I, Zombie

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.

He was cutting class that day, not because he did it often, but the weather had been too nice for being inside. He could feel it that morning when he left the apartment, the crispness in the air like a spring or fall day that would warm up to something special. The sort of day where clouds played hooky, and so should he.

At first, people said it was a bomb. Some said it was a fire or a small plane, like a Cessna. All Jeffery knew was that it had happened at the World Trade Center, and that’s where his father worked. That’s where he said he worked, anyway. Jeffery had never been. All the weekends he’d been invited out to ride the boat back and forth across the Hudson, and he’d never been.

He went that time, on that day many years ago, but not by choice. His young legs just took him at a trot, his thoughts rattling around in his skull, people on the sidewalks actin’ crazy, the traffic coming to a halt.

Some others had moved with him, more and more, curiosity flowing south. He remembered angling toward the river, noticing the change in the traffic, the cars backed up at the tunnel, a sudden explosion in cops and firefighters. They yelled at him and others to turn around, more cops than he’d ever seen.

The blocks had gone by in a blur. He remembered his father arriving at their apartment once, smiling and sweating, claiming to have walked all the way there from work. Jeffery didn’t believe him. No one walked the length of the island. But jogging it that day, gray smoke clogging a cloudless sky, blocks and blocks drifting by of stuck traffic and people holding their phones, mouths covered with trembling hands, Jeffery saw that the island weren’t as big as he liked to think.

He never got there, of course, to where the smoke was coming from. The crowds heading south bumped into the much different crowds fleeing north. This is what reminded him of that day eleven years ago, what looked the same between the island getting hit and bit. The people staggering north back then had been pale, skin white like ghosts, even the brothers and sisters. They looked like the dead, their eyes these dark and unblinking circles. They pawed at their own faces, groaning, holding shoulders to see where they were going, just like the undead did now.

Jeffery remembered how they cried and moaned, how they fell in the streets, shaking. People were hugging whoever was there, was closest, didn’t matter. Jeffery remembered that. It didn’t matter.

A cop had told him to get lost. He picked Jeffery out of the downtown crowd, could tell that he was different, didn’t belong. Jeffery’s skin glistened with sweat from the long run, his eyes wide with curiosity, wide with all he hadn’t seen. They were different than the look from those who had.

“My daddy’s down there,” he tried to tell the cop.

“Then your dad’s in a world of hurt,” the officer had said.

Jeffery had been pissed. It was a shitty thing to say. But he realized later that the cop was just like him. There was no blanket of ash on that man, no desire to hug a stranger. He hadn’t seen. Hadn’t seen a thing. Was just reacting. Drafted into a war, not asked.

His father, Jeffery would learn, was not in a world of hurt. He was helping that world. The ferry had run back and forth across those cold September waters for much of the morning, people piling aboard from the seawall like an army of the undead, more and more of them, always coming, crowding aboard pale as ghosts and shaking like grocery bags caught on a clothesline. And Jeffery’s dad, hands rough from handling ropes all those long years, had been there, pulling those people aboard.

27 • Jeffery Biggers

The dumpster lurched as the dead knocked against it, and Jeffery nearly fell on his ass. He steadied himself and held the extended aluminum pole with both hands, leaving him with only his jutting elbows for balance. More bangs, and the dumpster slid a few inches, tired wheels groaning, the hollow metal resounding beneath him.

It was working. Holy shit, it was working!

Jeffery spread his feet, his knuckles pale as he gripped that cool aluminum pole, his arms shaking from the strain of holding the thing out as far as he could.

They’d done this in boot camp, he remembered. It was a form of punishment. Made them hold their rifles by