Passing Strange

  “Your mother…your mother took your death very personally, Karen. You have to understand that.”

  “My suicide, you mean.” I said. I don’t know that I’d ever said the word to him before.

  “Yes. Your suicide.”

  I know he’s never used the word in front of me before. The word, in our house, was like one of those really awful words that couldn’t be said on network television and would get you an instant R rating in the movies. A word with impact. A whispered word. The weird thing is, it hurt me when I said it, but it made me feel better when he said it. I don’t know. I guess I took it as another sign that he was starting to come to terms.

  “You have to know, Karen,” he said, “that your suicide is something that we, your mother and I, are having a very difficult time understanding. Never mind accepting.”

  He held up his hand before I could speak. “Let me finish. I know, intellectually, that we’re not to blame. My brain knows, but I don’t know if my heart ever will. I might know that the things you did, before you died, weren’t really a reflection on me as a father. I may know that I didn’t cause you to be suicidal.

  But I’ll never, ever know if I had been there for you more, had watched and listened and cared more, that things might not have ended when and how they did. If I’d just paid more attention, maybe I’d have seen the signs and gotten you some help.”

  Watching him cry was not easy, especially since I could tell he was trying as hard as he could to control himself, probably out of some misguided notion that it would heap trauma upon trauma for me to see him cry.

  As painful and harrowing as it was, there was a part of me, the part that still wanted to live, that was glad he was crying. My parents had never mourned in front of me.

  “I’ve read stacks of books on suicide since you died,” he continued. “Articles, journals, notes.” Here he paused to blow his nose. “Time that I probably should have spent reading about zombies. Or time I should have spent just being with you.”

  He wasn’t able to regain his composure for some time after that last revelation. I almost hugged him then, but something held me back, some internal directive that said he really needed to work through all of this stuff before I could give him any type of physical expression of solace.

  “I hid the books from your mom for weeks, months, even. Then one day I found one in the magazine bin by the sofa in the living room, and I thought I’d slipped and left it out. But it wasn’t one I’d bought. Your mother was doing the same thing I was. We just didn’t talk about it.”

  As sad as that was, I felt a spark of happiness flare up in me. I’d thought my mother had written me off completely. That I was dead to her.

  “She…she won’t touch me, Dad.” I didn’t have to tell him that the last time I remembered her touching me is when I told her about Monica. It was the first and only time one of my parents hit me.

  “We’ve never talked about it. Your death, I mean,” he said. “I’m sorry if this is upsetting you. I think your mom will come around, but it may take time. There’s no mechanism inside a parent to deal with their child’s suicide, Karen,” he said. “Nothing at all. No way to prepare, no way to assimilate it or understand it or deal with it in any way.”

  “It wasn’t Mom’s fault, Dad. It was…” It was the depression, I wanted to tell him. The blue fog. My voice trailed away as he stood.

  “I just hope that you can forgive us.”

  “Forgive you?” I said. “Forgive you?”

  I kept saying it. Then we were hugging. I’m not sure who embraced who first, and in the end it doesn’t really matter, all I knew was that it felt good to have my Daddy’s arms around me again, even if the feeling wasn’t quite the same as before I killed myself.

  I called Pete. His answers on the phone were curt, monosyllabic. I asked him if he wanted to go out that night. He said he did.

  I met him at the top of the street. There was a single red rose on the passenger seat.

  “Is that for me?” I said, taking the flower. He nodded, solemnly.

  “I was worried about you,” he said. The weird thing is I think he really meant it. “I’m sorry,” I said. So maybe I’m a better liar than he is. “Are you okay? I heard you were sick.” Now that was creepy, because I didn’t tell anyone I was sick except for Craig. I didn’t want to think about him asking questions about me at work. “Let me guess,” I said. “He wouldn’t admit he had a Christie working for him, either.” Pete watched me closely. Thank heaven I only blink at will. “That’s right.” I nodded, smiling. “He lies to every guy that comes in asking for me,” I said. “He thinks it isn’t good for business.”

  “A lot of guys come in asking for you?”

  “Kind of. Don’t be jealous.”

  “Not the jealous type,” he answered. “But your boss is an idiot, because you’re probably the only reason anybody comes into that stupid store.”

  “Pete…”

  “So where have you been? Are you seeing someone else?”

  Good thing he isn’t the jealous type, I thought.

  “I needed some time away, Pete,” I said. “Things are moving kind of quickly for us and I needed to think.”

  “So have you been thinking?” The scar on his cheek was a vibrant red line; the muscles in his jaw clenched tight.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I need to see you,” I told him. “Only you.”

  I don’t know what made me look down at my wrist at that moment, but I noticed that sometime between slashing myself with the box cutter and lying to Pete, the cut had healed. I could see no trace of the wound, and it had been a deep one. It had been deep enough for me to sink the very long fingernail on my index finger all the way in. There was no scar, and I found myself comparing both wrists to see if I could spot a difference. I couldn’t.

  Pete and I went out that night, and again the two nights after that. Somehow I was able to avoid a dinner date, although Pete wanted to take me to one of the chain restaurants in Winford where all the foods are fried, and even the soft drinks taste like bacon. “No thanks, I’m already dead” would have been a really funny thing to say, but instead I just said I really wasn’t hungry.

  “You don’t have an eating disorder, do you?” he asked at one point during the thrilling first two weeks of our relationship. I think it was the only harsh thing he said to me the entire time we were going out—which makes him unique among people I’ve dated. The boys I’ve dated, I mean.

  We went to a movie. We drove around—Pete likes driving. We went bowling. I scored a forty-eight, and was so awful that it was probably the closest I came to blowing my cover as a zombie. We went sledding, and it was after the sledding date that he kissed me a second time. I tried to think of a volcano, a roaring fire, the heat of the sun, hoping that I could influence my own temperature. Maybe it worked. Or maybe I was like a rock that lined a campfire, absorbing and reflecting the heat I enclosed. We kissed for some time, and Pete never noticed that he was kissing a corpse.

  Me kissing Pete Martinsburg; what could be more revolting? At least my puffy coat made it easy to keep his hands outside.

  I had to kiss him to gain his trust, which, when I think about it, makes me feel just awful. And I’d made comments here and there about zombies during our dates, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I had no more information about the Guttridge murders than I had when he first came into my store at the mall, and I didn’t know anything about his plans for my friends. I needed to do something—something other than stringing him along and letting him kiss me—fast.

  I asked some questions about what his life was like at the One Life.

  “I was only there a couple weeks,” he said, grinning. “Even though it must have seemed like months for you. It’s just like school,” he said, “only spirituality is brought into all the subjects. All the classes are the same, except we also have a class in self-mastery.”

  “Self-mastery?” I ask
ed. “Is that to help you stay celibate?”

  He laughed. “No. It’s about controlling your emotions. Making them work for you, not against you.”

  “Oh,” I said, nodding like I understood. “So it is about helping you stay celibate.”

  Laughing, he told me a bit more. Foundational to Mathers’s teachings, apparently, is this idea that God wants you to have a tight rein on your emotions and that you learn to be disciplined and not reactive when dealing with other people and their concerns. He—Mathers—connects this with a pretty harsh old-school fundamentalism that has no room for undead Americans, who he refers to, among other things, as Satan’s plague. I’d read a few of Mathers’s books, but I understood them much more after talking to Pete. It is almost as if Mathers’s message of total restraint and the elimination of “emotive spikes,” to use his term, allows him to plant within his followers a single large emotive spike, one aimed directly at zombies.

  Even so, I thought that this bizarro concept of self-mastery sounded like a good idea, I guess because of the implication that someone like me could have used it to combat depression. Most of the examples that Pete gave were about defeating the sudden and frequent rages he experienced, which was a good thing, but he also said he was supposed to use the technique when he experienced an intense feeling of happiness. Not surprisingly, he didn’t have an example for that emotion.

  It was very strange listening to Pete talk about his time at the One Life campus, because he talked about the classes he was taking in the same way that Adam and Phoebe talk about Adam’s karate—in terms of the benefits he derived. Both disciplines seemed to teach students to know themselves better, and by applying that knowledge they were able to change both the way they perceived and they way they were perceived by the world at large. But I could tell that Pete still walked with violence inside him, and I didn’t think being with Mathers was going to help him use all that energy in a positive way.

  Interesting info, but after that speech, and after yet another gruesome kissing session, I still hadn’t solved the great anti-zombie conspiracy. Still, that didn’t mean I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  I was getting somewhere, all right. Where I got was in his bedroom. And then finally, Karen DeSonne, Girl Detective, had a break in the case.

  He lives in the basement just like me, although his sitch is a bit different from mine. He’s got padded carpeting, the walls are paneling instead of exposed cinder block, and he’s got just about every boy toy that you can imagine down there—wide screen television, a Wii and an Xbox, high-end stereo, weight bench, the whole works. He asked me to spot for him on the weight bench, which I guess was his idea of a thrilling date. He’s pretty strong. I think he’d be surprised at how strong I was, but I didn’t actually need to help him.

  He has quick hands, as well, but he didn’t seem too upset after I removed them when they went under my shirt and against the skin of my back. I’m pretty sure he was counting to ten—I think I’d be insulted if he wasn’t—but he didn’t get angry. I guess religious self-mastery classes did help with celibacy.

  “I just figured why you seem so familiar to me.”

  We were sitting on his unmade bed. I’d only known Pete for a short while, but the undercurrent of menace that pulsed beneath his skin made it difficult to know what he was thinking (other than: I must get this bra off). If I were a real girl I would have tensed up, afraid that I’d been discovered.

  “Why?” I asked, trying to make my voice light and flirty. “Do I kiss like someone you know?”

  “A little bit,” he said, without emotion. He said it as if he was just being honest, not hurtful, so I wasn’t sure how I should react.

  “Really?” I replied, straightening a little. “Why don’t you tell me all about her.”

  “Her name was Julie,” he said, really, really surprising me, because I’d asked in a snotty tone meant to convince him that I was deeply offended he thought kissing me was like kissing someone else. “I just felt…peaceful around her.”

  I was going to make another comment with an extra dose of snottiness, but he looked away from me.

  “She died,” he said.

  My heart kind of broke for him just then.

  I know who he is. What he is. But he looked and sounded so alone in that moment, I couldn’t help but feel for him. Even monsters have their scars.

  “Oh, poor you,” I said, almost meaning it, and I stroked his cheek with my cool hand. “Is she…is she a zombie?”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t come back. This was a few years ago, just after the Dallas Jones thing. We were young.”

  “I’m so sorry, Pete,” I said.

  “She was stung by a bee,” he said. “She went into anaphylactic shock, and she didn’t have her meds with her. She died before anyone could help.”

  I know who Pete is. I know that he killed Evan and turned Adam into one of us—and I was certain he was involved in the conspiracy that sent all of us into hiding.

  Still, I couldn’t help but feel for him. Call me human—crazy, huh? Plus, as a suicide, I can’t help but feel stabbing pangs of guilt whenever I hear about the remorse someone feels over a life lost. Julie didn’t ask to die, like I did. And unlike mine, Julie’s death was not revocable.

  The blue fog had led me to commit suicide. Maybe Pete had a crimson fog inside him, one that made him direct his anger and sadness against others, instead of hurting himself.

  Pete didn’t cry, but his right hand was squeezed into a tight fist.

  “She didn’t come back.”

  “Would…would you have wanted her to?” I asked him.

  There was a moment where I thought I’d asked exactly the wrong question, because the tension in his fist seemed to be traveling up his arm, and I really thought that he was going to punch me. He didn’t, but the tension didn’t go away when he answered me, his voice just above a whisper.

  “I don’t know.”

  I rested my hand on his shoulder. I could feel him vibrate beneath my fingers.

  “But she didn’t. That’s how I know.”

  “That’s how you know what?”

  “That’s how I know that zombies are evil.”

  Quite a deductive leap, I thought, but one that someone in a great deal of pain could make without much difficulty. I’d made similar leaps when the depression had me in its grip; both Pete and I plunged headlong into our own personal abyss. He turned to look into my eyes, but he was looking through me.

  “Everyone else was coming back. When I was in California with her, this kid drowned in a surfing accident, and a day-and-a-half later he came back. They hadn’t been able to recover his body, so it was a big deal when he finally crawled up on the beach. I remember three kids dying after driving drunk and wrapping their car around a telephone pole, and all three came back, and the newspaper printed before-and-after photos. One of the kids had gone through the windshield, another one lost an arm. Julie told me they’d been the biggest hoods in her school. They all came back, but when she didn’t, I knew something was wrong. She was so good—I can’t explain it, she was just good. I was a different person when I was with her. Totally different.”

  I tried my best to look sympathetic.

  “She was my first real girlfriend, I guess. I spent two summers with her. The things we did—I felt like I was growing up when I was with her, but I also felt like if we stayed together, we’d stay young.”

  He smiled, but the smile slipped off his face when I spoke.

  “First love,” I said. I should have just let him talk, because I think in his mind he was adding “and last.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “We knew it was a summer thing, so we saw other people during the school year. I saw a lot of girls. A lot of a lot of girls.” Emphasis on the lot, as though my “first love” comment might have been a slight on his masculinity, but then he said, “I always thought about her, though.”

  “She must have been a very special girl.”

 
“She was. She was the best.”

  I rubbed his back, feeling the rhythm of his breath entering and leaving his body, but then he stood up.

  “But she’s gone. And all these others came back. I think the Reverend is right about them.”

  “That they’re demons?”

  “Yeah. The Reverend says they’re trying to infiltrate society, not because they want to join our society, but because they want us to join theirs. The society of the dead. He says ‘the goal is the soul,’ meaning that the zombies aren’t looking to destroy us physically without taking our souls first.”

  “How do they do that?” I was really interested, thinking maybe I’d start up a soul collection.

  “Take Williams,” he said. “He’s the most obvious example. He gets people to think that it’s okay for zombies to walk around, that they’re just people. Instead of rooting out and destroying the evil, people accept it. He’s like a recruiter for Satan.”

  I frowned. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Pete, but isn’t that kind of what you did when you killed Adam? You made another zombie, so you increased Satan’s army?”

  He didn’t get mad, he got excited, as if I were his student and I’d stumbled wide-eyed into a teachable moment.

  “No! That’s just it, I didn’t make the zombie at all. Adam prepared the way for the zombie when he gave his soul over to Satan. See, when Adam started hanging around the demons, taking classes with them, accepting them, basically choosing their company over that of real people, he lost his soul. He chose evil over good. So when he died, his soul went straight to hell, and a zombie came back.”

  “So,” I said, wishing that Tayshawn was around—he’s seen, like, every horror movie in existence and would probably understand this goofy occult belief better than me—“you’re saying that Adam Layman isn’t really Adam? He’s some sort of demon?”

  “Exactly. That’s all a zombie is. A demon cloaked in human flesh.”

  Ewww!

  I didn’t feel like a demon. I felt like me. Blue-foggy me. It was very hard to sit there with an attentive look on my face and not feel totally humiliated and offended. I mean, really. A demon? No. An imp, maybe. I’d make a good imp. Cloaked in human flesh, indeed!