Pelizzarro sat unmoving, head resting on his shoulder, eyes dull, mouth open. On being revivified they are all intractable and lax, blank slates, much like the zombies of folklore. They are told by the orderly that they have died and been brought back to life by means of an experimental process, and that he is taking them to someone who will help. It is the therapist’s job to make the ‘zombie’ want to please her - or him - by stimulating a sexual response, initiating a dependency.
‘Naturally,’ said Ezawa, ‘the sexual response has the side effect of increasing acetylcholine and norepenephrin production at the neuromuscular junctions… improves the motor control.’ He switched on the audio. The orderly had left, and the interview had already begun.
Jocundra stood in front of the ‘zombie,’ swaying her hips like a starlet tempting a producer.
‘Why won’t you talk?’ she asked.
He rolled his head from side to side, pushed at the cushions, still too weak to stand. When his hand impacted with the plush of the sofa, his breath came out in a soft grunt.
Jocundra stepped behind him and trailed her fingers along his neck, stimulating the spinal nerves. He froze, his head cocked as if listening to an ominous whisper; his eyes flicked back and forth. He seemed terrified. Jocundra moved around the sofa and posed before him once again.
‘Do you remember your death?’ she asked coldly. ‘Or anything afterwards?’
The ‘zombie’ floundered, flailed his arms; his lips drew back, revealing rows of perfect white teeth, small and feminine-looking in contrast to his fleshiness. ‘No!’ His voice was choked. ‘No! God, I… I don’t!’
‘Maybe I should just leave. You don’t seem to want to talk.’
‘Please… don’t.’ He lifted his hand, then let it fall on to the cushion.
I was to learn that each therapist employed a distinctive method of relating to the ‘zombies,’ but - perhaps only because Jocundra was the first therapist I observed - I have never found another style more compelling, more illustrative of the essential myth-construct at the heart of the therapist-‘zombie’ relationship. I have mentioned that her movements were graceful and unhurried under normal conditions; when working, however, they grew elegant and mesmerizing, as if she were displaying invisible veils, and I was reminded of the gestures of a Balinese dancer. The ‘zombie,’ then, would perceive her initially as a blurred silhouette, a shadowy figure at the centre of a dim candle flame, an unknown goddess weaving a spell to attract his eye until, at last, his vision cleared and he saw her there before him, taken human form. Jocundra utilized the classic feminine tactic of approach and avoidance to augment her visual and tactile presentation, and, in this particular interview, once the ‘zombie’ had begged her not to leave, she sat beside him on the sofa and took his hand.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
He appeared to be stunned by the question, but after several seconds he answered, ‘Frank. Frank Juskit.’ He peered at her, searching for her reaction, and managed a smile. ‘I was a… a salesman.’
‘What sort of salesman? My uncle’s a salesman, too.’
‘Oh, I was just an old horse trader,’ he said, assuming a character at once pompous and self-deprecating. A mid-western accent nagged at his vowels, becoming more acute as he grew more involved in telling his story. ‘At the end, there, I didn’t do much selling. Just kept an eye on the books. But I’ve sold franchises and factories, swampland and sea coasts. I’ve worked land contracts and mortgages and tract developments. Hell, I’ve sold everything every which way and backwards!’
‘Real estate?’
‘Yes, ma’am! Both real and surreal!’ He clapped his hands together and attempted a wink which, due to his lack of muscle control, came off as a grotesque leer. ‘And if I couldn’t sell it, I bought it! I turned landfills into shopping malls, treelined suburbs into neon wastes. I swallowed quiet suburbs and shat out industrial parks. I was the evil genius of the board room! I sharked through the world with blood on my teeth and a notary’s seal for a left eye! And when I get down to Hell, I’ll sell the devil two bedrooms and a bath overlooking the Promised Land and take over the goddamned place myself…’
Ezawa has labeled these outbursts ‘ecstatic confessions,’ but I find the term inexact and prefer ‘life story.’ Because the ‘zombie’s‘ senses are dim, his motor control limited, he must compress the variety of his synthesized experience into a communicative package in order fully to realize himself. The result is a compact symbolic structure, one summing up a lifetime of creative impulse: a life story.
‘This is typical,’ said Ezawa. ‘I doubt we’ll learn anything of value. Do you see the eyes?’
I looked. There were flickers of phosphorescent green in the irises, visible to me at a distance of ten feet; they were faint at first, but quickly increased in frequency and brilliance.
‘It’s the impingement of the bacteria on the optic nerve,’ said Ezawa. ‘They’re bioluminescent. When you see it you know the end’s near. Except in the case of the slow-burners, of course. Their brains retard the entire process. We have one out at Shadows who’s been showing green for two months.’
At Jocundra’s questioning, Mr Juskit - I came to think of him by his assumed name, convinced by the assurance of his memories - detailed a final illness which led to a death he had previously failed to remember. The flickerings in his eyes intensified, glowing like swamp fire, blossoming into green stars, and he made the fisted gestures of a company president exhorting his sales force. As he gained control of his muscles, he seemed more and more the salesman, the Napoleon Of the board room, the glib, nattering little man born of the union between a vagrant and the bacterial DNA. When I had first seen him in the room beyond the mirror, dazed, dull, barely conscious, I had been struck by the perversity of the situation: an unprepossessing, half-dead man was being danced for by a lovely woman in a nurse’s uniform, all within a gaudy room which might have been the private salon in a high class whorehouse. The scene embodied a hallucinated sexuality. But now there was a natural air to the proceedings, a Tightness; I could not imagine any room being made unnatural by Mr Juskit’s presence. He dominated his surroundings, commanding my attention, and I saw that Jocundra, too, was no longer weaving her web of elegant motion, no longer the temptress; she leaned toward him, intent upon his words, hands folded in her lap, attentive as would be a dutiful wife or mistress.
Mr Juskit began to address her as ‘babe,’ touching her often, and, eventually, asked her to remove her tunic. ‘Take it off, babe,’ he said with contagious jollity, ‘and lemme see them puppies.’ So convinced was I of his right to ask this of her, of its propriety in terms of their relationship, I was not taken aback when she stood, undid her buttons and let the tunic drop onto her arms. She lowered her eyes in a submissive pose. Mr Juskit pushed himself off the sofa, his hospital gown giving evidence of his extreme arousal, and staggered toward her, a step, arms outstretched and rigid, eyes burning a cometary green. Jocundra leapt aside as he fell to the floor, face downward. Tremors shook him for nearly half a minute, but he was dead long before they ceased.