During that all-night bull session in Year Eleven, Nishimura had spoken of Jenny Pagán, whom he’d stabbed, who’d saved him anyway, who’d then gone zombie and tried to kill him, only to be killed a second time by sharks. It was the cycle of it, Nishimura said, the cycles within cycles, that obsessed him. Everyone’s death allowed everyone’s life. Why did it have to be a traumatic exchange? If people could lose the fear of death that had hounded them since humankind’s first flicker of self-awareness—and without the dangling carrot of religion, so much like the dangling red meat of Fort York’s former enslaved—we might also lose the compulsions that drove violence, cruelty, and jealousy.
No one liked the word hospice. No shit they didn’t. It brought back the wretched, dragged-out deaths of loved ones, the shame of a society that forbade euthanistic dignity. In Year Fourteen, Marion said something Charlie never shook. “Zombies were old hat to me way before 10/23. I spent my whole career around them—terminal patients hooked up to breathing machines. You want more proof this is all our doing, there you go. We went ahead and invented the undead without bothering to figure out what we’d do when they learned to walk.”
The idea of the Caretaker program was to take your turn sitting with softies until fear turned to acceptance, disgust to empathy. Most people spoke to their softies. Some read from books. Some whispered songs. Some screamed, close to ripping their softie to pieces. In short, people worked out their shit and put it behind them.
After DOD—Death of Death—a softie was wrapped in a sheet and carried to a waterfront wood-burning incinerator at Bathurst and Queens Quay. When the wind was right, the ashes would self-scatter over Lake Ontario, some of it rippling the water enough that fish darted up to kiss them from the surface, swallow them, and get the cycle going again.
A Caretaker could never predict the state of their assigned softie. As with sounds of collapsing buildings, terms of art had developed. Talcum described a zombie so fragile it barely survived transport to the fort; they might last days, if the sighs of their Caretakers didn’t blow their bones to powder. Lace described a zombie months into inertia, whose flesh yielded to the touch; like Lesser Hedrick, they might last for weeks. Eggshell described a zombie picked up from Slowtown just after losing mobility; like eggshell china, they were delicate but firm, and might last months in Hospice before passing.
Tonight, that last category included Charlie Rutkowski. She almost smiled. Lace? She’d always been more of a denim girl.
Call it her imagination if you liked. It really didn’t matter. In the twitch of Lesser Hedrick’s eye, Charlie saw forgiveness for her early departure. More than forgiveness. Lesser and the softies all around him were bequeathing the planet back to their former rivals, trusting them to be Caretakers of it. Charlie held in a ragged sob only because of the physical pain it might cause her. The solace she’d always taken from Hospice had achieved its final form.
She nodded at the Dying Room.
The stretcher lifted. The upward disequilibrium made Charlie feel like she was back at the Acocella house, rushing upstairs to check on Luis. He’d been right about a lot, but he’d been wrong about one thing. The zombie genesis was no Miscarriage. It had been a successful delivery. DOD, after all, was a double negative. Wasn’t the Death of Death the same as the Birth of Life?
“Goodbye,” she called to Lesser Hedrick, who stood in for Luis Acocella, Mae Rutkowski, and so many others she felt fortunate to have met. So many people worth missing. The tear that rolled from her eye burned down her cheek like mercury, flaying open the flesh so she could feel the teeth that had chewed so many delicious foods, the tongue that had wrestled in so many exciting kisses. The world had fucked hard with everyone, her more than most, but goddamn, she’d miss it anyway.
Ecclesiastes Something
Personal History Transcript #1530
Location: Fort York New Library
Subject: Richard Lindof
Interviewer: Etta Hoffmann
Time: 5,745–15:22
Notes: Also present: Luvvie Lafayette.
Q.
I’m a movie guy. Never was much for books. This is what you do all day? Sit in here with these dusty books? I’m also a business guy, and what I know about books is, they don’t make business sense. Reading a book is like hiring the slowest, most expensive workers in Vermont. Watching a movie is like applying the screws to your workers in China, who give you a better product in a fraction of the time. Lady, you’re telling me you’d rather spend weeks reading The Da Vinci Code when there’s a perfectly good movie out there telling the same story?
Q.
Nice. Very nice. “Books still worked when we lost the grid.” I guess you think that’s cute. You’re one of those people who’s going to stand in the way of progress. I knew it before I sat down. You can always tell. It tends to be, I’m sorry, but it tends to be bitter females of below-average attractiveness who carved themselves a little corner of power and don’t want anything to change. Well, baby, it’s going to change. Jesus Hubert Christ, it’s going to change big-time.
Q.
Because I’m a nice guy? Because they asked me to? Your little board of directors. I caught their drift. I wanted in, I had to do this little sit-down. It’s no skin off my ass. My legs are beat anyhow. But don’t go thinking I need your little fort. Which, by the way, is the least fortlike fort I’ve ever seen. I could just keep on walking. Probably should. What am I doing in Canada? America was number one in the past, and it’ll be number one again. Forget it. I’m here. Do your questions. I’m hungry and want to check out what kind of food you have in this joint.
Q.
To be honest, I cannot say I’m impressed. So far, I cannot. I’ll tell you the first thing I thought after washing my hands like a five-year-old. Where are the heads on sticks? You can make a pretty fair judgment of a place by how many heads they’ve got on sticks. So that doesn’t bode well. Then they start showing me, what? The Armory? Are you kidding me? You got all those beautiful weapons and you’ve bricked them up? You people are mental. Forget the heads on sticks. I didn’t see any handcuffs, leg irons, pillories. You don’t even have a jail. Look, lady, take my free advice. See if your little CEOs will take up a motion to remove all heads from all asses.
Q.
That’s kumbaya stuff. That’s Sunday school. Let’s hold hands and think positive thoughts. If that’s the best you got, baby, you deserve what you’re going to get. Look, you got a nice little spot here. It’s cozy. You got some nice overpasses to shoot off of. I’d hate to see it all go up in smoke. Couple hours, the right kind of bad guys? Poof.
Q.
You got book dust in your ears? That’s what I’m saying. The bad guys don’t have to come galloping over the hill like Lee Marvin. They could come from right here. A cancer from within, as they say. How would anybody stop them? Let’s recap. You’ve got no jail and your guns are all bricked up, and what you’ve spent all your time on is—what do you call it? Sick bay? Nursing home?
Q.
Jesus Heathcliff Christ. You’re certifiable, you people. I’ve seen things, baby, that would wipe that smug look off your face. This takes the cake. I asked to see it. I thought someone was yanking my johnson. We wash our hands like we’re in kindergarten again, fine, and go inside this normal-looking building, and I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if you don’t have—lady, I was rubbing my eyes like a cartoon character. You’ve got dried-up old zombies in there with people reading them stories and whatnot. Let me tell you what you do when you find yourself a dried-up old zombie. You take your boot and go smash. You be glad there’s one less of them the world has to deal with. What you don’t do is go goochie-goo like they’re cute. Are there some kind of toxic fumes here I’m not aware of? Has something happened to your actual, physical brains?
Q.
You’re saying a living corpse is both disgusting and … what? Sacred? No, no.
Q.
No, no, no, no, no.
Q.
&nb
sp; No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Shut up. Not to be rude. But shut up. That Asian fellow with the flagpole up his ass fed me all of that sap. Sounded pretty proud of it too. Normally, I would’ve helpfully explained to him that he was a retarded individual. But you understand, my jaw was on the floor.
Q.
I’m not a weirdo freak, am I? So, no, I have not. My pop was a true-blue believer in all that God stuff. Let’s bow our heads in prayer, yea Christ has risen, all that, and it made about as much sense as what you all are saying here. He wouldn’t listen to sense either. I’d say, “Pop, what’s the meaning of life?” and he’d say, “Richie, you have to have faith,” and I’d say, “But didn’t we come up with faith in our brains?” and he’d say, “God made your brain,” and, well, you see how productive that all is. If Pop were here now, he’d say something like “Zombies don’t have souls, which proves we do.” [Exaggerated shrug.] Instead of heading for the hills, he should have come here and become a zombie-lover like your Asian fellow. The way zombies went around and converted people, so to speak? That’s A-plus missionary work. That’s what he’d say.
Q.
Just so I have this straight, you’re saying maybe zombies are holy because they show us our sins? I suppose Fort York is Noah’s Ark, then? And this whole thing’s supposed to teach us some big lesson? Let me guess—the same one people like you always hope is true. “The meek shall inherit the Earth.” But did they? Take a peek into your Hospice and tell me if the meek in there inherited anything good. Pop’s favorite Bible verse was, “Men go and come, but Earth abides.” Ecclesiastes something. We read it differently, me and Pop. He read it like Earth shows us who’s boss. I read it like, no, you don’t get it, Pop. Men will keep coming, and coming, and coming.
Q.
Where did you hear that? One of these books?
Q.
Did I say I’m denying it? I’m not denying anything. I told you I was a movie guy. I admitted it first thing. The limp, the arm, they confirm it, don’t they? Oh, you’re clever. You think you’re clever. Waiting to reveal this now. You know what I think? I think you’re a bitch. Your whole no-smiling thing. I see right through it. I see through everybody. It’s my little talent. You know what? I did this as a favor. In good faith. Well, you got what you wanted. Now I’m shutting it down. Good riddance.
Q.
I’m walking back over to your table to say this so your recorder gets it nice and clear. With you? No. No second session, not with you. No way. With baby darling over there, though? That I’d consider. Didn’t catch your name, darling, but you want a private interview sometime, you just let me know. You’re a little darker than I usually like my girls, but this is Canada after all. Eskimos, Inuits, Aboriginals. You take what you can get, right? Jesus Harrison Christ. I’m leaving. Your Asian fellow wanted to show me a few more things, and I’m going need all my energy to pretend to care.
Throw the First Punch
Nishimura’s specific goals: check off the one pending obligation he had at the fort, break the news to Luvvie, and go to bed early. Hopefully, daylight would dry the spatters of Richard’s bile from people’s faces—and clear Nishimura’s own head about what had happened to Charlie and the Chief. His broader goal of being a good person got in the way, as it often did. When he entered the historic grounds to review, as promised, a team’s progress on a telegraph machine, he could not bring himself to rebuff an overture from a group calling themselves the AV Club.
They were devoted to bringing art back to the world via whatever media they could muster. Until he vanished, Muse King, skilled at nothing but making people take a knee when they heard him play, had been the AV Club’s patron saint. Without him, the club carried on. Their current efforts included mixing paint so there could be painters, getting analog four-tracks rolling again so there could be recording artists, and producing fresh film so they’d have something to run through rejiggered 8 mm cameras. The club members were young, sixteen to twenty-five years old, and were as flushed and flustered as Nishimura had been in his youth. He adored them, but for now, showed them the glow.
“Karl, you have to do something,” Georgia said. She was their de facto leader, six feet four, shaggy-haired, outfitted with thick-framed black glasses.
“I am.” Nishimura tried to smile. “I’m going to play with a telegraph machine.”
“They’re like wolves,” said a boy named Jack. “Since your team left, there’s been fights, all afternoon.”
“Not as bloody as the Blockhouse Four fight,” added a girl named Marilyn. “But worse. That fight was because of drugs. It didn’t mean anything. These were for real.”
Nishimura’s sigh felt like glue, oozing up his throat. He gazed across the fort with hard reluctance. Past the Garden, swaying like the Garden’s windblown leaves, was Richard Lindof’s flock, and beyond them, the makeshift crate stage awaiting the arrival of their leader. That’s what he was, a leader, the very thing Fort York had tried to avoid.
“The will of the people,” he said, “will be what it will be.”
“Bullshit,” said fraternal twins Rudi and Russell.
Nishimura hated to survey the AV Club’s expressions. He knew what he’d see. Bright, attentive agony, the tiki light painting passionate patterns across clean, ardent faces and hair grown to snatchable lengths, unthinkable just a couple of years ago. That they’d been barely self-aware on 10/23 meant nothing. As proven in the 1960s, the 2010s, and every era between, young adults did not need to know the feel of a fist to understand it; they’d absorbed truths from their parents’ quivering hands. It took the undamaged to fight the hardest fights.
Jack pointed at Richard’s crowd. “If they win that vote, we’re out of here. The whole club. Along with everything we’ve built, all our ideas. We mean it, Karl.”
It was one more spear into his side, each spearhead carved from a dead person’s bone—the Chief, Charlie, Jenny, Larry, his children. The combined weight made him heavy and slow.
Didn’t they know the clear, common sense Nishimura might espouse to the masses would only wilt in the red blood Lindof would be spewing? He shook his head, hoping the motion would free him of these burdens; hot sweat rolled laterally across his cheeks.
He started to go around Jack, but a kid named Gary blocked his path. Nishimura redirected, only to be hindered by a girl named Vincenza. These weren’t aggressive moves; the AV Club was large. Nishimura’s chest clenched at the sheer number of young people refusing to back down. Perhaps he, Karl Nishimura, age fifty-eight, should forget everything he thought he knew, and listen to them, and trust them.
Georgia was back in front. Her large hands were pressed together, nearly in prayer.
“We know you don’t want to engage him publicly. You think it will legitimize him. We understand that. Everyone does.” Georgia winced. “But, Karl, man, there’s no choice anymore. This is the wire we’re down to. I’d walk over there and do it myself if I had the right words. But we all know you’re the one. It sucks. I know. Being the one sucks. But sometimes, that’s what life makes you.”
Nishimura’s face broke open like pond ice after a thaw. It felt as if he’d been bitten back in Slowtown and this was the ripe tearing of decay. It was more shocking than that: it was a grin. This kid. This Georgia of the AV Club. Already people were following her like they’d followed him. One day, whether at Old Muddy or somewhere new, Georgia would have the right words, perhaps through her art, and growing numbers of people would listen to them. Whatever happened tonight did not have to be the final word.
Nishimura took hold of the side of Georgia’s neck. Beneath his soaped and scrubbed hand, he could feel the young woman’s unwashed hair and sweaty skin, and he was glad for it. They’d need plenty of grit for where they were headed. Not just ten years from now but ten minutes from now.
“Hold on tight, Georgia,” Nishimura said, and Georgia did, gripping the wrist that gripped her neck. “Here we go.”
Releasing her and being released by h
er, Nishimura turned from the AV Club and ducked like a boxer past other citizens petitioning for his attention. He broke from the pack at the Master Sundial. It was night; there was no telling the time. That was good. Let this event exist outside of time, outside the record of what they tried to do with Fort York. Let this night and morning be one last, loathsome dip into a past of aversion and antipathy. He realized both his hands were in fists. The impulse that had made him shoot the Chief was back. It should have repulsed him. It really should.
Halfway across the fort, Lindof began to speak, in the low, scratchy tones Nishimura had come to loathe.
“Look at this crowd. This beautiful crowd. I recognize so many of you. Hi, William. Hi, Lewis. You’re all here. And it’s cold! Isn’t it cold? But you’re all here, bundled up, aren’t you? You’re here because this is important. Because you care about your community. Because you have common sense. And what’s common sense? When a guy comes up to you and socks you in the kisser, you don’t stand there and wait for him to sock you in the ball sack too! You sock him back. Better yet, the whole community comes together and socks him back together. That’s called punishment. That’s called common sense.”
When the cheer went up, Nishimura was on the path through the Garden. He’d heard plenty of cheering at Old Muddy. When the first waterwheel went operational. When they got a moped engine to run on vegetable oil. When a woman woke successfully from a spleen operation, proving the viability of homemade ammonium-nitrate ether. This cheer, however, was a kaboomie, screecher, duster, and marimba all at once. Vegetation blocked Nishimura’s view, but he pictured it just fine. He knew William. He knew Lewis. He liked them. He had no desire to see their kind faces warped by wrath.
The Living Dead Page 62