Is more or less what I’ve been thinking at Matt this morning. Now I twist around in my seat again, to check on the progress at the Freedom Fuel. In the time that I’ve been waiting, additional infected have arrived: either attracted on their own by the commotion, or else rounded up in the vicinity. Wherever they came from, six new silhouettes have converged on the nearest cruiser, clumping around its sides. If the police are concerned about this, they don’t show it. As I watch, a single infected (a stick figure, at this distance) detaches itself from the hood and starts wandering across the parking lot. The cruiser merely flashes its sirens — they glint blue-red, blue-red for three revolutions above its roof — and the infected comes shuffling back.
At the thought of Mazoch watching this from the window, through his binoculars, I become strangely enraged. I can actually feel the monologue welling up in my mouth, like spit before the vomit, and I unbuckle my seatbelt as violently as I can before flinging open the car door.
But when I jog up the driveway and up the porch steps and barge into the living room, I don’t find Matt standing at any of the windows. He’s slumped on the sofa: elbows on knees, head in hands. The binoculars are lying on the cushion beside him. He looks up at me. ‘Any news out there?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘not yet.’
I take a moment to survey the living room. For the most part it’s as I suspected: no signs of struggle, no traces. But this is the first I’ve been inside since beginning the search, and I’m surprised by the degree of dilapidation. The place looks even more miserable than I remembered. In the short time that the windowpanes have been shattered, the interior appears to have been exposed to catastrophic elements: the carpet where I stand is sodden from dew and rain, and the July air is heavy and hot and hard to inhale, exactly as humid in here as outside. Along the walls, the outlets are nicotine brown around the sockets (power surge?), and in the corner of the room, all three bulbs of the brass floor lamp (whose central pole branches out into three adjustable eyestalks, forming an ommatophorous torchiere, each stalk capped with a miniature trumpet shade of jade-green glass) are blown, charred black from poppage. Elsewhere the unchecked humidity seems to have had effects that I associate only with serious flood damage, for instance in post-Katrina photos of abandoned buildings: the five faux-mahogany particleboard blades of Mr. Mazoch’s ceiling fan all droop downward now, curling together in a tarantula of warped wood; and the walls’ navy paint seems to be, like, bubbling in places, trapped air (I guess) swelling it upward in convex blobs. The place is falling apart. Plus random animals appear to have taken advantage of the shattered windows as well. Dotting the gray carpet are the dried fecal pellets of free-ranging rodents and cats, which fauna are probably also responsible for the shredded paper strewn around the coffee table.
This coffee table — actually an old treasure chest, wooden, with a vaulted top and rusted hinges — is currently serving Matt as a footrest. I wonder whether he has been sitting there this whole time, kicking up his feet while I waited alone in the car. Or, for that matter, whether he has been sitting like that all week, every morning after his inspections. This is the room that he has had to see each day. He looks up at me again, head still in hands, and sees me staring: ‘What?’
‘Listen,’ I say, on the verge of launching into my monologue. But I find that I’m unable to. I snap at him instead: ‘Well, what are you waiting for? Aren’t you going to come look out the window? You’ve got a straight shot with the binoculars.’ He shakes his head. ‘I looked earlier,’ he says, and there is immense futility and tiredness in his voice. I wonder whether he knows about the new arrivals, the six additional infected to buoy his hope, but I have no intention of telling him. ‘I’m sorry, you know,’ he says. ‘For driving you out here like this. Into the middle of a lockdown. You were right the other day, what you said: about the risks I’ve been taking. What we’re doing is dangerous, and you didn’t have to do it. So thanks.’ ‘Well thanks, Matt. I appreciate that.’ ‘And I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have to worry about it. About me—’ ‘Really, it’s—’ ‘—because I’m finished.’ I study his face for some clue, but it’s inscrutable. ‘Finished?’ ‘This, the search, it’s over. You were right. It’s been over, and today’s the last day I’m going to ask you to do this. So I wanted to let you know. You know. How much I’ve appreciated…’ ‘The help.’ ‘Everything.’ Somewhere behind me, another far-off siren sounds outside, and Matt lifts his chin at the window: ‘How are things looking at the Freedom Fuel?’ I turn to the frame and make a show of peering through it (I even arch all ten fingers over my brow, forming a glare-reducing testudo with my hands, such that I am the very image of flamboyant voyeurism), but in truth I’m too distracted by what Matt’s just said to concentrate, and anyway there don’t appear to be any new details to discern: the six new infected are still absorbed by the cruiser; the LCDC van is still nowhere to be seen. ‘Well?’ he asks. ‘No sign,’ I say.
I continue looking out the window all the same, fingers steepled at my forehead, rather than turn to face him. I can barely process what he’s said. If it’s really true that he’s finished, then that would at least absolve me from the obligation of delivering my monologue. Reasonable, realistic, and resigned, he would not need to be talked out of anything. But on the other hand, this is the same Mazoch whom I had imagined — just yesterday — driving himself to the ends of the earth, his deepest desire precisely never to be finished. It’s possible that he’s only telling me what he thinks I need to hear. If he has a bad conscience about putting me in danger or endangering my relationship — if he regrets having invited me along in the first place — then he might be trying to get me to quit. He did declare this the last day of our search, after all, not his. His exact words were, ‘Today’s the last day I’m going to ask you to do this.’ Maybe Mazoch, in his own way, was trying to insinuate or admit that he has every intention of carrying on with the search without me.