‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask him. I keep my voice casuaclass="underline" ‘Now that you’re finished.’ ‘I’m not sure, to be honest. Maybe volunteer. Take a look at one of the shelters.’ ‘That’s good. I was going to say something about that.’ Mazoch doesn’t respond. If he’s planning to continue the search on his own, he evidently isn’t going to tell me. But if he wants to keep his search a secret, let him. Let him drive alone to this dilapidated house, and sit on that waterlogged sofa, every morning for the rest of the summer, if that’s the form his mourning takes. When Rachel and I invite him over for dinner, we’ll just talk about other things. And when he and I meet up to play chess, we’ll studiously avoid the subject. We’ll all pretend he isn’t waiting still.
‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘You and Rachel?’ ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I don’t know. She’ll just be happy that I’m home.’ Or vice versa. On my way out this morning, Rachel stopped me at the door, placing her hands on my shoulders. She made me promise that today would be the last day. I nodded, said ‘I promise,’ and gave her a covenantal kiss on the cheek. If I had decided to go out again tomorrow, there’s no guarantee that she would have been home when I got back. And even with the search over, it will take longer than next week for us to normalize. Worry for Matt will continue to be the explicit subject or tacit subtext of our every waking moment. Whenever he doesn’t answer his phone, Rachel will assume that he’s snuck off to Denham. And whenever I go out to buy milk, she’ll assume that I’ve snuck off with him. I doubt that Matt fully appreciates this — the extent of the dust cloud that he has left behind him, domestically — and I’m tempted to let him know. No, Matt, Rachel and I have not made plans. We haven’t been able to think too far beyond your manhunt.
‘Plus there are projects,’ I say. ‘Things to do around the apartment, hurricane-wise.’ In the silence I feel Mazoch nodding behind me. It may have just occurred to him — as it’s occurred to me — that this house, too, is unprepared, hurricane-wise. If no FEMA crews get here first, it’ll probably be demolished come August. A single week of mild storms would be enough to reduce the living room to a ruin: for rain to lash in through the broken windows; for mud and mold, for water rot, to claim everything; and for the creeping tendrils and vines, which cling already to the window frames, to spill over into the space of the house, covering the floors with lush overgrowth. Followed by whatever havoc would be wrought by the rodents and cats, driven inside by the wind. So even if Mazoch wants to keep coming here — sitting vigil among his father’s things; basking in the memories of the man that they catalyze — soon enough that won’t be an option. There won’t be any ‘here’ here to speak of. By September, whatever of his father’s things remain will be utterly defaced: the antiques and trinkets strewn across the room will be rusted over, and the furniture all moth-eaten and murl-ing. Sunlight will puncture the staved-in roof, birds roost in the rafters. Every surface will be maculated with mold. Eventually the space, arrogated by nature in this way, won’t even remind Matt of his father at all. Its signifiers of ‘Mr. Mazoch’ will gradually be overcoded by signifiers of ruin, anonymized by them, until ‘Mr. Mazoch’s house’ has grown indistinguishable from any other disaster site: just generically derelict, and therefore unrecognizable. Whether or not Matt gives up looking for his father, I have to imagine he’ll give up coming here.
I turn back to look at him. He’s still got his elbows on his knees, head in hands, and though his shoulders flex beneath the thin white cotton of his t-shirt, he looks small somehow. Hunched into himself like that. He even looks — sitting alone on his dad’s sofa, in the middle of his dad’s wrecked and ransacked living room, surrounded by all the dead man’s antiques — like a little kid. His dad died here. This is the place he died. And the sofa, the wooden chest, the brass floor lamp: these are his dead dad’s things. In any other era, Matt might have inherited them. Now he sits among them, in the house where his dead dad came back, and where for a month Mazoch has waited, daily, for his dead dad to come back. He won’t be coming back. Not here, not if he hasn’t already. And not only that, but who knows where he even is by now. Matt knows that. Something in his hunched posture suggests to me he’s accepted this: the windows, the missing shirt, the closing in. He’ll never see his dad again. In this moment, he really does look finished. Leaning forward, fingers buried in his hair, he’s staring beyond the far wall without blinking. He looks like a statue of something: one of those bronzed embodiments of abstract concepts. He looks like the perfect sculpture of having come to terms — with loss, with death, his dad’s absence — he looks like a Rodin of resignation. Printed across the plinth the treasure chest makes beneath his feet should be the title, ‘I’m Finished.’
I feel a newfound respect for him swell inside me. What strength it must have taken for him to be finished! Seeing me staring, he makes a quizzical expression. Then he reaches for the binoculars. ‘You want to take a look?’ he asks, holding them out. ‘Sure,’ I say, and cross the room to accept them.
Back at the window I face the Freedom Fuel, raising the binoculars and bracing myself for whatever it is I might see: a rotting face, two white eyes. But by chance what the lenses alight on is the besieged cruiser, its passenger side, and all I have a view of is the backs of two infected as they beat their hands against the window. Their shirts are all I see. A black polo on the left, a blue work shirt on the right. I try panning the binoculars between their shoulders, to clear a sightline through the window, and eventually I get a bead on the officer inside. He’s looking out the windshield, head in profile. He can’t be much older than we are: a scrawny kid with a blond buzz cut and a strong square jaw like Matt’s, gripping the steering wheel and looking bored. He stares stoically ahead, presumably at the three infected pounding on the hood, and I wonder whether the expression on his face (phlegmatic, contemptuous) is what the scuba mask conceals in the shark cage: they want nothing more than to destroy him, but they can’t get at him. He can go on sitting there, baiting them, until the van arrives to detain them. Like Matt, this officer is probably fantasizing about putting a bullet in the head of every infected surrounding his car. And perhaps, in the very near future, he’ll be authorized to. If quarantines nationwide keep overflowing and no medical solutions are forthcoming, the government might decide to unknot the Gordian hordes by sanctioning mass extermination. Of course, the executions would have to be handled humanely, conducted by whitecoats with syringes. But this kid might still get his chance to take a few potshots. I imagine him and a partner parked in the bayou at night, hunting for strays, one swinging the beam of a roof-mounted searchlight, while the other hangs out of the passenger-side window with a scoped hunting rifle (just like the bored sniper teams who are occasionally dispatched to neutralize nutria rats, prowling the swamps late at night in a wildlife-control jeep, and searching the bright plate of their spotlight for any hollow eyeshine [e.g., in bushes or in lakewater, where two jacklit tapeta, flaring out momentarily, will yield a brief Geminian glimmer]). I imagine the kid and his partner searching the darkness for those milky-green cataracts, and taking a swig of bourbon for every pair that they extinguish. A pull of Bulleit for every bullet they put in the head of an infected.