Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos (11 page)

Time seems to stop, waiting for Francis Bacon to get home from school. I don’t know what time does. I don’t know how it works. Everything seems to happen now. It rushes in from both sides. It smothers me. I don’t know what to tell Francis Bacon. Not the truth. I can’t tell him the truth. That’s probably the thing that’s surprised me most about being a father: how rarely I tell my son the truth. Everything is a lie aimed at turning him into something I’m not. I’m not sure the lies work because they didn’t for me but the truth is so terrible. How could I ever tell anyone the truth? I spend most of my time trying not to admit it to myself.

Francis Bacon is a good-looking young man. I don’t think he has a girlfriend but I don’t know. I don’t think he has a boyfriend, either, but I don’t know. If he has a group of friends at school, that’s where he keeps them. He doesn’t get many phone calls here. He doesn’t go out often. He keeps to himself, even in the family. He’s pleasant and polite. Sure, he and I get into fights. He doesn’t have his music loud enough. He doesn’t drink or smoke enough. We never walk in on him having sex with some girl. It’s regular family stuff. “Francis Bacon, are the cops ever going to come looking for you?” You know. That sort of thing.

Francis Bacon, who are you?

I have such mixed feelings about him. I love him. I mean, I think I love him. I don’t know. I’m not sure what love is and it seems like there are so many different kinds and all the different kinds get swirled up with frustration, impatience, worry, and resentment.

Francis Bacon took his mother from me. When Francis Bacon was born, Chi became a different person. She tried not to. She tried to keep everything the same but it was impossible and we both knew it. I knew it before she did. I pouted. I walked around feeling sorry for myself. For a while, she tried to cheer me up. When she’d put Francis Bacon down for the night, she’d get dressed in torn lingerie and holey stockings and broken high heels and beckon me into the locked and padded room where we keep the living people we eat. Sometimes we’d make love in front of our groceries, turned on by their terror. Sometimes, as foreplay, we’d arouse each other by killing a member of the same sex. As we fed, tearing off and chewing chunks of human flesh, while blood spurted on and spilled down our faces and naked bodies, we’d have telepathic table-talk, discussing how the screaming faces of our food, contorted in pain, were like sex faces, and how it was strange that the faces of making life were the same as the faces of facing death. Having sex in the warm, sticky, salty wet, we agreed red was a wonderful colour choice. But after a while, Chi got tired of trying to cheer me up. She started telling me to grow up. I don’t know if I did or not. I think I just shut up. And part of me shut down. Has that part been awoken by Fairy_26?

I’ve been trying not to think of her. But I do. I think of her so often and in so many different ways. She’s infected me with health. She’s poisoned me with the memory of well-being. She’s killing me to life. I think about her hair: how green it is; how soft it looks, and how shiny; I imagine holding it, not in my tree-root-excuse for hands, but in my old alive hands; I imagine her locks spilling between my fingers. I think about her eyes: they’re so blue, the colour of cold and death, but so warm and alive; between blinks, they go from concern to smile, from fear to hope, from loss to lust. I see myself in them, my reflection, and I don’t look as bad as I feel. I imagine seeing myself through them and I look better. I don’t imagine her doing the things I used to imagine women doing before I became a zombie. I don’t imagine her naked. I don’t imagine her doing anything sexual. Even though she can hover. I imagine her clipping her fingernails; pushing back her cuticles. I imagine her brushing her teeth; flossing. I imagine her doing her makeup; her hair. I imagine her getting ready for me.

Then, in my mind, I shake my head, trying to get rid of these thoughts, fears, hopes; I don’t know what they are. I just know they’re too much for me. Too much to dream; too dangerous to consider. I love my wife. I say it over and over to myself. It’s my mantra; a prayer. There’s the danger: the more I say it, the less it means. It’s becoming letters and sounds: representing nothing. I hold onto it because it’s in my hands. It’s pulling me somewhere. Toward something, away from something, or both? Should I find out or let go?

Francis Bacon, have you done this to me? Did you take your mother from me? Did she leave me for you? If this is a competition, you win. She wanted you before she ever met me but if we’re trying to share her, I’m not getting enough. You can’t be getting enough of her, either. She’s not getting enough of herself. She’s just like us. Doomed. She doesn’t know what she wants but she keeps trying to get it. What are we going to do?

Maybe Francis Bacon won’t come home; the thought shines a light into my dark mind. Maybe, for some secret teenage reason, he has to leave. Maybe he’s in love with someone. Maybe he’s running away with her. Or him. I don’t care. Just don’t come back. Just go and forget us. I can’t say your mother and I will be fine. I can’t say you’ll be fine. We won’t. You won’t. But maybe, just maybe, if only for one day, you’ll be more alive than anyone has ever been, with suitcases in the backseat, one hand on the steering wheel, and one arm around that special someone. Turn up the music; drive fast; laugh for no reason or because you’re scared; don’t know where you’re going; never get there; and may you never get sick of trying. I wish you could. I wish you would. You’ll be home any time now.

I’m afraid of the door. It could open any second. Will it be a good one? The second it opens could close everything around us. Will it protect us or kill us? I could leave before Francis Bacon comes home. I could open the door myself and of possibility in myself. It’d change everything. I could open the door and walk out and never come back. I could do anything. I think that’s the most difficult thing to remember or maybe just the most difficult thing to comprehend. I could do anything.

I roll off the sofa, onto the floor. I end up face to face with the male head, the brains from which Chi ate, the mouth of which is open in horror. It’s like looking in the mirror.

After a minute of rolling around and failed attempts, I manage to get up. I amble to the locked and padded room in which we keep the living people we eat. After fumbling with the mechanisms, I get the door open. Hanging from the ceiling, the solitary bulb flickers on, stirring the flies, drawing them off the floor and walls, away from the bodily fluids, toward the light, which they buzz around; they’re so scared to land on it; it gets so hellishly hot. There’s only one person left, alive, in the padded room. Naked, the catatonic girl who helped me wake the butterfly sits in a corner, holding her knees to her chest. I stagger out of the room, leaving the door open behind me. Unafraid it’s a trap, or recognizing she doesn’t have much to lose, the catatonic girl gets up and follows me a few moments later. I’ve already trudged to the front door, the door I’m afraid of someone else opening; I’ve opened it myself. The mid-afternoon sun drips in, filtered through heavy blue rain clouds. The fresh air is like a shower with soap in all this house’s rot and corruption. Bored flies lazily buzz out, away from all the sick they can eat, into the cold clean world we, the zombies, keep trying to warm with random fires and to prove we’ve visited by wrecking everything we can’t find.

I’m standing next to the open door. Unintentionally, my outstretched arms block the catatonic girl’s path to survival; I don’t even notice until she, bravely, ducks underneath them and moves past me, beyond me, somewhere I can never go. She hurries to the street. Then she stops. With her back to me, she stands there for a second, waiting. Maybe she’s waiting to see if this is a game, if she’s going to hear me groan and stumble toward her, or if, even worse, she’s going to feel my claw hands on her naked shoulders. Maybe she’s thinking I just want a picnic on the front lawn. Then, mustering the courage, or realizing the truth, she turns back. I’m still standing in the entryway. I’m just watching.

“Why?” she says.

I can’t answer. I don’t speak her language. Even if I did, I’m not sure I could explain. I’m not sure I understand it myself. I just don’t want to eat her. I don’t want to eat anyone ever again. I didn’t want to eat the cat. I was just so angry. Not at Chi. At the world. Zombies, supernatural creatures. I thought I was doing Constance a favour. It was quick and painless. You can’t say that about life.

“Well, thank you,” says the catatonic girl.

I can’t do either but I wonder, if I could, whether I’d laugh or cry. I want to do something nice, wonderful, for someone, everyone, everything, and I tried to do it for this catatonic girl but at the same time, I’m the one who kept her in a locked and padded room, suffering with knowledge: at any moment, she could be eaten.

“You’re welcome,” I think.

I watch her turn and go. She walks for a while. Then she starts running. She runs so quickly. I hear her bare feet smacking the concrete. The sound echoes off the houses and rings sharply in my undead ears. I watch her until she turns into Francis Bacon, running home from school, at the point in the distance where everything becomes more confused and true. I go back inside and close the door.

A few minutes later, Francis Bacon rushes in. He’s stopped being my son. He’s a force. He’s words and energy. “Did you find Constance?” he asks, breathless. “Did she come back? It was so cold last night. You don’t think she froze to death, do you?”

I don’t know what to say. All the lies seem true and the truth seems like a lie.

“Dad?”

Why did I stay here for this?

“What’s wrong, Dad?”

I want to kill him. I want to kill Francis Bacon, to protect him: from me; the truth. I want to give him a chance to avoid my fate: to know how much at fault you are. I don’t want him to know, like I know, when I’m honest with myself, undead people, like me, are the problem and must be stopped but it’s so much easier to become me than to stop me because to stop me you must stop yourself. It’s easier not to think. It’s easier to be mindless. And everyone else is anyway.

“Dad? You’re scaring me. Just tell me what’s going on. I can handle it, whatever it is. We’ll get through it together. Right? That’s what you always say.”

“Constance is dead.”

Francis Bacon drops his backpack. When he was running home, he had it slung over one shoulder. When he got inside, he let it slip to his hand, and he held it by one strap. Now it’s on the floor. Dropping his backpack is Francis Bacon’s physical acknowledgment of a horrible truth. Perhaps it’d be more meaningful if the backpack contained a few key books, the titles of which would reflect his feelings right now, but I don’t know what books he has in his backpack. It’s closed. Zippered shut. Like fate.

Here’s a mindless thought: maybe the books are trying, in some imperceptible way, like we are, to escape.

“What happened?”

Francis Bacon asks that and I don’t know if he means what happened to Constance, what happened to himself just then, what happened to me, what happened to the world, what ever happened, if anything, or what. I want to say I don’t know because I feel like it’s truest but I don’t. Instead I tell the truth, which seems far less true.

“I ate her.”

“What?”

“I ate Constance, last night, when you were sleeping.”

“Mom?” He calls out, “Mom?”

“Your mother is at the Graves’. I think she’ll be staying with them for a while.”

Realizing he isn’t going to get any help from his mother, at least not immediately, Francis Bacon turns his attention back to me.

“I’m a zombie.” I tell Francis Bacon, my son, half me, half my wife, the union and division of our love: “I’m a zombie.”

He frowns at me.

I explain: “I’m bad, okay? I know you thought I was good but you were wrong. I’m a zombie. There’s no such thing as a good zombie. Don’t shake your head. Listen. I don’t want you to learn from my example anymore. I’m mindless. I do things because I’m supposed to, not because I want to, not because I understand all the factors involved, including my own motivations, predispositions, and emotional state. I do things because I’m supposed to. The albinos want me to. They probably want me to do this. There’s no escape. Get away from me, Francis Bacon. Find a few likeminded people, arm yourselves, barricade yourselves in a secure location with plenty of food, potable water, and condoms, and kill every damn zombie trying to eat or infect you. Bash out their brains; chop up their bodies; light the pieces on fire. When you realize no help is coming, kill yourselves. I wish I had the courage to do what I know is right. Maybe you will.”

Francis Bacon runs to his bedroom and slams the door.

“While you’re packing,” I call to him, “keep in mind, winter is coming. You don’t need to be fashionable. You need to be warm and dry. Layers. Think layers. Pack light. You can loot most of what you need. Hit a sporting goods store, as soon as possible. You want a good winter coat, a good sleeping bag, a few pairs of long underwear. You’ll need waterproof pouches for matches, ammunition, and things like that. You’re going to be starting fires to cook meals and purifying water to drink, so steal accordingly. Be on the lookout for Kevlar, chainmail, and the mesh suits scuba-divers use to swim with sharks.

“Find yourself a staff: a good wooden stick; and keep it with you always. You’ll probably be tempted to go with a metal rod, considering all the zombie skulls you’ll be smashing with it, but you don’t want something that hastens frostbite in the winter and you’re going to be carrying it around a lot so you want something light. When you carry it around for a few years, you might be tempted to trade it in for a plastic model. Don’t. Sure, you can sharpen the end of a nice light plastic pole and use the pointed end to pierce zombie skulls but you can and should do that with your wooden staff, too.

“Trust me. Your wooden staff will serve you far better when you’re locked in close combat with overwhelming numbers of zombies; you want something with a little heft when you panic and you start swinging wildly. I’m not going to tell you not to panic because you will, and, considering what you’re up against, should. Just do as well as you can. If you’re lucky, you’ll die of natural causes before you know it. If you’re unlucky, you’ll suffer an agonizing death at the tearing hands and chewing mouths of hungry zombies. If you’re miserably unfortunate, they’ll infect you, turning you into one of them and you’ll be like me. You don’t want to be like me. I should know. I’m exactly like me and I don’t like it at all. I’m going now! Good luck! And don’t forget to get a great staff!”