Sunspot Jungle: Volume Two, page 20
With eyes that shone of curiosity as well as love, the Chef climbed quietly into bed. He cut two of the pale stalks that sat in the Lover’s flesh with a broad, curved knife that had been made to decapitate mushrooms. The Lover shuddered and set his jaw but did not open his eyes. The Chef left the damp bedding and padded into the tall and narrow kitchen, rinsed his pale harvest in the tepid water from the tap, put them in his mouth, and chewed. Something in the spectral-looking digits reminded the Chef how decay dissolves every barrier and door, like love, but they brought no pain or regret to him.
The next morning, new fruiting bodies had replaced those the Chef took. They wafted in the air like sea anemones in slow current. The Chef took out the crescent-shaped blade again, leaned across the sticky sheets, and sheared off a handful of the mushroom stalks. The remnants of the ghostly fingers twitched and jerked and filled the air with blue scent.
In his restaurant on the ground floor, the Chef fried the mushrooms in a small round skillet and mixed them with grilled squid and spring onions, toasted red chili, thick dark soy sauce, and a dash of bitter tamarind. The Water Seller who peddled liquid on their street came inside and sniffed the air like a hungry dog.
“What is that?” the Water Seller said.
“Try it,” the Chef said and scooped the steaming food onto a fresh lotus leaf on a cracked porcelain plate with faded gold decoration on the rim, then handed the Water Seller a fork.
“Thank you so much,” the Water Seller said, while he chewed loudly at the Chef. “I haven’t had any breakfast. We can’t afford to with the tourists absent and business lagging.”
“Yes, the weather has been strange,” the Chef said. The years were less moist and warm when he first got together with the Lover.
“This is delicious,” the Water Seller said, “there are white truffles in it?”
“Do you know what truffles taste like?” the Chef said.
“A few years ago, my wife and I went to Paris,” the Water Seller said. “She always wanted to go to Paris, the most romantic city on Earth. We ate in a real gourmet restaurant to see what it was all about; wild boar, white truffles, red wine, and everything. It was good but not that good. This, though,” the Water Seller motioned at the plate, “is different, it reminds me of something good that I have always known but forgot a long time ago and which I ought to remember. What is it?”
“My new course,” the Chef said and smiled, quickly and strange, like the ghost lights that flare up in the rice fields at night.
The dish was an instant success, and everyone wanted to know what the ingredients were; but the Chef only said: “It’s made with love,” and thought about his Lover. The word spread like running lichen, and soon the restaurant was always full despite the lack of tourists in the city. The locals spent their hard-earned currency on the mushroom dish before they bought water or rice.
“You’ll never have to work again, you can spend all day taking pictures of dying buildings as you adore doing,” the Chef told the Lover. The Lover lifted his head from the pillow and smiled, his teeth ultraviolet bright and his eyes white like the mushroom’s ivory buttons.
Every night, the Chef harvested a few of the wafting fingers. Even a quarter of a stalk was enough to remind the eater of the love that decay has for the living. The mushrooms said nothing when he cut them from the colony, they only stiffened a little as if in momentary agony. The Lover did not complain that small pieces of him vanished during the night because he knew what it meant to the Chef. Isn’t love also self-sacrifice for the dreams of your beloved?
The Chef sharpened his gently curved mushroom knife at night under the serpentine shadows of the rain that trickled down the windows. The year before he had painted the walls sky blue to give them some sunshine, but the paint couldn’t take the moisture and had flaked and peeled like tourist skin. The rivulets of precipitation twisted and turned like the plant fibers that were wound in the ropewalk at the edge of the city.
Every day the crop of ghostly fingers on the Lover’s leg became a little smaller and a little thinner while the Chef’s smile broadened. The Lover returned to the abandoned building in the drowned district to find the nail with the fungal spores again, but the structure had collapsed from the water’s slow consumption and the nails pulled out by scavengers from the steel plant nearby.
Defeated but not lost, the Lover returned home. There, he took the broad-bladed mushroom knife, bit down on a thin scarf printed with blue dragonflies, and cut a deep gash in his other thigh and on his upper arms in the same measured and deliberate way the Chef harvested the fungal stalks. He crushed several ivory buttons between his fingers, smeared them into the wounds, and prayed that they would grow.
The white digits multiplied in their new sites. The Chef saw that the fungi had spread to the Lover’s other thigh and both his upper arms but said nothing. When the Lover slept, the Chef harvested what he could.
Journalists and magazines visited the restaurant and wrote about the Chef’s delicious dish. He was invited to France to work in a golden restaurant. Paris was bright and warm like the Chef and the Lover remembered their country had been. The Lover hoped the fungi might grow in their new home as well.
But it didn’t. The temperature was a little too low, the air a touch too dry. The ghost fingers wilted and dwindled. In despair, the Lover ran the shower in the bathroom and the tap in the kitchen to moisten the air in the tall-ceilinged, many-windowed apartment. He went to the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt and bought an old humidifier. The seller laughed and asked if he was making a sauna in the heat. The Lover kept the humidifier on high, and he and the Chef were constantly wet; but neither of them said anything for the sake of the fungi and for the sake of love.
But the Lover knew the fruiting bodies were dying. They no longer glowed blue at night, and their electrical kisses had ceased. When the Lover woke to the Chef crying above him in bed, he didn’t need to ask for the reason.
“We should never have left,” the Lover said.
“But you always wanted to live in the most romantic city on the planet,” the Chef said. “And the people here are the best and most appreciative eaters in the world.”
“This city is too dry,” the Lover said. No shadows of running water adorned their walls at night, no raindrops rushed in on the wind’s warm breath. Compared with their home country now, Paris was cold and dry.
The Chef relented because isn’t that also what love is? His Lover had sacrificed so much for him, now it was his turn. Wrapped in plastic like a dead body, the last of the fungal fingers barely survived the arid air on the plane home. They flew through thunder and lightning, and the electrical discharges enlivened the remaining fungi like defibrillation of a still heart. The Chef and the Lover returned to their apartment above the small restaurant, and its food remained a local delicacy instead of an international sensation.
“They didn’t like my other dishes, anyway,” the Chef said. “Just the one with the mushrooms.”
The Lover only smiled at him, and blue sparks rose from the ends of the white fingers that moved like smooth tentacles on the Lover’s arms and legs. The tiny lightning bolts felt like decay’s never-ending but always loving thoughts.
Portrait of a Young Zombie in Crisis
Walidah Imarisha
Ralph tore the man’s scalp off with his fingernails, bit into the cranium, cracking it with his molars like a walnut. He revealed the gray contents and dove in face first.
“Brains,” he drawled contentedly, slurping like a child sucking the gooey center out of a Cadbury egg.
I rolled my eyes and sighed, looking down at the dead woman whose head I cradled in my hands. I used an incisor to pop a hole in her skull, inserted a straw, and sucked gingerly. Most people think brains are a solid mass, but they’re actually mostly liquid. They take the shape of any container they’re put in. That’s why they get everywhere if you’re not careful. Most zombies didn’t seem to mind being covered in it. In fact, ones like Ralph reveled in it, always making sure to smear some around before finishing. Guess it’s like when people take pictures of their dinner and post it on Facebook—everyone wants to remember a good meal.
“Brains,” Ralph said again, a little more urgently. Bits of brain matter clung to his lower lip, and his mouth had the same Kool-Aid ring around it I used to get when I was a kid.
Ralph tapped the side of the man’s head he was devouring and then pointed toward the one in my hand. He always worried I wasn’t eating enough. Gotta keep my strength up to continue terrorizing the world as one of the walking dead. He was right, though—I was far skinnier than any of the other zombies I’d seen since I turned.
“Yeah, yeah, brains,” I grimaced, sucking a little bit more of her brain through the straw.
This is the level of discourse that happens amongst zombies. After a time I realized they were like little cannibalistic Pokemon, as they can only say one word, to wit, “brains.” That’s it. That was what I had to work with. “Good morning.” “Brains.” “Good afternoon.” “Brains.” “Oh, that bloodstain on your shirt is just darling.” “Brains.”
Why, you ask, if I am one of the undead as well, am I able to converse at a higher level? Yeah, I definitely ask myself that question every day. Every day since I woke up to being dead. Or undead. The living dead? I never really understood the difference, but I remember an ex telling me once there was indeed a difference. Since he had seen every zombie film every made and had a tattoo of Dawn of the Dead spanning his entire back, I accepted his expertise. However, given that humans either scream and run or start shooting, I haven’t found anyone to help me clarify the distinction.
Either way, I woke up a zombie. I remembered I was walking to my car after yoga the night before. Fifteen of us all headed toward the parking lot. Nothing but stretch pants and blue yoga mats as far as the eye could see. Of course, we had all heard the alerts not to go out after dark if you could avoid it and if you did, not to travel in groups, so you were less like a herd of cattle, fat and grazing. But no one really listened to that stuff. After all, there hadn’t been a zombie attack in Portland—it was all on the east coast where folks lived more densely populated. There had been no reported outbreaks farther west than Chicago.
Perky Blonde #2 heard them first (I never bothered to learn the names of the other women in my yoga class. They were all white women who fastidiously spent their time ignoring the existence of the one Black woman in their midst. And at this point, I guess it really doesn’t matter what her name was). Perky Blonde # 2 shrieked, and I looked in the direction her quivering finger pointed. Shuffling shapes lurched toward us from the darkness. Red eyes glowed. As they got closer, I could hear the zombies moan and growl. It sounded like a mix of a pissed-off Chihuahua and a very tired ghost.
Most of my classmates joined Perky Blonde #2 in screaming. I decided to save my oxygen and turned to sprint in the opposite direction—only to find, while we had been distracted, an even larger group of zombies had snuck up behind us—which is actually pretty impressive when you think about their motor function challenges.
Two of them lunged at me—I tried to beat them off with the yoga mat, but one just bit it, shook, and spit it out.
Zombies move much slower than humans. Painfully slow. Like grandpa with a broken hip, arthritis, and a knee that’s acting up because it’s about to rain slow. It always seemed asinine to me that people couldn’t just run away from a zombie. Hell, all you’d have to do is speed up your walking pace just a little bit. I would watch zombie films with my ex, and I’d think to myself, “Well, if you’re that stupid, you deserve to get eaten.”
What I learned that night is that it’s not zombies’ speed that is the threat—it’s their numbers. They massed around us like cockroaches in a roach motel. They were everywhere, a swarm of grasping hands and gnashing, dripping teeth. And of course the endless refrain of “Brains, brains, brains!” If I hadn’t been so terrified, it would have been highly irritating.
I noticed, however, that the zombies mostly massed around my classmates. The lone zombie who grabbed at me looked put out like I was the leftover kid in Dodge Ball and he’s just got stuck with me on his team. He grabbed my arm and began chewing, reluctantly.
You never know what you’re going to do in a situation like that. Because of my ex, I had spent hours thinking what I would do if I was attacked by zombies. I always imagined I would fight back, break free. Run away. Hide.
But when faced with the actual imminent danger of a zombie chowing down on my flesh, I did something I would have never imagined—I bit the zombie back. I just clamped down on his shoulder and locked my jaw. I don’t know which of us was more surprised. He yelped around my arm in his mouth, tried to shake me off. But I open bottle caps with my teeth all the time, I have a surprisingly strong jaw.
So we just stayed that way until I passed out from blood loss. And when I woke up early in the morning before dawn, I was a zombie.
Except different. I definitely have the living dead limp as I call it, which can be very frustrating. You just have to resign yourself that it takes you five times longer to get anywhere than it did when you were human. But I can still speak (as my white college professors would say with surprise and more than a little condescension, “You are so articulate!”), and I can still reason, whereas I quickly learned my former classmates-now-zombies seemed to have the collective IQ of pudding.
It took me some time of reflecting, but I narrowed down the reason I don’t follow the zombie stereotype to two options. The first is the same reason I shocked myself by biting the zombie who turned me.
You see—I’m vegan.
I’m a vegan zombie.
The second is a question of melanin. You see, I’m also Black. I’m a Black vegan zombie in Portland, Oregon. Life is, in a word, rough.
I originally thought my veganness had to be the thing that allows me to still think as a human. It is the only concrete difference between me and my yoga classmates. You’d think there’d have been more vegans in that yuppy yoga studio (that I actually only went to because I got a Groupon), but I’d seen enough fro yo containers in the trash can to know I was probably alone.
My veganness could explain the reaction of the zombies during our attack—they all shied away from me because I smelled different, tasted different.
Or maybe racism persists even after you’re (un)dead. All of the zombies I had seen were white. Not surprising given that I live in the whitest major city in the country. But maybe it wasn’t just based on demographics. Maybe these white zombies believed some fucked-up Bell Curve eugenicist theories. They could subscribe to turn of the century craniometry, which measures the size of the head to judge intelligence (spoiler alert: Black folks lost that contest). If that’s the case, it would make a twisted sort of sense: the zombies wouldn’t want to get stuck with a small head. Small head equals small brain. If you’re really hungry, what are you going to go for, the appetizer or the main course?
Regardless, if they judge me for my race or my dietary choices, it’s clear the other zombies do judge me. Oh sure, they let me mass with them when we are hunting and feeding, but when work is done, they drift off, babbling “brains” back and forth to each other animatedly and leaving me to contemplate my Kafkaesque existence.
All but Ralph. Ralph is the only one who spends time with me. Who seems to like being around me.
Sometimes I envy Ralph and all the others. They have a singularity of purpose, and as long as they get some brains, their lives are fulfilled.
I, on the other hand, have been in the throes of a moral dilemma since I woke up dead. How do you maintain your vegan principles when the only source of food that sates your hunger is flesh?
I have tried to find ways around it. I thought, well, perhaps it’s protein we living dead crave. I broke into a health food store and grabbed all the vegan protein bars I could find. When I tried to eat them, though, I was so repulsed I couldn’t even swallow.
I even tried to trick myself. I got a head of cauliflower and a can of marinara sauce. Ralph and I went to a 7-Eleven, and while he munched on the clerk, I heated it up in one of their microwaves. When it was piping hot, I pulled it out.
“Hmmm, these brains sure look good,” I said as I inhaled deeply, taking in the scent.
Ralph watched me out of the corner of his eye, utterly confused.
“These are gonna be the best damn brains I ever had!” I declared. I grabbed a chunk and shoved it in my mouth. I wanted to retch instantly, but I soldiered on.
“Ugh … good … brains,” I choked out around the fake-bloody cauliflower.
I chewed as quickly as I could and then swallowed. It took less than ten seconds for my stomach to send my vegan mock brain right back up the way it came.
Ralph looked at me sadly and held out the 7-Eleven clerk’s heart to me as a consolation.
No, no vegan substitutes for me; it has to be flesh. Human flesh.
So I feed but just enough to keep me alive—well, not completely dead. And every time I do, I hate myself. Every time I bite into a skull, a little bit more of my soul dies.
“Brains!” Ralph’s voice pulled me from my grumpy vegan musings.
He closed his eyes and sniffed the air, turning his head to this side and that. Ralph had a much more developed sense of smell than I did. He could find a human finger in a pile of manure just using his nose. And when he did find it, he would not hesitate to pop it into his mouth. I know this from past experience.
He took off down the street, ambling as quickly as he could. I followed behind him. It had become harder and harder to find food. As the number of the living undead grew, people began to take the recommended precautions.
We lurched through the streets for what seemed like forever, turning left and right like we were in a maze. Sometimes, Ralph would pause to sniff and then set off with renewed vigor—well, as much as you can muster when you don’t have a beating heart or blood pumping to help propel you forward.
