Zombie Classics: Ishmael

Of course, reading is dead. Now, this is not to deny the fact that people still read, as someone is presumably reading these very words and taking umbrage at this assertion. But just as god is dead and priests still exist, so too is reading dead and readers still exist. These wakes are all-night affairs, and well attended.

Many lament the death of the great slow art, one of the finest aesthetic experiences available to humanity, but how to resist the final closing of the coffin? Can the dead yet rise again? People devise all sorts of desperate schemes to bring books to the disinterested modern youth, ranging from graphic novel adaptations of literary classics to stylish, modernized film versions of Shakespeare acted out by teen idols. These attempts, while done with the best of intentions, seem doomed to fail, as they are rightly perceived as the Trojan horses of high culture and never allowed past the gates.

My solution is simple. What do the kids love? Zombies. These lumbering, ridiculous monsters are slowly becoming ubiquitous among the youth of today. Zombie escape plans, zombie parties, zombie parades, amateur zombie films--the trend calls for more and more zombies. One can easily see it becoming a new personal style comparable to goth, with high school students putting on fake blood and dirty clothes each day before school, forming zombie cliques, only going to see zombie bands, et cetera.

To capitalize on this trend, I propose Zombie Classics. Combining a wide range of respected literary writing with images of the zombie apocalypse promises to introduce youth to a world of culture beyond the narrow range of George Romero and “Thriller.” This edition, the first in what I hope to be a long-running series, features Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, described as “one of the most beloved and best-selling novels of spiritual adventure ever published [with zombies].” Enjoy.

1
The first time I saw the flyer, I nearly burst into tears. I tore it down, which was irrational. Why should I prevent others from seeing it? I put it back up, which was also irrational. What if someone else saw it? I took it down again and tore it into several pieces, and then finished stocking up on canned goods from the deserted grocery store. I left the store and then marched right back in and picked up the pieces of paper, just to reassure myself that I had not imagined those words: “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.”

Save the world! What a joke. What a farce. After all this time, someone had decided to save the world. I couldn’t believe it. Not just the fact that someone wanted to save the world, but just the fact that there was someone else out there. It had been months since I had seen another human soul. And now here was someone advertising their heroic delusions in the grocery store among all the old flyers on the bulletin board, tacked between the homemade posters saying “room for rent” or “couch for sale, slightly used.”

Once, several years ago, when things had begun to get bad, I had felt that way. I would save the world. With a buxom lady at my side, I would rescue the scientist (who would be too nerdy and plain to really be any competition for the lady’s affections) and work with him to devise a cure. I had pictured it all in great detail, right down to the undead hordes breaking through the doors of the lab as we desperately did the final test, injecting our last hope of a cure into a captive zombie and watching in amazement as it fell back into the normal sleep of death, freed from the insane disease that had destroyed the world. Gathering together a rag-tag group of survivors, we would spray the area with the cure, slowly bringing normalcy back to the beleaguered human race.

How stupid could I have been? You might say that it was unavoidable in the circumstances, but please, don’t spare me your criticism. It was naïve and delusional. I was a fool. The few survivors I found were more brutish and violent than the zombies that eventually ate them. All I encountered was cowardice, avarice, or at best, idiocy.

But I couldn’t let this flyer go. It bothered me. I needed to meet this supposed hero, if only to tell him of how stupid he was acting and prevent others from being sucked into his folly. After all, how could I ignore the message? There were so few of us survivors left.

More after the jump...

2
I hated going downtown, but I had to do it. I had to see this so-called teacher, even if just for a moment. Gas was getting scarcer all the time, but I felt this was a worthy excursion, so I packed up my jeep and navigated an obstacle course of burnt-out cars and zombie hordes until I reached the apartment building where this person was supposed to live. Fortunately, the building had secure underground parking, so I could leave my vehicle safe and out of sight.

The building seemed deserted. There were no zombies wandering the hallways, so I relaxed my guard a bit. Just a bit. I’m not stupid, of course. Not that it should be difficult to escape. Frankly, I never really understood how I became one of the last survivors. I firmly believe there’s no excuse for succumbing to zombies unless you accidentally parachute right into the middle of a group of them.

I knocked on the door to room 105, but received no reply after several minutes. The door was unlocked, so I entered cautiously, only to discover an empty room, the air stagnant with the smell of decay. There was a lone chair seated in front of a glass partition. On the other side of the glass, there was a zombie.

I looked around, expecting to see someone else. Was this a joke? Surely the zombie did not put up the flyer. But who would do such a sick thing? I walked closer to the caged creature. It watched me, but with a vague air of superiority, almost disinterest. I had never felt so insecure of myself around a zombie before. It was like the creature thought I was too inferior to be worth eating.

A sign above the zombie’s makeshift cage caught my eye. It read:

With Zombie Gone,
Will There
Be Hope
For Man?

The question unsettled me. It seemed so obvious at first. Surely there would be hope for man without zombie--wasn’t zombie the whole problem here? Or did the question suggest that man would destroy himself without zombie? But the implication of this interpretation was that somehow zombie averted humanity’s self-destruction, an idea I could not fathom.

More disturbing: did the zombie write it, or was it all part of some sick menagerie being put on for reasons beyond my understanding? I should have run out of there, but something compelled me to sit in the chair. The glass was not thick, and if the creature wished, it could have broken through easily, but its calmness soothed me. I sat and watched it.

“Urrrrrr,” it said.

Startled, I jumped from the chair. “Urrr,” it said more gently, but with great authority. To my own amazement, I sat down again. I could hear the creature’s words in my head, and I realized that it could communicate to me. For the first time in months, I was having a real conversation.

“Urrrr,” it said.

“I will call you Ishmael then,” I said, studying him more closely now that we had been properly introduced. He seemed much like any zombie I had ever seen--lumbering, unsteady, except with a certain drive to his movements that suggested a keen intelligence lacking in the others. His face was in particularly rough shape. A hole in his cheek allowed me to see his tongue, which writhed like a worm moving across a sidewalk. The jaw was fractured and hung lower on the right side.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

“Urrrr,” Ishmael explained. “Urrrr. Urrr; urrrrrrrrrrrr.”

“Incredible,” I said. I was fascinated by what he had to say, even though it occurred to me that if someone had entered the room at that moment, I would probably have appeared to be a madman talking to a grunting zombie. They could not possibly appreciate the richness of my dialogue with Ishmael. “And you want to teach me to save the world?”

“Urrr,” Ishmael said, nodding.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Urrrr,” he said sternly.

“No, really, I don’t know what to say.” He frowned at me, glaring through his dead eyes. “Okay,” I said, “I do know. Yes, I see what you’re saying--zombie does, in a certain sense, rely on man. We are your food supply and parents, I guess, so we are intertwined. But does man really need zombie?”

“Urrrrr,” Ishmael explained, idly picking up a severed arm that I had not noticed before and chewing on it absent-mindedly. I tried not to stare, even though I was naturally quite unnerved by this action. If Ishmael noticed my discomfort, he did not let it show. “Urrrrrrrr.”

“I hadn’t really considered that. It isn’t really a matter of us needing you. We are you, and you us. But at the same time, we are fundamentally different. I don’t eat other people. I can procreate and live. These aren’t minor differences, are they?”

He waved the arm in the air and then made a great show of dropping it. “Urrr,” he said, pointing at it.

“Wow, just like that,” I said, shaken by this wisdom.

“Urrrr,” he added.

3
During the course of the next several days, I returned to Ishmael, always seeking to understand the depths of his parables. He was a difficult teacher, apt to scold me when I struggled and unsympathetic to my ignorance. Perhaps he was simply impatient. These were not minor issues that could be hashed out over the span of years. Zombie and man were fatally intertwined at the moment, and the situation was much like a person chained to a corpse and then tossed in the river. I suggested that the solution was to break free from the corpse and swim to the shore. He politely pointed to the folly of this solution--if I could break free so easily, then it wouldn’t be any real sort of dilemma, would it? His solution was to join the corpse, which he reckoned to be the more harmonious, natural alternative. I struggled with this idea. The implications of it hung over me like a shroud.

This day, when I entered room 105, I found that Ishmael was not behind the glass. I paused in the doorway, but he just looked up at me with mild disinterest and then returned to flipping through the book in front of him. I swallowed my fear and shuffled into the room, walking a bit like the undead myself. I wish I had the words to describe this strange, stumbling walk. At first glance, it looks comically clumsy, too stiff and slow to be threatening, but its implacability is terror itself. It suggests nothing less than the unstoppable desire to keep moving forward long after your ability to walk has decayed into a parody of itself. If you wish for more detail than my description can provide, I suggest you go to horror section of the nearest video store and start researching. It’s really for your own benefit.

I sat in my chair, as per usual, and awaited today’s lesson.

“Urrr?” Ishmael asked, finally looking at me. I noticed the hole in his cheek had grown larger since last time.

“I believe you were explaining to me how there are really two basic types of people, the Dead and Undead.”

“Urrrr?”

“Well, the Dead delude themselves into believing they have achieved that illusory state of perfection--which they call “living”--while the Undead are free of that illusion.”

Ishmael nodded, seemingly pleased with my progress. He rarely offered praise for my learning, but he sometimes betrayed a hint of satisfaction. “Urrrrr?” he prodded me on.

“The Undead have broken the barrier of death, that’s why. The Dead live in fear of death, the state they are naturally evolving towards, which is what drives them to such foolish behaviour. They live in fear of what they must inevitably become, constantly trying to put it off with all sorts of destructive “cures,” bad medicine and foolish schemes. We’re prey for every two-bit huckster with a miracle cure, and in the process of prolonging our so-called lives, we bring pain and suffering to everything around us.

“But the Undead are simply the Dead liberated from that fear. Having faced death, they see nothing to fear in it. It is simply a natural progression in the development of the human race.”

“Urrrrrr.” Ishmael shuffled back and forth, and I found myself almost hypnotized, as if I were watching a pendulum swing back and forth.

“So then the way we were trying to save the world was all wrong--the failed cures, the soldiers gunning down zombies--all of that was just a prolonging of the inevitable?”

“Urrrr.”

“I think I’m having trouble here. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Ishmael frowned.

“No, you’re right, I see what you mean. Perhaps I just have a hard time giving up this illusion.”

“Urrrrr.”

“Well, I always saw the zombie process being reversed through sheer human ingenuity. But that wouldn’t change anything, would it?”

“Urrrr.”

“Because we all still die in the end. This is just evolution deferred.”

“Urrrrr,” Ishmael said, and as he spoke, I heard a faint, bone-cracking sound that made me jump in my seat.

“Are you okay, Ishmael?”

Ishmael frowned at this, waving his hand dismissively. “Urrrrr--” he started to speak, but the right side of his jaw detached and hung momentarily by the skin of his left cheek until it ripped apart like an old rag and clattered to the floor. Ishmael said nothing. He stared at the jaw that lay at his feet.

I stood up awkwardly. “Listen, this isn’t right, something’s wrong. You need help. You’re malnourished, or sick, or something. I want to help.”

“Rrrrrrr,” he rasped. The words came out guttural and distorted, sliding helplessly off that writhing tongue into the stale air of the room.

I held out my arm.

He scraped his upper jaw along my forearm, drawing blood but unable to bite off any flesh. He shook his head sadly and pointed to the door. “Rrrrr,” he said. “Rrrrrrrrrr!”

I had seen Ishmael irritated many times, but this was the first time I had seen him angry. Upset and confused, I left.

4
Of course, that was the last time I saw Ishmael. When I returned to the apartment the next day with some food for him (don't ask), he was already gone. Do the Undead die? I wish the lessons had covered that. Perhaps he had gone on to the next stage of human development, a mystery so obscure that not even Ishmael, in all his wisdom, could have warned of it.

I walked around the apartment, which had never seemed so empty now that Ishmael was gone. Some of his books remained; the chair lay on its side, as if the spirit had left it now that Ishmael was no longer there to animate the room. He had seemed so wondrously alive with ideas, while I--I was utterly dead without him.

Standing at the window, I could see several zombies inspecting my jeep. It was parked outside the front door. Ishmael was not among them, but I watched with curiosity. Were all of the Undead as wise as Ishmael? The fundamental distrust between the Dead and Undead made it futile to hope of any communication between their disparate worlds. You might as well build a bridge between Earth and Mars.

I turned away from the window, rubbing my forehead. I felt feverish. The blood seemed to be draining from my face. But where could it possibly go? Didn’t it travel in a cycle, meaning it would inevitably return to the place it had left behind? I had never understood such things, and I feared I would never find any more answers without Ishmael.

As I shuffled about the apartment, I felt something beneath my shoe and looked down. The sign was on the floor, which bothered me for some reason. It seemed like the sign was made to be hung on a wall and shown respect, not trampled under foot. I picked it up and noticed there was writing on both sides. The phrase I had first seen when I entered the apartment reversed itself on the back:

With Man Gone,
Will There
Be Hope
For Zombie?

It seemed that Ishmael had posed one last question for me. I picked up the chair and sat down, rubbing the wound on my arm, waiting for the answer.