“You must be hungry,” I said to her, eyeing her slim calves as she walked past me through the den. I held out half of my sandwich.
“I’m okay,” she replied, one arm weighed down by the bucket, the other dragging a broom behind her. “I’ll start upstairs,” she said and lugged the stuff up the steps, her face flat and serious, the enormous bulge of her belly straining against her shirt, which was already darkened with sweat down the front. I chewed and watched her disappear up the stairs. Shreds of lettuce spilled out the sides of my sandwich. A slice of pickled jalapen?o smacked the hardwood floor. I left it there and ate, happily. It was deadly quiet in that house without the television on. I could hear the toilet flush, the girl grunt and breathe, the scrub brush scrape rhythmically against the bathroom tile. I gulped my soda down, burped with my mouth open wide. I wrapped up the dinner half of my sandwich and set it aside.
Then I took out my zombie dust. I figured I could just test it to see what the zombies had chosen for me that day, a sneak preview of what I had in store. Later, once the girl was gone, it would be nice to take a shower, walk through the clean house, silent and fresh, and sit at the coffee table in my bathrobe with a rolled-up dollar bill. I’d let my soul fly wherever the stuff sent me until it got dark and I remembered the sandwich and the world down below. My mouth watered just imagining it. My hands got hot. That was the best part, that moment, anticipating miracles. But when I uncrinkled the foil and peeled back the plastic wrap, what I found was not magic powder but a cluster of clouded, butter-colored crystals. The hard stuff, I thought, agog. Upstairs there was a loud thud. I put the stuff down on the table and listened.
“You okay?” I hollered, still staring down at the crystals.
“Yeah, I’m all right,” the girl answered. The scrub brush started up again slowly.
What was the meaning of those crystals? They had appeared only once before, with Clark that first summer in Alna. I was still new to the zombies then, still afraid of them. My walks up Riverside with Clark were fraught with nervous thrills. The bus station had been out of operation for a few decades—fake-wood-veneer benches and an old soda-vending machine, empty windows, faded ads with Smokey Bear admonishing smokers and Hillside Church offering day care and asking for charity. Occasionally teenagers would skateboard around, hopping up with a frightening rumble and clack onto the counters at the old ticket windows. The men’s toilets were in back, through a short maze of brick riddled with graffiti. A few zombies were stationed back there, sitting on sinks or squatting on the floor, their wolf dogs tied to a pipe in the wall, panting. The zombie in charge sat in a stall with the door swung halfway open. Silently he took our money and handed over the goods. His fingers were huge and cracked and red, black creases lining his palm, his nails thick and yellow. I hid my face under my hair, lurked and cowered next to Clark, masking myself in false subservience. The zombies saw through all that. They saw everything. But I was clueless still. I was a foreigner. I didn’t know their customs. I got more comfortable as time went on, of course. And then once Clark was out of the picture, I was forced to go alone. The zombies rarely lifted their gaze above my waistline. Theirs was a solid, grounding, animal attitude. Each time I met them in the bathroom I felt I was walking in naked, as if I were some pilgrim approaching a saint. I offered ten dollars and I received my blessing.
When the crystals had appeared for me and Clark all those years before, I had been honored, moved even. It felt like some kind of rite of passage, a sacrament. But when Clark saw the crystals, he crushed the foil back up and jammed the stuff down the front pocket of his jeans.
“What are you going to do with it, Clark?” I asked.
“Flush it, at my house” was his brilliant reply.
Whatever lame affection I had left for Clark was smashed in that instant—it was obvious he was trying to deceive me. I suppose those crystals worked to save me from really getting attached to the man. Such was the magic wisdom of the zombies.
“What’s wrong with my house? Flush it here,” I insisted.
“I could flush it here,” he murmured.
“So flush it.” But Clark just sat there, stroking his beard and staring at the television as if the opening credits of Will & Grace had hypnotized him, as if he’d become one of the zombies.
“Ahem.”
“What?” he asked.
“Give it back,” I said, elbowing him in the knees.
“Trust me,” he whispered. “This stuff rots your brains.” He stood up, scratching his head, his armpit a rat’s nest of hair flecked with white gunk from his antiperspirant. “I’m going home,” he said. “I’m tired.”
I let him go then. I didn’t argue. He tried to kiss me good-bye but I turned my face away. I spent the rest of the day bored in front of the television, pining, furious, confused. I tried to go upstairs and scrape the leftover wallpaper in the bathroom, but it was no use. The next morning I went to the zombies alone and received the usual stuff. When Clark called in the afternoon, I told him I needed some time to myself. I sniffed my magic powders while he blubbered an apology that sounded like all his lame professions—foolishly sincere.
? ? ?
After cleaning my bedroom, the girl trudged slowly down the stairs. I’d been lying on the sofa reading a teen magazine left behind by one of the tenants. I stared at articles that told me how to “live my dreams,” “score total independence,” and “make more $$$.” I can’t say exactly what I thought I’d do with the crystals. I’d seen movies about people smoking crack out of little glass pipes. I could fashion something, I thought, but I was scared I’d mess it up. I imagined dissolving the crystals like rock sugar in a mug of herbal tea, or grinding them like sea salt over a bowl of canned tomato soup. But I wasn’t sure ingesting the stuff that way would work. And what if it did? I still had a life back down in the city, after all. There were certain realities I had to face. I couldn’t handle real oblivion. I just wanted a vacation. So I had some doubts. I had some misgivings.
I’d been rolling the little nest of foil between my fingers, pondering all this, as I stared at the magazine. When I heard the stairs creak, I sat up and stuck the stuff back in the pocket of my shorts.
“Hot up there,” I heard the girl say.
Her pretty, gleaming calves appeared between the rungs of the banister as she came down the steps. She’d folded the cuffs of her leggings up above her knees, which were red from kneeling on the floor. When her thighs appeared, I saw a black stain of blood at her crotch. She seemed not to know that she was bleeding. There was no way she could have seen the blood past the mountain of her belly, I suppose. She gripped the bucket with one hand and the railing with the other as she descended the stairs.