Bob Fingerman - Pariah

The depiction of the afterlife wasn’t explicit in the Torah. That’s where the goyim had it made. It was so black and white. They got scary fire and brimstone if they were bad or the Pearly Gates and Paradise if they were good. The Torah was more enigmatic. As a good Jew you were supposed to focus on your role in this, the material world. An eternal reward was a vague but effective motivator to stay on the correct path. All Ruth knew was that the soul went on for eternity and that was good enough for her. She just hoped that Abe would get his act together and make peace with God so they could link up in this nebulous afterlife.

And the children and grandkids.

And maybe Cary Grant.

Sure he was treyf , but oof.

Abe held the book close to the candle, straining to read the small print. Though he enjoyed Dick kicking the crap out of his poor deluded bozos in their subterranean Martian hovels, drugged to the gills with their little Perky Pat doll setups, the pain in his eyeballs negated the pleasure. Besides, he was actually envious of these fictional characters. Sure they’d been forcibly evicted to live on Mars-which was a complete crudhole-but at least they could get bombed out of their gourds and have these collective fantasy trips courtesy of some kooky hallucinogenic drug called Can-D. Or was it Chew-Z? It was both. Whatever. It was a crazy book, but Abe found himself embroiled in its labyrinthine plot. Dick was a nut, but an imaginative nut.

He put the book down and closed his eyes and rubbed them-hard. With spots and tiny patterns of organic hieroglyphs swimming on his orbits, Abe sat back in the chair by the window and enjoyed the fireworks. Abe rubbed some more, even though it was supposedly bad for you. When he pulled his hands away and opened his eyes again, flashes of light joined the spots and indecipherable microscopic pictographs. A distant clap of thunder echoed throughout the dead city, followed by a chorus of idiot groans from the undead. Abe blinked and pretended he was crocked on Dick’s wonderdrugs.

“I’m on Mars,” he whispered. “I’m in my hovel. Where’s my dolly?”

As the spots and runes melted away Abe realized the light wasn’t self-induced. Lightning? No, this flash of light cut right across his ceiling. From below. What the hell? Abe manually uncrossed his sleeping legs, flung himself out of his chair and hobbled on limbs of pins and needles toward the window. Just as he hung his head out a swath of light was cutting across the tops of all the cabbage-heads, forging south- a flashlight beam!

“Jesus H. Christ! Jesus H. Christ!” Abe gasped. He ducked his head back in and shouted, “Ruth! Hey! Ruth!” Another small thunderclap swallowed his thin voice. “God damn it! Ruuuuuth! ”

“What? What is it already?” Ruth screeched from the bedroom. “You’ll wake everyone!”

“Good! Come in here! Quick!”

“What is it?”

“Come in here!”

Abe was trembling all over. He leaned back out the window and shouted at the departing beam of light. As it receded down York the horde seemed to spread out before it, creating a path.

“Hey, wait!” he shouted, his frail voice swallowed by another burst of thunder. In his ferment he launched into a convulsive coughing fit, his watery eyes following the light until it disappeared from sight. Now his coughing tears mixed with tears of despair.

“What’s the commotion?” Ruth whined. Though she was shrouded in darkness Abe could picture her bitter, disbelieving face. “What’re you dragging me out of bed for?” Her mental image of Cary Grant faded into nothingness.

“There was a light out there!” Abe said, gesturing at the street below, wiping his eyes.

“A light.”

“A light, for Christ’s sake. A light! A light!”

“Abe, it’s thundering out there. Ever hear of a little thing called lightning?”

“It wasn’t lightning. It came from down there! Down there! Not up there! Down! ”

Ruth sighed the sigh of a long-suffering martyr and waddled back to the bedroom, leaving Abe wondering if he’d dreamt the whole episode, his mind suggestible to the transcendental literary powers of Can-D.

Or Chew-Z.

“They’re beautiful in a hideous kind of way,” Ellen said, admiring Alan’s studies of the undead. A week had passed since their coupling and Alan had invited her to his studio to see his work. No one else in the building had been permitted into his sanctum sanctorum. “My God, there are so many of them.”

“And no two alike,” Alan said. “Just like snowflakes.”

“Not quite,” Ellen frowned.

“Fingerprints?”

“That’s a bit closer. It’s like you’re cataloguing them.”

“I guess I am. Passes the time. Cave paintings of the future.”

Ellen’s eyes roved over the dizzying cavalcade of renderings. Beyond their technical excellence, Alan had captured something she hadn’t stopped to consider about the things outside: their innate humanness. Those things weren’t always things . They had been Homo sapiens. Alan’s meticulous artwork, while unsentimental, betrayed an element of latent humanity in the subject matter. The tilt of a head, the softness of a brow, the turn of a mouth, all reminded her that these empty vessels once had inner lives. They’d been friends and neighbors.

“I’m amazed at how unbiased these are,” Ellen marveled.

“They don’t hate us. They didn’t ask to be what they are.”

Ellen fingered the edge of a pastel of an armless male zombie with half its face missing. It had no pants and its penis was gone, but not its scrotum and testicles. She scanned the other images. Males, females, all dismembered in various ways. Not a single one was intact. How had she never noticed that before? She hastened to the window. Resting on the sill was a pair of binoculars, which she snatched up. Though they were packed together down there, she confirmed what Alan’s drawings portrayed; not a single one of them was complete. On some the damage was more evident than others-whole missing limbs were easy to spot-but all were mutilated beyond the general rot. It made sense. Most had been savaged when they were still people. They’d died and been resurrected.

Missing ears, noses, jaws, chunks of shoulder, gaping gashes, hollowed out cavities where their bellies should be. She noticed that many were nude, their clothes having either fallen off or been forcibly torn away. Some trailed lengths of dehydrated intestine, which others stepped on. Several had cutaways through which their withered internal organs could be seen, just like those “Visible Man” model kits her kid brother made, only less pristine. The legless pulled themselves along with their arms, almost lost in the crowd, trod on by the others, but they kept on. Ellen looked back at the wall of Alan’s portraits, trying to match ones there with the crowd below.

“It’s like a Bosch painting out there,” she said, sounding dazed.

“Bosch was an amateur. The Black Death was a stroll in the park. Those pussies had it cushy.” Alan smiled at Ellen.

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Too dark?”

“No, too vulgar. You sound like a more cultured version of Eddie.”

“Gotcha. Ecch . Okay, I’ll refrain from the cussing. But seriously, the ninnies-is that okay?” Ellen nodded. “The ninnies of the fourteenth century had it good compared to us. But what we’ve got going on is a logical extension. Rats and fleas spread the bubonic plague. See, rats infected with the disease were brought to Europe through trade with the east. At least that’s the theory I remember. Fleas on the rats transmitted the disease to people. I mean those weren’t exactly hygienic times. Open sewers, people shitting out their windows-excuse me, relieving themselves. Just like us, right? The plague spread like wildfire. The symptoms were obvious to anyone with eyes. You’d get these buboes, which were swollen lymph nodes. Along with your high fever you got delirium. The lungs became infected and an airborne version spread from person to person through coughing, sneezing, or just talking. Maybe this whole mess started with fleas or rats. Who knows? I’m sorry, this isn’t history class.”