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beat her to death with the baseball bat that we stow under the bed. The trick, I thought, was to be beating on a mound beneath the covers. To be beating some soft writhing green thing, rather than Rachel, nude and recognizable. And to drag her body, still bundled in blankets, out to the street without ever once actually looking at her face, which would have to be as forbidden to me as Eurydice’s, or Medusa’s. I didn’t like to think about it.
    â€˜That’s absurd,’ I told her, ‘we’re not going to kill each other .’ But I was noticeably shaken by what she’d said, and she probably could have guessed what I was thinking. First, that it was emotionally corrosive to fantasize so much about murdering my lover, to hold her in such distrust, and second, that yes, perhaps it was possible, one night I might make a mistake and strike at her warm flesh.
    It was around this time that Rachel wrote me the email reminding me of Tunica Hills, recalling the Bethlehem stars there and insisting on how vital to the relationship our taking quiet walks and watching afternoon light together was. How long could I remain holed up in this gloomy apartment, as if in a nuclear bunker, she wanted to know? And how long did I realistically expect her to stay here with me? If I didn’t learn to leave the apartment, she would have to leave, even if it meant moving back in with her mom. Eventually, she wrote, I would have to come to terms with what was happening, because in all likelihood it
would go on happening for months, maybe years. And if others had come to terms with it, why couldn’t I? That there were periodic flare-ups in shopping malls didn’t seem to derail people’s lives any more than that, in Tel Aviv, there were periodic suicide bombings in cafés and public buses, she wrote. People drove to the grocery store (‘Even Whole Foods!’) as they always had, and if on the way there they spotted an infected in the road, very well, they might pull over to look at it (the way that when a black bear, a cub, wanders out onto the shoulder of a rural highway, people always pull over to photograph it), or else they might just drive past it altogether indifferently. And when a street was overrun with infected, police were quick to block it off with barriers and road flares, warning traffic away, until all the infected could be detained. Was I aware that more people were attacked in their homes than in public spaces? (I wasn’t.) Or that, in general, it was safer to walk outdoors, where assiduous police officers combed the streets all hours, than to stay alone inside? (Again, no.) The infected weren’t monsters, she wrote, or killing machines. They wouldn’t chase you down relentlessly to bite you. They were just diseased, brain-damaged people, and they were only as dangerous as you allowed them to be. If you didn’t put yourself in a position to be bitten, you wouldn’t be. Any able-bodied person could outrun them. Everyone else had realized this by now. The only reason that I hadn’t—Rachel wrote—was that I refused to go outside. Once I saw for myself how calm things had become, the shock would wear off. She concluded her email with a caricature of the redneck-ascetic existence that I risked slipping into: living in paranoid withdrawal in a fallout shelter, feeding on canned goods, polishing my rifles, prophesying dissolution for a society that was as homeostatic and heedless of me as ever. Swearing at a government I didn’t trust to protect me. ‘Let’s not live that way. Love, Rachel.’
    So later that same night, at around three a.m., while Rachel was sleeping and while I couldn’t seem to, I decided to go for a
walk. As if I were both the hands and the child thrown into the deep end by the hands. Heading out from our apartment, I made my way through residential neighborhoods toward the LSU Lakes. It was a typically humid Louisiana