by Lynn Messina
“Not really sure,” Cammie says with a shrug. “Maybe urban security for the first year, then transfer to the ZIB.”
“You should do it,” Ritchie says. “I’m taking the ZIB test next month. It’s where the best opportunities for leadership are.”
Cammie nods. “Everyone says that.”
Cantor tears off another piece of bread. “It’s the truth.”
“Totally,” agrees Ritchie. “Security is a good gig if you want to stability, but if you’re ambitious you should go into the ZIB.”
“I am ambitious,” Cammie says.
Cantor asks Cammie how ambitious, Cammie says very, and I realize that it could go on forever—their trivial, mildly banal conversation could continue and continue until the world finally ends.
“Stop,” I say, practically shaking from the madness of it all—their irrelevant chatter, the restaurant’s impeccable service, the human male’s quivering body, still on the floor in a lump. “Just stop.”
Cammie and the two guards look at me like I’m the crazy one, but they stop. I look at Cantor, then Ritchie. “Are you telling me that all men are sniveling idiots?”
Ritchie laughs and shakes her head. “Not at all. Some men are non-sniveling idiots.”
Her colleague nods emphatically. “But trust us. You’re much better off with the sniveling variety because they at least keep their dicks in their pants. Non-snivelers take it out every chance they get.”
“Remember Commando Carlos?” Ritchie says, giggling. “Pathological.”
Cammie leans forward. “Seriously?”
Cantor nods. “Oh, yeah. He’d whip it out thinking that it was the neatest trick in the world. We had to keep telling him to put it away.” Cantor shrugs. “Of course, the older ones are easier to handle. They remember what things were like before the plague so they have some perspective. But the younger ones? They’ve known nothing but worship from women their whole lives and it has warped them.”
Cammie, wide-eyed, continues to grill them. Slowly, it dawns on me that it’s not their trivial chatter that’s misplaced; it’s my concern. The three of them don’t care about the horrifying state of contemporary manhood because they’ve been aware of it all along. They’ve grasped the essential truth of our age: Men don’t exist. A species that lives only in captivity isn’t truly alive.
Somehow, I’d missed this revelation. Until now, I never let myself face the simple fact that men are gone. They’re never coming back. A wonder pill isn’t going to miraculously restore everything to the way it was. My father isn’t going to one day stumble out of the woods he disappeared into all those years ago.
Mankind is over.
It has been over for 17 years.
I drop into a chair at a vacant table. The waitress appears with a basket of bread and a glass of water.
Cammie laughs as Cantor describes the dress one of her regular charges wears to avoid detection. “Dresses and wigs are hugely popular among UHMs so they can fit in,” she laughs. “Some really commit and shave their arms and legs and everything.”
“Yeah, you probably see them all the time in Starbucks. You just don’t know it. The world isn’t the place you think it is,” says Ritchie.
No, it isn’t, I think to myself. It’s so much worse.
And yet.
The sense of despair I expect to feel at the loss of my cherished illusion doesn’t come. I don’t feel hopeless. For so many years, I fought the truth, telling myself that it wasn’t too late for the world to be saved.
Maybe now, I’d think. Maybe now.
But knowing that the “maybe now” moment will never come releases me from the obligation of wishing for it. It liberates me from wanting and waiting and hoping, from devoting my time and energy to a false reality. It finally lets me see the world as it is, with a clarity so crystalline, it almost hurts my eyes. In that moment, everything is beautiful, even the grotesque hordes of rotting flesh, and I realize that the ability to look at the truth without flinching is a superpower.
Not everyone has it. Cammie, Ritchie, and Cantor do. Also Mehta, with her merciless accounting of every seal in New York Harbor. Katya Yusenoff, on the other hand, doesn’t come close. She stuck a zombie doll in a cheerful domestic scene and acted out an obsolete tradition like a child playing with puppets. She set the stage just right so that when she squinted her eyes, that blob of rotting flesh slurping up cow’s brain in the candlelight would look like the man of her dreams.
And yet , until now, she rated higher than me on the honesty scale because she only squinted; I closed my eyes and shut out the world.
Cammie squeezes my arm and I stare at her blankly for a moment before seeing the question in her eyes. “I said, Are we staying for lunch?”
Ritchie slides over to make room for me at the booth. “Come on. The Provisional Government Authority thinks you deserve a free meal after the crappy day you’ve had.”
I look at Cammie, wondering what exactly she’d told these two. The waitress hands me a menu, and I decide I don’t care.
Have I had a crappy day?
My hopes for a Whirligig debut are dashed, my romantic dreams are crushed, I’m out the cost of the car rental, and I’ve met one of the estimated 344,923 men left on the planet, so my chances of having my spleen eaten by a saber-toothed tiger just went up eightfold.
But in the win column, I gained a superpower.
All in all, a pretty good day.
Reading Guide Questions
1. What do you think of Hattie’s decision to date zombies? Do you think there might be some advantages to dating a zombie (for example, he wouldn’t mind if you got held up at work and missed dinner)? Would you try dating a zombie if 99.9999 percent of the men on Earth were zombified?
2. What’s the best piece of dating advice you’ve ever gotten? What kind of tips do you give to your friends? Would any apply to dating a zombie? Do you identify with Hattie? Do you feel that men are elusive and hard to meet?
3. In her research on how to meet a man, Hattie references several clichés of romantic comedy, including “meet cute” and female klutziness. How do you feel when you see movies and read books with these conventions? Do you think they accurately reflect your experience?
About the Author
Lynn Messina is the author of eight novels, including The Girls’ Guide to Dating Zombies and Fashionistas, which has been translated into 15 languages. Her essays have appeared in Self, American Baby, and the New York Times, and she’s a regular contributor to the Times’s Motherlode blog. Lynn lives in New York City with her husband and sons. You can visit her at http://lynnmessina.com/.
Also by Lynn Messina
The Girls’ Guide to Dating Zombies (an ebook)
Fashionistas
Henry and the Incredibly Incorrigible, Inconveniently Intelligent Smart Human
Troublemaker (an ebook)
Bleak: A Novel
Savvy Girl
Tallulahland
Little Vampire Women
Lola Was Here
Mim Warmer’s Lost Her Cool
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