Still watching the front door in the rearview, I reach for the mirror and tilt it upward slightly, bringing the finger-oil whorl to head height in the threshold. The smudge hovers right where Mazoch’s face will be reflected. When he opens that door, he’ll walk face-first into the blur. The second he steps outside, he really will have a blankness on his face. A Holbein blankness, a death’s-head blankness: the face his father would see.
MATT AND I ARE PLAYING CHESS IN HIGHLAND Road Park, deep in a deserted picnic field. This was Matt’s idea: both the hike into the field, and the game of chess (he keeps a board in his trunk). Whether he associates the game with this place from his childhood outings with Mr. Mazoch, and just likes to play when he comes here; or whether he had hoped that by reassembling enough of the props of one memory — himself, the grass, the beige and black plastic of the figurines — his father would arrive as if bidden to complete the scene; or whether his desire to play was more subconsciously motivated than that… were questions that interested me for precisely four moves into the first game, at which point Matt captured a pawn of mine so unexpectedly as to sting my pride, and I resolved to focus entirely on the match. In the end I lost, though it was very (indeed, frustratingly) close, as was the second match that I lost. In each case the balance tipped in Mazoch’s favor only late into the middlegame, when a deadlocked block of our pieces — one of those nasty mires in which any given piece threatens three others and is defiladed in three directions by comrades ready to counterattack, and which develop on the board like (it always seems to me) that scene at the end of action movies, when the hero draws a gun on the villain, only to have a gun drawn on him by a henchman, who is surprised to have a gun drawn on him by the hero’s newly arrived sidekick, himself now compromised by the gun being drawn by a second henchman, et cetera, et cetera — finally dissolved in such a way that I was put on the defensive, masterfully pursued, and ruthlessly checkmated. Needless to say, I am determined to win one match before we leave.
When we first got here, pulling into the parking lot, I assumed we’d be surveying the area from the car. But Matt surprised me by stepping outside. What was I waiting for, he asked. Wasn’t I coming with him? Obviously I refused. The grounds of the park, which has been closed to the public since the first weeks of the outbreak, haven’t been tended to in months, and the weeds have risen far above our knees. Overgrown and deserted like this, the place has a kind of sunken, shipwrecked look, as I can recall it did anytime hurricane rains flooded the valleys between its hills. Standing beside the car, Mazoch pointed across the field toward three far live oaks, separated from us by a sprawling waste of waist-high grass.10
‘Are you kidding?’ I asked. ‘An abandoned house isn’t enough for you?’ I told him that we’d already taken enough risks today, without trudging through jungle. Matt waved off my concerns. He reminded me that the infected would have been rounded up as comprehensively here as everywhere else in the city. Then he cited, from this morning’s paper, what was meant to be a mollifying statistic: there had been only two attacks in Baton Rouge this past week. Statistically speaking, he said, we were more likely to be mauled by sharks, in the shallows of some Florida beach, than be ambushed here. Which was all that I could think about, naturally, as I followed behind him into the tall grass. Wading through the overgrowth, unable to see my feet, I felt exactly like a selachophobe in dark ocean: each step seemed to bring my ankle nearer to the gray hand that would grip it, tripping then dragging me beneath the surface, to be fed upon like chum.
Midway into the field, Mazoch stopped suddenly, cocking his head to squint at something to our left. I spotted a short shrub, nondescript, then watched as he knelt beside it. After a moment he called me over, and I saw what had caught his attention: in the thorns of the thin branches, there was a blue scrap of tattered plaid cloth. There was no telling how old it was. It could have preceded the epidemic, even, left here by some Ultimate Frisbee player, foraging for his disc. But as I watched him pore over the plaid — with a kind of Sherlockian scrupulosity, as if searching it for prints — an absurd thought occurred to me. When he looked up, his face was bloodless: ‘I know it sounds crazy.’ ‘So don’t say it.’ ‘Would you believe me if I told you my dad had a shirt like this?’ ‘I would believe you if you told me I have a shirt like this. It’s generic plaid. Everybody has this shirt.’ ‘I know, I know. It’s probably nothing. But weird, right? First the window, then this? Two traces in the same day. It’s like we’re closing in.’ Closing in on what, I did not ask him. I simply nodded and asked what he wanted to do. Set up camp, he said. Stake the site out.
We quickly stamped down a clearing of flattened stalks, like a protective ring, for about ten feet around ourselves, and we have been playing chess here for the past two hours. Standing, we can scan the horizon for any silhouettes; sitting, out of sight, we can concentrate safely on our games, listening for disturbances in the rim of the grass. It’s been forty minutes since either of us has bothered to take a periscopic survey of the park. The sun has risen higher overhead, basting us both with sweat. I doubt we’ll wait much longer beyond the close of this game.
Of which it’s still Matt’s move. He’s lying across from me, propped up on one elbow and studying his configuration of units. When he extends his free hand to hover it over a knight, I sit up and watch him deliberate. Two of my pawns are divided in such a way that he could place the knight on a square equidistant from them, forking both at once and forcing me to sacrifice one over the other. He lifts the knight in question, then lets the piece hang tentatively in the air, between his fingers, like a junkyard car from one of those crane magnets. ‘Ready now?’ I ask. He places the knight back on the square where he found it. ‘Hold your horses, Vermaelen.’ ‘Move yours.’ He smiles: ‘When I’m ready.’
I close my eyes and begin to massage them. When he’s ready. For a quiet moment there is phosphene-less dark against my eyelids, until I thumb a pressure cloud of electric blue into vision. One of the conversations we’ve been having off and on all day, in between moves in our matches, is about what being undead would be like. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to raise with Mazoch lately, and today it came up while we were flattening out our playing area. As we marched around in a wide circle, making a spectacle of ourselves, I stopped to peer across the field. ‘Do you think any infected could see us out here?’ I asked him. Matt shook his head. They were just corpses, he said. Rotting as they walked. Their eyeballs were glaucomatic and clouded and white. How well could they possibly see? If he had to guess, he’d say they were close to blind. I was surprised to hear this,11 and I told Matt that he had touched on a topic of particular fascination for me. As we finished stamping down the grass and started setting up the chessboard, I asked him how he thought the undead navigated, if not by sight.12 Oh, he’d read the usual studies, he said: lab tests suggested that reanimated eyeballs, critically compromised, were possibly over-reliant on motion and light. But he had his doubts that they could perceive visual data at all. He went on to speculate — after making his opening gambit — that the undead probably can’t see consciously, no matter how well their eyeballs are functioning. So even when the undead seem to ‘see’ an object in the distance, they must actually — Matt felt sure of this — just be seeing it in the way that a robot with sensors sees, or the way in which a sleepwalker maneuvers through an environment: by processing and responding to brute stimuli. Automatically, unreflectively, beneath the threshold of awareness. Rather than seeing in the mind’s eye way that he and I can see — when we appreciate the greenness of this grass around us, or the blueness of this sky — the undead must be all dark inside, he said. Consciously blind while physically sighted.