“As I see it, suicide or zombification.”
“Don’t focus on the negative, Jack. Think! How can we fix this?”
I made my jaw go slack and drooled. “Brains. I could eat your brains!” I held out my arms like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, a film that disgraces monsters everywhere.
In Mary Shelley’s original novel, the creature is sympathetic, a victim of human hatred and intolerance; he speaks French, reads Milton, and loves flowers. He is not a natural-born killer; society turns him into one.
Karloff’s mute brute, on the other hand, yearns for flesh and blood from the get-go. He turns crowds into mobs and creates fear and loathing, yet his version is the one that lives in our imagination, not Shelley’s.
To pervert Rodney Dangerfield: Monsters can’t get no respect.
Lucy slapped my forearm. “That’s not funny,” she said, and started to cry.
“You cry because there’s truth in my jest,” I said. “Which is the goal of all effective humor, exposing the hidden pain in pleasure. The sorrow underneath all we do. The tragedy of our lives. I will be one of them soon, my dear, and I may indeed want to eat your brains. I have a decision to make. To be dead or undead. That is the question.”
“Let me look at your shoulder.”
The area surrounding the bite was plum purple and gashed open, the blood already coagulated. I felt beatific, angelic, but my failure to bleed was no miracle; it was the virus congealing my blood, freezing it, stopping it in its tracks and turning me into something both sub- and über-human. If the news reports and movies were true, I would have flulike symptoms-a fever, vomiting, chills, joint pain-then a numbing sensation, followed by a brief death culminating in my reanimation as one of the living dead. The whole process could take anywhere from six to thirty-six hours-the length of the average birth.
Lucy glanced at the wound and moved several inches away from me. “You could try electrocuting yourself with the Christmas tree lights,” she suggested.
“Why don’t we have any tools?” I asked, getting up to poke around the basement. “I can’t even find a hammer. Didn’t we ever have occasion to hammer something? A nail perhaps?”
I was already speaking in the past tense.
“A hammer would come in handy now,” Lucy said. “We could fortify the door.”
“Or rope,” I said. “Why don’t we have any rope? We don’t even have a rope to hang yourself with.”
“Or a pot to piss in.”
“Rope wouldn’t do anything anyway. I have to destroy my brain. With hanging I’d just be a zombie with a broken neck. That could prove to be a disadvantage in my search for food, I suppose.”
“But does natural selection, survival of the fittest, apply to the living dead?” Lucy asked. “I mean, does it matter at that point? Will you need to compete with other zombies for food? Or will you live, or unlive, regardless?”
My bite site stank like rotten pork shoulder. My flesh was putrefying and I felt feverish. Or maybe it was psychosomatic. I sat down on the concrete floor and looked at my wife.
“It’s a valid question,” she said, “if you decide to, you know, go the zombie route.”
Lucy wore her hair in a short, mannish cut, which I wished she would grow out into a softer style. But I never asked her to. God forbid I should appear controlling or, even worse, a card-carrying member of the patriarchy who dared suggest she assume a more traditionally feminine appearance.
She was a big-boned woman, but thin, so that her knees, elbows, and feet stuck out like knobs, almost bursting through her pale, blue-veined skin. She could have gained fifteen pounds. I could see her skeleton, the thinnest veneer of flesh covering it, with no body fat to speak of. Although I loved her dearly, sometimes, in bed, her bones ground into me and hurt.
But yum. If I could gnaw on one of those bones now as I write this. Just a strip of flesh hanging down would do. The smallest sinew is all I need.
MUFFLED BY THE cellar door, the moans of the undead sounded like an avant-garde chorus, a John Cage composition. The United States of the Undead: A Sonata in the Key of Reanimation. At the end of the cacophonous piece, the orchestra, consisting of infected musicians in tattered tuxedos, eats the audience.
It was hot; my shoulder was disintegrating. Lucy held my forehead and stroked my back while I vomited everything I’d ever ingested: Hershey’s Kisses, funnel cakes, peach pits, mother’s milk.
“You’re a regular Florence Nightingale,” I told her, wiping my lips with the back of my hand. There was a metallic taste in my mouth, like I was sucking on rusty nails or had eaten liver at a roadside diner in the rural South.
“I’d rather be Hot Lips Houlihan,” she said.
“Walt Whitman was a nurse in the Civil War.”
“I wonder what Walt would’ve thought of the living dead,” Lucy said.
“He’d drink the tasteless water of their souls.”
Lucy felt my forehead. She fought back tears, my little trouper.
“You’re burning up,” she said.
“I’m on fire for you, baby. You make me hot.”
She kissed my cheek. “Let’s make love,” she whispered. “One last time.”
Her voice was atonal and shrill, a screech owl in my ear, Yoko Ono singing. I knew it was just my senses, heightened by the fever, as well as the virus coursing through my veins, but I needed her to be quiet.
So I kissed her. She sucked in her breath and turned her head, wrinkling her nose and gagging. I must have tasted like death, but still she bent forward for another kiss.
“You need an Altoid,” she said.
“They’re curiously strong,” I said, “and I’m decaying.”
I took her in my arms and we kissed again. A violent chill overtook me and I turned my head to the side, coughing up what looked like a piece of lung.
“What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette,” I said.
“This would be an excellent time for you to start smoking. I mean, why not? At this point, you’ve got nothing to lose.”
She put her head on my shoulder, then started back in horror when she felt its wetness. A few pieces of my meat stuck to her hair. They were the size and color of bacon bits and although they were pulsating, throbbing, beating with my heart, I couldn’t feel a thing.
Lucy stood up, located the stuff sack for our tent, and tied it around my wound in a sloppy tourniquet.
“What’s the plan?” she asked.
“Plan?”
“Come on, Jack. You always have a plan. And I always think it won’t work and doubt you and beg you not to do it. You ignore me and do it anyway and it does work, wonderfully, in fact, and everything’s okay and I’m proved wrong again.”
“Like the time I successfully lobbied to deny Dobson tenure?”
“I was thinking of that ugly-ass cat-scratching post you constructed out of old carpet and clothes. But yeah, poor Dobson. I felt sorrier for his wife, actually.”
“He’s an idiot”-I coughed up a speck of blood-“and she’s a bitch.”
“They’re probably zombies by now.”
“And the cats loved that post. They used it all the time, sparing the ridiculously expensive couch you made us buy.”
“My point precisely. You were absolutely right. You always are.”
The undead rattled the door. They wouldn’t leave until they broke it down; they had nothing better to do.
“I don’t have a plan, Lucy-kins,” I said. “Unfortunately, there is no master plan. No meta-narrative.”
“No clockmaker?”
“No exit.”
“Hell is other zombies,” she said.
“Hell is for children.”
“Love is a battlefield.”
“A ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’” I said. “Cowritten by Plato and Jesse Jackson. Break beats provided by Chuck D.”
Lucy put her chin on her knees and wrapped her arms around her shins. “I can’t do this,” she said to the floor.
“Can’t do what?”
“We’ve got a real problem here, Jack,” she whispered. Her eyes had a surprised look about them, round and alert, the eyebrows high on her forehead and plucked to a thin arch. “In a few hours, you’re going to be a zombie. And I’m either going to be devoured by you or else bitten and turned into a zombie myself. At the very least I’ll be a widow.” She paused and cocked her head to one side. “But if you join the ranks of the undead,” she continued, placing a finger on her lips, “and I manage to escape unharmed and survive as a human, would I be a widow then? Technically speaking, I mean. Is there a word yet for that relationship?”