We Live in Water: Stories

by Jess Walter

  The manager was watching the girl zombie steam my milk when Brando screwed up the next order, too, turning a simple double cappuccino into “Dapple cat beano—”, a hungry hitch on that word cat, and you could feel the other businesspeople in the Starbucks-Financial tense, and even the short-sleeved manager knew this could be trouble, no doubt thinking back to their training (apparently, they put four or five of them in a room with an actual cat and repeatedly stress DON’T EAT CAT, which has to be tough when every fiber of the zombie’s being is telling him to EAT CAT); and in the meantime, poor Brando was humming, just about full tilt. At that point, of course, the manager should have called the Starbucks-Financial security guards to come over from the banking side or called whatever priva-police firm had that contract, but instead he put a hand up to the dozen or so of us in the store and he walked calmly over to the kid and said, “Brando, why don’t you go into the break room and relax for a few minutes.” But Brando’s red-veined eyes were darting around the room and he started making those deeper guttural noises, and look, I was not without sympathy for the manager, or for Brando, or for the twitchy zombie girl running the steamer, who looked over at her fish-skinned counterpart, both of them now thinking ca-a-a-at, salivating like someone had yelled chocolate in a kindergarten, the girl zombie humming too now, the soy milk for my latte climbing to two hundred degrees—“Miss,” I said—and still my soy was hissing and burbling, half to China Syndrome, the boiling riling everyone up, the manager calmly saying “Brando, Brando, Brando,” and I suppose I was still freaked by the bad news from my doctor’s appointment, because I admit it, I raised my voice: “Miss, you’re burning it,” and when she didn’t even acknowledge me, just kept humming and watching Brando, I clapped my hands and yelled, “Stop it!” And that’s when the manager shot me a look that said You’re not helping! And hell, I knew I wasn’t helping, but who doesn’t get frustrated, I mean, I wouldn’t want that manager’s life and I certainly wouldn’t want to be some twenty-one-year-old with full-on Hypo-ETE but we all have our crosses to bear, right? I just wanted a stupid cup of coffee. And I’d have stormed out right then, but my iVice had already been debited and I suppose there was something else too, something personal—I’m willing to acknowledge that—I mean how would you feel if your girlfriend got so depressed that she actually chose to start taking Replexen, knowing it could make her a slow-witted, oversexed night-crawler, how would you feel if the woman you loved actually CHOSE zombie life (I know, we’re not supposed to . . . ) over the apparently unbearable pain of a normal life with you? So fuck-me sue-me yes yes yes I was short-tempered! You bet your ass I was short-tempered, and I yelled at that poor pale girl, “Hey Zombie! You’re scalding my fucking latte!”

  I know.

  We’re not supposed to call them zombies.

  What was I supposed to say, “Excuse me, unfortunate sufferer of hypo-endocrinal-thyro-encephalitis, please stop burning my coffee”?

  I suppose it was inevitable what happened next. As it unfolded I felt awful. I still feel awful—but in my defense, I was the only customer who didn’t turn and run right then, as Brando flashed his teeth and pit-bulled the manager, leaped right into the poor guy’s chest, both of them tumbling to the ground. In fact, I actually tried to distract him, clapping my hands and yelling as he worked over the poor screaming manager. And to be fair, Brando didn’t get far. He bit but he didn’t chew . . . is I guess how you’d say it. He really wasn’t trying to eat the manager. He was just scared and agitated. Probably not a distinction the manager was making at that time, with Brando yowling, biting and scratching, sinewy veins popping beneath translucent skin, the manager lying on his back, covering his face, weeping, “Oh God,” as Brando snarled and struck and the girl zombie yowled in sympathy, still standing there, steaming my soy milk, which was like magma now, gurgling over the side of the pitcher. And if I give myself credit for anything, it’s thinking quickly on my feet. I grabbed the scalding pitcher out of her hand and threw the boiling milk on Brando, who reared his head like a bridled horse, snarled and spun on me as I turned and ran for the door, Brando now bounding over the counter and toward me like a hungry wolf, knocking over displays of coffee cups and food-mortgage brochures as he ran straight into the arms of two Starbucks-Financial security guys, who quickly Tasered the poor guy to the ground and, eventually, into submission.

  I stood on the sidewalk with the gathered crowd as the security guys loaded the hog-tied, muzzled Brando into the back of a Halliburton priva-police car, the poor kid still making that awful yowling noise, which shivered up my neck.

  “What happened?” a young man asked.

  “Zombie attack,” a woman said.

  I muttered, “You’re not supposed to call them that.”

  It was the first documented attack in months and the sim-tweets went crazy, as they always do when the subject is Hypo-ETE. The tweet was up for hours, twice as long as any election news; only the Florida evacuation tweet was up longer that week. Most of the noise came from Apocalyptics ranting about Revelations, law-and-order types calling for another crackdown on Replexen, and on the other side Hypo-ETE activists calling for mercy, for understanding, and for more government funding for programs aimed at those kids born into Replexen addiction, family support groups accusing the “irate customer” of being an agitator (thankfully, I wasn’t named). Starbucks-Financial stock dropped a couple of points after that (I managed to short the whole coffee finance sector for my Indonesian clients), and the company announced it would “revisit its Hypo-ETE retraining program.” But, honestly, it just seemed like the whole thing would fade. The manager would get a good payout, I’d get a free latte, the zombies would get retrained (“Brando. Do not eat cat.”), and the world would go on. Or so I thought.

  2

  EVERYONE HAS an opinion about when it all went to hell: this war, that epidemic, the ten billion people threshold, the twelve, this environmental disaster, the repeated economic collapses, suicide pacts, anti-procreation laws, nuclear accidents, terrorist dirty bombs, polar thaws, rolling famines—blah blah blah, it’s getting to where you can’t watch the sim-tweets without someone saying this is the end of the world or that—genetic piracy, food factory contaminations, the Wasatch uprising, Saudi death squads, the Arizona border war. Animal extinctions. Ozone tumors. And, of course, the so-called zombie drug.

  But here’s what I’ve come to believe. That maybe it’s no different now than it ever was. Maybe it’s ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you’re alive for a while, and then you realize you’re going to die, and that’s such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you.

  Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn’t it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet?

  Yes, we’ve ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we’re always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we’re getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we’ve got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely—the statistics say you’re more likely to be killed by lightning—a person.

  But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It’s always the Apocalypse. The world hasn’t gone to shit. The world is shit.

  All I’d asked was that it be better managed.

  But four days after the Starbucks-Financial incident, Apocalyptics began protesting Starbucks-Financial headquarters and the company announced the complete suspension of its zombie retraining program, which got the Hypo-ETE activists and suppor
t groups going again about the 60 percent zombie unemployment rate. Then, worst of all, some vigilantes came to Seattle from the country and killed a nineteen-year-old zombie girl with an antique hunting rifle, shot her outside a club and left her body outside a Starbucks-Financial.

  All because I’d wanted better service.

  The dead zombie girl was all over the news-tweets. I couldn’t stop staring at her photo. Her ashen-white skin glistened in the blue light. Of course it wasn’t Marci; it looked nothing like her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my old girlfriend. I sat that night in our apartment on Queen Anne Hill, staring at the results from my full body scan, the doors and windows double-locked, low music playing, and I wondered if things might have been different.

  3

  MARCI HAD a cousin who went zombie a few years back, before it was called that. It was the usual thing: Stephanie came from a poor family, got low scores on her sixth-grade E-RADs—we’re talking food-service low, back-labor low. Imagine being a twelve-year-old girl and being told that all you can ever aspire to is greeter at a Walmart-Schwab. Stephanie had childhood diabetes, and since her parents’ application for gene therapy had been rejected, her own chances of getting a childbirth license were nil. So she started snorting Replexen. This was right after kids in clubs discovered that grinding up the weight-loss/metabolism-boosting pill could give them an ungodly buzz, slow time, allow them to dance and screw all night, and although it was already connected to the symptoms of Hypo-ETE—milky eyes, pale skin, increased hunger, slow-witted aggressiveness—it didn’t stop them. For some, that only seemed to make the high better.

  One day, Marci and I were watching sim-tweets of the Northeast Portland Riots—during the debate over anti-harassment laws and the whole Don’t-Call-Them-Zombies campaign.

  “Poor Stephanie,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Marci said. “Maybe she knew what she was doing.”

  Afterward, people at work would ask me, Did you suspect? Of course, after someone leaves, you find all sorts of clues, look back on conversations that suddenly have great significance, but honestly, that’s the first thing I remember, Marci saying about her zombie cousin, Maybe she knew what she was doing.

  Of course, I had known for some time that Marci wasn’t happy. Our last couple of years had been tough on her, tough on both of us. Most of our friends had moved out of the city. Our apartment had lost most of its value. That fall, our procreation application had been red-flagged—Marci’s gene scan had uncovered some recessive issue. I told her I didn’t care if we had a kid. But it became part of the class stuff between us: I was from money, Marci wasn’t; I’d aced my E-RADs and Gen-Tests; she’d been borderline in both. None of that had mattered when we’d started seeing each other. And it still didn’t for me. But when the procreation board said she couldn’t have a kid? I guess it was too much for her.

  But did I know Marci was using Replexen? I don’t think so. It’s hard to separate what you suspect from what you know later. Certainly, she seemed off that spring, disoriented, nervous, wearing more makeup, eating more, yet somehow getting thinner. Then I got promoted at work, to the Asian desk, only days after Marci’s job was eliminated. We’re fine, I kept telling her, and I meant financially. But it must have seemed insane to her, the way I just kept saying we were fine. That March there was a story on the sim-tweets about a couple in the Magnolia neighborhood who had chosen to go zombie. I turned away from the screen to Marci and I just . . . asked. Would you ever?

  I think she’d been waiting for me to bring it up. “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “Yes, what?” I asked.

  Yes, she had used Replexen. A few times. Snorted it.

  I asked, “Recently?” She slumped in her chair.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How recently?”

  “I’m using it now,” she whispered.

  We were in the living room. I stood. And for some reason, the question that popped into my mind was this one: “Where did you get it?”

  She glanced up at me and, in that moment, I suppose we were thinking the same thing—why, when Marci tells me she’s taking the most dangerous club drug in the world, the first thing to pop into my mind would not be her health, but where she had gotten it.

  A few months earlier, Marci and I had gone through an especially difficult time. Her company had just been bought up and the inevitable squeeze had begun. Marci had wanted to leave Seattle, to move closer to her family, but my company was thriving, so I said no. She said I was imperious and blind to reality; I said she was defeatist. We split up for a few weeks before we realized we’d made a mistake and got back together. It was only after she came back that time that I began to suspect Marci had gone back to her previous boyfriend, Andrew. He was a club owner and a nonbie, one of the lucky fifteen percent who could use Replexen without any of the undesirable zombie side effects.

  So I asked: “Did you get the drugs from Andrew?”

  “No,” she said, “I got them from a woman I used to work with.”

  “What woman?”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “Why would you do that, Marci?”

  “Oh, Owen,” she said, “this isn’t about you. It’s about me.”

  It was the cliché that got to me. (“Yeah, you’re right, it’s about you, Marci . . . you’re becoming a fucking zombie!”) I yanked her sleeve up and saw the red marks against her white skin, and Jesus, shooting it is twice as dangerous as snorting it. Once your skin starts to go you’ve already done permanent damage. She shrank away from me, cried, apologized, promised to get treatment, and when we went to bed that night I honestly believed we could get through this, that we’d caught it in time. I spent the next day applying for loans from all the food-service-banks—Starbucks-Financial, Walmart-Schwab, KFC/B-of-A. I would have debited my apartment, my car, my organs for her treatment, but I came home from work that night and she was gone. No sim, no note, no nothing.

  I simmed our friends and her parents, her old coworkers, but no one had heard from Marci. I even went to see her old boyfriend, Andrew, at his club in what was still called the U-District, even though the state university there had shut down years earlier. Andrew was bald and lean—a little taller than me, with a long neck and cavernous eyes, pock marks on his sunken cheeks. Nonbies always have that feral look, as if they just finished running a road race in their clothes, or they haven’t slept in months. We had met once, in passing, but I would never have picked him out of a lineup, so many years had been put on his face. Andrew came from behind the bar, and I could smell the nonbie on him—like a soup of sweat, smoke, and old bacon. He stared at my suit and tie, at my wool coat.

  “Slumming, Owen?”

  I looked around the seedy club but said nothing.

  He crossed his arms. “What do you want?”

  I explained that Marci had started using Replexen and that she was missing. I watched his face to see if maybe he already knew what I was telling him. Andrew was wearing a black leather coat, too short on his arms. I saw one of his hands twitch. He stared at the door to his club. He let out a deep breath. “Was she snorting it?” he asked quietly.

  “Needles,” I said. His eyes closed, and I realized that he hadn’t seen her after all. He asked about her skin. “Yes,” I said, “milky.”

  “You didn’t notice?” he asked. Then he looked down. “Sorry.”

  Even as a nonbie, Replexen use shortens your lifespan. They are hard years spent on that shit. I followed Andrew’s weary eyes as he looked around his own club . . . painted windows and scarred wood on the tables and floors. Did he wonder, how did I get here? This wasn’t a full zombie club, it catered more to nonbies and first-timers; no, it wasn’t hell, but it was the waiting room.

  “I haven’t seen her,” Andrew said, and he turned and went back behind the bar. I could’ve just simmed him my number, but I wrote it on a piece of paper and slid it across the bar. He looked up. He was chewing on one of those pocked cheeks, an
d it looked like he was trying to say something. I left before he could.

  My guess was that Marci had disappeared into what was already starting to be called Z-Town. And if that was the case, of course, I was too late. Seattle was one of the worst cities for derelict zombies—old Fremont had been turned over to the hardcore clubs, brothels, and shooting galleries, to bars that supposedly released rodents during happy hour—places that made Andrew’s shitty club seem like a Four Seasons.

  For two years after that, I waited for Marci to come back. But it wasn’t until my last doctor’s appointment and the bad news I got, it wasn’t until after Brando snapped and the death of that poor zombie girl, that I finally felt compelled to go to Z-Town and look for her, look for the only woman I have ever loved.

  4

  WENDY GASSON was the last of my neighbors to have a pet: Fidel. He was an indoor cat and she was careful about making sure he didn’t get out, but one day, as Fidel sat there by the window watching birds, Wendy came in with the groceries and the cat bolted out the door, down the stairs, out the open front door, and into the street.

  After the initial sim-tweets about Hypo-ETE, a new sector of the economy had appeared: private eyes who went into Z-Towns and looked for missing kids and spouses and took them to quack deprogrammers, or surgeons, a whole industry of people who promised—lied, really—that they could reverse the effects of long-term Replexen abuse. The sleaziest of these PIs would even take cat cases, usually for elderly people who just couldn’t come to terms with the fact that Fluffy was seriously not coming back. Some of the private eyes just went to a pet store and got a tabby to match the pictures (“No, this is Fluffy; I’m sure of it.”). Wendy told me she’d tried to hire one of these guys off the Craig-sim to find Fidel, but the guy only went after people. “Lady,” he said, “your cat’s gone.”

  I got the detective’s name from Wendy, but I didn’t contact him right away. I tried everything else I could think of first: simming Marci’s friends and family, taking out Craig-sim ads. I even went back to Andrew’s club in the U-District, but it was closed; a Dumpster Divas secondhand food store was now in its place. Nobody knew anything. I had no choice.