Zombies: The Recent Dead Part 33

Somebody asked me about Zora Neale Hurston's research practices. I said that was a very good question, which was addressed at greater length in the finished paper, of which what I had read was essentially an edited abstract.

Someone else-a short, plump woman-stood up and announced that the zombie girls could not have existed: zombie drugs and powders numbed you, induced deathlike trances, but still worked fundamentally on belief-the belief that you were now one of the dead, and had no will of your own. How she asked, could a child of four or five be induced to believe such a thing? No. The coffee girls were, she said, one with the Indian rope trick, just another of the urban legends of the past.

Personally I agreed with her, but I nodded and said that her points were well made and well taken, and that from my perspective-which was, I hoped, genuinely anthropological perspective-what mattered was not whether it was easy to believe, but, much more importantly, if it was the truth.

They applauded, and afterward a man with a beard asked me whether I might be able to get a copy of the paper for a journal he edited. It occurred to me that it was a good thing that I had come to New Orleans, that Anderton's career would not be harmed by his absence from the conference.

The plump woman, whose badge said her name was Shanelle Gravely-Kin was waiting for me at the door. She said, "I really enjoyed that. I don't want you to think that I didn't."

Campbell didn't turn up for his presentation. n.o.body ever saw him again.

Margaret introduced me to someone from New York and mentioned that Zora Neale Hurston had worked on The Great Gatsby. The man said yes, that was pretty common knowledge these days. I wondered if she had called the police, but she seemed friendly enough. I was starting to stress, I realized. I wished I had not thrown away my cell phone.

Shanelle Gravely-King and I had an early dinner in the hotel, at the beginning of which I said, "Oh, let's not talk shop." And she agreed that only the very dull talked shop at the table, so we talked about rock bands we had seen live, fictional methods of slowing the decomposition of a human body, and about her partner, who was a woman older than she was and who owned a restaurant, and then we went up to my room. She smelled of baby powder and jasmine, and her naked skin was clammy against mine.

Over the next couple of hours I used two of the three condoms. She was sleeping by the time I returned from the bathroom, and I climbed into the bed next to her. I thought about the words Anderton had written, hand-scrawled on the back of a page of the typescript, and I wanted to check them, but I fell asleep, a soft-fleshed jasmine-scented woman pressing close to me.

After midnight, I woke from a dream, and a woman's voice was whispering in the darkness.

She said, "So he came into town, with his Doors ca.s.settes and his Crowley books, and his handwritten list of the secret URLs for chaos magick on the Web, and everything was good. He even got a few disciples, runaways like him, and he got his d.i.c.k sucked whenever he wanted, and the world was good.

"And then he started to believe his own press. He thought he was the real thing. That he was the dude. He thought he was a big mean tiger-cat, not a little kitten. So he dug up . . . something . . . someone else wanted.

"He thought the something he dug up would look after him. Silly boy. And that night, he's sitting in Jackson Square, talking to the Tarot readers, telling them about Jim Morrison and the cabala, and someone taps him on the shoulder, and he turns, and someone blows powder into his face, and he breathes it in.

"Not all of it. And he is going to do something about it, when he realizes there's nothing to be done, because he's all paralyzed. There's fugu fish and toad skin and ground bone and everything else in that powder, and he's breathed it in.

"They take him down to emergency, where they don't do much for him, figuring him for a street rat with a drug problem, and by the next day he can move again, although it's two, three days until he can speak.

"Trouble is, he needs it. He wants it. He knows there's some big secret in the zombie powder, and he was almost there. Some people say they mixed heroin with it, some s.h.i.t like that, but they didn't even need to do that. He wants it.

"And they told him they wouldn't sell it to him. But if he did jobs for them, they'd give him a little zombie powder, to smoke, to sniff, to rub on his gums, to swallow. Sometimes they'd give him nasty jobs to do no one else wanted. Sometimes they'd just humiliate him because they could-make him eat dog s.h.i.t from the gutter, maybe. Kill for them, maybe. Anything but die. All skin and bones. He'd do anything for his zombie powder.

"And he still thinks, in the little bit of his head that's still him, that he's not a zombie. That he's not dead, that there's a threshold he hasn't stepped over. But he crossed it long time ago."

I reached out a hand, and touched her. Her body was hard, and slim, and lithe, and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s felt like b.r.e.a.s.t.s that Gauguin might have painted. Her mouth, in the darkness, was soft and warm against mine.

People come into your life for a reason.

4.

"Those People Ought to Know Who We Are and Tell That We Are Here"

When I woke, it was still almost dark, and the room was silent. I turned on the light, looked on the pillow for a ribbon, white or red, or for a mouse-skull earring, but there was nothing to show that there had ever been anyone in the bed that night but me.

I got out of bed and pulled open the drapes, looked out of the window. The sky was graying in the east.

I thought about moving south, about continuing to run, continuing to pretend I was alive. But it was, I knew now, much too late for that. There are doors, after all, between the living and the dead, and they swing in both directions.

I had come as far as I could.

There was a faint tap-tapping on the hotel-room door. I pulled on my pants and the T-shirt I had set out in, and barefoot, I pulled the door open.

The coffee girl was waiting for me.

Everything beyond the door was touched with light, an open, wonderful predawn light, and I heard the sound of birds calling on the morning air. The street was on a hill, and the houses facing me were little more than shanties. There was mist in the air, low to the ground, curling like something from an old black-and-white film, but it would be gone by noon.

The girl was thin and small; she did not appear to be more than six years old. Her eyes were cobwebbed with what might have been cataracts; her skin was as gray as it had once been brown. She was holding a white hotel cup out to me, holding it carefully, with one small hand on the handle, one hand beneath the saucer. It was half filled with a steaming mud-colored liquid.

I bent to take it from her, and I sipped it. It was a very bitter drink, and it was hot, and it woke me the rest of the way.

I said, "Thank you."

Someone, somewhere, was calling my name. The girl waited, patiently, while I finished the coffee. I put the cup down on the carpet; then I put out my hand and touched her shoulder. She reached up her hand, spread her small gray fingers, and took hold of mine. She knew I was with her. Wherever we were headed now, we were going there together.

I remembered something somebody had once said to me. "It's okay. Every day is freshly ground," I told her.

The coffee girl's expression did not change, but she nodded, as if she had heard me, and gave my arm an impatient tug. She held my hand tight with her cold, cold fingers, and we walked, finally, side by side into the misty dawn.

About the Author.

Bestselling author Neil Gaiman has long been one of the top writers in modern comics, as well as writing books for readers of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama. Some of his notable works include The Sandman comic book series, Stardust, American G.o.ds, Coraline,, and The Graveyard Book. Gaiman's writing has won numerous awards, including World Fantasy, Hugo, Nebula, IHG, and Bram Stoker, as well as the 2009 Newbery Medal. Gaiman's official Web site, www.neilgaiman.com, now has more than one million unique visitors each month, and his online journal is syndicated to thousands of blog readers every day.

Story Notes.

A mysterious, melancholy, yet lovely story that mixes the metaphorical zombie (a person who feels dead inside) with the atmosphere of New Orleans, and Zora Neale Hurston's encounters with zombiism. (See the note with "Zora and the Zombie.") The girl with the red ribbon in her hair mentions Santeria. Santeria is the Spanish name for the Afro-Caribbean religion Luk.u.mi. (The word translates as "the way of the saints" and is not accepted by its adherents.) A "cousin" of Voudou, it is a.s.sociated primarily with Cuba. Since our fictional character is of mixed race and from Brazil-unless she's lying, you never can tell with these fictional characters-she might be familiar with Umbanda which is practiced in Rio de Janeiro, Sn Paulo, and southern Brazil. Yet another religion arising out of the African Diaspora it is also known, pejoratively, as Mac.u.mba (a word that commonly means "witchcraft.")

Beautiful White Bodies.

Alice Sola Kim.

The fall after Justine moved back home, the high school girls became beautiful. She saw it herself, from behind the counter of the coffee shop by her old high school. The beauty spread viciously: first to one girl, then two, then four, and now almost twenty.

Once it struck, the girls became impossibly beautiful in the s.p.a.ce of days. Even if you could pay some super-surgeon-sculptor-sage (a three-way cross between Dr. 90210, Michelangelo, and Maimonides) to crack open your face like a watermelon and chisel away at it until your bones were fine and symmetrical, you still wouldn't look like these girls. Their necks were too long. And the whites of their eyes? Much too white!

Justine had moved back home after losing her job at a weekly paper in the city. She was now a twenty-seven-year-old who lived with her parents. Magazines like Time and Newsweek called it "boomeranging," as if vaudeville canes were emerging from the childhood homes of millions of young adults to yank them out of their lives as consultants and a.s.sistants and editors and back into their old bedrooms, where they would download music from the Internet and collect Cheeto dust in their emerging wrinkles.

So for now Justine was at the coffee shop-not belonging, not young but not old. She dealt with it. Many geniuses had sections in their biographies that could be described as "The s.h.i.tty Years" so perhaps all this was necessary. As long as it was temporary.

Pearl came into the coffee shop.

"Caffeine," said Pearl, "I need it." Lacking beauty, Pearl was one of those girls for whom style was a refuge. Today she was wearing a hound's-tooth coat, its tall funnel neck covering her up to the chin, like a mod ninja. Some sparkly lip gloss was smeared on the collar.

"Sure," Justine said. "But you need to pay this time."

Pearl moaned. "How about you put it on my tab?"

"Girl, if we did tabs here, it'd be about time for us to break your kneecaps for nonpayment."

Pearl pulled a cranky, ha-ha face. Justine poured her a mug anyway.

Pearl was Justine's friend, and yes, Pearl was in high school. Justine was as embarra.s.sed as any normal person would be, but also she was charmed by funny, artsy Pearl, an obsessive shut-in who worshipped alt-weeklies, music festivals, zines, homemade screen-printed T-shirts, and boys with torsos like female runway models. Justine didn't have any siblings, and she justified her friendship with Pearl by telling herself that she'd always wanted a little sister, whether that was true or not.

"When are you off today?" said Pearl.

"Another hour. Then Greg takes over."

"Mmm, Greg taking over," said Pearl.

"He's not that great," Justine said. But if Greg wasn't that great, he was still pretty f.u.c.king good. He was one who had cast off the stupidity of his teenage years-had given away his bowling shirts and skater sneakers and shaved his floppy, trying-too-hard hair into an even quarter-inch all over his head-in order to become nothing. Nothing was good. Nothing was hot, actually. There wasn't anything bad you could say about nothing.

"You only say that because you can't have him, according to society's rules."

Pearl knew the rule for determining the youngest person you could date. Take your age, halve it, add seven. Greg was nineteen. Pearl was sixteen. Justine was at an age where n.o.body was the right age for her. It was the world she had stuck herself back into, all kids and parents. She had Rip Van Winkled herself in a backwards, sideways, mixed-up sort of way.

"Hon, he's a fetus," said Justine. "He's an egg."

Pearl shrugged and looked around the room. Justine thought maybe this big sisterly/old-school diner waitress "hon" thing wasn't working so well. Always, she had to recalibrate.

At a window table near the front door, a girl named Rebecca was laughing with a boy. She kept slapping the table and throwing her head back, her teeth glistening in her gaping mouth. Her face was careless and unarranged in the way of all beautiful girls who knew that, on them, ugly looked good. Rebecca used to be a plain, chunky girl who wore her hair in pomaded hanks over her face. Now she looked like something a talented goth high school student would draw in her notebook-a manga G.o.ddess with big-irised sepia eyes and witchy white skin and an upper lip with two fine, pointy peaks.

Justine glanced over at Pearl. Pearl was staring at Rebecca, her face too ravenous and obvious, beaming out painful pick me pick me rays.

"Check her out," said Pearl, subdued. "Miss Thang."

"He should have seen her two weeks ago," said Justine.

"Why her? No wait, why everyone but me?" Pearl said. She sounded five years old for a moment. "I have to show you something. It'll just take a minute." She scurried around the counter to stand next to Justine and set down her laptop.

"So, I started this blog last week," Pearl said. "As a record of all the weirdness going on here lately. You know." She scrolled halfway down the page, and found a post that had a YouTube video embedded, which she clicked on. "You are going to pee your pants when you see this," she said.

There were three girls in the video. They leaned in close to the webcam, their faces turned moony and wide by the slight fisheye effect of the lens, but no less lovely. They sat there, very still, just blinking and smiling. Justine could tell that Pearl thought they were perfect. It showed in the yearning stretch of her neck, the way she held her breath for the entire duration of the video.

But the girls, even though they were beautiful in their way, looked wrong. Justine thought she recognized the one on the left-but was that really Khadija? The face was morphed, skin faded to a pale glow, hair hanging down in sleek, heavy curtains, the same style as the others. She could be mistaken; the girls in the video all looked alike. All of them distinctly uncanny, with airbrushed skin and features with sizes and shapes that fell just a bit beyond the human norm. No one looked like that, except for video game characters.

Their staring grew intolerable. The video played for a minute and a half. Justine was relieved when it ended.

"Look, they've got a whole YouTube channel." Pearl clicked over to a screen with long columns of thumbnails. She snickered. "It's all the same thing, with different girls. Dumb hos."

Justine was chilled, but she tried to match Pearl's light tone. "High school kids," she said. "I don't understand you. They're not even doing anything. People used to have to do something to become Internet-famous."

"Don't act so old. I don't understand us either."

"G.o.d! What's the point? That's p.o.r.nography that's non-p.o.r.nographic. But still completely embarra.s.sing to watch in public."

"I know," said Pearl. "That's why I made us hide behind the counter. It's skeevy. But you have to admit it's also super-interesting! That's what my blog is about, this whole phenomenon. I totally think it's a phenomenon. Someone needs to a.n.a.lyze it. Like, how do I have the stupid luck to live in a place where everyone is suddenly beautiful? G.o.d, it sucks. I wish I was dead."

Pearl was awkward-looking, with a pug nose and gappy teeth and tender, glowing cystic acne. She was so short and stocky that she appeared to be from a high-gravity planet. To top it off, she was Filipino-American in a town where most everyone had only recently made room in their worldview for Asians who were 1) Chinese and 2) j.a.panese people (not so much the people themselves, but the idea of them, at least). So what the h.e.l.l was Pearl, some like mutated Chinese chick? Or perhaps Mexican? Probably things would have been easier for her if she were, like, Miss The Philippines 2009, some kind of pretty that was universal enough to play in all nations; but she wasn't. Still, Pearl was so clever, so curious, so fun, they should have given two s.h.i.ts about her no matter what, and then Justine remembered how she had hated her own high school, and she'd hated life too. She'd hated everything. She remembered what it was like to not so much wish you were dead, but to feel bad and lonely enough that you'd tell everyone you wished you were dead.

"This is wonderful, Pearl," said Justine, nodding at the blog page. "What a timely project. I can send it around to people I know, try to get you some more traffic."

Pearl's eyes widened. "That. Would be. So great!" She took her computer and sat down at a small table. Soon she was typing at a rapid clip.

Justine rested her elbows on the counter, sucking her cheeks in and out, in and out. All around her, beautiful girls were sitting at the tables and on the floors with their jackets and backpacks spread around them, as if they had parachuted in. Some of them were resting their heads on the table while their friends talked over them. Such tired, languid beauties. She was not afraid of them when they were at rest, when they didn't look up at her and creep her out with their impossible faces. When they left, they left plates of m.u.f.fins, poked into infinity crumbs, and full drinks with only the foam licked off. That too was awful. What was with these girls? Were they are all on crash diets?

Pearl, friend to the arts, also wanted to be an actress. She was playing Tzeitel in the high school's production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Justine attended opening night by herself. Greg was sitting a few seats away. He had said h.e.l.lo to her when he sat down. To her horror, her hand had moved up to pat her hair, as if pulled by a fishing line.

The great thing about high school plays was that almost everyone was exactly physically wrong for their roles. Tevye, a tall boy with girlish wrists, had a fake belly that sagged in his shirt and sometimes swung in the opposite direction of his torso. Pearl played the oldest sister, but she was the smallest. Now Pearl and her two sisters stamped up to the front of the stage and started shrieking the lyrics to "Matchmaker."

Justine's stomach began to growl. There hadn't been time to eat dinner. Fiddler on the Roof had its moments of quiet (buried somewhere in the traditional musical Song Scene transitional-oho-we-just-said-the-first-few-words-of-the-next-song-I-think-it's-time-to-Sing Song structure) and during those moments, her stomach yowled and moaned.

"Father, I love him!" said one of the sisters.

Justine wrapped her arms around her waist. It didn't help. If anything it pushed the noises out of her stomach more hastily. Baaaaaaarrrroooooool. Greg made eye contact once. Then he was laughing, staring straight ahead with his lips clamped shut.

During intermission, Justine escaped. She walked down the hallway and out the front doors. Hunched over by the entrance, she dug through her bag for some Tums. Greg stepped out of the building.

"Are you okay?" he said.

"Just hungry. I guess that's obvious."

"Possibly a little." They smiled. "They're doing good so far," he said.

"Yeah. Pearl's really talented," she said. "Who are you here for?"

"My brother," said Greg. "It sucks. They didn't give him any lines. They made him play the violin, but he messed that up too. You saw. I don't know what they were thinking, it's not like playing the violin is easier than acting. Do you want to go get something to eat? I'm hungry too."

The auditorium was lit up. You could see down the length of the dark hallway right into the back rows of the auditorium, everything tiny and bright and precious, like a diorama. People were starting to file back in.