I, Zombie

This was what his city had become. Shattered glass, unmoving traffic, hungry packs roaming aimlessly.

But not Jeffery. He was aimless no longer. He felt a pull southward like the slope of a crater, felt drawn by more than the mere scent of the living. Drawn by something else.

It occurred to him, as he strode toward the winter sun in its low, noonday position, that this wasn’t the first time he had looked south while all the traffic stopped. He had been fourteen when the planes hit. He remembered the smell, that acrid odor of asbestos and melted steel and who knew what else. Paper had fluttered on the breeze clear up to Harlem, little charred pieces of the stuff like burning snow. That was how white-collar buildings bled: They leaked paperwork, filing cabinets full of the shit, coughing it out through broken glass to flap in the same wind that brought the smoke all the way up to Harlem.

The wind had been out of the south that day, just like it was right then. It was the world’s way of sharing its misery with the whole island, the stench flowing through the glass caverns of uptown, over the park, and infecting the colored streets with the ruin of a white man’s world.

At the time, of course, Jeffery hadn’t known what the smoke was all about, hadn’t understood the sickness at the yoke of those planes, but he knew a personal attack when he saw one. He knew when a man fronted you, you didn’t back down. Men were like dogs. You give ‘em something to chase, and they’ll chase it. You turn, and they’ll bite you.

And so his mother had cried when he’d enlisted. Jeffery didn’t tell her beforehand. Shit, she still had the acceptance letter from Medgar Evers on the fridge when he deployed, dreamed of him coming home and getting a business degree, dreamed of him coming home at all.

Jeffery told everyone it was 9/11 that made him sign up. Part of him believed it. The rest of him knew better. He had known since he was born that he would go off and fight in a war, whether he wanted to or not. His old man had fought. Back in his father’s day you were drafted by law rather than circumstance. The world sent a man off to fight another man who had never fronted at all, just wanted to be left alone. It weren’t like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, some slap in the face like that shit. His old man said it was just confused men killing confused men so they might be the one to come home in one piece. That was all.

Jeffery believed him. He knew his father. Not like knew-who-he-was, but really knew him. That bullshit about black boys not knowing who their daddies were drove him fucking crazy. Every kid he grew up with knew who his daddy was. How could you not, when your momma spent most of her days cursing his name over and over, telling her kids what a shit that man was. Most everyone knew their father, sometimes got a letter or a guilty glance on the street, but Jeffery was different. He knew his dad. They’d spent hours and hours bullshitting after the war, drinking malts on the stoop while kids screamed down the street and traffic drifted by, his father telling him the shit he’d seen, Jeffery keeping mostly quiet.

The talks would last until nine o’clock, when his dad would get up, knees making noises, and reach out a hand calloused from handling ropes all day. The Liberty Landing Ferry made its first run at five in the morning. Jeffery’s dad had to be on the boat by four-thirty. So they would shake hands around nine, father and son, and his dad would glance up at the lit window a few stories above but never ask how she was doing.

“No one told you that you had to do it,” his father often said back then, referring to the fighting Jeffery had done.

And Jeffery had known right from the start what his old man was trying to say. There was something different about volunteering, something else about being taken. All the questions about who he was dating, was he in love, what’s she like, any kids? Jeffery knew his old man. He had worried that his son, this second chance at life, a life full of freedom and free of mistakes, would mess up and lose the same wars he’d lost. The same wars overseas and battles in those streets. Battles in one’s own mind.

But Jeffery couldn’t lose. That only happened when a man fronted you, when you turned and ran. Wars were only lost when they breathed down your neck. And so Jeffery headed south, drawn by more than the breeze, freer in some ways than the unthinking monsters crushing and bumping all around him, pulled down the slope of that distant crater, and not for the first time.

There was something else the same, he saw. It was the crowds, just like all those years ago. People had staggering about, confused, dazed, half-dead. Jeffery didn’t know what the smoke meant back then, but he knew where his dad worked. Something bad had happened on the tip of the island.