Things got worse as I started to lecture. I tend to pace back and forth as I talk, and as I did she shadowed me, taking two small, lurching steps for every one of mine. The scuff of her little feet on the linoleum floor set my teeth on edge. Bare feet scuffing on dirty floors made me nuts, the way some people go nuts at the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, or the feel of cotton balls. I stopped pacing.
I kept losing my train of thought, stumbling over words. I made eye contact with one of my new students; she quickly looked down, pretending to take notes, though I hadn’t said anything important. I was barely saying anything coherent, let alone important.
Without realizing it I found myself looking right at my corpse, as if I were lecturing to her. She stared back. I forced myself to look away, at the blank white wall in the back of the room, realized I was pacing again, and she was pacing with me—scuff-scuff, scuff-scuff, jerking along like… like what? Like a dead child.
I let the class out early and headed to my office in a fog—exhausted, hung over, wondering how I could possibly make it through my one o’clock class. She did her best to keep up—I could hear the scuffing behind me.
A surge of anger tore through me and I wheeled, pointed at her, opened my mouth to speak. Her gaze flickered to my chest for a split second, then back up. This time I’d seen it, there was no doubt. Her eyes had dropped and almost—not quite, but almost—focused.
“I saw that!” I said, stabbing my finger at her. I was in the hall outside my office, confronting a corpse. Jack popped his bald head out of his office, took in the scene, pulled his head back inside.
Embarrassed, I wheeled and headed into my office, leaving the door ajar, allowing her to follow. I stared down at her.
“Tell me what I did!” I shouted, leaning down and pushing my face close to hers. “I’m a good person! I don’t deserve this!” I wanted her to focus, to look at me, to listen to what I was saying. I saw the little pinkish-grey dollop dangling from the back of her throat. Below that, darkness.
I yanked the onyx Buddha statue off my desk and hurled it over her head. It crashed into a bookshelf, shattering a framed picture of Yankee Stadium, scattering a half-dozen textbooks.
“Jesus! sYou okay?” Jack called. I hefted my computer monitor over my head and slammed it to the floor at her feet. It split partway, popping and sparking. Then Jack was on me; I hadn’t seen him come in, but he was behind me and had his arms wrapped around my chest.
“Calm down, calm down!” he shouted.
I struggled, tried to yank free. I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d gotten free. I truly hope I wouldn’t have brought the computer console down on her head. I gave a final, violent tug. My shirt ripped loudly.
“Shhhh, shhhh,” Jack said into my ear. “You’re okay, it’s okay, shhhh.” I started to cry. Jack held on until he felt me relax, then loosened his grip, kept his arms around me for a moment longer, let me go.
Jack and I didn’t know each other very well; it added to the surreal feel as I stood in my demolished office, crying. Through a blur of tears I saw a button lying on the floor by my corpse’s foot. In a daze I knelt and picked it up. It was her button—grey, with veins of teal. Unmistakable. How had it gotten out of her pocket?
“I think the shirt’s a total loss,” Jack said behind me a little sheepishly. I looked down at my shirt. There was a long tear along the seam under the arm, and the front was flapped open—three or four buttons had popped off.
I guess you never look at the buttons on a shirt, even if you button them a thousand times. The buttons on my white shirt were gunmetal grey, with veins of teal. Quite unique. They weren’t as bright and new as my corpse’s button, because they’d taken a few turns in the dryer.
Gently I lifted her hand and turned it over, ran my finger over her tiny palm, over the pads of her baby fingers. Rough. Not the fingers of a child who spent much time playing hopscotch.
“Is everyone all right?” Maggie, from down at the end of the hall, stood in my doorway. Behind her two more of my colleagues craned their necks, trying to see what was happening. There was rarely excitement in our department; maybe an irate student once in a while, but never shattered glass or exploding computer monitors.
“Everything’s fine,” Jack said. He was a good guy, I realized. I was still down on my knees, staring at the button, my eyes red and tear-stained. The crowd dispersed, trailed by two corpses.
Jack squatted, put his arm around my shoulder. “You okay now?”
I nodded.
“I’m not gonna say I understand how you feel, but it must be awful.”
I nodded.
“If you ever want to talk, just knock.”
I nodded a third time. He patted my back and left.
It was nearly time for my one o’clock class. I kept a sweater in the bottom drawer of my desk for days when the a/c was cranked too high. I pulled the sweater over the ruined shirt, and, as my head popped through, I thought I caught my corpse glancing down at the button lying at her feet.
I stooped and retrieved the button, slipped it into her pocket, next to the other, shinier one.
I went around the corner to the bathroom, held the door open for my corpse when it started to swing shut on her. I washed my face and combed my hair, her watchful eyes reflected in the mirror.
I yanked a couple of paper towels from the dispenser, wet them under the faucet, knelt and wiped the worst of the dirt from my corpse’s chubby cheeks and forehead. I tried to comb some of the debris out of her hair, but it was hopelessly tangled. I shoved the comb into my back pocket and plucked the biggest chips out by hand. I glanced at my watch. Time for class.
After retrieving a stack of syllabi and the class roll from my office I headed into the airy central lobby, up the double flight of stairs, steadying myself with the silver metal handrail. Halfway up I turned and looked back. My corpse was struggling up the second step, her legs too small, and too stiff, to make the climb easily. I went back down, wrapped my arms around my corpse, and carried her up the stairs.
THE SONG THE ZOMBIE SANG
by Harlan Ellison® and Robert Silverberg
Between them, Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg have won pretty much every award the science fiction and fantasy field has to offer; heck, individually they’ve each won pretty much every award the field has to offer. Both have been named Grand Masters by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (the organization’s life-time achievement award), and between them they have 12 Hugos, 8 Nebulas, and 27 Locus awards, among a slew of other awards. They are, quite simply, living legends. To include a story by either would be an honor; to have one written by both of them is transcendent.
In his collaborative collection, Partners in Wonder, Ellison said that this story was inspired by a writer he encountered while teaching at a college writing workshop. The man was “smashed drunk from morning to night” but still managed to put himself in front of the typewriter every morning to bang out a few words. “It was as though he was a zombie,” Ellison said, “that he continued writing only as a reflex, the way a frog’s leg jumps when it receives a galvanic shock, that he might as well be dead and stored in a vault except when he had to write.”
From the fourth balcony of the Los Angeles Music Center the stage was little more than a brilliant blur of constantly changing chromatics—stabs of bright green, looping whorls of crimson. But Rhoda preferred to sit up there. She had no use for the Golden Horseshoe seats, buoyed on their grab-grav plates, bobbling loosely just beyond the fluted lip of the stage. Down there the sound flew off, flew up and away, carried by the remarkable acoustics of the Center’s Takamuri dome. The colors were important, but it was the sound that really mattered, the patterns of resonance bursting from the hundred quivering outputs of the ultracembalo.