaps just the pointlessness of the barges — his anger at his missing father — that is fueling his resentment of the undead race right now. Or whether he is simply being provocative, contrarian, baiting Rachel with this eradication rhetoric. Whatever the explanation, he can’t possibly believe the things he’s been saying tonight. And even if he does believe them tonight, he couldn’t possibly have believed them this entire time, every day this past month. Could he? The crestfallen son I saw at Citiplace was not on the lookout for a ‘contagious cannibal’ or ‘killing machine’ to kilclass="underline" he was searching for his father. So if Matt really does propose mass extermination, then he has to be making some exception in his heart for Mr. Mazoch. Doesn’t he? Not that he would shelter him and keep him alive, necessarily, just that he would be horrified if he found a lynch mob dismembering him. That at some level Matt must recognize the residual humanity of Mr. Mazoch — his ineliminable Mr. Mazochness — since at some level Matt must feel that only he, Mr. Mazoch’s son, bears the right or the responsibility to murder the man (if, indeed, he plans to murder the man). Otherwise, why search like this? Why race against what clock? Why not let the exterminators take care of him, or the armed guard, or the hurricane? Is more or less what I’ve been thinking.
I’ve also been thinking about Rachel, whose face has been growing increasingly distraught, and who has surely been imagining Matt putting a ‘bullet in the head’ of Mr. Mazoch. If she had heard him going on like this any earlier, there would have been no question of her condoning the search. And it’s been valiant of her — in light of the search’s failure, when all this rhetoric is empty and inconsequential — to refrain from bringing up his father. To keep the argument abstract.
I, too, would like to keep the argument abstract, and the final thing I’ve been thinking is how to explain Rachel’s point of view to Matt. Put it in terms he’d understand. I want to try to communicate her empathy for the undead — her respect for creation78—without any more recourse to infected fathers or little Barbaras. So when he asks what I’ve been thinking, I ask in turn, ‘Have you read Homo Sacer?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘but I’ve played bisexual baseball.’ ‘No, like—’ ‘I’m kidding. Of course I’ve read Homo Sacer.’
But Rachel, as it turns out, hasn’t, so for her benefit I find myself drunkenly reconstructing Agamben’s argument79 before making my own point, which is that, basically, Rachel’s ethical unease regarding the reduction of the undead to something like bare life may after all be justified. ‘Because you can imagine exactly the kind of argument that Agamben would make: the undead occupy a “zone of indistinction,” a cloudy biological interstice, and it would be all too easy to dehumanize them, justifying anything from forced labor to genocide. Even if you reject the term “genocide,” you’re still talking about extinction. You’d be wiping out a new form of life in less than a year of its inception. Think of what scientists still have to learn from them: organisms of dead cells, creatures that persist beyond cell death. For all we know this could be a net evolutionary gain, the human race’s phylogenetic solution to mortality. So I think what Rachel’s saying is, “Hold on, let’s wait a minute — before we do anything rash why don’t we study this some more.”’ ‘And what I’m saying is that we don’t have a minute. We have approximately until hurricane season.’ ‘Yes, Matt, you’ve made it abundantly clear already that that’s what you’re saying.’ ‘The insane thing isn’t that walking corpses might be divested of their legal rights, Michael. That’s not the insane thing. The insane thing is that they haven’t been yet, that it’s been two months now and legal rights still adhere to them — walking corpses! — even as they decay on their feet. You don’t find that insane? True, the police aren’t going to conduct any murder investigations, if they find a slain undead in the streets. But by letter of the law you could be arrested for homicide. “Man”slaughter. That’s what’s insane!’ ‘The only people who have been or are going to be arrested for homicide are the sadists who lynch the infected. And you probably feel even as strongly as I do that lynch mobs shouldn’t be allowed to string stray infected up in trees. I hate to invoke families again — you seem to think it’s rhetorically illegitimate — but imagine if “little Barbara” walked outside and saw her undead father hanged, ten drunk men beating at him like a piñata. Or saw them pouring gasoline over him in the yard, setting him ablaze. These are the people who are and who will be arrested, not the families who quietly decide to put an undead relative to sleep.’ ‘What you—’