Zombie Read online

  That afternoon a few weeks ago Dr. E__ was too polite to notice that I had fallen asleep in the chair facing his desk. It was the strong medication maybe. He might think. Or maybe Dr. E__ did not notice. For he is sleepy sometimes, too. Heavy-lidded eyes like a turtle’s. It was raining & water ran down the window behind his head in thin pissing streams.

  Wrote my refill prescription & handed it to me, dosage as indicated. Dad’s medical insurance covers it. Saying we can end our session a few minutes early this week (it is 4:36 P.M. by my watch) if that’s O.K. with me, he had a staff meeting. It was O.K. with me.

  6

  Last night I was working late in the cellar. Emergency work repairing SEEPAGE DAMAGE in the old cistern. I am a hard worker if what I am doing has a purpose. I did not require sleep (did not take my nighttime medication) & so at 3 A.M. climbed to the attic where there is a star-shaped window at the front of the house. The peak of the ceiling is not high enough for me to stand upright & anyway I needed to crouch there looking up at the night sky where there was a MOON so bright it hurt my eyes! How I knew the MOON was there, from down in the cellar, I don’t know. Shreds of cloud were being blown across the moon clotted & cobwebbed like thoughts moving too fast for you to hear.

  So sad & squalid Quentin.

  But now we are going to turn over a new leaf aren’t we son.

  You get to the attic by a steep narrow stairs at the rear of the third floor hallway. The attic is locked & OFF LIMITS to tenants like the cellar. I made my way silently in wool socks not wishing to wake up the young Pakistani graduate student whose room is almost directly beneath the stairs.

  Ramid would not be a safe specimen. Nor any of them beneath this roof. I never think of it.

  In the attic there was a strong sharp smell of dust & that sweetish-sour smell of dead mice. I took a deep breath & another & another—my lungs like BALLOONS filling with air. Proof I don’t need fucking medication. Am I sick? Who says? Shining my flashlight into the corners of the attic.

  This could actually be for the best. Bringing a problem out into the open. The clarity of day.

  Had I been here before? A long time ago a boy had climbed up here scared & in a hurry & he’d hidden something glittering & plastic on top of one of the beams back in the shadows but I don’t know if I am supposed to be that boy or the other one bleeding & choking. But I was not wearing glasses then was I. (Did not begin wearing prescription lenses until aged twelve.) So it couldn’t be Q__ P__. Or if I am confusing two times.

  Fuck the PAST, it’s NOT NOW. Nothing NOT NOW is real.

  Quiet & not moving for many minutes. I have trained myself to do so. & my eyes to penetrate the dark.

  Shining the flashlight which is the CARETAKER’s flashlight into the corners of the attic. Where shadows leap like bats. Smiling to see how, when light moves, light you hold in your hand, bright as starlight you make shadows leap. The shadows are there all along. BUT YOU MAKE THEM LEAP.

  Crouched there at the window watching the MOON move out of sight. The way a dream will move & you can’t stop it. Heart beating fast & hard. & beginning to feel horny. Excited, & blood seeping into my cock. I am not so safe in the attic as in the cellar where I have my work bench. I have moved my things to lock in the big drawer of the work bench with the CARETAKER’s tools.

  This space in the attic is like certain dreams I used to have where shapes meant to be solid start to melt. & there is no protection. & there is no control. Unlike the cellar which is safe UNDER GROUND, the attic is far ABOVE GROUND. The concentration of COSMIC RAYS is higher at higher elevations on Earth than at lower elevations.

  The suggestion was made by Dad that I clean out the attic to reduce the fire bazard & I said O.K. I will begin that task soon. Right now the cellar is my Number One priority.

  Now we are going to turn over a new leaf aren’t we son & I said Yes Dad.

  7

  Of all of them, of Mom & Dad & Grandma & my sister Junie it has been hardest on Dad I know. For women, it is their nature to forgive. For men, it is harder.

  Upsetting to Professor R__ P__ to learn certain things about his only son & these things a matter of public record. How does your client plead, the judge asked, & the lawyer Dad hired for me said, Your Honor, my client pleads guilty.

  In my heart I did not plead GUILTY because I was NOT GUILTY & am not. But it was a RACIAL MATTER, too. The boy was black & Q__ P__ is white & the lawyer advised Dad this was a delicate issue in Mt. Vernon right now & the courts are carefully monitored, just be grateful we didn’t draw a black judge.

  But I am on good terms with the family again. This is a relief to all concerned. I have been driving Mom & Grandma to church & have attended four Sundays in a row. I have been driving Grandma to senior citizens’ affairs & visiting friends. I have told them how sorry I am that I have hurt them. & how much it means to me that they trust me. I will live up to your trust from now on I told them.

  The drinking is the cause of it & that will be terminated from now on.

  It is fucking hard for me to hug them! Especially Dad. There is a stiffness in all our bones. But I do it & I believe I am doing it O.K. Mom & Grandma & Big Sis Junie were crying & there were tears leaking from my eyes I didn’t wipe away.

  When Judge L__ pronounced TWO YEARS there was a long moment when nobody spoke or breathed before he added SUSPENDED SENTENCE. Judge L__’s eyes which I had no choice (my lawyer so counseled me) but to look at reflected severity but also kindness.

  Judge L__ is a fair man & not vindictive & not to be pushed around by special-interest groups it was said. He is known to Dad & Dad is known to Judge L__. I did not ask but Mt. Vernon is a place where important men in the professions know one another & it may be they belong to the same club or clubs. Dad has membership in the Mt. Vernon Athletic Club downtown not far from the courthouse.

  Afterward Dad shook my hand so hard it hurt & did embrace me & there were tears in his eyes behind his glasses like his eyes were loose in their sockets like jelly about to slip out. Handed me the keys to his car so I could drive the family home.

  KEY TO DAD’S CAR (ACTUAL SIZE)

  8

  It has been hardest on Dad because R__ P__ is a name known to people. In Mt. Vernon where he & Mom have lived for thirty years & in Dad’s profession where he is a distinguished man.

  I don’t mean that Dad is famous like Einstein or Oppenheimer or Dad’s mentor at the Washington Institute Dr. M__ K__ are famous, or a great genius in his field but he is well known & admired & has many graduate students wishing to study with him. His Ph.D. is in both physics & philosophy or maybe he has two Ph.D.’s & they are both from Harvard unless one is from somewhere else, Dad was at a lot of other universities & knows a lot of people.

  Before I was born when R__ P__ was a new Ph.D. he received a fellowship from the Washington Institute in D.C. & there he was befriended by the research scientist Dr. M__ K__ who won a Nobel Prize in 1958. In something like neurobiology, or cell biology. On the fireplace mantel of the house in Dale Springs where I grew up there is a photograph of men in evening dress & one of them is Dr. K__ & one of them is Dad so young it’s hard to know who he is & these two are shaking hands & smiling toward the camera. Pinpricks of red lights in their eyes from the camera’s flash. Dr. K__ is a balding white-haired old guy with a goatee like crotch hair and R__ P__ could be his son is what you’d think. Serious & intelligent & only twenty-nine years old but already he’d published some papers as he calls them. & already married to Mom (who is not in the photograph).

  This photograph of Dr. M__ K__ & R__ P__ is to be found in three places: Dad’s office in Erasmus Hall at the University & at the house in Dale Springs & in Grandma’s house on a dining room wall with mostly family photos. Visitors stare at it and say Oh! is that?— & Dad says Yes it is. Blushing like a kid. I didn’t know him that well really—but he was a great man, he touched many lives & he certainly touched mine.

  When Dr. K__ died a few years ago at the age of eighty the
re were obituaries in Time, People, the New York Times, even the Mt. Vernon Inquirer. Dad clipped them all & had them laminated & they are on a wall in his University office. There was an obituary in the Detroit Free Press I saw & I should have torn it out & saved it for Dad but I forgot or it got lost. I was in Detroit where I go sometimes & stay in a hotel on Cass where I’m known as TODD CUTTLER a guy with curly red-brown hair & a moustache & he wears a leather necktie & looks kind of cool but also kind of a square, an asshole you could put something over onto if you tried. I was with Rooster & the two of us high & laughing leafing through the newspaper which always makes me laugh in the right mood & one of us was turning the pages fast & hard like a kid trying to rip them unless it was both of us & I saw this face on the obituary page NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATE DIES & I poked Rooster & said This guy is somebody my Dad knows & Rooster said Yeah? No shit?

  9

  It was five years ago the idea of creating a ZOMBIE for my own purposes first came to me in a brain storm to change my life.

  Jesus! At such rare times you can feel the electrically charged neurons of the prefrontal brain realigning themselves like iron filings drawn by a magnet.

  The Earth is continually bombarded by high-speed cosmic rays a voice was lecturing. An amplified voice. Was it Dad? Or somebody pretending to be Professor P__ with his nasal drone & habit of clearing his throat & pausing to let his words sink in.

  Cosmic rays from outer space. Of an age many millions of years. More concentrated at higher elevations than lower. It was a darkened lecture amphitheater at the University. I did not know how I came to be there. I did not remember entering the amphitheater. It might have been observed that Q__ P__ had hidden himself purposefully to hear Professor P__ lecture, maybe he was seeking some knowledge or some secret? Like a dog seeking what dogs seek sniffing along the ground & their eyes alert. Except I must have nodded off in the back row & when I woke up I did not know where I was at first which happened in those days when I was not so much in control of myself as I am now & going for as long as forty-eight hours unsleeping then crashing wherever I might be. My skin giving off a pulsing heat & my breath tasting of metal & seeing me people kept their distance from me not sitting in any row near. I was not living at home at the time but had a place downtown. It was hard to bathe there, no hot water.

  Dad was at a podium to the right. A microphone around his neck. Two or three hundred students in the amphitheater taking notes & if Dad saw his son he gave no sign. But he could not see me I am sure in the darkness.

  Quantifiable & unquantifiable material. Research into the early Universe suggests. On an illuminated screen at the front of the auditorium was a computer simulation as Professor P__ identified it of a section of the Universe two hundred million years ago. Demonstrating how the Universe evolved from its early smoothness & equitable distribution of matter to the present condition of superclusters & dark matter. As much as ninety percent of the Universe’s mass is in unquantifiable “black holes.” Most of the Universe is therefore undetectable by our instruments & does not “obey” the laws of physics as we know them.

  There was a hum & a drone & vibrating in the room. That sense you have that the floor is tilting or the Earth shifting & settling beneath your feet. Professor R__ P__’s students were busy taking notes & I observed their bent heads & shoulders & it came to me that almost any one of them would be a suitable specimen for a ZOMBIE.

  Except: you would want a healthy young person, male. Of a certain height, weight & body build etc. You would want somebody with “fight” & “vigor” in him. & well hung.

  But the University students have been forbidden to me. After that ignorant incident that, lucky for Q__ P__, turned out O.K. It was dark behind the dorm & the kid was drunk & stooped over vomiting & gagging & when he looked up hearing me the tire iron slammed down over his ear crashing him to the ground before he could register seeing me so it was O.K. I was wearing my hooded canvas jacket & there were no witnesses, still I panicked & ran as I would never do now with more experience. But it was O.K. A lesson was learned.

  & in Ypsilanti a long time ago so long I can’t remember really I came to the same conclusion I think. For the fact is: any University student (with the exception of the foreign students who are so far from home) would be immediately missed. Their families care about them. & they have families.

  A safer specimen for a ZOMBIE would be somebody from out of town. A hitch-hiker or a drifter or a junkie (if in good condition not skinny & strung out or sick with AIDS). Or from the black projects downtown. Somebody nobody gives a shit for. Somebody should never have been born.

  Walked out of the amphitheater in the midst of the voice droning & went to the psych library to look up LOBOTOMY.

  10

  This is why: seeing the Universe like that (& that a replica of something billions of years extinct!) you see how fucking futile it is to believe that any galaxy matters let alone any star of any galaxy or any planet the size of not even a grain of sand in all that inky void. Let alone any continent or any nation or any state or any county or any city or any individual.

  The idea came to me at that time too because I was having trouble keeping my dick hard with guys’ AWAKE EYES observing me at intimate quarters.

  11

  I was living in a two-room place on Twelfth Street at Reardon, back in Mt. Vernon after spending some time in Detroit & this address was known to Dad & Mom & I was working at Ace Quality Box Co. (Dad thought as a clerk, in fact it was loading & unloading trucks) or maybe I’d just quit or been fired that time Dad dropped by. A few days after the lecture in the amphitheater I think. It was mixed up in my mind that Dad had seen me there in the dark HIS EYES PENETRATING THE DARK but maybe that was not so.

  Aged twenty-seven & time to be ON MY OWN I told them. & I meant it.

  (Except: Mom gave me $$$ when I was in need, not checks but cash. So Dad wouldn’t know.)

  The week following Thanksgiving 1988. BUNNYGLOVES had been missing twelve days but there was never anything in the Mt. Vernon Inquirer or on local TV, why would there be? Set out from Detroit to Montana & not a trace.

  How many hundreds, thousands in a single year. Like sparrows of the air they rise on their wings & soar & falter & fall & disappear & not a trace. & God is himself the DARK MATTER swallows them up.

  Dale Springs pop. 8,000 is where the P__’s live & where their son Q__ grew up. A suburb of Mt. Vernon beside Lake Michigan & many tall trees & a meridian of green planted in geraniums in summer when you drive in crossing the (invisible) border from the City of Mt. Vernon. Six miles west & north of the University now a big sprawling campus. Downtown Mt. Vernon, this shitty neighborhood where I was renting my place is five miles to the south so go figure. Dad said he’d DROPPED BY to visit me.

  The rapping at the door. My eyes flew open breaking the sticky lashes apart & my heart beat in a cold panic because NOW WAS NOT THE TIME.

  Called out stammering & was up from the bed stumbling pulling on my trousers. Zipping up. Dragging the khaki blanket up over the mattress. The stained sheets, the sweet-stale smell. I was used to it by now & should have tried to open the window but didn’t.

  “O.K.,” I said, “—I’m cool. O.K.”

  And it was Dad. My Dad. DROPPED BY to see how I was!

  The chain latch was on the door. There was Professor R__ P__ smiling wearing his sand-colored corduroy face & his tweed asshole for his mouth & his black plastic-professor glasses riding the bridge of his nose. I fumbled opening the door. I tried to say the door wouldn’t open any further, the latch was stuck. But DAD’S EYES a few inches away through the crack.

  Out of a horny dream of BUNNYGLOVES, & fondling. His voice so clear in my head like it was before the change in it. & his eyes muddy-brown as KNOWING deepened in it & the pupils shrank to pinpricks.

  “Quentin, hello! It’s just me! Am I disturbing you?”

  My hand moved & the chain latch was off. & Dad filled the doorway staring & breathless from the stairs. Wh
en R__ P__’s professor-goatee went from glossy brown to gray filings he shaved it off out of pride but there is the shadow of the goatee on his face still. That edge in his voice. “Son?”

  The two of us the same height if I stood up straight which is hard & lifted my head to confront him. Asked how I was like always, & I said. & how was he, & things at home? & Mom & Grandma send their love. Yes & Junie. All wondering why I didn’t call & didn’t drop by & worrying (you know how women are!) maybe I’m sick. & DAD’S EYES darting as I had known they would fixing on the one thing. A pause & then asking, “That locker, that’s new isn’t it?” & a pause. &, “What’s in that that requires a lock, son?”

  I turned to see the five-foot metal locker leaning in the corner. Between the bed & the bathroom. Like I had not seen it before & was myself surprised.

  “Just some gym things, Dad,” I said. I said at once. “Jogging shoes, socks. Towels & stuff like that.”

  Dad asked, so reasonable, “But why does it require a lock?”

  It was a combination lock like for a high school locker. I had memorized the combination & thrown the slip of paper away.

  I was saying, “A lock came with it, Dad. From the Salvation Army. It was a real bargain at $12. It’s a part of it. It’s a way of getting the full use of the locker, I suppose.”

  “You wouldn’t need to use it, though. Why would you?”

  Distinguished Professor, Mt. Vernon State University. Dual appointments in Physics & Philosophy. Senior fellow of the Michigan State Institute for Advanced Research.

  DAD’S EYES behind his shiny glasses. Looking at me like when I was two years old & squatting on the bathroom floor shitting & when I was five years old playing with my baby dick & when I was seven years old & my T-shirt splotched with another kid’s nosebleed & when I was eleven home from the pool where my friend Barry drowned & most fierce DAD’S EYES when I was twelve years old that time Dad charged upstairs with the Body Builder magazines shaking in his hand. “Son? Son?”