The Zombie Letters (4 page)

A therapist’s office is an important part of the treatment. It’s not just sitting on a sofa, talking about your mama. Reassuring platitudes. But not for the person you would think. The patients, no matter how crazy they were . . . are masters of their world. They just
react
to what happens to them. The real person on the chopping block is the doctor. That is the real person truly fighting for his sanity. He needs a bubble . . . a blanket. Because we
all
know that there is no cure for a cracked mind. Let us not kid ourselves. Therapists exist simply in a futile effort to catch the patient
before
they crack. It is a nearly impossible thing to pinpoint. The mind can break in an instant. Some people have iron sanities . . . impenetrable tanks of human beings that do not rattle no matter what’s tossed at them. There are some people that are already as thin as paper. Their grip on everything was hanging in a balance
before
they were probably even aware of it. Psychoanalysts and therapists still have a place in this world, however. Some people can be saved. Some can. We worked in the most expensive facilities the government can pay for. If one of us freaks out, they have an opportunity to do a hell of a lot of harm. That Stephen in Seattle wasn’t the only one. Since initiating this program, Nathaniel Winters and I managed to weed out some people we would have otherwise never known about. It had been a success . . . and Nathan would have loved to have been proven wrong. It seems that he was right. Our governments and medical boards placed a lot of people in my position that failed psychological screenings with flying colors. It was amazing. Also, quite frightening.

II

I remember that next day very well. Like it was yesterday. The sound of pots and pans clicking together in the kitchen woke me up. The missus was downstairs cooking something as she loudly whistled to herself.

              I could smell lilacs.

              I don’t know why that stands out, but I remember lilacs. Funny how some things stand out like that now. My memory wasn’t always the sharpest. Now it is.

              Now it is.             

Nathaniel Winters shambled downstairs on peg-legs as I came back to the waking world on the couch. All that leftover turkey knocked me comatose. Nathaniel’s knees popped and his legs ached all the time, especially after sleeping. Restless Leg Syndrome often has bouts on the person who manages to sleep through it, too. Sometimes he had to stretch his legs before getting out of bed. One morning when he fell down the stairs, broke two fingers and bruised his ribs, he never got out of bed without stretching first. After that, his pinkie finger sat a little crooked because of it. Left hand. He wrote with his right anyway. Something about the bone didn’t knit quite right.

              Sami was in the kitchen, looking lovely. She had on a pair of those dark blue yoga pants and one of her t-shirts from that REO Speedwagon concert she went to when she was fifteen. Those guys were still touring at the time. I always said they will be rocking arenas and selling out tickets until I land myself in a nursing home. I don’t know about now. Nathaniel smiled at her when he entered the kitchen . . . her back turned to him as she whistled some Katy Perry song that had just hit the radio. She was making eggs. Just the way he liked them. Sunny side up and runny as a motherfucker. She brought me a cup of coffee to the sofa, where I had sat up to watch the weather report. Lots of cream, lots of sugar. I don’t eat breakfast.

“Hi sweetheart,” she said to him, not even turning around. She did that often. Nathaniel always joked that she had a touch of the shining. Not a lot of it, but probably enough to help him escape a hedge maze if he ever got stuck in one.

              “Morning, Sam,” he said.

              “Huh?” she said as she placed a large pan into the sink. It clattered loudly, giving Nathaniel the impression that she did not quite hear him.

              “Sami-boo, Sami-boo, how are youuuuu?” He always sang that song to her. It made me wish I had someone to sing to.

“What?” she said, turning around. Her long brunette hair was tied up in a bun at the top of her head. It had already begun to spill out of the loose hair-tie. Strands hung to the middle of her back in small sections. She would say she looked messy that morning, but I thought she looked radiant all the time. Women think they need to be all made up to be attractive. I think the time a woman is the most beautiful is when she is walking around in nothing but her man’s dress shirt, her hair all messed up and reeking of morning breath. Women have this comical quality about them in a home environment. Women . . . they are stunning, intelligent and so strong-willed. They are capable of anything. A good, respectable woman with just a hint of that sexual prowess can turn even the strongest man into a melting pile of goop in an instant. When you see them all mussed up and awkward, it is like peering into something sacred. Here you have the most powerful force of nature ever created. Woman. Woman is allowing you to see her at her most fragile, her most unprepared . . . but they were still enough to make a heart ache. That is the truest definition of raw power I have ever seen. Samantha Winters was like that.

Nathaniel rubbed his temples harshly, trying to clear a thought from his head. “Nothing. Just being silly. Eggs smell good.” He was a brilliant man, but his thoughts were sometimes so disjointed and random . . . completely out of nowhere. It was like hearing a friend you haven’t talked to since high school. You remember their voice, but it takes a second to place it. Nate had been having little random thoughts at that point . . . he told me that they were goofy ones like calling the electric company to double-check if the bill had been paid five minutes after he got done paying it. When I first started working with him, he told me he was making love to his wife when he thought about baking gingerbread cookies. If she knew about
that
one, the sofa would be a permanent resting place for him. He was just one of those random guys.

“Indeed they do,” she said happily. “Hey, stop thinking, Mister. I know how you get when you’re under pressure at work. Your mind wanders worse than usual.”

Nathaniel sighed a bit with relief. He knew her well enough to pick up the tone of her voice. Samantha Winters loosened the tie in her hair and let it fall in tangles. She didn’t bother to re-fasten the tie or smooth it out. She was content with that kind of stuff. She knew that Nathaniel loved her in all-out ‘Woman of the Amazon’ mode, as well as all made up . . . he wanted her all sweaty from working out all morning, headache or no headache, makeup or no makeup. At that point, she started going back to school and quit the catering job. The government was paying for her schooling and she could hone in on what she really wanted to do. She wanted to be a veterinarian. Ever since she was a little girl. She had started working part-time through school placement at a local vet clinic. She seemed quite a bit happier there than at LeGrange Catering. She was always a damn good cook, though. Samantha was born and raised in Vegas, until her parents moved to Missouri for work. Her teenage years were spent in Mesquaki Lakeside Casino kitchens and restaurants. Animals were her passion, but Nate and I always though the culinary arts were her calling. She
knew
food.

Sami brought her husband a nice dish of sunny-side up eggs with some green leafy shit around the sides. Cilantro? Nah. Maybe some other kind of green. That part never left Samantha. She still presented every dish like she was serving it to any high-roller in Sin City or any well-to-do country club businessman. Didn’t matter if it was a steak dinner or two fucking pop tarts. Everything had a presentation to it. That morning it was two eggs, a side of seasoned sausage, a glass of orange juice, two aspirin (gotta love a woman who has the shining and knows from the bone-creaking that her husband’s legs were sore) and a slice of grapefruit. Nathaniel took a bite of his sausage and let out a satisfactory hum as the sweet glaze she put on it nearly melted in his mouth. I know it did. I snuck a piece when Sami was cooking it. “Man . . . what a lucky man I am. You gotta teach me how to cook this well. How much you charge for lessons?”

She smiled at Nathaniel as she sipped her coffee. That’s all she had. I remember being pretty sluggish that morning. I sat on the sofa, watching the weather channel and not saying much. Nathaniel had enough food to feed a horse, but Sami and I just had our coffee. She liked to eat the food she made as she was cooking it. Her family rarely saw her at the table, but it was a house rule that no matter what you are eating, you do it in the dining room. She ate in the kitchen as she was cooking, but she sat at the table more to keep her family company. You know, set a good example for the kids. “Oh, I don’t think you can afford
me
. I am a very sought-after chef, ya know. My major was in it, remember?”

“I think both vet and cook talents come in handy,” Nathaniel said with his mouth full. “You can just learn how to cook dogs and cats.”

Sami threw her head back and laughed, giving his shin a small kick under the table. “You brat! That’s disgusting! Gross . . . don’t wanna make me lose my breakfast. Hey Darin!” she shouted over the table at me. “We got a comedian here!” She turned her look back to her husband and pointed a butter knife in his direction. “Keep it up and you’ll be learning to cook outta books. I won’t help you a bit, mister. But yeah . . .” she said. She took another large gulp of coffee and patted Nathaniel on the hand that was resting near the plate. The one with the cock-eyed pinkie. “I’ll teach you if you want to learn. Just like learning anything else. You wanna get good at it? You wanna get to the World Series, baby-doll? Practice.”

He ate as much as someone could a couple days after Thanksgiving. We were all still feeling that turkey. In between residual gobbler-pheromones and the coffee coursing through my system, I knew it would be time to deploy the troops in about fifteen minutes. Take the Cosby kids to the pool. Take the Browns to the Superbowl. How did Dad say it all the time? Oh, yeah. File some shit-tickets. Turkey does that to me . . . that, and Sami’s mashed potatoes. Mix them together and they move out quicker than Taco Bell. They like to make everything else move out quickly for about a week after that. The shits were a small price to pay for how good her cooking was. It was old school. Everything was butter . . . nothing low-cal or low fat. I’m talking the real-deal cooking, man. Grease, those old iron skillets that you’re never supposed to wash, cooking lard, bacon on everything and white wine to go with dessert.

Samantha finished her wake-up juice, got up with an empty coffee mug in her hand and kissed her husband on the forehead as she passed to toss it into the sink. She whistled as she tossed it in, purposefully hitting a higher note when the mug
ponked
into the stainless steel basin. That was the morning Nathaniel and I would relax and maybe do a little poking around in a new book we were co-writing together. We were not good at science fiction writing, but it was a fun little hobby. We wanted to publish independently, because we were making enough damn money. We just wanted to see a book in print. When Sami got off work that day, we were all going to do some more light Christmas shopping. Sami had to be at the Southtown Veterinarian Clinic and the whole crew had the weekend off. Nathaniel’s beautiful wife could be heard rummaging around upstairs, getting ready to leave the men all alone in their bathrobes to smoke a few cigars, work on the new book (if any good ideas crept up), maybe crack open the scotch and eventually have dinner ready for her when she came home . . . her feet hurting and smelling like dog. Nathaniel always did that on the weekends. He would always have food waiting for her.

Come to think of it, Nathaniel wasn’t a bad cook either.

She was upstairs for only a minute or two when Nathan plopped down on the couch with a fresh new Steven Grimes novel in his hands. I kicked back in a recliner to read the first chapter of the book we were writing. We only had about twenty pages printed out and bound up in one of those three-ring binders, but it would make for some light morning reading. I miss writing for fun. Our book . . . the title escapes me now. I don’t even remember what it was about. I always imagined myself as a novelist. It always seemed like a cool line of work for me . . . to do it full-time. I’m sure there is a lot of bullshit that goes along with it like every other job, but artistic things like that would be so appealing to me. I always wanted to write a book about a haunted place. Like that place out in Tennessee. Or was it Kentucky? You know, that place you always hear about on those Ghost Hunter shows and Unsolved Mysteries and stuff? That trailer where that rich kid vacationed with his friends from school . . . remember hearing about that on the news? Yeah . . . sad story. Some young guy freaked out, killed all his friends and two cops. Said that a ghost did it. Blamed it on this serial killer that died years before. Rodger Leary. I remember reading about himin the papers. That guy that killed all his friends . . . his accomplice never got caught, either. That’s why some people believe his story. Personally, I think its bullshit. What they dug up on that kid was pretty bad. He was messed up from the get-go, I think. But still . . . would be a neat story. Trailer in the middle of nowhere, a ghost running around and at the end, there’s no evidence. The kid is blamed for everything and eventually OD’s on his meds at the loony bin. Would be a cool movie.