The way that the eye can pinch that one point — where the lefthand sides of the cube meet in a Y at the bottom — and pull it perspectivally forward, such that the cube telescopes out, or else press it back, such that
the cube collapses, and how easy to toggle back and forth between the two cubes. This was how it felt when I watched the whole crowd convert: alive, undead. As if (to adopt Wittgenstein’s expression) I was merely ‘seeing them as’ undead. As if I was merely focusing on whatever point of the crowd drew forth their undead aspect, and as if — simply by blinking my eyes or scanning over the image — I might ‘see them as’ alive again, their undeath disappearing into their mortal aspect as surely as the Necker cube withdraws back into its sunkenness. Wittgenstein describes playing a similar game himself one day, when he attempted to see human beings as automata: ‘[C]an’t I imagine,’ he writes, ‘that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness…? …“The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism.”… [It] will produce… some kind of uncanny feeling… Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-piece of a window as a swastika, for example.’ Just so was I trying, as I watched the video, to see the automata there as living people. But they were utterly lost to their undead aspect, no amount of crossing my eyes would draw their liveliness out of them. The only way to simulate the double-aspectual toggling of ‘alive, undead, alive, undead’ was to rewind and fast-forward the video, dragging the Youtube player’s gray progress bar back and forth, so that the crowd onscreen would jerkily revert from corpses to human beings and back again. ‘That’s awful,’ Rachel said, when I showed it to her, and I said, ‘Who watches such a thing and wants to go for a walk?’
20
This is the chapter’s term for the various coping mechanisms required when confronting undead loved ones. Part of the reason that the house is such a treacherous environment, according to the pamphlet, is that people fall prey to fatal misrecognitions there: husbands hug undead wives; mothers dandle undead children. When you see your spouse standing before the refrigerator, or see your child stumbling out of the bathroom at night, you are primed by the context to see them as alive. And so, to prepare you for these kinds of encounters, the chapter includes a series of mental exercises and thought experiments that you can practice, all involving a process called ‘defamiliarization.’
21
I often describe their moan as unearthly, but what I really mean is that it is ‘earthly’ in the most exact sense of the word. When an undead opens its mouth and produces that low, guttural sound, as dark and compact as garden dirt, what the moan sounds like is an alarm of the earth. As if, by trespassing aboveground when they should be buried beneath six feet of earth, the undead have triggered some tocsin of the earth, and the reediness of their lowing is its own siren.
22
Even today, I cannot conceive of undeath except in terms of these neithers: to the degree that I understand it at all, it is still as that which resists understanding. A limit condition, irreducible to the usual dichotomies. For this reason the designation ‘living dead’—in its oxymoronic self-negation — seems to sum up best the fundamental in-between-ness of the creatures. In any given dichotomy, they will constitute neither the positive nor the negative pole — neither living nor dead, neither psychopath nor psychopomp — but everything that circulates between them. That is why any ‘neither _____ nor _____’ construction, yoking together any two oppositional terms, will approximate the essence of undeath for me: the creatures coincide with the very structure of the correlative conjunction. They are like walking ‘neither _____ nor _____’s, Janus-faced with blanks.
23
It seems clear, at any rate, that the undead don’t feel pain. Matt assumes that they don’t feel anything at all. For my part, I have always assumed that being undead would feel the same way that a sleeping foot feels, when you sit on it for too long and try to flex your toes: there is numbness initially, then a cold prickling sensation, following fast behind that first rush of blood. Wherever an infected bites you, I imagine, the bite wound must form a nidus of numb tingling, which spreads steadily outward: starting from the arm and climbing up the shoulder, across the chest, over the stomach, until your whole body feels asleep. That is what it would feel like to be undead, I often think.
24
From what I can gather her father, exposed to all manner of diseases and antibiotic-resistant microbes circulating through the hospital, eventually developed something like staph infection.
25
For the first few weeks, the mucous comprised black chunks of tar, which were discharged darkly into the fluid in the dangling bag. When Rachel first described this, I imagined ashy particles weightlessly afloat, stirred up then sinking, like tealeaves in the wake of a press pot’s plunger. She said that that’s more or less right, except that after a while the discharge tended to be ‘more phlegmatic.’
26
It wasn’t until a week later that LCDC — in part to quiet the public’s Judgment Day-flavored anxieties — conducted two experiments: first, they excavated a control group of corpses, all of them buried before the first reported case of infection and none of them reanimated; second, to be certain, they injected syringes of infected blood into their bodies (with no results). Which is to say, it wasn’t until a week later that people realized that only the freshly dead and mortally infected were reanimating.
27
Here’s what I remember about the drive there: that Rachel stared gloomily out of the passenger-side window and said nothing for the duration, and that I felt too self-conscious about the momentousness of the trip to try to say anything myself. What might have been said? The rural road that led to the cemetery was lined with tall, fresh pines, and in the spare tena. m. light only their tips were lit. Sunlight slanted across the uppermost branches, leaving everything below cold with shadow, and the sight of it reminded me of the sensation of doing dishes in the sink: that moment when the drain has been plugged and the basin filled with frigid water, and the hands are plunged, wrist-deep, into the cold to scrub the dishes, leaving everything from the forearm up dry. Something might have been said about that. But the more calmed I became by this comparison — as I watched the sunstruck treetops lean and all the pine needles waver a little in a wind that I couldn’t feel, and as I recalled the glovelike encompassing frigidness of reaching my hands down into dishwater — the more frivolous I felt it to be, as a thing to say, given the circumstances. So I didn’t share this comparison with Rachel, who generally likes it when I point out effects of light. Instead I placed my hand on her thigh, and, letting out a surprised grateful noise like ‘Mm,’ she covered it with her own.
28
Could anything rankle Rachel more than what must seem like Mazoch’s breezy disregard, his flagrant ingratitude, for the luck of a recrudescent father? Her own father taken first by disease, then by death, then by an undeath that did not bear him forth on its tide… and here is a son whose apparent new lifegoal is to find and eliminate, once and for all, the father who is always so reliably returned to him. Returned from divorce (for Mr. Mazoch did stick around to help raise Matt), returned from a near-fatal heart attack (which Mr. Mazoch survived), returned even from death: gliding back like some obedient fatherly boomerang from every distance into which life heaves him from Matt, who, as if mistaking him for skeet, steels himself now to pull the trigger. Unthinkable and unfair, it must seem to Rachel, probably.