I, Zombie (20 page)

This was ketchup, Rhoda said to herself as she buried her
nose in the gash and ate. She chewed down to the bone—the
plate
, she
corrected herself. It wasn’t bad. The constant jolt of electricity in her feet
receded to a thrum. It was amazing what one ill could do for another. Amazing
what could be justified.

Rhoda ate her way from the man to the woman, ate in that
place where the two mingled. The birds plucked scraps of flesh from a dozen
feet away, little pink worms. They squawked at each other as the crowds grew
closer, and Rhoda thought of the jumpers she’d seen on TV once. Little black
shapes falling. Like swooping birds. They caught her eye before the anchor
noticed, before the cameraman zoomed in. Yes, those where what the anchorman
thought they were. A jacket rippling in the wind, trailing the falling man like
a shadow, peeled away as it left one arm and then the other.

Several of them. She had watched, horrified, while they
showed it live. A man in a pike position, head at his knees, turning over and
over.

Rhoda never understood why.

Why?

Why jump?

But now she knew. It was the glass in her feet, the little
shards of wisdom grinding into her bones. She ate warm muscle, teeth scraping
on the insides of the skin—a baked potato, she reminded herself. It wasn’t that
bad. Not as bad as the walking.

Rhoda remembered the jumpers. Why leap like that? Because
the sitting had to’ve been worse. Trapped in there, the heat intolerable,
mangled bodies of people they’d worked with for years, getting hotter and
hotter. The only relief was by the shattered windows, the breeze that sucked at
the wrecked filing cabinets, the whoosh of winds high above the streets.

Cool by the window, but growing warmer. Fires advancing. No
way out. Like slippers of glass and just wanting to fall to one’s knees, to do
anything but suffer.

Rhoda ate. If she could have done it with grace, she would
have. She pictured herself in a glorious pike, high over a shimmering pool of
water, flying down like the swooping bird that stopped, cawed, and with its
perfect beak, caught the eye of that plummeting jumper.

Part V • The Lippmans

38 • Darnell Lippman

Darnell told Lewis something like this would happen. She
told him. Probably happened all the time. Who knew how often New York City went
through this sort of thing without word ever reaching Homer? Alaska was
practically a world apart. The East Coast was a foreign land where their days
slipped by before Darnell’s had even begun. Coming here was his idea. He wanted
to see Ground Zero, see the new tower going up, had found a deal on tickets.
But Darnell had
told
him something like this would happen. She knew it.
They’d get crushed by the traffic, mugged, lost, separated. She knew they’d get
separated, torn apart by the crowds. She wouldn’t be able to find him and would
be stranded there forever, she knew it. And now look.

As soon as they’d landed, she’d had this feeling. Was it
three weeks ago? It was in Times Square, that’s when the real panic had
started, when she just
knew
she’d lose him. They’d taken a cab straight
from the airport, suitcases and all. Lewis said he couldn’t wait, said they
could just walk to the hotel from there. He’d wanted to see this since he was a
kid, all the lights and those big video screens. It was where the New Year was
ushered in. Prematurely, as far as Darnell was concerned. A new year just in
time for dinner back in Homer.

But Darnell had gone along just like she always did.
Anything to see him happy. But the crowds! The throngs. Streets packed from
sidewalk to sidewalk, closed to traffic, and not even a holiday! Just the
regular mob. The daily flow. As crazy as if salmon spawned year-round, like
flapping fish that didn’t know when to quit.

She had chased him for blocks, her suitcase swerving behind
her and nearly twisting out of her grip, wrist still sore from getting through
that crazy airport with a bazillion foreigners, losing sight of him over and
over, his balding head a tiny raft bobbing on a sea of pedestrians.

And that’s why the green hat she’d bought him. The “I LOVE
NY” hat that used a heart in place of “LOVE.” Darnell made him stop right there
in Times Square and try it on. She told him it was his color. She told him he
needed it, that he looked so handsome.

Lewis asked if he was going bald, if that had anything to do
with the sudden interest. She told him “no.” The street vendor took their money
and stopped Lewis from taking the sticker off the brim, said he was supposed to
leave that on. Lewis narrowed his eyes, and Darnell knew he would be peeling it
off as soon as he got away. She didn’t care. All she wanted was a bright canopy
on that bobbing raft, a flag on his head like the one that always helped her
spot his boat when he pulled back into the harbor.

They had dragged their suitcases—still cool from the
altitude—through a New York night throbbing with neon and noise and a
frightening amount of life. And Darnell had watched for the green hat. She had
followed along, a few paces behind, no idea where they were going, no idea what
she would do if they got separated. Would he hear his phone ring over all that
noise? Would she know how to hail a cab? She didn’t even know where the hotel
was. This was her nightmare, the flashing billboards, videos and commercials
the size of football fields, people waving tickets at her, asking her if she
liked comedy, no safe way to clutch her purse and still drag her bag, the
jostling and bumping, people looking at her, Lewis disappearing between two
people ahead, that way cinching shut, have to jump the curb, hurrying down a
street closed off to cars, a cop on a clomping and snorting horse, where did he
go?

And Lewis, meanwhile, darting merrily through the crowd,
oblivious to her fears, looking up at the flashing billboard of a practically
nude woman illuminated with countless lights, his mouth hanging open like he’d
passed out drunk on the recliner.

The green hat, Darnell told herself.

Don’t lose it.

The green hat.

It bobbed on a sea of the dead, on a crowd of a different
kind.

Darnell could see it rise up in the distance, then slink out
of sight. It had been knocked askew during the last day or two. She didn’t
think it would stay on much longer, wondered if the sticker was still there,
that hologram of authenticity.

She followed numbly, but it wasn’t Lewis she seemed to be after.
Her limbs lurched of their own accord, an unknown number of days passing,
losing sight of him and then regaining it.

That green hat.

Darnell didn’t heart anything about New York. Not now, not
even before this nightmare. She knew something like this would happen. As the
sun gradually rose on another day of being trapped, of unholy horror, she felt
resigned to never seeing home again. She would have woken up by now if this
were a dream. She had given up on thinking this hell wasn’t real.

The sun rose and lit the faces of impossibly tall buildings,
but not her. Not yet. Darnell was thankful for the night, for the cold that
reminded her of Alaska. The smell lessened at night, the shuffle of the mob
seemed to slow, the hunger abated. And while there was no sleep, time seemed to
pass in long jerks of unconsciousness.

Her prayers had changed over the course of days. At first,
she had prayed for it to end, to wake up in that filthy and cramped hotel
they’d paid too much for, or to wake up in her home or on a plane. Later, she’d
prayed for her soul to go away, for it to leak out her nose or ears and drift
up to heaven, to fly away from all the bad her body had done. Now she simply
prayed for the cool nighttime, the numbness, the brief interludes of not
knowing where she was, what she was doing.

She prayed for the snow.

She thought it would be colder in October in New York, but
it had been warm everywhere. A warm year. Not much snow, even back home. And
snow made everything look whole. It was the flesh of the soil, the epidermis of
Alaska. It turned brown like decay in the sun. But there was no snow in New
York City. No flesh. No gleaming white skin to cover the asphalt bones, the
gristle in the gutters, the stained underbelly of Manhattan. All that remained
was the rot, the putrid browns and the ash charcoals of an Alaskan thaw. And a
green hat floating on it like a patch of kelp in Coal Bay, a spot of life among
the dead, a remembrance of hope, a symbol of her sorrow, something to pretend
she was following.

Anything. Anything but the scent of the terrified and hidden
living, clinging to the dark corners for one more day, watching with hope that
same sunrise Darnell Lippman sensed with utter dread, a day of hoping not to be
eaten, a day of dreading to be fed.

39 • Lewis Lippman

The fat lay in golden layers beneath the skin. It was like
roe, stored away amid the deep organs and the bright muscle. The color of
butter and the texture of firm cottage cheese, it came away easily and went
down hungrily.

Lewis pawed into the woman’s steaming abdomen. He made
happy, wet smacking sounds and slurped raw fat down his throat. It was as
glorious as it was vile. He ate and ate, squishy fists of the stuff oozing
through his fingers, his belly straining against a belt he couldn’t command his
hands to loosen, his distended flesh pinched tight against his blue jeans like
a bloated fish that’d been pulled behind his boat for miles.

His bladder and bowels released while he ate. They went at
the same time to make more room—and his blue jeans, already caked to his skin,
filled with gore. He felt all this, tasted all this. He knelt over the morbidly
obese woman they’d caught running through the streets, screaming her fool head
off, and he made her fat his fat.

And as Lewis Lippman wallowed in the woman’s meat, slurping
her golden goodness, he thought about how he’d always hated fat people. And
now, how he couldn’t get enough.

It was a matter of will, he’d always thought. He hated them
for that, for being weak. Why couldn’t they just
stop?

Lewis remembered giving them dirty looks in the marina. He
would fire up a cigarette and glare at the waddling tourists who tottered down
a finger pier into one of the whale-spotting boats. The docks would groan and
shift on the Styrofoam floats as they went.

He even said something once in the Chinese restaurant where
he and the boys often went for the lunch buffet. He watched as a man well over
three hundred pounds grabbed his dirty plate, squeezed out of the booth, and
went to attack his seconds or thirds.

“Don’tcha think you’ve had enough?” he grumbled, just loud
enough for the man and his fat family to hear. Kyle and the others laughed,
even though Kyle was lugging around a few extra pounds himself. But nothing
gross, not like this.

Flashing back to the gruesome present, Lewis watched himself
as he dug sideways under the woman’s skin. Here was that feller from the buffet
that day. No telling them apart from their insides like this. He scooped the
fat with his hands, tearing it away from the skin and the meat below, like
cleaning a fish.

Lewis used to shock the tourists he took out in his boat by
cutting off a piece of a fresh catch and popping it in his mouth. He’d offer
them a chunk on the end of his fillet knife and take pleasure in the way they
recoiled from him. Once they were out on the sea with him and Kyle, they were
stuck. Hauling in the fish they’d dreamed of catching—that they’d paid good
money to catch—Lewis would watch them as the seas picked up and they turned a
hundred shades of green. He’d delight in their sickness, watch them turn up
their noses to the smell when the belly of a nice big jack was opened like a
purse, his knife the zipper, the ripe contents sliding toward feet picked off
the deck in a hurry.

It was fun, that, having them trapped out there, the sea
roiling the lunches in their landlubbing guts, the smell of fish innards that
Lewis had become inured to crowding their noses with a ripe stench. He and the
others would turn and smile as their fares lost it over the gunwale. Crowds of
little fish would come to the surface and chew the lost breakfasts of strangers
from Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas.

And now Lewis was the passenger, the one shitting himself at
sea, this concrete sea. A world he’d dreamed of seeing, that he’d fantasized
about from a distance, Times Square with all those crowds as the ball dropped,
as the date changed for the East Coast well ahead of the great big nothing that
happened in Coal Bay.

He was the tourist, now. He was trapped in this skull of his,
watching the guts spill, smelling the horror, feeling sick and being unable to
vomit. He was the man growing bloated like a fish dragged on the end of a line,
the man with his plate, bending over seconds and thirds. No willpower. No
willpower in the world was enough.