Should come as no surprise that I stopped in my tracks, blocking the door to the office, and that Roger crashed into the back of me.
Should come as no surprise, though I feel awful about it, that Roger became the outlet for this rage, and that before anyone could register that we were in the doorway or that Roger had said, “Hey, Jonnie, what’s the holdup?” before Barbara had the chance to even notice I was there, I turned, grabbed Roger, poor Roger, grabbed him fiercely by the throat, my gray knuckles white from the force of my exertions on his windpipe, which was crushed almost immediately, grabbed hold of him, lifted him off his feet, marched him back toward the elevator, which hadn’t closed yet, and threw him inside. Nobody noticed me do this at all. Except for maybe Roger, though by all rights he didn’t feel this, didn’t experience this or the tearing of limb from limb, didn’t feel the bloody evisceration of himself, didn’t feel anything at all, which is small comfort, I know, which is almost no comfort at all, not for Roger, certainly, and not for the part of me trying so desperately hard to be someone other than who I am.
It’s a fine line. It’s a tightrope. It’s a balancing act. I’m perched atop a thin, wobbly fence.
Have I fallen off the fence? Have I stepped off the line, slipped from my rope? I could say I’m barely hanging on, that I’m holding on by a thread. I could say I’m hanging in there. But to look at Roger, or what’s left of him, to look at what’s left of Roger, I would say that I’m now, no matter your metaphor, no longer hanging or perched or balanced, but am standing firmly on solid ground.
Don’t assume that I don’t understand the difficulty inherent in trying to control what we cannot control or that I haven’t considered the difficulties that everyday people face or that I haven’t thought about the ways in which I am lucky, luckier than Barbara or Mark or Roger, that I haven’t taken into account the fact that we are not really so different, or that I don’t see Barbara’s difficulties for what they are or how they compare to my own, that I don’t understand how hard it can be to keep our baser selves in check or how much easier it is, ultimately, to go back to the evil we know and understand, the evil we have lived with for so long that it feels an inherent and important part of ourselves, to go back to this evil and tell ourselves that we had no other choice, that we didn’t opt for this decision, but that really there were never any other options for us to take. I know about choices and about not having choices and how it feels when it seems you have no other choice. Don’t assume that I wasn’t sympathetic to Barbara, to the choices she was making with Mark.
I was. I am. Sympathetic, but also concerned. I’m concerned about the choices she’s making and worried that she is blind to the host of other choices out there available to her. And it dawns on me as I am cleaning up the mess of Roger — the seventh floor is, serendipitously, for lease and occupantless — that I also have choices, that in this moment, I am faced with more options than I have felt faced with in too long of a time for me to remember. And it dawns on me, too, that for the first time there is a choice amid all of these other choices that is perfectly suited to me, to all of me, to the me that cares about Barbara and her well-being, and to the other me that cares about so very little.
Perfectly suited to both of us.
As I survey the mess I made of Roger, there is a persistent voice in my head repeating, over and over again, “Let him rise, let him rise.” The voice is saying, “Horde, an army horde of us,” and it’s saying, “Let him rise,” and before that voice can take firm hold of me, I find a thin, sharp metal tray left here by the floor’s last occupants and I press it hard against Roger’s neck, hard and harder and harder still, until I sever through.
The point of this exercise being this: The mystical properties aside, our regenerative abilities and single-minded pursuit aside, zombies, even zombies, require heads.
There was a time, a long stretch of time, when it was all I wanted to do, create a horde, not an army horde, exactly, but a gathering, or not even that many, not even a gathering, but even just one, just one more. It was a trial and error process — more specifically, a process full of error. Not that the creation of other zombies is a complicated process, that process itself hinging almost entirely on biting, which is my most natural impulse. No, the actual creation of zombies worked once I got the hang of it, worked in the way that I understood how much damage the body could take and still become infected, be lifted back up, given breath, life, some semblance of cognition. But then, it never worked in that what I helped to create was never what I hoped to create.
What should I have expected, though? What was the best I could have hoped for, really? One monster bringing to life a second, a third, a tenth monster?
In hindsight, the endeavor was doomed to fail from the beginning.
Still, if I can be honest with you, if we can speak honestly about this, if I can tell you exactly what I felt during that long stretch of time, what I felt every time a new one came to life, lifted itself to uncertain feet, stumbled back a few steps, then saw me and then lunged for me, only to realize it would get nothing more from me, and then ignored me and everything I said to it, looked past me as if I didn’t exist, as if I hadn’t just that moment brought it to life, and then stumbled off into the night in search of some living morsel, what I felt was this: envy.
Envy and desire.
Envy and desire and power.
But never satisfaction. I never felt satisfaction, not even the satisfaction of a job well done, which is such a small kind of satisfaction that it’s the kind of satisfaction that I get from submitting my salary sourcing reports on time.
But no matter. It’s no matter to me at all. It’s not a point I wish to belabor. I’m not the kind to dwell. I’m not the kind to say that things are unfair even when things are unfair. We are dealt our hand in this life, and we can only do with it what we can is more the kind of thing I’m known to say. We are given opportunities, and we have to know when these opportunities come around so we can take advantage of them is another.
And what I have now is an opportunity, what I have now is a chance. This is the thought on my mind, what’s going through my head as I look at Roger and then leave him, or what’s left of him. This is what’s in my head as I make my way back to my office, back to the twelfth floor. And because opportunity is fleeting, because chances like this don’t come around every day of your life, because when an opportunity such as this presents itself, you want to take advantage of it quickly, as quickly as possible, because of all of this, I take the elevator back to our offices, not the stairs.
It isn’t large-scale change I’m hoping to effect. It isn’t the grand course of human events that I want to influence, but just one person, just one woman, just the life of one woman. And as I wait outside our office, around the corner from our office, hidden by the potted ficus next to the elevators, it’s her I am thinking of, her and her alone.
I wait for what seems an inconceivably long time. I wait for what feels like hours. I wait and wait and wait, but still, I am focused. My mind is focused on this new decision I’ve made, this new direction my life will take.
And when he finally turns the corner, I smile. For the first time in a long, long time, I smile in the way that someone who knows what he’s doing smiles. I smile the way a man who knows what’s going to happen next, who knows what his place in this life is meant to be, smiles. In that way, I smile.