Breathers (2 page)

“No,” says Carl. “I agree with her completely. She
is
hopeless.”

“That's nice,” says Naomi, lighting up a cigarette. Half African American, half Japanese, Naomi could still pass for a model if it weren't for her empty eye socket and the way the right side of her face sags. “Why don't you just rip open her stitches while you're at it?”

“I'll leave that to your husband,” says Carl.

Naomi's husband came home after a bad day of golf and took out his frustrations on her with a Titleist four-iron.

“He's no longer my husband,” says Naomi.

“Technically, no,” says Carl. “But then technically, none of us should be here.”

“And yet we are here,” says Helen. “So why don't we focus on that.”

In addition to Helen, Rita, Naomi, and Carl, the other members of the group include Tom, a thirty-eight-year-old dog
trainer who nearly lost his right arm along with the left half of his face to a pair of Presa Canarios, and Jerry, a twenty-one-year-old car crash victim. Like me.

Because of our similar experiences, Jerry feels a connection with me, so he sits next to me at every meeting. I don't feel anything but lost, and Jerry, who listens to rap music and still wears his pants halfway down his ass, annoys me, so tonight I made sure to sit at the end of the semicircle next to Naomi.

“We're all survivors,” says Helen, who then stands up and walks over to the chalkboard. “I want you all to remember that. I know it's hard dealing with the threats and the name-calling and the expired food products thrown at you, but you survived for a reason.”

At times Helen reminds me of Mary Poppins—always cheerful and full of advice that works for characters who live in movies, fairy tales, or the Playboy Mansion. But I have to admit, without the support group I'd probably never leave my parents’ wine cellar. Still, I think we need to come up with a name other than Undead Anonymous. After all, when you're undead, you're about as anonymous as a transvestite with a five o'clock shadow.

At least we don't get any support group imposters crashing our meetings, trying to pick up vulnerable women. That would be sick. Interesting, but sick.

Helen finishes writing another of her messages on the chalkboard and turns to face us. Beneath YOU ARE NOT ALONE, she's written the words:

I AM A SURVIVOR.

“Whenever you're feeling lost or hopeless, I want you all to say this out loud. ‘I am a survivor.’ Say it with me now.”

By the time the meeting breaks up, it's dark outside. The end of October is more than two weeks away, but less than a
month into autumn and it's already pitch black before
Jeopardy.

I never liked autumn. Even before the accident I hated the weather growing cold and the changing of the leaves. Now it's a visual reminder of how my own life has grown cold. Lately I'm beginning to think there's just an endless autumn threatening an eternal winter.

I'm getting melancholy again.

Helen advocates the buddy system when we leave our meetings, though Carl says he doesn't need anyone to hold h is hand and heads for home on his own. Jerry, Helen, Rita, and I all live in the same direction, so we head off one way while Naomi and Tom head the other. Most nights, Jerry buddies up with me and talks incessantly about his accident and how he needs to get laid and how he wonders what it would be like to be dead. I wonder about that, too. More so when I have to pair up with Jerry.

“Dude, that car was awesome,” says Jerry. “Cherry red with a beast for an engine and a killer sound system. You should have seen it.”

I know the story by heart. A fifth of Jack Daniel's, half a dozen bong hits, no seat belt, a utility pole, and bad judgment on a right-hand turn sent Jerry through the windshield of his cherry red 1974 Charger and skidding along River Street head first, scraping away a chunk of his scalp. I've heard the story so many times that I can almost believe it happened to me. Except my accident was worse. Jerry was alone in his car.

My wife was asleep in the passenger seat and, unlike me, she never woke up.

For the first two months after the accident, all I could think about was Rachel—the smell of her hair, the taste of her lips, the warmth of her body next to me at night. I wallowed in my suffering, consumed with anguish and self-pity. That
and I had to deal with the smell of my decomposing scalp, the taste of formaldehyde in the back of my throat, and my own cold, decaying body. It was enough to make me want to take a gasoline shower and set myself on fire.

If you've never woken up from a car accident to discover that your wife is dead and you're an animated, rotting corpse, then you probably wouldn't understand.

Helen says that even though we've all lost more than our share, we need to keep our faith in the path that lies ahead of us. She says we need to let go of the past before we can embrace our future. I'm still working on that. Right now, the past is all I have and the future looks about as promising as the new fall lineup on CBS.

I used to wish Rachel would have reanimated with me so I wouldn't have to go through this alone, but eventually I realized she was better off dead. I'd thank God for small favors, but I doubted his existence before this happened and I haven't exactly changed my mind. Losing your wife in a car accident is enough to challenge the faith of even the most devout believer. But when you're a skeptic to begin with, being able to smell your own rotting flesh tends to put the kibosh on your belief in a divine power.

That's one of the biggest problems about coming back from the dead. The smell never quite goes away.

I reanimated within forty-eight hours after my death, before putrefaction and after I'd been embalmed. Upon re-animation, the process of decomposition slows down to a rate about half as slow as natural hair growth. However, for those of us who were fortunate enough to have been embalmed, formaldehyde is the magic elixir that slows decomposition down to an almost imperceptible pace, enabling the undead to maintain some sense of pride. The stigma of being a zombie
is bad enough, but for those who reanimated prior to being embalmed, it's disheartening when your hair, nails, and teeth become detached. And it's downright embarrassing to be walking down the street and suddenly have one of your main body cavities burst open.

If you consume enough formaldehyde, you can keep the decomposition of your body and your internal organs at bay. Even if you can't get hold of the industrial-strength concentrated stuff, formaldehyde can be found in lipstick, makeup, fingernail polish, toothpaste, mouthwash, deodorant, antiperspirant, bubble bath, bath oil, shampoo, and soft drinks.

Rita gets most of her formaldehyde from lipstick and fingernail polish, while Jerry prefers his fix from a can of carbonated sugar. Personally, I try to stay away from the soda. Bad for the teeth. I get most of my supplements from shampoo and toothpaste. Occasionally, however, I like a helping of Alberto VO5 Conditioner.

“… so then the next thing I know, I'm like, totally road surfing on my face,” says Jerry. “Road rash city.”

Jerry's been droning on about his accident the entire way home, while ahead of us, Rita and Helen walk in a blissful silence. It's times like this that make me wish I'd nearly lost both of my ears.

“Dude,” says Jerry. “You wanna touch my brain?”

The last thing I want to do is touch Jerry's brain, but it's hard to write
No thanks
with one hand on a dry erase board hanging around your neck while you're shuffling along on a broken ankle. So I just shake my head and hope he doesn't start talking about his permanent erection.

The four of us make our way through empty parking lots, past stores closed up for the night and distant homes where warm lights glow behind curtained windows. A few of the
houses have decorations up already, skeletons and ghosts and witches on broomsticks. Pumpkins not yet carved sit on doorsteps and porches. The cold breath of autumn whispers through the trees.

Halloween is coming, which seems more fitting than in years past. After all, it's not like I need a costume anymore.

ighway 17 is a four-lane roller coaster of asphalt connecting Silicon Valley to the Pacific Ocean through the Santa Cruz Mountains. The highway is divided by a concrete barrier, with gaps that allow cars to make left turns onto secondary roads. On rare occasions, a vehicle veers into oncoming traffic through one of these gaps, causing a fatal head-on collision. On even rarer occasions, in the early hours of a star-filled July morning, a driver falls asleep on his way home from a dinner party and his 2001 VW Passat drifts through one of these gaps into the northbound lanes and hits an embankment on the opposite shoulder at just the right angle, launching the car nearly twenty feet off the ground and into the trunk of a three-hundred-year-old redwood tree at more than sixty miles per hour.

Even Hollywood couldn't re-create my accident and make it look unstaged. Of course in a movie, the lead actor would somehow manage to walk away from the car with his body intact.

Maybe not Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis, but Brad Pitt, definitely.

I don't remember the accident. I didn't see any bright light
or hear any ethereal voices, but then this isn't exactly heaven. I just remember darkness, endless and close, like a membrane.

The next thing I know, I'm stumbling along the shoulder of Old San Jose Road, dragging my left foot behind me and wondering what day it is and where I'm coming from and why my left arm doesn't work. Then a pickup truck drives past and a rotten tomato explodes against the side of my face. Two teenagers are riding in the back of the truck. One of them has his pants pulled down and his bare ass pointed my way, while the second one throws another tomato at me and yells:

“Go back to your grave, you fuckin’ freak!”

At first I think they're just being kids, throwing rotten tomatoes at people for kicks. Denial is one of the first hurdles zombies have to overcome. Then I stagger up to Bill's Groceries and catch a glimpse of myself in the front window.

My left ankle is twisted at an obscene angle. My left arm is useless—the bones pulverized from the shoulder to the elbow, ending in a twisted claw that used to be my left hand, while my left ear is mangled and my face looks like a jigsaw puzzle.

As I stare at my hazy reflection, dressed in a black suit and tie and looking like I just walked off the set of a George Romero film, a six-year-old girl walks out the door, drops her frozen fudge bar when she sees me, and runs off screaming.

Not exactly one of the top ten moments of my life.

Except this isn't life anymore. And it's not death, either. It's not even in between. It's more like a bad spin-off from a successful sitcom that the network refuses to cancel.

From my injuries, I figure I've been in a horrible accident and lost consciousness and wandered away without any recollection of what happened. Which isn't too far from the truth. Except I've lost consciousness for three days. And instead of wandering away from the accident, I've wandered away from my coffin less than twenty-four hours before my funeral.

I don't know any of this at the time. I just think I need help, so I go into Bill's Groceries to ask if I can use the phone. Before I can get more than one foot inside the door, Bill's wife comes at me with a broom and a spray can of Lysol disinfectant and shoos me away.

I wander off, confused, with rotten pieces of tomato clinging to my face as I stagger toward town, looking for help. A quarter mile away, I come to a park. There are two pay phones over by the restrooms, so I lurch my way up the sidewalk, dragging my left foot behind me, ignoring the screams of children as they scatter in front of me like the Red Sea parting for Moses. Though I suppose Lazarus would make a more appropriate biblical reference.

Still unaware that my injuries aren't causing me any discomfort, I reach the pay phone and remove the receiver, cradling it between my right ear and shoulder as I dial 9-1-1 with my right index finger. Seconds later, an operator is on the line asking me what my emergency is.

I don't know what I want to say or how I want to say it, so I just decide to open up my mouth and say the first thing that comes into my mind. Except there's one problem.