In addition to the missing heartbeat, Stag doesn’t breathe, feel (other than his left eye), or need to eat. He’s a zombie.
Richard Stein said that a zombie is the star of a very low budget horror movie that can’t be killed and hates to come out during the day. Its favorite pastimes include the mindlessly gnawing of human brains with a group of companion zombies, moaning really loud, and taking very-very slow nature walks by the graveyard. But Stag is not the same as Richard Stein’s zombie. He’s just a dead person that is still alive. He’s not mindless and doesn’t care much for eating human brain.
Nan finds Gin rickety-smoking a cigarette on a nearby pile of granite, trying to straighten out his broken neck. She hears his neck snip-crack a bit, getting a better position; he sighs with relief. The sigh was queer to him, not a normal sigh of relief that comes naturally after fixing a problem. It was a forced sigh. This is because he doesn’t breathe anymore. He can force himself to breathe if he wants to, but he doesn’t need to in order to survive. For Gin, breathing is completely voluntary now. He can go weeks without taking a breath and without even realizing that he hasn’t taken a breath.
Nan squats next to him on a cardboard log and asks, “What happened?”
“I was killed,” he answers.
“What — how could you be killed?”
“Stag and I got in a car accident and died.”
She laughs. “What are you? A zombie?”
“Yes.” He puts her hand on his heart. “No heartbeat,” he says.
Ripping her hand back, she shivers a laugh. It is funny to her.
“You’re cold,” her voice giggling-drunk.
“Not completely,” he says, serious.
“Does that make me a necrophiliac?”
“Stop.”
His hippie-sorrow eyes drool into her, and she feels his hurting. Please-please, she senses him say. Nan holds him. All he can hear is her awkwardness.
Lenny arrives to repeat, “Stag’s dead,” purple-wide face, stutters.
Gin answers, “Yeah, so am I.”
“How can you be dead if you’re walking around?” Lenny asks.
“I don’t know. I’ve never been dead before.”
“Stag isn’t walking around,” Lenny says.
Gin says, “Maybe he is asleep.”
“No, he’s dead. His skull is broken.”
They go back to the autocar to find Stag.
“I’ll show you,” Zombie Gin says… But Stag isn’t there once they arrive.
“He was here,” Lenny says, adjusting his nerdy-wear glasses.
“Are you sure he was, Lenny?” Nan asks, holding onto Gin to warm his blood.
“Of course I am,” answers Lenny. “What did he do? Just get up and walk away with a collapsed skull?”
“Yes,” Gin says coldly, scratching his left eye.
I go to my body.
A handwritten sign says, “Satan Burger, 2 miles.”
“It’s a pretty long drive for food,” Mort comments.
I look through the windows at the moon. It isn’t our original moon. We lost the original moon in ’72. Well, we didn’t lose it. The moon lost itself. It forgot its way around the Earth, probably because of its Alzheimer’s or maybe it was committing suicide to save itself from the oblivion that Alzheimer’s would cause. It strayed from its usual path, breaking from its orbit, sinking into infinite soot, through millions of tiny white dots — pinholes in black construction paper held up to a light. And we never heard from it again.
Now we have a new moon.
We had to build it ourselves out of concrete. It wasn’t an easy job. Making colossal molds, miles and miles high — a pain in the ass. It was a titanic ball of white, larger than mountains, but not as BIG as the original. To solve the size difference, it had to be launched into a new orbit, placed closer to the Earth, so that it would appear to be the same size as the original.
Sometimes I look at pictures of the old moon. There’s not too many differences, except that the sponsors who paid for the new moon insisted on putting their logos all over the surface. But it’s better to have a corporate moon than none at all.
The world was miserable without its moon: that’s what my ex-father told me. He said the night skies were empty-dark. So dark that more streetlights had to be made and people owned a dozen flashlights each.
Back then, romance seemed foolish without a moonlit night; not that anyone cares for romance anymore, but I heard it was a BIG thing back then. And the astronauts that went to the original moon felt really stupid for wasting their time on a sphere that no longer exists.
They thought the poetic words, “One giant leap for mankind,” should’ve been used somewhere else.
Scene 6
The Queen of Darkness
It is now the period between day and night where the sky is dark blue and silky cold. Normally, the sky’s condition would not be considered strange, but after three minutes of driving, the sky went from pitch night to almost morning. Even though it’s only 3 a.m.
I come to the conclusion that this side of town is closer to the sun than our side, so the day here arrives earlier than what I’m used to.
Vodka drives without noticing the sky change. He is within a small cotton ball cloud, which is his go-away place. A go-away place is the place where your mind goes when it is tired of being on Earth. Normally, it is a comfortable place where you can sleep and relax and forget all your worries. Sometimes it’s a fantasy world that is more interesting than real life. It may not be less laborious, but it is less boring.
It’s not hard getting to your go-away place, but coming back can be hard. One side effect of not coming back very often is having difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. That’s what Richard Stein said. In his history book, he talks about his cousin, Anne, who was committed to an institution because she couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. They called her insane. An institution was once a place where they cared for people like this, but nobody cares enough to care for anyone anymore, so insane people are now in the streets and institutions are places where new people find refuge after coming out of the walm.
My go-away place is almost impossible to leave. Luckily, I don’t go there often enough to lose touch with my sanity. I call it Sleepyland. It’s a place where dozens of naked people are piled together inside a moist fruit cellar, doing nothing but sleeping lustfully on top of each other. This doesn’t seem like much, but it is complete comfort to me. Sleepyland is so hard to leave because the fruit cellar chemicals make you feel drugged-drowsy and stiff-shanked, so all you do is sleep and dream, which makes it hard to get back to reality.
To get out of Sleepyland you have to: first, get woken up by one of the sleeping nudes who inhabit the sleepy land, and second, you have to be taken out of your head by someone in reality before you fall asleep in Sleepyland again. You can never get out all by yourself. You need to go there when a friend is nearby who has the ability of waking you; and inside of sleepy land, you should sleep next to someone who snores or rolls around a lot. Actually, it’s better not to go at all.
We see a BIG sign ahead:
The street is no brighter than before, but now it’s grayed misty. An early post-rain morning, cold and calm, the whole city asleep. Well, besides one car and one business. It’s still around 3:00 a.m. on an Erdaday — the eighth day of the week.