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This is the LCDC’s infamous flotilla of ‘processing centers.’ Until space can be made in the nursing homes or hospitals, the barges serve as auxiliary lazarettos, flat-bottom ferries on which the infected can float, waiting for some Charon to come quarantine them. Earlier this afternoon, as Matt and I were making the rounds of the real quarantines, he skimmed the thumbnail photos of their patient rosters, which LCDC still declines to post online (the logistics of such a database — a public registry of corpses’ faces — have generally been too grisly to legislate): each Friday he has to sign in at front desks for access to the rosters, then flip through the clipboards for a mug shot of his father, and today this task felt more futile than ever (he had already checked the house in Denham a final time this morning. To my surprise, he didn’t discover any muddy boot prints, or make any more mention of an extension). And now we’re here, where no one has yet compiled a patient roster. The place is too makeshift for that. Mazoch just has to make do with the binoculars.
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I’ve never considered the traveling undead before. What would happen if you reanimated while abroad? How would your undead body, discombobulated in this unfamiliar space, ever orient itself? If you were on vacation in Venice when the epidemic hit, and ended up getting infected, your body would just have to spend its undeath in Venice, wandering to your most recent haunts: the beach, the gondolas, the hotel restaurant.
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From the LCDC’s point of view, provincialism like this is a blessing. The fewer undead there are trying to pass from city to city and state to state, the easier it is to staunch the epidemic at local levels. Like Mr. Mazoch, I’d be one of the more manageable undead. Shuffling within my hundred-mile nostalgic radius, I would pose no threat to Floridians or Texans and do nothing to help spread the infection. Let this, then, be my gift to the human race: that I’ve never left this place.
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Mazoch: ‘I picked this one out because it sounded like a tank.’
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When Rachel first lit the wicks, there was still a good bit of wax built up around the bases of the brass candlesticks: the white runoff had congealed somehow anthropomorphically, in these knotted strands, such that it looked as if a congregation of gnarled ghosts was kneeling in prayer before the flame. They reminded me of the nightgown-clad and spectral infected that I had seen standing in the pasture that one morning. Midway through dinner, though, they all began to soften from the flame and melt, pooling in haunted puddles on the tablecloth.
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Because of course her respect for creation would encompass the undead. When for breakfast she eats a grapefruit on the landing, holding closed her bathrobe and watching the sunrise over the apartment complex’s courtyard, and announces, ‘It’s a perfect morning,’ she means all of it, nothing escapes her, not the sweet pink of the grapefruit, or the warm breeze, nor the bare light that collects in the glisten in her spoon, nothing, and if there happened to be an infected in the courtyard that morning, not that either. Her heart is like the sweep of a radar screen, this white line revolving a green field. Missing nothing and loving every blip. This is probably not something that Matt would understand. I barely understand. Which is why I’ve been trying to think of other terms to put it in.
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Which I think I do an okay job of. The book is bound up with the ‘zones of indistinction’ between life and death, namely what happens when political life is stripped from biological life (e.g., when a citizen is deprived of human rights), such that someone is biologically alive while legally dead. Agamben’s eponymous mascot for this mode of ‘bare life’ is homo sacer, a figure in classical Roman law who could be murdered with impunity — without its being considered criminal homicide — but who couldn’t be sacrificed. (Agamben, for this reason, refers to homo sacer as a ‘living dead man.’) Other examples abound, all of them politically disquieting: refugees who are afforded no rights in their host countries, German Jews who were fastidiously denaturalized before being murdered in the concentration camps, coma victims who are declared clinically dead before being euthanized, et al. In each case the divestment of political life from the biological body authorizes the murder, torture, or mistreatment of the living-dead man in question — a point that, in however slurred or garbled a fashion, I think I’m able to convey to Rachel.