Life Sentence
DYING TO LIVE
LIFE SENTENCE
by Kim Paffenroth
Dying to Live: Life Sentence
Kim Paffenroth
Published by Permuted Press at
Smashwords.
Copyright 2008 Kim Paffenroth
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
—Shakespeare,
King Lear
, IV.6.179-80
Call no man happy until he is dead.
—Solon, ancient Athenian law-giver
It’s funny, the things you remember, and even
funnier, the things you think you remember but aren’t sure. So many
times, I’ll ask my parents or someone else about something I think
I remember—a place we went, a summer night by the river, a
neighbor’s dog or cat—only I can’t
quite
remember who the
people were or exactly how old I was at the time, or some other
detail. I give every piece of information I can—the clothes we were
wearing, what the weather was, or the smells (I always remember the
smells vividly and perfectly, I think)—but they shake their heads
and say they’re sorry, they don’t remember. It’s not that they
simply can’t recall the lost detail I’m searching for—the whole
scene doesn’t exist for them, even the parts I’ve described.
Sometimes they’ll laugh and say it’s just a funny
trick our minds play on us, and they don’t just mean that it’s
funny in the sense of odd or strange, but really that it’s funny,
that it makes you laugh. I know they mean well, but I don’t think
it’s funny in that way, because I see how much our memories make us
who we are, make us different from one another, make us miserable
or happy. They’re funny in a way that makes me angry sometimes,
because I can’t help the things I remember, and I certainly can’t
help the things I’ve forgotten or the things I never knew. I didn’t
get to pick what goes in which category, and neither did anyone
else, unless they’ve willfully lied to themselves, which seems to
me a terrible and dehumanizing act. I’ll never think this haphazard
kind of memory is fair—let alone the laughing kind of funny—because
it’s not, and because it’s hurt so many people I know.
The older people, they remember the world the way it
used to be, and the memory usually hurts them. It’s where they
belong, really, and this is all some bad second half to their
existence, an exile in a strange and terrible place that they
shuffle through, mostly for the sake of the younger people like me,
I think. And even though their obvious pain makes us want to hold
them and love them and take the hurt away, we can’t, because it’s
not ours to bear, or even understand. Never mind all the hundreds
or thousands of people they saw torn into screaming, bleeding
meat—a memory the youngest of us have been spared—it’s their
memories from
before
all the horrors that really separate
them from us. We don’t know what a “real” root beer float tastes
like, or what makes a “real” Fourth of July or a “real” Christmas
so different from the ones we have now, or any of the thousand
other things they recollect while shaking their heads wistfully,
while we just look at them and blink and wish we could love them
enough to make them forget. But they don’t, and we can’t. And I
don’t think memories that anguish and separate people like that are
very funny at all.
My mom and dad—Sarah and Jack are their names—they
have those memories, like all the older people—like Jonah and
Tanya, whom I called “uncle” and “aunt” when I was much younger,
and then “Mr. Caine” and “Ms. Wright” when I got a little older. I
don’t like to say Mom and Dad aren’t my “real” parents, though
that’s how some people say it. Their love has always been
completely real to me, as real and overwhelming as hunger or thirst
or death itself, and I don’t ever want to say anything to take away
from that. They’re not my biological parents is what I mean; both
of my biological parents died long before anything I can remember.
I’ve been told that my mom died when I was born, and my dad was
murdered by very evil men when I was just a baby. I’ve been told
about my dad many times, about how kind and brave he was.
I have a single picture of my parents. They look so
young in it, in their twenties, about the age that I am now, as I
write this. They look alive and happy and free in that picture, but
all those feelings are trapped in the past, even for the ones who
were “lucky” enough to keep on living after the dead rose and the
world they knew died. My parents and the others look at a picture
like that and they see a door they’d climb through if they could; I
see a window on a world I never knew, a world that has as little
reality or relevance to me as a fossil or a diorama in the museum
where we used to live when I was little, when the dead still
controlled most of the area.
For the people my age or younger, like Tanya’s
daughter, Vera, or my brother, Roger (as with my parents, I try not
to preface his relationship with “step-,” as I’ve known and loved
him as a sibling my whole life, and he certainly grated and annoyed
me as a child just like a “real” brother would), this is the only
world we’ve known. We have a good life, I think. The people I love
are in this world, this “real” world, and wishing for something
else or something better seems disloyal to them. Perhaps even
worse, it seems ungrateful. Being ungrateful is selfish and
childish, and we all have tried hard to learn not to be like that.
In fact, growing up and putting away childish things is a big part
of the story I am telling now, the story of the things that
happened that summer when I was twelve years old.
Once Milton started to herd the living dead away
from us, when I was still a baby, our lives got much safer. Even
today, no one knows how he had the power to repel the dead with his
presence, but some would call it a miracle for our survival; anyone
being appropriately grateful, I think, would at least call it a
blessing or a gift.
The first people in our community had all been
living in the old museum by the river, walled in and safe, but
unable to move about and always worrying that the dead might break
in and make us all eternally hungry and awake and mindless. Over
the years, as we took more land back from the dead, we met other
survivors. They had all found some secure, defensible place, like
we had with the museum. Some were in an observatory at the top of a
mountain, some had occupied a monastery deep in the woods, and some
were on an island in a big lake. A handful of people had lived in
some barricaded buildings in a nearby town, hopping from roof to
roof across bridges they had built, as I am told my biological
father did when I was first born.
They found another group in a huge building full of
all kinds of things; the older people said it was called a “mall,”
and they laughed because they had found people there. They tried to
explain why it was funny, because some old movies had people hiding
in a mall when there were zombies outside. I still didn’t get the
joke, but people have often told me I don’t have much of a sense of
humor. Sometimes they say it ruefully, because they say I used to
laugh a lot when I was a baby.
Each of these new groups became a part of our
community, though we had few formal rules. My dad explained to me
that when they had lived in the museum, he and Milton had more or
less led the group, and they’d had many more rules. But with so
much land cleared of the hungry dead, plenty of room and farmland
was available for the few hundred people we had managed to bring
together. With people more spread out and not jammed on top of one
another, the rules of an armed camp under siege were relaxed, and
there seemed much less need for a formal government. The concept of
government—and the even more alien ideas of a state or nation—was
one I had come across in old books, but I had a lot of trouble
understanding exactly what it meant. And except for a tiny bit of
reflected glow from the fireworks and celebration of “freedom” that
we still have on the Fourth of July, I’ve always gotten the
impression that government isn’t something from the former world
that the older people miss very much.
But if the older folks were stuck in the old world,
while we younger people were completely a part of the new, I think
it was hardest of all on those just a little older than myself,
just old enough to remember that the dead once lay still, old
enough to remember their parents and others being torn apart in
fountains and pools of their own blood, or dying slow deaths from
the infection or starvation. When I looked at my slightly older
peers, I saw the kind of ghosts that were the strongest and most
bitter, the kind that didn’t live in your mind or even your heart,
but in your bones. I could be happy, or at least content with the
new world; my parents could be regretful or resigned to it. But for
the people in between, for the people whose childhood had been
interrupted by the rising of the dead, the effect seemed much more
lasting, deep, and alienating.
A few people were in this age group, the generation
between me and my parents, people like Will, who was a young man
when the story I’m now telling took place. They had called him
Popcorn when he was a boy, because they had rescued him from an
abandoned movie theater, and there was this food they called
popcorn that was traditionally served at movies. He was raised by
Mr. Caine and Ms. Wright, and he subsequently announced that his
name was Will—never William or Bill or Billy, just Will. It was a
matter of some speculation whether he had christened himself this,
or whether he had suddenly remembered his name from before, or even
if he had known it all along and kept it secret till it suited him
to reveal it.
People Will’s age seemed like they could only be
angry and disappointed in this new world. Their anger could either
be directed towards the dead, or towards whatever concept they
retained of God or the devil—it didn’t seem to matter, or even to
be separate in their minds—while their disappointment was most
keenly and consistently directed at the living. They remembered
each and every smile and kiss and embrace from the time before, and
they remembered every scream and gasp from when death shattered
that dream and robbed them of every hope and love they had ever
had. And they never forgave, it seemed—not the dead, not the
living, and most especially, not themselves. Both the older and the
younger tried to love their pain away, but this seemed to be even
less successful than it was with my parents’ generation. My parents
had lost the future as they had hoped or expected it would be, so
they clung sadly to the past. People like Will saw both the future
and the past as empty, meaningless, and painful—a broken promise
from a cruel stepmother, a betrayed vow from a wanton and faithless
lover—and they often lived just in the present, taking risks,
snatching at small pleasures, seldom speaking or getting close to
others. Or so it seemed to me then.
It was not surprising that Will began to accompany
Milton into the wilderness to help round up the dead, though he
hardly seemed to get the kind of satisfaction from this job that
Milton did, and of course it was much more dangerous for him, since
he didn’t have Milton’s immunity to the ever-hungry corpses. For
Milton it was a service both to the community and to the zombies,
or as he called them, “our dead brothers and sisters.” For Will, it
was an escape from the living, to be among a group for which he had
no more affection, but which were, in a way, much better company
for him, for they were quiet, unquestioning, uncomprehending, and
most of all—so long as one could avoid their hideous and voracious
jaws—utterly undemanding. Perhaps it was for the best, though I
still wonder if it was either necessary or good for Will to spend
so much time among the living dead.
The other thing that makes memories not so funny in
the humorous way is that sometimes people hide their memories from
you, even if those memories involve you directly. I’ve found this
with my mom and dad. I’ve always—as far back as I can
remember—noticed that my dad looks at me differently than my mom
does. With her, the love is not only unrestrained, it’s exuberant
and inquisitive and joyful. With him, though his gaze was always as
unconditional and even passionate as hers, there was something
about it that was not exactly held back or guarded, but something
that expected and even wanted me to be cold and guarded and in
control—around everyone, but towards him most of all. My mom would
do anything to protect me; my dad would trust me to protect him or
anyone else. I’d say it was a father-daughter thing, except that
Jonah has always looked at me the same way as my dad does, so I’m
almost positive they know something about me or my biological dad
that no one else does.
It’s almost like they have treated me or expected me
to be like Milton, with a special power or insight, but I know I
don’t have that. I’ve seen the dead, and they look at me just like
they look at everyone else, with uncaring and uncontrollable
desire, and I get just as queasy and scared around them as anyone
else. I sometimes wished I could just ask my dad or Jonah what they
were thinking when they looked at me that way, but I always knew I
wouldn’t, I wasn’t sure they would tell me anyway, and I was pretty
sure that I didn’t want to know.