Isaac Marion - Warm Bodies

Later that evening we sit in the 747, cross-legged in the middle of the aisle. A plate of microwaved pad thai sits on the floor in front of Julie, cooling. I watch her in silence as she pokes at it. Even doing and saying nothing, she is entertaining to watch. She tilts her head, her eyes roam, she smiles and shifts her body. Her inner thoughts play across her face like rear-projection movies.

‘It’s too quiet in here,’ she says, and stands up. She starts digging through my stacks of records. ‘What’s with all the vinyl? Couldn’t figure out how to work an iPod?’

‘Better… sound.’

She laughs. ‘Oh, a purist, huh?’

I make a spinning motion in the air with my finger. ‘More real. More… alive.’

She nods. ‘Yeah, true. Lot more trouble though.’ She flips through the stacks and frowns a little. ‘There’s nothing in here newer than like… 1999. Is that when you died or something?’

Another obstacle to estimating my age: I have no idea what year we’re in. 1999 could have been a decade ago or yesterday. One might try to deduce a timeline by looking at the crumbling streets, the toppled buildings, the rotting infrastructure, but every part of the world is decaying at its own pace. There are cities that could be mistaken for Aztec ruins, and there are cities that just emptied last week, TVs still awake all night roaring static, cafe omelettes just starting to mould.

What happened to the world was gradual. I’ve forgotten what it actually was, but I have faint, foetal memories of what it was like. The smouldering dread that never really caught fire till there wasn’t much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us. Then one day we woke up, and everything was gone.

‘There you go again,’ Julie says. ‘Drifting off. I’m so curious what you think about when you daze out like that.’ I shrug, and she lets out an exasperated huff. ‘And there you go again, shrugging. Stop shrugging, shrugger! Answer my question. Why the stunted musical growth?’

I start to shrug and then stop myself, with some difficulty. How can I possibly explain this to her in words? The slow death of Quixote. The abandoning of quests, the surrendering of desires, the settling in and settling down that is the inevitable fate of the Dead.

‘We don’t… think… new things,’ I begin, straining to kick through my short-sheeted diction. ‘I… find things… sometimes. But we don’t… seek.’

‘Really,’ Julie says. ‘Well, that’s a fucking tragedy.’ She continues to dig through my records, but her tone starts to escalate as she speaks. ‘You don’t think about new things? You don’t “seek”? What’s that even mean? You don’t seek what? Music? Music is life ! It’s physical emotion — you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow. Are you telling me, what, that it’s boring? You don’t have time for it?’

There is nothing I can say to this. I find myself praying to the ghastly mouth of the open sky that Julie never changes. That she never wakes up one day to find herself older and wiser.

‘Anyway, you’ve still got some good stuff in here,’ she says, letting her indignation deflate. ‘Great stuff, really. Here, let’s do this one again. Can’t go wrong with Frank.’ She puts on a record and returns to her pad thai. ‘The Lady is a Tramp’ fills the plane’s cabin, and she gives me a crooked little smile. ‘My theme song,’ she says, and stuffs her mouth full of noodles.

Out of morbid curiosity, I pull one off her plate and chew it. There is no taste at all. It’s like imaginary food, like chewing air. I turn my head and spit it into my palm. Julie doesn’t notice. She seems far away again, and I watch the colours and shapes of her thought-film flickering behind her face. After a few minutes, she swallows a bite and looks up at me.

‘R,’ she says in a tone of casual curiosity, ‘who did you kill?’

I stiffen. The music fades out of my awareness.

‘In that high-rise. Before you saved me. I saw the blood on your face. Whose was it?’

I just look at her. Why does she have to ask me this. Why can’t her memories fade to black like mine. Why can’t she just live with me alone in the dark, swimming in the abyss of inked-out history.

‘I just need to know who it was.’ Her expression betrays nothing. Her eyes are locked on mine, unblinking.

‘No one,’ I mumble. ‘Some… kid.’

‘There’s this theory that you guys eat brains because you get to relive the person’s life. True?’

I shrug, trying not to squirm. I feel like a toddler caught finger-painting the walls. Or killing dozens of people.

‘Who was it?’ she presses. ‘Don’t you remember?’

I consider lying. I remember a few faces from that room; I could roll the dice and just pick one, probably some random recruit she didn’t even know, and she would let it go and never bring it up again. But I can’t do it. I can’t lie to her any more than I can spit out the indigestible truth. I’m trapped.

Julie lets her eyes auger into me for a long minute, then she falters. She looks down at the stained airplane carpet. ‘Was it Berg?’ she offers, so quietly she’s almost talking to herself. ‘The kid with the acne? I bet it was Berg. That guy was a dick. He called Nora a mulatto and he was staring at my ass that entire salvage. Which Perry didn’t even notice, of course. If it was Berg, I’m almost glad you got him.’

I try to catch her gaze to make sense of this reversal, but now she’s the one avoiding eye contact. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘whoever killed Perry… I just want you to know I don’t blame them for it.’

I tense again. ‘You… don’t?’

‘No. I mean, I think I get it. You don’t have a choice, right? And to be honest… I’d never say this to anyone, but…’ She stirs her food. ‘It’s kind of a relief that it finally happened.’

I frown. ‘What?’

‘To be able to finally stop dreading it.’

‘Perry… dying?’

I instantly regret speaking his name. Rolling off my tongue, the syllables taste like his blood.

Julie nods, still looking at her plate. When she speaks again her voice is soft and faint, the voice of memories longing to be forgotten. ‘Something… happened to him. A lot of things, actually. I guess there came a point where he just couldn’t absorb any more, so he flipped over into a different person. He was this brilliant, fiery kid, so weird and funny and full of dreams, and then… just quit all his plans, joined Security… it was scary how fast he changed. He said he was doing everything for me, that it was time for him to grow up and face reality, take responsibility and all that. But everything I loved about him — everything that made him who he was — just started rotting. He gave up, basically. Quit his life. Real death was just the next logical step.’ She pushes her plate aside. ‘We talked about dying all the time. He just kept bringing it up. In the middle of a wild makeout session he’d stop and be like, “Julie, what do you think the average life expectancy is these days?” Or, “Julie, when I die, will you be the one to cut off my head?” Height of romance, right?’

She looks out of the airplane window at the distant mountains. ‘I tried to talk him down. Tried really hard to keep him here, but over the last couple of years it got pretty clear to everyone. He was just… gone. I don’t know if anything short of Christ and King Arthur returning to redeem the world could have brought him back. I sure wasn’t enough.’ She looks at me. ‘Will he come back to life, though? As one of you?’

I drop my eyes, remembering the juicy pink taste of his brain. I shake my head.