The street is there – sort of. The close-set red-brick houses. The thick groups of Purples lounging in nests, tossing garbage around, climbing through the windows or slapping their jackets. But something else is there. It’s not just a nest for Purples today: the bulldozers have moved in, bringing a maze of scaffolding and temporary wire fences with them.
These things roam the outskirts of campus. Digging up roads and putting them back. Smashing old, living buildings and assembling new ones. Something hovers around the university that is insatiable, that cannot stop building, and the bulldozers are its midwives.
You almost fall back and detour. But Professor Yao is too good to send you here by mistake. She has a virtual map keeping track of the bulldozers’ migrations. She wouldn’t have sent you to them unless she wanted you to face them.
Still, you falter. You risk a look over your shoulder.
Your mother has come entirely apart. Barely more than a skeleton now, dusted with clumps of black hair, fragments of the red sari.
You squeeze your eyes shut.
“Go back,” you whisper. “Please.”
She gives you the same pain-and-terror look with those empty sockets. You never studied how zombies are made, what spells are used. Maybe she can’t go back. Maybe the same force that brought her to life keeps her cloven to you.
Your hands are shaking. You breathe as deep as you can. You have to fight your way to the centre now.
You walk forward.
The bulldozers rumble and roll of their own accord, chattering to each other every so often with piercing beeps. You walk into their midst, into the wire-fence maze.
Your presence makes them pause. It turns the Purples’ heads. They stare at you. Murmur to each other. A few shift like they’re thinking of getting up.
You fight down panic. You’re not quite in your centre. You’re radiating too much emotion and they’re noticing you too fast.
What did Professor Yao tell you to do in a situation like this? Better meditation? A detour? You can’t remember. You hardly care. It’s hard enough to put one foot in front of the other, let alone think of other options.
You put one foot in front of the other for a while. And then the maze comes to a dead end.
You pause. Try to retrace your steps. But looking carefully, there is no way forward. There’s a wire fence here stretched all the way across the street. No opening. No gate. You’re stuck.
You waver.
And then, before you can stop her, the skeleton of your mother leaps up and begins to climb the fence.
You rush after her. You’re not the best climber. But you’re suddenly frantic to reach her. Little slivers of bone are clattering to the ground now as she hooks her fingers into the links. “No,” you whisper. “No, no, no!” But she climbs faster than you. You’re up at the top of the fence, nearly at her, before you can think straight. She wobbles. You reach out to steady her.
Before your fingertips reach her, she falls forward.
You leap. It’s only eight feet down from the top of the fence to the other side. Not enough to do more than jar you, with your gymnast’s sense for landings. But where your mother hits the ground there’s suddenly nothing but red fabric and broken fragments of bone, rolling outward in all directions.
You land on your hands and knees. You stare at the red fabric in disbelief. You scrabble at it, like you can put her back together again.
Where is your centre? You can’t find it. You can’t even imagine where it would be. All you can do is crouch on the ground, staring, shivering.
The Purples, in your peripheral vision, are all crawling towards you.
Fine. You have no centre. You can’t even bring yourself to get up. You don’t care. So the Purples will take you. There are too many of them to fight, and not enough time for the emergency robots to get here. There’s nothing you can do. You can refuse to be afraid. You can’t refuse to grieve.
You hunch down and wait for them. A violet hand, surprisingly warm, grips your shoulder.
“Oil Thigh na Banrighinn,” murmurs the Purple. As though it’s sad.
“A’Banrighinn,” echo the others. And there’s a slow, rhythmic thunk of jackets on the ground.
Not an attack. A dirge. They are mourning with you.
You bury your face in the Purple’s shoulder and weep.
∆ ∆ ∆
Written Component, Part 5
Q. Do you think you have passed your exam?
A. I think I have survived.
I think Non-Mind is the wrong name for them.
They’re not safe. Their minds are not like our minds.
But sometimes they are just close enough.
WAITING FOR JENNY REX
Melissa Yuan-Innes
Anorexia nervosa came first. She was the first and the best. But then I’m biased, since I also like to think she came back for me.
The autumn day she walked into my life, and back to life in general, started off as usual in the Ottawa Citizen newsroom. I was cutting two hundred words out of my movie review. It was raining hard outside, but I hardly noticed until my screen died and the room went black. In that astonished moment, a shadowy, angular form appeared in the doorway.
Her heels clicked as she walked to the centre of the room. Her voice was young and clear. “Hello. My name is Jenny Reed. I died from anorexia three months ago, and I’ve returned to be a spokesperson for the disease.”
Marsha, our sports editor, was the first to recover. “Excuse me. You said you died from anorexia?”
“That’s right. I died in the Ottawa General Hospital and I was buried in Beechwood Cemetery. Here’s a copy of my death certificate. You can ask me questions and get a doctor to prove that I am a) dead and b) Jennifer Emily Reed. But I’ll only spend an hour on that sort of proof. I want a front page story with a maximum of 35 percent of the column space devoted to the fact that I’m dead. The rest of it must be on anorexia. And I get to approve the final copy.”
I had to ask. “What if we refuse your conditions?”
“I walk out of here, leaving you with nothing but a nice anecdote, and I go to the Ottawa Sun.”
“Wait. No need for that. Josh is just being cautious,” Marsha soothed, casting me a glare. “But I’d say we need an hour for the medical exam alone.”
“Well.” She cocked her head to her side. “I can see how you’d want to be sure I’m dead. All right. An hour medical.” We negotiated an hour for Q&A on her former life, including research time, and voted to go for it. Then the lights came on.
My breath caught. She was so thin that her temples were concave and her cheekbones protruded obscenely beneath her glittering brown eyes. Only thin brown wisps of hair remained on her skull. I could almost count the bones in each hand. She wore a navy pantsuit which mercifully hid the rest of her body.
She let us look our fill, then, surprisingly, grinned. “Anorexia isn’t pretty, and now I’m taking it out of the hospitals and into the street. If you guys want in on it, you’d better hurry up.”
We dug up her medical records, her death certificate, even some school records of Jennifer Emily Reed, dead of anorexia at the age of twenty. A doctor began the physical exam. She had no pulse or blood pressure. Her temperature was only 20°C. Her eyes jerked slightly as they moved and did not respond to light. Her mouth was dry. No heart sounds. Her reflexes were delayed and faint. Her sense of touch was diminished. She let him do a heart tracing (flatline) and a dental X-ray, but drew the line at in-hospital tests. He inserted a needle in her arm for a blood sample. He tried twice more, and she didn’t flinch, but said, “That’s enough. I don’t heal like I did when I was alive.”
“One more time—”
“You can’t get a blood sample. That’s the point!” She sighed. “Okay. I know this isn’t what you learn in medical school. How about this. If you promise to sew me up afterward, you can cut my arm. A small cut.”
The room was quiet as he wielded his scalpel. Then he yelped, a
nd we gathered around Jenny, with her smiling above us like a pale saint. The vein on the inside of her elbow was neatly cut in half. So was the blood in her arm, which was a solid instead of a liquid. We were mesmerized, and people started arguing over whether we should do another cut, just to be sure. She shook her arm to get everyone’s attention. “That wasn’t the deal. Show’s over, folks. Could you sew up my arm, please, Doctor?”
“I still have fifteen minutes left!” he objected.
“You still have to sew up my arm, and I want you to do a good job.” He protested until she took ahold of his chin with one of her skeletal hands and made him look her in the eye. “Now.”
He blanched. So did the rest of us. He sewed her up in silence. I walked up beside her. I could actually see her teeth through her sunken, grey cheeks. She jerked around to return my gaze. Her over-bright eyes were frightening, but I said, “Hi. I’m Josh Kleinedler. I like your style. It could have worked against you, though. What if none of the newspapers had agreed to your conditions?”
“Oh, even the more conservative papers like to have something weird and wonderful.” She huffed slightly over her words, more noticeably at the ends of her sentences. “And Plan Z was the Internet.”
“Why didn’t you go there in the first place?”
She shrugged and grinned. Her gums were pale. “Too many kooks there already.” She nodded approval at her arm, refused a bandage, and turned to the fully assembled group. “Time for the interview. Remember, I’ll only answer questions about anorexia and my past life. You already have enough for the zombie angle. And there’ll be plenty of time for that later.” She spoke of a lonely childhood with parents who pressured her to overachieve. “That joke about getting a 97 and them asking ‘What happened to the other 3 percent?’ was serious. If I got a 100 in English, they would demand how I was doing in math. Or pressure me about my extracurricular activities. Or about my weight. That was the one area where I could never, ever please. I had a pretty normal build, but my mother was a really skinny teenager, much smaller than I ever was, so she thought I was a freak. She literally watched what I ate.”
Jason Delaney prompted, “And your father?”
“Well, he was more concerned about my marks, but he never stopped my mother’s nagging. Once I appealed to him, and he said, ‘Well, you probably could stand to lose a few pounds,’ then went back to reading the paper. So finally I thought, if everyone cares so much about losing weight, I’ll be the best weight watcher that ever lived.” She smiled grimly.
“So you’d say your parents were responsible for your anorexia?”
“No. At least, not completely. But they definitely got me started by making me hate my body and convincing me that nothing I did was good enough.”
∆ ∆ ∆
I waited until most of the crowd died down to make my way over. “What are you doing afterward?”
“Researching anorexia.”
“Could I treat you to dinner first?”
She looked amused. “I don’t eat anymore.”
“Oh,” was all I could say while my face turned red.
“Sorry.”
“Well, could I help you do your research?”
She cocked her head. “You want a scoop on zombies, or are you that hard up?”
Shot down by a dead woman! I stared at her.
“I’m sorry.” She reached out and caught my arm. Avoiding her weird eyes, I studied the skeletal hand on my arm. Her skin was cool, almost cold. I felt vaguely repulsed until I saw her very human expression. “That was rude,” she said, “but I’ve had a long day. Everyone wants an exclusive, and they think they can buy it out of me with everything from dinner to plastic surgery.”
“Plastic surgery?”
“Yeah. So I would look more ‘normal.’ I told him it was a bit late for that, seeing as how I was dead and all.”
“Did it bother you?”
“A little. But not as much as when I was alive. I have so much to do.” She smiled so radiantly then that I forgot her haggard face. After a minute, she said, “You’re staring at me.”
“I’m sorry. You just looked – nice. I mean…”
“You mean instead of like a skeleton.” She cut off my apology. “Forget it. I spent my life worrying about not being pretty enough. I have better things to do now that I’m dead.” She gave me a curt nod and left.
∆ ∆ ∆
For two weeks following her Ottawa Citizen debut, my contact with Jenny was limited to TV and newspapers. The people who couldn’t get a direct line on her were cashing in on the interest with stories on eating disorders and zombies. One guy wrote acidly, “Amidst the hoopla, the fact remains that the most interesting thing about Miss Reed is that she is dead, which enables her to capture everyone’s interest with the subject foremost on her mind, namely, anorexia. In her latest speech, she said ‘anorexia’ an average of four times a minute. Congratulations on your fifteen minutes of fame, Miss Anorexia 2002.” But mostly, they loved her. Some took to calling her Jenny Anorexia, which turned into Jenny Rex. She adopted that for her web page. She wrote, “I like being called Jenny Rex. It seems fitting to be renamed after the cause that I’m fighting for. It’s a lot catchier than Reed, anyway.” I clicked on the icon to send her mail, despite the warning that she had little time to answer. I sent some advice and my phone number.
The next week, she called, sounding hesitant. “Josh Kleinedler? This is Jenny Rex.”
“Thanks for calling. How are you doing?”
“Fine. Ah, I got your email. You think I should do school tours?”
“I know you should do school tours. The talk show circuit is fine for reaching a mass audience, but the more you’re on TV, the more you turn into a media icon. You need more interaction. You need to convince people you’re real.” She was silent. I added, “And you want to reach young people, right?”
“Well, not just them, but…yeah.”
“They’ll lose interest first. Get ’em while you’re hot.”
She sighed. “You have a point, but I don’t have the time.”
“You can make the time. Start small. If someone flies you out for a speech, talk at one of the local schools afterward. You can build from there.”
There was a short silence. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I like you. I liked you ever since you walked into our blacked-out newsroom and started telling us what to do.”
She laughed reluctantly. “I think I remember you. You’re the guy with glasses who asked me out, right? I thought you were shy. What happened?”
“I took a course: How to Be Aggressive.”
Long pause. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Yes,” I deadpanned. “It was actually How to Be Assertive.”
She groaned. “Okay, whatever. Do you want to help me organize this? I might be able to scrape up an honorarium—”
“That’s not what I’m looking for. I just want to be your friend.”
“Okay.” She sounded surprised but pleased. “We can see about that over dinner.”
“I thought you didn’t eat.”
“I don’t. But you do. And I can talk while you eat.”
“You’ve mellowed.”
“Yeah, I took a course: How to Mellow Out.”
∆ ∆ ∆
“Did you see this?” Jenny Rex waved People at me indignantly.
“That we’ve been an item since you were resurrected? Yep. Good picture, eh?”
“You know I hate pictures of me, but that’s not the point. Everyone thinks we’re going out, even though I keep saying we’re just friends. And the National Examiner thinks we’re having kinky sex!”
“Hey girl, I’m surprised that they’re not saying you’re pregnant with a zombie love child. I think it’s because you’re so straight laced, not to mention an anorexic zombie.”
She stared at me. “You’re enjoying this!”
“Well, it’s sort of funny, don’t you think?”
“No! I want people to believe what I say about anorexia, not make up lies about my sex life!”
“Welcome to the real world, Jenny. People like romance. No one wants to hear about eating disorders twenty-four hours a day. It’s getting kind of tired.”
“What!”
“Haven’t you noticed you’re getting less play, and the stories they do run are about you, not your disease? You’re still hot, but if you keep up this ‘talk about anorexia, never mind that I’m dead’ 24/7, you’ll be in the ‘what’s not’ column soon.”
“Well, excuse me for having a message instead of endless B.S.!”
“That’s fine. But don’t freak out over fluff. It shows people you’re human. And they need to hear that because you’re, well, not human. You don’t sleep, you don’t eat, you’re above romance because of your holy message…”
“Shut up!”
“Oh oh, the saint is enraged…a fit to kill…Now, that would really get you in the news: ANOREXIA KILLS…HER BOYFRIEND!”
“You are not my boyfriend!”
“No? Why not?”
“Because…because I have work to do!” We stared at each other, and then she finally started laughing. I put my arms around her, which made her laugh harder, and then I gave her small, thin lips a light kiss. Her eyes turned serious. “Josh…”
“Yes?”
“I’m tempted. I – never really had a boyfriend. But—”
“I won’t distract you from your mission. I’ll just hold your hand as you go from school to school.”
“Well…okay.” And she kissed me back.
∆ ∆ ∆
As predicted, our romance created a small flurry of renewed interest. So that was just peachy for her mission. She worried too much about what she was doing, though. One of the things that bothered her was blaming her parents for her anorexia. She wanted to talk to them about it, but they were trekking in Nepal and couldn’t be reached.
“Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now. You left your messages at the hotel. They’ll call you when they get back,” I assured her. It was sort of weird. She didn’t feel right living at home, since her parents didn’t know she wasn’t still six feet under, so she was living from hotel room to hotel room and constantly calling her parents’ answering machine to update her number. I said she could crash at my place whenever she was in town, and she almost bit my head off.
Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction Page 8