The zombie apocalypse didn’t really turn out the way we expected, but then, it never does, does it? I guess you could make the argument that it wasn’t a zombie apocalypse at all—it’s a little like saying that an extinction-level asteroid impact didn’t really happen the way we expected, because the asteroid skipped off the atmosphere and just churned up the oceans a bit. Move one vector a little bit to the left, and Judgment Day is just another Tuesday, but boy, how about this weather, huh? The trumpet of doom loses the gig to a sad trombone.
The first reason the zombie apocalypse underwhelmed is the obvious one: zombies aren’t real. Sure, you can find a few almost-zombies out there if you look hard enough, the classic Haitian hypnosis version, or the modern mental ward Thorazine version, or even that ant that gets its brain commandeered by a fungus, but there’s no such thing as the classic Romero-style brain-eaters any more than there’s werewolves or vampires. I mean, come on. Let’s be grown-ups, here.
Really, I would have expected the zombie apocalypse to be something more in line with a virus that escapes from a lab and turns people into assholes. More than usual, I mean. Not the walking dead, but you get most of the key plot points: the possible danger around every corner, the collapse of civilization, the sudden and necessary familiarity with firearms and chainsaws, the thick and endless stink of millions of rotting corpses.
Well. We sure got that last part right. That’s something the movies never really get across. You just don’t get used to the smell of rotten meat. It’s in our DNA. Just one dead body will put up a whiff you can smell for miles. Millions of them mean you can never escape the stink, least of all when they’re walking around with you. Even out in the country you can smell the cities for a good hundred miles if the wind is right.
Anyway, that’s sort of the way our apocalypse finally shook out: as a disease. Whether or not it bugged out of some government skunkworks or not, who knows. Reckon you might, if you’re still alive and reading this, but I haven’t heard anything concrete. Personally, I think it’s something like SARS or AIDS, some pre-existing virus that grabbed an extra chromosome somewhere and freaked out. Maybe not a chromosome, I don’t know if viruses have chromosomes. But something like that. A mutation. Just doesn’t seem like something a government would come up with on purpose, because it’s not very useful in a tactical sense. Too slow. It’d be like dropping buckets of termites on enemy cities and waiting for them to take out the buildings.
The first identified case was some old boy in Georgia who went to the doctor complaining of the usual flu-like symptoms, soreness, stiffness, blurry vision, loss of motor control. Doctor took the old boy’s temperature, found it in the seventies somewhere, and locked everything down and called in the CDC, who coincidentally kept shop just down the road in Atlanta. That’s why I say the first identified case; I’d be willing to bet there were some other cases that were ignored for a while because they didn’t have the CDC for neighbors. Probably burned through a few old people, a few homeless people, a few junkies. The ones you already expect to be complaining about aches and pains. The ones who already smell bad.
I also think that’s why the disease flared up first in cities with major freight rail hubs. Not so much initially in places like New York and Los Angeles, but huge outbreaks in Chicago and Kansas City, and pretty quickly even smaller cities were making the national news, Cheyenne, Sioux City and the like. I thought the era of the rail-riding hobo was long past, but I guess there’s still plenty of boxcars to jump. Sure, that pattern might have indicated cattle, too, but the TSA or whoever already pats them down at every stop looking for the mad cow disease, so they were absolved early on. Cows and Muslims, peas in a pod when it comes to travel. Sure we like you just fine, but we’re going to give you a little extra attention, just because, well, you know.
Bovine encephalopathy. That’s got some rhythm to it. Once you get to saying it right the first time, it’s hard to stop saying. Drop spongiform in between those two words and it’s like a god damned Buddy Rich drum solo. I’m not aware of any scientific dead-language-based name for the zombies, because pop culture jumped in right away and took over. Because the disease doesn’t really kick in until you die, and because it became clear within a week or two that everybody has it, and mostly because it doesn’t turn you into a dangerous brain-eating monster, the word “zombie” ended up with less of a ghoulish tone and more of an endearing but disappointed one. Somewhere in between “retard” and “herpes.”
Depending on how you died, the effect was wildly different. Rather, the pathology was exactly the same: you died, but kept on truckin’, but the post-mortem psychology was all over the map, especially before we knew what was going on. For some, say those who kicked off in a car wreck, it was a miracle. “I thought for sure I was dead,” they’d say, not knowing their instincts were, well, dead on. Of course, the ones that walked away with missing limbs and so forth were suspicious that something was going on, and that was usually followed by “it’ll probably grow back.” That’s what everyone who loses a limb thinks. Just for a little while.
For others, death was a non-event of the highest order. Those who died in their sleep woke on up the next day and went to work. Fatal heart attacks were shrugged off as heartburn, gas. Stroke victims shuffled around in classic zombie style but didn’t topple over. Suicides felt a lot better or a lot worse, depending on their point of view. For every person that experienced miracle, though, there were ten that were cursed. Patients racked with cancer, burn victims, all those that were looking forward to death to escape the pain, well, they eventually died and the pain just kept going. They were some of the earliest to be recognized, since all the machines that were supposed to be displaying numbers would display zero, and all the lines that were supposed to be moving up and down would go flat, but the patient would still be twitching around so everyone would start yelling downstairs for the med techs to get up here and fix the machines.
I’m not sure those poor souls even had it the worst, though; hoping for death and getting a kick in the balls is pretty bad, but the pain does eventually end after a few weeks once the nerves quit. If there’s any blessing to this whole mess, that’d be it. Plus, they’re in a hospital surrounded by people who are confirming that yes, something is wrong, and once we realized what was wrong, most terminal pain patients could just get up and walk around when they were ready. For a little while, anyway. Terminal patients tend to have less body mass, so they fall apart a little quicker.
No… I think the worst cases have to be those unfortunates that were killed in remote areas in such a way that they couldn’t move and didn’t know what was going on. Crushed by a boulder while hiking. Trapped in an underwater cave-in while diving. Broken into little pieces in a plane crash. Those pieces can get pretty small, too. I heard more than one story of a head rolling out of a car wreck and mouthing “boy, that was a close call, huh?” at the first responders. Can’t imagine what the families did with those heads. Put ’em in a jar on the mantelpiece and wait it out, I guess. All that business in the movies about decapitation or destroying the brain stem is nonsense. What happens when you shoot a corpse in the head? You get a corpse with a hole in its head. What happens when you shoot a zombie in the head? You get a zombie with a hole in its head saying “hey, man, what the fuck?” Maybe with a little bit of a lisp, depending on where you tagged it.
And, yeah, you can get arrested for that sort of thing. I’m not sure what the technical definition of murder is, but if someone is walking around, although not alive in the strictest sense, and you try to kill them some more, seems to me that your intent is murder. Cops showing up at a crime scene don’t have the time to determine whether or not the victim sitting up in the pool of blood was dead before the act or not until after. In fact, it makes their job a whole lot easier, because now there’s always an eyewitness. Turns out there are some pretty easy ways to tell if someone is already dead, but in general if someone can say—or mouth, or blink, or whatever—that they would have preferred to not have this new gunshot wound, then they count as alive as far as the law is concerned.
But if that made the job easier on cops, boy were they getting worked over everywhere else: criminals give a whole lot less of a shit about taking your stuff when they figure out you can’t hurt them. Sure, the dead ones slow down a bit as they ripen. The movies got that part right. But they’re still people. People that can use guns and knives and don’t feel pain when they mash their soggy knuckles against your nose. So, home invasions were up for awhile. Carjackings. Only got a few months until you’re going to rot away anyway, and bullets won’t stop you? Hell yeah I’m going to jack that Ferrari. On the upside, though, the punishment for even the smallest of crimes became prohibitively severe: sixty days in jail is now basically a life sentence. Or a life-after-death sentence. Look, let me put it like this: if you’re already dead when you go into jail for sixty days, you’re going to be in pretty bad shape when you come out, depending on the local climate. In some places I’ve heard that the deal is if you can’t make it to the door under your own power when your time is up, they throw you in a quicklime pit. That doesn’t seem like it’s really following the spirit of who’s alive and who’s not, though, so maybe that’s just some bullshit story being passed around. I mean, it’s not like they’d do that to a living guy in a wheelchair who couldn’t get up the stairs or something.
In any event, not a whole lot of criminals bother with the being-taken-alive part any more, especially after cops started being issued flamethrowers. It took awhile, but after enough zombies started pulling suicide-by-cop routines without the courtesy of dying, it seemed the prudent thing to do. A pile of burned bones doesn’t move, you see. It made living criminals a lot more docile, as well: getting a beatdown with a nightstick is one thing, but getting a hosedown with a firestick is a lot more permanent. And, as I said, the cops had their hands full in those early days, so, sure, maybe not every criminal was correctly identified as a zombie. Might have been some living ones got torched, too. It’s hard to tell afterwards. Might have been a message being sent. So after an initial flare-up, so to speak, crime actually dropped off. Also, if you are still alive, jail time is even less appealing when you’re locked up with a bunch of corpses. Being locked in a cell with a rotting corpse for any amount of time is pretty likely to make you a corpse yourself pretty soon. They generally locked up dead with dead, living with living, but, you know, overcrowding.
The criminals weren’t even the worst, in terms of pushing the boundaries of civilized behavior. The worst? Teenage boys. No change there, you say, and I’m not disagreeing, but it’s a matter of degree, of outrageousness. You already think the world doesn’t understand you and you’ve got nothing to live for, and you already like jumping off the roof and backyard wrestling, and you’ve already got a video camera and a YouTube account… and then you come up all dead and feel no pain? Jackass had nothing on this new wave. When you’re a walking corpse, you can get up to some serious slapstick. Back in the day it was just skateboarding into handrails crotch-first and falling over and moaning “my balls…” Now it’s skateboarding off a fifty-foot cliff, hitting every rock on the way down and ending up as a pile of bones and laundry on the ground and croaking “my balls…” through your shattered jawbone.
Funny as hell, once you got used to it. I mean, I don’t know how many times I got drunk when I was a teenager and decided the thing I had to do right now was run full-tilt into that tree right there. It’s what you do. If I was a walking dead teenager, I’d probably have all sorts of fun like that. Chainsaw Juggling for the Non-Juggler! Hell, I probably still would, even at my distinguished age, but I have no friends left with video cameras. At least, none that would get it. Bunch of adult-acting assholes, for the most part.
Speaking of no friends, though, that’s the downside of the dead teenager phenomenon. For all the guffawing boneheads with video cameras, there were also plenty of friendless loners who decided—in a reversal on the old formula—to kill themselves and then go shoot up the school or blow up the mall. There were only a couple of spectacular incidents like that, though, since shooting up the school loses a bit of its frisson when everyone you’ve just shot stands up and says “Danny, you are such a dick” just like they used to. Teenage depression took on a different flavor when “they’ll be sorry when I’m dead” lost all its weight.
But good people stay good people, too: a lot of posthumous self-destruction ends up being for the benefit of humanity. Not that some emo kid blowing himself up and taking a bunch of mall fats with him isn’t for the benefit of humanity, but it’s not exactly what I would call altruistic, either. I just read in the paper the other day about a vulcanologist who was driving up to some caldera that was having a coughing fit. His Jeep hit a rock, which caused the steering wheel to crimp most of his vital organs with his ribcage. His buddies gave him some first aid, but it was pretty apparent he was dead once he sat up and brushed himself off. So, he called his wife and gave her the bad news, said he’d been in a car wreck and he’d try to get back as soon as he could, before he started to smell too bad.
The rest of the expedition still wanted to get up to camp. They’d been planning this for years, there were dissertations at stake, all the usual drama that happens when someone dies on a mountain or whatever and the group has to make a decision that ends with “it’s what he would have wanted.” Nowadays the deceased just tells you what he wants, and off they went to camp, with him wheezing and moaning in the back seat. A crushed ribcage doesn’t stop hurting until the nerves give up, and morphine doesn’t seem to do much when your blood isn’t moving. Sometimes ice helps.
When they set up camp at the volcano—it was that one in Uganda, with the really fast flowing lava. You know which one I mean? I already threw out the paper, but you can look it up if you want. Anyway, when they set up camp, it turns out he’d had a brainstorm. It’s always the goal of volcano scientists to get next to some lava and dunk a coffee can into it and bring it back to study. I don’t know why, it’s been done plenty of times, and I can’t imagine lava really changes that much. Not like we keep going back to the moon for more of those rocks or anything. Maybe it’s something to do with gasses. More likely it’s something to do with people at cocktail parties asking “you ever do that thing with lava and a coffee can?” and if you say “no…” they just walk away. I know I’ve been guilty of that. I once asked a seismologist who overwintered in Antarctica if he ever peed outside to see if the stream would freeze, and when he said “no…” I didn’t really have much else to say.
So the problem with this lava lake is that that it’s very unpredictable and very fast. You can put on the shiny suit and walk to the edge and grab some lava, but if the lake changes mood and wants to reach out and give you a little hug, it will, and you won’t get out of it. Flows clocked as high as sixty miles per hour, according to the paper, and nobody can outrun that, especially over rough ground. While overheated. In a shiny suit. It looks harmless enough on the science shows, like orange water that you could just shake off and keep on running. But I guess it’s more like a monster made of rock that’s pissed off at being locked in the oven for all those years and thinks you’re the one that did it.
After waiting in camp for a week or two, the scientist in question pounded himself smack on the chest, declared himself an unfeeling bastard, and took charge of the lava-gathering trips. He still wore the shiny suit: just because you don’t feel it when you burst into flame doesn’t mean you still don’t do it. He was a dedicated lava mule for days, gathering sample after sample, even during tantrums the lake would throw, running back and forth, dodging lava blobs—and “blobs” is just not the right word for red-hot rock that sticks to you after it knocks you down and sets you on fire, but it’ll have to do—until he started getting too slow to be effective. Then he called his wife one last time, said goodbye to his campmates, dropped himself over the lip of the caldera, and vaporized. I like to think he did backflip into the lake, but if he was getting too slow to walk the lava back and forth, he probably wasn’t doing any flipping. But maybe a swan dive. Something classy.
I think that’s a wonderful thing. Getting to the exit doing what you love doing, but without having to suffer in those last moments, which is usually the price for it. Hunters eaten by bears, surfers by sharks, those last moments are pretty grim. We all like to make ourselves feel better by saying “well, at least he died doing what he loved.” Dead hunters and dead surfers are out of luck there, because bears and sharks aren’t interested in old meat. If your hobby is buzzard watching or worm farming, I guess you’re good.
The other reason the zombie apocalypse wasn’t quite what we thought it would be is that aside from the zombies not being zombies, it wasn’t really an apocalypse, either. First of all, we kind of eased into it. The already-dead didn’t crawl out of their graves—and really, they wouldn’t have been able to; if a living person can’t claw out of a coffin and dig through six feet of dirt, no way a weak-ass wobbly old moving corpse could—so it was at least a month from the time of first identified victim and media uproar to the first time your average city dweller saw someone looking definitely corpsey limping down the street. And even those first few you might catch a glimpse of were homeless, so you’d already averted your eyes and held your breath. Most likely you’d seen a few walking dead without even knowing it before it actually clicked. And that doesn’t even include all the freshly dead that might have been wandering around that hadn’t begun to decay yet.
Most people don’t even like going outside with a pimple, let alone a case of the rots. So the streets weren’t filled with shambling ruins; most of them called in sick for a week or so until the truth set in, then they called in dead. And because the old dead were still dead and the new dead weren’t running around chewing on the living, the death rate didn’t really increase. There were bacterial and hygiene issues from people living with their dead loved ones, the occasional cholera outbreak from dead people swimming in reservoirs and so on, but for a few months it seemed like the death rate was zero, until finally the new deads started rotting away completely. Caused a bit of a housing problem for a while, because babies didn’t stop being born, but the dead were still hanging on to their apartments, and even once they liquified it’d take weeks to clean all the funk out of the place, so nobody would want to rent it. On the other hand, once a place was properly aired out, nobody gave a shit about “somebody died here” any more.
Populations went through this cycle at different rates depending on climate, too. Dry places like the American southwest or the Canadian arctic saw populations rise; mummification or freezing could keep grandma around damn near forever, so you’d never get that inheritance. Whereas Florida—where you have the perfect storm of death-prone retirees, swampy humidity and hungry palmetto bugs—maintained almost the same turnover rate it used to have. Climates like that, you get about a week of decay delay, and that’s it. There was a small spurt of some of them trying to escape to Arizona before falling apart, but airlines wouldn’t let them on due to the smell, and no half-rotten corpse is going to make it all the way across Texas in a car, no matter how good the air conditioning is. I suppose some made it a certain distance in freezer trucks, but all that freezing and thawing has got to have an unfortunate effect on muscle tissue.
Now, all this sudden inconsistency around death and not-death caused a ruckus throughout the banking and insurance industries, but I’m pretty sure we can all agree when I say: Good. Fuck ’em. Funeral industry? I don’t know. They tend to keep a pretty low profile in the news, and, really, hasn’t there always been just a touch of sweet to the bitter when you read the headline “Funeral Home Goes Out of Business?”
The military got wise real quick. Anybody killed on the battlefield automatically fell under the new stop-loss clause and had to keep on fighting until the tendons in their trigger finger stopped pulling. Whatever bits and pieces left after that were sent home in a baggie tied off with one of those little pine-tree air fresheners, same as it ever was. There was surprisingly little backlash against this, even among soldiers who’d had their tours comically over-extended, since nothing makes you thirst for blood more than getting a free pass to hunt down the motherfucker than just killed you. It’s ultimately an empty victory, though, just two dead guys emptying clips into each other and then feeling stupid about it once the ammo runs out. It just takes too long to completely destroy a corpse. Way longer than the bloodlust lasts, unless you came into the army as a stone-cold serial killer already.
And due to rockets and IEDs and whatnot, a certain percentage of the dead would be missing a certain percentage of the parts that made them useful as soldiers—arms, legs, torsos—and they just got sent home over whatever protests they might have. The upper half of Private Jones pulling his way out of a wrecked humvee wheezing “c’mon, Sarge, I can still fight,” wasn’t so uncommon. Probably would have made for some good psychological warfare except both sides could do it. When one army can raise the dead, it’s terrifying. When they both can, it’s tedious.
The speed at which it all became routine is why the whole thing is a let-down as an apocalypse. It’s not the end of the world any more than the internet gave us all space helmets and flying cars. It’s the future, but not how anybody expected. Everybody doing pretty much the same thing, just with a new twist. Cars? People still going from place to place on a horse, but faster. Television? Just like going to the theater, but at home. Zombies? People still dying, but taking their time about it. I think the last true civilization-changing event before people forgot how to die correctly was probably the phonograph. That’s when everyone forgot how to get together in the evening and sing. If you think about it, rock bands are just quaint little historical re-enactment clubs.
People are still the same, people are still different. Little girls still dance, though sometimes they’re dead. I saw a gymnastics event the other day that was downright creepy. The dead girls weren’t as smooth and graceful as the life ones, but the shapes they could get into, the cracks and snaps as they dislocated some joints and hyperextended others… it’s one thing to watch two dead teenage boys do some extreme backyard wrestling and beat each other with their own pulled-off legs while their buddies howl like hyenas in the background, but seeing a little girl in a leotard literally tie her arms in a floppy square knot behind her back… gruesome. Gruesome like a toddler beauty pageant. Somewhere there’s a parent not letting a kid be a kid, even in death. I still watched the whole routine, don’t get me wrong. It’s a brave new world, I don’t want to miss any of it.
Everybody rots differently. Medical examiners already knew this, but the average layman didn’t used to see cadavers as often as they do now. Once upon a time, us round-eyes thought all Chinamen looked alike, and only anthropologists knew any better. Same thing. Fling open the big refrigerator door to the morgue and look at ten fresh bodies laid out, they look more or less the same. I mean, they have the same differences they did in life, height, weight, gender, hair color, skin color, but beyond that, to the uneducated—or pre-apocalypse—eye, they just look “dead,” because we don’t want to look too close. Each one has its own special fingerprint of decay, though: the pattern of blood pooling, say, indicating what position they were in after their heart stopped moving the stuff around. Certainly there are bold differences, someone who died and spent time in water is pretty obviously different from someone who died and spent some time in a campfire. But I’m talking about the little things. The little color changes, the little areas of puffiness or collapse, maybe on the face on this one, on the legs of that one.
Now, here’s the thing: when those bodies don’t have the decency to stay lying down, those changes are both magnified—you can really see how that stroke worked over the left half of Granny’s body when she’s stumbling around the kitchen knocking over all the pots and pans, her face in half droop—and smoothed over at the same time. Most of the dead still walking around have a serious case of The Westerns: paleface and redfoot. You didn’t used to get blood pooling in the feet very often, because people didn’t generally stay in a vertical position after death. Hangings, mostly. Laid out on slabs, the dead are the dead. When they’re walking around, you see that one’s arm is all smashed up and doesn’t work, that one’s tongue is bitten off, that one’s chest is caved in and only talks in a whisper. Most lose their vision if they let their eyes dry out. Bet you never considered that all the lying-down dead you ever knew were not only dead, but blind, too.
And unlike the movies, nobody walks around in the clothes they died in, that’s just stupid. You get in a car wreck and get blood all over you, you just going to keep walking around in bloody clothes? No, you go and take a shower and put on a fresh shirt, same as if you spilled soup on yourself at dinner. That’s just manners, decency. Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you lose your self-respect. Sure, there’s plenty of scummy dead just like there’s plenty of scummy living. Well, no, okay, maybe there’s a few more scummy dead. I suppose I didn’t used to see as many out-of-place meth heads as I do now, because they’d be off somewhere doing meth or scoring meth or cooking meth or doing crimes to get some money for meth. Then they’d overdose or blow themselves up and the medical examiner would take them away, and I wouldn’t see any of that, either. Nowadays, they overdose or blow themselves up, and surprise! they’re still here. And even bigger surprise! the meth doesn’t work any more. Going through decay and withdrawal at the same time has got to be the worst one-two punch ever, especially since cold turkey takes, what, I don’t know, a few days to get over the worst of it, and the first few days after death are really when you’re at your best. Having to waste those days cramped up and screaming is… well, karma, I guess, but it still sucks.
I don’t know how any of that works. I mean, none of this makes any sense anyway, but I don’t get how drugs stop working after death, but withdrawal still gets its hooks in you. Something to do with blood not moving drugs around, but the nerves still being content enough to cause you some pain for awhile. That’s a chilling thought: what if nerves were still causing pain for all the dead before all this started, but they just couldn’t sit up and scream about it? I know there’s smarter people than me working on all this, but maybe it’s not a bacteria or a disease or anything biological. What if it really is God’s Wrath? I’m joking, of course, but it sure has been fun watching all the various churches get all bent out of shape about all this. Especially the suicide cults. Boy did those not work out as planned! Bet those snake-handling hillbillies got a boost, though. Anyway, so, like I was saying, what if it’s not biological, but electrical? Nerves and muscles work on electricity, so what if there’s some weird electrical field that’s just keeping everything conducting after the switch has been flipped? Probably not. I think that’s how Dr. Frankenstein planned to kickstart his little project, and science has advanced a little bit since then. Plus, people are still dying from electrocution. And muscles keep working after nerve sensation stops. Look, I don’t know.
I’m not the only one thinking about it, though. Trying to figure out What The Hell has become a popular hobby. Anatomy books have been flying off the shelves. Can’t even find used ones any more. Families hang on to them, pass them down, everyone knows they’re going to need it eventually. They’re really more like automotive service manuals than research books these days. Once you’ve kicked off and things start failing, it’s handy to know how things connect together so you can make adjustments. If you have a case of stiff arm causing you an inconvenience, for example, you can just flip through your copy of Sobotta, look up where the humerus connects to the scapula, run a carpet knife through your subscapularis tendon, and pow now that arm’s out of the way. And here’s the thing: I didn’t even have to look that up. A year ago I couldn’t have told you the difference between my anus and my supra-ulnar joint capsule, but anatomy just becomes part of the language landscape when you’re faced with it on a day-to-day basis. Consider all the computer jargon you don’t even notice any more that was completely exotic ten years back, say. Or worse, military jargon.
And once you’ve stuck a knife in yourself the first time, it’s hard not to poke around in the hole and give in to curiosity. After all, you couldn’t do it before, and you won’t be able to do it for long. It’s a short window. You can cut open your forearm and give each tendon a pull, watch the fingers dance. First time I saw it, it was with a buddy of mine who’d left the flue closed on his heater, died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Definitely the way to go: he was in great shape. We were hanging out, shooting the shit, talking about all the great times we’d had when he was alive. The exact same stuff you’d talk to yourself about over a coffin, but you both get to do it. It’s a beautiful thing.
The downside is that you eventually get to the end of all the great times, and you’re both still sitting there, and you don’t get to tearfully stumble away from the coffin with a handkerchief pressed to your face. So we played cards for awhile, then played the game where you put your hand out on the table and dance the point of a knife between your outstretched fingers as fast as you can. It was a pretty fair match: he wouldn’t feel it if he stabbed his fingers, but my muscles were a lot more limber. Once it started to get boring, he said “okay, check this out,” and fired it up one last time, going as fast as he could, then when I least expected it, he just up and whacked the knife into his arm.
We laughed like lunatics. Then he raised his arm off the table, made a fist, twisted the knife and his middle finger popped up. Just about the funniest thing I ever saw. Hard to explain why. I guess it’s because when I flip someone off, my whole body is involved. All your brains and guts and muscles are concentrated in that one finger. Pow! Take that! But seeing his hand do it in such a disconnected way like that, man, it was like seeing Pinocchio do it, or Howdy Doody jerk off or something. Making the puppet do funny things. After we settled down, though, we opened up his arm and started poking at all the stuff in there, all serious and scientific. Well, not too scientific, because neither of us had an anatomy book yet, but we both had some basic high school biology lingering in the back of our brains, so we tried to act smart at each other, pointing out fat and muscle, tendon and nerve, different layers of skin, the easy stuff. And, of course, continued foolishness with the tendons; middle finger, devil horns, hang loose brah.
That night went long and strange. Fact is, he’d already done his goodbye ritual with everyone else, and I was last on the list. After me, his plan was to do a half-gainer into a bonfire and call it a life. But after playing with his arm for a while, it seemed like more experimentation was in order. He knew I could deal with stuff that would freak out other people, so we decided to keep going. Plus, we’d both had a good eight or nine beers at this point. So, I was eight or nine beers worth of drunken, and he was eight or nine beers worth of looking pregnant. He’d lean to the left, slosh, lean to the right, slosh, burp, slosh. It wasn’t uncomfortable, he said, but he did feel a bit fat. He told me he was going to go on a crash diet, and stuck the knife in his gut, right next to his belly button. There was a small farting noise, and a worse farting smell, but that was it. No beer, like we expected. I pointed at his chest and said his stomach was up higher. He pointed the blade. Higher. He pointed. I waggled my hand left. He pointed. I gave him a thumbs up, and he drove the knife home, spilling stinking beer and stomach acid all over the kitchen table like a slot machine paying out big. I told him it was a damn good thing this was his house, because I wasn’t going to clean that mess up.
He stood up and did a few sloppy jumping jacks, then looked back down at his deflated gut.
“You know,” he said, “there’s a whole lot of crap in here I don’t need any more. Come on.”
I’ll spare you most of the details, but what happened then was that we went into the bathroom, stood him up in the bathtub and gutted him like a fish. Not exactly like a fish, since we had to be a little strategic about what to remove, and how. Didn’t want to just slice through his abdominals, because you need those to stand up. Didn’t want to wreck his diaphragm, because he still needed to push air in and out of his lungs to talk. So we ended up with some smaller incisions on his sides, and pulled out all the useless guts that were just sitting around in there and piled them up in the bathtub. If you’ve ever butchered a hog before, you might have just the barest inkling of what it smelled like in there. That little bathroom fan is useless after a mean shit, so you know it didn’t do anything to clear the air when presented with an entire colon.
After he had a spray-down with the shower, he shoved his hands into the holes and said “pockets!” Then he got all serious and said it would be an excellent way to shoplift. Grab the good stuff and stick it where your liver used to be. He sounded a little wheezy. Said he could feel his lungs pulling down into his abdomen a bit, might not be a bad idea to stuff a bunch of newspaper in there or something. Then he got out and jumped up and down a few times. “Hell yeah,” he said. “I just lost, what, thirty, forty pounds? Check my vertical leap,” and he squatted down, launched himself into the air, and smashed his head through the drywall in the ceiling.
And so that’s how my best friend and I ended up sprawled on the bathroom floor next to a tub full of his guts laughing ourselves silly. You just never know how things are going to work out the last time you see someone. Later, as the east started to lighten up, we started throwing wood into a pile for that last fire, and decided it would be a great idea to fill up his new kangaroo pouch with gasoline before he did his final leap. It ended up taking a little more engineering than we thought, lots of plastic bags and twine and one of those big hooked needles you use to close up the Thanksgiving turkey—that was my guess, anyway: neither one of us knew why he had a big-ass needle tucked away in the back of a drawer. We decided maybe a girlfriend had left it there. But we sewed him up, we got the fire blazing up a good fifteen feet into the sky, and we said good bye to each other. I won’t describe our last moments together, I don’t think, because that’s just one of those things I want to hang onto for myself. He left well. I kept my last promise and set his house on fire.
Yeah, it was intentional, and it was me. The police and fire department just chalked it up to a self-immolation that got out of hand, something that had become more and more common, and I didn’t see the need to say otherwise. And no, I wouldn’t have done it if there was any danger of burning anything else down, but he lived in a little shack way out on a beach, so there was nothing but water and sand for miles. The only reason it got reported at all was that there happened to be someone out on a boat that dawn and they radioed in. They were bobbing around waiting for the sun to break the horizon so they could—get this—scatter someone’s ashes on the water. We might disagree on implementation a bit, but the ritual’s pretty similar.
Fire’s not the only way, but it’s the cleanest way, the purest way. Wood chippers, combine harvesters, sure, they work, too, but there’s no class to that. You don’t see pictures in National Geographic of families on the bank of the Ganges saying farewell to Granny by chucking her in a wood chipper and aiming the spray out over the river. Acid works. Time works. Time always works. With a patient enough corpse, the sky burial still gets the job done. The thing is, we don’t know what’s causing the slow death, so we don’t really know when it quits, or even if it quits. We just have to believe it quits, because after you’ve tumbled a loved one into a fire, you have to believe they’re not there any more, you have to believe you’ve helped them escape the suffering, you have to believe they’re not still hanging around wondering why they can’t see or hear or feel anything any more.
Exactly like it used to be, in other words. If you believed in ghosts before, well then, you probably still do, and the only thing that’s going to convince you otherwise is a proper education and parents who cared about you as a child, and I can’t help you with that now. Sure, we don’t know everything about the nature of consciousness, but we know it doesn’t hang around on its own. In fact, most of the time consciousness is trying to get the hell out of here, and I’ve got a garage full of empty whiskey bottles to prove it. We know this: the brain is still—symbolically, at least—the main player. If you cut parts off a dead’n, the parts not connected to the brain stop moving, and the parts connected to the brain complain that you’re cutting their parts off. If you cut it down to just a piece of brain—not even the whole thing, just a sliver—and an eyeball, it’ll still give you a rotten little wink.
So who knows if burning or chopping or dissolving really ends it all. Seems to me that consciousness just keeps contracting and contracting into the largest piece of brain connected to the largest piece of body like a hermit crab sucking itself into its shell, so if there’s even one brain cell still connected to one skin cell, it might still be flopping around inside that wood chipper thinking “are you fucking kidding me?”
For a while, anyway. Time still wins, and that last bit of brain and skin will find itself inside some bacterium’s gut, finally being digested into freedom.
That’s what I think. There’s always time. Time to live in happiness, only to be saddened by knowing you’ll someday die; time to live in sadness, only to find relief in the knowledge that someday death will free you.
I also think that’s why I never had children. It’s a terrible burden on a child for its first word to be “existentialism.”
Yeah. Elephant in the room right there, huh?
Okay.
I did have a child. I also had a wife.
My boy was stillborn, and my wife died giving birth to him.
So, we still had a week or so together as a family, but it wasn’t ideal. Little Charles had never used his lungs before, so he didn’t know he was supposed to. He was too quiet for a baby. Quiet, stiff, and cold. Not the squalling pudgy red shit machine that I’d been steeling myself against for months. He didn’t have all those things I didn’t like about babies, and found myself desperately wishing he did. He would suck at her breast, and for the first few hours the milk still flowed, but while his suck instinct was there, his swallow instinct wasn’t, and it would just dribble out of his mouth and run down his chin and onto her belly.
I hadn’t wanted to get married, I hadn’t wanted to have children, but over time I got used to the idea. It’s hard to let go of bachelorhood, but you get there eventually. I used my imagination. Wife, child, okay, how does that work? House, job, first steps, first words, barbecue, baseball, baby teeth. I could do this. I could do this.
Wedding. Honeymoon. Pregnancy.
I learned everything about pregnancy. Lamaze. Much more than I wanted to. Episiotomy. We decided to have a home birth, a water birth. All those things I learned, all those things I imagined, all the good and bad I prepared myself for emotionally, all swept away by my dead wife holding my dead child, all swept away by her eyes, her look pleading with me to fix it, she knows I can fix it. All swept away by her dead hair floating in the dead water.
You can’t scream and wail for the dead and your heart when they’re right there waiting for you to make things better, make things right. You can’t cry and feel sorry for yourself and beat your chest because even though it’s happened, it hasn’t really happened, yet. All that’s happened is that the biggest fucking countdown clock in the universe just started ticking, and you have to do everything exactly right in every last second you have left. Just like life, all over again.
I did my best, I did as good as anyone could, I think. I didn’t fall to my knees, I didn’t scream to the heavens. I told her everything was okay and we’d figure something out.
The mating call of the male who has no idea what to do to the female who needs to think he does.
We stayed up all night, they no longer needing sleep, me not sure I’d ever sleep again, Charles slowly waving his stiff limbs around like a beetle tipped onto its back. The next day we put him in a hole and put kerosene to his motions. No grave marker. I’d like to use a word like abomination, but it was just a mistake. An error. Something that shouldn’t have happened. There is no bonding with a corpse, especially from a corpse. She worried I thought badly of her, that she was a callous mother, no mother at all. I told her we didn’t know what to think any more. I told her we’d figure something out.
I don’t know when my boy died and wasn’t my boy any more. I think they both died at the same time. But I’ll tell you one thing we’ve learned positively and without question: the stillborn keep moving. Abortions don’t. You square that with your imaginary god however you want, but facts are facts. I guess it’s pretty small to shake my fist at pro-lifers at this point, especially since that term’s been co-opted by anti-dead racists, instead, though it’s mostly the same crowd, but I had to watch my dying wife give birth to my dead child, and I had to set him on fire. If you haven’t been there, keep your hands off my bodies.
I don’t know why I called him Charles just now. That wasn’t Charles. Charles was the son we never had. Our daughter would have been Mary.
She called faraway friends and family and said her goodbyes, and made plans to see anybody nearby and have her final dates for coffee. I slept while she was gone, sweating out nightmares of a child-sized spider gently testing Charles with a furry forelimb as he lay there in the hole waving, waving. I don’t sleep good during the day. I always get too hot, and when I get too hot I dream about spiders. Not being chased or attacked by spiders, just spiders start taking key roles away from people. A fist-sized spider taking a shower under the spout next to me after gym class in high school. A chihuahua-sized spider squatting in the dirt in the back yard not chasing after the stick I’ve thrown, just gazing back at me with six eyes full of nothing, pedipalps round and furred like a vulva a week or two out of trim.
Soon enough, her nerves started to go and her complexion became too difficult to correct with makeup, so she stayed home and we talked. I drank coffee and vowed to stay up every night with her, but that was a mistake. It’s difficult enough to spend long empty nights talking to the decomposing corpse of your wife without hallucinations being involved. So I would sleep here and there, and I’d wake up and she’d be a little worse, a little more worn. The fly strips we hung from the ceiling above her would fill with little buzzing allegories, flies that were dead but just weren’t ready to stop moving yet, and we’d replace them every day or so. She was good about keeping them off her, kept herself doused in poison and perfume, wrapped tape around any parts that were threatening to burst or weep, but we both knew it was going to have to end. When you’re with someone long enough, you don’t see how they really look any more. After all these years, she still looks like the girl I first met, not the woman she grew in to, and not the corpse she became.
It wasn’t as fun as the night or two I spent with my other friend. We went over the good times in the same way, but the conversation always seemed to find its way back to all the things we hadn’t done yet. All the things we’d planned and dreamed but never got around to. All of our regrets were of things that hadn’t happened.
There was a time when we were young and full of love and said crazy things to prove it. I asked her if she remembered that time, way before all this not-really-dead stuff started, we promised each other that I’d fuck her one last time if she died.
She nodded.
“This isn’t what I expected,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“So I don’t think…” I said.
“No,” she agreed.
And that’s where we left it.
I figured you might be wondering.
She did want to watch me one last time, but to my shame I couldn’t make that happen. Or maybe it would be more shameful if I could find myself jerking off in front of a corpse. It’s funny, the only time I would ever think about the possibility of reincarnation is when I’d be masturbating and then catch the dog watching me, like she’s made it pretty far up the reincarnation ladder, cockroach, finch, squirrel, and now house dog, which is a pretty good gig, pretty close to the top, but even this close to enlightenment she still has to suffer through watching this. Fortunately I’ve never had to concern myself with thinking she might be my dead grandmother looking at me with those disappointed puppy dog eyes. That’d be even worse. But then, Grandma was Catholic, so she’s in hell.
There was also a time in those early heady days where we dreamed of harvesting the other’s skin should one of us die. Tanning it and making a book, and writing dreams in that book. I think only young lovers could make a promise like that. Young, tanned, pliable, moisturized lovers. As you age, the book becomes less a book of dreams then a book of connect-the-dots, a book of Rorschach tests. Had I—or rather, we—skinned her immediately after death, it might have been possible, but her nerves would still be firing, and I’ve heard that being skinned is unpleasant. Once her nerves died, the skin was useless. All of our morbid teenage plans wasted, and yet here she was, the walking dead. Not at all what we were playing at when we dressed up in our funeral finest and went dancing at the goth club. Not at all.
When she became unable to move or speak above a whisper, I wrapped the sheets around her and carried her to the pyre we’d built in the yard. She was so light.
We spoke some last kindnesses to each other. I made jokes. Told her this wasn’t what I meant when I said I wished I had a hotter wife. Her lips were gone, so I kissed her teeth and held her hand. I fired a signal flare into the center of the pile, a signal flare that was going to be part of the emergency kit from the boat we never got around to buying, the trip we never managed to take. I held her hand as long as I could, then backed away from the heat. She turned away from me and looked at the sky.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t have any left. Nor did I put on a funny hat and get drunk on beer and celebrate life, like you want your friends to do. I was tired, empty.
Not empty enough, I guess, because I stopped eating. It wasn’t so much one large decision as a series of small ones. Just didn’t feel like it any more. Time to eat became time to do something else. After a week or so it started to get interesting, so I just kept on going. Started to wonder what the best way to die would be. Or rather, what would be the best way to die in order to maintain my health best after death. I’m not sure health is the right word there. Maintain my physique. Rot the least.
Drinking myself to death had some flair initially, since being soaked in alcohol seemed like it would have some anti-bacterial properties, but I’d probably do something stupid on the way to the final pickling and end up on fire, or in my sister-in-law’s bed again, or both. Booze is like your best friend in fourth grade who suddenly turns on you and pulls your pants down in the middle of the schoolyard.
See, here’s the thing. I lost my best friend, my wife and my child within the space of a month or two. It’s tough business, no doubt about that. I got to spend some time saying goodbye to them, but I don’t know if that’s better or worse. I guess it’s not so different than pre-zombie times if they’d been hanging around fucked up on cancer or something. But I wonder how I’d have responded to all that a couple years ago. What I’m getting at is: is trying to figure out the best way to kill yourself “suicidal” any more? A couple years ago, yeah, I’d say maybe thinking about killing myself might be an indication of depression possibly linked to the fact that all my favorite people went and fucking died. But now, I’m specifically interested in the problem of the best way to die in order to stay dead as long as possible. Not-really-dead, I mean. Language was really not built for this shit.
The two obvious answers are dead—yes, ha, ha—ends. Mummification, sure, keeps something body-shaped around for thousands of years, but it’s a bit brittle for walking around in, and remember they did that whole deal where they pulled the brain out through the nose and everything. I think there’s still some useful techniques to borrow, like filling the body cavity with eleven special herbs and spices to keep the stink down, but mummies are better at lying down and spooking children than they are at driving to the deli for a corned beef on rye or hitting the gym for a session on the treadmill.
Not that a dead person needs to worry about eating or keeping up on their cardio, but habits are another thing that take a long time to die.
Likewise, modern embalming is a non-starter because formaldehyde firms up tissue in a way that makes it hard to move. Formaldehyde ceviché. Good for open caskets, but it’s like being trapped in a rubbery mannequin. Undertakers were hoping to make a killing—yes, ha, ha—on the posthumous cosmetics market, but the first few experiments in that area were nightmares. Real nightmares. You know, the one where you’re trying to run but can’t move your legs. It took those poor bastards an hour just to walk across the room and climb into the crematorium. They couldn’t talk, couldn’t explain what the problem was, but putting yourself into an oven seems like a pretty clear indicator of mood.
The best way to stay immortal is to not die. Keeping your corpse in shape might give you a few more years, but it’s still a crap shoot. Keeping your living body healthy is a lot easier. Still a crap shoot, what with car crashes and cancers and pianos falling from high buildings, but it’s a lot less time consuming than having to spend hours every day taping yourself up to go outside, and then being faced with people scrunching up their noses at the smell or throwing up in the bushes because part of your face slid off and you didn’t notice. I guess it’s not really any less time consuming being alive, but most of the time being consumed is enjoyable: corned beef, treadmill, sleep.
Dead time is consumed by constant maintenance, like having to spend every evening after work wrenching on a shitty car than never works right but never quits, either. Nobody will take it off you and anyway you can’t afford a new one and it’s the only way you can get to your job. Nothing more idyllic than being under the hood of a car on a warm summer evening, cold can of beer sitting next to the socket set, but that magic doesn’t work forever, and sometimes you just want the damn thing to run. When you’re under that hood every night, those tools become knives and that engine turns into the belly of the girl I loved in high school who told me she was pregnant after prom but I never even got my dick in there so what the fuck is she telling me and I’m going to rip those fucking spark plugs right out of you until you stop crying you god damned oil burning cunt whore who tells me lies and tells me you love me every time I slide my foot onto your pedal and who’s the father then tell me that and if there’s one thing that’s exactly the same between engines and women it’s that you can’t fix either one without ending up with bloody knuckles.
I never went to prom, but you know what I mean. Being betrayed by a person is almost expected, but when my car does it, well, I just don’t know.
So I keep on living. It’s just that… well, I’m not very good at it, truth be told. I’m not good at things like remembering to eat, or brush my teeth, or hold down a job. Seems I’m mostly good at watching television, pouring liquor down my neck, setting my loved ones on fire, and waiting around for the inevitable. Without wanting to sound too teenagery about it, I think I might be more successful as a corpse. Then there’d be no more liquor, no more fires, and no more waiting. Just me and the television, face to face in one final ultimate deathmatch. Me and my recliner gonna show the world how a real zombie rolls.
But I’m not really very good at dying, either. That’s just another project that I can’t seem to get motivated to finish. I chewed over all the usual ways to kick off, but none of them really worked for me. They’re either messy, or painful, or require prescriptions. Thought it might be a hoot to eat a box of baking soda then down a bottle of vinegar, do a nice death by science fair volcano, but as cool as it would look I don’t think it would work. I figured just not eating would get me there eventually, but it just seems so passive.
Still, it seemed worked okay, if a little slow. I could feel parts of my body starting to shut down. Woke up one morning and my left arm was all fucked up. Couldn’t feel a thing in my hand, then I’d accidentally banged it on a table and it would start sizzling like it had grown a tongue and stuck it on a fresh nine volt battery. Hell, maybe even a ten or eleven volt. Probably I just slept on it wrong, but, fingers crossed, maybe I’d had a stroke or a minor heart attack. Fingers crossed on my right hand, obviously. Couldn’t do it with my left unless I used my other hand to put them in position. Sort of like when you see a wheelchair fella cross his legs by lifting one leg up with his hands and plopping it across the other.
Thought I’d stop drinking for awhile, too, but man that gets painful quick. Stop drinking water, I mean. Not drinking booze just gets cost-effective real quick. Not eating is pretty easy after the first few days; once your body gets used to the idea, it doesn’t bug you too much about it. Dying of thirst, though, you just go right into red alert emergency mode after day two or three. Tongue all swollen up, lips all cracked, sinuses shot to hell… I could even feel my blood thickening up and slowing down, like my heart was trying to shove paste through my arteries. On paper it’s a quicker way to go than starvation but time slows way down when every second of every minute is all about water, nothing but water. Your brain won’t even let you think of anything else, it just turns on a special set of emergency broadcast neurons that kick the shit out of any other thought that tries to bust its way into the party.
Also, I’d say it’s pretty close to impossible to thirst yourself to death when there’s faucets all over the house. Even if I had unbreakable willpower, I think my body would mutiny while I slept and just go get some water on its own. I mean, I’ve done a lot weirder shit when I thought I was asleep than get a glass of water, so that would be a no-brainer. Literally. Tell you something else about not dying of thirst: when I finally said fuck it and had a tall cool glass of water, it was the best thing I have ever tasted. Ever. Better than the hautest of any cuisine, better than barbecued shrimp and a beer on the beach at sunset, better than a handful of nuts on the top of a mountain, better than a squashed-up peanut butter and jelly on white in a sofa-cushion fort while playing sticky-fingered doctor with the girl next door for the first time. Then my stomach cramped, I threw it up and tried again, a little more slowly.
So there I am, freshly vomited and lightly hydrated, wearing nothing but shorts to really show off my Body by Gandhi, and there’s a knock at the front door. Normally I’d just ignore it or maybe sneak a peek through a curtain to see what flavor of door-to-door dumbass I was ignoring, but I guess I was just high on water, because I slowly walked—while keeping one hand on the wall for balance—over to the door and threw it open with a hearty “what can I do for you?”
Two stinking corpses were standing there in the midday summer heat, asking me something in Spanish which I didn’t catch all of, but there was definitely a “Jesus Christo” in there. I was trying to translate “are you fucking kidding me?” in my head, but the one who’d spoken caught my blank expression and repeated in English the question regarding whether or not I’d found their friend anywhere. As it turns out, in English, I do know how to say “are you fucking kidding me?” So I did.
So then two corpses and a skin-and-bones stick-figure man proceeded to have a spirited debate about theology and its place in a world where the dead walk. There’s been a few times I’ve regretted not having a camera crew follow me around full-time to document how ridiculous my life is. This was one of those times.
Or maybe it wasn’t happening at all. Maybe in whatever quantum state of simultaneous living/dying I was in I was just imagining two zombie christians rotting on my doorstep. Maybe it was just the starvation talking. Maybe I’d crossed the boundary and it was actually three zombies standing there making a mockery of conversation, moving jaws and lips around like real grown up living people do.
Only one way to find out.
I stretched my hand out into the sunlight and poked one of them on the shoulder. Poke. My finger went in further than it should have, and a brown wet spot remained on his white poly/cotton button-down when I withdrew. Not only Christians and zombies, but stupid, as well. Everybody knows you don’t wear white before labor day or after death. You wear dark colors and eye-confusing patterns to hide the inevitable eruptions and outflows. Paisley and camouflage are both good options, although never at the same time.
But aside from the squish, he seemed solid enough, so I figured I wasn’t hallucinating. I said “gotta go” and shut the door on them. I had to find out if I was dead or not, and I had some potato vodka kicking around the pantry somewhere that was going to give me the answer. I hadn’t had a drop since I stopped eating, so whatever tolerance I had before had long since evaporated. I rummaged around until I found it, spun off the top and took a healthy belt. Burned like hell going down, nothing new there. I stumbled back and forth for a minute or so, but stumbling could mean I was either drunk, starving or dead, which didn’t narrow it down any. So I hit the bottle again. Burned a little less the second time, which could be my nerves starting to dull due to the vodka, or it could be my nerves starting to dull due to the death. No easy answers were coming out of that bottle. As usual.
I staggered into the bathroom and found a thermometer. Ninety eight degrees. A little low. Hard to say. And the air temperature is at least ninety. I looked in the mirror. Death warmed over would be an accurate description, but I’d looked like that all week. I fumbled around at my neck, trying to find a pulse, but my hands were trembling too much to do any good, and I ended up just slapping around like a junkie looking for a useable vein. Enough with the science. I’ll just take up residence in the easy chair and wait this thing out. When night falls it’ll cool down and then I’ll see if I’ve cooled down.
I sure wasn’t drunk, though. I was fuzzy and felt a bit thick in the head, but I wasn’t feeling any warm friendliness towards the vodka bottle like I usually do. No “c’mere, buddy, let’s hang out tonight.” The bottle was on the counter next to the stove, cap still unscrewed. On the stove was a saucepan that I’d washed at some point and didn’t bother to put away. I looked at the bottle. I looked at the saucepan. Back at the bottle. I felt exactly the same way when I looked at the saucepan as I did when I looked at the bottle. I felt “I left something on the counter, I should put it away.” That’s it. Didn’t want to go over and give it a hug and put my mouth on its neck.
And that’s how I knew I was dead.
My best guess is that I blew a hose when I was throwing up the water. Body just decided to get all spiteful and say “nope, uh uh, too little, too late.” But even then I might’ve only started dying, and not actually finished up until I opened the door to the messengers of Jesus. For fuck’s sake. Of all the obnoxious ways to die, I had to do it in front of two dead assholes who think there’s an afterlife. If walking around dead doesn’t make you question your ridiculous beliefs, I don’t know what will. I guess mental illness doesn’t clear up just because your heart stops pumping.
I thought about pouring the rest of the vodka down my gullet just for old times’ sake, then thought about pouring in the sink for symbolism’s sake, and finally decided to keep it around as a disinfectant. It would probably come in handy once I started getting, you know, drippy.
I spent the rest of my death day cooking. Wasn’t hungry, obviously, but I had all this food I hadn’t eaten and wasn’t going to eat, so rather than throw it out I had a pleasant afternoon of putting it into different pots and pans, salting and peppering, arranging it on plates, then throwing it out. Once the refrigerator was empty, I pulled out all the shelves and gave them a good cleaning. While they were laid out on the counter drying, I realized not only could I fit in the refrigerator, but that I probably should. If it can keep hamburger from going bad for a while, it can probably do the same for me. I wedged myself in there and shut the door. The light went out. That would need fixing. I wasn’t just going to sit in a dark box all day. That’s the old way of being dead, and it’s boring as hell. I could put a pillow on the floor, stick a few books in the shelves in the door, hell, it could be downright cozy. In fact, if I rigged up an extension cord and got some electric in there to power some internet, I could spend almost all my time in there.
And so it went for a time. I’d climb out so I could enjoy the occasional sunrise or sunset and to wiggle all the stiffness out of my chilled muscles, but I could tell from the smell it wasn’t going to be a permanent solution, even after I removed all the useless plumbing from my abdominal cavity and threw a handful of cinnamon and a few cloves in there instead. I’m sure I’d last a good long time in the freezer, but then I’d be immobile until the power went out, and ice crystals just aren’t very good for walkin-around meats. Definitely can’t be good to have your eyes freeze solid, either. They’d probably thaw out all mushy and wrong and throw your prescription all out of whack. Moot point in any event, since the freezer was too small.
The real answer would be replacement therapy. Replace all the bad parts with new ones that work right and don’t rot. Become the bionic zombie. Prosthetic everything. The problem with that plan is twofold: I’m not sure the technology is there yet—and even if it’s there, it sure ain’t here—and I’m not a surgeon. Oh, sure, I may have pierced the occasional body part for a friend, but I’m not sure that qualifies me to, say, replace a rotten leg with a fusion-powered titanium and carbon-fiber personal mobility device. I could probably drill holes through my tibia and install some boss dirt bike wheels or something, though. But if my legs stop working, most likely my arms will have stopped, too, so, really, this stuff should be done sooner rather than later, but, again, it’s not going to be done at all, because I’m not a robo-surgeon.
In other words, I was coming to terms with the fact that one day I was going to die. Again. Maybe in a few years they’ll have this whole zombie immortality thing worked out, and it’ll just be part of the whole death process. You die, you go to the hospital/mortician of your choice, get all your body parts swapped out, and you’re on your way. I just had the bad luck to die at the beginning of this thing, so I’m just going to rot and fall apart and set myself on fire if I remember in time. That’s life on the cutting edge, on the frontier, like the first people with televisions who discovered there wasn’t a single damn thing to watch on ’em.
I decided that if I was destined to fall apart, though, it would be on my terms, in my way, with my style. And like I said, I’d done some piercing before, spent some serious time in tattoo parlors, hung with the bodymod crowd for a while. Now I’ve got this entire body to work with and none of that pain nonsense to get in the way. Sure, sure, pain is part of the process, part of the experience, blah blah whatever, but really, it just slows you down. There’s a reason surgeons knock you out before digging in.
So. I decided it was Art Time. That’s the way to go out.
The first thing I did was remove all my teeth. Maybe “remove” isn’t exactly the right word, because that makes it sound like I knew what I was doing. Like I had a plan. What I did was smash a few out with a hammer, snap a few out with some needle-nose pliers. Didn’t really care so much about the roots, but once one popped out on its own, I decided I had to get in there and dig them all out. I wanted a clean canvas to work with. No pain, no bleeding, no problem. Lots of tough noises to work through, though. Lots of flinching. Cracking and snapping deep in my jaw. Even if there’s no physical pain, hearing your bones and teeth pulling apart does a real number on your head.
It would have been neat to have sharp metal teeth, like a bear trap or something, but I hadn’t really planned ahead, so I poked around in the garage and settled on some dull gray drywall screws, because, well, that’s what I had. I tried to figure out how to install them in my tooth holes with the pointy parts out, like you’d expect, but they just wouldn’t hold, no matter how hard I wedged them in there, so I went ahead and flipped them over and just screwed them into my jaw with the heads out. Stuffed that Makita in my mouth like a suicide gun and torqued those bad boys until they chattered. Ended up being much cooler than having them pointy-side out, because I could rattle my jaws like a pair of maracas and not tear my gums to shreds in the process. It’s a good sound. Like a robot seizure deep in my head. Worth all the breaking and snapping sounds earlier.
I’m pretty satisfied with how my legs worked out, too, but I wish I’d moved more tools from the garage to my makeshift art lab here in the living room beforehand. It was a pain in the ass having to drag myself out to my workbench with both my tibia split up the middle like cordwood. I think the spreader bars holding the halves apart look pretty good. Had just enough old rebar kicking around to make it work. If I’d had a thick old mustache and some mirrored aviator shades around before I’d died, the bell-bottom effect would be perfect. Imagine me stepping out of a GTO with some feathered hair and legs like these. You wouldn’t even be able to see me through the blizzard of cadaver panties flying at my face.
Now, you’re going to have to decide if what I’m doing to my arms is successful or not. Got the left one mostly finished, but that caused the hand to stop working, so I thought it would be a good thing to type all this up while I still have the good right hand. I also need to finish setting up the tableau: if it works, you’re reading this, and if it didn’t you’re not. Guess you are, so my blowtorch/extinguisher rig worked fine, and I burned my head off without burning the house down. With any luck it didn’t burn down any other parts of the scene… check the laptop stashed in the refrigerator, it should have all the footage even if the camera gets burned. I think I turned off the password, but just in case, it’s “sp0il3d” without the quotes. Huh. I chose that because I because I thought I was spoiling myself by getting a fancy new machine. And just smell me now. Funny old world.