The only thing he’d known for a while was the feeling of falling out of the sky, like a lazy leaf butting up against gusts of air as it goes. The ground was his last stop, and falling was all that was left of his life.
Elza’s husband, Gregory, didn’t care about Horace. He was supposed to come up and see after his brother-in-law twice every night while Elza was off at work, but Gregory stayed downstairs drinking beer and watching the TV.
Horace didn’t mind. The sight of anyone moving made him dizzy. The sound of anything but his sister’s voice gave him frights.
He lay there, propped up on his pillows to keep the fluid in his lungs from drowning him. The oak outside the window was full of leaves. The sky above the highest limb was a dark blue.
Late afternoon. The thought blew through Horace’s mind, something he still knew between the cancer cells that crowded his brain. When the sun goes down, he remembered, when the night comes and all the pretty girls put perfume on they necks and thighs. He thought of bees then and the stinging pain. He smiled because there soon wouldn’t be any pain for him to fear.
A drum was beating and he wondered if what Jimmie T had said in Attica were true; was Africa in him? Was this drum some long, long ago memory in the back of his mind? Would he awake on some vast savanna where the first men walked and made life?
But the beating was just the fast tempo of his heart, the rhythm of life pumping quickly in his veins, trying to outrun death one last time — the final act of a wasted life.
He felt the falling again. The cascading leaf now slicing the air with a downward dip. Then there came a racing toward the ground. A quick downdraft, and suddenly Horace was dead — his eyes still open but no longer seeing the tree in the window.
Human time stopped in the tiny room. The clock lost its meaning but still checked off the moments that once might have been. Horace was gone.
And then that quick shaft of blue light — a commuter minutes too late for his train — shone its full radiance into the dead stare.
Horace was gone, but the urgency of the blue light on the cells still living in his eyes coursed through his body like a seismic eruption. Life leaping from one dead synapse to another, demanding one last act. The deep breath of the corpse and his lurching leap from the bed caused a racket.
Gregory jumped out of his TV chair down below and hurried up the stairs.
The corpse that was Horace dragged itself to the lamp on the table across from his bed. He ripped the cord from the pink ceramic vase and shoved the bare wire into his mouth.
Fat Gregory took three steps with his first stride. Three hundred pounds dragging on his heart as he went.
Electricity combined with the equations of light and played through every cell in the dead man’s body. The cancer withered, and the cool resolve of life engaged the lungs and bones and breath of this once-man. His skinny, naked body pocked with sores. His hair matted, eyes yellow. His forgotten cock just a lump of sagging skin.
Gregory made it to Horace’s door but had to stop to catch his breath. He looked at the door and listened. All he could hear was the theme song of The Wild Wild West from the television two floors below. Night was close at hand, and Gregory felt a twinge of fear. He decided to go back downstairs. He decided to let Elza come home and find her brother dead in there. Gregory was sure that Horace was dead. If he wasn’t dead before he fell, then the fall must have killed him.
But if Elza found him on the floor and he was cold then she would blame him. And what kind of woman could he find if she left him? He was fat and unemployed. All it would take was a quick look and then a call to the hospital.
Gregory opened the door.
The blue glare hovered over the zombie in an electric arc. Yellow eyes glowed from the brown skull as black lips sucked on the lamp cord.
Horace looked up, moving the cord to the side of his mouth like it was the stem of a water pipe.
“Run, Gregory,” the corpse said in a voice that was like Horace but, then again, was not.
“What you say, Horace LaFontaine?”
“Run, Gregory. Run now. Enjoy your last days as a man on this rock. Run.”
Gregory took a step toward his brother-in-law. He wasn’t afraid, not really afraid. The man had just gone crazy with the disease. Gregory reached out to take the wire from Horace’s lips, and the blue/electric shock hit him. All three hundred pounds of unemployed dockworker went flying backward, through the doorway and down the top flight of stairs.
Gregory kept going. He ran down Laramie Street. Not running really; he was walking hard with all the force of a run in his heart. He kept up his fast pumping walk until the police stopped him, a fat man in boxer shorts screaming down the streets of Oakland. There was an article about it in that week’s Oakland Standard, a throwaway paper. An unidentified man was detained after being stopped on the street in his BVDs raving about a zombie. He died in police custody from a heart attack, the coroner’s report said.
When Elza got home that night neither man was in the house. She called the hospital, but no ambulance had been dispatched for Horace. She called the police, but they didn’t identify Gregory until late the next day.
William T. Portman, burned out on hallucinogens and homeless, was living in the park at that time. Philosophy school dropout and compulsive liar, he had changed his name to Ordé and took to begging and living off young women who were temporarily fooled by his lies and handsome blond features.
Ordé had a lean-to made from a tarp in the bushes behind a large water tower. There was a woman with him then. He usually had a woman with him, until she got tired of his talk. This one’s name was Adelaide.
It was late in the afternoon and Adelaide was sunbathing with Ordé atop the wooden tower. She had fallen asleep, but Ordé didn’t know it.
“I can see,” he was saying, “a great wrong across the city. It’s like a fog, only deadly. But not smog. Not something... something scientific—” And then the blue light came into his eyes. He knew at once that it wasn’t one of the wild hallucinogenic flashbacks. His body didn’t melt, the history of his life wasn’t written on the ground beneath his feet. It was his true nature repeated a trillion times. It was the whole history of something that he didn’t understand — not yet.
“Did you see that, Addy?” Ordé asked sixteen seconds later.
The girl opened her eyes and sat up. She was naked and beautiful. Nineteen, with red hair and green eyes. Her eyes were small and too wide apart — which banned beauty queen contests from her life. But Ordé loved her. He’d loved her for almost a week now, and she hadn’t tired of his lies yet.
“Did you hear it?” Ordé asked.
“What’s wrong, honey?” She had never heard his voice without the strained notes of prophecy in it. Even when he made love, he talked in that Moses-giving-the-commandments kind of tone.
“We have to make love,” he said.
She reached out to hold him.
“No,” he said. “It has to, it has to — cook.”
“Huh?”
Ordé touched his eyes. “The word. It has to filter down. It has to bond so I can, so we can... come together.”
“We can do that now, honey,” Adelaide said.
She reached for him again, but he held her away.
“No. No.”
After a long while Ordé and Adelaide dressed and then climbed down from the water tower. Addy was a little scared of the beautiful man that she had tamed in the park. His sudden and solemn sanity, his unwillingness to lose himself in her perfect body made her think that it was time to leave.