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quarantines, to see and say goodbye to undead relatives there. Public places were well protected, she said, and so was the relief center. If I wanted to lock myself away, fine, but I couldn’t bury her alive with me. She needed to do what she could to help. She was going out, and that was that.
    Before she left, as despite my protests she almost always did, she would kiss me on the cheek, promising me that she would be prudent. Prudent! In those khaki shorts and that sleeveless tank top, every inch of exposed skin practically begging to be bitten! The whole time she was gone I would sit in my spot on the living room sofa, watching the news in the dark and nursing dark thoughts about Rachel. The news, which showed people being bitten in the streets, the very streets Rachel was now wandering. Every minute that I waited for her someone new on the news was being bitten—some fresh victim. Then, to compound my anxiety during commercials, I would reread FIGHT THE BITE , skimming the chapter on domestic infections, with its thorough list of precautions (such as wearing mouthguards to bed, in the event of nighttime reanimation; or conducting full-body searches; or practicing ‘defamiliarization’ 20 techniques). When after a few hours of this Rachel did come home, walking
through the door and exclaiming ‘It’s so beautiful outside!’, how coolly and paranoiacally I felt obliged to receive her. On bad days I would even make her bare her forearms and ankles, her calves, so that I could inspect them for bite wounds, as if she would ever try to conceal such a thing from me (what was more likely, of course, was that she would have unknowingly ingested infected food, but however much I worried about that I had no way of testing her for it, so it was the ankles that these afternoons I examined). ‘What kind of monster do you think I am,’ Rachel would cry, as I lifted her pants leg and palpated the unbroken skin of her thigh, ‘that I would let my own lover be infected?’ Or, if she caught me eyeballing her calf from across the room: ‘If you don’t stop looking at me like that, I’m going to freak out. Really, I’m starting to freak out.’ Then, so that she didn’t ‘freak out’ and begin weeping, I would have to embrace her trembling body, hold her close to me and rub her back, when for all I knew there was some plum-colored ring of teethmarks still hidden, like a hickey, beneath the rim of her sock… which finally one day felt to me so much like hugging a rabid dog (like rubbing a rabid dog’s back and telling this rabid dog in an earnest voice that I trusted it) that I grew nauseated with resentment, of her and of myself for yielding to her, and pushed her away from me. To be bitten at the throat mid-sentence, even while I was telling her that I loved and trusted her! To die the death of some dumb Romeo, kissing poisoned lips to prove his love! ‘Look,’ I said, waving a copy of FIGHT THE BITE in my hand, ‘we need to observe the proper precautions. We’re behaving like idiots.’ ‘What’s idiotic is that if we go on like this we’ll kill each other.’
    She was alluding to a recent news story, in which a man, returning home drunk, startled his wife and was shot dead by
her, who in her keyed-up state had mistaken him for infected. But that premonition—‘We’ll kill each other’—disquieted me at a much more personal level. It was almost as if Rachel were tweaking my conscience. For at night I would imagine it, killing her, as I lay in bed unable to sleep. ‘What would I have to do,’ I would ask myself, ‘if this creature, asleep on my chest, woke and was monstrous?’ There was never really any question: I would have to throw the comforter, verdant and spring-patterned, over her head, not only to keep her from biting me but also to keep me from seeing her face; then I would have to