His face referring most obviously and unashamedly to her husband’s face.
His name is Mark.
“Eat his face” is what the zombie tells me because the zombie knows that I am tempted. Knows that when it comes to eating someone’s face when that someone’s face is Barbara’s husband’s face, I am sorely tempted.
What troubles me more and more about the zombie is that he is, while not especially good with words, persistent. The zombie is persistent and also, only recently, only very recently, and much to my horror, very, very good at creating images, vivid, vivid images inside my head.
For instance . . . Let’s not for instance. Let’s simply say that these images are graphic and appealing and horrifying and leave me confounded and hungry and bloodthirsty.
Though there is one image, one the zombie has begun to lean heavily on.
It is an image of Barbara. It is a surprisingly calm and pretty image of Barbara.
She is with me and we are holding hands and we are near the beach, but not on the beach. We are on a boardwalk walking along the beach. I’m not in a bathing suit, but I’m not in my normal clothes, either. I’m wearing rags of my normal clothes, and it’s clear in this beautiful, ridiculous image just who I am. Just what I am. And the image plays on and there is no sound, only the picture of us, the two of us, hand in hand, and it’s lovely, and it plays on and it plays on and then Barbara leans her head on my shoulder and then she turns her face to me for a kiss, and that, right then, right before the kiss, that is when the zombie ends the image, and suddenly, in my head, I’m eating Mark’s face off.
Don’t think I don’t understand the meaning of the zombie’s play with images.
I’ve been introduced to Mark twice. The first time being on the day of their wedding anniversary, when Mark arrived at the office accompanied by a violinist and with a bouquet of roses. The other time being only recently, the time after she caught him with another woman, the day after that day, actually, which was the second day Barbara had called in sick to work and the phones were being covered by another woman, a temp, a temp who smelled like camphor, unpleasantly like camphor. Barbara had called in sick and hadn’t come to work, but apparently she hadn’t gone home, either, which was why he came looking for her at our office, which was when he found me.
“Nathan, right?” he said to me.
“Um, actually, no,” I said.
And he said, “So, Nathan, has Barbara made it in to work, today?”
He said, “Is she here? Is she hiding in someone’s cubicle?”
Then he said, contemplatively: “Cubicle.”
Then he said, “There’s something slightly sexual, isn’t there, about that word, cubicle?”
To which I said, “No. I don’t think so, no.”
Mark is not a big man, but he acts disconcertingly bigger than he has any reason to act. He is somewhat threatening, in fact. Short as he is, small as he is.
He leaned in close to me, much closer to me than most people lean in, much closer than I am comfortable with, and said, not in a threatening way, not in a way that was particularly threatening, physically threatening, but threatening in a conspiratorial way, he said, “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“To the bottom of what?” I asked.
“This whole cubicle thing,” he said, and then he laughed and clapped me hard—too hard—on the shoulder and said, “Okay, well, if you see her, let her know I came around, will you?”
Then he left.
His breath smelled like deli counter ham, I would like to point out.
The reasons why I don’t feel comfortable with people leaning in close to me are many, of course, even aside from the deli counter ham smell. The main reason being that I’ve always felt discomfited by unnecessary intrusions into my personal space, though I don’t think this is a zombie-based peculiarity, don’t think it is out of the ordinary, that I am the only one who feels this protective of his personal space. The other reason being, of course, the fact that I am never fully certain how much scrutiny the makeup binding my face-flesh together can withstand.
Not very much scrutiny, if you ask me. Hardly any scrutiny at all, I’d say, but then I’m somewhat biased.
The zombie in me, of course, feels the exact opposite, welcomes, in fact, the close scrutiny of others, welcomes even the soft stench of deli counter ham, welcomes all of this because, for one, the zombie is tired, is sorely tired of the charade, and secondly, because of all the pieces of human meat the zombie likes to eat, the face is perhaps the zombie’s favorite.
By necessity, I have established coping mechanisms.
For instance, I like to throw things. For instance, I sometimes feel a great and desperate urge to throw things.
Mechanisms, of course, by which I hope to cope with the painfully obvious.
The throwing of things being just one example of what I do in lieu of eating off the faces of my coworkers or snapping the necks of my bosses or breaking in half the spines of the husbands of certain women I feel an unfulfillable attraction to.
The throwing of things being, surprisingly, one of the more successful coping mechanisms I’ve devised, so successful that I have devoted an entire room of my home, which is not a very large home, which is not a home with a lot of rooms in it to spare, yet I have devoted an entire room for the sole purpose of throwing things in it, an entire room that was until just very recently ankle-deep in the various shards of the various breakables I have thrown, composed mostly of cheap glassware bought in secondhand stores, boxes and boxes of these glasses, which are stacked in my garage waiting to be thrown. This spare room, with the shards of glass covering the floor, this room is the same room I mentioned to Barbara, jokingly, or half-jokingly, after she finally came back to the office and took up answering the phones again, that if she wanted, of course, I had a spare room and she’d be more than welcome to use it. Mentioned all of this knowing, of course, that she would have other friends, that if not friends she would have other coworkers, and if not coworkers, family, she would certainly have family, not to mention any number of nicely outfitted hotels, with whom or at which she could stay. Mentioned all of this knowing, of course, that she would never take me up on the offer.
That she took me up on the offer, then, explains why I left work immediately after lunch, rushed to a nearby Salvation Army, bought what amounted to a poor representation of guest-bedroom furniture—a scratched, mirrorless vanity, a wrought-iron twin bed frame, a weak-looking sagging mattress, a large black beanbag chair—and then rushed back home to clear the room, to set it up, to make it look livable, to make it look lived-in, to make it look as if it had not recently been employed as a room in which I violently threw glasses and plates and other breakables as a means of curbing my hunger for human flesh.
Rushed being a relative term, of course.
The mystical quality of my existence notwithstanding, the fact that I am undead flesh moving around at all notwithstanding, I’m not generally a very fast mover.
The problem being, in the end, not the room or the furniture, which was cleared, which was set in place in time, but more my appearance, which was, let’s say, somewhat bedraggled after all was said and done. Or not bedraggled, but ruinous, let’s say. Let’s say the pallor of my skin was a pale pea-green, for instance. Or, for instance, that the thumb on my left hand was set at an angle more pronouncedly right-angle-ish than usual, due in no small part to the accidental crushing of it between the wall and the bed frame. Or that the tip of my nose had sloughed off, I don’t know how or why, and was held in place, I’m sure of it, by sheer will alone.
Let’s just say this: When all was said and done, I looked more ghoulish than any reasonable person would hope for or expect to on the occasion of Barbara’s appearance on my doorstep.
Or let’s not say any of that. Let’s not focus on the negative, but rather on t
he positive, on the fact that when she did arrive, she did so drunk and with fat tears in her eyes and hardly seemed to notice my somewhat skewed appearance. That when I left her to fix us a drink and took twenty minutes to patch myself back together, she hardly noticed that, either, or that I returned without any drinks, or that I confessed that, in fact, I didn’t have anything to drink in the house at all. She only shrugged her shoulders, stood up, and then said, “Let’s go out, then,” grabbing me by the hand and leading me out the door, hardly noticing even then the queer texture of my skin.
Here’s the thing about last night, about what happened last night.
Last night? Hands down, the best night of my life, or of this life, or of this nonlife.
Last night was such a good night that this morning, the morning after, when I came into work and Roger, who saw me shuffling out of the stairwell moving no slower than I normally move, looking no less meticulously arranged than I normally look, said, “Christ, Jonnie boy, you’re a fucking zombie today,” I exhibited Herculean restraint and said, simply, “Thanks, Roger. Nice to see you, too.”
A restraint I can only credibly attribute to that night, to last night and this morning.
As to what might have happened between Barbara and myself last night, as to what might have happened when we were out together having drinks, if that’s the first question on your mind, if, perhaps, a dimly lit, softly sweet scenario is the kind of scenario you envisioned for me:
Nothing happened.
Barbara’s expectations of my role in last night’s events didn’t involve our engaging in any second wrongs in hopes of making the first wrong right. Rather, my role involved the buying of drinks, the watching of her purse and jacket, the finding of seats, the holding of a place for her in the bathroom line, for example. The holding of her hair as she threw up in my bathtub, as another example. And in between all of that, in between drinks, in those moments when she stumbled back to our table, tired of dancing, tired of being hit on, I was there to listen to her confess that she had suspected all along, had convinced herself it couldn’t be true, that she felt so betrayed, not by Mark, not because she had a false understanding of Mark, who had been married when she’d first started sleeping with him and had only left his wife because his wife in fact left him when she caught him and Barbara in certain compromising positions, not wholly unlike the compromising positions she had only recently found Mark in with a younger woman from his office, but that really she felt betrayed by herself, by her complacency in the face of overwhelming evidence of her husband’s indiscretions and underwhelming evidence of his love for her.
Such was the role I played that night.
But before it’s concluded that I have no backbone, that I let myself, in that one night, become “the friend,” before you decide that I can’t “close the deal,” let’s disillusion ourselves of any Vaseline-blurred fantasies, let’s throw some cold water over those most thrilling parts of our reptilian brains, let’s discuss this gross misunderstanding of my existence, and let’s take a closer look at my particular abilities in the realm of sexual fulfillment: I have no particular abilities in the realm of sexual fulfillment. I have no abilities in this realm whatsoever. The mystical quality of my existence does not account for such abilities or desires or needs.
Such is the life of a zombie, you might say.
Wouldn’t it be better, simpler, if you were just actually dead? you might say, and on that point, I might not disagree.
Though last night, I didn’t mind; with Barbara, I didn’t mind. I should have minded, but I didn’t. When she woke up and when I saw her—and she looked bad, she looked awful, tired and rough, and she had large, dark circles under her eyes, and her hair was a tangled, ratty mess, and she looked like this but still somehow lovely, somehow absolutely lovely in a pair of matronly, flower-printed pajamas—standing there in my small kitchen, and when she asked weakly, hoarsely, for coffee and then for cereal and then rested her weary, matted head on my shoulder and then gave me a deep hug and whispered, “Thanks for this,” I minded even less.
The point I’m trying to make here being this: I was in a fine mood when I left the house this morning. I was in a splendid mood this morning as I left my house.
Barbara left before me so she could go home and get a change of clothes, pack a bag so that the next morning and the morning after that and the morning after that she wouldn’t have to leave again, and we could ride into work together, and “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
After she left, I cleaned the kitchen some. I tried to whistle a tune. Failing that, I hummed.
As I drove, I hardly noticed the traffic boxing me at all times into the exit-only lanes.
If I could have skipped up the twelve flights of stairs from the lobby to our offices, I tell you now, I would have skipped.
And this was not because I was in love, or maybe it was. Maybe it was because I was in love. But this was not because I envisioned a happy and long-lasting life with Barbara at my side. This was not because we kissed, which we didn’t, or because we made love, which I can’t, but because she had been there with me in the morning, had come to me the night before and had stayed and had been there still when I woke up, that she had confided in me, that she had appreciated the fact that she could confide in me, and that for a small moment it seemed to me that I had achieved something undeniably human, had tapped into a sort of life I had for so long assumed unavailable to me.
So it should come as no surprise that when I stepped into the office and saw Mark at her desk, laughing loudly, jovially, standing there almost hidden by the overlarge vase of flowers, so large it could barely fit alongside her phone and computer, that when I came into the office and saw Mark there laughing and saw her laughing back, laughing and blushing and lively, saw them there together as if nothing had happened, it should come as no surprise that my first instinct then was a rageful one.
Should come as no surprise that I stopped in my tracks, blocking the door to the office, and that Roger crashed into the back of me.
Should come as no surprise, though I feel awful about it, that Roger became the outlet for this rage, and that before anyone could register that we were in the doorway or that Roger had said, “Hey, Jonnie, what’s the holdup?” before Barbara had the chance to even notice I was there, I turned, grabbed Roger, poor Roger, grabbed him fiercely by the throat, my gray knuckles white from the force of my exertions on his windpipe, which was crushed almost immediately, grabbed hold of him, lifted him off his feet, marched him back toward the elevator, which hadn’t closed yet, and threw him inside. Nobody noticed me do this at all. Except for maybe Roger, though by all rights he didn’t feel this, didn’t experience this or the tearing of limb from limb, didn’t feel the bloody evisceration of himself, didn’t feel anything at all, which is small comfort, I know, which is almost no comfort at all, not for Roger, certainly, and not for the part of me trying so desperately hard to be someone other than who I am.
It’s a fine line. It’s a tightrope. It’s a balancing act. I’m perched atop a thin, wobbly fence.
Have I fallen off the fence? Have I stepped off the line, slipped from my rope? I could say I’m barely hanging on, that I’m holding on by a thread. I could say I’m hanging in there. But to look at Roger, or what’s left of him, to look at what’s left of Roger, I would say that I’m now, no matter your metaphor, no longer hanging or perched or balanced, but am standing firmly on solid ground.
Don’t assume that I don’t understand the difficulty inherent in trying to control what we cannot control or that I haven’t considered the difficulties that everyday people face or that I haven’t thought about the ways in which I am lucky, luckier than Barbara or Mark or Roger, that I haven’t taken into account the fact that we are not really so different, or that I don’t see Barbara’s difficulties for what they are or how they compare to my own, that I don’t understand how hard
it can be to keep our baser selves in check or how much easier it is, ultimately, to go back to the evil we know and understand, the evil we have lived with for so long that it feels an inherent and important part of ourselves, to go back to this evil and tell ourselves that we had no other choice, that we didn’t opt for this decision, but that really there were never any other options for us to take. I know about choices and about not having choices and how it feels when it seems you have no other choice. Don’t assume that I wasn’t sympathetic to Barbara, to the choices she was making with Mark.
I was. I am. Sympathetic, but also concerned. I’m concerned about the choices she’s making and worried that she is blind to the host of other choices out there available to her. And it dawns on me as I am cleaning up the mess of Roger—the seventh floor is, serendipitously, for lease and occupantless—that I also have choices, that in this moment, I am faced with more options than I have felt faced with in too long of a time for me to remember. And it dawns on me, too, that for the first time there is a choice amid all of these other choices that is perfectly suited to me, to all of me, to the me that cares about Barbara and her well-being, and to the other me that cares about so very little.
Perfectly suited to both of us.
As I survey the mess I made of Roger, there is a persistent voice in my head repeating, over and over again, “Let him rise, let him rise.” The voice is saying, “Horde, an army horde of us,” and it’s saying, “Let him rise,” and before that voice can take firm hold of me, I find a thin, sharp metal tray left here by the floor’s last occupants and I press it hard against Roger’s neck, hard and harder and harder still, until I sever through.
The point of this exercise being this: The mystical properties aside, our regenerative abilities and single-minded pursuit aside, zombies, even zombies, require heads.
There was a time, a long stretch of time, when it was all I wanted to do, create a horde, not an army horde, exactly, but a gathering, or not even that many, not even a gathering, but even just one, just one more. It was a trial and error process—more specifically, a process full of error. Not that the creation of other zombies is a complicated process, that process itself hinging almost entirely on biting, which is my most natural impulse. No, the actual creation of zombies worked once I got the hang of it, worked in the way that I understood how much damage the body could take and still become infected, be lifted back up, given breath, life, some semblance of cognition. But then, it never worked in that what I helped to create was never what I hoped to create.
Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041) Page 11
