I shake my head. This is easily Matt’s most unnerving example yet. ‘The undead don’t spread their infection merely by moving,’ I remind him, ‘by walking across a map as Command and Conquer ’s units do.’ They do so by biting other humans. And whereas the enemy AI in videogames really are mindlessly violent — programmed to attack anything within their radius of awareness — the undead are less predictable. An infected might stagger for hundreds of miles without biting another human, without snuffing out a single mortal POV, and so without exhausting one speck of fog of war. And how is his model supposed to account for that? Do I have a better one, he asks? I consider bringing up Bubble Bobble, then shake my head again. Perhaps it would be best to avoid videogames altogether: the more abstractly Matt thinks about the pandemic, I realize, the less capable he is of individuating the undead. They just become blind tiles on a monolith of mini-screens, or an all-obliterating boundary line, or — as with Command and Conquer—a literal army of darkness. Points on a chart to be wiped out.
How could he look them in the eye as often as he does, zoomed in through the binocular lenses like that, and not wonder what might be going on inside them? How could he conclude that they are experiencing nothing, that there is nothing it is like to be them? ‘They just don’t seem blind,’ I say. ‘Have you ever seen one in person? Without binoculars, I mean?’
‘No,’ he admits, shrugging. I lean over the chessboard to get his attention: ‘Well, I have,’ I tell him. I try to describe my only encounter with an undead: how I was out for a walk one night when I spotted it; how it exuded this eerie awareness, palpable even from two blocks away. ‘I couldn’t tell whether it saw me,’ I say. ‘But it definitely knew I was there. It was quote unquote looking directly at me.’
Matt raises an eyebrow, unfazed, then raises his knight from the board. ‘It’s your move,’ he says, setting the knight down between my pawns. I advance the farther of the two — as I have been planning — and place it in the strike zone of one of his. If he captures the remaining fork-pawn with his knight, I’ll be able to capture his pawn with my own, moving it that much closer to the eighth rank.
The advance of a pawn to the eighth rank! Now here is a model for transformation into undeath. Whenever a pawn reaches the end of the chessboard, it is finally able to metamorphose into a queen. A new system of moves opens up to it. What used to be impossible, even to conceive, has been unlocked inside it, and suddenly the entire board is in play. There has bloomed in its chest, where once a pulsion moved it only forward and only one square at a time, a compass rose, given to limitless extension in every direction.
What if that is what it is like to become undead? Not like being blinded, but just the opposite: like being promoted into a new modality of seeing, one that would seem infinitely advanced and incomprehensible to mortals. For all Matt knows, the undead could have communal vision, routed by a hive mind, such that what any undead sees the entire species sees.15 If that were the case, then whenever a random undead looked at Matt, it would be a way for Mr. Mazoch to look at Matt. Any gesture Matt wanted to convey to his father could simply be conveyed to that undead, as to a courier: one relay in a network of seeing. I try to imagine what it must have been like for him, those first few seconds after reanimation. Mr. Mazoch must have felt whatever it is that the promoted pawn feels, right inside his eyebalclass="underline" now a vision moves laterally, now backward, with the white ease of the white queen, and so different are these rules that it feels as if there are no rules. Why can’t Matt imagine that that is what happened to his father?
‘Versmallen, go.’ Ah. He has captured my pawn with his, keeping it from ever reaching the eighth rank. I move forward a knight of my own, and a breeze stirs the grass around us. The whole world seems to sway. ‘It’s getting hot,’ I say, mopping sweat from my forehead. Matt nods. He places his finger on the tip of his king and wobbles the piece back and forth a little, as if to topple it in forfeit. But a moment after letting it droop, he cups the base of its skull with his fingertip, then lifts the piece to a standing position. I watch the king as it rises (or seems to rise, uncannily, by itself), gliding from back to feet with this Nosferatu stiffness.
THE NIGHT THAT I FIRST SAW AN INFECTED WAS A few weeks into the epidemic, a transitional period, when conditions were stabilizing but when I was nevertheless still afraid to leave our apartment. LCDC had lifted its curfew; the BRPD had issued a public statement declaring streets ‘under control’; and quarantines were by then up and running. Almost no one believed — as initially everyone had, when after The Broadcast16 all we knew was that the dead were rising, biting, proliferating virally — that societal collapse and its concomitant anarchy were only one breached stronghold away. The grocery stores were actually selling supplies again, rather than being raided for them, and newscasters recited ‘findings’ from scientific studies on the undead, rather than breathless exhortations to protect our loved ones. In short, much of the chaos of the early days had dissipated, the way a nightmare’s logic will midway through the morning’s piss, or a morning’s mist will mid-afternoon.
Nevertheless, I remained afraid to leave our apartment. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Rachel and I had been told by panicked newscasters to board up our windows and hoard up on canned goods. During those first seventy-two hours, all of Baton Rouge was barricaded. The only people who dared step outdoors were soldiers in riot gear and virologists in canary-yellow biohazard suits. Then one morning Rachel and I turned on the TV, and LCDC was holding a press conference. A spokeswoman at a podium told us all how safe it was to go outside. The worst had already passed, we were told. The virus was not airborne, we were told. Knowing what we knew now about the infection, an outbreak could never spread that fast again. The LCDC had been working around the clock to print and distribute copies of FIGHT THE BITE, which condensed all available knowledge about the epidemic. Copies had been mailed to census addresses, and were available in bulk at relief shelters. So long as we studied these survival manuals carefully, and exercised the proper precautions, it should be safe to leave our homes.
Rachel, heartened by the news, was eager to explore the city. We hadn’t seen daylight in days, and our diet had been reduced to microwave-heated green beans and oatmeal. Now that the curfew had been eased, Rachel wanted to take a walk to the LSU Lakes and see sun sparkling on water. She wanted to see what new foods they had for us to eat at the relief tents on the campus fairgrounds. She wanted to drive to the grocery store and buy real food. And eventually she wanted to visit her father’s grave. She wanted me to come with her.
Only, I didn’t share Rachel or the public’s faith in LCDC’s reassurances. Pace the spokeswoman at the podium, it struck me that in fact nothing would be simpler than for a single stray infected to spark another citywide outbreak. Or for a security breach in a quarantine to unleash hundreds of infected at once. Or for the so-called ‘virus’—which no scientist had actually identified beneath a microscope, even as they assured us it was not airborne — to simply mutate overnight, as real viruses are wont to do, and make itself airborne. Then Baton Rouge would again devolve into a Hieronymus Bosch pit, as we had all watched it do only days beforehand: telephones down, emergency teams unavailable, escape routes jammed with traffic, neighborhoods flooded as at Mardi Gras with bacchantes. Who could guarantee that this stability was anything more than a lull? No, the sensible thing, it seemed to me, was to just batten17 down the hatches and wait. A week, two weeks, until we were absolutely sure that conditions would remain stable outside. Even if that meant locking and bolting our apartment door and swallowing the proverbial key.