by Jeffrey Ford
“Who knocks at the back door?” I said to myself as I made my way through the kitchen.
3
His eyes were the oval disks of Japanese cartoon characters, glassy and brimming with nothing. Like the whiteness of Melville’s whale, you could read anything into them, and while Lyda and I sat staring at him staring at the wall, I projected my desires and frustrations into those mirrors with a will I doubt Ahab could have mustered.
“A blown Easter egg,” said Lyda, breaking the silence.
And in the end, she was right. There was an exquisite emptiness about him. His face was drawn, his limbs thin but wiry with real muscle. He looked like a fellow who might at one time have worked as a car mechanic or a UPS delivery man. I guessed his age to be somewhere in the late thirties but knew, from what Malthusian had suggested, that his youth was merely compliance to a command. I wondered how old he would become when the spell was broken. Perhaps, like Valdemar in Poe’s story, I thought, he will eventually be reduced to a pool of putrescence.
We had been sitting with the zombie for over an hour when Susan finally arrived home from work. Lyda got up from her seat and ran into the living room to tell her mother that we had a visitor.
“Guess who?” I heard her ask. She led Susan by the hand into the kitchen.
Upon discovering our guest, the first word out of her mouth was, “No.” It wasn’t like the shriek of a heroine being accosted by a creature in the horror movies. This was the no of derailed late-night amorous advances, a response to Lyda’s pleading to stay up till eleven on a school night.
“Let’s be sensible about this,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
“Call the police,” said Susan.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “The very fact that he is here, proves that what Malthusian told me was all true. We’d be putting our lives in danger.”
“Go play,” Susan said to Lyda.
“Can the zombie play?” she asked.
“The zombie has to stay here,” I said, and pointed toward the kitchen entrance.
When Lyda was gone, Susan sat down at the table and she and I stared at him some more. His breathing was very shallow and, with the exception of this subtle movement of his chest, he sat perfectly still. There was something very relaxing about his presencè.
“This is crazy,” she said to me. “What are we going to do with him?”
“Malthusian said he would soon remember where he was from, and that we should take him to his home whenever the memory of it became clear to him.”
“Can’t we just drive him somewhere and let him out of the car?” asked Susan. “We’ll leave him off in the parking lot at the mall.”
“You wouldn’t do that with a cat, but you would abandon a human being?” I said.
She shook her head in exasperation. “Well, what does he do? It doesn’t look like much is becoming clear to him,” she said.
I turned to the zombie and said, “What is your name?”
He didn’t move.
Susan reached over and snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Hey, Mister Zombie, what should we call you?”
“Wait a second,” I said. “He doesn’t answer questions, he responds to commands.”
“Tell me your name,” Susan said to him.
The zombie turned his head slightly toward her and began to slowly move his lips. “Tom,” he said, and the word sort of fell out of his mouth, flat and dull as an old coin.
Susan brought her hand up to cover a giggle. “Tommy the zombie,” she said.
“Pathetic,” I said, and couldn’t suppress my own laughter even though there were shadowed entities at large in the world who might engineer our demise.
We had never had so unassuming a house guest. Tom was like that broom standing in the kitchen closet until you need it. The novelty of performance upon command soon wore off. Sure, we got a little mileage out of the stage hypnotist antics—“Bark like a dog,” “Act like a chicken.” I know it sounds a bit unfeeling, but we did it, I suppose, simply because we could, similar in spirit to the whim of the government that originally engineered the poor man’s circumstance. Lyda put an end to this foolishness. She lectured us about how we should respect him. We were embarrassed by her words, but at the same time pleased that we had raised such a caring individual. As it turned out, she had a real affection for the zombie. He was, for Lyda, the puppy we would not let her have.
It was not difficult remembering to command him to go to the bathroom twice a day, or to eat, or shower. What was truly hard was keeping him a secret. We all swore to each other that we would tell no one. Susan and I were afraid that Lyda, so completely carried away by her new friend, might not be able to contain herself at school. Think of the status one would reap in the third grade if it were known you had your own zombie at home. Throughout the ordeal, she proved to be the most practical, the most caring, the most insightful of all of us.
The utter strangeness of the affair did not strike me until the next night when I woke from a bad dream with a dry mouth. Half in a daze, I got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. I took my drink and, going into the living room, sat down on the couch. For some reason, I was thinking about Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and how D. H. Lawrence had described it as a story of vampirism. I followed a thread of thought that looped in and out of that loopy story and ended with an image of the previously airy and lethargic Madeline bursting out of her tomb to jump on old Roderick. Then I happened to look to the left, and jumped, myself, realizing that the zombie had been sitting next to me the entire time.
Tom could make a great pot of coffee. He vacuumed like a veteran chambermaid. Susan showed him how to do hospital corners when making the beds. When he was not busy, he would simply sit on the couch in the living room and stare directly across at the face of the grandfather clock. It was clear that he had a conception of time, because it was possible to set him like a VCR. If we were going out, we could tell him, “Make and eat a bologna sandwich at one P.M. Go to the bathroom at three.”
Somewhere in the second week of his asylum with us, I got the notion to become more expansive in my commands. I recalled Malthusian telling me that Tom was capable of playing Chopin after only listening to a piece once. It became clear that the requests I had been making of him were penny ante. I upped the stakes and instructed him to begin typing my handwritten notes for the Poe book. He flawlessly copied exactly what I had on the paper. Excited by this new breakthrough, I told him to read a grammar book and then correct my text. Voilà!
It became rapidly evident that we would have to get Tom some new clothes, since he continued to wear the same short-sleeved gray Sears workshirt and pants day in and day out. There was no question he would have worn them until they were reduced to shreds. Susan went to the store on her way home from work one night and bought him a few things. The next day, as an experiment, we told him to get dressed, choosing items from the pile of garments we laid before him. He came out of the spare bedroom wearing a pair of loose-fitting khakis and a black T-shirt that had written in white block letters across it I’m with Stupid. We all got a charge out of this.
“Laugh, Tom,” said Lyda.
The zombie opened wide his mouth, and from way back in his throat came a high-pitched, “HA … HA.”
The horror of it melted my smile, and I began to wonder about his choice of shirts. That’s when I noticed that a distinct five o’clock shadow had sprouted across his chin and sunken cheeks. My God, I thought, without telling Susan or Lyda, the aging process has begun.
When Tom wasn’t pulling his weight around the house, Lyda usually had him engaged in some game. They played catch, cards, Barbies, and with those activities that were competitive, Lyda would tell him when it was his turn to win—and he would. For the most part, though, they drew pictures. Sitting at the kitchen table, each with a pencil and a few sheets of paper, they would create monsters. Lyda would have to tell Tom what to draw.
“No
w do the werewolf with a dress and a hat. Mrs. Werewolf,” she said.
That zombie could draw. When he was done there was a startlingly well-rendered, perfectly shadowed and shaded portrait of Lon Chaney in drag, a veritable hirsute Minnie Pearl. Susan hung the drawing with magnets on the refrigerator.
“Take a bow,” Lyda told him and he bent gracefully at the waist in a perfect forty-five-degree angle.
My wife and daughter didn’t notice that Tom was changing, but I did. Slowly, over the course of mere days, his hair had begun to thin out and crow’s feet formed at the corners of his eyes. This transformation astounded me. I wondered what it was that Malthusian had done to offset the effects of the original surgery that had been performed on him. Perhaps it was a series of commands; some kind of rigid behavioristic training. I hated to think of the old man poking around in Tom’s head in that checkerboard kitchen under the fluorescent lights. What also puzzled me was how Malthusian had transferred command of the zombie to me and my family. I began paying much closer attention to him, waiting for a sign that he had begun to recollect himself.
4
I held the drawing out to Lyda and asked her, “Who did this?”
She took it from me and upon seeing it smiled. “Tom,” she said. “Yesterday, I told him to draw whatever he wanted.”
“It’s good, don’t you think?” I asked.
“Pretty good,” she said and turned back to the television show she had been watching.
The portrait I held in my hand was of a young woman with long, dark hair. This was no monster. She was rendered with the same attention to detail as had been given to Mrs. Werewolf, but this girl, whoever she was, was beautiful. I was especially drawn to the eyes, which were luminous, so full of warmth. She wore an expression of amusement—a very subtle grin and a self-consciously dramatic arching of the eyebrows. I went to the kitchen and called for Tom to come in from the living room.
I told him to take his usual drawing seat, and then I handed him the picture. “You will tell me who this is,” I commanded.
He stared for a moment at the portrait, and then it happened, a fleeting expression of pain crossed his face. His hand trembled slightly for a moment.
“You must tell me,” I said.
“Marta,” he said, and although it was only a word, I could have sworn there was a hint of emotion behind it.
“You must tell me if this is your wife,” I said.
He slowly brought his left hand to his mouth, like a robot programmed to enact the human response of awe.
“Tell me,” I said.
From behind his fingers, he whispered, “My love.”
It was a foolish thing to do, but I applauded. As if the sound of my clapping suddenly severed his cognizance, he dropped his hand to his side and returned to the zombie state.
I sat down and studied him. His hair had begun to go gray at the edges, and his beard was now very noticeable. Those wrinkles I had detected the first sign of a few days earlier were now more prominent, as was the loosening of the skin along his chin line. Invading his blank affect was a vague aura of weariness. As impossible as it might sound, he appeared to me as if he had shrunk a centimeter or two.
“My love,” I said out loud. These words were the most exciting shred of humanity to have surfaced, not so much for their dramatic weight, but more because he had failed to follow my instruction and definitively answer the question.
I left him alone for the time being, seeing as how he seemed quite saddened by the experience of remembering; but later, when Susan had returned home, we cleared the kitchen table after dinner and tried to advance the experiment. We conscripted Lyda into the plot, since Tom was with her when he had created the portrait of Marta.
“Tell him to draw a picture of his house,” I whispered to her. She nodded and then Susan and I left the kitchen and went into the living room to wait.
“He looks terrible,” Susan said to me.
“The spell is slowly dissolving,” I said. “He is becoming what he should be.”
“The human mind is frightening,” she said.
“The Haunted Palace,” I told her.
Twenty minutes later, Lyda came in to us, smiling, carrying a picture.
“Look what he drew,” she said, laughing.
He had created a self-portrait. Beneath the full-length picture were the scrawled words Tommy the Zombie.
I pointed to the words and said, “Well that didn’t work as I had planned, but this is rather interesting.”
“A sense of humor?” said Susan.
“No,” said Lyda. “He is sad.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t push him,” I said.
“Wait,” said Susan and sat forward suddenly. “Tell him now to draw his home.”
Lyda nodded and returned to the kitchen.
An hour passed while Susan and I waited in silence for the results. We could hear Lyda, in the kitchen, talking to him as they worked. She was telling him about this boy in her class in school who always bites the skin on his fingers.
“When Mrs. Brown asked Harry why he bites his skin, you know what he said?” asked Lyda.
There was a moment of silence and then we heard the deep, flat response, “What?”
Susan and I looked at each other.
“Harry told her,” said Lyda, “he bites it because that way his father, who is very old, won’t die.”
A few minutes passed and then came a most disturbing sound, like a moan from out of a nightmare. Susan and I leaped up and ran into the kitchen. Lyda was sitting there, gaping at Tom, who was pressing on the pencil with a shaking hand, writing as if trying to carve initials into a tree trunk. There was sweat on his brow and tears in his eyes. I walked behind him and looked over his shoulder. There was a picture of a ranch-style house with an old carport to its left. In the front window, I could make out the figures of a black cat and a woman’s face. He was scrawling numbers and letters across the bottom of the picture.
“Twenty-four Griswold Place,” I said aloud. And when he finished and slumped back into his seat, I saw the name of the town and spoke it, “Falls Park.”
“That’s only an hour north of here,” said Susan.
I patted Tom on the back and told him, “You’re going home,” but by then his consciousness had again receded.
The next morning I arose well before sunrise and ordered Tom down the hall to the guest bedroom to change. He set to the task, a reluctant zombie, his rapid aging causing him to shuffle along, slightly bent over. Literally overnight, his hair had lost more of its color and there was a new, alarming sense of frailty about him. While he was dressing, I went in and kissed Susan good-bye and told her I was taking him as we had planned.
“Good luck,” she said.
“Do you want to see him?” I asked.
“No, I’m going to go back to sleep, so that when I wake up I will be able to discount the entire thing as a bad dream.”
“I hope I get him there before he croaks,” I told her. “He’s older than ever today.”
I settled Tom in the backseat of the car and told him to buckle the belt. Then I got in and started driving. It was still dark as I turned onto the road out of town. Of course, I was taking a big chance by hoping that he might still know someone at the address he had written down. Decades had passed since he had been abducted, but I didn’t care. Think ill of me if you like, but as with the lawyer in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” who ends up finally abandoning the scribe, which of you would have done as much as we did? Shadowed entities be damned, it had to come to an end.
“You’re going home,” I said over my shoulder to him as I drove.
“Home, yes,” he said, and I took this for a good sign.
I looked into the rearview mirror, and could only see the top of his head. He seemed to have shrunk even more. To prepare myself for a worst-case scenario, I wondered what the bill would be to have a pool of putrescence steam-cleaned from my back seat.
About halfwa
y into the journey, he started making some very odd sounds—coughing and hushed choking. This gave way to a kind of grumbling language that he carried on with for miles. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and to block it out, I eventually turned on the radio.
Even with the map, the address, and the drawing, it took me an hour and forty-five minutes to find the place. The sun was just beginning to show itself on the horizon when I pulled up in front of 24 Griswold Place. It was remarkable how perfect his drawing had been.
“Go now and knock on that door,” I said, pointing.
I was going to get out of the car and help him, but before I could get my belt off, I heard the back door open and close. Turning, I saw his figure moving away from the car. He was truly an old man now, moving beneath the weight of those years that, in the brief time of our trip, had caught up and overtaken him. I hoped that his metamorphosis had finally ended.
A great wave of sorrow passed through me, and I couldn’t let him go without saying good-bye. I pressed the button for the window on his side. When it had rolled down, I called out, “Good luck.”
He stopped walking, turned slowly to face me, and then I knew that the transformation was complete. His hair had gone completely white, and his face was webbed with wrinkles. It was Malthusian. He stood there staring at me, and his eyes were no smaller because he did not wear glasses.
I shook with the anger of betrayal. “You bastard!” I yelled.
“Let’s not let it ruin our game,” he said with a thick accent, and then turned and went up the front steps.
I was so stunned, I couldn’t move. He knocked on the door. After a few moments, a woman, as old as he, answered. I heard her give a short scream and then she threw her arms around him. “You’ve returned,” she said in that same accent. She ushered him into the house and then the door slammed closed.