I, Zombie

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

Darnell told Lewis something like this would happen. She told him. Probably happened all the time. Who knew how often New York City went through this sort of thing without word ever reaching Homer? Alaska was practically a world apart. The East Coast was a foreign land where their days slipped by before Darnell’s had even begun. Coming here was his idea. He wanted to see Ground Zero, see the new tower going up, had found a deal on tickets. But Darnell had told him something like this would happen. She knew it. They’d get crushed by the traffic, mugged, lost, separated. She knew they’d get separated, torn apart by the crowds. She wouldn’t be able to find him and would be stranded there forever, she knew it. And now look.

As soon as they’d landed, she’d had this feeling. Was it three weeks ago? It was in Times Square, that’s when the real panic had started, when she just knew she’d lose him. They’d taken a cab straight from the airport, suitcases and all. Lewis said he couldn’t wait, said they could just walk to the hotel from there. He’d wanted to see this since he was a kid, all the lights and those big video screens. It was where the New Year was ushered in. Prematurely, as far as Darnell was concerned. A new year just in time for dinner back in Homer.

But Darnell had gone along just like she always did. Anything to see him happy. But the crowds! The throngs. Streets packed from sidewalk to sidewalk, closed to traffic, and not even a holiday! Just the regular mob. The daily flow. As crazy as if salmon spawned year-round, like flapping fish that didn’t know when to quit.

She had chased him for blocks, her suitcase swerving behind her and nearly twisting out of her grip, wrist still sore from getting through that crazy airport with a bazillion foreigners, losing sight of him over and over, his balding head a tiny raft bobbing on a sea of pedestrians.

And that’s why the green hat she’d bought him. The “I LOVE NY” hat that used a heart in place of “LOVE.” Darnell made him stop right there in Times Square and try it on. She told him it was his color. She told him he needed it, that he looked so handsome.

Lewis asked if he was going bald, if that had anything to do with the sudden interest. She told him “no.” The street vendor took their money and stopped Lewis from taking the sticker off the brim, said he was supposed to leave that on. Lewis narrowed his eyes, and Darnell knew he would be peeling it off as soon as he got away. She didn’t care. All she wanted was a bright canopy on that bobbing raft, a flag on his head like the one that always helped her spot his boat when he pulled back into the harbor.

They had dragged their suitcases—still cool from the altitude—through a New York night throbbing with neon and noise and a frightening amount of life. And Darnell had watched for the green hat. She had followed along, a few paces behind, no idea where they were going, no idea what she would do if they got separated. Would he hear his phone ring over all that noise? Would she know how to hail a cab? She didn’t even know where the hotel was. This was her nightmare, the flashing billboards, videos and commercials the size of football fields, people waving tickets at her, asking her if she liked comedy, no safe way to clutch her purse and still drag her bag, the jostling and bumping, people looking at her, Lewis disappearing between two people ahead, that way cinching shut, have to jump the curb, hurrying down a street closed off to cars, a cop on a clomping and snorting horse, where did he go?

And Lewis, meanwhile, darting merrily through the crowd, oblivious to her fears, looking up at the flashing billboard of a practically nude woman illuminated with countless lights, his mouth hanging open like he’d passed out drunk on the recliner.

The green hat, Darnell told herself.

Don’t lose it.

The green hat.

It bobbed on a sea of the dead, on a crowd of a different kind.

Darnell could see it rise up in the distance, then slink out of sight. It had been knocked askew during the last day or two. She didn’t think it would stay on much longer, wondered if the sticker was still there, that hologram of authenticity.

She followed numbly, but it wasn’t Lewis she seemed to be after. Her limbs lurched of their own accord, an unknown number of days passing, losing sight of him and then regaining it.

That green hat.

Darnell didn’t heart anything about New York. Not now, not even before this nightmare. She knew something like this would happen. As the sun gradually rose on another day of being trapped, of unholy horror, she felt resigned to never seeing home again. She would have woken up by now if this were a dream. She had given up on