The looks on their faces! They couldn’t believe what they were seeing! A tower of steam and fire, gushing out of the onion! Poor Candace reared back as though Evangeline had released a mountain lion from a cage; she collapsed into her husband, burying her hatchet face into his meaty shoulder.
And it was a good thing, too, because it was at Bob’s big bald head that Evangeline launched the first flaming onion ring. It traced an arc of oily smoke across the living room and came to rest just above his left eye. He barely had time to flinch. The burning ring stuck there, and for a terrible moment flared up, singeing his combover and leaving what would obviously be a painful and unsightly scar. He screamed, smacked the onion ring onto the carpet, and gawped at Evangeline with the expression of a big, miserable child who has just been called fatty by his own mother.
By the time it registered on the faces of Roy and June that something bizarre had occurred, the missiles intended for them had already been launched. The first caught June in the breast, where an embroidered silk rose brooch likely spared her from injury; nevertheless she squealed as if stabbed. Roy took his ring on the cheek, though it bounced off, leaving only a greasy smear. He said, much as though he were reading it from a script, “Ouch!”
It was not clear why Candace was spared. Evangeline was poised to strike, with Candace’s burning ring perched on the end of the knife; and Bob, having stood up in shock, left his wife exposed and cowering in her chair. Perhaps it was some kind of solidarity between quiet women; perhaps it was nothing more than pity. In any event, the onion never flew. The knife clattered onto the grill. Evangeline’s venom was spent. She bent down, turned off the heat, and walked calmly out of the room.
Leaving Philip alone with their stunned and injured guests, his mind racing. “Let me get you a cold washcloth,” he said to Bob, whose soft hand was cupped underneath the wound, as if something, his mind perhaps, might fall out. But Bob held out the other hand to stop him, and without another word walked out the door, Candace following close behind.
“Roy, I’m sorry,” he said, turning, and in spite of everything Roy’s eyes still harbored a hint of humor. He would have a good laugh about this, sooner rather than later, but for now he put his arm around June (whose eyes betrayed nothing but hurt, and whose protecting hands concealed her charred rose) and led her out the door.
Alone in the living room, Philip set to cleaning up. He folded up the trays, put away the plates and silverware, maneuvering his chair with what he was beginning to realize was expertise. He wiped down the grill surface and threw away the ruined food. All of this took him a good twenty minutes, during which he strove not to think about what had transpired. When he was finished, he looked around for something else he could do in order to avoid going to Evangeline. But there was nothing. He took a deep breath, navigated around the hibachi, and rolled into the bedroom.
She was there, still in her apron and hat, lying supine on the bed. He wheeled over to his side, unbuckled his restraints, and hauled himself up beside her.
“I don’t know what came over me,” she said.
“It’s all right.”
Her eyes were dry. She was looking at the ceiling. “We’re going to lose our jobs.”
After a moment’s thought, he said, “I’ll be able to keep mine. It’ll be enough.” It wouldn’t, of course—he worked under contract; she was the one with the salary, the benefits. And his medical bills remained high. But none of that seemed to matter.
“I was so angry,” she said, and he could hear the resignation, at long last, beginning to creep into her voice.
He was supposed to have been angry, too. He had gone to a psychiatrist after the accident, and she had told him, week after week, that the anger would come out eventually, in some form or other, and that he had to be ready for it. Over and over the woman told him this, but it just didn’t happen. And the psychiatrist seemed to lose enthusiasm for him, and eventually he stopped going to see her. Was it wrong to be able to absorb so heavy a blow with such perfect equanimity? Was it wrong to need no one but Evangeline, and to be glad for it, to be grateful for the excuse to renounce all others?
Philip took his wife’s hand. “Thank you,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
She turned to him and, as though she hadn’t heard, cried, “Please don’t leave me!”
“I will never leave you,” he replied, as if there was even the slightest chance he would do such a thing. “I will always be here.” He couldn’t go anywhere on his own, anyway. And that was fine with him. He didn’t need to walk to love her. He didn’t even need to make love to her. He didn’t need anything he didn’t have.
He was hungry, but they didn’t move. She slept through the night with her hat on.
Zombie Dan
They figured out how to bring people back to life—not everybody, just some people—and this is what happened to our friend Dan Larsen. He had died falling off a yacht, and six months later, there he was, driving around in his car, nodding, licking his pale, thin lips, wearing his artfully distressed sport jackets and brown leather shoes.
Dan’s revivification was his mother’s doing. Yes, it was his father, Nils Larsen, who greased the right palms to get him bumped up in the queue, but his mother, Ruth, was the one who had the idea and insisted it come to pass, the one who called each and every one of us—myself, Chloe, Rick, Matt, Jane, and Paul—to enlist our emotional support as friends and neighbors and decent, compassionate Americans. When Dan revived, she explained, he would need to rely upon the continuing attention and affection of his loved ones, and it was all of us—his old high school chums—whom he would need the most.
Of course we agreed, how could we not? Dan’s mother brought us all together in the living room of the Larsen penthouse—a place of burnished mahogany, French portraiture, and thick pink pile carpet, which none of us had ever imagined we’d see again—and told us what was about to happen. We stared, petits fours halfway to our gaping mouths, and nodded our stunned assent. A thin, bony, almost miniature woman of sixty with an enormous dyed-black hairdo like a cobra’s hood, Ruth Larsen gazed at each of us in turn, demanding our fealty with hungry gray eyes. The procedure would take several days, and then Dan would need a few weeks to recuperate—could we be counted on to sit at his bedside, keeping him company in regular shifts? Why yes, certainly we could! Were we aware just how important a part of the revivification process it was to remind the patient of his past, thus effecting the recovery of his memory? And did we know that, without immediate and constant effort, the patient’s memory might not be recovered at all? And so would we commit ourselves to assisting in this informal therapy by enveloping Dan in a constant fog of nostalgia for the entire month of March? Sure, you bet!
Excellent, Mrs. Larsen told us, her papery hands sliding over and under each other with the faint, whisking sound of a busboy’s crumb brush.
What remained unspoken that day, and went largely unspoken even among ourselves, in private, as we waited for Dan to be brought back to life, was that we had pretty much gotten over Dan since the funeral, and could not be said to have greatly missed him. Indeed, by the time Dan reached the age of twenty-five, the year of his death, we had basically had all of Dan we could ever have wanted. He was, in fact, no longer really our friend. The yacht he’d fallen off of belonged to some insufferable blueblood we didn’t know—that was the crowd Dan had taken to running with, the crowd he’d been born into, and all parties concerned had seemed satisfied with the arrangement. Dan’s being dead was no less acceptable to us than his having drifted out of our circle.
But Ruth Larsen didn’t know this, and so we were the ones she called upon in Dan’s time of need. Either that, or the insufferable bluebloods had refused. At any rate, we agreed to do what Mrs. Larsen demanded, and for better or worse he would be our friend once again.
The discovery of the revivification process had resulted, initially, in great controversy. Surely, the naysayers wailed, not everyone who died
could be brought back to life. What would separate the haves from the have-nots? Science offered one answer. To be eligible for revivification, you had to die a certain way. Drowning was best. Suffocation. Anything that resulted in a minimum of harm to the body, other than its being dead. Freezing wasn’t too bad, and a gunshot wound, if tidy, could be worked around. Electrocution was pushing it, as was poisoning. Car crash, cancer, decapitation, old age? Right out.
But still, who then? Who among the drowned, the frozen, the asphyxiated, would get to come back?
The rich. Naturally.
Riots had been predicted, the burning of hospitals and medical schools, the overthrow of the government. None of it materialized. The rich had been getting the goodies for millennia—why should that change now? People shrugged and got over it. After all, it wasn’t like the rich could live forever now. They would still die—it was just that now they could get a second chance in certain circumstances. And the rich had always gotten second chances at everything. No, the fact that they could be brought back to life was no big deal, and when you thought about it, not even very surprising.
Besides.
Besides, once the process started becoming commonplace, once people had gotten a look at the revivs, had talked with them, touched them, slept with them, it became clear that, as a general rule, they were a little bit off. You could miss it if you weren’t paying close attention, but they were definitely not quite right. They had, for instance, a way of walking, a kind of sway, an instability. Their hips seemed to ratchet back and forth, like the platen of a typewriter. Their fingers had a habit of twitching or suddenly clenching. Their jaws moved with a bovine circular motion, whether or not they were eating—and when they did eat, they were fussy, often choosing a single item from a varied dish and pushing the rest aside, like children. They had a watery way of speaking and a faraway look in their eyes, but when you asked them, with irritation, if they had heard even a single word you had said, they were able to regurgitate your side of the conversation with pedantic thoroughness, all in a deadpan monotone that made everything you said sound foolish and dull. And they rarely advanced any ideas themselves, no intellectual abstractions, no opinions, not even suggestions for where to eat dinner or what movie to see. They were robust, it seemed, healthy-looking, upright, but passionless—you would never see them jump for joy or raise their voices in anger. They seemed to have a normal sexual response, all the parts worked and if they liked you they would do what you suggested and appear, in some detached way, to get off. But the expected and hoped-for moans, screams, and grunts just did not happen.
Also, they smelled different. A bit spicy. Not at all bad—better, in fact, than regular people. But it was different all the same.
So if you asked a random person from the street whether, if they choked to death on a Jolly Rancher, they would like to be revived, the answer was generally yes. But not an especially enthusiastic yes. “Sure,” accompanied by a shrug, was the common response. By and large, revivification was thought to be something weird rich people did, something along the lines of hymenoplasty, or owning an island. It was impressive, but maybe it wasn’t exactly a great idea.
You weren’t, it turned out, supposed to call revivs revivs. Political correctness dictated that, if you had to refer to them, you should call them restored-life individuals. But, the argument went, since they were not disabled, any specialized term was an insult, and it was best to say something like “Ronald has gotten a second chance at life,” or, “Francine has recovered from her fatal trauma.” Better still to keep mum—to just pretend there was nothing amiss, because really there wasn’t. Everything was totally normal. Calling somebody a reviv was a lie—every person is just a person, and that’s all there is to it.
You were never, in any circumstances, supposed to call them zombies. This was, however, the most commonly employed term.
“My God,” Chloe said, after that first long day at Dan’s bedside. “He’s a fucking zombie.” The six of us were sitting around a table at the closest bar to the hospital, a too-well-lit place with vinyl settees separated by terra-cotta planters full of ferns. The settees were too low for the table, and we had to reach up to get our drinks, which we needed very badly.
As it happened, the meeting at Dan’s mother’s apartment was the first time we’d all been together in many years. Our manner with one another was familiar and weary. As teenagers, we had been inseparable; now we were grown, and had grown apart. Not completely apart, of course. We knew too much about one another for that: the broken homes, the crazy relatives; the dramas of self-discovery, the dirty secrets. The myths we armored ourselves with, out in the world, were worthless here, among people who had witnessed their genesis; and allegiances and estrangements had arisen and retreated among us more times than anyone could count. Chloe and Matt were once an item, as were Chloe and Paul. Rick and Jane had once seemed destined to spend their lives together, but they had broken up, and now Jane had married Matt. Paul and Rick had spent a drunken, carnal week together in a cabin upstate, and now Paul was in a relationship with a man twice his age, a painter from Long Island, and Rick had a girlfriend in Brooklyn. Chloe evidently had a boyfriend—they lived in New Haven—but I had long carried a torch for her, and she and I had managed a few moony glances at each other over the course of the day. I had a good feeling about Chloe. Hearing her call Dan a fucking zombie sent a pleasurable itch across my back. She had always been vulgar.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Paul groaned.
Matt sighed, shaking his head. “How did we ever get into this mess?”
“It’s my fault,” said Jane, who always blamed herself for everything.
Rick said, “Let’s just tell Ruth to go to hell.”
“Oh, we can’t do that,” I said.
“Fuck, no,” Chloe agreed, offering me a sly glance from the corner of her eye.
The group parted at the subway station. I lived nearby and could walk. Instead of following the others to the trains, Chloe grabbed my hand. “Let’s go to your place.”
“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” I said.
“Feh,” she said, with a shrug, and we walked off arm in arm.
As the days passed by, Dan slowly came around. He looked pale, and there were bandages on his head and neck where the revivification fluids and electrical current had gone in, but his eyes were clear and he followed us with them as we moved around the hospital room. Chloe and I had taken to sharing one another’s shifts.
“Let’s make out,” she said one morning.
“He’s watching us.”
“So?”
She sat on my lap and we snogged as a cool polluted wind blew through the open window. I hazarded glances at Dan, who gazed at us intently, blinking. His soundless mouth opened and closed. Without solid food, his doughy countenance had given way to a new and slightly frightening chiseled look.
“I think he’s trying to talk.”
“Who?” Chloe said.
“Dan.”
She tossed her hair over hear ear and winked at Dan. “Zombie Dan,” she said. “Do you remember sex?”
A small groan seemed to escape him. Or maybe it was a noise from outside.
“How about boobs? Do you remember boobs?”
“I’m sure he remembers boobs,” I said, trying to nip this one in the bud.
“Here,” Chloe said brightly, hopping down from my lap. I awkwardly adjusted myself with a sweaty hand. Chloe stood beside the bed, unbuttoning her blouse. Dan stared. He seemed excited, though not in an especially lascivious manner. Before he died, women’s breasts had always rendered him speechless; he tended to ogle. It had always irritated me when this resulted in his getting laid, which was most of the time.
But now his excitement seemed purely empirical, like that of a scientist gazing in sober wonder at the test results scrolling across a computer screen. Chloe unlatched her bra and did a little dance. “Remember, Dan? Boobies?” She scat-sang the stripping song.
> “Okay,” I said. “That’s probably enough.”
“It’s therapy,” she said. “We’ve got to get his motor running.” She leaned over, bringing her chest about six inches from Dan’s stunned face. “Here ya go, pal, get a good look.”
Neither of us was prepared for the speed with which Dan’s hands shot out from under the sheets and clamped themselves onto Chloe’s breasts. She yelped. I gasped and jumped out of the chair to pull her away. But she warded me off. “No, no,” she said. “I think it’s all right. Look at the little bastard go.” Dan had settled into a firm, somewhat mechanical knead, palpating Chloe like a masseuse-in-training. He scowled, licking his lips. A sound escaped him.
“Was that a word?” Chloe asked.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Stizz,” said Dan.
“It was a word!”
“Niztizz!”
“Oh, listen!” Chloe cried, turning to me. “He’s talking! He’s saying ‘Nice tits’!”
It was true. He was quite coherent now. Clearly he was remembering—“nice tits” was a thing he always used to say.
We called Ruth Larsen, who since the procedure had spent far more time than we had expected sitting around the family apartment. She claimed to be attending to Dan’s business affairs. But a zombie didn’t have any business, and it seemed clear that she was really spending her time drinking. Chloe had been encamped in one of the many guest rooms at chez Larsen and could attest to the woman’s dissolution, which involved a lot of vituperative mutterings and slow, self-indulgent groans. A nurse had told us that her reaction, upon seeing her child show the first signs of renewed life, was to run crying from the room. We hadn’t seen her around the hospital since, though she insisted that she habitually sat with him through the night. The nurses, upon hearing she had told us this, had rolled their eyes.
See You in Paradise Page 8
