Some wealthy people underwent the infection as their only hope. Maybe their rare cancer, maybe their unidentifiable disease would be cured,
and
a cure found for the zombie virus. Their shambling state, their pale skin might be ended in some happy future. But given their looks and the years of zombie mythology in popular culture—they were seen as grade-A George Romero living dead. Although their tasteless food was made by baby food manufacturers, any number of brain-eating jokes came into being in the early years.
Soon there were rest homes in Japan, Canada, Dubai, and Italy full of the blind mindless ex-humans that seemed happy to live forever—as long as they didn’t wander in front of a speeding car and or disappear into an open elevator shaft. There were human rights debates, tired old clichés about the dignity of human life were traded by both sides. Then Capeksen, a Japanese robotics firm, came up with a solution. Scoop out the eyes and upper brain and put in a few dedicated microprocessors to care of things. The robotic eyes saw and looked better than blackened pustules. The computers used the remaining nervous system to move the “dead” man around. Suddenly the zombies could care for themselves. They could shower, they could fix food, they seemed more human.
At first no one had thought of them as slaves.
The next day Billy wanted to shoot a film of the
kyonshi
washing toilets in his school. He remained after class. The
kyonshi
paid no heed him as he knelt in front of each toilet and washed it clean. Billy thought this guy would get more out of Zen training than he was. He squirted some blue fluid into each bowl, methodically swished its white porcelain interior then flushed. Billy had shot him processing three bowls in a row and was about to leave when the
kyonshi
tripped on a small pencil stub dropped by a careless student. It pitched forward and dunked its head into the water. Billy winced at the cracking sound of the control unit hitting the bowl, and thought of getting swirlies in the eight grade. Emergency programs went into play and it pulled itself out. The crown-like controller on its head blinked on and off and on and off. The zombie sat with its back against the stall. It looked at Billy and said in toneless Japanese, “An accident has occurred. Please call a Capeksen technician. An accident has occurred, please call a Capeksen technician. Thank you for your aid in maintaining this expensive Kyonshi Mark IV.” The
kyonshi
cradled its head in its pale hands like a human with a bad headache. All of the lights went out. Billy’s instinctive programing as a human being took over, and forgetting that he was watching a zombie ran to what seemed to be a dying man. The
kyonshi
breathed slowly and evenly. It must be in some sort of sleep mode, thought Billy. He ran to the headmaster’s office.
Since Billy had reported the problem (with typical Japanese management style) it became his to oversee. As he waited in the restroom for the technician to arrive, Billy became an average American for a few minutes—underpaid, working in a humiliating environment, hating his boss. He was his father’s son for perhaps for the last time. He needed to comfort the zombie. It was like taking care of Dad after Mom left in his ninth-grade year. At least there was no vomit to clean up. Billy got a few stiff brown paper towels and dried the toilet water off of his suit. He pulled the zombie from the stall and laid it out on the green and brown tiles of the restroom. He was making a little pillow for it out of copies of
To Kill a Mockingbird
from his class. As he waited for the technician, he kept telling the
kyonshi
it would be all right, and cussing his asshole boss for making him wait in an unheated restroom. He was patting the cold brow of the
kyonshi,
when the restroom door swung open.
“Please stand away from the Kyonshi Mark IV,” said the white-coated technician.
It was an awkward moment. The technician lived in the the apartment next to his. This man or his wife had pounded on Billy’s wall many times when his Zazen program would loudly awaken him.
“I tried to make him comfortable,” said Billy.
“The Kyonshi Mark IV has no software appreciating comfort. Please explain the accident to me.”
The technician showed no signs of recognition, but how many six-foot-eight chubby red-haired Irish-Americans lived in Nagoya? From the small high windows, Billy saw that night had fallen. He had probably pulled this poor man from his apartment—once again disturbing his night.
Watching the man work on the fallen zombie looked like that robot repair scene from a dozen cheap movies. The technician popped the controller open and was removing a small box from behind the
kyonshi’s
right eye. He took a small unit from his belt, and connected it to the fallen zombie. He pushed buttons, the
kyonshi
sat up. More buttons, it stood up. The technician pushed more buttons, watched indicator lights and said, “I will have to take him home for repair. I will need you to sign him over to me.”
“Home?” said Billy, “Not to a factory or office?”
“I am the Capeksen representative of the area. Many people do not like having the
kyonshi
near them. But I live in an apartment full of Koreans and other foreign devils.”
Billy looked down. He had suddenly become Japanese again—not really Japanese of course, but the fantasy Japanese he had hoped to be. Billy Parsons felt loss of face. He bowed, and said quietly, “I am sorry to have disturbed the harmony of your home.”
The technician looked like he might laugh. Twice he started to speak, trying to find the right words, finally he spoke in English. “Mr. Parsons, you cannot understand, but you have given my wife and I someone we can yell at. It is a rare gift.”
Billy stared. The man was right. He didn’t understand. He looked at the bathroom floor again.
The technician said, “Would you like a ride to our home? I have brought my van, and I will have room for your bicycle as well, my friend.”
The technician had installed a device with longer cables by the time Billy brought his bike around. He walked the
kyonshi
to the van and stepped him in.
Conversation was limited on the way home. Eventually Billy managed to get the technician to talk about the mechanized puppets that Nagoya was famous for. Robotics had started here long before the West had dreamed of such toys. Billy asked if the technician’s family had made the puppets. The technician grimaced and said that his family had been butchers and leather workers. Then the man had laughed as though Billy was the funniest foreign devil of all time.
Billy learned that Capeksen did have a factory here. In fact most of the newly infected were shipped to that factory. The technician was a sort of contractor—much as Billy’s grandfather had installed cable TV. Billy guessed the job didn’t pay much. When the van had been finally been parked, Billy asked, “Please forgive this one’s ignorance of Japanese culture, but why did you say that it is rare you and your wife can yell at anyone?”
The technician looked at him and said, “
Burakumin.
” and shrugged. Billy had no idea what he was talking about, so he bowed. The technician laughed again.
When he got to his apartment he asked his phone what
Burakumin
meant. It said, “Village people.” He asked his phone to show him “village people,” and it showed him a photo of an American disco music group from his grandmother’s time. The technician did not look like the cop, the construction worker, or the Indian chief.
He nuked some yakitori, and when it was time to run his zazen program he turned off the “Awakening” feature. His koan for the night was, “A student asked Joshu, ‘If I haven’t anything in my mind, what shall I do?’ Joshu replied: ‘Throw it out.’ ‘If I haven’t anything, how can I throw it out?’ continued the questioner. ‘Well,’ said Joshu, ‘then carry it out.’ ”
He nodded off and woke about 8:00 to call Suzi. Suzi had been his Japanese girlfriend. All nippophiles get a Japanese girlfriend. It comes with the small apartment and the visit to fertility shrines. Suzi had ended his dreams about being Japanese. They had dated for three months. One day he had mentioned his hope of marriage. “I cannot marry you.” she said, “My family would never speak to me. They want to me marry a Japanese man.”
“But I want to live here all of my life.” said Billy, “I want to be Japanese.”
“If you want to be Japanese, die and be reborn as a Japanese. I date you because you are a foreigner. Last week you told me you loved me. My Japanese boyfriends never say that. You are the same thing for me that I am for you. A fantasy of not being myself.”
Billy did not speak to her for a week. When he started talking to her again, it was as a friend, which was his first woman who was a friend. She found another foreigner to date.
“Suzi, what is a
Burakumin
?”
“Have you been talking to old people?”
“No, my neighbor said it. I think it means ‘village person.’ ”
“It does mean ‘village person.’ That’s the literal meaning, but it is really a derogatory term—like some Americans calling Arabs ‘towel heads.’ In the old days some trades were considered polluted—butchers, leather workers, people who wash corpses, some sexual entertainers. They are separate like a caste. Pollution beliefs are very strong in Shinto.”
“But they are Japanese, aren’t they? He looks Japanese.”
“Of course he
looks
Japanese, he is Japanese by DNA. It’s a taboo—your neighbor will make less money, live in bad places, marry into his own kind. The notion of pollution runs deep. Companies used to keep illegal lists of the
Burakumin.
In the beginning of this century they were almost mainstreamed. Then when
kyonshi
technology showed up, they were the only ones who could risk the pollution. You aren’t Japanese, you wouldn’t understand.”
Billy remembered his dad railing against the Italians and the Poles. His mom’s maiden name was Polish. Dad explained to him many drunken times, that Mom looked white but . . .
He knew about the human need to hate. His body was full of memories. When he was a geeky teenager obsessed with Japanese pop culture, he was hated. He was
marked.
In sixth grade two junior high boys beat him yelling that he should have learned karate from his comic books. In seventh grade he was tossed headfirst into the girl’s bathroom. The impact with the door actually knocked him out, so he arrived unconscious. When he came to in the nurse’s office, the principal sent
him
home because of
his behavior.
He had to come the next day with his parents to be reinstated. That led to his Dad’s first burning of his manga. Later that year at Halloween he had engaged in cosplay—he was the evilest “hero” of them all: Lelouch Lamperouge. Everyone made fun of him, the dark and interesting antihero of
Code Geass
was called a “Fag Vampire.” Some kids caught him in a park. He called his parents and his drunk dad drove up in his small tan Toyota pickup. It began all heroic-like. Dad drove into the park, across the football field toward the white bandstand. The Hulks, the Spider-men, the one Wonder Woman fled from his dad’s headlights. Billy ran to Dad. Dad got out of the truck and picked him like a trash-bag and threw him in the back of the truck. Billy heard a rib crack when he landed.
But he stood his ground, he watched anime on his computer, and kept his manga under his bed, took Japanese in high school. He swore a samurai oath to help the downtrodden, yet by his senior year he was making fun of the childish tastes of the new members of the Patterson Ottaku Club. “You like Sinji? And you’re potty-trained?” He taunted kids that liked
G-force
or (Buddha help them!)
Speed Racer.
In college he passed his larva stage as a worm-like
ottaku
and gained the wings of a true Nippophile. He learned Japanese literature, studied Zen, wrote haiku. He majored in English because English teachers can always get crummy apartments. Who cares how bad your apartment is if you can see Nagoya Castle? Of course he had first seen it in
Godzilla vs. Mothra
or had it been
Gamera vs. Gaos?
No one had saved him, no human had reached out to him, so he choose reading over life, the fantasy of Japan over the reality of Patterson.
Tomorrow he would reach out to his neighbor. He would bridge the gap that surrounded the
kyonshi
workers. His own quest to be Japanese was nothing compared to the
Burakumin.
He surfed the web into the night learning the history of the
kyonshi.
After Capeksen designed the controllers, a major scandal shook the industry. The promise was that somehow cures would come for the wealthy dead. The controlling units enabled them to live with some measure of dignity—which they did when their families visited. But the zombies also worked well as lawn mowers, gardeners, car washers, and—for some people with a taste for geriatric porn—they became sex slaves. An unscheduled visit by a reporter ended the appeal. No one wanted their grandmother blowing programmers who couldn’t get laid otherwise. It did not matter that new safeguards could eliminate this semi-sentient slavery; stock in Capeksen fell like Lucifer from heaven.
It took murder to change the fate of Capeksen again. When the Toronto cannibal, Robert “Taco Time” LeBlanc’s infamous Mexi-Cali Grill had been less than careful with the meat grinder and the mangled diamond wedding ring of Mary Casutto wound up in a food critic’s mouth, a new “crime of the century” dominated the newsfeeds for months. Who can forget the angry, crying Robert Casutto begging the white-wigged judge to sentence LeBlanc to zombie status? Owning a slave became a statement that one stood for Justice, Liberty, and the Canadian way. Humanity’s age-old fascination with slavery re-manifested. At first, zombiehood was reserved for the worst offenders. But the status symbol of owning a (former) human being as a slave began filling the newsfeeds. Every star, every pop singer had a zombie in tow. The Electric Luddites had an entire zombie road crew with their neon orange logo tattooed on their pasty faces.