I, Zombie

Lewis rarely looked where he was going. He tried to remember the first time he’d yelled at his wife. It’d been back before they’d gotten married, but just a time or two. Hadn’t really lit into her until later. There was the time she’d wrecked the truck, said it was a patch of black ice, but he’d let her have it anyway. Never struck her, but she recoiled just the same. Made him feel like shit, the way she flinched from his words. Pissed him off even more for her to make him feel that way.

“It’s just a scratch,” she’d tried to tell him.

A scratch. In a thing that don’t heal, he could see that now. Another scratch, and the wound is open. Emotions don’t know how to stitch back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades, and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, “Forget everything we’ve got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too. I take it all back.” How do you do that? It ain’t a lizard’s tail, those years. It ain’t something you walk away from and start over.

A gash is what it becomes. And then a stump, until you can’t feel it anymore. Until there’s just an itch where things used to be, a phantom love you feel silly for recalling. Now it’s someone who takes care of the kids, does the dishes, talks your head off when you get back from being on the water a few days. Now it’s just someone you live with. It’s excuses to get away so you can meet the boys at the bar. It’s inconvenient phone calls in the winter when she’s visiting her sister in Anchorage, too scared to walk out of the grocery store and across the parking lot in the dark. That was a wound, that one. Yelling at her for being afraid. Yelling at her to keep up all the time. Yelling at her for being scared of the crowds in the city.

Goddamn, he missed her. Why didn’t he ever tell her that? Those long nights on the water with the decks slippery and lit up from the flood lights, Kyle telling a joke, and all Lewis wanted was to get home to a hot meal, to their bed, to a hug and her joking that if his neck smelled any more like fish he’d have gills.

And he’d feel it for a little while, that joy of being home, but never say it. Little cells of thought that didn’t know how to reach out to the other side and start pulling back together. A tongue for lashing but not for stitching.

He missed her terribly now that he felt this fear of the crowd, the helplessness that she must’ve felt. And he had yelled at her for it, for being afraid. All he’d had to say was that it was gonna be okay, but he’d made it worse instead. It was easier to imagine, now, how the world must’ve seemed to her. The fear of not being in control. The fear of being lost all the time. Lewis no longer had any idea where he was—all the blocks looked the same to him. He had no map, no chart, no points of reference. The first time he’d popped up from a subway station, back before all the madness began, he’d felt the first tickle of this, of not knowing where he was. You pop up and you can’t see the horizon. Just tall buildings on all sides, no feeling of where east or west was, no idea which way to start out, all turned around from winding down a flight of stairs in one part of the city, riding that train somewhere, and then winding his way back up. Dizzy, and he couldn’t ask anyone, couldn’t do that, not in front of her. It was scary, feeling that for the first time. Completely and utterly lost.

Darnell must’ve felt like that a lot.

It was getting colder every day, and Lewis wondered if the pain would eventually get so great that he wouldn’t feel anything anymore. Enough wounds, and you just go numb. He hoped that happened soon. He was just glad it wasn’t August with all that heat. The smell and the torture would be worse in August. Maybe he would still be alive and around then and he’d find out. But he hoped not. He’d rather be buried in the snow come winter, cover these wounds up. That was the thing about a scratch or a gash: sometimes there weren’t no healing from them at all. Sometimes you had to hope for them to get worse and worse until the mechanisms shut down, until you couldn’t feel nothing. That was easier, somehow. Easier than doing the unnatural thing—than doing whatever it took to stitch a wound back to how it was before.

42 • Darnell Lippman

She thought the helicopter would take them far away, would whisk them out over the river to the forest of low buildings and those red-and-white factory smokestacks beyond. But the net swayed to the side as the helicopter banked low over the water. And pinned to the rough twine of the net, a man chewing on her arm, the scent of blood in the cool air, Darnell peered through the holes of her confinement and spotted the thing they were aiming for.