I listen to her breathing slow as she falls asleep. After a few hours, with her fear safely tucked away in dreams, she rolls over, removing most of the gap between us. She’s facing me now. Her faint breath tickles my ear. If she were to wake up right now, would she scream? Could I ever make her understand how safe she really is? I won’t deny that this proximity ignites more urges in me than the instinct to kill and eat. But although these new urges are there, some of them startling in their intensity, all I really want to do is lie next to her. In this moment, the most I’d ever hope for would be for her to lay her head on my chest, let out a warm, contented breath, and sleep.
Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and colour? Since I became Dead I’ve recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I’ve lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I’ll remember this one for the rest of my life.
Sometime in the pre-dawn, as I lie there on my back with no real need to rest, a dream flickers on like a film reel behind my eyes. Except it’s not a dream, it’s a vision, far too crisp and bright for my lifeless brain to have rendered. Usually these second-hand memories are preceded by the taste of blood and neurons, but not tonight. Tonight I close my eyes and it just happens, a surprise midnight showing.
We open on a dinner scene. A long metal table laid out with a minimalist spread. Bowl of rice. Bowl of beans. Rectangle of flax bread.
‘Thank you, Lord, for this food,’ says the man at the head of the table, hands folded in front of him but eyes wide open. ‘Bless it to our bodies. Amen.’
Julie nudges the boy sitting next to her. He squeezes her thigh under the table. The boy is Perry Kelvin. I’m in Perry’s mind again. His brain is gone, his life evaporated and inhaled… yet he’s still here. Is this a chemical flashback? A trace of his brain still dissolving somewhere in my body? Or is it actually him? Still holding on somewhere, somehow, somewhy?
‘So, Perry,’ Julie’s dad says to him — to me. ‘Julie tells me you’re working for Agriculture now.’
I swallow my rice. ‘Yes, sir, General Grigio, I’m a—’
‘This isn’t the mess hall, Perry, this is dinner. Mr Grigio will be fine.’
‘Okay. Yes, sir.’
There are four chairs at the table. Julie’s father sits at the head, and she and I sit next to each other on his right. The chair at the other end of the table is empty. What Julie tells me about her mother is this: ‘She left when I was twelve.’ And though I’ve gently probed, she has never offered me more, not even while we’re lying naked in my twin bed, exhausted and happy and as vulnerable as any two people can be.
‘I’m a planter right now,’ I tell her father, ‘but I think I’m on track for a promotion. I’m shooting for harvest supervisor.’
‘I see,’ he says, nodding thoughtfully. ‘That isn’t a bad job… but I wonder why you don’t join your father in Construction. I’m sure he could use more young men working on that all-important corridor.’
‘He’s asked me to, but ah… I don’t know, I just don’t think Construction is the place for me right now. I like working with plants.’
‘Plants,’ he repeats.
‘I just think in times like these there’s something meaningful about growing things. The soil’s so depleted it’s hard to get much out of it, but it’s pretty satisfying when you finally do see some green coming through that grey crust.’
Mr Grigio stops chewing, blank-faced. Julie looks uneasy. ‘Remember that little shrub we had in our living room back east?’ she says. ‘The one that looked like a skinny little tree?’
‘Yes…’ her dad says. ‘What about it?’
‘You loved that thing. Don’t act like you don’t get gardening.’
‘That was your mother’s plant.’
‘But you’re the one who loved it.’ She turns to me. ‘So Dad used to be quite the interior designer, believe it or not; he had our old house decked out like an IKEA showroom, all this modern glass and metal stuff, which my mom couldn’t stand– she wanted everything earthy and natural, all hemp fibre and sustainable hardwoods…’
Mr Grigio’s face looks tight. Julie either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
‘… so to fight back, she buys this lush, bright green shrub, puts it in a huge wicker pot, and sticks it right in the middle of Dad’s perfect white-and-silver living room.’
‘It wasn’t my living room, Julie,’ he interjects. ‘As I recall we took a vote on every piece of furniture, and you always sided with me.’
‘I was like eight, Dad, I probably liked pretending I lived in a spaceship. Anyway, Mom buys this plant and they argue about it for a week — Dad says it’s “incongruous”, Mom says either the plant stays or she goes—’ She hesitates momentarily. Her father’s face gets tighter. ‘That, um, that went on for a while,’ she resumes, ‘but then Mom being Mom, she got obsessed with something else and quit watering the plant. So when it started dying, guess who adopted the poor thing?’
‘I wasn’t going to have a dead shrub as our living room’s centrepiece. Someone had to take care of it.’
‘You watered it every day, Dad. You gave it plant food and pruned it.’
‘Yes, Julie, that’s how you keep a plant alive.’
‘Why can’t you admit you loved the stupid plant, Dad?’ She regards him with a mixture of amazement and frustration. ‘I don’t get it, what is so wrong with that?’
‘Because it’s absurd,’ he snaps, and the mood of the room suddenly shifts. ‘You can water and prune a plant but you cannot “love” a plant.’
Julie opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it.
‘It’s a meaningless decoration. It sits there consuming time and resources, and then one day it decides to die, no matter how much you watered it. It’s absurd to attach an emotion to something so pointless and brief.’
There are a few long seconds of silence. Julie breaks away from her father’s stare and pokes at her rice. ‘Anyway,’ she mumbles, ‘my point was, Perry… that Dad used to be a gardener. So you should share gardening stories.’
‘I’m interested in a lot more than gardening,’ I say, racing to change the subject.
‘Oh?’ Mr Grigio says.
‘Yeah, ah… motorcycles? I salvaged a BMW R 1200 R a while ago and I’ve been working on bulletproofing it, getting it combat-ready just in case.’
‘You have mechanical experience, then. That’s good. We have a shortage of mechanics in the Armoury right now.’
Julie rolls her eyes and shovels beans into her mouth.
‘I’m also spending a lot of time on my marksmanship. I’ve been requesting extra assignments from school and I’ve gotten pretty good with the M40.’
‘Hey, Perry,’ Julie says, ‘why don’t you tell Dad about your other plans? Like how you’ve always wanted to—’
I step on her foot. She glares at me.
‘Always wanted to what?’ her father asks.
‘I don’t — I’m not really…’ I take a drink of water. ‘I’m not really sure yet, sir, to be honest. I’m not sure what I want to do with my life. But I’m sure I’ll have it figured out by the time I start high school.’