by Paula Guran
Is it possible to talk without moving your lips? The stranger in her room doesn’t speak. Instead, Dana knows. Uncanny. she knows.
—Good evening. Isn’t that what you people say?
She does what you do. She opens her throat and screams to wake the dead.
—Don’t do that.
“I can’t help it!”
—I’m sorry. I’m new at this.
“Who are you?”
—You mean the name I used to have? No idea. It left me when I died . . .
“Died!”
The intruder continues —and I would have to die again to get it back, and you know what death brings. Dissolution and decay. Sorrow.
“What are you?”
—For the purposes of this conversation, you can call me X. Every one of us is known as X.
“Oh my God. Oh, my God!”
The great head lifts. —Who?
“Get out.” Higher. Dana sends her voice high enough to clear the room and raise the neighborhood. “Get out!” When she uncovers her face the intruder hasn’t advanced and it hasn’t run away.
It hasn’t moved. It is watching her, graceful and self-contained. As if her screams are nothing to it. —No.
“Get out or I’ll . . . ” Groping for the empty pistol she keeps under the pillow she threatens wildly. “I’ll shoot!”
—Go ahead. So calm. Too calm! —It won’t change anything.
“Oh.” Noting the fixed, crystalline eyes she understands that this is true. “Oh my God.”
The bedroom is unnaturally still. So is the intruder. Except for the trembling Dana can’t control, except for her light, irregular breathing, she too manages to stay quiet. The figure in white stands without moving, a monument to patience. There is a fixed beauty to the eyes, a terrifying lack of expression. They are empty and too perfect, like doll’s eyes: too pale to be real, blue as blown flowers with stars for pupils. —Don’t be afraid. That won’t change anything either.
Dana isn’t afraid, exactly, she is too badly hurt by the breakup with Bill to think much about anything else, and this? What’s happening here in her bedroom is too strange to be real. It’s as though she is floating far above it. Not an out-of-body experience, exactly, but one in which everything changes.
The intruder is impeccable in a white suit, black shirt, bright circle of silver about one wrist—silver wire braided, she notes in the kind of mad attention to detail that crisis sparks in some people. The rapt gaze. Like an underground prince ravished by its first look at the sun. The attention leaves her more puzzled than frightened. Flattered, really, by that gaze fixed on her as if she really matters. As if this strange figure has come to break her out of the jail that is her life. Bill’s betrayal changed her. She was almost destroyed but even that is changing.
She can’t forgive Bill but with this magnetic presence in her room, for seconds at a time she almost forgets about Bill.
The dark hair, the eyebrows like single brush strokes, the pallor are eerie and sinister and glamorous. She doesn’t know whether to flirt or threaten. Better the former, she thinks. Let Bill come in and finds us, that will show him. Unless she’s stalling until her fingers can find bullets and load the gun. As if she could make a dent in that lustrous skin. “What is this?” she asks, overtaken. “Why are you here?”
The answer takes too long coming. It is not that the stranger has stopped to choose its words. It exists without reference to time. When the answer comes, it isn’t exactly an answer. —You are my first.
“First what?” First what, she wonders. First love? First kill? The stranger is so gorgeous standing there. So courteous and so still. Impervious. None of her fears fit the template. If Dana’s clock is still running, she can’t read the face. Unnerved by the absence of sound—this intruder doesn’t shift on its feet, it doesn’t cough or clear its throat; she doesn’t hear it breathing!—she whispers, “What are you?”
—Does the word undead mean anything to you?
“No!” It doesn’t. Nice suit, cultivated manner, he’s a bit of a mystery, but the handsome face, the strange, cool eyes lift him so far out of the ordinary that the rules don’t pertain here. He’s here because he’s attracted to her. “You don’t look like a . . . ”
—Zombie?
Then it does! Images flood the room, blinding her to everything but the terror. Dana flies out of bed, rushing the door, ricocheting off the stranger’s alabaster facade with her hands flying here, there. Screaming, she hurls herself at the sealed bedroom window, battering on the glass.
—Or walking dead.
“No!” A zombie.
—If you prefer.
This is a zombie. “No, no! Oh my God, don’t touch me!”
—Hold still. It has an eerie dignity. —I’m not going to eat you.
Idiot human. If you’re afraid of getting your face gnawed off or your arm ripped out of its socket and devoured, you’ve seen too many movies. Your body is of no interest to us, not me, not any. We don’t hunt in packs nor do we come in pairs. The zombie travels alone and the zombie takes what it needs without your knowing it. What I take can be extracted through the slightest opening; a keyhole, the crack under your bedroom door. Like a rich man the morning after a robbery, you may not even know what is missing.
“Don’t.” Sobbing, Dana retreats to the bed, pulling the covers up in a knot. All her flailing, her failed attempts to escape, all that screaming and the intruder hasn’t advanced a fraction of an inch. So calm and so very beautiful. In a way it’s everything she wants, she thinks, or everything she wants to be. Unless it’s everything she’s afraid of. She is a tangled mass of conflicting emotions—grief and terror and something as powerful as it is elusive. “What do you want?”
—Zombies do not want. They need.
“You’re not going to . . . ” She locks her arms across her front with an inadvertent shudder.
—Do you really believe I want to chew your arm off?
“I don’t know what I believe!” This is not exactly true. In spite of what it says, Dana is afraid it’s here to devour her. Doesn’t have to be me, she thinks cleverly. Odd what rejection does to you; her heart congeals like a pond in a flash freeze. Why not pull a switch and buy her safety with a substitute? In a vision of the fitness of things she sees Bill broken in two for his sins; she hears Bill howling in pain as the zombie’s pale, strong hands plunge into his open chest, and when this happens? Maybe she and her elegant zombie will make love while Bill dies and that’ll show him, that will damn well show him. “If you want to eat,” she says in a low voice, “I can feed you.”
—If that was what I came for you’d be bare bones by now.
She does what you do in ambiguous situations. She asks a polite question. “How . . . How did you get this way?”
—No idea. Zombies do not remember.
This brings Dana’s head up fast. “You don’t remember anything?”
—No.
Thoughtfully, she says, “So you don’t remember how it happened.”
—No. Nothing from before. The silence is suddenly empty, as though the thing in her bedroom has just walked out and closed the door on itself.
Nothing, it is the nature of our condition. There was a name on my headstone when I got up and walked, but I had no interest in reading it. There was this silver bracelet on my wrist that must have meant something to me once. Engraving inside, perhaps, but I don’t need to read it. Who gave it, and what did I feel for her back when I was human? Human I’m not. There is no grief in the zone where I walk, There is no loss and no pain, and yet . . .
I came out of the grave wiped clean. I came out strong and powerful and insentient. Yet there is this great sucking hole at my center. It burns. I need. I need . . .
What?
“But all this time you’ve been dead. I mean, undead. You must be starved.” Clever Dana’s fingers creep toward the phone. She can’t imagine what she needs to say to please him. “I can get you somebody. Somebody
big. Practically twice my size.”
—No thank you.
“Really.” All she has to do is tell the bastard she’s OD’d on sleeping pills. Guilt will have him here in a flash. “Tall. Overweight.” Fat, she thinks, Bill is fat and now that she thinks about it, probably unfaithful. “Fleshy. Just let me make this call.”
—You don’t understand. Terrifying but beautiful, in a way, the flat blue gaze. That grave shake of the head. —Flesh is anathema to us.
Idiot woman, do you imagine I came here to feed? Flesh-eating monsters may exist, botched lab experiments or mindless aberrations raised from the grave by toxic spills, but they are only things with no awareness of outcomes and this is the difference between them and us.
When you have been dead and buried, outcomes are everything to you.
Eat and the outcome is inevitable. Gorge on flesh—take even one bite!—and it all comes back: life, memory and regret, rapid, inexorable decay and with it, an insatiable desire for the fires of home.
Gnawing anxiously at her lower lip, Dana is too distracted to feel her teeth break the skin. She sees the intruder’s eyes shift slightly. They are fixed not on her throat, but on her mouth. She shakes her head, puzzled. “You’re really not hungry?”
—When you have been dead and buried, mortal concerns are nothing to you.
“So you really don’t have to eat.”
—If we do we lose everything.
“But when you die you lose everything,” she says, shivering.
—If you mean little things like pain and memory, yes.
This brings Dana’s head up. “Nothing hurts?”
—Nothing like that. No.
“Wait,” she says carefully. “You don’t feel anything?”
—We are above human flaws like feeling . . .
“And you don’t remember anything. Oh. Oh!” The truth comes in like a highway robber approaching in stages. She says in a low voice, I can’t imagine what that’s like.”
— . . . and mortality.
Her breath catches and her heart shudders at the discovery. Her hand flies to cover it. “Oh,” she cries. “Oh!”
Easy. This is easy. Greedy, vulnerable girl. I knew you before you saw this coming. Who wouldn’t want to forget and who doesn’t love oblivion? Who would risk all that for a scrap of meat, the taste of blood? Knowing flesh can destroy us.
Topple and your former self comes back to you. All the love and pain and terror and excitement and grief and intolerable suspense that come with mortality. All you want to do is go home. You want to go home!
Aroused and terrified, you set out. With your restarted heart thudding, you approach the house. You are burning to rejoin the family. Walk into the circle: am I late? as though nothing’s happened. Do not expect to find them as you left them. You have changed too. Are changing as your body begins to decay—too fast, all that lost time to make up for.
It will be harsh.
Do not imagine that—wherever you come from, no matter how sorely you are missed—they will be glad to see you. Didn’t they drop dirt and roses on your coffin a dozen years ago when they put you away? They sobbed when you slipped into a coma and fell dead, no cause the doctors could find, so sad. They loved you and begged God to bring you back to them, but they didn’t mean it.
Not like this.
Your body is no longer in stasis. You are in a footrace with decay. The changes begin the minute your heart resumes beating so hurry, you are on fire. If only you can see them again! Hurry. Try to make it home while they can still recognize you! You will decompose fast because, face it, you died a long time ago. You’ve been around too long. In the end, you’ll die again, and the family? Look at them sitting around the supper table in the yellow light, photo of you on the mantel, pot roast again. God in His Heaven and everything in its place. Do you really want to blunder in and interrupt that?
You should hang back, but now that you remember, now that you feel, you are excited to see them, you can’t wait! Be warned, nothing is as you remember. Not any more. With your arms spread wide in hopes you will come surging out of the darkness, incandescing with love, but do not be surprised when they run screaming. Your loving face is a terror, your gestures are nightmarish, they are horrified by the sounds you make, your heartfelt cries that they can’t quite decipher bubbling out of your rotting face.
Pray to God that your home is so far away that you won’t make it even though you are doomed to keep going. Sobbing, you will forge ahead on bloody stumps, heading home until the bones that hold you up splinter and you drop. Now hope to God that what’s left of you decomposes in a woods somewhere, unseen by the loved ones you’re trying so desperately to reach. You need to see them just once more and you need it terribly, but be grateful that they are spared this final horror. You will die in the agony of complete memory, and you will die weeping for everything you’ve lost.
Time passes. The silence is profound. It is as though they are sharing the same long dream. Certain things are understood without having to be spoken. At last Dana snaps to attention. Like a refrigerator light set to go on when the door opens, the handsome figure in her bedroom remains motionless, with its great hands relaxed at its sides and crystal eyes looking into something she can only guess at. Alert now, excited by the possibilities, Dana tilts her head, regarding him. Carefully, she resumes the catechism. “You really don’t feel anything?”
—No.
Dana studies the beautiful face, the graceful stance. Absolute composure, like a gift. She says dreamily, “That must be wonderful.” Some time during the long silence that has linked them, she stopped thinking of the zombie who has come for her as an it. This is a man, living or dead or undead, a beautiful man in her room and he is here for her. Without speaking he tells her, —When you have been dead and buried there is no wonderful . . .
“I see.” Not sure where this is going, Dana touches her Speed Dial. On her cell phone, Bill has always been number One. Her zombie notes this but nothing in his face changes. If he hears the little concatenation of beeps and the phone’s ringing and ringing cut short by Bill’s tiny, angry “What!” it makes no difference to him. When she’s sure Bill is wide awake and listening Dana opens her arms to the intruder, saying in a new voice, “But we can still . . . ”
— . . . and no desire . . .
“But you’re so beautiful.” She expects him to say, So are you.
— . . . looks are nothing to you . . .
“That’s so sad!” The phone is alive with Bill’s angry squawking.
—because you never change.
“Oh!” This makes her stop and think. “You mean you never get old?”
—No.
For Bill’s benefit she continues on that same sexy note. Oddly, it seems to fit the story that’s unfolding. “And nothing hurts . . . ”
—No, nothing hurts.
Far out of reach, Bill shouts into the phone. “Dana . . . ”
As Dana purrs like a tiger licking velvet. “But everybody wants.”
—Zombies don’t want. They need.
She is drawn into the rhythm of the exchange, the metronomic back and forth. God he is handsome, she would like to run her hands along that perfect jaw, down the neck and inside the shirt collar to that perfect throat. “And you need . . . ”
Without moving he is suddenly too close. She sees green veins lacing the pale skin.
—Something elusive. Infinitesimal. You won’t even miss it. And when it’s gone . . .
“Dammit, Dana!”
“But when it’s gone . . . ”
—You will be changed.
“Changed,” she says dreamily, “and nothing will hurt any more.”
—When you have been dead and buried pain is nothing to you.
“Will I be like you?”
—In a way.
She says into the growing hush, “So I’ll be immortal.”
—In a way.
There is an intolerable pause. Why doesn’t
he touch her? She doesn’t know. He is close enough for her to see the detail on the silver bracelet; he’s next to the bed, he is right here and yet he hasn’t reached out. Unaccountably chilled as she is right now—something in the air, she supposes—Dana is drawn. Whatever he is, she wants. She has to have it! Her voice comes from somewhere deep inside. “What do you want me to do?”
His cold, cold hand rises to her cheek but does not touch it. —Nothing.
“Are we going to, ah . . . ” Dana’s tone says, make love. She is distantly aware of Bill Wylie still on the phone, trying to get her attention.
“Dana, do you hear me?”
“Shut up, Bill. Don’t bother me.” She wants to taunt him with the mystery. She doesn’t understand it herself. She wants to make love with this magnetic, unassailable stranger; she wants to be him. She wants him to love her as Bill never did, really, and she wants Bill to hear everything that happens between them. She wants Bill Wylie to lie there in his outsized bachelor’s bed listening as his seduction unfolds, far out of sight and beyond his control—Bill, who until last night she expected to marry and live with forever. Let this night sit in Bill’s imagination and fester there and torture him for the rest of his life. Whatever she does with this breathtaking stranger will free her forever, and Bill? It will serve him right. “Come take what you want.”
“Damn it to hell, Dana, I’m coming over!”
—When you have been dead and buried you do not know desire.
Yet there is a charge in the air between them.
The mind forgets but the body remembers. Bracelet glinting on my arm. What’s the matter with me? Zombies know, insofar as they know anything, that you extract the soul from a distance. Through a keyhole, through a crack in a bedroom window. Always from a distance. This is essential. This knowledge is embedded: get too close and you get sucked in. And yet, and yet! It is as though the bracelet links X to the past it has no memory of. Interesting failure here, perhaps because this is its first assault on the precincts of the living. Zombies come out of the grave knowing certain things, but this one is distracted by unbidden reminders of the flesh, the circle of bright silver around the bone like a link to the forgotten.