I, Zombie

The eating wasn’t too bad. It was better than the walking. It meant kneeling down and taking the weight off her glass slippers. And besides, as foul as the taste was, Rhoda had prepared for this. Life in the aftermath meant eating for sustenance, not for pleasure. It meant holding one’s breath and forcing down dry and pre-packaged meals. It meant eating bugs, which Rhoda had done in abundance to prepare herself. Six times, she had taken that tour with the smelly guy from Craigslist who for twenty bucks would turn over logs in Central Park and show you what you could and couldn’t eat. They tasted like peanuts, he said, and Rhoda hadn’t believed him. Just like peanuts. He’d been right. The power of suggestion, perhaps.

Rhoda told herself that this feast would be like sushi. It was a game show. All she had to do to win a million dollars was gobble it down and keep it down. Which she knew wouldn’t be a problem, she just needed to forgive the taste.

Two jumpers. She’d seen the remnants of another jumper a week ago, but it’d been at night and after a soft rain and much of the mess was gone before her nose led her to the smear. This was fresh. Two others were already there, lapping up pink globs amid scraps of clothes. The bodies had exploded, the clothing shredded. Like a bomb going off. Maybe they’d gone from the top. A man and a woman, judging by the clotted tangle of hair at the end of one mess and the beard on what looked like a chin a pace away.

The insides were everywhere. Made it easy. Like finding a buffet on the pavement. Scrambled human. Rhoda fell to her knees, so thankful to her body for doing so, and the pressure and pain in her mangled feet lessened. The perpetual burning became a distant hum. Eating meant forgetting these other things. Being disgusted lessened her physical pain.

A crowd headed their way in the distance. Rhoda ate while she could. Two jumpers. She wondered if they’d gone together, a lover’s leap. Maybe they’d held hands. It was hard to tell where their hands were. The man’s arm had split open like a lobster tail cooked too long, a neat rupture from impact, a baked potato with all the fixings.

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