Breathers (18 page)

Carl stands up, gives another, uncharacteristic nervous smile, then clears his throat and stumbles through his story about getting stabbed to death in the face and chest. Naomi laughs at his behavior but Carl offers no rebuttal and just sits down when he's done.

“Hello, my name is Leslie,” says his guest, standing up and smoothing out her cornflower blue dress, which is a shade darker than her complexion. “I'm afraid my story isn't nearly as exciting as Carl's. Just last Thursday I had a heart attack and died.”

“Whoa,” says Jerry. “You're like, totally new to this undead thing, aren't you?”

“Quite,” says Leslie.

“How are you adjusting?” asks Helen.

“It's been a bit of a shock, naturally,” says Leslie, her English accent making being undead sound so formal and proper. “But Carl's been a dear.”

We all look at Carl, who offers an uncomfortable smile, then stands up. “Excuse me,” he says. “I have to use the rest-room.”

Naomi lets out another laugh as Carl leaves.

“So what happened?” asks Rita.

“Well, when I woke up Friday morning on a table under a sheet,” says Leslie, “I thought I was still alive, until I realized where I was.”

“Where was that?” asks Helen, her voice soft and supportive.

“When I sat up and removed the sheet, there were two men in surgical clothes and masks cutting open the chest of a dead boy on another table.”

Knowing nods and murmurs from the group.

“What did you do?” asks Rita.

“My initial reaction was one of modesty,” says Leslie. “I wasn't clothed and tried to cover myself with the sheet. Then I noticed the stitches running down the length of my own chest. That's when one of the men noticed me and started to scream.”

More murmuring and head-shaking.

“So how did you meet Carl?” asks Naomi.

“Well, after a bit of a scene, I was taken to the SPCA until my daughter came to pick me up,” says Leslie. “Carl was in the cage next to mine.”

At that moment, Carl returns from his pee break. No one says anything as he walks over to his chair. It's so quiet I can hear Jerry decomposing.

“What?” says Carl, standing there and looking down to make sure his fly is zipped up.

“Dude,” says Jerry, “you were in the pound?”

Carl glances around as if he'd been caught masturbating.

“I told them that was where I met you,” says Leslie.

“Yeah, well,” says Carl. “It was just a misunderstanding. Can we move on?”

Zack and Luke stand up, shoulder to shoulder, and recite their story of diving headfirst off the railroad trestle into the San Lorenzo River. It's kind of eerie how they tell the story,
each one saying a few words and then the other picking up the thread and continuing with it, back and forth as if they had one mind and two mouths.

Jerry follows the twins with an amusing narrative of his car accident, finishing it off by offering to let everyone touch his exposed brain. The twins take him up on his offer while everyone else declines.

I start to get up to shuffle over to the chalkboard and share my story, but Rita puts her hand on my arm and keeps me in my chair.

“Andy survived a car accident that left him severely damaged and unable to talk,” she says, looking at me and smiling. “But that doesn't mean he's not a good listener.”

I sit there and watch Rita tell my story, mesmerized by her lips, which are Succulent Red, as they shape the words that should be mine. I feel honored to have her speaking for me, sharing my history with everyone else. I almost think she tells it better than me.

Once she's done with my story, Rita tells her own tale of suicide. How she felt alone and desperate, an outcast among the living—no friends, no community, no sense of belonging. Then one day, while standing in the kitchen of her studio apartment eating leftover pizza and listening to The Smiths, she just grabbed a steak knife and slit her wrists and then her throat. No planning. No note. She just pressed the blade to her flesh and cut.

She's never told her story like this. Her description has always been brief and matter-of-fact, a hurried account of something she felt ashamed of. But this time there's no shame. No remorse. Instead she seems eager to share.

“I can still remember how I felt watching the blood pool on the floor around me,” says Rita. “How I felt my strength ebbing, the life draining from me, knowing that I'd succeeded
in ending my lonely existence, only to wake up at the mortuary two days later and realize I still wasn't dead.”

Heads nod in acknowledgment, along with an empathetic “Bummer” from Jerry.

“But even though I'm still an outcast among the living,” says Rita, her gaze traveling around the semicircle of zombies until it settles on me. “I don't feel so alone anymore.”

If I could blush, I'd be a third-degree sunburn.

Ray introduces himself and tells how he was shot by a trigger-happy landowner with a shotgun, got kicked out of his home by his wife, and moved into the granary. Then he stands up, opens his backpack, and hands out a jar of Ray's Resplendent Rapture to everyone. Several members of the group eye the contents of the jars with skepticism, but Rita, Jerry, and I vouch for the quality, which seems to satisfy everyone.

Naomi's account of her death at the hands of her husband is short and bitter. Afterward, she lights up one of her formaldehyde-laced cigarettes and manages to smoke half of it before yielding to Helen's request to put it out, which she does in her empty eye socket.

Sometimes she's such an exhibitionist.

Naomi's guest, Beth, was killed by a drunk driver and lives with her parents and younger sister. She has stitches crisscrossing her face and scalp and the left side of her head is shaved from the doctor's attempts to stop the hemorrhaging in her brain.

“What is it like living with your family?” asks Helen.

“My mom cries a lot,” says Beth, nervously playing with the hair on the right side of her head. “My dad spends most of his time at work now. And my sister invites her friends over to stare at me.”

I can't help but look at Beth and think about Annie, wondering if it would be worse to have a daughter who's a zombie
or to be a zombie with a daughter who's a Breather. I suppose neither one is much of an option, but at least if I were the one who was alive, I'd have the right to raise my own daughter.

Most of the time I try to avoid thinking about Annie and what she's doing and how much I miss her. It's not natural for a father to try to forget he has a daughter, but when you're not allowed to communicate with her in any way, then the only thing you accomplish by thinking about her is to create an exquisite, aching pain that never goes away.

But sometimes, when I see other children playing or walking home from school, I think I hear Annie's voice or her laugh. Other times I think I catch a whiff of her hair. She was always partial to Suave Tropical Kiwi.

When Beth finishes her story, Jerry leans over to me. “She's totally hot, dude.”

“She's only sixteen, Jerry,” whispers Rita.

And the side of her head is shaved. And she has stitches tic-tac-toed across her face.

“So?” says Jerry. “She's a totally hot sixteen-year-old.”

Jerry takes a swig of his grape soda, then reaches into his pants pocket, pulls out a can of Altoids, and pops two into his mouth.

“Curiously strong,” he says with a grin.

They'll have to be more than curious to make an impact on Jerry's breath.

Next, Helen tells her story about getting shotgunned in the chest while attempting to resolve a domestic dispute with one of her patients. When she finishes, she turns to her guest, who looks a bit out of place in his Brooks Brother's suit and Armani tie.

Maybe it's because I've had a recent crash course in foundations, concealers, and powders, but I can tell he's wearing makeup.

“I met Ian more than a year ago, when I was still a Breather,” says Helen. “I didn't know he was one of us until last week. I think you'll all find his story a little unique. And perhaps inspirational as well.”

Ian is a thirty-two-year-old attorney who got drunk one Saturday night and fell down in an alley, struck his head on the asphalt, knocked himself out, then choked on his own vomit.

Yes. Inspirational. Definitely.

“Six hours later,” says Ian, “I woke up and didn't realize anything was wrong until I was home taking a shower. I just didn't feel right. Not sick, exactly, but as if something inside just wasn't working right. That and I could smell myself and the smell just wouldn't go away. I must have used an entire bar of soap and half a bottle of shampoo and I still stunk.”

“So when did it dawn on you that you weren't alive anymore?” asks Helen.

“Well, after my shower,” says Ian, “I was leaning toward the mirror, checking out my complexion, which had gone kind of gray, and I noticed I wasn't fogging up the glass. I breathed and breathed and nothing. Then I checked my pulse. That's when I passed out again.”

Jerry lets out a guffaw. No one else laughs.

“When I came to,” says Ian, “I thought it was just a bad dream. How could I be dead? Then I realized it was real and I smashed the bathroom mirror, as well as the toilet seat and several tiles on the bathroom floor. When I was done breaking things, I sat down and tried to cry until I felt like I would throw up. Then I fell asleep. When I woke up, I put on extra deodorant and a bunch of cologne, went down to the store, bought two more bottles of cologne, extra toothpaste, mouth-wash, soap, shampoo, deodorant, and a bunch of cosmetics,
then I spent the rest of the night applying makeup until I found something close to a natural look.”

I have to say, Ian's natural look pretty much kicks ass on mine. I'll have to ask him what kind of foundation he uses. And if he can recommend a good concealer.

“Why did you put on makeup?” asks Rita.

“So I could keep my job,” says Ian. “I make a good living as an attorney and I have a nice house. I didn't want to give any of that up.”

No one says anything until Naomi finally speaks up.

“Nobody knows you're dead?”

“So far I've managed to fool everyone at the firm,” says Ian. “But I've had to stop dating. And going to the gym. And playing tennis. And I had to give my dog away because he kept wanting to roll around on me.”

Tell me about it.

“And how long ago did you reanimate?” says Helen.

“Three weeks ago last Sunday.”

Lots of murmurs of disbelief.

“But how?” says Rita. “How do you … ?”

“I have a friend who runs a crematorium over in Salinas and I paid him to embalm me,” says Ian. “It's more like hush money, actually. He gets five hundred a month to keep his mouth shut and provide me with enough formaldehyde to keep the decomposition to a crawl.”

It hardly seems fair. I drink Alberto VO5 conditioner in bulk to get my daily recommended dose of formaldehyde and this guy gets the pure stuff.

“If no one knows you're dead,” asks Carl, “then why risk coming here?”

“Helen asked me to come,” says Ian. “I owed her a favor and couldn't turn her down.”

“What kind of favor?” asks Naomi.

“If it wasn't for Helen,” says Ian, “my sister would be dead.”

Turns out the patient of Helen's in the domestic dispute was Ian's sister. Helen saved her life.

“So,” says Helen. “What can we learn from Ian's story?”

Everyone looks around at one another, waiting for someone else to give an answer. Thankfully, Jerry obliges.

“It's good to know someone who works at a crematorium?” he says.

“No,” says Helen. “I mean yes, that's true, but it's not the point.”

“Oh,” says Jerry, “if you're gonna die, make sure no one's around when it happens.”

“Not exactly,” says Helen, as she walks around the semicircle of chairs. “We are all survivors. We are all here, in this room together, because we've all experienced something extraordinary. We've been given a second chance. And although we face more obstacles and more heartache than perhaps we want to deal with, we can never let our spirit be broken. We can never give up.”

Helen walks over to the chalkboard and underneath WELCOME SURVIVORS, she writes tonight's message:

NEVER GIVE UP.

“Say it with me now.”

The rest of the meeting is devoted to a sort of structured conversation, allowing everyone to get to know one another while helping each survivor find some action he or she can take to keep from surrendering hope.

Ray and the twins seem satisfied with their existence, but Beth and Leslie, having reanimated more recently, are more overwhelmed with the constraints and the stigma of their new status. Jerry offers to act as a sort of spiritual zombie
guide for Beth, who is flattered by his proposal and they spend the rest of the evening sitting next to each other, comparing stitches and wounds. It's sweet, really. In a decaying, putrid sort of way.

As for the regulars, it seems like everyone is doing something to improve their existence.

Rita has started taking walks. Jerry is working on some kind of
Playboy
art project. Naomi has become a fan of the PGA to deal with her anger toward her ex-husband. Carl, when he's not helping other zombies he meets at the SPCA, has taken up meditation. And Helen, of course, helps the rest of us.

Which makes me wonder about my own efforts at self-improvement.

Sure, I've worked on my singing voice and learned how to blend concealer. And I've protested and been urinated on by a poodle and assaulted with food products. But other than helping to get Tom's arm back, or at least someone's arm back, I haven't really done anything to help anyone like Helen does. I haven't taken any steps to better myself like Naomi or Carl. And I haven't taken up a constructive hobby like Jerry.

So when I bring out my petition for zombie rights, thinking it's a poor excuse for making a difference but with nothing else to contribute, I expect it to be met with cursory enthusiasm. Like applause for a warm-up band from a bored audience impatient for the main act. Instead, everyone is enthusiastic. Surprised. Impressed. So I tell them about my protests and about my trips to the SPCA and about the little girl who pointed to my sign and asked me if it was true. Were zombies people, too?