| Exactly one year to the day that Malus was simultaneously hit by a train, hit by a car, hit by three or four bullets, and hit by lightning, and hit by a lethal case of botulism, Malus woke up in his coffin. He opened his eyes, and then he tried to sit up. And he hit his head. "Ow," he said. "Fuck," he said. "I'm buried." He said. He thought about it for a while. I guess I'd better try to get out of here, he thought. Then he thought about it some more. Where is here? It occurred to him that he knew more than he used to know. Like he knew he had been dead. And he knew why: train car bullet lightning botulism. And he even knew that he wouldn't know why he was dead, since it killed him while it was happening. And he knew he should know why he was not dead anymore, but he knew he did not know why. And he knew he was in a coffin, and that, conveniently, part of it was broken, and that, of course, it was the way he would have to get out. So he started, and boy, was it tough. It was really hard getting out of that coffin. He started by kicking at the broken parts, and continued as the broken part grew until he was able to start hitting it with his fist, until he could grab part of the wood. He was able to get some room above him to pull at the cement interment block, and begin to scrabble at the packed earth. The more he dug, the more the dirt began to fall down around him, and he began to work his way upward, but once he was able to stand all the way up, the earth was pretty well much all around him, and he said "Damn it," and he died again. The next day, exactly one day later, he woke up again. He said fuck and damn it and damn a few more times and started to dig again. When his hand broke the surface, he sort of knew it was not night time and that what it looked like out there was not like in the movies or on the TV when the buried person digs their way out of the ground. Out of the grave. It was full day light and it was like Tuesday or something and yes it was a graveyard and yes there was a headstone. Here lies Malus Regan, 1971-2008, Brother, Son, Husband. I was never married, he thought. In 2002, or maybe 2001, Malus had written a paper which attempted to show how voodoo was an inauthentic religious experience, based on the ingredients of its rituals, the component parts of the various talismans and doodads, gris gris, potions, packets of pieces parts used in incantations, spells, and so forth. The paper showed how the elements of these objects were basically what could be found in garbage, and given the various oaths and curses your average sanitation engineer mutters when slinging trash from bin to truck to dump, the fact that voodoo like activities did not spontaneously pop up around trash collectors was more or less proof there was no such thing as magic. In his paper, Malus spelled spontaneously as "spawntaneously." But by a happy coincidence, the same garbage man picked up the same assortment of old bones and chicken fat and said the same curses two days in a row, one of which brought Malus back from the dead, and the other of which brought him back again. Malus Regan was a zombie. But not just any old zombie. Or, maybe he was just an old zombie. But he was his own zombie. He knew that he had been hit by a train, a car, three or four bullets, and lightning, and a case of botulism, but he did not know which one for sure had actually killed him. Really, when he thought about it, shuffling, and then walking like a normal person, out of the cemetery, what killed a man was lack of oxygen to the brain, as a result of stroke, or heart attack or blood loss, or head trauma, or failed breathing, all via various and variable reasons. So he knew the train would have killed him all by itself, and so would have the car, and so would have the bullets, and so would have the lightning, and so would have the botulism. So, I'm a zombie, he thought, too. Guess I better go eat somebody's brains. It had been your typical gray day. He had been walking under darkening skies in late afternoon. He had been near the railroad tracks, in the rougher part of town. A thunderclap had caused a driver to swerve, hitting him into an oncoming train, which made the engineer throw the brakes, setting up a magnetic field shift around the electric engine, drawing lighting to where Malus was flying through the air at that moment, right into the path of three or four stray bullets, just as the various botulism chemicals caused his stomach to burst. An all together messy death. And so Malus set out, walking around, trying to decide what to do. It was another typical gray day, except for the whole being a zombie thing. He tried to decide where to go. He didn’t really feel like eating brains. He wasn’t especially hungry. Not knowing how he knew, he knew his stomach was more or less useless now anyway. The botulism had got it good. His spine, too, was more or less worthless, thanks to the train. His arm felt weird, like if he tried to play tennis or foosball, he wouldn’t do very well, and teenagers might laugh at him. That had been the car. And one of his eyes was permanently wide open, thanks to the lightning. And he could feel the bullets, three or four of them, rattling around in his chest. Nice shot, he would have said, if he had thought they’d been on purpose, and they had not been at him. Clearly, Malus thought, as he walked out of the cemetery and into town, clearly, there’s a God, and I was supposed to be dead. There’s too much coincidence to car train lightning bullet botulism. Maybe my death, he considered, looking both ways very very carefully as he crossed a railroad track, maybe my death was one of those points in history where the various threads of free will sort of have to come together all of a sudden. Destiny or something. And just as clearly, he thought, or tried to think, because the sun was shining in his eyes, that voodoo nonsense meant it was also destiny that I be brought back from the dead. He stopped and looked up. How in the hell can the sun be shining in my eyes when the sky is gray? This suddenly made him very sad. So Malus walked into town. This was either an old part of town that didn’t need to expand any more, or a new part of town that had not expanded yet, since the cemetery was on the outskirts. They stick their dead, they stick us, on the edge, where they don’t have to deal with us. And then they get all cramped up, and move in on our turf, and everything gets gentrified and they won’t bury folks there no more. This made Malus angry. He tried to swing his good arm at a pretty blonde who was walking by. Brains, he said. Creep, she said, dodging his arm, walking away. Malus found that he took no satisfaction in realizing his death and zombiehood was his destiny. He found a chair outside a café, tried to sit down, but ended up just sort of sloppily perched on one arm. He wanted to think about this. This sucks, clearly, but it’s not so bad. I don’t know what I want to do right now, but I don’t know either if I want to have something to want. Across the street, through a barber-shop window, an old man and a guy holding the biggest pair of scissors he’d ever seen in his life looked at him, seemed to say something, then looked up at a TV and seemed to say something else. Malus stood up and walked on. At the corner of one street and another, he came to a building with boarded up windows. His head was buzzing. A tiny part of him considered the possibility of trying to break into the building. I will break in, find a cozy corner, and stand there. That might be a good idea. Suddenly, one of the boards fell out, and Malus realized the buzzing sound in his head had been some kind of saw. Some dude in a hard hat poked his head out, looked around. Malus tried to say brains, but the head disappeared before he could get the word out. God damn it, Malus, thought, and shuffled on. Because he was shuffling for sure now. At first he had been able to correct the shuffle, but now he had a good rhythm going. He wasn’t sure where he was headed. He wanted to find a place to think, but thinking was becoming more difficult. Doing, though seemed easy. He came to a park bench and tried to sit down again. The old man who’d been sitting there got up and out of his way as Malus sort of fell onto the bench. Brains, Malus muttered, as the man brushed bird seed off of his coat and hobbled away. Half-on, half-off the bench, Malus tried to think about this situation while he struggled to stand up again. Through the slats of the park bench, he could see a cat eating at the remains of a dead bird. But Malus simply could not get his mind to focus. He could think of things, but not think about things. Here he was, a zombie, shuffling along. And why? Leibniz said that nothing simply happens, that everything has a purpose. But does that purpose have anything to do with me? Hegel would have said that’s a question impossible to answer, because universal purpose can’t make sense from the perspective of the individual, so clearly Malus was not going to ever understand why he was a god damn zombie. Kirkegaard said screw that, mofo, I am full of angst precisely because I can’t see why the universe is torturing me. Schopenhaur, of course, would have told Malus that life is suffering, whether you know why or not, so if you don’t like the zombie business, buddy, then that’s proof you’re alive. Malus giggled at this though, thinking, yeah, and to Schopenhaur, Descarte the zombie would have said “Oh really? I stink therefore I am?” Maybe. At this point Heidegger would have chimed in and insisted that as far as destiny goes, zombiehood is almost a kind of Nirvana, since life was just a state of being dead eventually. Hume would have said some bull crap about destiny be damned, look at the facts, and Wittgenstein would have said what the hell do you mean, “Zombie,” why are you letting all these words confuse the issue in the first place? Malus finally got to his feet again and managed to get moving. It was no good, his mind simply was unable to process thoughts. Old dead white dudes had been eating at his brain for far too long, and there was nothing left. Out of the corner of his good eye, Malus recognized a torn shirt, a dirty pair of pants, and an odd shuffling gait. It was another zombie, so he decided to follow it. At the edge of the park, they encountered another zombie, this one a woman. A beautiful woman, actually: her hair was mottled and thick with dirt and a few dead worms, her skin a deep purplish-grey with open soars in a few spots, and she had a long, shapely bone sticking out of her upper thigh. Brains, Malus whispered, and had a revelation: he could regain the ability to think about all of this, being a zombie, being alive, being human, god, destiny, fate, the rising price of gasoline, sex, drugs, rock’n roll, he could stick it all back in his head just by eating someone else’s brains. Well duh. It was that simple. They continued to shuffle, as more zombies joined them, their progress slow but inexorable. As night fell, a full moon rose, fat with the juices of fear, leached out of cavemen a million years ago who used to stare at the damn thing and wonder if it was what gave them birth or if it was going to kill them. Eventually Malus and the zombies came across an isolated farm house. He knew there were some people trapped inside there, could smell them. The zombies decided to move toward the house, maybe try to break in. It seemed like a pretty good idea. |