Breathers (26 page)

“Andy? “

“Okay, okay,” I mutter, then smile when I realize it's the first completely clear response I've spoken.

I remind myself to keep from talking because that would most likely freak out my parents and give my father another excuse to ship me off to Cadavers R Us. Still, I'd love to see the expressions on their faces. It would almost be worth it, except I'd never get to see Rita again. And that would definitely be a deal breaker.

I hang my dry erase board around my neck, then try to drag myself up the stairs as if my left arm and leg still don't
work. But when you've suddenly found your body healing and your basic motor skills returning, faking mangled limbs and decomposing flesh is harder than it looks. It's like pretending you're a woman and walking into the men's bathroom to use the urinal.

Sometimes you just forget.

From upstairs, I smell homemade Christmas cookies baking while Frank Sinatra croons his version of “Mistletoe and Holly.” Mom always loved the Rat Pack.

Christmas is just around the corner, which seems appropriate since each day I wake up with the anticipation of discovering the new gifts awaiting me. But instead of finding them beneath the Christmas tree or in my stocking, I find them within myself or in my reflection in the mirror.

When your ability to walk and talk begins to return, when you experience pleasure and excitement and other physical sensations that you thought were no longer possible, when you can once again taste and smell and feel, the moral questions surrounding these changes lose their power. Grow moot. Become just another distraction on the way to self-discovery.

As for God, I'm not concerned about him anymore. God had his chance. And he sent me to the SPCA.

The entire way up the stairs, I keep checking to see if I can feel my heartbeat.

I'm beginning to wonder, if my heart starts beating again, am I still a zombie? Am I technically one of the undead if I have blood pumping through my veins? And what if I start to breathe again? Does that make me human? Will I regain the rights and opportunities that once defined my existence?

I suppose it doesn't really matter, since I don't have any control over what Breathers think of me, of my kind. They're going to believe what they want to believe, even if they're family.

When I reach the top of the stairs and stagger into the kitchen for effect, my father is sitting at the kitchen table watching me while absently thumbing through a stack of papers. My mother stands at the sink doing dishes, apparently oblivious to my entrance.

“Take a seat,” says my father.

Other than the Thanksgiving turkey debacle, my father has seldom addressed me directly since I reanimated and my mother is oddly aloof, yet this feels vaguely familiar—a scene I've participated in before. The unease I feel is also familiar, not a zombie-living-in-a-Breather-world unease, but something less recent. A memory from my youth.

Then it hits me.

Whenever my parents felt the need to discipline me as a child or an adolescent, my mother would call me into the room and then retreat to some mundane task while my father handed out the punishment. This time, however, I get the sense that getting grounded is the least of my worries.

“Take a seat, Andrew,” my father says again.

Now I know it's serious. My father only calls me Andrew when I'm in big trouble.

I shuffle over to the table and do my best to sit down awkwardly in the chair across from my father. I glance at my mother, who has been washing the same glass since I came upstairs.

I remove the dry erase board from around my neck, then set the board down on the table and write:
What's up?

My father stares at the words I've written, then finally looks up into my face and makes eye contact with me.

“We have a problem,” he says, continuing to thumb through the stack of papers. “Do you know what these are?”

I shake my head.

“These,” he says, holding the papers up for effect, “are individual invoices for every bottle of wine I've purchased over the past ten years.”

Uh oh.

“Every time your mother and I consume a bottle, I file the invoices away,” he says. “These invoices here, which number one hundred and seventy-two, represent the wine that should still be in the cellar, minus the bottles you've broken in fits of anger.”

Oops.

“The other night,” he says, “while you were at one of your meetings, I took inventory and discovered that of the one hundred and seventy-two bottles of wine that should be in the cellar, forty-seven are missing.”

Somehow, I don't think telling my father that I share the bottles with the undead would improve my situation.

“According to my figures,” he says, removing the top page from the stack, “the total replacement value of the missing bottles of wine, as well as the eleven other bottles you've broken, comes to just under seven thousand dollars.”

Yet another reason to drink beer. The price of wine is almost as bad as the price of real estate.

“Add to that the cost of your therapist, the numerous times we've had to pay to get you out of the SPCA, and the damage you did to your mother's tea cup collection,” says my father, “and that brings the total to just under ten thousand dollars.”

I sit and stare at my father, listening to Frank Sinatra and the
squeak squeak squeak
of sponge against glass as my mother continues to wash the same glass over and over.

I'm beginning to perspire.

Hospitals pay good money for cadaver-derived human tissue.
Skin can fetch up to $1,000 per square foot. Corneas go for $2,000 apiece, femurs $3,800 each, and patella tendons $1,800 to $3,000. Heart valves run from $5,000 to $7,000.

Granted, hospitals are paying not just for the tissue but for the removal of the tissues in a ready-to-use form that has undergone significant quality testing. Prices for research items are usually lower because the tissue undergoes less testing and processing, but even so, my father could recoup the entire $10,000 by selling me off to a research facility.

And I thought being sent off to summer camp was bad.

I wipe my previous question off the dry erase board and write another one:
What do you plan to do?

“You know what I'd like to do,” says my father, studying me with an expression of disgust and resentment. “But your mother can't stand the thought of you getting cut up into pieces and sold off.”

I look over at my mother, who refuses to offer me even a glance of recognition.

“You've worn out your welcome here, Andrew,” my father says, and I can tell from the hint of a smile on his face that he's been waiting to say that since I came back. “The dead don't belong with the living. They belong in the ground.”

I'm not dead
, I almost say.
I'm undead.

“Your mother and I are driving down to Palm Springs tomorrow morning for a few days,” he says, collecting the stack of papers and standing up. “When we get back, we'll contact the zoo up in San Francisco and make arrangements for you to join their family and earn back the money you owe us.”

A zombie zoo. That's worse than a research facility. At least in a research facility, you're being destroyed for some sort of noble purpose. But a zombie zoo strips you of any remaining dignity. You're on display for everyone to abuse and you spend
the remainder of your existence slowly rotting away until you're nothing but tissue and bone. I hear that at some zoos, Breathers are even allowed to take home a piece of preserved zombie as a souvenir.

I stand up, leaving my dry erase board on the table, then shuffle over to the cellar door, where my father stands holding the door open, waiting for me to pass. I look him in the eye, almost catch myself, then blurt out the words I've been wanting to say for the past several months.

“Fuck you, Dad.”

Behind me in the kitchen, a glass shatters on the floor.

My father stares at me, his jaw slack, the confident expression in his eyes replaced by doubt. Maybe it was a mistake to let him know I could talk. I don't know. But I do know that it's worth seeing that smug look of his clouded by a trace of fear.

I glance back once more at my mother, who stands with the sponge in her hands and pieces of broken glass at her feet, then begin my descent. As soon as I hit the second step, the door slams and locks behind me. From the other side, I hear my mother start to sob.

Back in the wine cellar, I sit down on my mattress and wonder what's going to happen to me. I've just started to feel alive again, to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of self-worth, and it's all going to be taken away—my new friends, my new existence, Rita. Everything.

Before I realize what's happening, I start to do something I never thought I'd do again.

Tears build up in my ducts and spill out of my eyes, coursing down my cheeks, across my makeup and healing stitches. At first I laugh, elated at the fact that I'm crying, then I remember why I'm unhappy and I cry harder.

I am a survivor. I am a survivor. I am a survivor.

I know I shouldn't just sit here getting angry or feeling sorry for myself. I should try to figure out a way to avoid being shipped off to the zoo. Instead, I open a 2002 Kistler Pinot Noir from the Sonoma Coast and start drinking.

'm standing in the kitchen in a puddle of defrosted frozen food items just after midnight on an early December morning, listening to Christmas music—my stomach empty and the refrigerator filled with my parents.

Not exactly a Hallmark moment.

On the CD player, Frank Sinatra is singing “White Christmas.”

I think this is where we came in.

I still can't piece together how this all happened. Or how I got into the house. The door to the wine cellar is standing open, but for the undeath of me I can't recall a single moment that transpired after the third bottle of wine, which I think was a 1995 Barbaresco from Italy.

I also have no idea how I managed to do all of this considering my left arm still isn't much better than fifty percent. I must have surprised them somehow, caught them off guard. Maybe I coaxed my mother into opening the cellar door. Maybe I went outside and climbed in through an unlocked window. I guess it doesn't matter. All that matters is that I've suddenly got bigger problems than getting grounded or sold off to a zombie zoo.

Coming to terms with the fact that I've killed my parents
is enough of a shock without having to think about how I'm going to get rid of the evidence. Not that my only regrets have to do with how I'm going to explain this to the police or how I plan to dispose of my parents’ bodies. It's just that I've got a lot of processing to do. After all, it's not every day you wake up drunk on the kitchen floor and realize you've dismembered your parents and stuffed them into the refrigerator.

I'm not sure what's more disconcerting—the sight of my parents’ disembodied heads staring out at me from the freezer through gallon-sized Ziploc bags, or their dismembered and headless torsos squeezed into the refrigerator where the eggs and cream cheese should be.

It's at times like this I'm grateful I don't believe in eternal damnation.

Of course, you could argue that I've already reached that particular destination and have been renting a penthouse suite there ever since I climbed out of my coffin. Though
eternal
tends to have an expiration date when your body is gradually decomposing. And
damnation
is only a punishment if you have something to lose.

It's not that I don't feel bad about what I've done to my mother and father. But up until recently, I expected to just eventually rot away. And anything I had to lose had already been stolen from me. Then I meet Ray and fall in love with Rita and I feel like I have something to exist for again. I have something that matters. And my parents were going to take that away from me because of ten thousand dollars and a few acts of civil disobedience.

I know I wasn't the easiest zombie to raise, but my father could have shown some compassion and my mother could have let me hug her without screaming and gagging. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Maybe this would have happened sooner or later. Maybe my father was right.