Zombies vs. Unicorns (18 page)

Justine
: Maureen Johnson’s brain does not work like that of most people. Possibly because it’s already infected. Consider this story a report from the inside and a warning to begin your search for a zombie-proof abode NOW. Stock it well!

Holly
: One of the things I find particularly upsetting about zombies is the idea of being trapped in your own head, unable to think clearly, but still conscious. Forever. It’s pretty much the worst thing I can think of—ugh. Just writing about it makes me shudder.

Justine
: Once again, I thank you, Holly, for pointing out further awesome aspects to writing about zombies. While, yes, I do, indeed, love zombies qua zombies, it’s also true that they are the most resonantly powerful metaphor of all time.

By Maureen Johnson
 

Maybe I really should have guessed the moment I saw the children and the room they were kept in. Sure, there’s no way I could have known what was
specifically
going on … only a lunatic could have guessed what was
specifically
going on … but something was clearly wrong with the picture.

The room was a child’s wonderland. What had once been formal dining rooms and sitting rooms and reception rooms had been turned into one massive, long room, separated only by bits of load-bearing walls or massive fireplaces that could not be removed. The walls and ceiling had been painted to look like a blue sky, full of cartoonish clouds. The wood floors had been covered by colorful squares of heavy foam rubber and carpet. At the far end there was a full-size jungle gym, complete with a purple and red tube slide and a small ball pen. There was a fake tree that rose all the way to the ceiling, with a tree house and a swing. There was a book nook, and a play kitchen with plastic pots and pans. There was a section for throwing balls. Televisions were mounted high on the walls. In one corner there were five little beds—a little race car, one that looked like a plastic castle, one that looked like a rocket, one that was covered in sparkles, and one designed to look like a half-moon in a puddle of starry sky. There was everything needed to keep small children very
happy. The enormous windows had clearly been treated with something to keep out prying eyes, and were barred for safety.

The whole thing was sealed off by an extraordinary baby gate—about five feet of a clear fine mesh of very strong plastic, clamped from wall to wall. The mesh was as tall as the average adult and was soft and strong enough to take any assault a child could inflict upon it. A wayward ball had gotten loose, and their mother tossed it softly over the top of the gate.

“I can’t really take them outside,” the woman explained, “so I tried to bring the outside in.”

They certainly looked like they needed a little outside time. Their lips were all very dry, their eyes all very milky. Their skin had no luster. I was prepared to blame almost anything on England at that point, but these kids … It wasn’t just the bad weather. They moved like toddlers, even though they were older than that and should have had more of the easy grace of kindergartners. They needed the vitamin D of the sun. They needed to run and play and get a healthy glow and some coordination.

“They come from all different countries,” their mother went on. “None of them are native English speakers. They know a few words. They’re learning. Watch. Everyone! Look at mommy! Listen to mommy.”

Five little heads turned. The one closest, a girl started to drool. A long strand of saliva loosened from her mouth.

“Mommy has to go on a trip. A very short trip. Mommy has to go to London, just for a day. Just for a day.”

This brought a collective noise of interest from the children.

“It’s all right, it’s all right. Look at the nice friend mommy
has brought to stay with you! Isn’t she nice? Isn’t she pretty? You like her, don’t you?”

The children all examined me with baffled stares.

“Ugggnnhhhhhh?” asked the oldest boy, pointing at me. It seemed a little judgmental to my ears.

“Yes,” said their mother, who apparently understood this. “This is Sofie. You like her!”

One of the girls stumbled and fell over for no reason at all. She hit the ground with a solid thump, but the thick rubber easily cushioned the fall. She pushed herself back up, and promptly fell again.

So, yeah. I should have known that these were not normal children. But I thought, Celebrity children. Well, they’re just different. You can’t apply the same standards you apply to regular children. And though they were clearly not doing well, I guess the voices in my brain were telling me that these kids had dietitians and had spent a lot of their short lifetimes on private aircraft (that has to mess with your inner ear balance), and maybe that’s just what being really rich looks like.

But there was another voice in my head—a quieter one, way in the back, telling me to leave, to get out of the house and away from them, to go back into the rain, to hitchhike to London or starve or even just call home.

While I can still assign blame, I want to make sure you know this was
all Franklin’s fault.
…

Come to England, he said. We will have a romantic summer together picking berries on an organic farm, he said. Wild
ponies roam free around the farm, he said. Imagine us with our organic berries surrounded by the beautiful wild ponies, he said. We will read to each other, he said. We will write long letters in real handwriting, he said. We will enjoy the quiet and fresh air and be together all the time, he said. Learn to live, he said. Look at this website I found, he said.

The website talked about the free room and board on the farm. Three square organic meals a day in the fecund countryside. It presented images of an ecologically friendly, healthy, progressive wonderland with a house full of people from many countries. It showed pictures of carrots and berries and ponies and little English towns and a big English fireplace with a roaring fire.
This
is where Franklin wanted us to go to be together.

Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are on to something deep. You see only deep brown wavy hair and strong legs, well honed by years of Ultimate Frisbee. You see that book of T. S. Eliot poems held by the hand with the long, graceful fingers, and you never stop to think that it shouldn’t take half a semester to read one book of poems … that maybe he is not so much reading as getting really high every morning and sleeping it off on the library steps, forcing the people who actually go to class to step or trip over him.

At least if you are me. Looking back, I made a number of bad decisions that now seem glaringly obvious. But that’s hindsight for you.

I mean, I was a freshman at college, overwhelmed, with too little sleep and an experimental haircut and a bipolar roommate and little to no idea what I was doing with my life. I was out of my depth with Franklin—a beautiful junior, so very dreamy eyed. (Again, I know what that means now.) We met when I basically fell over him on my way out of the library, which led to three weeks of I-fell-for-you jokes that he laughed at every time. (This is because he was very, very high and had no memory of my telling them before, and also he laughed at everything, including sneezes and radiators and doorknobs and long silences.)

I guess I was just a little too easily impressed with people that seem beyond me socially. I mean, Franklin had been
an actual catalog model
for J.Crew when he was thirteen. I think you can maybe understand why it took me a few weeks to catch on to the fact that he was completely and totally full of shit, and that all of his ideas were bad. Specifically, I caught on when I was up to my ankles by the side of an English road weeks later, yanking reluctant blackberries out of a bush full of thorns that tore at my skin while cars whizzed by my back. Alone. In the misting rain.

See, what Franklin did not mention—or, more likely, did not know—was that “Come live and work on our organic farm in remote England this summer!” actually meant “Be our slaves, stupid students!” No one mentioned that the farmhouse was uninsulated and not really weatherproof, and that the huge fireplace was in the owner’s house. Our accommodation had no such fireplace. The roof leaked on the third floor, and the floors leaned and creaked, and the beds were World War II
surplus cots. The website didn’t convey the all-pervading damp and boredom, that it was the land of daily rain and sweaters in mid-June. That the owners were mean and cheap, that hot water was unknown, that there was no washing machine (except in their house, and they certainly weren’t sharing). That the nearest town was a mile and a quarter away down a road with no shoulder. That it was the land of godforsaken wild ponies that charged at you through the bushes when you were least expecting it, looking for apples in your pockets and hating you for not having them, butting you with their massive heads in retaliation.

And it was a land of absolutely no weed, which is probably why Franklin took off after two weeks—two utterly miserable weeks. Because a non-stoned Franklin was actually a grouchy, extremely lazy Franklin who made other people pick his berries while he sought out other ways of getting high. Then, one very wet day in the middle of the second week, he just dropped his plastic berry basket and said “I’m going to London. You can come if you want, but I’m not paying for you.”

Franklin had cash. I, however, did not. I had blown everything I had on the stupid ticket to England. I tried to explain this to Franklin, and he just said “Sorry” without sounding sorry at all. He put on his backpack and walked to town.

I was alone. My days were filled with watery organic vegetable soup and tasteless organic curry and mysterious organic mash. (What I would have given for solid food.) And then, of course, there was the death match for the berries themselves—the berries that came out of the hedgerows along the road.
I’m not even sure that the farmers
owned
these bushes. I suspect the bushes were wild and on public land, and the farmers were having us steal berries from the English government to fuel their fascist jam-making empire. Those who brought the most berries got the best rooms, the warmest blankets, the occasional cup of extra tea or ride to town to do laundry.

Every night, I thought about giving up and going home. I could fall on my parents’ mercy and beg them to pay the difference to get my ticket changed. But that would mean that every single thing I tried to do for the rest of my life would only bring trouble. “Remember that time you thought it was a good idea to run off to that stupid organic farm with that guy … What was his name?” they would ask. “And then he left and you were stuck there and we had to bail you out?” Oh, my parents had guessed that something like this would happen. They
always
thought my ideas would turn out badly. They had seen Franklin, and they knew.

No. It was unthinkable to run home. Sometimes it is worth any amount of suffering just to prevent giving your parents the opportunity to be right.

What I needed was some money, that was all. Then I could go to London too, and get a room with some people and a job somewhere. I could survive on just a little for a few weeks. Fuck Franklin. I could do this myself.

This is all I thought about, day and night, for a week after Franklin’s vanishing act. I walked to town every day, risking life and limb on the non-road, as English people in nice, warm cars, went to their homes. “Town” was about as depressing a place as
you could ever hope for—a booze shop, a betting shop, a pub full of old dudes, a knockoff “American Fried Chicken!” place, and a place to make copies.

Of all the places in town, the Laundromat was actually the best. Even though it was just cracked linoleum and a bunch of industrial washers and driers, it was warm and snug. The owner was an older man named George with a flushed red face who wore the same navy blue fleece every day. He kept a bowl of hard candies on the counter and was kind to all of the students on the farm. He knew the farm scam well, and he knew what the owners were up to. So he would let me come in every evening and use the rickety old computer in the corner, the one that was supposed to be for customers only. I used this to research my escape.

The one thing that was immediately clear was that it was going to be very hard to get a job in London. I wasn’t very qualified for anything that required a résumé, and for all the other jobs, you had to turn up in person to apply. Which was all part of the problem. Every night, I played this game with myself before walking home down the road with no shoulder, praying that I wouldn’t be hit. Or sometimes, that I
would
be.

One miserable, murky afternoon, as I worked my little blackberry patch, George’s rusty little car pulled up behind me.

“Hello!” he called cheerfully. “You making out all right there?”

“Not really,” I said.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said. “You know the big house up on the hill?”