The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (28 page)

What else was I to think but that Malthusian was pulling my leg. “Do I look that gullible?” I said, and laughed so hard I spilled a drop of my wine on the table.

The old man did not so much as smile. “We had created a zombie,” he said. “You laugh, but you should be laughing at yourself. You do not realize how, without any of our work, the human mind is so perfectly suggestible. The words ‘obedience' and ‘to listen' share the same root in more than half a dozen languages. With our experiment, this man would do whatever he was told. The results even surprised us. I instructed him to learn fluent French in a week. He did. I instructed him to play a Chopin nocturne on the piano after only hearing it once. He did. I instructed him to develop a photographic memory. I commanded him to stop aging. At times, for the purpose of a particular assignment, I might instruct him to become fatter, thinner, even shorter.”

“Impossible,” I said.

“Nonsense,” said Malthusian. “It has been known for some time now that the mere act of deep thought can change the physiological structure of the brain. If only my colleagues and I could publish our findings, others would also know that prolonged, highly focused thought is capable of transforming the physiological structure of more than just the brain.”

It was obvious to me at this time that Malthusian's illness had affected his mind. I put on a serious face and pretended to follow along, exhibiting a mixed sense of wonder and gravity.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” I asked.

“Why, yes, why,” he said, and, more astonishing than his tale, tears began to form at the corners of his eyes. “The zombie had been useful. Please don't ask me specifically how, but let us just say that his work resulted in the diminution of agitators against democracy. But then, with the end of the Cold War, our project was disbanded. We were ordered to eliminate the zombie and set fire to the facility, and we were given large sums of cash to resume normal life—with the threat that if we were to breathe a word about Dumbwaiter to anyone, we would be killed.”

“Eliminate the zombie?” I said.

He nodded. “But I had pangs of conscience. My own God was talking to me. This man, whom we had hollowed out and filled with my commands, had been kidnapped. Just an average healthy citizen with a wife and small child had been taken off the street one day by men in a long dark car. His loved ones never knew what had become of him. Likewise, I had made a deal to never see my family again when I promised to work on Dumbwaiter. I disappeared after my parents and sister were brought to this country. For me to contact them in any way would mean their demise. I have missed them terribly through the years, especially my sister with whom I had a strong bond after surviving the horrors of the old country. For this reason, I could not dispose of the zombie.”

“That would be murder,” I said, and instantly regretted it.

“It would have been murder either way,” said Malthusian. “Either I killed the subject or they killed us
and
our subject. Instead, I took a chance and left to the ravages of the fire a cadaver we had on ice there for many years. We hoped that no one was aware of it, that if a body was found in the ashes that would be enough to suffice. Remember, this is the government we are talking about. We had worked for them long enough to know that their main priority was silence.” Malthusian went silent, nodding his head upon his chest. I thought for a second that he had fallen asleep. When I cleared my throat, he reached for the wine but stopped. He did the same with the cigarette case. Then he looked up at me.

“I'm dying,” he said.

“This very moment?” I asked.

“Soon, very soon.”

“Did they tell you that at the hospital?”

“I'm a doctor. I know.”

“Is there something you need me to do? Do you want me to contact your sister?” I asked.

“No, you must not mention any of this. But there is something I want you to do,” he said.

“Call the ambulance?”

“I want you to take care of the zombie until the transformation is complete.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, and smiled.

“He's here with me, in the house. He has been with me all along since we burned the lab.” Malthusian dropped the cane on the floor, leaned forward on the table and reached for me with his left hand.

I pushed the chair back and stood away from the table to avoid his grasp.

“I've been working with him, trying to reverse the affects of the experiment. The change has begun, but it will take a little longer than I have left to complete it. You must help me return this poor man to his family so that he can enjoy what is left of his life. He is beginning to remember a thing or two and the aging process is slowly starting to return him to his rightful maturity. If I should die, I require you to merely house him until he remembers where he is from. It won't take very long now.”

“Dr. Malthusian,” I said. “I think you need to rest. You are not making any sense.”

The old man slowly stood up. “You will wait!” he yelled at me, holding his arm up and pointing with one finger. “I will get him.”

I said nothing more, but watched as Malthusian precariously leaned over to retrieve his cane. Then he hobbled out of the room, mumbling something to himself. When I heard him mounting the stairs to the second floor, I tiptoed out of the kitchen, down the hall, and out the front door. I reached the street and started running like I was ten years old.

Later, in bed, after locking all the doors and windows, I woke Susan up and told her everything that Malthusian had said. When I got to the part about the zombie, she started laughing.

“He wants you to baby-sit his zombie?” she asked.

“It's not funny,” I said. “He worked for some secret branch of the government.”

“That's the one all the kooks work for,” she said. “You're a man with way too much time on his hands.”

“He was pretty convincing,” I said, now grinning myself.

“What if I told you they were putting Frankenstein together in the basement of the hospital? If he's not crazy, he's probably playing with your mind. He seems to have a healthy measure of mischief about him. That string tie is a good indicator.”

I wasn't completely convinced, but Susan allayed my fears enough to allow me to get to sleep. My dreams were punctuated by wide-eyed stares and piano music.

I forced myself to believe that Susan was right, and that I had better ignore Malthusian and get to work on my book. Summer was quickly approaching and soon autumn would send me back to teaching. It would be a great embarrassment to return to work in September empty-handed. I picked up where I had left off months earlier on the manuscript—a chapter concerning “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The return to work was what I needed to anchor me against the tide of Malthusian's weirdness, but that particular story by the great American hoaxer, second only to P. T. Barnum, had
zombie
written all over it.

One afternoon, when I was about to leave the house to go to the local bookstore, I looked out the front window and saw the old man slowly shuffling up the street. I had neither seen nor heard from Malthusian since the night I had abandoned him in his fit of madness two weeks prior. It would have been a simple thing to leave the living room and hide in the kitchen, but instead I quickly ducked down beneath the sill. As I crouched there, I wondered at the fear I had developed for my neighbor.

Five minutes went by, and when I thought he should have passed on to where the woods began at the end of the block, I raised my head above the windowsill. There he was, standing at the curb, hunched over, staring directly at me like some grim and ghastly bird of yore. I uttered a brief, startled gasp, and as if he could hear me, he brought the top of his cane up and tapped it lightly against the brim of his Tyrolean hat. Then he turned and moved off.

This little scene threw me into a panic. I never went to the bookstore, and when it was time for Lyda to get out of school, I drove over and picked her up instead of letting her take the bus, which would have left her off at the corner. My panic was shortlived, for that evening, at dinner, as I was about to describe the event to Susan, we heard the ambulance.

It is sad to say, but Malthusian's death was a relief to me. Lyda and I watched from a distance as they brought him out on the wheeled stretcher. Susan, who was afraid of nothing, least of all death, walked over to his house and spoke to the EMTs. She was not there long when we saw her begin walking back.

“Massive heart attack,” she said as she approached, shaking her head.

“That's a shame,” I said.

Lyda put her arm around my leg and hugged me.

The next morning, while I was wandering around the house looking for inspiration to begin working on Poe again, I discovered that Lyda had draped a silk purple flower, plucked from Susan's dining-room table arrangement, around the neck of Rat Fink. The sight of this made me smile, and as I reached out to touch the smooth illusion of the blossom, I was interrupted by a knocking at the door. I left my daughter's room and went downstairs. Upon opening the front door, I discovered that there was no one there. As I stood, looking out, I heard the knocking sound again. It took me a few long seconds to adjust to the fact that the sound was coming from the back of the house.

“Who knocks at the back door?” I said to myself as I made my way through the kitchen.

3

His eyes were the oval disks of Japanese cartoon characters, glassy and brimming with nothing. Like the whiteness of Melville's whale, you could read anything into them, and while Lyda and I sat staring at him staring at the wall, I projected my desires and frustrations into those mirrors with a will I doubt Ahab could have mustered.

“A blown Easter egg,” said Lyda, breaking the silence.

And in the end, she was right. There was an exquisite emptiness about him. His face was drawn, his limbs thin but wiry with real muscle. He looked like a fellow who might at one time have worked as a car mechanic or a UPS delivery man. I guessed his age to be somewhere in the late thirties but knew, from what Malthusian had suggested, that his youth was merely compliance to a command. I wondered how old he would become when the spell was broken.
Perhaps, like Valdemar in Poe's story
, I thought,
he will eventually be reduced to a pool of putrescence
.

We had been sitting with the zombie for over an hour when Susan finally arrived home from work. Lyda got up from her seat and ran into the living room to tell her mother that we had a visitor.

“Guess who?” I heard her ask. She led Susan by the hand into the kitchen.

Upon discovering our guest, the first word out of her mouth was, “No.” It wasn't like the shriek of a heroine being accosted by a creature in the horror movies. This was the
no
of derailed late-night amorous advances, a response to Lyda's pleading to stay up till eleven on a school night.

“Let's be sensible about this,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

“Call the police,” said Susan.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “The very fact that he is here, proves that what Malthusian told me was all true. We'd be putting our lives in danger.”

“Go play,” Susan said to Lyda.

“Can the zombie play?” she asked.

“The zombie has to stay here,” I said, and pointed toward the kitchen entrance.

When Lyda was gone, Susan sat down at the table and she and I stared at him some more. His breathing was very shallow and, with the exception of this subtle movement of his chest, he sat perfectly still. There was something very relaxing about his presencè.

“This is crazy,” she said to me. “What are we going to do with him?”

“Malthusian said he would soon remember where he was from, and that we should take him to his home whenever the memory of it became clear to him.”

“Can't we just drive him somewhere and let him out of the car?” asked Susan. “We'll leave him off in the parking lot at the mall.”

“You wouldn't do that with a cat, but you would abandon a human being?” I said.

She shook her head in exasperation. “Well, what does he do? It doesn't look like much is becoming clear to him,” she said.

I turned to the zombie and said, “What is your name?”

He didn't move.

Susan reached over and snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Hey, Mister Zombie, what should we call you?”

“Wait a second,” I said. “He doesn't answer questions, he responds to commands.”

“Tell me your name,” Susan said to him.

The zombie turned his head slightly toward her and began to slowly move his lips. “Tom,” he said, and the word sort of fell out of his mouth, flat and dull as an old coin.

Susan brought her hand up to cover a giggle. “Tommy the zombie,” she said.

“Pathetic,” I said, and couldn't suppress my own laughter even though there were shadowed entities at large in the world who might engineer our demise.

We had never had so unassuming a house guest. Tom was like that broom standing in the kitchen closet until you need it. The novelty of performance upon command soon wore off. Sure, we got a little mileage out of the stage hypnotist antics—“Bark like a dog,” “Act like a chicken.” I know it sounds a bit unfeeling, but we did it, I suppose, simply because we could, similar in spirit to the whim of the government that originally engineered the poor man's circumstance. Lyda put an end to this foolishness. She lectured us about how we should respect him. We were embarrassed by her words, but at the same time pleased that we had raised such a caring individual. As it turned out, she had a real affection for the zombie. He was, for Lyda, the puppy we would not let her have.

It was not difficult remembering to command him to go to the bathroom twice a day, or to eat, or shower. What was truly hard was keeping him a secret. We all swore to each other that we would tell no one. Susan and I were afraid that Lyda, so completely carried away by her new friend, might not be able to contain herself at school. Think of the status one would reap in the third grade if it were known you had your own zombie at home. Throughout the ordeal, she proved to be the most practical, the most caring, the most insightful of all of us.