Pariah

by Bob Fingerman

  Alan chugged the peaches, sputtering as he choked on the last couple of slices, a small, stinging upsurge of syrup leaking out his left nostril. His mother used to scold him for wolfing his food—another indication of his regression. Alan wiped the syrup off his nose and chin and then licked it off his hand, which he hadn’t washed off since he’d masturbated. Wonderful. Washed off. Bathed. There was a quaint custom gone dodo. Mona had at least scored cases of Purell, so Alan traipsed over and pumped a couple of squirts into his palm and cleaned up. He stroked some onto his wilted penis, too, which stung as the alcohol penetrated the sensitive skin. “There, all germ free,” he said, as if it mattered. “Cucumber Melon,” he mused aloud, looking at the label. “As if. Still, it smells nice.”

  As Alan took a few whiffs from the bottle it hit him that the stench of the undead didn’t bother him any more, even when his sense of smell was rekindled by a pleasant odor. The renewed appreciation for scent made him hungrier, and he ate a can of peas. Then a can of baked beans, including the disgusting wad of pork. Staring at his work in progress, he sat down on his couch and noticed he’d only given Mona four toes on each foot, like some cartoon character.

  “That’s stupid,” he muttered as he slipped into dreamless slumber.

  “We should get a generator,” Eddie said as he toyed with the fishing reel. “I mean, it’s not gonna be summer forever. Nobody took my car-boosting idea serious, but if Mona can drive, she should take a car, you know, find a Hummer and snag us some gennies. I could teach her how to siphon gas. Maybe seeing that would plant some thoughts in her head.” He grinned smuttily, arching his eyebrows in case Dave didn’t pick up the innuendo. Dave frowned. “Anyway,” Eddie continued, “It’d be sweet to get some power going. Maybe some AC, for a change.”

  Dave nodded. “Yeah, that’d be cool. But you couldn’t keep the whole building chilled.”

  “So we get everyone in one apartment and crank it. A sleepover.”

  “A sleepover. Because I know how much you love hanging with the others in here,” Dave scowled. “But, yeah, I see where you’re coming from.”

  “For real, right? The people in this dump, they got no vision. Okay, I admit it; I’m not so book smart, but I got life smarts. These pampered Upper East Side homos would just shrivel up an’ die if Mona hadn’t come along.”

  “So would you and me,” Dave interjected.

  “Yeah, but not without a fight. They’d of gone out like babies, all curled up in a fetal position. If I knew for sure my number was up I’d of gone downstairs, outside, and taken a few of those fuckers out, mano à mano. If Mona doesn’t drive, I could teach ’er. Maybe she could snag a laptop and one of them driving simulators.”

  “No such thing.”

  “For real? But they’ve got flight simulator games.”

  “No cars, though.”

  “That’s retarded. Five zillion driving games, but none that teach actual driving?”

  “None that I ever heard of.”

  “Wow, that makes no sense.”

  “Would you have played one?” Dave asked.

  “Fuck no. I only like shooters.” Eddie dropped the fishing rig on the floor and got up. “I’m gonna go talk to Ms. Vegetable-matter.” On his way to the door he picked up a blister pack and popped a pink pill.

  “You really shouldn’t do that,” Dave said.

  “Fuck you, Mom. And anyway, these pills don’t do shit.”

  “Maybe they’re placebos.”

  “Maybe they’re female shit and I’m gonna sprout some tits. Time will tell, bro, but in the meantime I plan on testing the waters a bit longer.”

  “Yeah, well when you start menstruating, drop the regimen.”

  Eddie laughed as he sailed out the door, letting it slam as he tromped downstairs. When he arrived at Mona’s door he affected a more sedate demeanor and then knocked. After a few gentle raps he pounded the side of his fist on the door. Fuckin’ bitch was probably listening to her death metal or whatever it was. How could anyone listen to that noise? He tried the doorknob to no avail, rattling it in frustration. Oh come on, he thought. After several more thuds the door opened a crack, held that way by the chain, and Mona greeted him with a dull stare, her earbuds draped around her shoulders. If this chick had tits, Eddie started thinking, then stifled the notion. He was here on a different kind of business.

  “Sup?” he said, flashing her his most winning smile.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  “Can I talk to you about something?”

  “Uh-huh.” She undid the chain and opened the door the whole way, ushering Eddie in. As he stepped past her he took in their disparity in size, he standing at least a foot taller than she.

  “What are you,” he began, “like maybe five one or something?”

  “Five two.”

  “Wow. It’s so fuckin’ weird that a tiny chick like you—no offense—can just truck around town with all those zombies and a big guy like me can’t. I can’t figure it out.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I’ll “uh-huh” you, you fuckin’ . . . No, no. Stow that shit. Make nice. “So, okay, what I was thinking was this: you’re always going out on these errands, right? And the most you can carry is what you can pile in a shopping cart. So that limits what you can score. So maybe, I dunno if you can drive, but maybe you could make the most of your trips out there in the world, if you drove a truck or Hummer or something. Even a Mini Cooper. Anything.”

  “Can’t.”

  “I could teach you.”

  “They have to sense me.”

  “Huh?”

  “In a car they can’t sense me so they don’t disperse.”

  Eddie was doubly stunned. Not only had she answered his question but also it was a complete sentence and it made sense. Sense. The senses. Eddie didn’t even think about that before. The zombies still had senses, even if they were a bunch of rotting brain-dead skinbags.

  “Sense,” he repeated. “Like maybe you give off a stink—no offense—that those pusbags can’t abide. Wicked. Like because maybe you . . .” Eddie cut himself off before he tipped his hand. He didn’t want her to know he’d filched those pills. But this was the lynchpin. This was it. He felt sure. The pills. The quantity. She’d been megadosing those pills and it made her immune to attack. Oh, this sly bitch. And she didn’t want to share. He’d tell the others and they’d flip. All those smarty-pants. Should he tell them? Yeah, because then they could decide what to do. He didn’t want to flat out accuse her, but if they were all on the same page, like a committee, then they could move as a unit. That was strategy. He felt like he did when he was playing hockey. Strategy was never his strong suit, at least not formulating it, but he had some dope—literally and figuratively—that the others didn’t. He’d present his findings and they’d take it from there.

  “I tried driving once. They tipped the car over.” Her dull face actually betrayed a trace of anxiety. She didn’t like the memory. “Never again.”

  “That’s really interesting,” Eddie said with unaccustomed sincerity. She was a waste case, all right, but she was human. “Listen, I didn’t mean to freak you out. I just thought maybe it was a good idea about the car and all. Sorry. I’ll leave you alone, a’right?” She nodded and Eddie let himself out, grinning as he turned his back on her, feeling smarter than everyone else in the joint. It was cool knowing something no one else did. And he got it out of her. He did.

  Suck on that, you faggots.

  part three

  32

  “It would be a total betrayal,” Ellen said, rubbing her abdomen, phantom kicks pummeling her innards. “We shouldn’t, and you had no right to do what you did. My God, if she discovered what you did it could mean the end of everything we’ve got.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Eddie sulked.

  “Or the beginning of a brave new era,” Karl added. “Really. If she isn’t sharing knowledge of how to walk among the unclean then she’s done nothing to engender our loyalty.”
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  “Unclean? Engender?” Alan echoed.

  “What? I’m not entitled to be articulate?”

  “Um, of course you are, it just sounds a little unnatural, you know? You never spoke in such a grandiloquent manner before.”

  “Oh, and so what’s ‘grandiloquent,’ then?” Karl bristled.

  “It’s mockery.” Alan pushed back his chair and crossed his legs with a smirk.

  “Shut up, both of you,” Ellen snapped. “This is serious. Eddie’s proposed betraying Mona’s trust, and moreover turned it into a conspiracy of us against her, which, frankly, is pretty fucked.”

  “Hey, I didn’t put it like that,” Eddie said.

  “No, but that’s the gist. And listen, I wasn’t going to share this little tidbit with the rest of you, but I’m pregnant and I’m not about to risk poisoning my baby in some experiment with mystery drugs.” Ellen looked at her watch to confirm how long Mona had been away on an errand. She felt tired and irritable, some of which was hormonal, but mostly it was disgust. The others offered no comment on her gravidity. Whether that was in deference or indifference was anyone’s guess, though Dabney did look away.

  “Well, I’m in,” Karl said. “I need to know whether she’s divinely imbued or just a druggie with a heckuva side effect.”

  “I guess I’m in, too,” Dave said, winning a clap on the back from Eddie.

  “Include me out,” Abe said, softly. “That little girl has been good to us and I don’t plan on returning the favor with treachery.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” said Alan.

  “Same here,” said Dabney. “ ’Less we keep it honest and talk to her about it, I don’t want no part of it.”

  Outside heavy rain pelted the windows, but no one was rushing upstairs to frolic and strip. The sky was an oppressive, ever-darkening gray and the climate inside wasn’t conducive to abrupt shifts in mood. Even though this meeting was taking place in Ellen’s dining area, four floors above pavement, a bunker mentality prevailed. Ellen wondered if this was how Hitler’s staff felt as it plotted his demise. Was that an apt comparison? She hoped not. How about Kennedy’s people plotting his? Ellen believed the conspiracy theories. Not all of them, but some.

  She got up from the table and stretched, then stepped over to the front windows. Below, the horde shambled, aimless, ugly as ever, pockets of unrest visible from this elevation. Some pushed and shoved, others stumbled, fell from view, trampled underfoot. It always looked like the least festive New Year’s Eve gathering ever down there; Times Square, apocalypse-style.

  Behind her the others continued to dicker about whether or not to raid Mona’s pharmaceutical stash. Abe had no interest. Since Ruth’s death Mona had gotten him hooked on Valium and now he almost matched his supplier in imperturbability. He was like the pod-people version of his former self. It didn’t seem possible that a chemical cocktail was what kept Mona safe out there, though pounding drugs certainly went a long way toward explaining her personality, or lack of one.

  “Pregnant, huh?” Dabney sidled up to Ellen and took a spot beside her at the window, rain spatter stippling them both with dark spots. Lightning flashed, followed by booming thunder. Ellen just nodded. Karl looked over at the windows and considered the constant thunder and lightning emanating from God’s throne in Revelation.

  “Is this a joyous kind of thing or an unexpected problem?” Dabney continued. “I don’t mean to pry, but it’s a big development.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  As he looked over at Alan, Dabney suppressed his urge to ask who was the father. Mike hadn’t been dead that long. Maybe she didn’t know. If so, they’d never know, not even when—or if—the baby was born. Mike and Alan fit the same basic description, brunette, pale but with a slightly olive complexion. Did it even matter? Not like junior would be headed for college someday. Or even kindergarten.

  Ellen smelled alcohol on Dabney’s breath. It wasn’t beer breath, either. It was distillery-strong, whiskey breath, complemented by cigarettes. His eyes were red-rimmed and hooded. It seemed to Ellen that almost everyone was in a mad rush to be medicated. Or anesthetized. Dabney gave her bicep a soft, paternal squeeze and left the apartment. From the table, Eddie pounded his fist like a gavel and declared the meeting adjourned. He and his confederates would break into Mona’s apartment and steal drugs from the kitty. Ellen took a deep breath, the air wet and redolent of death and ozone. Sheet lightning whitewashed the sky, leeching the remaining pigment from an already colorless vista. If the world weren’t already over, she’d find this a whole lot more portentous.

  Psychosomatic or not, her insides churned, and she wondered if taking this baby to term was a good idea. The zombies weren’t going anywhere. It had been over five months since they’d supplanted mankind. For all Ellen knew, the occupants of 1620 were the only people left, at least in New York. What hope did her baby have? Alan was probably right.

  To hell with him and his rationality.

  To hell with Mona and her lack of charm.

  To hell with ’em all.

  As the last of her “guests” left, she slumped against the wall, wanting nothing more than to cry, but no tears came. She just sat there, hunched over and desolate. A baby. New life for a dead planet. Was that hopeful and wise, or just selfish and stupid? Perhaps later, in keeping with the narcotics theme of the day, she’d ask Mona to venture out and fill a prescription of her own: Mifepristone, aka RU 486, aka “the abortion pill.”

  An ounce of prevention, retroactive-style. Better safe than sorry.

  Abe lay on the bed on the spot in which Ruth had succumbed. Alan and Karl had flipped the mattress for Abe, since her seepage had done a number on the other side, even with the mattress pad in place. The air in the bedroom was stale but Abe didn’t mind. He was comfortably numb. Where had he heard that phrase before? Maybe he just made it up. The room was dark and Abe stared at the ceiling. After a short while he wasn’t sure if his eyes were even open, so he blinked a few times to clear that up. Open, closed. It made no difference. The Valium made Abe aggressively apathetic, which he supposed was oxymoronic, but who cared?

  For a man as formerly opinionated as he, indifference was unnatural, and drug induced or not, becalmed or not, he felt the unnaturalness deep in his id. It wasn’t Abraham Fogelhut’s role in the universe to be its calm center. It conflicted with his essential Abeness. Was this what the hippies and yippies experienced, he wondered? When they were all dosing themselves to the gills back in the sixties, when all that nonstop navel gazing was happening, when everything was a happening, when happening became a noun, was this that? If so, Abe, in soft focus, needed to revise his opinion of the sixties drug subculture; it was even dumber and more self-centered than he’d suspected.

  Happening as a noun.

  Party as a verb.

  Vacation as a verb.

  Summer as a verb.

  Summer as a verb?

  Jesus H. Christ.

  Between the hippies and the yuppies, English was in its death throes. And forget the coloreds and their hip-hop lingo. Ebonics, was it? If the plague hadn’t come along when it did, given the trajectory on which English was headed—at least as spoken by Americans—pretty soon the younger generation would be reduced to tribal clicking languages. Maybe the zombies did everyone a favor.

  This wasn’t relaxing.

  It was too soon to have developed a tolerance for the drug, wasn’t it?

  When was the last time he took a pill?

  Take a pill, take a pill, take a pill. Ugh, that was what weaklings did. Take a pill. The world is shit. Take a pill. Your wife is dead. Take a pill. The kids are dead. Take a pill. Take two pills. Take a whole bottle of pills and be done with it. Fuggit. Forget it. Man was made to suffer. Didn’t some poet say that? Somebody said it. Maybe it was a song. Okay, I’m making a compact with myself, he thought. In the remaining weeks I read. I read everything Mona can get her hands on. The classics. I read some, but not enough. And always it was for school.
I need to make a list. Let the others do what they will, chase their tails, fritter it away, but I’m going out enriched in the brains department.

  Abe got off the bed, grabbed a bar of Ivory soap and walked up to the roof, shedding garb as he made the ascent. Modesty? Antiquated notion. The downpour drummed against the pebbled-glass skylight, smearing the soot, its rhythm beckoning Abe forward. Let the others cower in their hidey-holes. Or whatever they were up to. From the sounds of it as he passed the Italian ape’s digs, some vigorous buggery. To each his own. Abe dropped the last of his attire as he stepped onto the tar paper, which shimmered with wetness, reflecting each stroke of lightning. His body, even well fed, was lank and achromatic. Had his balls always hung this low? Who could remember? The sky looked like a backdrop from an expressionist German film of the silent era—thick, black clouds set asymmetrically against deposits of leaden gray. With the recurrent lightning the buildings all became, at least in flashes, monoliths of pure black and white.

  Absolute.

  As a youngster Abe had been instructed in absolutes. There was good and evil, period. Good folks and bad. As an adolescent he saw little to contradict that. The Nazis were unadulterated evil, easy to fight, easy to hate. Their atrocities left no room for debate. He’d joined up and fought for good, and even though the horrors were manifold, the cause was inarguably virtuous—and this was before he was aware of the death camps. He’d seen brutality in all its gory glory. But glimmerings of gray began to afflict his psyche. His first German corpse conflicted with the propaganda. This wasn’t some massive Hun with sharpened teeth—though even as a naïve teen, Abe hadn’t really expected the enemy to look that way. But this was just a kid. Skinny, blond, lightly freckled, soft pink lips, and fading color in the cheeks. This wasn’t a Nazi; this was just a foot soldier. Just a dead kid in a muddy ditch.

  The world was easier to absorb before that moment. Abe had liked black and white, and he’d missed it when it was taken from him. Down below, the multitude groaned in protest of the weather, their plaint drowned out by the pervasive, ground-shaking thunder. There were no towheaded blond kids with freckles and soft lips down there. Maybe once upon a time, but not now.