Who Will the Zombies Eat First?
Aunt Henrietta died. It is a cold Tuesday evening when I arrive at the wake. My older sister, Annette, and my mom, Babs, are already inside when I walk up to the Cumberland Chapel.
“Do you want to meet some of your distant cousins?” my mother asks.
“Not really,” I tell her because funerals seem like an awkward place to finally meet someone. I liken the introductions to uncomfortable accusations: I remember you when you were this big; and they’ll pinch together their fingers like I was born an inch tall and I should be surprised at how much I’ve grown.
I turn melancholy and wonder if things might have been different for me if I’d been the firstborn or the baby, instead of sandwiched in the middle. Would I have been more pampered or spoiled? Would I still feel like a meddlesome mistake? More importantly, if zombies finally took over the planet, would they eat the eldest, the middle child, or the youngest, first?
Cumberland Chapel is full of mourners that closely resemble the walking dead. The presence of the barely living somehow puts me at ease. I don’t mind funeral homes. They don’t make me particularly anxious or sad. In fact, I view death as one of the few occasions my family dresses appropriately. Standard funeral-black is hard to screw up; but my sister still manages to do so. Annette is wearing my father’s overcoat. It hangs awkwardly, like a sheet, and gives her a distinctly square frame. The buttons are left over right. They are cartoonish and large and loose threads scream to be ripped from the seams. She is covered in various breeds of animal hair. The three of us are standing in the corner until my mother decides to link her hand in mine and pull me forward. She leaves Annette behind like a burdensome suitcase stuffed with old newspapers.
I am greeted again and again. I smile and express my condolences. I look over to my sister standing in the corner by herself and I’m crying not for my aunt, but for my sister’s quiet despair. I’m shedding tears for all of my siblings. We’re different monsters, each with our own set of wet eyeballs and gizzard-gray brains; but we came from the same mad laboratory and have much of the same afflictions and deformities. I am walking with my mom who has whipped her blood red hair into stiff crimson peaks. She is presenting me to onlookers because I’m part of the outside world and not subject to the calamities of the family’s nightly Grand Guignol—or so they think.
If your home is your castle, then a haunted castle may be the ultimate possession. My three siblings live together, with my parents and my Aunt Christine. They are all part of the never-ending, magnificent monster show, an over the top cast of characters that are telepathically aware of each other’s thoughts and whereabouts. Because I’m not privy to the inner sanctum, I’m left to decipher cryptic messages made from crackling cell phones dropping in and out of hot zones. I find myself constantly fielding calls where I keep saying, “What happened? I can’t hear you. Your signal’s dying.”
Everyone always ends up being fine. Scathed, scarred, bruised, maimed, in hospital, broken hearted, miscarried, aborted, suicidal, high, beaten, punched, blathering, shattering windows, breaking doors, ripping stitches, lost on highways, but fine. They have developed a very interdependent and intricate kinship and I am the keeper of their crypt. I keep telling them that I am no different, that I don’t need this survivor’s guilt that I swallow like a lump of soft fatty phlegm the color of pigeon poop. I keep telling them that I embody all of their neuroses, but the angry villagers just won’t listen to anything I have to say.
Bwaa-ha-ha, welcome to the spook house. This is my nightmare. All three of my siblings have left the spook house to spend time in jail. Listen in while they clear away the cobwebs and take you into the dark side of their stay.
Annette and I are kicking back in my parent’s furnished basement. We are sitting on a long cream sectional sofa that my mother bought at the Merchandise Mart years ago. It’s one of the few pieces that wasn’t lost in what the family refers to as, the Great Fire of 2004. The entire basement burned and transformed keepsakes into charred and melted things. Everything smelled of oozed and toxic plastic. Photos crisped like marshmallows on a stick. Long gone is the full kitchen and wet bar and projector screen that slid down from the ceiling. There is no more secret safe, elusively locked. We never had the combination. There is no more dark room full of vats and sinks with wet prints. The walls are beige and the floor is wall-to-wall Berber carpeting. It’s possible that this new generic backdrop is better suited for such interesting characters living with such brutal pageantry.
Annette is wearing navy sweat pants and a black hoodie. She is a large sloppy bruise, freshly punched, with yellow green weepy eyes. She is slurping ice from a tall glass and chewing the small bricks into slush. She has been chewing ice since we were little children. I’m certain she is keeping her vampire heart cold. “Have you ever been in prison?” I ask. She continues to gnash the cubes between her teeth, which are white and straight from years of sitting open-mouthed in Dr. Jantzen’s orthodontic chair. They are teeth perfect for leaving bites. Her ginger hair is pulled back into a ponytail, like a rat’s long and wet back. “I cried for 23 days straight,” she says, rolling chips across her tongue.
I can’t help but think back to the night I received the phone call regarding my sister’s incarceration. I was cooking dinner when Laurie Trost phoned, a worker with the American Embassy in Japan, and told me that Annette had been arrested. They had her involved with possible terrorist activities, wiring funds to Iran, conspiracy for gain, and co-possession of narcotics. “The walls,” Ms. Trost said, “were filled with drugs.”
For the next thirty days, Annette is guilty until she is proven innocent. She’s provided with a public defender that does not speak English. Thus begins an overseas phone tree that extends through family and friends, and ends with a privately retained Japanese lawyer who also speaks English. Moneys are wired and all transactions are tallied in receipts full of yens. As Annette begins her stay under interrogation, we the family sit waiting, in our own tortuous prison, trying not to think of how she is spending her days.
“I had to learn my roll call number. It was #228, ni-hiyaku-ni-ju-hachi,” she says. Twelve prisoners shared one cell.
Each prisoner was issued three pairs of socks and a uniform. Annette could not keep track of her socks. This is an issue she’s had since childhood. My mother had to label them with a sharpie pen, left and right; otherwise she’d sit and cry, not knowing which sock was meant for which foot, like her cotton and toes were lovers and she was somehow responsible for their happiness.
In her cell, Annette fingered English with her hands and mouthed some broken Spanish to a fellow cellmate. She smiles fondly as she recalls lapping up salty cups of miso soup and sticky rice. The days were repeated stretches of sitting and crying. She would lie down on her tatami mat and take daylong naps. Annette washed herself, from the neck up, every morning; but she was only allowed to bathe her body once a week. Bath time meant standing naked in a tiled room, with a bowl full of tepid water, and splashing yourself clean.
“But you still felt dirty,” she says. “Your clothes were still dirty so it didn’t matter how hard you scrubbed.” The guards once left her in the same red sweats for five days. In prison, Annette was exposed to tuberculosis and developed a hacking cough that rattled her lungs. She still has some residual wheezing, even though she’s been home for over two years. I’m beginning to wonder if she too is swallowing pigeon poop.
She is chewing the last of her ice. She tells me that her siblings are lucky because she has set the bar so low. (Lucky, or a conditioned path setting up her brother and sisters for failure?) She looks off distractedly, her eyes shifting like sand, and says, “I’m a failure. I did what you’re supposed to do and I have nothing. I got married, I went to university and still.”
At 38 years of age, she is the oldest of the four children. She’s my full sister and the half-sister of Pamela and Brad. She set the pace for the rest of us. It has been an arduous trudge filled with hardship and disappointment. At times, the size of her body has slowed her down to a snail’s pace. The picture of her in Cherry magazine tells a different story. It lets you know her body was once achingly hot and how she used to dance it down a pole on a neon stage. She used to wiggle in g-strings and high leather boots and shed her clothes in private booths. But when you see her now, eighty pounds heavier, drowning in sweat pants, it’s hard to believe she was once a size 4.
On a cold night in January, a man watched her shimmy across the room and decided that’s the woman I’m going to marry. He took her away and beat her senseless and she showed up at my door wearing a face of puffy bruises and her head split in two like a watermelon. There were blood specks the size of seeds caught in her hair. She crumpled in my arms. I held her and cried and said, “My god, what did he do to you.” She was never the same. She tried. She moved far away from man, to Alaska, and ate seal meat and sang with Eskimos. She graduated with honors, a degree in Philosophy, and went on to Georgetown and attended internships and seminars; but something called her back to the spook house. The thing that talked to her at night and told her she was not like the rest of the world and that she’d never be okay. I look at Annette and wonder how someone can be so smart and yet constantly fail; and I see she is already starting to change. She rises from the sofa and belts out a shrilly squawk and shakes her hips and her eyes tremble and poof—she bats her wings and flies out the window.
Our next victim has arrived. Please, have a seat and try not to stare at the witch. She will take off your head.
Pamela is the middle child, her mouth scripted like a dirty book. She is 5’10 and her hair hangs wildly loose and straight, almost reaching her waist. It is the color of fresh buttered corn and mayonnaise. She has piercings in the cartilage of her upper ear and in her navel and in her middle finger. She had a post implanted, where you might wear a ring, and she can screw in different stones and gems. These are Pam’s mystical mood rings that allow her to control thoughts and to levitate. “Tattoos are grimy,” she says and flips her hair back behind her shoulder. She is older than the youngest, Brad, by four years. “We’re the middle kids so we get fucked,” she says, including me. She leans back into the sofa and makes herself comfortable.
Pam’s eyes are squinted and she looks pissy, like she’s just swallowed a cup full of vinegar. Her nose wrinkles into a pointy staff and she disapproves of what she smells: potatoes boiled alive in butter, gouged cranberries, and the wizened skin of a dead bird. “I’m shitty and I’m not thankful for anything this Thanksgiving,” Pam informs me and she also lets me know she can’t stand Annette.
Pam sits up and believes she has an answer to the problem of birth order, and who should be in charge of the family’s spooky castle. “You should have four kids and then kill the oldest and the youngest.” She says this matter of fact ready to sacrifice Annette and Brad, to rip their hearts out and keep them beating and warm inside a sac of cheesecloth.
“Mom protects Annette because she’s the weakest.” Pamela’s violent urges are palpable. She is ready to pounce and take me down, her arm full of razor blade cuts, ready to magically stretch and wrap her white fingers around my frail turkey neck. Pamela has pretty pale skin, like linen draped over a cadaver. She has scarred it into tangles of white pink flesh that show you the places she tried to slice herself and the time she got serious about the business and applied the cold steel to her wrists. She has big hazel eyes, which she calls shitty green, that sparkle with ferocity and tell you and anyone in the path of her hypnotic stare, you’re a stone’s throw away from a slash or a hex.
Her proudest moment is beating up the Northwestern girls’ hockey team. “Bam to the head,” she says. “I smacked them up.” There is nothing sugar coated about Pamela’s words or disposition. She is a witch without a candy-windowed gingerbread house. When she rolls up to the curb, smoking Newports, exhaled minty tendrils curl into a big cartoon finger that pulls you by the nose. Her familiars—a 160lb Rottweiler and a brindle pit bull, flank her. She is ready to tell you like it is. Ready or not, here she comes.
Pam grimaces when Annette walks back down the stairs and tells her to get the fuck out, and Annette quietly walks back up. She leers in Annette’s direction; mad at the invisible stain she’s left behind. The witch is pissed at the vampire and her eyes are ready to shoot wooden stakes. “If she were an animal, the other animals would kill her so she wouldn’t have to suffer.” It becomes clear why Babs, the wizard, is violently protective of her oldest daughter.
Pam affirms Annette’s ability to blaze a path so fucked up that she could get away with anything. I ask Pam to tell me about jail. She rolls her eyes upward and crumples her face into a moldy peach. “I was so fucking pissed,” she says. “Not at mom, but at the whole system, how someone can just falsely accuse you of something and you end up in there.”
Pamela spent three days in the basement of the Glenview Police Department and she seems more put off, more bothered by the situation, than embarrassed. Babs claimed that Pam had hit her. Given their record for violence, it’s easy to see a circumstance where they both could take the blame. When my mom did her time in Glenview’s basement, Pam had accused her of beating her with a lawn sprinkler. In both cases, the charges were dropped and they walked out of the courthouse arm-in-arm. There were many fights like this that all ended the same. Punches thrown, keys flung, bruises and welts and fuck offs spilled on to the sidewalk, and then a long hug letting you know that it was time to pretend that everything was okay.
The most horrific part of Pam’s time as a jailbird, was how she was forced to be alone, something she is not used to being. Something that had once caused her to shred her skin into jiggly flaps that could easily tear. Her phone is constantly blowing up with different ring tones for voice mails, missed calls, text messages. As we’re sitting here together, she keeps flipping her phone open, mildly distracted, and softly mumbling fuck them, and ignoring the call.
“I was blind. They took my glasses,” she says. I look at the pair she is wearing and wonder if they are the same ones she had to place in a manila envelope until my dad posted bail. “I can’t see without them. It was bogus,” she says and points toward the scratched feather light lenses. Pam remembers the cell was clean but cold. She had to remove her hoodie and her bra and given her ample breasts, this would bring about more than slight discomfort. “The police kept apologizing to me,” she says, petting her pit bull Hilo on his short mug face.
The guards ran a long gray telephone chord between the bars and allowed Pam to keep the phone and use it the entire length of her stay. She was allowed to order any food she wanted, pick-up or delivery, and the village paid for the meals. “They let me out for cigarette breaks every couple of hours.”
This sounds like a cakewalk. This sounds like a North Shore jail unaccustomed to young girls behind bars. Is there protocol that needs to be followed in cases of privileged adolescents? Or do they know she is a powerful witch? I think she hypnotized them. The police say: She shouldn’t be in jail. We will make it as comfortable as possible. I’m sure they did the same for Babs.
Pam is so gruff, but she can also be gentle and kind, granting wishes like Glenda the Good Witch. It is Pam who will call me for no other reason than to tell me she loves me and wonders why I haven’t been around the spook house. She’s the only one who asks me if everything is okay. Maybe it’s because we’re the middle kids. We’re fucked as she so eloquently puts it again. Statistically, our oldest and youngest siblings will take most of our parent’s money and time. I realize why Pam might be screaming like a two year old, trying to get someone to look her way. She acts like a child because babies are nurtured and loved and adored. All babies—vampire, witch, or mummy—are supposed to be treated the same.
The dogs start barking. Something is coming and Pam waves her hand and turns the glowing orb on her finger. The flesh twists and blood leaks from the spirited bolt. She flies out into the night, wearing a pointy hat and a long tattered cape.
This is the last stop on the haunted ride. Brace yourselves; you’re about to meet a goblin carrying a bag full of trick-or-treats.
Brad stinks like a skunk. He smells like dizzyingly potent weed. He is sizing me up as I ask the twenty-three year old baby of the family about his night in Cook County lockup. He slinks down on to the sofa. He looks at me with his elfin cheeks and his mischievous eyes. Brad is six feet tall and a few of his tattoos peek out from his white T-shirt. He scratches his left arm with his spindly long fingers. The fabric bunches and exposes the tail end of an Arabic word. The curled letters spell out SACRIFICE, all in capital letters. He had it inked before his vacation to Israel. His khakis hang from his hips and a chain connects a wallet to his pocket, like a demon on a leash. The leather fold is thick with bills.
“The guards were just as shitty as the people.” In the first 24 hours of processing, he lost his belongings and his privacy. Everyone had to strip down and shower because of the smell of rancid hobo dick. As Brad approached the shower, he noticed a guard at the door. There was a moment where he took a deep breath and thought, this guard is either legitimate protection, or he’s going to offer up my ass as fresh meat. These are not words you want to hear about your baby brother whose bottom you used to diaper, not in the least.
Brad made friends with a Gangster Disciple named Smokey and hustled his way up to the front of the phone line. He promised the five guys before him that if they let him go first, he guaranteed he’d get their messages through to the world outside the gray walls. This explains the morning I walk into my mother’s kitchen and watch her frantically speed dialing and leaving messages for people named Sno-Ball and Keekee and Bullet and Double.
“But the worst part,” Brad says, “ is the guards singled out this guy as a pedophile. “
This was a processing line not an interrogation. The guards pointed to the man and announced the allegations someone had made. And then they proceeded to beat him senseless. “I bet he woke up pissing blood, they were kicking him so hard,” Brad tells me as he’s shaking his head.
“Does any part of this experience want to make you stop dealing?” I ask, wondering how it couldn’t; how one could remain active and brazen having witnessed the possible consequences that seem almost inevitable. His answer is a flat out, “No.” He adds, “There’s no karmic value in nugs.” He believes that selling marijuana is an act that exists outside of man’s law. Brad says he’s working under a bigger law—one that operates or controls the algorithm of the universe. “You’ve got to know what’s up. You’ve got to float like a leaf on water and listen for the ripple.”
This is daunting and difficult amidst the constant and crashing waves that overturn the spook house in seas of suspenseful surprise. Won’t he drown? Does he feel like he’s drowning? Before I can ask, he senses the question building behind my eyes and starts referencing Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five, which brings depth to his words, wiser than his age, letting me know that he knows what he’s talking about. He explains:
“Look, I was grouped in with the kids labeled BDC which stands for Behavioral Disorder Contained. They put us together because they thought we were the worst kids, that we were wretchedly infectious.”
I am reading an excerpt from Brad’s psychiatric evaluation, written by Neil J. Fialkow, M.D. It is from 2001, when Brad was a sophomore at Glenbrook South High School:
Concerns developed due to Brad’s unusual behavior. He would talk to himself, sit underneath tables, his writing became more ‘bizarre’, ‘paranoid’ and dark (‘I am the son of man…destruction is coming’). He told a police officer he wanted to kill himself and other people, leading to his hospitalization in Highland Park in November. Drug screenings were positive in September, October, and November. At home, he had become more withdrawn. He was also much more irritable and reactive, played his music loudly and became extremely angry when told to do something. His parents were concerned that at the reintegration meeting for school, he wore a ring with a blade on it that cut paper. Approximately two weeks later, due to Brad’s bizarre writing, it was recommended that he leave school. He recalled feeling that if he had an opinion, he should let his voice be heard. He remembered that he then wrote on the board at school that he was the son of God. He felt that he understood things that other people didn’t and they could die a horrible death. He noted that he would like to have enough money to build a big tree fort and live there with his family.
His skin twitches with worms of anxious energy. His eyes are big green flying saucers, spinning towards a crash. He laughs disparagingly as he describes the videos he was forced to watch, the informational tapes on how to succeed at remedial work. “I didn’t want to work in a hotel or be a cashier. There’s nothing wrong with that. Those are jobs. But these things were presented to us like this was future university, that this is where we would be going to school and learning. No one brought us college applications and told us that there was more out there.” These career choices were supposed to be their ultimate goals. Brad keeps shaking his head in disbelief that he was so young and that a system had already given up on him. He tries to understand how teachers could fold so easily. “I mean, weren’t we worth fighting for?”
Labeled and conditioned at an early age can permanently skew the picture. It’s a lock down that eliminates all possibility and hope. This sounds like prison, being fed certain specific skills to fit in society, but at a very menial level. Of the seven kids he spent his high school days with, two died of an overdose and the rest, including himself, are drug dealers. “We were just collateral damage,” he says. The school took them out in order to maintain its high rate of success. Brad’s days at Glenbrook South recall a single classroom full of social isolates. These were writers and readers and thinkers that did not want to conform.
When Brad speaks, it’s hard to see him as a castaway misfit. He’s tall with a sinewy muscular frame. His vocabulary is intense with SAT static and colloquial bust-a-flow lingo. He is a sharp, handsome kid who stayed in the same classroom the entire day for entire years. His best friend Harris, the all-four-years-class president, sat down the hall, getting his noggin filled with opportunity, while Brad was left to jack-o-lantern his own gourd and flounder.
“Jail? Jail isn’t a worry when your wings are already clipped.”
His eyes are glowing like candles. His fingers are turning green. He takes one claw and rips into the sofa cushion and quietly slithers into the feathery seat.
There’s a gap of fifteen years in age from youngest to oldest. I asked each of my siblings if they would change anything about the spook house and they all resoundingly said no. All for different reasons. They are pragmatic realists. All three believe that you can’t change someone or something. Things are what they are and to try and change them is futile. Brad expounds further and says that sensitive dependence and butterfly wings could mess everything up. Even the slightest change is full of ramifications and not worth the risk. Despite their hardships and the belief that they have not succeeded, they genuinely like where they came from because their environment let them exist as creative souls exploring unconventional environments. It’s hard to distinguish if it’s creativity born as a response to chaos and irrationality or if they are thoughtful artists trying to bare their horrible souls.
They’ve grown used to the shrieks and chains of the spook house. It’s all part of the family’s macabre circus spectacle; but what if the chaos was fierce and severe and came from outside their home? What if they were the victims running from monsters not of their own creation? I ask them to pretend they have one hour before the zombies arrive. Where would they go and what would they do. Their answers take on a serious tone, as if they’ve been waiting for someone to ask this very question their entire lives. They are fully prepared.
Annette says she’s been contemplating this possibility since she was five. Her plan is to carry a large flamethrower to the top of the Sears Tower. She suddenly changes her mind and yells, “Wait!” Her mouth opens into a cavern, echoing the cry. She’s made a terrible mistake. She decides that plan b, floating on a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan, is the better choice to make, but she is uncertain. She grows anxious with doubt, wondering which decision is the best.
Brad pulls a business card from his wallet and says, “I’d go to Maxon Shooters Supply.” He points to the address. “I’d get a bunch of guns and ammo. All the women would be on food duty.” He would hole up in the fire station on Waukegan Avenue, explaining that high-pressure hoses would come to good use. He adds, however, that he doesn’t like to think of such things. He doesn’t know what he would do if a beloved turned into a zombie. He wonders if he could shoot a family member stone cold in the brains.
Pamela discredits the question immediately and states she does not believe in zombies, only ghosts. She says, “I’d blow my brains out so I wouldn’t have to see them in my face.”
They all have a plan. If life were a zombie attack, my siblings would be prepared. They would isolate themselves, hole themselves up, and destroy themselves, just as they’ve done in their real lives. Zombies would not throw them off their game. And what would I do? What would the person outside of the spook house do? Well, thankfully they all live together so I would only have to drive to one location. I’d pick them up in my fully gassed car and we’d hit the road, far away, to our house in the northern woods of Wisconsin. I’d make them beds in the secret loft and I’d pull the stairs back into the ceiling and make it look like we were never there. I’d hide them in the walls, away from the bloodthirsty zombies, and I’d protect them. I’d protect them with everything I had and finally keep them from harm’s way. And if that didn’t work, I’d crawl down the ladder and put my head on a plate and let the zombies eat me first. And then I’d go back upstairs and kill them myself.